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On Monday morning Thrud and I got up early to go to the Biblioteca Laurenziana. It closes at like noon and is open way before the church is. You go up an interior stairway in the cloister, and then into a room which has no purpose other than the entrance stairs designed by Michelangelo. They are great stairs, with three flowing stepways, the outer two rectangular and the middle one a sequence of attenuated ovals. The issue is the room they're in, which was built for this-- they put another floor on the building so they could have A Stairway-- and it feels odd that you approach them from the side instead of the front, and the room is too tall for its length. But the stairs themselves came out very well, and you even get to go up them when you go into the reading room. Because you have to. Believe me, if there were a way to get you into the reading room without having you walk on Michelangelo, somebody would arrange it, but there isn't.
The reading room is long and high and narrow and has an intricate carved-wood ceiling with fake animal skulls, which sounds like a terrible motif but is somehow carried off here. It's lined with combination lecterns/chairs/shelves, amazing pieces of furniture where you lift the slanted lid to find the row of volumes, close the lid to prop the volume on while reading it, and even get to sit down while doing so. Well, they don't keep the books there anymore; there are too many. But it was comfortable, and it is the first library in Europe to have a catalogue, in that at the end of each lectern row there is a wooden placard hung on the end-cap with the names carved into it of all the volumes that were shelved in that row. Walking down you pass Latin History, Latin Poetry, Hebraica, Liturgica, the entire inventory of the original Laurenziana right there out in front of you. Hypnotic. One spends time looking for one's favorite authors, determining their shelf positions: is Aristotle under Philosophy? Under Rhetoric? (Some in both, sensibly.) Are we still in the era of considering pseudo-Aristotle Aristotle, and are they distinguished? (Yes, and no.)
Then the end leads into Special Exhibitions, which at the moment was Surgery in the Renaissance. Codices of Avicenna, Trotula, Galen; cautery knives and Byzantine bandaging diagrams; a picture of someone doing surgery on Hannibal with everyone dressed as a fourteenth-century Florentine, from a book about Carthaginian medicine. Incunabulae and parchment fragments, three rooms of priceless knowledge from the Romans on forward, ending in a case with plates from Diderot's Encyclopedia showing the same cases of surgical instruments that have appeared in century after century: a testament both to the transmission of knowledge, and the ways in which, sometimes, things don't advance as quickly as one might like them to.
November 23rd
The Laurenziana giftshop, like several other giftshops in Florence, sells cloths with which to clean the lenses of your glasses. The cloths have interesting and appropriate things printed on them, such as the painting from the Duomo of Dante explaining his cosmology. There is a different set of images available depending on which shop you go to, and the Laurenziana is noteworthy because they have one which is an illuminated manuscript page which turns out, when unfolded, to be a portrait of Ficino. You can't find that out until you buy it because it is folded in a way that makes it look very generic. These lens-cloths are not only scenic but amazingly useful; the difference between cleaning glasses with one of them and cleaning them on an ordinary piece of cloth is dazzling. I will probably wind up getting many of them, because they combine the categories of presents nicely: useful, beautiful, place-specific, cheap.
Then we went down to the crypt and saw the more conventional bits of Cosimo's tomb, which looks like an ordinary tomb because all the porphyry is on top. There's also a tomb in which are buried some bones which were in the right place and of the correct age to be Donatello's, and which contained some lead residue of the sort that accumulated in the bones of artists of that period, so they put up a nice plaque and rely on hope.
The crypt also contains a chunk of the Medici silver. There's another chunk over at the Argenti museum in the Pitti, which I haven't seen yet, but I have to say, this family could revolutionize art and science, build great cathedrals, patronize music that is still played and poems which are still read, but good God did they have terrible taste in reliquaries and other silver objects. This is the most garish, overdone, frighteningly ornamented, badly sculpted silver exhibition I have ever been in*. It's amazing. Putti with faces blown out like balloons, a relief of one of the Medici dukes that might just as well have carved on it in letters of fire LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME, a bishop's crozier with poorly articulated sheep gamboling up it... but the piece of greatest resistance is a reliquary. This reliquary is carved in the shape of the dome of San Lorenzo, which looks just like the dome of Santa Maria della Fiore except for being much smaller and having tiles with rounded bottoms instead of square bottoms. But the tiles in the reliquary are made of rock crystal. One just stares at it in horror. It is bizarrely translucent, so you can see all the interior wires, and it fails on every conceivable artistic level. It is not, quite, the worst art in the city; I would see that the following day. But it's right up there.
Afterward we went back into the church for a while, spending some more time in the sacristy, which has a beautiful lapis zodiac dome over one of the alcoves. And then Thrud went to work, and I went to the Museo dell Opera du Duomo.
