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On Sunday morning, we went to Mass at San Lorenzo. Going to Mass is a classy way of going to see a church free in Italy. Tell the attendant you are there por Missa, find a seat across from some art you like without wandering unduly before choosing, and sit, stand, and kneel as appropriate. You can wander around a bit after the service, but not very much. But you will have at least forty-five minutes to look at whatever piece of art you have selected.
Also, the Mass can be pretty nice. San Lorenzo is the church devoted to three things: the intellect, the soul, and the Medici. It's Cosimo's church, the one that he built, where he was originally supposed to do the sacristy and the city was supposed to do the rest, and he put up this lovely sacristy, and the city was still sitting there being financially confused, so then he put up the rest of it and his parents and some other Medici are buried there. As is Cosimo. It's an amazing church, full of Donatello (he did them both pulpits and a Medici tomb made of marble carved to look like a woven basket), and a not-half-bad gilt-candy Baroque ceiling with a desperately inappropriate and gaudy Baroque dome. It's a humanist church in style, it's meant to suggest ancient Athens, and so the interior space really feels like the outdoors, because it's meant to be the agora and all the side altar niches are the frontispieces of the buildings surrounding the agora.
Cosimo is buried directly under the foot of the steps which lead to the altar. His tomb is in the crypt in the basement, but the top of his tomb rises up through the ceiling of the crypt and forms part of the floor of the church, and it is a giant slab of porphyry surrounded by smaller slabs of porphyry in a large mosaic with marble. No one has any idea where he stole all that porphyry. This is a thing that is really hard to do. Porphyry is of course that lovely purple stone from Egypt which is so very, very hard that cutting it, shaping it, or even polishing it is a thing that kings do to show off how awesome they are. It is, even nowadays, expensive as hell. The Romans were decent at cutting it, but the art was lost during the Middle Ages (for a while they even lost the mine), and Cosimo's tomb is notable partly because they actually managed to hack letters into the porphyry-- very shallowly, but the stone is so solid that that's all you need. The marble around it has worn away from the age's feet, but those quarter-inch-deep porphyry letters, Cosimo Pater Patriae, will be there after that marble has gone to dust.
And during the Mass there was a christening on it. For the rites involving the congregation, the christenings and weddings, the receiving of Communion, the priests come down the altar steps and stand on Cosimo. So we got to watch that. If you're christened on Cosimo de Medici, then by God you are a Florentine and no one can ever say otherwise. The baby was very good, very quiet. The service had a lot of modern folk music, with guitar, which was madly incongruous. I mean it wasn't bad music, but it was completely out of period.
After the Mass Thrud went home to do some work and I went to the Accademia, because it is obligatory and open Sunday afternoons (which little else is). The little piazza behind it was having an uneasy set of opposed crowd-drawing options, because one side was full of a protest which involved a tent city and Marxists and something about the (recently resigned) Berlusconi, and the other side was a fair of craftsmen and artists, and these things do not get the same audience. There was a guy in the craft fair carving stone at his booth, slab of stone on a table, sitting leaning over it, intricate tracing lines sinking in as he leaned on his chisel looking as easy as though he were working in butter. I must have watched him for half an hour as he put petals into a floral rosette of at least a hundred layers. He didn't speak a word of English and my Italian is not good enough to ask technical questions, but it was good enough for repeated admiration, and he did not seem to mind me watching.
As for the Accademia, though-- look. I know it's an industry. I know you can get it on everything from coffee mugs to fridge magnets, not to mention the infinite T-shirts, and I know it produces more tourist revenue than most of the rest of the city put together and all of that, I do know this. But I cannot like the David. I have cordially disliked it since the first time I saw it fifteen years ago and it hasn't gotten better. The hands and feet are out of proportion, and I find the pose stiff, and I don't think much of the facial expression, and--
okay, so Michelangelo was a man who had seen a fair number of other men naked; his David is meant to be Jewish, so he ought to be circumcised. I am fairly certain Michelangelo had never seen, naked, a man who was circumcised. So he faked it, and as a result that is one odd-looking naked statue and he's neither really circumcised nor isn't and I mean this is basically eye level and it bothers me. It just does, okay? Because Michelangelo is usually so good at anatomy. Not my favorite thing.
