The Wild Man of Florence Is Tamed, and the Guardian Takes Note

The Guardian's weekly art dispatch this week runs a line that will interest anyone who follows how the foreign press reads Florence: the "wild man of Florence" is tamed, and the painter Filippo Lippi lays his sins at the altar. The item sits in a roundup that also covers LS Lowry heading south and a Soho show the paper calls the Hockney of Soho displaying all.

The framing is characteristic of the Guardian's art desk, which likes to set the Renaissance against the modern in a single column. Lippi, a Carmelite friar whose biography the paper gestures at through the word "sins", is presented as a figure whose disorder is part of the work rather than a footnote to it.

For the culture desk the interest is comparative. Florence's quattrocento is the material the world's critics return to most often when they want to talk about Italy, and the vocabulary they reach for — wild, tamed, sins — says as much about the readers as the painter.

What the Guardian item does not do is announce a new exhibition, a loan or a discovery, and this dispatch will not pretend otherwise. It is a weekly column, and its value lies in the juxtaposition: Lowry's industrial north, a pop show the paper finds kinky, and a Florentine friar-painter all filed under the same heading.

That juxtaposition is the point. When the foreign press writes about Italian art, it rarely writes about it in isolation; it puts it in a queue alongside British and American work and asks what the comparison yields. Lippi arrives in that queue as a case study in appetite and penance, not as a monument.

The phrase "lays his sins at the altar" is doing real work in the Guardian's sentence. It suggests a painter whose religious subjects are read through the disorder of his life, a reading that has followed Lippi since Vasari and that the foreign press keeps alive because it makes for a better story than attribution disputes.

For readers in Italy, the useful takeaway is modest. The world's art columns still treat Florence as a place where the past is argued over in the present tense, and a single line in a weekly roundup can carry more of that argument than a catalogue essay. The Guardian's column is not scholarship; it is the weather, and the weather is Florentine this week.