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

Florentine Update

We've been in Florence since Thursday, staying in an urban camper-stop about 3 km from the old city center. It's a ten-minute bus ride to the historical district. We bought Florence Cards Friday--for 50 euros you get admission to most everything plus free transit on the bus and tram systems. The really good news is that with the Card you don't have to stand in lines, which, in this town, can go for hours. The bad news is that we always gorge ourselves at the all-you-can-eat, Florence is just about incomparable in its offerings, and the Card lasts only 72 hours. Consequently, I've scarcely had time to download photos, much less select, edit, shrink and post them. It will probably be a couple more days before I get to posting all this stuff. Indeed it has been overwhelming, and, because of our on-going art history lessons, more rewarding than ever before.

Sandro Botticelli's 1486 Birth of Venus, at the Uffizi

Lucca

We drove on, a whole 20 miles or less, to Lucca, up in the hills, but not a hill town. It is almost completely flat, surrounded by a great old but not very high wall, a great bicycle town. It doesn't have any particularly famous nor wonderful art nor architecture. It's just a very pleasant beautiful old city, with great ambience and ease of getting around. We spent a couple nights in the camper-stop there, a fair 10 euros a night, just outside the wall, including one do-nothing and then rest day.

A section of Lucca's city wall

Up on the wall, great for walking, bicycling, etc.

Piazza Napoleon; when Napoleon conquered much of Italy, he

gave Lucca to his sister

The clock tower, one of many towers

Looking up at another, the Guingi Tower

Lucca was Pucini's birthplace; the Geburthaus,

so to speak, will open as a museum September

13

Interior of a nice little Pucini memento store;

my favorite Italian opera composer

Ancient entrance to what is probably Lucca's most interesting

sight...

The Piazza Anfiteatro; all these old buildings--you can just

make out the curve in this shot--are ranged around what used

to be the Roman amphitheater

There it is; Google Earth to the rescue...

Lucca's Duomo, 12th-13th century, the most

remarkable part being the great variety of

columns on the facade

Thus

Interior

A Tintoretto Last Supper

And, on the porch, a maze (the pilgrim's ordeal) just as at

Chartres

Pisa: Buffalmacho and Other Stuff

The cemetery on the Field of Miracles is a place few tourists get to. It contains all the usual things you'd expect for a Medieval/Renaissance cemetery, tombs and memorials and such. But it also houses some incredible frescoes from the 14th century, including Buffalmacho's more-than-enormous pieces dealing, seemingly, or presciently, with the catastrophe of 1348, that greatest catastrophe mankind has ever known, at least until our own time. Before going there, we visited the Sinopia, across the Field, where are displayed the mark-ups, as it were, for the great frescoes.

Before painting the fresco (quickly, on wet plaster), the master

would first do a full scale sketch, the sinopia, which his pupils

would then copy on to a full-scale cartoon, to guide the actual

painting; many such sketches survive at Pisa; this is one of

the Universe (seriously) according to Thomistic doctrine

Now we are in the Cemetery, which contains scores of giant

Medieval and Renaissance frescoes

And here is the finished Universe

Interior of the Cemetery; soil from the Holy Land

The two gigantic Buffalmacho frescoes, the Judgement and

The Triumph of Death, were what interested us

The Triumph of Death is too large to capture on any normal

lens; here, on its left third, a knightly party encounters

corpses in the woods, representing the three estates; a third

or more of Europe died in the Black Death...

In the right third, a group of young women have retreated

to the countryside to avoid the plague, a la Boccaccio, but

Death, partly obscured (scythe), stalks them

In the right third of the Judgement, there is a fierce battle

for souls...

Spiritual tug-of-war

Cauldron of the damned

Snake pit of the damned (I'd really be concerned if they had

South Island sand flies)

Enough eschatological gloom; an artsy-fartsy view of the

duomo from the cemetery; redemptive, no?

0, 1, 1, 2,3,5,8,13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144... tomb

of the 12th century mathematician Fibonacci,

aka Leonardo of Pisa; Vicki says she thinks

she remembers this from calculus; or maybe

from The Da Vinci Code; having flunked

algebra II and not having read The Da Vinci

Code, it is all beyond me, except I know that

no educated person refers to the great

Leonardo as "Da Vinci"

Pisa: the Touristy Stuff

We can't remember whether this is our third or fourth visit to Pisa. First time you go to see the leaning thing. Second time you go to show the kids, who, in our case, actually got to go up to the top: one of our treasured family photos. Third time, for old time's sake. Fourth: well, really, for the Buffalmacho frescoes in the cemetery, but that's another story, or post.

First view of the Field of Miracles, the Baptistry and beyond

Cathedral and tower

Tourists

Other tourists; I have often thought an interesting photo

book might be one of all the silly poses people undertake at

such sights...

'

Yes, even after all the repairs of the past two

decades, it really does lean, disturbingly

Recylcing stones on the cathedral

Cathedral facade...its own style, Pisa Romanesque...begun in

1073...that's way old for Europe...

Interior; people who are too stupid to dress

appropriately get these attractive little

disposable wraps to wear...

In 1073, we were still very much under the

Byzantine influence

Pantokrator and all

Pulpit by the same team that did Siena

Nice, swirling Ascension dome, however

In the huge Baptistry, which also leans, though

not as perceptibly

The Bapistry has an incredible 10 second echo; I went up to

the balcony and sang a couple bars of "Stranger in the night,

some people say I'm stranger in the night," but Vicki, below,

at one o'clock, claimed she couldn't hear me; I think it was

another case of SHDS (Spousal Hearing Deficiency

Syndrome)