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