The Arno River flood that deluged Florence, Italy, in 1966—killing 33 people and damaging 14,000 works of art and countless books and antiques—frames this meditation on the relationship between art and life. Clark (River of the West
) embarks first on a leisurely history of Florence's intertwined experience of great floods and great art, through the perceptions of Dante, Leonardo, E.M. Forster and other writers and artists. The world's rapt concern for Florence's cultural treasures contrasts sharply with its neglect of the city's inhabitants, Clark argues, offering his impressionistic account of the 1966 disaster as seen through the eyes of artists, photographers, volunteer “mud angels” who swarmed the city to help rescue its waterlogged art and Communist militants who organized relief for poor neighborhoods. He then follows the decades-long and rancorously debated restoration projects, especially the controversial rehabilitation of Cimabue's 13th-century Crucifix
, seeing in them a metaphor for artistic beauty as an endless work-in-progress. Clark's study is sometimes unfocused, but by building up layers of atmospheric chiaroscuro—the drying city, he notes, lay “lacquered in tints of warm earth and azzuro
sky... like pigments just brushed on and still moist”—he achieves an evocative portrait of Florence as its own greatest masterpiece. (Oct. 7)
