Tuesday 20 May: Dan and Gary visit David and Venus

Today it rained on and off; a good day for visiting museums to see the art for which Florence is famous. We had timed admission tours for two of the great museums of Western art: the Galleria dell’Accademia, home to Michelangelo’s David, and the Uffizi Museum, with the world’s largest collection of Florentine art. Good thing I booked our entrance online months ago; there were folks standing in the rain for four hours waiting to get into both galleries!

The Accademia in Florence was founded in the 18^th century as the world’s first professional school for training artists in drawing, painting and sculpture; before then, budding artists trained as apprentices under master artists. The Galleria of the Accademia is a small but excellent collection of mostly Florentine paintings, tracing its development through the Byzantine, Gothic, early and high Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque styles. The works in the gallery served as models for the students. The high point of the Accademia, however, is the hall of sculptures by Michelangelo, culminating in his famous David. You first pass several of the master’s “unfinished” sculptures. These are works that are partially carved from blocks of marble, which Michelangelo considered to be complete even though they appear to be only half finished. It’s really interesting to see how he could create a figure out of a hunk of rock. Michelangelo used to say that he did not create an image from a block of stone. Rather, the figure was already there, trapped in the marble, and all he did was carve away the excess stone to free the statue from its rocky prison. Finally, you come to the renowned David, which he sculpted when he was only in his twenties, and which immediately made him the most famous and well-paid artist in Europe. Everyone is familiar with the image of the nude David poised in thought before pulling out his slingshot to whack Goliath. Although we’ve seen pictures and copies of the work all our lives, including the full-size replica in the piazza downtown, it is still amazing to see the original in person. To think that one person, with only chisel and hammer, could take a big piece of stone and create the textures and tensions you see in the statue is amazing.

Gary and I had a break for lunch between tours, so we headed across Ponte Vecchio for pasta. We stopped at a little place where two workers were beckoning passers-by with very amusing gestures. The man would extend both arms in dramatic arcs, one raised to point to the sign showing the day’s pasta special, and the other spectacularly held out in a gesture of welcome. He looked like he was striking a pose from grand opera. The woman was standing next to a menu sign, making Vanna White-like gestures towards it with both hands, muttering what appeared to be a welcome under her breath, although she was about thirty feet away from the people she was trying to entice into the restaurant. You will probably see both of us imitating these poses in Flickr pictures for the next several months!

After lunch we toured the Uffizi gallery. We quickly ditched our tour guide, who went into way too much detail (“now look at the folds of the gown on the second angel from the left in the back row behind the Madonna”); at her speed, we would be in the museum until August, and miss the masterworks we wanted to see. The Uffizi is an amazing place, filled with famous Florentine, Italian, and other European works arranged chronologically, tracing the development of Western painting. Giotto, Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael are all represented in abundance. We spent hours viewing the paintings, the high point of which for me was seeing Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, always one of my favorite works. I love going to museums and finally seeing in person the masterpieces that I have always read about and studied.

That evening Gary bought panini to take home to our b&b for dinner. A group of students from a university in the Pacific Northwest was staying there as well, and we hung out with them for a while before calling it a day. The students amused us with tales of collegiate antics from their home institution, and we responded in kind. We then headed to bed, since we were getting up early the next day for a trip around the Tuscan countryside.