The historical epic as rational discourse, which without having to once raise its voice becomes overwhelming. Roberto Rossellini's Renaissance Florence provides a marketplace for ideas, arts, enlightenment, but his three-part work starts out in the dark -- the head of the Medici house lies on a ceremonial slab, Cosimo de Medici (Marcello di Falco) retires to another chamber for the will's reading while intrigue is murmured among the guests. The war goes on, villages are pillaged (a building is invaded and burned down, one unbroken take studied via the zoom); Cosimo is banished but, "a great chess player," he comes back to end the conflict and solidify the church, with a whiff of Mafia in his ruthlessness. The well-oiled economic system assures Florence's artistic prosperity, gold makes it "the center of the world": the traveler who's been to the edges of the globe praises the Medicis for making "plunder an ethic, avarice a philosophy." It's the age of capitalism, yet also of Masaccio and Donatello, all flourishing under the benign dictatorship of Cosimo, a harmony of art and commerce hardly found by the director in the movie business. The most hopeful of Rossellini's avant-garde time-machines, technique transcending itself in a lesson of perspective as the curving pan around the pulpit is followed by a reverse track and finally flattened the zooms -- the style is Preminger's in Saint Joan (the siege at Orleans is heard, second-hand, from a soldier on the road), taken through A Man for All Seasons then passed through the eye of a needle until it is translucent. All of it is incalculably lucid, like the visiting Wadding (Lincoln Tate) pondering "useless beauty" while a Masaccio fresco gets its finishing touches or Leon Battista Alberti (Virgilio Gazzolo) dispelling the mysticism of the magic scrim that so dazzles his guests. When love poems are recited on the streets in strangely disembodied English voices, however, we venture "far from the clarity of Aristotle's logic and into a cloudy world of dreams." Rossellini never separates one from the other, for "the careful analysis of art increases my wonder." With Tom Felleghy, Mario Erpichini, Adriano Amidei Migliano, John Stacy, Sergio Nicolai, and Michel Bardinet.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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