NEW YORK, NY.- “Almost nobody comes to see Donatello’s ‘David’ in the Bargello, the first nude statue of the Renaissance,” lamented Mary McCarthy in 1959 in “The Stones of Florence,” a masterpiece of American travel writing. A famously contrarian critic, she believed that Michelangelo’s David was overvalued, and, writing for a postwar generation of American travelers, wanted them to appreciate an earlier sculptural tradition.

Certainly, few saw Donatello’s “David” during these last two pandemic years, but he is having his moment now, just as travel restarts — Florence, Italy, has opened a spectacular exhibition, which stars his creator. “Donatello, The Renaissance” will be in the Palazzo Strozzi and the Bargello Museum until July 31, and it is the kind of exhibition you might cross an ocean to see.

The other once-in-a-lifetime moment in Florence right now is the chance to get right up close to the frescoes in the Brancacci chapel, an opportunity that would have been equally appreciated by McCarthy, who much preferred Masaccio’s frescoes from the 1420s to the later, more famous Botticelli paintings in the Uffizi Gallery (too pretty, too floral, in her view). McCarthy celebrated Masaccio’s frescoes for their “spatial immensity, deep, massive volumes, and implacable candour of vision, which sweeps across the panels in aerial perspective like the searching ray of a lighthouse.”

The Brancacci chapel is being restored, and visitors who manage to reserve tickets (the hardest tickets to get in Florence) can climb the scaffolding to find themselves face to face with Masaccio’s Adam and Eve, as they are expelled from Paradise. Even McCarthy never got to do that.

With the heady sense of travel made new — intermittently fraught, but fundamentally reborn — comes a chance to look again at some of the places that we have, perhaps, come to take for granted, and appreciate the beauties of the world with new and less jaded eyes.

Mind you, McCarthy herself was a little jaded back in the 1950s about Florence and its too-famous golden history. “For the contemporary taste, there is too much Renaissance in Florence,” she wrote in “The Stones of Florence.” “Too much ‘David,’” she went on, dismissively, “too much rusticated stone, too much glazed terra-cotta, too many Madonnas with Bambinos.”

The essay, originally published in The New Yorker in 1959, became a coffee table volume, lavishly illustrated with photographs, many by gifted German American photographer Evelyn Hofer. It was a follow-up to McCarthy’s “Venice Observed,” the bestselling art book of 1956-57.

In 1959, she was already lamenting overtourism in Florence, complaining of “barbarian hordes from the North, squadrons of tourists in shorts, wearing sandals or hiking shoes ... who have been hustled in here by their guides to contemplate ‘Venus on the Half-Shell.’” Though there were crowds in the Uffizi, and around Michelangelo’s “David,” few went to the places she regarded as the key to the heart and soul of Florence.

And now, as Florence welcomes back tourists with genuine joy, perhaps especially because those returning, so far, tend to be the individual adventurers, the art-lovers, the Italy addicts, McCarthy’s opinionated and idiosyncratic voice makes for particularly wonderful company.

Secrets of the Duomo

McCarthy had her doubts about Michelangelo’s “David,” and those Botticellis, but she has a deep respect for the Duomo: “very noble — sturdy, tall, grave, with great stone pillars rising like oaks from the floor to uphold massive arches.”

Before the story of Brunelleschi’s amazing dome, she wants you to consider Arnolfo di Cambio, who began the cathedral in 1296, and hear the uniquely Florentine hubris in the order itself: “that an edifice shall be constructed so magnificent in its height and beauty that it shall surpass anything of its kind produced in the times of their greatest power by the Greeks and the Romans.” There’s a fresco in the cathedral by 15th-century artist Paolo Uccello, the trompe l’oeil “feigned equestrian statue” of Sir John Hawkwood, an English mercenary soldier who fought for Florence, where she’ll show you Uccello’s struggle with perspective, and connect it to sculpture, which she considers the most essential art of Florence.

“The Stones of Florence” was never intended to be a guidebook, but I’ve used it as one as I’ve wandered around Florence over the years. I have been obsessed with McCarthy’s writings for a long time, and I teach both her nonfiction and her fiction to journalism students. Her level of engagement with Florence is intense and complicated, and the book stands as a record of a formidable intelligence examining a city so famous that many tourists might almost take it as a given; a city so mobbed with tourists that the true cognoscenti might bypass it, looking for less obvious delights.

