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rushthatspeaksThe smells of Florence: piss, tobacco, drains, incense, the musk that is the base of some perfumes and stays when the perfume has worn off the person who put it on in the morning, lighted candles, shit, roasting chestnuts, evergreens, citrus, stone.
The colors: stucco white-yellow, terra-cotta red, slate blue, stone sand, clear sky (it's winter light already).
The feel: cobbles under feet, cold air.
I did get to the Bargello, which is pretty much the attic of Florence. It's an eleventh-century public building which has been palazzo and keep and prison, made into a museum when somebody discovered the Oldest Known Portrait Of Dante in it, which to the Florentines is enough to consecrate it forever. The downstairs sculpture room has a fair bit of Cellini, including the original base of the Perseus, which is probably the only statue base of which I am aware to include an entirely separate statue of the same figure on it-- the base has young Perseus posing with Danaë, along with depictions of Zeus, Apollo, and Athene, a family group. Cellini's Ganymede is there also, hands, feet, and eagle added to a classical Bacchus to guarantee that no critic, ever, would know what to say about it; critics can become so uncomfortable with art which has no obvious parentage, no single voice which can be seen as the work's genius. Cellini and the Roman piece work together very well, I think; it's a Bacchus which has fairly Mannerist hair anyway, one of those updos with a lot of tiny curlicues, so the featherwork of the eagle is saved from being overfussy by textural harmony with the head. In that room there's a good Apollo, too, with Hyacinthus, an Apollo who really is noble and young and graceful and poised on the edge of tragedy, my mental image of the one that spoke to Rilke that one time.
The rest of the Bargello can be handily described as fifteen or so rooms full of five hundred Renaissance hairpins. In which Donatello's David is standing and looking rather embarrassed, if indeed any expression is visible under his very peculiar hat. Okay, okay, not quite all hairpins. But they seem to have bought anything museum-worthy that nobody else wanted, ivories of Byzantium, chessboards and backgammon sets, arms and armor of four centuries, medals of every ruler and duke and minor nobleman from the nearby vicinity who ever had one struck, more della Robbia porcelain figure sets than I bet were ever in the della Robbia workshop at a single time. A room of Islamic art that wandered west somehow. You name it. There are some lovely and charming things, and some frankly bad art, and all in the same case. It's entertaining but a bit tiring; a lot of the objects are very small. It is possible to get eyestrain from museums and I think that I have done it.
In a case in the room of bronzes there is another portrait of the dwarf Morgante, this time riding a nautilus shell on the back of a sea dragon. He is perfectly recognizable. I need to look to see if anything is known about his life.
In the courtyard there are two stone lions, each with a lion cub under its foot, wearing large iron crowns of the classical crown-shape (resembling muffins), embossed with fleur-de-lis. The combination of marble and iron is ridiculous but faintly dignified, and the cubs are sheltered and playful.
After the Bargello I stopped briefly at a dolceria and had a sachertorte, which was necessary or I would have fallen over entirely, and then I went to the Pitti Palace, which I should not have done on that day. It is because I hadn't been before and didn't know how large it is. The Pitti is six museums and a garden in one building, three stories high and a maze of passages and signs and guard stations and sudden gift shops. Unlike every other museum in Florence, it does have sufficient bathrooms, but this is small consolation when you're wondering what floor you're on and whether you're ever going to find your way out again. Not that you would necessarily want to. I went to the Costume Museum first, which is up at the very top, of course, because the things one wants to go to are the farthest away. It's pretty good, although I wish they would display more by way of older clothing. At the moment, there are a lot of twentieth-century evening dresses which are being shown so that we can see how they have taken elements from the two or three seventeenth- and eighteenth-century outfits that are next to them in the cases. In proportion I would have preferred this to be the other way around.
Interspersed with this was the temporary exhibition which has now overtaken most of the Pitti, and which I frankly find hilarious. It's titled 'La Bella Italia', and is supposed to be a hymn to the glory of Italy's cities (and former city-states), a celebration of the different art styles and beauties of each one. So you'll be walking through the Costume Museum, and suddenly there's a room labeled 'Turin', and it's full of Turin, in landscape-painting format. Maps of Turin, drawings of Turin, maybe a couple of portraits of People Who Were Important To Turin. And there are rooms like this for lots of different cities.
Then there is the room About Florence, which is actually three rooms, and it has: a Botticelli (Athena and the Centaur). A Michelangelo. The portrait of Dante standing in front of his cosmology, on loan from the Duomo, so you can get right up close and really look at the details of Dante. That portrait of Machiavelli, the one that winds up on more than half of the book covers, the one without the hat. A fresco of Boccaccio. A fresco of Petrarch. And on and on and on, and there are not, in fact, any landscape paintings.
Now, I realize that all the best things that have been made in Turin are, as they should be, basically in Turin, and that Turin is not going to send its best to an exhibition in Florence; also that all Florence's best stuff is right here. Still. The distinct impression one gets is that there is a message being sent here, which I would summarize as 'it's not that we're better than you, it's just that we're better than you'. I mean, there is a (terrible) statue in the Bargello of Firenze, in the Guise Of A Lady, Overcoming Pisa, and while they did not bring this statue over to the Pitti for this exhibition, it wouldn't have seemed out of place.
