I went back to one of my favourite places last week, the glorious city of Florence in Italy where the architecture, painting and sculpture make this the best place in the World to see the great masterpieces of the Italian Renaissance whilst also having a good time in the restaurants and bars of this friendliest of cities. The Cathedral, one of Florence’s main focal points can be seen from many angles and is often stumbled across when you are just back-doubling down one of the many narrow streets. The dome, designed by the architect Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446) is an object of real beauty – it was the first such structure built since the Pantheon in Rome built during the time of the Roman Empire. I never tire of gazing at it. When I was there, the promised rain didn’t materialise and, instead, the April sun lit up the architecture and shone from the golden orb that crowns Brunelleschi’s wonder-work.

Brunelleschi was also one of the main architects of another impressive Florentine Church, San Lorenzo the church and burial site of the all-powerful Medici family but Brunelleschi died before he had finished work on it and the build continued to the design of Michelangelo (1475-1564) no less. Michelangelo too, as was often the case, failed to finish his work here and the frontage of the church, even though, he did the design drawings, was never built – leaving modern Florence with the dilemma of whether to complete it now nearly 500 years later. San Lorenzo may be famous for Michelangelo and those Medicis but, for me, it is the place where I do my kungfu practice every morning when I’m in town – often to the thrilling sound of those stirring San Lorenzo bells.

I have been visiting here since 2008 and nobody seems to mind me taking over this small space every morning at around seven o’clock. There is something special about the mix of martial meditation and movement that combines to make the ground beneath your feet sacred somehow – whenever I return here I feel the special relationship that has formed between me and this historically vivid environment.

Luckily for me, the morning commuters and market stall holders are tolerant if sometimes amused and intrigued by my kungfu patterns every morning. One of the young Italian handbag sellers has christened me Signor Karatti and, this year, he welcomed me back like an old friend. I was proud too to receive an encouraging thumbs up from a passing Chinaman. I no longer feel that there’s anything odd about the mix of Chinese martial arts with the fine art of the Italian Renaissance.

By the time that the market is open for business and the great San Lorenzo bell chimes 8.00, I return to my hotel, just round the corner for breakfast.

The Hotel Rex is situated in what might look like an ordinary little Italian street but it is in fact right in the middle of things with excellent restaurants, cafes and bars just across the road and a friendly staff who really do seem to be pleased to see me when I return.

I thought I had sampled all of this street’s wonders but I had somehow missed the prosaically named Fish Restaurant until a friend recommended it – it was an unmissable experience and I shall remember my crab risotto, salmon flambé and creme caramel for a very long time.

Espresso coffee still delights me in Italy but there were also moments after a lot of street wandering when there was nothing quite like that cup of lemon tea in Florence’s busiest square, the Piazza della Signoria, home to the Medici palace, the Palazzo Vecchio, just round the corner from the Uffizi gallery, one of the artistic wonders of the World. It is worth the cover price to sit quietly gazing at this wonderful view.

This bottle of Venetian chardonnay, pleasantly chilled, to be consumed outside on a sunny Italian Spring evening, was the perfect aperitif before moving on to that fish restaurant known as Fish Restaurant.

The reason for my visit, as if I needed a reason, was to meet up with my nephew, Ali, who is lucky enough to be based here for four months as part of his language degree. It was good to see him and to be shown the city from his perspective but it was difficult to hide my growing jealousy. It doesn’t get much better than being a student in Florence.

I was only in Florence for three days and there is more than a lifetime’s worth of art to visit so I decided not to go to the Uffizi this time and, instead I concentrated on the extraordinary riches of Florence’s statues by those supreme masters, Michelangelo and Donatello (1386 – 1466). The city has so much Michelangelo that it can wear it casually on its sleeve.

My hotel was just round the corner from the Medici chapel attached to Michelangelo’s San Lorenzo where he created these moody and disturbing statues, allegorical figures for the four times of the day, for two Medici tombs. A short walk away is the Accademia, home to the World’s most famous statue, Michelangelo’s David – as mysterious as the Mona Lisa and as open to as many different interpretations standing there in the moment before he slings his rock to kill Goliath and by doing so, to leave his youthful innocence behind him.

