Italy, Florence

I’m in Italy, not the first time.  My first visit was in 1961, returning to California after a year in India.  My mother took us to Europe, organizing stops in Rome, Florence, Venice, then a train to Lugano, Vienna, Salzburg, and some weeks at a lake in the Austrian Alps where my father joined us. 

I vaguely remember a pensione in Rome, somewhat larger and more elegant than the places I choose now, dinner outdoors in a plaza,  its souvenir, a painted ceramic ashtray, later looking up at Michelangelo’s David in Florence.  There were other trips, again to Venice in the 1970’s,  a concert and the frescoed ceiling at its Scuola Grande di San Rocco, in Rome in the 80’s or 90’s reading I Claudius, the Robert Graves novel.  About twenty years ago, my sister invited me to join her family at a rented house near Orvieto. Then last year I  was in Merano and Milan with close friends.

The earlier memories faded.  Now they are feelings or images, rather than precise elements.  In Rome, it’s the violence in the novel, in Venice hand held mirrors for the ceiling frescoes at San Rocco; in Milan it was my friend Scot, guiding us to the entrances of a number of beautiful post World War II apartment houses.  There is a pastry shop in central Milan where the beauty of the shop was even more memorable than the taste of the pastry. 

In my room in Florence there is a blood red orange on the desk, a cup and saucer with dark tea and lots of lemon juice.  There are large double doors, overlooking the hotel terrace, the Arno river and Brunelleschi’s dome. It is egg-shaped, tiled and ribbed, large on its base from close up, smaller from my room, ethereal.  I admire it from the bed, lit up at night or colored by early morning daylight.  I will be sorry to leave it tomorrow.   

Italy has more man-made beauty than any other place on earth, so it seems.  It is the talent for composition in painting and architecture, the skill in layering detail without excess or weight. It is the the streetscapes, the store fronts, the sense of age, the combination of these things, so beautiful despite many other tourists.  There is so much of it, seemingly around every corner.  Jaded by my own age, not easily impressed, constantly and for years exposed to beautiful things, I am awed like a child, as though seeing beauty for the first time.   The superiority of it takes my breath away.  If only I can describe it, understand it,  remember it, so here I’ll try, for two of the most beautiful things. 

David

There was a crowd outside the Accademia Museum in Florence;  but the Florentines kept the crowds waiting outside; once inside it was merely busy.  It was easy to find the David and a corner chair, to stand and walk around him, then sit again.  He is the most beautiful object I have ever seen, muscular without distortion, yet with enlarged and powerful hands and feet. His gaze is elevated to his task, the pending battle, the relaxed pose of a man who effectively uses his body, still a “youth” as described in the Torah, the youngest of Jesse’s sons, when the prophet Samuel finds him in Bethlehem, “. . . ruddy, and withal of beautiful eyes, and goodly to look upon.”  Michelangelo portrays him as a young man, retaining the beardlessness and smooth, slim-muscled elegance of youth, a kind of ideal, a symbol of history, of masculinity, yet a sensual object.  I was awed by this portrayal of a Jew by a Christian sculptor creating what he admired and presumably what he desired.  Its beauty and masculinity speak from the flesh of the stone, as much as from that of a living man. 

The gallery and the Uffizi

I do not mean the entire museum but the three-sided passage on its top floor that the Medicis used to display art.  Knowing nothing, I “discovered” it at the top of a stairway at the start of the exhibition.  I had never seen museum architecture like this.  It  is strong and impressive, yet like so much in Italy, it is layered and ornamented and so seems to say many things.   It is grand, on a large scale, wide with high ceilings, unexpectedly long, accentuated by beams separated by shallow, delicately frescoed, vaults.  There are huge framed windows on one or both sides, letting in incredible light, with views of the Arno and the surrounding city, reinforcing their intimacy.  For centuries the gallery has been used for display; there are probably hundreds of Roman statues and above them, portraits, in a secondary position, some hanging lower, some between the huge windows.  The statues may have been the initial focus, but they enhance and are strengthened by the gallery, so it is not the pieces, but the totality of the place that is the primary work of art.  The major paintings, including the Botticellis, are in a series of windowless side rooms opening from the gallery;  none of them fascinated me as much as this space. [1]

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[1] The Uffizi was commissioned by Cosimo de Medici in about 1550 according to the Uffizi website; Georgio Vasari was the architect. The building was completed shortly after their deaths in 1574.  Vasari is even better known for his book Lives of the Artists, an early survey of the great artists of the Italian renaissance. According to Donald John Fricelli, in an unpublished dissertation (1984),  the gallery (Altana) was originally conceived as an open passageway but was glazed in 1574.  Again according to the Uffizi, Francesco I, son Cosimo, began adorning gallery with statues and art in the 1580’s.