Contrast is all: Mary McCarthy starts off [The Stones of Florence] with a racy, highhanded fault-finding. As if from the petulant mouth of the tourist, she speaks; hustling a cranky mirror down streets, she echoes that never-hypothetical creature's complaints: that the city is drab, provincial, harassed by Vespas, overrun by occupying armies of tourists, stuffy like Boston, not naughty, with too much rusticated stone and too many "academic" masterpieces.

After the reader has been caught and nettled, she changes her stride and her "true" eye takes over. But the tone emerges, ever so often, that launches the book—a kind of talking down to, with tongue in cheek, or a kind of bringing things down to the level we can all understand. Therefore the ambition of the Renaissance artist to excel everyone, even the Ancients, is compared to some millionaire's boast of ordering a building bigger and better than the Parthenon—which is like comparing John D. Rockefeller to Lorenzo the Magnificent. (p. 14)

The Renaissance and Florence, its chiefest lily, have been written about voluminously, and usually with painstaking scholarship and in a spirit of submission to their enchanter powers. Like a cool member of this age, McCarthy stands off from it to just a degree, and delivers a work of another hue. But it is a brilliant assemblage of anecdotes, observations interlaced with history, some accounts of painters' lives, à la Vasari, all in a swift, energetic and highly charged style. Its excellence lies in part in the way things are made to hang together; the city, that work of art, and its works of art, is seen in firm relation to the checkerwork of its history. Its excellence also lies in the visual pleasure it has to give us. The look of things, the grand joy of Italy after all, is wonderfully caught, from the "enchanted economy" of Italian gardens and the plotted colors of the countryside to Florence at its stoniest. (pp. 14-15)

Shying off somewhat from that almost unbelievable unicorn that the Renaissance has a way of seeming to us, with its profundities of many-mindedness, magnificence and daring, giving, in fact, almost more emphasis to the iron-tempered time preceding it, of Guelph and Ghibelline frays and feuds, she brings a fresh insight—and an interpretation unexpected (at least to me)—on Florence, with its "wise ruling of space—the only kind of government the Florentines ever mastered," when she says that it has about it the look of the ideal city of reason and justice as dreamed of by the Greeks and Dante, and that its great statues in the Bargello and in the Piazza della Signoria are like "admonitory lessons or 'examples' in civics, a part of the very fabric of the city—the res publica." (p. 15)