The rest of the Accademia is okay; the reason I went this trip was that on previous occasions I have been with people who rushed straight to the David and stayed there, so I felt like I was giving short shrift to the other bits of the museum. There's an entire second story I had never been to. There are Michelangelo's Prisoner statues, which I do like, and it turns out, and this is awesome: all of the paintings in the room with the Prisoners are portraits of Saint Zenobius! They are basically the only pictures of him out there! It's like they decided they had to collect their saint in one place. So you get Saint Zenobius healing the elm tree and, uh, standing around. Not a very active saint. I was delighted.
The paintings in the room with the David are pretty cool, too, as they were all restored in 2003 and have giant placards explaining exactly how they were restored and showing pictures of how awful they looked previously. I have to say, those restorers have every right to be proud, as these are lovely bright shiny pictures full of glowing Renaissance color and cunning witty details, when before they were basically big blobs of varnish. If you are at all interested in art restoration this is worth some attention.
And the second story: so what we hear about in Florentine painting is the Renaissance, but it must have come from somewhere. It came from the second floor of the Accademia, which is Medieval Florentine Painting. That second floor will drown you in a swirling sea of iconography, flat gilt backgrounds, punch-embossed halos, mysteriously smiling Madonnas and infinite iterations of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Some of it is great and some of it is terrible and some of it is pretty mediocre, all shoved in one space together, and all the paintings look amazingly like each other, except for the trifling matter of quality. It will give you a beautiful aesthetic education and a headache. There will be one painting, and it will be a tripartite panel of the Madonna and Child flanked by John the Baptist and the aforesaid Catherine, and it will be terrible and you will hate it, and there will be another painting, and it will have exactly the same subject matter but be beautiful and glorious and you will love it, and they will be hung next to each other, and you stand there going 'but they differ in two lines! two lines! what is even going on here?' and feel your brain trying to understand the process of the comprehension of beauty until you hurt yourself.
For the record, I turn out to deeply love Lorenzo Monaco among thirteenth-century Florentine painters, although I admit to having no ideas about why.
Also, if you want to sit down in a museum in Florence and stare at some art in uninterrupted tranquility, the second floor of the Accademia is a great bet, because no one is up there. They are all down admiring the seismology equipment that has been strapped to the David so that the strain in its right leg from the weight of the marble can be measured because as I said earlier the pose is really stilted ahem anyway the second floor is pretty much deserted. And has comfortable benches, with padding. So it will never be my favorite museum, but I'm glad I went once without a party who had an agenda involving Michelangelo.
Also, the Mass can be pretty nice. San Lorenzo is the church devoted to three things: the intellect, the soul, and the Medici. It's Cosimo's church, the one that he built, where he was originally supposed to do the sacristy and the city was supposed to do the rest, and he put up this lovely sacristy, and the city was still sitting there being financially confused, so then he put up the rest of it and his parents and some other Medici are buried there. As is Cosimo. It's an amazing church, full of Donatello (he did them both pulpits and a Medici tomb made of marble carved to look like a woven basket), and a not-half-bad gilt-candy Baroque ceiling with a desperately inappropriate and gaudy Baroque dome. It's a humanist church in style, it's meant to suggest ancient Athens, and so the interior space really feels like the outdoors, because it's meant to be the agora and all the side altar niches are the frontispieces of the buildings surrounding the agora.
Cosimo is buried directly under the foot of the steps which lead to the altar. His tomb is in the crypt in the basement, but the top of his tomb rises up through the ceiling of the crypt and forms part of the floor of the church, and it is a giant slab of porphyry surrounded by smaller slabs of porphyry in a large mosaic with marble. No one has any idea where he stole all that porphyry. This is a thing that is really hard to do. Porphyry is of course that lovely purple stone from Egypt which is so very, very hard that cutting it, shaping it, or even polishing it is a thing that kings do to show off how awesome they are. It is, even nowadays, expensive as hell. The Romans were decent at cutting it, but the art was lost during the Middle Ages (for a while they even lost the mine), and Cosimo's tomb is notable partly because they actually managed to hack letters into the porphyry-- very shallowly, but the stone is so solid that that's all you need. The marble around it has worn away from the age's feet, but those quarter-inch-deep porphyry letters, Cosimo Pater Patriae, will be there after that marble has gone to dust.
And during the Mass there was a christening on it. For the rites involving the congregation, the christenings and weddings, the receiving of Communion, the priests come down the altar steps and stand on Cosimo. So we got to watch that. If you're christened on Cosimo de Medici, then by God you are a Florentine and no one can ever say otherwise. The baby was very good, very quiet. The service had a lot of modern folk music, with guitar, which was madly incongruous. I mean it wasn't bad music, but it was completely out of period.
