I do remember them and I was there by Mary Hoffman

The Sixties, that is. I don't think it really hit me that the 1960s now count as history until I saw Angela Davis on Channel 4 News and realised it was part of a feature on 1968 and that was fifty years ago.

We have debated often on this blog what constitutes "history;" is it a generation ago, 25 or 30 years? Well 50 years certainly counts and this decade in my life was a momentous one on the national stage. In particular it was the time when young people became what is now called "woke" and social protest became effective, long before there were any social media to support it and help it spread.

As Angela Davis said, "I couldn't afford international phone calls – I had to write letters." (For those of you who don't know or can't remember who she is we'll get to her later on). Here is a snapshot both public and personal of the years about which it was said "if you can remember [them] then you weren't there."

It was the era of the Cold War, Apartheid, the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan, the Vietnam War and the reign of the Kray twins in London. It was also the time of the Beatles, flower power, psychodelia, the moon landing, the Civil Rights movement and the beginning of second wave feminism.

At the beginning of the decade my boyfriend was Roger Rees, who went on to become a huge star of stage and screen, living with a male partner for 34 years. (RIP, lovely Roger). Briefly in the middle I dated Roger Scruton and smoked pot (unconnected, though it would be a sort of explanation). Two months before the sixties ended I met the man I married three years later. Being neither gay nor Tory, he suits me very well.

1960 The Sharpeville Massacre opened the eyes of the rest of the world to what was going on in South Africa. For years and tears, till the end of Apartheid, we bought no South African fruit and veg. Harold MacMillan made his "Winds of change speech," To Kill a Mockingbird was published and in London there was the obscenity trial of Lady Chatterley's Lover. How well I remember the copy being passed round at school which fell open at the rude bits. When I read the whole novel I found it disappointingly dull.

1961 Charismatic and (relatively) young John F. Kennedy became President of the United States.

I can't honestly say I remember his election or inauguration but I remember the night of his assassination two and a half years later very well. My older sister and I were babysitting a friend's 8-months-old son and he would not sleep. Surely everyone who was alive and beyond babyhood then remembers that night? And I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 too. It was the period that shaped the consciousness of those who were young in the 60s. We really believed that WW3 was imminent and we were all going to die.

In the early 60s I joined CND, while I was still a schoolgirl.

1961 The Berlin Wall was erected as the effective division between not just the city but East and West Germany. I was amazed to discover it was as recent as that when researching my novel When she was Bad (written as Amy Lovell).

Catch-22 and The Pride of Miss Jean Brodie were published. The Beatles first played the Cavern Club though, as a Londoner, I had yet to hear of them. I fell in love in Spain with an English boy called Tony but omitted to discover his surname and his parents whisked him away before we could exchange addresses. He had a twin sister called Tina. The trial of Adolf Eichmann began in Jerusalem.

1962 The Cuban Missile crisis was in October/November. Earlier in the year Fonteyn and Nureyev first danced together and I was besotted with him (ever since his defection to Paris the year before and his arrival in the UK). I heard about Marilyn Monroe's death while I was on holiday with my parents in Spain. Max Perutz won the Nobel prize for Chemistry, which I didn't pay much attention to at the time, but I later met him In Cambridge as his daughter was a friend.

1963 Please, Please Me, introduced me to the Beatles and in particular George Harrison. The Bell Jar was published but I didn't read it till a year or two later.  And Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, though it took a while for feminism to reach these shores. Martin Luther King made his "I have a dream" speech and, on St. Cecilia's Day, JFK was assassinated in Dallas (see above). I don't think we knew if we were on the verge of something wonderful or something terrible. I'm still not sure.

"los Beatles" in Madrid

1964 The Civil Rights Act was signed by LBJ, though begun by JFK and his legacy. Another set of three initial, MLK, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The death penalty was at last abolished in the UK – another fact that surprised me with its lateness when I researched When she was Bad.