There have certainly been times over the last two years when Florence felt empty, even in the Piazza Duomo, where the cathedral facade faces the doors of the baptistery, with the fabulous gilt bronze panels of biblical scenes, made by Lorenzo Ghiberti in the 15th century, and nicknamed the “Gates of Paradise” by Michelangelo. Seeing that piazza empty — no tourists, no one hawking horse-and-carriage rides — was one of the eerie experiences of pandemic Florence, but these days it’s generally bustling again — lots of Italians, lots of Europeans and, increasingly, Americans.

The baptistery doors today are replicas; the originals are in the Museum of the Works of the Duomo behind the cathedral. It’s a museum that McCarthy loved for preserving the early Renaissance sculpture of Arnolfo di Cambio and Donatello, but she never saw the brilliant new display, a huge bold reconstruction of what the facade of the Duomo originally looked like in the early Renaissance; what you look at today is a 19th-century neo-Gothic re-imagining. Through Aug. 1, the museum holds Michelangelo’s three Pietà images, with casts of the statues from Rome and Milan juxtaposed with the Florence statue he intended for his own tomb.

Beneath Florence, ‘a Sunken Rome’

I have been living and teaching in Florence on and off over the past four years, negotiating travel (and teaching) during the pandemic. When I flew to Rome in August 2020, clutching a folder of documents to show I was not a tourist, I found the flight scary, but I was overjoyed to see that the world was still there. Now, with vaccines and boosters, travel feels like a chance to connect, to hear art and history whisper to you directly as you experience places in person, or as Italians say, “in presenza.”

Attuned to art and history, McCarthy writes in “The Stones of Florence” that “beneath the surface of Florence lies a sunken Rome,” so to look past the Renaissance recreations of antiquity and back to the classical origins of the city, I went with her to San Miniato al Monte, a medieval basilica built in the 11th century on the highest point of a hill overlooking the city. The views over Florence and the Duomo are even more splendid than those from the nearby Piazzale Michelangelo, and in the crypt of the church, as McCarthy promised, was a “petrified forest” of the assorted Roman columns and capitals that had been incorporated into the church.

I let her take me to the church of Santa Maria Novella, to admire the facade, pointing out the scientific instruments embedded on either side, a gnomon and an astrolabe, and also another very important Masaccio fresco. In the arrangement of the figures and the cross in this Trinity fresco, McCarthy finds “the great ordered plan of Nature embraced in a single design,” comparing the fresco to a proof in philosophy or mathematics: “an equilateral triangle is inscribed within an arched figure which is inscribed within a rectangle; and the centre, the apex of the triangle, and the summit of all things is the head of God the Father.”

McCarthy’s project before Florence was the incisive “Memories of a Catholic Girlhood,” in which she stakes her claim as a commentator on Catholicism, discussing how religion had offered mystery and beauty during a complex and often harsh childhood. I wish she could climb up the scaffolding in the Brancacci chapel, where she was particularly moved by “the stumpy body and gaping mouth of Eve as she is driven, howling, from the Garden,” which made McCarthy reflect on “all the horror and deformity of the human condition.”

Masaccio again makes you think about the relations between Renaissance art and sculpture; his great innovations included the heavy sculptural presence of the bodies he painted, and also the first use of vanishing point perspective; literary historian Stephen Greenblatt in “The Rise and Fall of Adam and Eve,” writes: “Masaccio’s unforgettable figures depend ... on their overwhelming sense of embodiment, an illusion of actuality conjured up by perspective and heightened by the shadows ...”

McCarthy found redemption in the similarly realistic details that Masaccio painted into other figures in the chapel, the cripple being healed, or the old woman receiving alms, a “universal truthfulness that shows the whole expanse of the world, fair and foul alike.”

