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rushthatspeaksNext day: we met up with Thrud's colleague again, and went over to San Marco, which is the monastery that has all the cells frescoed by Fra Angelico. Stopped by the church briefly, to say hi to Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, buried there with some other people Piero de Medici poisoned. It's a fairly good church, with a candy-box Baroque ceiling that is substantially less hideous than many candy-box Baroque church ceilings, and an incorruptible saint in a box in the side chapel. It's a clear box, and I must say he looks somewhat corrupted, or at least as though he has been for a while out in the rain. The test is of course what fluids the body gives off and stuff like that, so it all counts, and it is true that he is in good preservation for five hundred and something, when one would expect most corpses to have gone to bones. (You get used to seeing corpses in Italian churches. Random parts of bodies, skulls, reliquaries, femurs, finger-bones. I am told that in the Museo del' Opera du Duomo I will see the finger of John the Baptist, and I have seen Peter under the Vatican; according to some theologians there is merit and luck in this, but I couldn't say. We were theorizing earlier that the sponge used on Christ's side must be a relic somewhere but none of us knows where. I forget who has Christ's foreskin but I've been in the church-- it isn't out on view, they bring it at festivals.)
The monastery at San Marco is one of the best museums in Florence, which is to say anywhere. All the cells are in situ, unfurnished but otherwise as they were, except the two where they've chopped holes in the floor to show the medieval paintings on the level down before the second story was built. Savonarola's cell is here, with his rosary and his chair, and a lot of nineteenth-century devotional art aimed in his direction when the Florentines seem to have decided they liked him again for some reason.
Let me tell you about Savonarola's chair. I know he was all against luxury and comfort, that he wanted people to mortify the flesh: if that is the case why on earth did he have the best folding chair in the world? I am not kidding. I have sat in replicas, because they are all over the place around here, because they are ridiculously comfortable, and he had this thing invented. It's a dignified, beautiful wooden folding chair in a conformation that suits the human back and spine, shows off the wood grain, and stores neatly into a corner. Thrud bought multiple ones recently for our house. They do not even need a cushion. Savonarola's has a dagger skewering a snake carved into the back as his arms. It is one of the best objects. It does not really make me forgive him for the Bonfire of the Vanities, but it's just an extremely awesome chair.
Then there are the Fra Angelico frescoes.
Narrative. They have narrative, between cells. And they are trying to do things that paintings don't do, that paintings don't do even now. There's a sequence that is Saint Dominic meditating on the life of Christ, and specifically on the Passion. In order, down the corridor, you move through various scenes of the life, and in each of them Saint Dominic, in the foreground watching, is older. He doesn't think about the stories in order, he moves from Sermon on the Mount to manger, but his progression is linear, the lines on his face, the white in his beard. He comes back over and over to the Crucifixion, and the picture is almost a copy but slightly different each time, with a slightly different emphasis, so that you know that it's not a copy but that each fresco depicts a different moment of his meditations, a different understanding of these incidents.
In the best painting, Dominic sits in the foreground, middle-aged, reading a book, across from Mary, who's also been in a lot of these, and is smiling at him. In the middle distance Christ in the aspect of heavenly king is shown standing in his coffin, coming out of it with open hands, alive and also smiling, looking at Dominic. The entire background of the painting is black, and in the blackness there is a painting of Christ blindfolded, and around him are images of the things that he heard and felt while blindfolded, on the way to his execution: the silver coins ringing into Judas' hand, the spear, the sponge, the whip on skin, the nails, a man spitting on him. So we are meant to understand: a) Dominic is contemplating this, the things that Christ heard and felt while deprived of sight, and the blackness is meant to represent the lack of visual experience; and b) Christ, risen, can see Dominic and appreciate his contemplation, because he is outside of time; but also c) Christ, standing in that background, is also contemplating the pains he had, which will, outside of time, never leave him. It's a very impressive image because it is attempting to communicate an essentially non-visual thing, on multiple levels of time and narrative, in a three-foot square portion of a wall more than half of which is unrelieved blackness. And it succeeds. And all this in the 1450s; there would not be established visual conventions for any of this for... well, I'm not sure there are now.