1965 Malcolm X was assassinated. T S Eliot died a more peaceful death but I was sad to see him go. The bombing of North Vietnam by the US and South Vietnam intensified, though I don't think I knew about it then, not till much later in 1967/68. I certainly didn't know about the marches to Montgomery now well-known from the film Selma. I spent the summer in Florence, determining much of the rest of my life. I'll be there again in a week's time. The Race Relations Act was passed in the UK.

1966 The demonstrations against the Vietnam War really picked up in the US, where I spent the summer but I'm ashamed to say they didn't feature in my awareness.  I was living in a flat in NYC on the Upper East Side, wearing clothes bought in Carnaby Street ad eating Euphrates crackers with Philadelphia cheese and ground pepper, living a life incomprehensible to my parents.

I took more notice of the conviction of the Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley and the disaster in Aberfan that killed over a hundred children. And hearing about the flood in Florence that destroyed or damaged so much art. Never dreaming that fifty years later I would be writing about it in in an App on Michelangelo.*

1967 Elvis Presley got married! If this had happened a few years earlier, I would have been devastated. At the age of fourteen, I had decided he would marry me. And indeed he did meet Priscilla when she was about that age, so it wasn't quite as delusional as some of my crushes. (OK, it was still delusional). But now I was older and wiser and graduated a month after this seismic event. It was followed by the "Summer of Love," which wasn't for me, though I loved the dresses and the music and the pacifism.

1968 Martin Luther King was assassinated and Bobby Kennedy, who had been going to run for President, was killed two months later.  This was when I really became aware of what was happening in Vietnam, appalled by the pictures in the newspapers. I started a Postgrad linguistics course at UCL, taught be Michael Halliday, who died a few weeks ago. This was another profound influence on the direction my life would take.

Angela Davis in the middle

Angela Davis was a Black activist and feminist who we were just about to hear about in the UK, though she wasn't arrested till the following year. Her stencilled face with its distinctive Afro hair appeared on walls in the UK. (She was found not guilty and has had a distinguished academic career). She is still an activist.

In France, "les evènements," the student riots, took place in Paris and beyond, protesting against capitalism, consumerism and American influence. They were accompanied by national strikes.

Czechoslovakia was invaded by the USSR. We had Czech students stranded at UCL and I remember vividly the marches, occupations and the fundraising Czech Appeal to help students cut off from families and finds.

1969 Richard Nixon became President of the United States. The Charles Manson "family" murdered Sharon Tate and four others and two more people the next day. The murders seemed even more horrific because Tate was eight months pregnant. She was married to Roman Polanski.

The Beatles gave a last impromptu performance together on a rooftop. Monty Python got its first TV airing. My sister and I stayed up late to watch the moon landing. It was her birthday, a fact that neither of us remembered later until reminded. It kept being delayed so we set an alarm and got up again in the early hours to watch it.

I moved into my first flat in London in Swiss Cottage, sharing with two others. Became a vegetarian. And at a Halloween party in Roehampton met my husband-to-be. 

So those were the 60s, those were, remarkable in so many ways but viewed through the eyes of a teenager turning into an adult, a girl who had crushes on public figures and boys she met in real life, turning into a woman with a degree, some knowledge and and a serious relationship. What began as a sort of Adriana Mole view of the world turned to a commitment to civil rights, pacifism, feminism and socialism. When my first book was published in 1975, my publisher Rex Collings said drily, "I don't think we'll put on the jacket flap that you are a vegetarian, feminist, socialist" and he was probably right. But I am all those things and my views were formed in the decade I do remember, in spite of the pot. And I was there.




* Buried Alive: the Secret Michelangelo took to his grave, is an App created by Time Traveler Tours & Tales  and can be downloaded for free on to iPhones and Android devices.

When she was Bad by Amy Lovell is published by the Greystones Press and available in paperback and on Kindle.


All photos are from Wikimedia Commons
(The montage at the top of the page is by Vitek - the images are:

1. The Beatles in America.JPG
2. CheHigh.jpg
3. Mao Zedong portrait.jpg
4. Kennedyb.jpg
5. AABAP.gif
6. Woodstock redmond stage.JPG
7. Bruce Crandall's UH-1D.jpg
8. Martin Luther King - March on Washington.jpg)

Finding Michelangelo by Mary Hoffman

Every now and again in a writer’s life there comes an experience that you have just exactly because you are a writer. You are doing your research and you stumble across something you didn’t know or someone tells you something unexpected. And this might lead to something amazing.

