"Dark Water": Great works of art and heart

"Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City

of Masterpieces"

by Robert Clark

Doubleday, 354 pp., $26

If talent and dedication were the standards by which contemporary writers are measured, by now Seattle author Robert Clark would have achieved name recognition, along with other local authors such as David Guterson, Jonathan Raban and Ivan Doig, to name just a few.

But in an age of nanosecond attention spans, it's good to have a "brand," and Clark has always been hard to pigeonhole. The subjects of his books have meandered all over the map: a history of the Columbia River, a biography of James Beard, a novel about abortion in the 1950s, a nonfiction book about his embrace of Catholicism in midlife. A mystery, "Mr. White's Confession," Clark's first and last attempt at crime fiction, won the Edgar Award for best novel in 1999.

Clark went off to Italy for a few years on a Guggenheim, intending to study art, belief and the intersection of the two. There he discovered the 1966 flood that devastated Florence, Italy, a deluge that almost succeeded in wiping out an irreplaceable trove of Renaissance art. "Dark Water" is, like Clark's other work, difficult to categorize: a meditation on art, religion, the power of nature to destroy man's legacy on this Earth and the against-all-odds determination of people — young and old, working class and cultured, rich and poor — to save it.

The first sections of "Dark Water" recount the history of a city perhaps unique in the Western world for its critical mass of artists and writers: Dante, Michaelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, Galileo — in one of "Dark Water's" rescue scenes, a staff member of a science museum escapes the flood across a roof with Galileo's telescope tucked under her arm — and politicians, schemers and villains: the d'Medici family, Machiavelli, Savonarola.

In the next layer of history, Clark chronicles Florence's "art tourism" phase of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Mary Shelley ("Frankenstein"), husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron and Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning breathed in the city's golden air and celebrated its treasures, followed by a pantheon of American writers, notably Henry James. As a reluctant teenager, the British writer E.M. Forster was dragged around by English ladies on interminable art tours, material used later to wonderful effect in his novel "A Room With a View."

It was a golden era that ended with the Fascists' ascension in Italy. Germans occupied the city, and when they fled, they blew up every single building and bridge along the Arno, except for the 600-year-old Ponte Vecchio (some say it was spared on the orders of Hitler, an art lover). As two art historians took in the destruction, Clark writes that they "gazed again at what seemed to sum up not the pity of war, or even the evil of war, but a dark mirrored analog of beauty; not mere ugliness or desecration, but an urge that went beyond destruction; a furious negation, annihilation aimed at absenting altogether what was most fully — in beauty — present."

In every century, the autumn rains came and the waters in the mountains above Florence came roaring down. 1333 (3,000 dead). 1557. 1740. 1844. November 1944, just two months after the Germans dynamited the river's banks and bridges.

In November 1966, a "stationary moist weather system" stalled over Italy. It rained 17 inches in 24 hours on Mount Falterona above Florence. The Arno gathered force, and a night watchman felt it coming: "The noise was tremendous ... — what struck him as he stood for a while on the pavement was a palpable vibration emanating from the stones, from, it seemed, the arches of the bridge itself, a vibration on the verge of a throb."

Floods are dramatic, as are death and rescue, and the flood sections in "Dark Water" are can't-stop reading. The deluge, which rose as high as 20 feet above the street in some locations, left 33 Florentians dead and 5,000 families homeless. But it wasn't the workaday city's plight that caught the world's attention — it was the submersion of a substantial chunk of the world's artistic heritage.

"By the end of the day of November 5," Clark writes, "most of the city's museums and churches were either still inaccessible or uninspected, but some 14,000 movable artworks would prove to be damaged or destroyed, sixteen miles of shelved documents and records in the State Archives had gone underwater; three to four million books and manuscripts had been flooded." Readers who remember the flood may retain images of the "mud angels," the students who flocked to Florence from all over to swab mud off masterpieces. Short-term rescues were one thing; the long-term restoration task was far more daunting. In the Bibliotheca Nazionale, " ... the card catalogs were buried in mud ... there were 62,000 miles of shelves in the library," perhaps half of them submerged by the floodwaters.

Clark's central symbol for the flood and its aftermath is a little-known artwork, the Crocifisso (crucifix) by the artist Cimabue, an artist who in 1288 painted the image of Christ on the crucifix on canvas attached to two gigantic timbers shaped like the cross. When the flood came, this 700-year-old work was stored on a ground floor. The paint literally floated off the canvas; its restoration began with monks panning and skimming up flecks of floating paint and gesso from the floodwaters, the painting itself "in tatters, the flesh ripped off the face," Christ crucified and then drowned for good measure. The debate over how to repair a half-destroyed work of art is one of the more fascinating aspects of this book.

"Dark Water" is an ambitious work, and as the narrative winds down, Clark struggles somewhat to bring his story to a conclusion. Art restoration takes decades, and the politics of who gets to do what (and get paid handsomely for it) are byzantine and not that compelling. He reveals that he has lost his religious faith; for an author who wrote an entire book on his Catholic conversion ("My Grandfather's House"), this is a revelation, and his avid readers will expect more explanation of this development than they get.

But for this reader, "Dark Water" is fundamentally an optimistic work about humanity's determination to preserve the evidence of its better selves. If the Nazis' destruction of the bridges of the Arno is a "furious negation," the story of Florence's reclamation is its opposite. "So there is the city and the river, what people make and lose and what survives, and then there is the beauty of it. Here is where we begin," Clark writes. We can only hope.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357

or mgwinn@seattletimes.com