The Museum of the Works of Santa Maria della Fiore is a museum which has no need to brag. It contains all the important, interesting, or aesthetic objects which have been removed from the Cathedral due to changing fashions or replacement by different objects. Which is to say, it's the museum for things the Florentines didn't think were quite good enough at the time but refuse to get rid of. And this is why the museum, without ever having to do any actual bragging, in itself constitutes a boost to the Florentine ego: it is full of Donatello, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, and della Robbia. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WASN'T CONSIDERED GOOD ENOUGH. BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THEY HAVE BETTER STUFF IN THERE.
I mean, mostly the people who took these things out of the Duomo were wrong-- the new choir stalls, for instance, may be larger but they aren't as good as the Donatello and that's all there is to it. But it's a museum which exudes a subtle smugness.
Highlights are the aforementioned Donatello choir stall and its match by della Robbia, both of which take as subject the praising of God through music and are covered with joyous statues of laughing children and angels playing medieval instruments. Neither slips into sentimentality, somehow. There's also a nice Michelangelo Pietà , not the one you're thinking of of course because that's in Rome, but the one from his old age, where he carved his own features into Nicodemus who carries Christ: an anguished composition by a man who has spent years afraid of death, and powerful although unfinished. Brunelleschi's tools are there, levers and diagrams and the competition entries from the competition in which he won the right to do the dome, and also all the entries from every competition which has ever been held about the church, which is a lot of them. The terrible eighteenth-century propositions for the new facade are pretty amazing and one is very glad they didn't happen. There are the original statues from before the new Cathedral, from before all this modern remodeling that made it into della Fiore instead of Santa Reparata, i.e. the things that were above the door and so on from before 1296; there are some Roman mosaics people found in the back; there are the original statues and reliefs from the bell tower, since the ones up there now are copies for conservation reasons.
I was glad to see an explanation of the iconography of the bell tower because it is very confusing and Thrud and I had spent a half hour or so staring at it from the ground and trying to make it out and gotten nowhere. The explanation, while not ridiculously helpful, did clear up that the top tier of reliefs are the Planets, the Cardinal and Theological Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments; the bottom tier remains a muddle.
Unlike many other museums in Florence, the Museo dell Opera du Duomo believes in both bathrooms and English-language signage. Well, mostly English-language. A greater percentage than in other museums is bilingual, let's put it that way, so at least forty percent of it has something English. I can read Italian reasonably, as one Romance language is much like another, but it takes more mental effort and makes the museums more tiring, so I am glad when I don't have to. (I can't really speak it. I can understand it when it is spoken to me, but when I try to speak it my grammar goes entirely to hell. I can write it, though, because one has more time.) And the museum is a pleasant building with an atrium and interior benches and views of the Duomo from every window, which is correct.
* Until the Argenti Museum. Entry coming eventually.
The reading room is long and high and narrow and has an intricate carved-wood ceiling with fake animal skulls, which sounds like a terrible motif but is somehow carried off here. It's lined with combination lecterns/chairs/shelves, amazing pieces of furniture where you lift the slanted lid to find the row of volumes, close the lid to prop the volume on while reading it, and even get to sit down while doing so. Well, they don't keep the books there anymore; there are too many. But it was comfortable, and it is the first library in Europe to have a catalogue, in that at the end of each lectern row there is a wooden placard hung on the end-cap with the names carved into it of all the volumes that were shelved in that row. Walking down you pass Latin History, Latin Poetry, Hebraica, Liturgica, the entire inventory of the original Laurenziana right there out in front of you. Hypnotic. One spends time looking for one's favorite authors, determining their shelf positions: is Aristotle under Philosophy? Under Rhetoric? (Some in both, sensibly.) Are we still in the era of considering pseudo-Aristotle Aristotle, and are they distinguished? (Yes, and no.)
Then the end leads into Special Exhibitions, which at the moment was Surgery in the Renaissance. Codices of Avicenna, Trotula, Galen; cautery knives and Byzantine bandaging diagrams; a picture of someone doing surgery on Hannibal with everyone dressed as a fourteenth-century Florentine, from a book about Carthaginian medicine. Incunabulae and parchment fragments, three rooms of priceless knowledge from the Romans on forward, ending in a case with plates from Diderot's Encyclopedia showing the same cases of surgical instruments that have appeared in century after century: a testament both to the transmission of knowledge, and the ways in which, sometimes, things don't advance as quickly as one might like them to.
November 23rd
The Laurenziana giftshop, like several other giftshops in Florence, sells cloths with which to clean the lenses of your glasses. The cloths have interesting and appropriate things printed on them, such as the painting from the Duomo of Dante explaining his cosmology. There is a different set of images available depending on which shop you go to, and the Laurenziana is noteworthy because they have one which is an illuminated manuscript page which turns out, when unfolded, to be a portrait of Ficino. You can't find that out until you buy it because it is folded in a way that makes it look very generic. These lens-cloths are not only scenic but amazingly useful; the difference between cleaning glasses with one of them and cleaning them on an ordinary piece of cloth is dazzling. I will probably wind up getting many of them, because they combine the categories of presents nicely: useful, beautiful, place-specific, cheap.
