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rushthatspeaksFlorence is a small city, so I had already walked by the Palazzo Strozzi several times without being very aware of it, although I had seen signs for the exhibit (on Renaissance banking, the Bonfire of the Vanities, and Botticelli) all over, which is why I decided to go. Many of the museums in Florence are free to people who have a Friends of the Uffizi card, but the Palazzo Strozzi isn't one of them; it's divided into several spaces, including the main exhibition rooms, several high-class giftshops and art bookstores, what looks like an expensive restaurant, and a basement exhibition space called the Little Strozzi, or Strozzina. You pay to get into the exhibitions separately, so I only went to the main one. It was ten euros and it was entirely worth it.
The building itself was built by a head of the Strozzi family in the early sixteenth century. He asked an astrologer to name a propitious day for him to begin building; the astrologer did so and told him that his house would endure for centuries and be famous both in Florence and outside it. The Strozzi died before construction was finished, without issue, but centuries later his house, his literal house, is right there and is a moderately well-known museum. It's a pleasant stone building with an interior courtyard, extremely high ceilings, and all the standard Renaissance flourishes.
The exhibition was a look at the changing and peculiar relationship between Florentines and money from just before the Renaissance through the change into Baroque. It's there through I think January 2012 and it's stellar. It's got all sorts of examples of the iconography of art associated with money-- the paintings that were hung in the Mint, including a stunning thirteenth-century piece meant for the interior vestibule in which the Madonna is being crowned by her son with a literal and large golden crown; a series of portraits of prominent persons who were merchants and moneylenders and looks at the symbolism used in the portraits and what it says about how these professions were thought about, so that you can see in the early pictures how the merchants are shown as deformed and icky through contact with money, surrounded by symbols of avarice and hell-fire, and then this slides into the portraits being just like those of anybody; a complete look at the rise of the Medici with documents, letters patent, letters of exchange, Lorenzo's personal codebook for correspondence and letters sent in that code, and some of the things they did with their money at various points (my favorite is a book of scandalous Latin poetry Lorenzo gave his brother, in which the title-page shows satyrs juggling the balls from the Medici coat-of-arms, a joke just as dirty in Italian as it is in English: the Medici get their balls everywhere). The exhibit has the few depictions of Florentine Renaissance Jewry, a depressing and not-often-told history involving great persecution. It has a discussion of the dangers and benefits of merchanting travel, a close look at the logistics of that and the ways people tried to make it safer.
And it has a room of Savonarola, the backswing against the new banking/merchanting culture, the attempt to recall the city to a pious poverty and the violent death that came with that attempt. There are some of the earliest depictions of the execution of Savonarola here, so early they don't even have a year on their internal labels, but just 'this happened in April'.
In short, it's an exhibit which is an intentional and careful dramatization and explanation of the tensions that have always dominated Florence, the tensions between money (and the luxury and power that go with it) and piety (and the simplicity and power that go with it). All of it is equally bilingual, English-Italian, and has placards by two respectable historians who, and I was delighted by this, do not always agree with one another. It was well-curated, well-organized, full of beautiful and unusual objects taken from the best museums, and not overwhelming.
And then at the end, after all of that context, they had, with almost no labeling, a room of Savonarola's most famous adherent, that tension in the person of one painter's flesh: a room of the late Botticelli, so that the viewers can make up their own minds about the infamously confusing images of the most confusing era of perhaps the world's greatest painter. The torment in his jewel-like scenes, the clarity of linework in these details that cannot mean anything now, is just amazing. In one painting a group of women drag a man in a loincloth by his hair to the seat of an angry king; off to the side, a naked woman who looks a great deal like the Venus smiles seraphically, while an old woman cloaked in black shakes her fist. The tentative identification is of the old woman as Avarice and the Venus as Truth, but as for the rest, who can say? This is not the iconography of medieval Florence, this is not the saints and angels. Neither Bible nor classical folklore will help, none of the usual sets of tools that one hauls into the edifice marked Western European Painting. Part of Botticelli's genius is that he was one of the first artists in his tradition to have this kind of interiority. And yet, one can feel something, so great is the painter's power, and I think the rooms and rooms of reminder of the times he lived in help. It was certainly a worthy antidote to the Argenti.