Also at the Accademia, as if you needed anything else, are the powerful and unfinished statues Michelangelo carved for the tomb of Pope Julius II. These suffering titans, still attached to the rock from which they are carved, stand at the other end of the spectrum from David’s precariously held innocence, here is the suffering of experience, Michelangelo’s King Lear.

It was another short walk to the City’s main sculpture gallery, the Bargello,  where you can see several more Michelangelo figures, including his very tipsy Bacchus, the god of wine…

…but, for once, Michelangelo takes second place to another artist because, here in the Bargello, the star attraction is Donatello’s David dating from 1430, seventy-four years earlier than Michelangelo’s David and thought to be the first free standing nude statue since ancient times. Here, as in several other sites around Florence, you can witness the dawn of the artistic phenomenon that was the Italian Renaissance.

Donatello’s David is still very much a boy, albeit a rather feminine one,  as compared to Michelangelo’s young man and he is shown in tender triumph, foot placed in victory on Goliath’s severed, and oddly smiling, head. As with the other David, there is much ambiguity here, the piece is about more than just
a Biblical act of combat.

There was time for one more gallery visit before I left, so I chose to go to the Cathedral’s museum to see more statues by Michelangelo and Donatello.

The tragically meditative Pietà, really a “Deposition”,  where Michelangelo, in the guise of Nicodemus, not only supports the dead Christ but towers over him, the largest figure, in deep contemplation. It is easy to believe that this was intended by the artist for his own tomb. It was, inevitably, left incomplete and, as with the Julius II sculptures, all the more moving for being a work in progress.

Donatello’s wildly expressionist Penitent Mary Magdalene has stayed in my memory ever since I first saw it in 2008 so I had to see it again before I left Florence. The museum has a Donatello room with a number of other figures intended for the cathedral’s giant tower. Among them is his dramatic Abraham and Isaac where father Abraham pulls back his son’s hair to expose the jugular vein in anticipation of an execution-style slaughter whilst looking fearfully and beseechingly to Heaven.

Florence is full of statues and they are just one of the many reasons why I would like to return there at least once a year.

The clear April light illuminated the architecture to perfection and the promised rain kept away enabling me to ramble freely around this city that is, of course,  really an art gallery itself.

There was even time for a very welcome siesta. Arrivederci Florence – until next time.

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It is now nearly a week since I returned from my Swiss/Italian holiday which took me to Zurich, Venice and, ultimately, the truly supreme Italian Renaissance city of Florence. It is a difficult place to shake off and my brain is still crowded with images from this most evocative and culturally rich urban paradise.

My camera tended to come out on turbulent stormy days when the odd Italian thunder storm repainted those usually cloudlessly blue skies but, even though, there was more than enough sunshine, heat and fun for a temperate climate Englishman abroad, those thundery skies managed to sum up a profundity that lurks here for anyone susceptible to the overwhelming quantity of some of the Western World’s greatest works of art.

Nothing more impressive, of course, or symbolic of this place than the cathedral’s elegantly proportioned and architecturally pioneering dome by just one of Florence’s many geniuses, Filippo Brunelleschi (1377-1446). It comes out at you from every angle, at the bottom of streets when you turn almost every corner and it is the model for every ecclesiastic dome that followed.

It is most at home with, well this is Florence folks, the bell tower designed by Italian Renaissance art’s great and earliest inspiration, Giotto (1266-1337) – it was a sobering thought, and one easy to get immune to, that everywhere you go in Florence, you are walking with giants.

You don’t need to know who did what but will know from your very first visit that this is a very special place indeed.

Florence is a city of great architecture but is is also a city of statues.

The Rape of the Sabine Woman by Giambologna (1529-1608) with its dramatically upward surging pyramid of bodies is just one of the fine statues that are crammed into the famous Piazza Della Signoria, Florence’s main square.

Giambologna intended it to be a composition of three figures but no one told the pigeon who sits comfortably preening itself unaware that it is perched on a Sixteenth Century kneecap.

Just a few feet away, Perseus  by Benvenuto Cellini (1500 – 1571) waves the slaughtered Medusa’s head at the copy of Michelangelo’s David that stands at the entrance of the Fourteenth Century home of the Medici family, the Palazzo Vecchio. The original statue of David is now stored away at a special gallery which is maybe the city’s greatest treasure of all.