After the Mass Thrud went home to do some work and I went to the Accademia, because it is obligatory and open Sunday afternoons (which little else is). The little piazza behind it was having an uneasy set of opposed crowd-drawing options, because one side was full of a protest which involved a tent city and Marxists and something about the (recently resigned) Berlusconi, and the other side was a fair of craftsmen and artists, and these things do not get the same audience. There was a guy in the craft fair carving stone at his booth, slab of stone on a table, sitting leaning over it, intricate tracing lines sinking in as he leaned on his chisel looking as easy as though he were working in butter. I must have watched him for half an hour as he put petals into a floral rosette of at least a hundred layers. He didn't speak a word of English and my Italian is not good enough to ask technical questions, but it was good enough for repeated admiration, and he did not seem to mind me watching.
As for the Accademia, though-- look. I know it's an industry. I know you can get it on everything from coffee mugs to fridge magnets, not to mention the infinite T-shirts, and I know it produces more tourist revenue than most of the rest of the city put together and all of that, I do know this. But I cannot like the David. I have cordially disliked it since the first time I saw it fifteen years ago and it hasn't gotten better. The hands and feet are out of proportion, and I find the pose stiff, and I don't think much of the facial expression, and--
okay, so Michelangelo was a man who had seen a fair number of other men naked; his David is meant to be Jewish, so he ought to be circumcised. I am fairly certain Michelangelo had never seen, naked, a man who was circumcised. So he faked it, and as a result that is one odd-looking naked statue and he's neither really circumcised nor isn't and I mean this is basically eye level and it bothers me. It just does, okay? Because Michelangelo is usually so good at anatomy. Not my favorite thing.
The rest of the Accademia is okay; the reason I went this trip was that on previous occasions I have been with people who rushed straight to the David and stayed there, so I felt like I was giving short shrift to the other bits of the museum. There's an entire second story I had never been to. There are Michelangelo's Prisoner statues, which I do like, and it turns out, and this is awesome: all of the paintings in the room with the Prisoners are portraits of Saint Zenobius! They are basically the only pictures of him out there! It's like they decided they had to collect their saint in one place. So you get Saint Zenobius healing the elm tree and, uh, standing around. Not a very active saint. I was delighted.
The paintings in the room with the David are pretty cool, too, as they were all restored in 2003 and have giant placards explaining exactly how they were restored and showing pictures of how awful they looked previously. I have to say, those restorers have every right to be proud, as these are lovely bright shiny pictures full of glowing Renaissance color and cunning witty details, when before they were basically big blobs of varnish. If you are at all interested in art restoration this is worth some attention.
And the second story: so what we hear about in Florentine painting is the Renaissance, but it must have come from somewhere. It came from the second floor of the Accademia, which is Medieval Florentine Painting. That second floor will drown you in a swirling sea of iconography, flat gilt backgrounds, punch-embossed halos, mysteriously smiling Madonnas and infinite iterations of Saint Catherine of Alexandria. Some of it is great and some of it is terrible and some of it is pretty mediocre, all shoved in one space together, and all the paintings look amazingly like each other, except for the trifling matter of quality. It will give you a beautiful aesthetic education and a headache. There will be one painting, and it will be a tripartite panel of the Madonna and Child flanked by John the Baptist and the aforesaid Catherine, and it will be terrible and you will hate it, and there will be another painting, and it will have exactly the same subject matter but be beautiful and glorious and you will love it, and they will be hung next to each other, and you stand there going 'but they differ in two lines! two lines! what is even going on here?' and feel your brain trying to understand the process of the comprehension of beauty until you hurt yourself.
For the record, I turn out to deeply love Lorenzo Monaco among thirteenth-century Florentine painters, although I admit to having no ideas about why.
Also, if you want to sit down in a museum in Florence and stare at some art in uninterrupted tranquility, the second floor of the Accademia is a great bet, because no one is up there. They are all down admiring the seismology equipment that has been strapped to the David so that the strain in its right leg from the weight of the marble can be measured because as I said earlier the pose is really stilted ahem anyway the second floor is pretty much deserted. And has comfortable benches, with padding. So it will never be my favorite museum, but I'm glad I went once without a party who had an agenda involving Michelangelo.
