Florence With a Friend

 Annamaria on Monday

My friend Kate and I bonded as fellow Lit majors and have remained in close touch all our lives.  During lock down, she in LA and I in New York kept each other company over Zoom by doing what we had done together all those decades ago. We studied.

Since neither of us had liked our long-ago course in Shakespeare, we started with the plays.  We read biographies of the Bard and books of criticism about his works.  Over the next year and a half, each week, we chose a play.  We read the professorial stuff, the play itself, and watched a movie of it.  Kate read the play first and then watched.  I did the reverse.  Then the following Sunday, we met to discuss what we had learned. We loved it.

But, eventually we decided to switch topics and took up Renaissance art, staring with Michelangelo, using the same sorts of source material and lots of gandering at the photos of the works.  Based on the facts of his life and the magnificence of his paintings and statues, we became completely enamored of him.  We followed up with Leonardo and Bernini.  It was about this time last year, when I was in Florence and could visit the masterpieces in person that we started to hatch a plan which this past week came to fruition.

Kate arrived on January 4, and we have spent the intervening days finding the works of the artists we have studied and those of their contemporaries who influenced them or were influenced by them.  Here is a taste of what we have seen so far.

(Ah well! Blogger has decied that you should see my photos in  reverse chronicle order.  It probably wants me to argue with it for an hour or two before I cry "uncle" or some unprintable curse.  But I have already learned how useless it is to try to impose my will on Blogger Almighty.) 

Going backwards in time: 

These next few phoitos are of Michelangelo sculptures that line the corridor leading up to his  David.  They are known collectively as The Prisoners.  Some think them unfinished work.  Michelangelo described his process as seeing the people trapped inside the block of marble and taking away the excess stone and liberating them.  Some people (and I am one) say that they are not unfinished, but left as they are because they said what he wanted them to say: They are still prisoners.

 

This one is particularly moving to me because

the face so closely resembles Michelangelo himself.

What do you think this baby is about to do?

I love annunciations, and particularly the myriad

ways painters have designed the wings of 

Angel Gabriel.

Another prisoner.  I have no idea why Blogger put it here.

The last night of Christmas projections on the Ponte Vecchio.

We visited the Palazzo Vecchio and saw the apartments where the Medici lived.

Mask of Dante

 

I like to look at the expression of Mary's face 

when she gets the new.  This one is rare.  She 

really seems to be saying, "What? Me?"

This vast space was the main gathering room for the

 Medici court and is still used as such.

The Medici collected  examples of newly discovered

African animals.  

Lorenzo the Magnificent had  a giraffe 

in his private zoo,

 

This 16th century Last Supper was painted by a woman!

The Church of Santa Maria Novella

Massacio's  Holy Trinity undergoing restoration

Santa Maria Novella

 Annamaria on Monday

According to UNESCO's worldwide analysis, sixty percent of the Patrimony of Humanity is in Italy, and sixty percent of the treasures that are in Italy are in Tuscany.  For me this means that no matter how many visits I make to masterpieces of art and architecture, there is always more to enjoy. And revisiting places I have not seen in a while can be as much an eyeopener as happening upon something I didn't even know existed.  This week that meant going to see the church of Santa Maria Novella, which I had not seen in at least a couple of decades.  It was far more wonderful than I remembered it.  I want to share it with you today.

Visitors enter from the side door

The main attraction for art lovers: Ghirlandaio's frescoes:

The zoom on the camera allows for seeing the panels in closeup.

I love it that the tabernacle on the main altar is a miniature of the dome of the Duomo. 

I understand from a friend here that a lot of people don't go out to see the cloister.  I am glad I did, if only to see the architecture and the trees.

But then I found the Spanish Chapel, so called because, even during the Renaissance, it was a favorite of noble Spanish visitors.  I understood why.  The frescoes are a knock out.

What you have here is just a taste of what there is to see in just one of Florence’s many many splendors.