Ode to Donatello

If McCarthy came back to Florence now, she would see Donatello and his “David” in the spotlight (rather than the eternal Michelangelo). Most of “Donatello, The Renaissance” is in Palazzo Strozzi, an aristocratic palace begun in 1489 by the wealthy Strozzi, a Renaissance banking family, rivals of the Medici. In the grand exhibition rooms of Palazzo Strozzi, you walk through an exploration of Donatello’s career, closely tied to Florence. Donatello was born in 1386, the son of a craftsman, and was apprenticed to goldsmith and sculptor Ghiberti, also becoming a close friend of architect and sculptor Brunelleschi. They traveled to Rome together in the early 1400s and created the Renaissance as we know it by studying the remains of antiquity and classical art.

Donatello’s sculptures in relief, in terra-cotta and marble, helped me understand why McCarthy considered his work to be the true soul of the Florentine Renaissance. His reliefs pioneered the Renaissance understanding of planes and perspective, and reinvented the geometry of complicated scenes. We think of this as what Renaissance painters did, reaching back to classical sculpture for lessons about the human body, but this exhibition puts sculptors at the center of that reinvention of art, and Donatello at the center of it all.

The exhibition continues at the Bargello, where the huge 14th-century hall on the upper floor of the palace, the “Donatello Room,” has been rearranged. Donatello’s St. George, high up in a niche on the wall, “is a Spartan athlete or young Roman Empire-builder,” McCarthy wrote. Directly in front of him in this new arrangement, you finally come to that nude bronze “David Victorious,” up on a pillar now, flanked by two other Davids by Verrocchio and Desiderio da Settignano. David was popular in Florence because the city saw itself as small but mighty, triumphing over larger, more powerful, opponents.

That “first nude statue of the Renaissance,” was made around 1440 for the Medici, and if you’re expecting Michelangelo’s heroic figure, you will find Donatello’s David slight, frail, adolescent. Like Michelangelo’s larger David, Donatello’s is completely naked, except for sandals and a rather odd hat, leaning on the large sword which he has presumably just used to cut off Goliath’s head; he rests one foot on that bearded trophy — clearly an adolescent male triumphing over an adult. McCarthy observes that he is “a transvestite’s and fetishist’s dream of alluring ambiguity ... a provocative coquette of a boy.”

In taking on the sexuality of the sculptures — and sculptors — McCarthy was playing to her own reputation. In the late 1950s, she was already a somewhat scandalous — or at least notorious — figure, thanks to the sexual frankness of her short stories. “The Group,” her 1963 bestselling novel, was still in the future, but in 1954 she had published what would become its most explicit chapter, “Dottie Makes an Honest Woman of Herself,” in the literary journal Partisan Review. That’s the chapter in which Dottie disposes of her virginity, and immediately, on the advice of her lover, goes to get fitted for a pessary, or diaphragm.

It’s a chapter which I remember reading with close attention as a high school student, and it seems to have made a similar impression on the elderly (and infinitely more sophisticated) art critic Bernard Berenson, who on McCarthy’s first trip to Florence, said to her, on being introduced, “Have you brought your pessary with you?” (McCarthy wrote to her dear friend Hannah Arendt, “He was familiar with my work, greeted me with an apt and naughty quotation from the one about the pessary — imagine! I felt quite shocked.”)

She was married to her third husband, Bowden Broadwater, but her trips to Europe in the 1950s involved intense flirtations with a number of well-known gentlemen, including Berenson and Igor Stravinsky; “I wish my admirers weren’t all quite so old,” she wrote to her husband.

Making Connections

Touring Florence with McCarthy’s book at this moment, when the world is opening up, sent me through the city with the world’s most opinionated guide, perfect for this Donatello moment, this Masaccio moment.

“The Stones of Florence” reminds you that getting to know a city is not just about conscientiously taking in its attractions, but making connections across history and art and architecture, picking out the threads that you want to follow, finding the characters to pursue, and encountering even the most storied and most reproduced paintings and statues with a willingness to look closely and make them your own.

And McCarthy is the perfect companion, the perfect voice in your ear — always interesting, a little unexpected — helping you find your own voice as you respond to the city. And when you find yourself inevitably pushing back and arguing with some of her absolute judgments and sweeping assessments, you know that you are finally beginning, in your own way, to measure up.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.