I’ve been lucky enough to have many of these, most of them in Italy, the land of my heart, but this post is specifically about two connected to Michelangelo.

The first happened in my first “Long Vacation” which is what they call the summer holidays at the University of Cambridge. It was a very long vacation indeed and my boyfriend had gone to India. I, on the other hand, had been given a bursary to spend a month in Florence, learning the language ay the British Institute.

Only in the mornings; the rest of the day was my own. It was not my first visit to Italy but it was my first to Florence. I arrived by train. My father was a railwayman and I never went anywhere you couldn’t get to by train.

I was staying in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, where there were three other students. The two men were also from Cambridge, a medical student and another reading English like me. Of the two women, one was reading English at Bristol and the other was an American of German origin on what we would now call a gap year.

Creative Commons: Saiiko

None of us was an art student and yet we all became passionate about art in that month, spending every afternoon exploring museums and galleries with our sketchbooks and meeting up for a cheap dinner every evening to share our discoveries.

One afternoon all five of us showed up at the Casa Buonarroti with our sketchbooks and 2B pencils but, alas, it was closed for renovation. “But we love Michelangelo!” we said. “And we are students here for only a short time.” We never actually claimed to be art students but our long faces did the trick and we were let in.

We saw Michelangelo’s two early marble relief panels: first The Madonna of the Stairs with the BVM represented as a strong peasant woman, who has just finished feeding her child. If she stood up, she would be a giantess. Then the Battle of Centaurs and Lapiths in which the artist discovered what would be his main theme for the rest of his life: depicting the athletic forms of naked young men.

Crative Commons: Carulmare

The third object I remember was a painted wooden crucifix with an almost childlike Christ, the whole thing about three-quarters life size. At that time there was a dispute about whether it really was an authentic Michelangelo early work. We were all very moved by it and quite convinced that it was.

The experts later agreed and it was returned to the church of Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno, where it had originally hung as a thank you from Michelangelo to the Prior Bichiellini, who had let him dissect unclaimed corpses that had been brought there from the hospital.

Scroll forward many decades and I am again in Florence in April of this year after more visits than I can count – more than thirty at least. This time I am a woman on a mission. I have been writing the story, In the Footsteps of Giants, that forms the basis of the app being developed for Time Traveler Tours & Tales and I am there with Sarah Towle, the American publisher and writer who set the company up.

We are developing an app to be used on IOS and Android phones in the city so that families with older children can take a tour of Florence, using Michelangelo as their Renaissance guide.

Creative Commons: David Gaya

A little bit of history: Michelangelo was born into a Florentine family, the second of five boys, and as a young teenager was taken under the wing of the great patron of the arts, Lorenzo de’ Medici. He was brought up with Lorenzo’s sons and nephew, two of whom later became Pope, but after Lorenzo died, Michelangelo had a fraught relationship with the family.

There were times when he worked for the Republic which had expelled the Medici and times when he took artistic commissions from members of the Medici family. As an adult he lived more in Rome than in Florence, thought the city of his adolescence and young manhood still contains some of his greatest works of art.

In 1527 he was appointed to oversee the fortifications of his home city, which was about the come under siege …from the Medici! So when the members of that family, in collaboration with the Imperial Army, attacked Florence so hard that the city surrendered in the summer of 1530, Michelangelo was a wanted man.

The New Sacristy, tomb of the lesser Lorenzo de' Medici

He went into hiding, in a place he knew well – San Lorenzo church. He had been building a chapel there to house the tombs of his old patron, Lorenzo de’ Medici and his murdered brother Giuliano, and two lesser Medici dukes who confusingly had the same forenames. These tombs were to be housed in a New Sacristy, designed to balance the Old Sacristy, which had been built earlier by one of Michelangelo’s heroes – Filippo Brunelleschi.

Brunelleschi was the gifted engineer and architect who had worked out how to fit a dome on Florence’s great cathedral and he had designed the whole church of San Lorenzo which was the family church of the Medici.