I have to go back to the Pitti. I didn't even manage to make it into the garden.
The colors: stucco white-yellow, terra-cotta red, slate blue, stone sand, clear sky (it's winter light already).
The feel: cobbles under feet, cold air.
I did get to the Bargello, which is pretty much the attic of Florence. It's an eleventh-century public building which has been palazzo and keep and prison, made into a museum when somebody discovered the Oldest Known Portrait Of Dante in it, which to the Florentines is enough to consecrate it forever. The downstairs sculpture room has a fair bit of Cellini, including the original base of the Perseus, which is probably the only statue base of which I am aware to include an entirely separate statue of the same figure on it-- the base has young Perseus posing with Danaë, along with depictions of Zeus, Apollo, and Athene, a family group. Cellini's Ganymede is there also, hands, feet, and eagle added to a classical Bacchus to guarantee that no critic, ever, would know what to say about it; critics can become so uncomfortable with art which has no obvious parentage, no single voice which can be seen as the work's genius. Cellini and the Roman piece work together very well, I think; it's a Bacchus which has fairly Mannerist hair anyway, one of those updos with a lot of tiny curlicues, so the featherwork of the eagle is saved from being overfussy by textural harmony with the head. In that room there's a good Apollo, too, with Hyacinthus, an Apollo who really is noble and young and graceful and poised on the edge of tragedy, my mental image of the one that spoke to Rilke that one time.
The rest of the Bargello can be handily described as fifteen or so rooms full of five hundred Renaissance hairpins. In which Donatello's David is standing and looking rather embarrassed, if indeed any expression is visible under his very peculiar hat. Okay, okay, not quite all hairpins. But they seem to have bought anything museum-worthy that nobody else wanted, ivories of Byzantium, chessboards and backgammon sets, arms and armor of four centuries, medals of every ruler and duke and minor nobleman from the nearby vicinity who ever had one struck, more della Robbia porcelain figure sets than I bet were ever in the della Robbia workshop at a single time. A room of Islamic art that wandered west somehow. You name it. There are some lovely and charming things, and some frankly bad art, and all in the same case. It's entertaining but a bit tiring; a lot of the objects are very small. It is possible to get eyestrain from museums and I think that I have done it.
In a case in the room of bronzes there is another portrait of the dwarf Morgante, this time riding a nautilus shell on the back of a sea dragon. He is perfectly recognizable. I need to look to see if anything is known about his life.
In the courtyard there are two stone lions, each with a lion cub under its foot, wearing large iron crowns of the classical crown-shape (resembling muffins), embossed with fleur-de-lis. The combination of marble and iron is ridiculous but faintly dignified, and the cubs are sheltered and playful.
After the Bargello I stopped briefly at a dolceria and had a sachertorte, which was necessary or I would have fallen over entirely, and then I went to the Pitti Palace, which I should not have done on that day. It is because I hadn't been before and didn't know how large it is. The Pitti is six museums and a garden in one building, three stories high and a maze of passages and signs and guard stations and sudden gift shops. Unlike every other museum in Florence, it does have sufficient bathrooms, but this is small consolation when you're wondering what floor you're on and whether you're ever going to find your way out again. Not that you would necessarily want to. I went to the Costume Museum first, which is up at the very top, of course, because the things one wants to go to are the farthest away. It's pretty good, although I wish they would display more by way of older clothing. At the moment, there are a lot of twentieth-century evening dresses which are being shown so that we can see how they have taken elements from the two or three seventeenth- and eighteenth-century outfits that are next to them in the cases. In proportion I would have preferred this to be the other way around.
Interspersed with this was the temporary exhibition which has now overtaken most of the Pitti, and which I frankly find hilarious. It's titled 'La Bella Italia', and is supposed to be a hymn to the glory of Italy's cities (and former city-states), a celebration of the different art styles and beauties of each one. So you'll be walking through the Costume Museum, and suddenly there's a room labeled 'Turin', and it's full of Turin, in landscape-painting format. Maps of Turin, drawings of Turin, maybe a couple of portraits of People Who Were Important To Turin. And there are rooms like this for lots of different cities.
Then there is the room About Florence, which is actually three rooms, and it has: a Botticelli (Athena and the Centaur). A Michelangelo. The portrait of Dante standing in front of his cosmology, on loan from the Duomo, so you can get right up close and really look at the details of Dante. That portrait of Machiavelli, the one that winds up on more than half of the book covers, the one without the hat. A fresco of Boccaccio. A fresco of Petrarch. And on and on and on, and there are not, in fact, any landscape paintings.
Now, I realize that all the best things that have been made in Turin are, as they should be, basically in Turin, and that Turin is not going to send its best to an exhibition in Florence; also that all Florence's best stuff is right here. Still. The distinct impression one gets is that there is a message being sent here, which I would summarize as 'it's not that we're better than you, it's just that we're better than you'. I mean, there is a (terrible) statue in the Bargello of Firenze, in the Guise Of A Lady, Overcoming Pisa, and while they did not bring this statue over to the Pitti for this exhibition, it wouldn't have seemed out of place.
I have to go back to the Pitti. I didn't even manage to make it into the garden.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-05 11:32 pm (UTC)