Plus of course Fra Angelico had beautiful linework and gorgeously melting delicate colors and a subtlety of shape that has to be seen to be believed. But I understand why they call him blessed, why he is Beato Angelico, when I think of him as a narrative painter.
After San Marco we had had enough museum, so Thrud's colleague took us to Lunch. I am capitalizing it because it was not lunch, it was Lunch. We got there at twelve-thirty and left at four p.m. and I have not eaten anything else today. Thrud's colleague is eating his way through famous places he wants to eat in Florence and wants company and so takes people to Lunch. This Lunch was at Osteria Giovanni.
We had as antipasti: beef carpaccio, prosciutto di Parma, mixed green salad with, and this is important, the first of the year's crop of new olive oil, chickpea salad, and a house ricotta so delicate it was difficult even to eat with a spoon because it resisted attempts to pick it up and would just melt into evanescence on you. New oil is assertive, smoky, bitter, with an aftertaste as complex as a wine. Unlike many olive oils, it tastes mostly of the olives. Only better. Primi: Thrud and I split a truffle and porcini cream raviolini and a pasta stuffed with pears and ricotta in a leek cream sauce with almonds. I am not much on truffles. To me they taste musty, and these were shaved into little crunchy slivers and it's just not my thing, but I do like porcini, as rich as meat but far less heavy. And the pear and leek and almond were harmonious, just a touch of cayenne, which I wouldn't have thought of, but this was one of those instances where complex tastes distilled to something simple.
Secondi: rabbit, braised, with spinach; lamb roasted with artichokes; chicken stuffed with sausage and zucchini. Shared three ways. I don't much like rabbit but it can be rubbery and here it wasn't. It was the best spinach I've ever had-- it had the stems on, and was cooked in a way such that the leaves were just wilted, but the stems were slightly softer than crunchy and exploding with garlicky juice. The lamb and artichokes were very dark food, a rich taste that made each take the nature of the other. And the chicken had a sweetness to it that I wouldn't have expected of zucchini, but which obviously was, and I don't like zucchini either but there it is.
Dessert: citrus tart with crema gelato, ricotta cheesecake, pear poached in red wine with chocolate gelato, split three ways. The ricotta cheesecake was fairly standard. The tart was I think bitter orange, shockingly, delightfully strong, requiring the gelato as a counterbalance but working well with it. And the pear was the most medieval thing I have ever had that wasn't something I made myself out of a medieval recipe book. It was purple, and tasted strongly of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, wine, and chocolate without sugar; again the sweetness came from the gelato, and from the sugars found in the pear itself. It was impressive, one of those dishes that makes you realize that the Middle Ages did not observe a boundary between savory and sweet the way that we do. I would like to try making it at home. I suspect you start by mulling the wine.
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The monastery at San Marco is one of the best museums in Florence, which is to say anywhere. All the cells are in situ, unfurnished but otherwise as they were, except the two where they've chopped holes in the floor to show the medieval paintings on the level down before the second story was built. Savonarola's cell is here, with his rosary and his chair, and a lot of nineteenth-century devotional art aimed in his direction when the Florentines seem to have decided they liked him again for some reason.
Let me tell you about Savonarola's chair. I know he was all against luxury and comfort, that he wanted people to mortify the flesh: if that is the case why on earth did he have the best folding chair in the world? I am not kidding. I have sat in replicas, because they are all over the place around here, because they are ridiculously comfortable, and he had this thing invented. It's a dignified, beautiful wooden folding chair in a conformation that suits the human back and spine, shows off the wood grain, and stores neatly into a corner. Thrud bought multiple ones recently for our house. They do not even need a cushion. Savonarola's has a dagger skewering a snake carved into the back as his arms. It is one of the best objects. It does not really make me forgive him for the Bonfire of the Vanities, but it's just an extremely awesome chair.
Then there are the Fra Angelico frescoes.
Narrative. They have narrative, between cells. And they are trying to do things that paintings don't do, that paintings don't do even now. There's a sequence that is Saint Dominic meditating on the life of Christ, and specifically on the Passion. In order, down the corridor, you move through various scenes of the life, and in each of them Saint Dominic, in the foreground watching, is older. He doesn't think about the stories in order, he moves from Sermon on the Mount to manger, but his progression is linear, the lines on his face, the white in his beard. He comes back over and over to the Crucifixion, and the picture is almost a copy but slightly different each time, with a slightly different emphasis, so that you know that it's not a copy but that each fresco depicts a different moment of his meditations, a different understanding of these incidents.
