Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Bargello

We started our week in Florence (and our 72 hours) with two of the super-biggies, the Bargello and the Uffizi. The Bargello is largely sculpture, the Uffizi, well, everything, but mostly painting, of a certain age.

Perhaps this is the place to note, and complain, that nearly all of Tuscany has gone to the "no foto!" policy. Except where this bears on preserving the works of art (idiots using flash, e.g.), I don't know how to construe it except as more gouging of the tourist and visitor. It's not like many of these places have websites with good copies to look at. So you have to go the museum/church's giftstore (usually multiple locations) and buy print copies, postcards, books, etc. Or you can play games with the museum's guards, as we do, and many other people do. I've come to regard the "no foto!" injunction as merely a challenge.
In the courtyard of the Bargello; the palazzo
itself is Florence's oldest administrative
building, originally the headquarters of the
city manager (who by law had to come from
some other city), then an armory, then a
prison, etc.























Cannons, in the olden days, were sufficiently rare so as to
have names; this is Saint Paul; also works of arts















In the chapel, formerly the jail; very old sources had indicated
that the chapel/jail contained frescoed walls and that one of
the scenes included a nearly contemporaenous  representation
of Dante; much time and expense scraping off the layers of
plaster yielded this result; he's the guy in red


















In the early 1400s, the Florence city fathers announced a
competition to see who would get the contract to do the
Baptistry's east bronze doors; the finalists were Brunelleschi
and Ghiberti, and these two were their entries; Brunelleschi's
entry is perhaps more dynamic, but its pieces were welded
together; Ghiberti had mastered a new technique--it's all one
piece; Ghiberti won and spent the next 20 years or so doing
the doors, one of the greatest Renaissance masterpieces;
Brunelleschi decided to become an architect; and became
the greatest architect of the Renaissance (more of him later);
the winner is on the left; both were assigned Abraham's
Near Sacrifice of Issac as subject






















 Cellini's bronze bust of Cosimo de Medici
(off the Bargello's very meager website)




















What we came here to see (apart from the
Ghiberti/Brunelleschi bronzes): Donatello's
(bronze) David; this is the first nude male
sculpture done since antiquity in the West;
full of complexity, controversy, etc. 1440s.
Wow.























Donatello's more conventional St. George



















Can't remember who did this cherub,
Donatello, possibly, but, as Vicki observed, it
really extends the notion of ass-less chaps

Michaelangelo's Bacchus, as I recall, his first
free-standing sculpture; not his most famous,
but a tipsy pose that was to become widely
imitated; and, hey, it's a Michbaelangelo

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