What Michelangelo knew and the Imperial forces didn’t was that there was a secret chamber under the New Sacristy. His friend Prior Figiovanni sneaked him in there and there he stayed in hiding from August till October.

And while he was there he drew on the walls with charcoal.

The room wasn’t found again until 1976, ten years after the great flood that damaged so much art in Florence in 1966. Obviously a lot more important spaces had priority for restoration over the room under the New Sacristy, which had been used for years to store coal. It was only when the walls were being cleaned up that the charcoal drawings began to emerge.

Here was the clue to where Michelangelo had been hiding in those missing weeks as summer turned into autumn in 1530. He had whitewashed the walls to cover up his drawings, we assume that he didn’t want to get Prior Figiovanni to get into trouble for showing him the hiding place.

The tour of Florence app, In the Footsteps of Giants, was loosely inspired by my novel David (Bloomsbury 2011, Greystones Press revised edition 2016) in which I imagined who the model might have been who posed for Michelangelo’s most most famous statue.

And the story of sculpting the Giant, as he was known in the earlier years of the sixteenth century in Florence, is still there in the app. But we decided to make the sculptor himself the narrator of the story, as he hid under San Lorenzo, sketching a kind of spiritual diary on the walls, looking both backwards and forwards.

So it was really important for Sarah and me to get into that secret underground chamber. The only trouble was it is not open to the public.

Without revealing any names or details, I will only say that Sarah is a very determined woman! The result was that we did in fact spend a full hour in that chilly underground room where one of our heroes had hidden in fear of his life nearly five hundred years ago. It was an unforgettable experience.

We took lots of photographs, which I can’t show you yet, because of copyright negotiations. But if you put “stanza segreta San Lorenzo” into your search engine, you will find plenty of images to give you an idea of what an overwhelming experience it was.

There is a well in one corner though the water would not have been any more drinkable than any other in Florence in 1530. You could probably have washed with it but I doubt Michelangelo bothered. One of things we know about him is that he washed rarely, didn’t change his clothes for ages and slept in his boots.

Much more interesting are the drawings on the walls, including sketches for the monument to the younger Giuliano de’ Medici, Duke of Nemours. You can tell it’s for that statue by the knees.

The funerary monuments in the New Sacristy were never completed, as Michelangelo was summoned back to Rome to work on the Last Judgment fresco in the Vatican. But he was pardoned by the Medici and his salary unfrozen, on condition he continued with the chapel. We don’t know for sure why he never returned to complete the plan.

What is certain is that visitors admired its extraordinary architecture and great sculptures for nearly four and a half centuries without knowing about that secret room under their feet, where the great man hid, not knowing if he’d ever be free to work on his art again.

(You can buy David: the Unauthorised Autobiography on this Amazon link (other booksellers are available))

And you can pre-order the story app here.

The Michelangelo Trail by Mary Hoffman

The History Girls blog began nearly four years ago, on 1st July 2011, and had its origin in a desire on my part to let the world know I had written a novel about Michelangelo's sculpture of David. The sitehas grown to be so much more than that but it is quite satisfying to come full circle and write about the new suite of educational materials, based on that novel, that I am going to write for an innovative new company called Time Traveler Tours & Tales.

Photo credit: Jorg Bittner Unner, Creative Commons

The book was a historical novelist's joy to write because it offered the perfect opportunity for fiction. So much was known about this famous figure: we have the contract the sculptor was given, the date he made the first chisel cut, the minutes of the committee meeting to decide where the sculpture was to be displayed (where Leonardo da Vinci was present).

And in the middle a great big hole. Who was the model for this, probably the most famous sculpture in the world? Or was there even a model at all? Maybe this David sprang from the imagination of the sculptor, who, it is worth remembering, was twenty-six years old when he asked the Operai del Duomo for the old block of Carrara marble that two previous artists had abandoned and which just lay about for forty years  in a building behind the Duomo in Florence for people to trip over.