Michelangelo may reign supreme but Benvenuto Cellini was pretty good too. There are plenty more of his works scattered with almost over-confident casualness in the city’s  museums and churches.

Walking through the Piazza Della Signoria everyday, through smaller crowds than those I had encountered in Venice’s San Marco square, I felt that everyone here was imbued with art but that is just me going all romantic about the place. Florence is not a big city, it has a small town atmosphere which mixes potently with its history as the birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. The art must have rubbed off on the people because they are exposed to it every day.

Here, on the steps of the Uffizi art gallery, the odd angel going home with his suitcase doesn’t even warrant a look…

…and any would-be clown can apply his make-up in public without causing any concern. He was going to entertain the long queues waiting to get into the Uffizi gallery – luckily I pre-booked my ticket, as you should, and got into the gallery in just a couple of minutes. Whilst I am thinking of the Uffizi, did I mention, Leonardo Da Vinci (1452 – 1519)?

His Annunciation, the angel Gabriel telling the Virgin Mary some pretty earth-shattering news in a landscape that all visitors to Tuscany will recognise.

and there’s Giotto’s radically realistic, for its time,  Madonna and Child where the angels have to jostle for a good look in a space defined by light. As you walk through the early Renaissance rooms at the Uffizi you can see the gradual secularisation of the Holy Family take place in front of you.

By the time you reach the works of Botticelli’s pupil, Filippino Lippi (1457 – 1504), the Virgin has become a shy but already ripe Tuscan beauty at ease with her boisterous son.

Michelangelo, of course was made of sterner stuff and he is represented in the Uffizi by his most famous painting where the Madonna is no Florentine lass but a monumental and rather formidable woman with the cares of the World on her shoulders. Is Joseph passing the Messiah to her or is she pushing him back? Whatever is going on here, it is a difficult and more complex world than that inhabited by the langourous nudes that are slouching around behind their backs.

When it comes to Virgins, I think we would all have much more fun with the sort of girls that  Sandro Botticelli (1445 – 1510) created in maybe the most sensational works in the gallery, The Birth of Venus and The Allegory of Spring where love is definitely in the air.

There are too many paintings to take in on one visit so I was flagging after Michelangelo and wondering whether to go for tea when I came across  Titian (1488 – 1576) and his least virgin-like of subjects, the Urbino Venus….she, unlike the Botticelli Venus, was most definitely not born yesterday.

It is an amazing place the Uffizi and it is well beyond my powers to guide you through it but go there everyone must – that is an order.

When you feel that you have been exposed to genius enough for one day, you can slip out into a Florentine backstreet for coffee and then more coffee and then more. Who needs art, I thought, when the next cafe espresso arrived.

Of course the streets of Florence are art in their own right so I spent many happy hours wondering around going nowhere in particular.

Then there are the churches, the Cathedral, Santa Croce, San Marco and this, what I used to think of as just the church by the station until some American friends said that they had been inside and it was truly amazing.

That is the trouble with Florence, there is just too much too see so, on this visit, I missed out on the Cathedral and Santa Croce but I did go into the spectacular Romanesque church of Santa Maria Novella which really is just by the station.

By this time of course I had grown quite relaxed about discovering a Giotto Crucifix, a Brunelleschi pulpit and a crib scene by Botticelli even though I was still awe-struck by the spectacular gradually narrowing perspective of the pillared nave which was cunningly devised to make the whole thing look even more impressive. Talking of perspective, there just happened to be on the wall a fresco of the Trinity (1426/7) by Masaccio (1401 – 1428).

It must be handy if you are a Florentine commuter and you have a bit of time before your next train to pop into this church and see one of the very earliest examples of perspective in painting. Masaccio, in a sadly short life, had started a revolution in art.

When I had seen enough revolutionary art for one day, I could return to the lovely little medieval street, the Via Faenza where I was staying and while away some time in one of the unspoiled Tuscan eateries that line this road. The friendly and highly entertaining Trattoria da Guido.

 

where the staff were as much worth the visit as the excellent Florentine cooking……

and here at the Trattoria Antellesi, you can eat unpretentious but traditional Tuscan cuisine in the friendliest of atmospheres. On one night I was even able to say goodnight to the Antellesi’s proprietor’s daughter as she dosed off in her student room talking on Skype from California.

