Renaissance

The Renaissance is presented as a world in which architecture, painting, religious authority, and wealth could be gathered into a single ambitious space—and in which that synthesis could later be violently undone. Rabo Karabekian recalls the palazzo of Innocenzo “the Invisible” de Medici in Florence as a structure shaped by a vast, unified artistic conception; its lost murals become a historical counterpart to the fragility of art and to the modern paintings he now exhibits in his home and potato barn.

The Palazzo and Its Artistic Program

Rabo’s recollection centers on a palazzo designed by Leon Battista Alberti in the mid-fifteenth century. Its four wings met at a domed rotunda twelve meters across, ringed by eighteen half-embedded Corinthian columns, each four and a half meters high. Above the capitals, a clerestory pierced by thirty-six windows rose toward the dome. Its underside bore a Christian scene painted by Paolo Uccello, while the terrazzo floor showed peasants engaged in planting, harvesting, cooking, baking, and winemaking.

The description reaches Rabo through a recently published architectural book by Kim Bum Suk, a South Korean political exile whose study originated as a doctoral thesis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The book records private Tuscan interiors that scholars had rarely seen and whose art had not previously been photographed by an outsider or included in a public catalogue. Rabo notes the irony that the palazzo, which he had entered thirty-seven years earlier, has now become accessible to readers through another person’s research and photographs.

That research also answers questions Rabo had carried away from his visit. Mirrors on the clerestory sills, together with more mirrors on the roofs, captured sunlight and redirected it upward to illuminate the dome. The palazzo’s architecture was not merely monumental: it was engineered to make natural light part of the experience of its central space.

Lost Murals and Religious Conflict

The broad spaces between the columns had appeared bare when Rabo saw them, painted a pale rose-orange. Kim Bum Suk’s account reveals that lightly clad pagan gods and goddesses had once occupied those walls. The images were not simply hidden beneath paint; they were scraped away during the Medici exile from Florence, from 1494 until 1531, at the insistence of the Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola, who sought to purge what he regarded as pagan contamination of the city.

The murals were attributed to Giovanni Vitelli, of whom little else was known beyond a report that he was born in Pisa. Rabo imagines Vitelli as an artist whose work was destroyed by the religious orthodoxy of his time, drawing an explicit analogy between that history and the modern coating of paint that ruined Rabo’s own paintings. The analogy makes artistic destruction recur across radically different eras: the medium and authority change, but a work can still be erased by forces that claim the right to decide what may be seen.

The account also places the palazzo’s owner within this history of power and concealment. Kim Bum Suk describes Innocenzo as a banker, while Rabo pointedly translates the occupation into the harsher terms of modern finance and criminality. Innocenzo was reportedly both the richest and the least public member of his family. No portrait of him survived except a childhood bust by Lorenzo Ghiberti, which Innocenzo smashed at fifteen and threw into the Arno. As an adult he avoided parties and traveled only in a conveyance that hid him from view. The Renaissance setting therefore contains not only public magnificence but also private wealth, deliberate anonymity, and vanished images.

Rabo’s Historical Analogy

Rabo thinks of the rotunda, with its pagan and Christian images together, as a Renaissance attempt to make an atom bomb. His comparison emphasizes the extraordinary resources invested in the space: great expense, the work of many of the era’s best minds, and an attempt to compress powerful ideas about the universe into a small area through unusual combinations of imagery. His remark that the universe has since come a long way places historical change beside the persistent human ambition to represent the whole within a bounded artistic form.

This interpretation is shaped by Rabo’s own position as an artist and collector. In the present, visitors repeatedly ask what his paintings are supposed to mean, even as he insists that they are about nothing but themselves. The old rotunda offers a contrasting model: a space in which images and architecture once assembled religious and pagan meanings into a deliberately encompassing vision. Its lost murals make that synthesis visible only through historical reconstruction, so the past arrives as both an elaborate artistic achievement and a record of its destruction.

From Private House to Public Display

The novel sets Rabo’s memory of Renaissance art beside the changing life of his own house. Edith had transformed the Victorian home to accommodate modern art, stripping wallpaper, removing chandeliers, and painting the rooms oyster-white; a 1981 architecture magazine presented the foyer as the core of a small museum collection. After her death, Rabo’s home shelters a major private collection, and he describes himself as little more than its guard, answering visitors who ask what the pictures mean.

The collection eventually becomes part of a regular tour. Visitors pass from the small girls on swings in the foyer to early works by the first Abstract Expressionists, then enter the potato barn to encounter Rabo’s enormous, difficult-to-classify work. He opens the far sliding doors so the increased flow of visitors can move through the barn without congestion; some return for another pass through that space. No solemn critic has appeared, while lay visitors ask what kind of painting it is. Rabo answers by calling it a tourist attraction, a World’s Fair, and Disneyland, then qualifies the comparison as gruesome. Against the Renaissance palazzo’s imagined fusion of images into a picture of the universe, the barn’s public spectacle resists settled classification. Both settings make the visitor’s movement through art part of its meaning, but the later museum-like display leaves interpretation visibly contested.