My first visit to Florence was at the end of my first year at university, when I spent a month there. It was probably the most influential four weeks of my life, directing my interests and enthusiasms from then on. I already knew I preferred Michelangelo to Leonardo but this sojourn, in a pensione overlooking Piazza San Lorenzo, confirmed it.

In my new project I'll be devising an app to take readers on a tour of the city visiting "hotspots" connected with the sculpture and the sculptor. And it occurred to me that readers of the History Girls blog might like an expanded version of my list - a sort of "print out and keep" guide to which works of art by Michelangelo you can see in the city I have now visited so many times I have  lost count.

Bronze of Michelangelo's head by Daniele di Volterra

• Casa Buonarroti Michelangelo never lived here but it houses two early works: the bas reliefs of The Madonna of the Stairs and The Battle of the Centaurs and Lapiths.

• The area behind Brunelleschi’s Dome on the Duomo (now the Museo dell'Opera del Duomo). This is where the workshop was where Michelangelo made the David statue. On the day it was moved from there to the Piazza della Signoria the doorway had to be broken down to allow the giant statue to be trundled out. It took three days to move it to its final position.

• Santa Croce church. Michelangelo is buried there (under a hideous tomb by Vasari) and lived near there. His mother is also buried there.

• Brancacci Chapel in Santa Maria del Carmine (Oltr’arno). The frescoes by Masaccio (Big Tom). It was here that Michelangelo’s nose was broken by Pietro Torrigiani when they were both teenagers and protégés of Lorenzo de’ Medici and were sent there to sketch the frescoes. (You can see the broken nose quite clearly in Volterra's bronze above.)

• Piazza della Signoria The David statue was here for hundreds of years. Also this is where Savonarola had his Bonfires of the Vanities and where he was executed.Michelangelo and several of his brothers were followers of Savonarola.

• San Marco convent Michelangelo’s older brother Lionardo was a friar there, as was Savonarola. It houses great art by Fra Angelico, Ghirlandaio etc.

• The Bargello for Davids by Donatello and Verocchio (Leonardo’s teacher) and Michelangelo’s Pitti Tondo, Brutus, Bacchus etc.

Brutus

• Palazzo Medici Riccardi Where Michelangelo lived with Lorenzo de’ Medici.

 

• Santo Spirito, Oltr’arno. Where Michelangelo dissected bodies. His wooden crucifix (the earliest recorded work) is in the Sacristy.

• Piazza Santa Trinita Where Michelangelo had his very public argument with Leonardo. 

• The Medici Chapels behind San Lorenzo church. Michelangelo designed the tombs for two of the de' Medici family. His statues of them are flanked by Dawn and Dusk, Night and Day.

• The Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo. This and the magnificent staircase to it were designed by Michelangelo.

• The Uffizi houses the Sacred Family painting by Michelangelo.

• And of course. The Accademia where the original David now stands. But don't neglect to look at the slaves/prisoners and St. Matthew who line the gallery leading up to David.

Photo credit: Jorg Bittner Unner, Creative Commons

On my first visit to Florence, I and some other students, none of us studying Art, managed to blag our way into the Casa Buonarroti, which was in restauro at the time and saw the two reliefs and the very touching little wooden crucifix, now in Santo Spirito, which was waiting to be authenticated. None of us was in any doubt.

On my last visit, a year ago, Sarah Towle of Time Traveler Tours and Tales and I went to the Medici Chapels at San Lorenzo and looked through the door leading to the underground hiding place that the sculptor used on a visit to the city, long after he had made the David. It is not open to the public but the whitewashed walls are covered with his drawings.

Michelangelo's relationship with Florence was fraught. As a protegé of Lorenzo de' Medici (the "Magnificent"), he was loyal to the family, but after Lorenzo's death became a Republican. Florence itself had an on/off love affair with the powerful de' Medici family, expelling them and welcoming them back more than once.

My relationship with Florence and Michelangelo has undergone no such upheavals. I can't wait to work with Sarah Towle to bring this Renaissance sculpture to life for 21st century children and teenagers. You can read more about the project below.

But in the meantime, if you are going to Florence this summer, do follow the Michelangelo Trail. I'm only sorry I won't be doing it with you!


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