I have had some memorable meals in these places and hope to return there again one day. Here you really can talk art and food without diminishing one by the other. As T.S. Eliot said: “In the room the women come and go, talking of Michelangelo” – we did that too in this place and planned that, in the morning, it was time for more of the very same, Michelangelo.

After a night of a few too many carafes of red wine, what better than to view, through slightly blurry eyes, Michelangelo’s wine god sculpture Bacchus who lurches precariously and lasciviously on his narrow stand. Apparently, this good-time god was the best endowed of all Michelangelo’s nude male statues but, early in the Sixteenth Century his member was broken off.  I suspect jealousy.

This statue, along with more of Michelangelo’s work jostles with a number of wonderfully lithe Cellini statues in the Bargello museum just a short walk from the Uffizi. It is worth every step for these works but the outstanding event of the visit is the truly sensational statue of David (1440/50) by Donatello (c.1386 – 1428).

This is reputedly the first free-standing nude statue to have been made since Roman times and it, like Masaccio’s fresco, began a revolution. When I was last in Florence, this piece was being restored and, as described in an earlier blog, I watched some of the process but now I could see it for the first time as it was meant to be. Strange, provocative and beautiful, the statue describes an ambivalent relationship between the boy David and his giant victim. Finer brains than mine have described the mysterious, or maybe not so mysterious, inter-tangling between the victor’s foot and Goliath’s head and how one of Goliath’s helmet feathers stretches up the length of David’s inside leg. If someone else hadn’t come along a bit later with another David statue then this would surely be the most famous David in the world.

However, just round the corner, at the Academia Museum, that other David statue stands supreme.

If you see no other work of art in your lifetime then you have to visit this gallery. Everyone knows the image, everyone has heard the jokes but, anyone who enters this room where David stands perfectly lit at one end, is wowed. You only have to look at each visitors face as they enter. Michelangelo’s David is art’s true celebrity.

No reproduction captures the full beauty of the marble or the impact that this figure has on its audience. David is a complex of ambiguities and pure perfection at the same time. Michelangelo’s statue shows his innocence but also his experience, he is the boy giant-slayer but also the giant, he has spent his force and yet is still in a state of vulnerable expectation. We already see the loss of innocence that this innocent will find with his victory and we are witnesses to his dawning realization. For all of that and more, we can also just simply marvel at this most beautiful and highly crafted masterpiece.

After Michelangelo, and there is so much of his work in Florence, I felt that I could really not take in any other artist so much of the rest of my visit centred around the Church of San Lorenzo round the corner from my hotel.

Designed by Brunelleschi and, er, Michelangelo, it is my favourite place in Florence.

Out through the cloisters is the Laurenziana Library, designed by Michelangelo and finished to his plans after his death. I have never seen a staircase like his with its grey stone cascading like a lava flow but also rising ethereally and weightlessly to the library itself – another miraculous creation from Michelangelo’s drawing board – even the tiled floor is the master’s design. 

So that might be enough, you may think, but on the other side of the church is the New Sacristy, the burial chapel for some of the Medici’s and another piece of Michelangelo’s architecture. Here too are the momentous but, as so often with this artist, unfinished, tombs for the Medicis.

So it was to San Lorenzo that I used to go every day during my stay in Florence. It was two minutes walk from the hotel down a street lined with the market stall holders setting up their ware under Michelangelo’s Sacristy domes

This was the focal point for my stay…..

…and if there was anywhere in Florence that felt like home it was here on the small piazza that runs along side the church.

I found this space on my first visit to Florence, in January 2008, and thought it was the perfect location for something.

On that cold January day, two and a half years ago, I came here every morning at 7.00 to spend an hour doing my kungfu and taichi practice and, now, after more than a few traumas in my life,  I returned here again last week happy that I am still able to do it and more than just still alive.

Kungfu in Michelangelo’s perfect setting, in this most beautiful of cities, was not as incongruous as you may think. It enabled me to root myself somewhere that is very close to my heart.

And then, as with all great holidays, it was time to go home. That threatened rain marked my departure….

but it failed to wash away the beauty of this great city.

