SIMMEL - Florence

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Florence
Georg Simmel
RANSLATORS NOTE: Originally published as Florenz, in Der Tag, Erster

Teil: Illustrierte Zeitung No. 111 (Berlin), 1906; also in Georg Simmel
Gesamtausgabe, vol. 8, Allesandro Cavalli and Volkhard Krech eds, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993, pp. 6973.
Simmel wrote this second of three essays reflecting on his travels to the major
Italian cities eight years after his piece on Rome and a year before the article on
Venice. His critical comments on German romantic longing for a lost aesthetic
unity here contrast with the philosophical perspectives of German intellectuals
discussed in the earlier essay, and also complement his later remarks on the
relationship of German to Italian culture in The Dialectic of the German Spirit
(1917, translated in this issue). His enthusiasm for the aesthetic achievement of
Florence contrasts with the negative judgement he makes in the later essay on
Venices false artificiality. Many of the ideas illustrated here regarding the image,
picture or portrait of Florence (each of these words is used below to translate the
German Bild) were later more fully developed in general terms in The Philosophy
of Landscape (1913, translated in this issue) and in The Picture Frame: An
Aesthetic Study (1902, Mark Ritter trans., Theory, Culture & Society 11, 1994:
1117).
In this piece as in the others, we generally translate Geist as mind (except
on one occasion here as spirit), although the term has a wider range of meanings,
as in the expression the spirit of the age.
* * *
VER SINCE that unified sense of life in antiquity was split into the
poles of nature and mind [Geist], and existence perceived in its immediacy had discovered alienation and opposition in the world of the
mind and interiority, a problem has emerged the awareness and attempted
solution of which has preoccupied all of modernity: the problem of restoring this lost unity to both sides of life. Yet this only seems attainable in the
work of art, where the form provided by nature reveals itself as the mind
having come alive. The mind no longer stands behind what is naturally
Theory, Culture & Society 2007 (SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore),
Vol. 24(78): 3841
DOI: 10.1177/0263276407084467
Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at KU Leuven University Library on January 16, 2016
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Simmel Florence 39
visible; rather, the elements become indivisibly one, as they were before the
process of historical life had separated them. However, if one looks down
upon Florence from the heights of San Miniato, framed by mountains and
with the Arno passing through it like a pulsating artery, and if after filling
ones soul with the art of its galleries, palaces and churches one strolls in
the afternoon through its hills, with their vines, olives and cypresses, where
each step of the paths, villas and fields is saturated with culture and the
past, and where a layer of mind surrounds it like an astral body of this earth
then a feeling awakens that here somehow the opposition between nature
and spirit [Geist] has been eradicated. A mysterious unity, which is nevertheless visible to the eyes and tangible to the hands, is woven through the
landscape, along with the smell of the land and its life-lines with the mind
that is its fruit. So too is the history of European man who has taken shape
here with the art that seems like a product of the land. One understands
that this is the place where the Renaissance originated, the initial sense
that all the beauty and meaning that art pursues were formed out of the
naturally given appearances of things, and where Renaissance artists, even
those with their own most sovereign style, could believe they were merely
imitating nature. Here nature has become mind without surrendering itself.
Each of these hills symbolizes the unity in which lifes opposites become
siblings: as each hill lifts itself up to a villa or a church, nature seems to
rise everywhere toward the crowning of the mind. The fertile earth encounters culture every step of the way, and yet no lush southern lavishness overwhelms what is human. There is a tropical abundance of outer as well as
inner being that no art can reach. However, here human forces have been
able to shape this abundance out of itself. It is because of this ultimate
characteristic of Florentine life that Benozzo Gozzoll and others represent
the landscape as a garden divided into flowerbeds, hedges and well-ordered
trees. They cannot imagine nature in any other way than as fashioned by
the mind. As the tension between nature and mind is thereby resolved, an
aesthetic mood emerges: the feeling of standing before a work of art. There
is perhaps no other city in which the overall impression, vividness and
memory, and in which nature and culture working in unison, create in the
viewer so strong an impression of a work of art, even from the most superficial point of view. The bare mountains behind Fiesole, which show no signs
of human activity, unlike those which are closer by, appear as if they are
merely a border for a portrait made up of mind and culture, and are thus
drawn into its full character like the frame of a painting that is useful
precisely by being different, embracing it as an organism that is complete
and sufficient to itself.
The unity of the image of Florence invests each of its details with a
deeper and broader significance comparable only to what is attained when
a detail is integrated into a work of art. Poppies and broom and villas, like
well-kept secrets, and playing children, the blue sky and the clouds all
this can be found anywhere in the world and is beautiful anywhere. Here,
however, it is furnished with a completely different psychic-aesthetic focal
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40 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)
point and environment, since nothing is delightful by its singular beauty

