A Pontormo!
On the way to the Bargello a few days ago, I dropped by the Chiesa di Santissima Annunziata – 100 metres from me and something I’d been meaning to do for ages – and saw a naked foot a shade of pink I would recognise anywhere. A Pontormo! Andrea del Sarto and Rosso Fiorentino make a Mannerist feast of the cloister, and the baroque interior of the church, quite odd for Florence, was really quite compelling in its… baroqueness. Some time later I had to return to something which was a lot less, and much much more.
I didn’t quite…
make it…
to the Bargello this time.
Jacopo Pontormo. Visitation 1514 - 1516.
I just love him.
The Angelico plane
Fra Angelico. St Dominic in Adoration of the Crucifixion. San Marco Church.
Pavements, traffic, people getting on and off buses at the piazza outside, the adjustment I needed to make it to the Angelico plane was helped along by this fresco, quite the first thing you see when you enter the cloister, with that gorgeous blue. And I never forgot it either, while peering at the frescoes, the illuminated manuscripts on display in the library, wondering what life would have been like in the cells.
Il Beato Angelico was born near Fiesole in Mugello, and as a Dominican friar lived in the San Marco monastery from 1436 to 1445, where he painted the frescoes on the walls, encouraged by Cosimo de’Medici, who had a cell there as a private retreat. Vasari wrote of Angelico as ‘a man of great simplicity, and most holy in his ways’. He died in Rome in 1455 and was beatified in 1982.
Fra Angelico. Crucifixion and Saints, detail. San Marco Church.
Ethereal Angelico
Fra Angelico fresco, Cosimo de'Medici cell, San Marco Church
Art fix by early afternoon – ethereal Fra Angelico frescoes floating in tiny, stark cells, arch shape repeated to infnity, in the framing of each fresco, the shape of each cell, each window, each tiny window within each window, each arch outside each window.
There was a particularly harrowing series of frescoes leading up to Savonarola’s cell, but having lost my little black Moleskin notebook, there’s not much chance of going into detail here. I snuck the above photographs, but ‘Sermon on the Mount’ was one I was brazen enough to ask to photograph, and here it is, courtesy of a very obliging guide, who pretended not to see, and asked if I would return for a comprehensive tour. Well, actually…
Fra Angelico. Sermon on the Mount. San Marco Church.
Just beautiful.
Astounding Ravenna
San Vitale Basilica, Ravenna
Ravenna, in Emilia-Romagna in Northern Italy and roughly a two-hour drive from Florence, continues to have an impact months after having spent a day in the city. Now 12 kilometres inland, it once was an important seaport and as such was: the capital of the Western Roman Empire under Honorius, the capital of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths under Theodoric, and part of the Byzantine empire under Justinian. Special points of interest for me included: Dante’s tomb, the poet having died there in 1321; the quality of the light streaming in through alabaster windows; the idea of a besotted Lord Byron roaming its streets, writing parts of Don Juan, and of course, the Ravenna Diary, from which I attach a favourite fragment, which recounts, after a chance encounter on a bridge, his second meeting with an old woman – 95, feisty and faintly bearded – much like what I aspire to be one day:
January 29th, 1821.
Yesterday, the woman of ninety-five years of age was with me. She said her eldest son (if now alive) would have been seventy. She is thin – short, but active – hears, and sees, and talks incessantly. Several teeth left – all in the lower jaw, and single front teeth. She is very deeply wrinkled, and has a sort of scattered grey beard over her chin, at least as long as my mustachios. Her head, in fact, resembles the drawing in crayons of Pope the poet’s mother, which is in some editions of his works. [---] Gave her a louis – ordered her a new suit of clothes, and put her upon a weekly pension. Till now, she had worked at gathering wood and pine-nuts in the forest – pretty work at ninety-five years old! She had a dozen children, of whom some are alive. Her name is Maria Montanari.
The mosaics aren’t bad either.
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- San Vitale Basilica
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- Mausoleum of Galla Placidia
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- Mausoleum of Galla Placidia
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- Mausoleum of Galla Placidia
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- San Apollinare Nuovo
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- San Apollinare Nuovo
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- San Apollinare Nuovo
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- San Apollinare Nuovo
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- San Apollinare Nuovo
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- Dante’s Tomb
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- Arian Baptistery
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- The Mausoleum of Theodoric
Thusnelda’s grief
Thusnelda, Loggia dei Lanzi
The six colossal female statues that line the back wall of the Loggia were discovered in Rome and formed part of the Cardinal della Valle antiquities collection by the mid-16th century. They were purchased by Ferdinando de Medici in the latter half of the century, and have graced the Loggia since 1789.
All compelling in their own way, this was the one that first caught my attention, probably because to my eyes she seems the least stylised – with her flowing hair centre-parted on her lowered head and her looser garments – and the most ‘natural’ in her stance and gesture, and almost as though – with her left leg crossed over the right leg which bears her weight, and her left hand at hip level supporting the right which is raised almost to her face in an aspect of weary contemplation, I had thought – the centuries had simply exhausted her.
She has been identified since 1841 as ‘Thusnelda’, the daughter of Segestes, a Germanic prince, and had been promised in marriage to another by her father before either eloping with or being abducted by or both, and marrying Arminius, who had fought fiercely against the Romans. While pregnant to him she was given over by her father, an ally to Rome, to Germanicus. According to Tacitus, her husband Arminius “was driven frantic by the seizure of his wife and the subjugation to slavery of her unborn child”. He never married again.
A beautiful 2.57 metre tall, heavily restored, marble expression of grief.
Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabine Women
Giambologna. Rape of the Sabine Women. 1581-83.
‘Rape’ meaning ‘abduction’ in the context of Giambologna’s sculpture: according to Livy in The History of Rome, the Roman state is powerful but vulnerable because of a ‘paucity of women’, and Romulus’ solicitations for intermarriage for his men among his neighbours, the Sabines, have been rejected. He plans and stages a deception: at festival games to honour Neptunus Equistris, to which the Sabines are invited, the Romans carry off the women at his signal. He promises the indignant Sabine women lawful wedlock, possessions and civil privileges, and children:
He begged them only to assuage the fierceness of their anger, and cheerfully surrender their affections to those to whom fortune had consigned their persons.” [He added,] “That from injuries love and friendship often arise; and that they should find [the Romans] kinder husbands on this account, because each of them, besides the performance of his conjugal duty, would endeavour to the utmost of his power to make up for the want of their parents and native country.” To this the caresses of the husbands were added, excusing what they had done on the plea of passion and love, arguments that work most successfully on women’s hearts.
The minds of the ravished virgins were soon much soothed…
Not so their families, and war broke out and ended only when the Sabine women, ‘hair dishevelled and garments rent’ (of course) threw themselves into the middle of the battlefield and talked some much needed sense into their husbands and fathers.
The stony cry of stones
Giambologna. Rape of the Sabine Women.
And yet, what did Giambologna have in mind? It was only when the sculpture was to be displayed in the Loggia dei Lanzi at Piazza della Signoria that a story had to be found to go with it, and as such, various classical abductions were considered, Persephone’s and Andromeda’s among them, before settling on the Sabines.
Sculpted from a single block of marble, the tortuous contortions of the figures as the woman attempts to free herself, an expression of terror on her face, spiralling from the ground up into the haze of a muggy Florentine morning: a convulsive cry that goes unheeded, fading into a thin, white sky.
Escher’s San Gimignano
This was Escher’s first Italian print, created during his travels in 1922 through Florence, San Gimignano, Volterra and Siena. A landscape both cultivated and convulsive – that boiling tree, those Van Goghian lines upper left – out of which the medieval towers of San Gimignano coolly rise to meet the blazing Italian sun… And yet, what blazing Italian sun? My bright as a daisy day quickly turned to overcast skies, rain and thunder… A beautiful day, regardless, particularly because I have a long drive in the Tuscan countryside, the promise of the best gelato in Tuscany, and the real San Gimignano to look forward to tomorrow.
Amor on the Ponte Vecchio
Amor on the Ponte Vecchio
Rushing home one afternoon, I noticed an American couple getting quite excited over some watercolours on the Ponte Vecchio, quite taken, I think I heard, by the yellow tones in the work, and asking where the nearest bank was. Having always bypassed these watercolours of the Arno and the bridge and similar scenes for Pinocchio ones, this time I decided to postpone lunch for a little bit to see what the commotion was about. So, let me introduce you to Amor, yes, as in ‘love’, and yes, I thought at first he was being allegorical. He is one of many artists who work and sell their watercolours around the Ponte Vecchio and especially Piazza della Repubblica and similar high-traffic areas.
But there’s more to Amor than his watercolours: he is a writer and his stories have won prizes and can be found in literary journals and numerous anthologies, and with his novel, I lupi della notte, was finalist in 2008 for the prestigious Italo Calvino Prize. You can read his story, ‘Salvation’, online, in the anthology, Multicultural Literature in Contemporary Italy (2007). He was born in Sétif, Algeria, lives and works in Florence, has studied in both places, has lived and worked in Germany and elsewhere, and rightly calls himself a citizen of the world. “I am anywhere”, he said, which I thought quite expressive, and a sentiment I can well understand.
The madonnari are back!
At 2.03 pm
It rained heavily the day after I posted about the madonnari, so I haven’t seen them for a couple of days, and believe me, their paintings and presence have a huge impact on the life of the street. But a flash of colour on the pavement on my way home today, and, yes, there they were, across the street, photocopies in hand, occasionally shaking their heads and drinking from a plastic cup of red wine. It would be some hours yet before the completed work, so I turned my back on the cool, crisp and glorious blue-skied, fluffy-clouded autumn day…
Lungarno to Ponte Santa Trinita
… returned to my studio to have lunch and study, before going back just before sunset to see the finished work.
At 6.35 pm
And unless it’s raining, they tell me, no matter how cold it gets in winter, they are always there. Good to know.
Goddess of the hunt
I know her well as Diana and love her most as Artemis; not by any means an exhaustive list but at different times and places under different guises – Arcadian, Taurian, Phrygian, she is goddess of the hunt, the moon, of nymphs, and is protectress of the young, including animals; she holds the oak, the laurel, the stag, the boar, and fish, sacred; is all nourishing nature personified, yet with bow and arrows fashioned by none other than Hephaestus can send plagues and sudden death to mortals. She loves the chase, particularly that of stags, and as the Roman Diana had a cult and was worshipped on the shores of Lake Nemi, not far south of Rome, where her priests engaged in a terrible, ancient ritual.
Not an ‘easy’ goddess by any means, but then again, none of them are. This Diana I found on the ground floor of the Archaeological Museum.
The madonnari
One of the madonnari, as street artists in Italy are called, because they often depict the Madonna in their chalk paintings. They have a tradition in Europe that stretches all the way back to the 16th century, and these days can be found on Via Calimala between Piazza della Republica and Mercato Nuovo, at all hours, working hard, chatting to tourists, posing for photographs, drinking wine. I wonder what they do with themselves when the rain really begins.