The post A Florentine Adventure appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I am off on my holidays again, this time to Switzerland and Italy, and won’t be back until the 14th. August but I thought I would write something to entertain you, I hope, whilst I am away.

When I was at school I enjoyed my history lessons. I could recite the names of the kings and queens of England in chronological order by the time I was eight and I had very strong views about  a number of what I thought were topical issues: the horrible Romans and Normans daring to conquer my country, Bonnie Prince Charlie being cheated from the English throne,  the wives of Henry VIII who had a pretty rum time and should have all been allowed to stay married to him if they wanted it that way and I also thought that it was truly glorious to die for your beliefs by having your head cut off like all those French aristocrats during the French Revolution or being burnt at the stake like the inspirational Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Best of all was that other Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas a Becket getting murdered in Canterbury Cathedral and The English Civil War when you could fight battles all over England and even cut off the king’s head if he didn’t do as he was told by us, the people.

When I was a bit older I saw things slightly differently and, possibly, more accurately. Maybe, I thought, history wasn’t just about murders and daring escapes. By then we were constantly being taught about the two most important “things” in history: The Renaissance and The Reformation. In my teenage years, it was pretty obvious too which was the “good thing” and which was the “bad thing.”

1) The Italian Renaissance was all about man being supreme and art being about humanity and not just about sin. There were wonderful and very sexy paintings and sculptures mostly coming from a town called Florence where, if you wanted, you could still get involved in executions, adventures and fighting too.

2) The Reformation was when puritans got rid of all the art in churches and even got rid of a lot of the churches too – often very pretty Gothic ones. They went on about sin and God quite a lot and disagreed with us having too much fun wanting us to read the Bible all day and to pray for hours before going to bed at night. This stuff mostly came from places like Germany and Switzerland but it ended up, in not such an extreme way, here in England too but not, definitely not, in Florence.

All this came back to me this week as I planned by imminent holiday. I am off for two weeks as from today on a journey to Zurich, yes, in Switzerland, and then on over The Alps to Florence in Italy. Sadly for this blog, I will not be writing it again until I get back so I thought I would leave you with some pictures and some thoughts about these inspiring European cities where I shall try to mix art and fun.

As a vertigo-sufferer with a distrust of Puritanism, I haven’t been to Alpine Switzerland very often and never before to Zurich so I am curious to see how I get on there in the city of one of the great Puritan revolutionaries Zwingli. I didn’t know much about him as I had often not paid attention in class when the lessons dwelt too long on how The Reformation changed European Christianity. I assumed that Zwingli was a bit like Calvin, that other Puritan who seemed to have a downer on everything I wanted to do.

Well Zwingli wasn’t that bad after-all, so it seems. He thought that priests didn’t need to be celibate and that everyone should eat what they wanted to in Lent – he even caused a scandal by handing out sausages to would-be Lenten fasters. I know just how tempting that can be because I gave up on a couple of years of being vegetarian when I had just one whiff of a German sausage one day in a cafe in that Italian mountain range, The Dolomites. So, maybe Zurich will be OK.

There is a great concert hall and art gallery where I am looking forward to seeing the Manets and Gauguins but also work by that wacky Swiss painter Heinrich, or Henry, Fuseli (1741 – 1825) who settled in London with his Romantic images of ghouls and ghosts as well as some very fine illustrations from Shakespeare:

The Kunsthaus also has one of Van Gogh’s final paintings completed only days before he shot himself and subsequently died. It is an eerily disturbing piece which, with that small ginger haired boy as a possible self-portrait, may well refer back to the painter’s childhood

Wagner had a load of fun in Zurich writing an erotic opera, Tristan und Isolde and having an affair with a banker’s wife Matthilde Wesendonck for whom he wrote the very sexy Wesendonck lieder (1857) setting her poetry to music which in many ways was a preparatory study for Tristan und Isolde.

I feel confident that there are all sorts of goings-on in Switzerland but I will be happy enough with some of those Zwingli sausages and a few beers.

Before I move on to Italy, let’s hear Wagner’s erotic love song to sexually cooperative Matthilde Wesendonck when he was so turned on by her in Zurich:

I have visited Florence before and Italy a lot. I was amazed the first time I saw any Italian Renaissance Art and the feeling has never gone away…..this is Donatello’s bronze statue of David which, some people say, (see yesterday’s blog), was the first statue since Roman times that depicted the human body realistically and not as a by-product of man’s life as a fallen-sinner which was the prevailing view in Medieval art.