The day afterwards, I went to Rome.
The building itself was built by a head of the Strozzi family in the early sixteenth century. He asked an astrologer to name a propitious day for him to begin building; the astrologer did so and told him that his house would endure for centuries and be famous both in Florence and outside it. The Strozzi died before construction was finished, without issue, but centuries later his house, his literal house, is right there and is a moderately well-known museum. It's a pleasant stone building with an interior courtyard, extremely high ceilings, and all the standard Renaissance flourishes.
The exhibition was a look at the changing and peculiar relationship between Florentines and money from just before the Renaissance through the change into Baroque. It's there through I think January 2012 and it's stellar. It's got all sorts of examples of the iconography of art associated with money-- the paintings that were hung in the Mint, including a stunning thirteenth-century piece meant for the interior vestibule in which the Madonna is being crowned by her son with a literal and large golden crown; a series of portraits of prominent persons who were merchants and moneylenders and looks at the symbolism used in the portraits and what it says about how these professions were thought about, so that you can see in the early pictures how the merchants are shown as deformed and icky through contact with money, surrounded by symbols of avarice and hell-fire, and then this slides into the portraits being just like those of anybody; a complete look at the rise of the Medici with documents, letters patent, letters of exchange, Lorenzo's personal codebook for correspondence and letters sent in that code, and some of the things they did with their money at various points (my favorite is a book of scandalous Latin poetry Lorenzo gave his brother, in which the title-page shows satyrs juggling the balls from the Medici coat-of-arms, a joke just as dirty in Italian as it is in English: the Medici get their balls everywhere). The exhibit has the few depictions of Florentine Renaissance Jewry, a depressing and not-often-told history involving great persecution. It has a discussion of the dangers and benefits of merchanting travel, a close look at the logistics of that and the ways people tried to make it safer.
And it has a room of Savonarola, the backswing against the new banking/merchanting culture, the attempt to recall the city to a pious poverty and the violent death that came with that attempt. There are some of the earliest depictions of the execution of Savonarola here, so early they don't even have a year on their internal labels, but just 'this happened in April'.
In short, it's an exhibit which is an intentional and careful dramatization and explanation of the tensions that have always dominated Florence, the tensions between money (and the luxury and power that go with it) and piety (and the simplicity and power that go with it). All of it is equally bilingual, English-Italian, and has placards by two respectable historians who, and I was delighted by this, do not always agree with one another. It was well-curated, well-organized, full of beautiful and unusual objects taken from the best museums, and not overwhelming.
And then at the end, after all of that context, they had, with almost no labeling, a room of Savonarola's most famous adherent, that tension in the person of one painter's flesh: a room of the late Botticelli, so that the viewers can make up their own minds about the infamously confusing images of the most confusing era of perhaps the world's greatest painter. The torment in his jewel-like scenes, the clarity of linework in these details that cannot mean anything now, is just amazing. In one painting a group of women drag a man in a loincloth by his hair to the seat of an angry king; off to the side, a naked woman who looks a great deal like the Venus smiles seraphically, while an old woman cloaked in black shakes her fist. The tentative identification is of the old woman as Avarice and the Venus as Truth, but as for the rest, who can say? This is not the iconography of medieval Florence, this is not the saints and angels. Neither Bible nor classical folklore will help, none of the usual sets of tools that one hauls into the edifice marked Western European Painting. Part of Botticelli's genius is that he was one of the first artists in his tradition to have this kind of interiority. And yet, one can feel something, so great is the painter's power, and I think the rooms and rooms of reminder of the times he lived in help. It was certainly a worthy antidote to the Argenti.
The day afterwards, I went to Rome.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-17 10:20 pm (UTC).....OMG awesome.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 01:41 pm (UTC)This really struck me, because oh, all museums should have this.