As we drive, Saskia and I, in our taxi, toward the centre of the city, I remember that a tour guide and amateur historian once informed me, when I asked where Baroque architecture came from, because almost every building in the centre is Baroque, that it was essentially a happier, more theatrical and entertaining form of Renaissance architecture. Renaissance architecture, for its part, was a revolution from Gothic, or Opus Francigenum, as it was known then. It introduced a new vocabulary. Strange proportions and asymmetry were abandoned. The bewildering detail and staggering heights of Gothic cathedrals were replaced with clean semicircular arches and hemispherical domes. The leap from Renaissance architecture to Baroque, in comparison, was not a great one – just as the leap from Romanesque to Gothic had been small. Baroque vocabulary remained the same as Renaissance – classical shapes, symmetry, geometry, orderly arrangements – but the rhetoric had changed. It was a humanist, accessible rhetoric.
According to the historian, with whom I spoke after the tour he gave, in a little café across a small square from a little Romanesque church, which he said was the oldest operating church in the city, Baroque architecture was the first grand diminishment in human evolution in the West. He said that humanism was the victory of man’s inner desire to be stupid in order to escape pain and to feel surprise, that the drive to re-establish classical literacy and eloquence had been impossible under the Catholic Church, and was doomed, in architectural expression, to be nothing more than naïve triumphalism, populism, and a retreat from intellectual honour – a retreat that would cost man everything, that would send human history spiralling into the abyss that would ultimately lead to modernity, from which there has been no escape. The historian was in his sixties, and wore circular, wire-framed glasses, and said all this very softly, without rancour, without even disappointment. Renaissance architecture, he said, born in Florence, could not travel. It was exceedingly difficult and inaccessible. It expressed human inconsequentiality. But Baroque, which was exceedingly easy to appreciate, and which expressed, as a deliberate lie, human significance, was like a plague, driven forth from Rome by wealth, or the pretence of wealthiness, and war, one hundred years of virtually continuous war in Europe, and colonialism, so that one may find as much Baroque in Mexico or Chile or even in the Philippines as one finds in France or Spain. Now mankind, said the historian, sinks forever into the despair caused by humanism and liberalism, which are nothing more than doctrines of flight from man’s real nature. He fights wars to spread Enlightenment, democracy, freedom, rights, but what he spreads is a despair of which he is entirely unaware. I told the historian he should say such things during the tour, and he said he had, for a short period of time, become known for such tours, tours that took tourists into the heart of the crisis the city was, all around them, quietly expressing, locked inside the pretence of imperial majesty, reluctantly inhabiting the intimidating forms of absolute power. But after a few years people simply came to heckle him, and call him a coward and traitor. Once a man threw an egg at him. Once he was punched by a skinhead and called a Jew. So he decided to go back to regular tours, polite tours, and the more glorious side of history. Why didn’t you quit altogether? I asked. Because I am a citizen, he said. I am a citizen. He paused, because my expression had not changed, and repeated: I am a citizen. He’d repeated himself with a tone of disdain that momentarily – though he would immediately go back to being polite – suggested my question was a hundred times more insulting than egg on his face.
After the historian and I had finished our coffee, he took out a huge map – a map that he stretched across the table so that it hung like an oversized tablecloth – and started drawing circles around streets where I would find exemplary works of late Baroque, and some authentic Renaissance. This took, embarrassingly, longer than the coffee itself – embarrassing because I had already shaken his hand, already wished him well. My mistake was to tell him that I’d moved here and had nothing in particular to do. We stood over the map, and the historian annotated the circles in handwriting I would never be able to read, and scratched his head, rubbed his eyes, and succumbed to a fever not unlike you imagine a great archaeologist might have succumbed to, suddenly aware he has stumbled upon the ancient tomb he alone believed existed. A waiter at one point asked us a question, and the historian did not so much respond as say, Ts! Ts! Ts! Ts! until the waiter left us alone. He circled a place where violins were once made and that is now a museum and a small venue for recitals. On Tuesday evenings, he said, the music school gave free recitals. So on the Tuesday that followed, I decided to go along.