This sculpture and much of the work of Michelangelo, Raphael and Botticelli was created in Florence and the city still has one of the greatest collections of Renaissance art in the World. I am also very enthusiastic about all that Florentine vino so don’t think that I will be only art gazing but I have no doubt at all that  I will have a wonderful time there with not just the Donatello’s David but Michelangelo’s too.

There is also one of the most beautiful of all ancient Greek sculptures, the Medici Venus:

and what might really be two of my all time favourite paintings, the exquisite Birth of Venus by Botticelli:

These works of art, with their complex and multiple meanings are, for me, about love but they can be about whatever you want, even if you just enjoy them for their rapturous colours.  Also, of course, you can see Michelangelo’s great late “unfinished” works, the Four Slaves, struggling to escape from their rock bases with fury, pathos and so much life. These works are enough to make it worth anyone’s time to visit Florence at least once a year for the rest of their lives.

 Oh yes, I forgot to say that I will also be visiting Venice for the weekend whilst I am in Italy…..am I excited? Yes sirree!

I have been to Venice on many occasions but every visit to this painfully beautiful city is special – there is a permanent sense of melancholy in its joy and I always think of that wonderful scene at the end of Visconti’s film Death In Venice when Aschenbach sits on the beach bidding the World a long farewell with Mahler’s Third Symphony as incidental music. The words are by Nietsche from his book Also sprach Zarathustra, and whilst they talk of pain they are also about joy, celestial if you must but, for me at least, joy in life. These words will stay with me when I return to Italy, the country that knows so well, superlatively in fact, how to express both pain and joy. See you when I return, I hope.

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I shall be going to Florence in less than a week and I am truly excited about it. I stayed in the peerless Italian city of Florence in January 2008 – it was my first visit even though I had been to Italy many times before and have always had an intense passion for things Italian, be it opera, fine art, leather shoes, vino rosso or just pizza rolled up and scoffed whilst wandering down some of the most beautiful streets in the World. I am not sure how it happened that I had never quite got round to visiting this, maybe the most important centre of Italian Renaissance Art anywhere in the world. I was even more amazed by his negligence when I got there and a part of me never really wanted to leave.

 

Then there was Donatello who is really the “other” great Renaissance sculptor and the artist who, in more knowledgeable opinions than mine, established the revolution in sculptural realism and the celebration of the body for the first time in Western art since Ancient Rome.  I headed for Florence’s Bargello gallery which has an impressive collection of  Donatello’s work. Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi  (c. 1386- 1466) was one of the “big four” Reanissance artists, along with Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphel but he should  not  be confused with that maybe better known Donatello (or Donny, born 1987) a  Mutant Teenage Hero of the same name. 

He, like Michelangelo, could bring palpable life to the inanimate materials that he carved.  I am still moved by memories of his statue of Mary Magdalene with its anguished expression of  suffering and regret felt as much in her rags and her body as in her face.

Donatello’s most famous work though wasn’t in its usual place – the bronze David was lying on his back in the middle of the gallery being seen to by a very serious-looking woman in a white coat.

David was dirty after over five hundred years hanging around in galleries and the time had come to get him back to his original glory when his body was highlighted in golden gilding instead of the dark grime that had accumulated on his much regarded body.

A battery of modern hi-tech equipment, including laser,  was being applied to his surface so that the delicate but hidden gold leaf could be restored without damage.

The gallery took the decision to do the work on the statue in full public view and it was fascinating to be able to stand and watch the restoration.

Donatello’s David is said to have been the first free-standing nude statue produced since Roman times but, sadly, I wasn’t able to see him stand, freely or in any other way. Happily, he is now fully restored and back on his feet, magnificent in his glowing light bronze with his original gilding visible after hundreds of years. Seeing him will be one of the high points of my holiday. What a strange, ambiguous figure he is, as difficult to define as the Mona Lisa’s smile, his androgynous mixture of coyness and mischief is as mysterious as his provocative attachment to the slaughtered Goliath.

Here is an Italian news clip that announced David’s return – it was seen in Italy, at least, as an event of real importance:

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