Then we went down to the crypt and saw the more conventional bits of Cosimo's tomb, which looks like an ordinary tomb because all the porphyry is on top. There's also a tomb in which are buried some bones which were in the right place and of the correct age to be Donatello's, and which contained some lead residue of the sort that accumulated in the bones of artists of that period, so they put up a nice plaque and rely on hope.
The crypt also contains a chunk of the Medici silver. There's another chunk over at the Argenti museum in the Pitti, which I haven't seen yet, but I have to say, this family could revolutionize art and science, build great cathedrals, patronize music that is still played and poems which are still read, but good God did they have terrible taste in reliquaries and other silver objects. This is the most garish, overdone, frighteningly ornamented, badly sculpted silver exhibition I have ever been in*. It's amazing. Putti with faces blown out like balloons, a relief of one of the Medici dukes that might just as well have carved on it in letters of fire LOVE ME LOVE ME LOVE ME, a bishop's crozier with poorly articulated sheep gamboling up it... but the piece of greatest resistance is a reliquary. This reliquary is carved in the shape of the dome of San Lorenzo, which looks just like the dome of Santa Maria della Fiore except for being much smaller and having tiles with rounded bottoms instead of square bottoms. But the tiles in the reliquary are made of rock crystal. One just stares at it in horror. It is bizarrely translucent, so you can see all the interior wires, and it fails on every conceivable artistic level. It is not, quite, the worst art in the city; I would see that the following day. But it's right up there.
Afterward we went back into the church for a while, spending some more time in the sacristy, which has a beautiful lapis zodiac dome over one of the alcoves. And then Thrud went to work, and I went to the Museo dell Opera du Duomo.
The Museum of the Works of Santa Maria della Fiore is a museum which has no need to brag. It contains all the important, interesting, or aesthetic objects which have been removed from the Cathedral due to changing fashions or replacement by different objects. Which is to say, it's the museum for things the Florentines didn't think were quite good enough at the time but refuse to get rid of. And this is why the museum, without ever having to do any actual bragging, in itself constitutes a boost to the Florentine ego: it is full of Donatello, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, and della Robbia. BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT WASN'T CONSIDERED GOOD ENOUGH. BECAUSE THEY BELIEVE THEY HAVE BETTER STUFF IN THERE.
I mean, mostly the people who took these things out of the Duomo were wrong-- the new choir stalls, for instance, may be larger but they aren't as good as the Donatello and that's all there is to it. But it's a museum which exudes a subtle smugness.
Highlights are the aforementioned Donatello choir stall and its match by della Robbia, both of which take as subject the praising of God through music and are covered with joyous statues of laughing children and angels playing medieval instruments. Neither slips into sentimentality, somehow. There's also a nice Michelangelo Pietà , not the one you're thinking of of course because that's in Rome, but the one from his old age, where he carved his own features into Nicodemus who carries Christ: an anguished composition by a man who has spent years afraid of death, and powerful although unfinished. Brunelleschi's tools are there, levers and diagrams and the competition entries from the competition in which he won the right to do the dome, and also all the entries from every competition which has ever been held about the church, which is a lot of them. The terrible eighteenth-century propositions for the new facade are pretty amazing and one is very glad they didn't happen. There are the original statues from before the new Cathedral, from before all this modern remodeling that made it into della Fiore instead of Santa Reparata, i.e. the things that were above the door and so on from before 1296; there are some Roman mosaics people found in the back; there are the original statues and reliefs from the bell tower, since the ones up there now are copies for conservation reasons.
I was glad to see an explanation of the iconography of the bell tower because it is very confusing and Thrud and I had spent a half hour or so staring at it from the ground and trying to make it out and gotten nowhere. The explanation, while not ridiculously helpful, did clear up that the top tier of reliefs are the Planets, the Cardinal and Theological Virtues, and the Seven Sacraments; the bottom tier remains a muddle.
Unlike many other museums in Florence, the Museo dell Opera du Duomo believes in both bathrooms and English-language signage. Well, mostly English-language. A greater percentage than in other museums is bilingual, let's put it that way, so at least forty percent of it has something English. I can read Italian reasonably, as one Romance language is much like another, but it takes more mental effort and makes the museums more tiring, so I am glad when I don't have to. (I can't really speak it. I can understand it when it is spoken to me, but when I try to speak it my grammar goes entirely to hell. I can write it, though, because one has more time.) And the museum is a pleasant building with an atrium and interior benches and views of the Duomo from every window, which is correct.
* Until the Argenti Museum. Entry coming eventually.