alone but when it shares in an all-encompassing larger beauty. The
impression made by Florence and its landscape includes not only the juxtaposition of all well distinguished elements, and of nature and mind, but also
the succession of past and present as if in a single point. The past in its
greatness may well only be painfully connected with the life of contemporary Florence. However, this past lives on in a way that is too strong and
immediately moving for any romantic notion of an abyss between then and
now to prevail. Of course, elements of romanticism are present everywhere:
the old ruin situated near the mountain, the villa on the hill with black
cypresses, those lonely turrets close by. All this is specifically romantic, but
completely without that German romantic longing which bemoans the loss
of something that perhaps has never existed. The past has remained vivid
and thereby has a peculiar presence that is situated next to that other
presence that which is borne by the day yet without ever touching it.
Here, time does not create a destructive tension between things, as real time
would, but is more like that ideal time in which artworks live. Here, the
past is our own, just like nature, which is also always present. All romanticism lives from that tension between reality, on the one side, and the past,
the future, ideal existence, and possibility or even impossibility, on the
other. However, this landscape is like an Italian portrait which displays
everything in its brushstrokes, where everything is said that has to be said.
By contrast, the northern style makes use of entirely different means,
namely, through hints, illuminations, symbolizations and contextualizations
in which the essential contents are never placed next to one another, but
rather demand from the viewer a retrospective representation of the sequential character of life. Florences landscape lacks any of that symbolism
possessed by the alps and the heath, the forest and the ocean. It signifies
nothing; it is what it can be.
As a result, life there becomes remarkably whole, as if the gaps were
closing which would otherwise emerge when its elements begin to split
apart. It is as if this city seeks to gather from every corner of the soul all
that is ripe, cheerful and alive, fashioning a whole by suddenly making its
inner context and unity tangible. Nevertheless, Florence must deny what is
symbolized within itself, even while trying to compensate for this denial
(since its existence cannot be avoided), namely, the Medici Chapel. It is
more Roman than Florentine. The fate of having had such a tremendous
past, whatever its contents, weighs on Rome and endows the rhythm of its
life with a heavy burden, a tragic tension which disappears in Florence,
where life opens its arms, as it were, in loving embrace of the past.
Michelangelos statues, by contrast, convey a sense of that fatal, unredeemed
past. They all seem to be seized by a numbness incurred by lifes incomprehensibility, by the souls inability to suture all the ruptures of fate
into a unified sense of life. Likewise, Michelangelo has transformed that
Florentine unity of nature and mind into something tragic. Certainly, the
inside and the outside, the soul and its appearance, are equally held
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Simmel Florence 41
together by the form of his art. However, the tension between them is so
powerful and even violent that they constantly threaten to break apart, and
only seem to retain their unity by continually calling upon their last reserves
of strength. It is as if he had captured each figure at that very moment in
which the battle between the dark burden of earthly severity and the minds
longing for light and freedom had come to a standstill. Michelangelos every
stroke points to that unity in which art frames a life consisting of two
irreconcilable parts. Florences image its landscape, its culture, its art
wants to persuade us that the parts of reality are growing together into a
unified sense of being. Thus, both express the same thing, but depending
on whether the emphasis is placed on the duality within unity or on the
unity within duality, the two worlds will be divided over what life must
inwardly decide, forsaking the one if it wants to possess the other.
And now a final point. Since in this case the form of culture covers all
of nature, and since every step on these grounds touches upon the history
of the mind that is indissolubly wedded to it, the needs which nature alone
can satisfy in its original being remain unfulfilled, beyond any extension in
the mind. The inner boundaries of Florence are the boundaries of art.
Florence is not a piece of earth on which to prostrate oneself in order to feel
the heartbeat of existence with its dark warmth, its unformed strength, in
the way that we can sense it in the forests of Germany, at the ocean, and
even in the flower gardens of some anonymous small town. That is why
Florence offers us no foundation in epochs in which one might want to start
all over again and to encounter the sources of life once more, when one must
orient oneself within those confusions of the soul to an entirely original
existence. Florence is the good fortune of those fully mature human beings
who have achieved or renounced what is essential in life, and who for this
possession or renunciation are seeking only its form.
Translated by Ulrich Teucher and Thomas M. Kemple

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038-041 084467 Simmel 3 (D)

RANSLATORS NOTE: Originally published as Florenz, in Der Tag, Erster

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at KU Leuven University Library on January 16, 2016

038-041 084467 Simmel 3 (D)

038-041 084467 Simmel 3 (D)

40 Theory, Culture & Society 24(78)

point and environment, since nothing is delightful by its singular beauty

038-041 084467 Simmel 3 (D)

Downloaded from tcs.sagepub.com at KU Leuven University Library on January 16, 2016

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