In the best painting, Dominic sits in the foreground, middle-aged, reading a book, across from Mary, who's also been in a lot of these, and is smiling at him. In the middle distance Christ in the aspect of heavenly king is shown standing in his coffin, coming out of it with open hands, alive and also smiling, looking at Dominic. The entire background of the painting is black, and in the blackness there is a painting of Christ blindfolded, and around him are images of the things that he heard and felt while blindfolded, on the way to his execution: the silver coins ringing into Judas' hand, the spear, the sponge, the whip on skin, the nails, a man spitting on him. So we are meant to understand: a) Dominic is contemplating this, the things that Christ heard and felt while deprived of sight, and the blackness is meant to represent the lack of visual experience; and b) Christ, risen, can see Dominic and appreciate his contemplation, because he is outside of time; but also c) Christ, standing in that background, is also contemplating the pains he had, which will, outside of time, never leave him. It's a very impressive image because it is attempting to communicate an essentially non-visual thing, on multiple levels of time and narrative, in a three-foot square portion of a wall more than half of which is unrelieved blackness. And it succeeds. And all this in the 1450s; there would not be established visual conventions for any of this for... well, I'm not sure there are now.
Plus of course Fra Angelico had beautiful linework and gorgeously melting delicate colors and a subtlety of shape that has to be seen to be believed. But I understand why they call him blessed, why he is Beato Angelico, when I think of him as a narrative painter.
After San Marco we had had enough museum, so Thrud's colleague took us to Lunch. I am capitalizing it because it was not lunch, it was Lunch. We got there at twelve-thirty and left at four p.m. and I have not eaten anything else today. Thrud's colleague is eating his way through famous places he wants to eat in Florence and wants company and so takes people to Lunch. This Lunch was at Osteria Giovanni.
We had as antipasti: beef carpaccio, prosciutto di Parma, mixed green salad with, and this is important, the first of the year's crop of new olive oil, chickpea salad, and a house ricotta so delicate it was difficult even to eat with a spoon because it resisted attempts to pick it up and would just melt into evanescence on you. New oil is assertive, smoky, bitter, with an aftertaste as complex as a wine. Unlike many olive oils, it tastes mostly of the olives. Only better. Primi: Thrud and I split a truffle and porcini cream raviolini and a pasta stuffed with pears and ricotta in a leek cream sauce with almonds. I am not much on truffles. To me they taste musty, and these were shaved into little crunchy slivers and it's just not my thing, but I do like porcini, as rich as meat but far less heavy. And the pear and leek and almond were harmonious, just a touch of cayenne, which I wouldn't have thought of, but this was one of those instances where complex tastes distilled to something simple.
Secondi: rabbit, braised, with spinach; lamb roasted with artichokes; chicken stuffed with sausage and zucchini. Shared three ways. I don't much like rabbit but it can be rubbery and here it wasn't. It was the best spinach I've ever had-- it had the stems on, and was cooked in a way such that the leaves were just wilted, but the stems were slightly softer than crunchy and exploding with garlicky juice. The lamb and artichokes were very dark food, a rich taste that made each take the nature of the other. And the chicken had a sweetness to it that I wouldn't have expected of zucchini, but which obviously was, and I don't like zucchini either but there it is.
Dessert: citrus tart with crema gelato, ricotta cheesecake, pear poached in red wine with chocolate gelato, split three ways. The ricotta cheesecake was fairly standard. The tart was I think bitter orange, shockingly, delightfully strong, requiring the gelato as a counterbalance but working well with it. And the pear was the most medieval thing I have ever had that wasn't something I made myself out of a medieval recipe book. It was purple, and tasted strongly of cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, wine, and chocolate without sugar; again the sweetness came from the gelato, and from the sugars found in the pear itself. It was impressive, one of those dishes that makes you realize that the Middle Ages did not observe a boundary between savory and sweet the way that we do. I would like to try making it at home. I suspect you start by mulling the wine.
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