A crash course in art history – Florence, June 17, 2014
PLAYING TOURIST
We were in the good hands of Elizabeth, our lovely, witty guide. No idea what has caught Camille’s attention but she should be following Elizabeth’s blue flag down the street and into the galleria.
GALLERIA DELL ‘ACCADEMIA
Unfinished work – two of Michelangelo’s prisoner series in which he purposely left the final sculpture up to the viewer’s imagination. He wanted to illustrate what every sculptor knows, that inside every block of stone is an image struggling to free itself.
An unfinished Michelangelo painting.
RENAISSANCE MAN
This incredible marble sculpture is breath taking in its beauty and surprisingly large at seventeen feet tall and weighing six tons. The very idea of taking an enormous block of marble and chipping away at it for four years just blows the mind. Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni was the third sculptor to tackle this project, winning the contract when he was twenty-six years old.
Elizabeth pointed out that David holds the rock in his right hand with his sling over his left shoulder. Because of previous work that had been done, Michelangelo was forced to leave out a muscle in David’s back because the marble had been previously worked and was gone. We looked and looked but were unable to see the missing muscle. David’s brow is furrowed, he’s a little bit worried as he determines how to slay the giant Goliath. His hands are disproportionately large to highlight the importance of the task at hand. We also learned that the heads on statues of this size were always made larger than scale because a proportionately correct head would appear too small when viewed from below.
GALLERIA DELGI UFFIZI
In the afternoon we resumed our tour with another guide in the Galleria delgi Uffizi, one of Europe’s oldest and largest art museums.
ORNATE CEILINGS
MARBLE ANIMALS
SARCOPHAGI
HORSES!
Bob thought the blaze-faced horse with the googly eyes on the right was surely reacting to the presence of the cheetah in their midst.
ANNUNCIATIONS
There was a whole slew of annunciation paintings depicting that moment when the angel comes down and informs Mary that she is with child even though she’s a virgin, that she has been divinely inseminated and that she will give birth to the son of God. We love the body language in this series.
NATIVITY
MADONNAS
BACCHANALIA AND LEDA AND THE SWAN
These photos are those which caught our eye, revealing perhaps a glimpse into our psyches and represent only a fraction of the art on exhibit at Uffizi.