Dana and I took a Eurostar train from Rome’s Termini station up to Florence for a day, where the highlight was Michelangelo’s David at the Accademia Gallery, a shoddy place with the poor lighting and fake red brick floor of a shopping mall food court circa 1985.
It’s fortunate the statue was moved indoors in 1873 because you can see the apparent effects traditional weather and/or modern phenomena like acid rain have had on Italy’s buildings, monuments and sculpture. I noticed this in particular yesterday at the steps of St. Peter’s Piazza, which are scarred with tiny blackened pits of decay that collect rainwater.
If you’ve only seen David in a print, the statue is much larger than you think: 17 feet tall1. His hands and feet, detailed with intricately realistic veins, seem exaggerated. But maybe this is appropriate for a giantslayer strong, surefooted and clad in nothing but his wits and a slingshot. His stature and gaze are simultaneously stoic and youthfully relaxed, shy even. You’re allowed to snicker at his dick, resplendent with abstract whorls of pubic hair, but NO PHOTO, as the plainclothes guards shouted. Dana tried to do so anyway, but a clear-eared guard heard the slow and sneaky rip of Velcro on her camera case, chastised her and glowered at us until we left.
Later we advanced slowly in line for the Uffizi Gallery while watching cretins jump queue and shitmongers shill art posters that they scooped off the cobblestones and hid every time a blue-uniformed poliziotto sauntered by. Once inside, I enjoyed German Renaissance man Lucas Cranach the Elder‘s diptych of Adam and Eve from 1528, but mostly Eve, who I think looks hot. (Is that wrong?) Also hot is the obvious standout of the Uffizi, which I didn’t even know was there until we saw it, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Venus bewitches, but so do the tumbling, entwined zephyrs personified on the left, blowing her ashore in a frisson of flowers.
I can tell you that if portraits of Madonna col bambino quicken your pulse, then the Uffizi—really probably any museum in Italy—is for you. It’s clear Italians are reverent superfans of Mary & Jesus, but all those paintings of mothers and children ran together in my mind until I started skipping them altogether.
1 Photos of canonical artworks like this (and the Mona Lisa, The Persistence of Memory, Rodin’s The Thinker, et al) are nearly always cropped tightly. Or they’re cropped loosely but without people or other scale-establishing elements. Travel guides love the latter because they imply romantic exclusivity. That is, you the tourist-viewer can walk right up to these famous works and bask in their beauty and have them all to yourself and your goosebumps. In reality, you will discover the museum has a heart-stoppingly long queue of guidebook-purchasing yahoos like yourself and the gallery is as packed as a Japanese subway car at rush hour. But the true determent of reproductions is that is no one realizes the scope of the actual artwork. This explains why, if you eavesdrop on people clumped around, say, The Persistence of Memory at the Museum of Modern Art, the #1 topic of conversation is disappointment or incredulousness over how small the thing is. Refreshingly, David is at least three times larger than most everyone imagines, plus buck naked, so everyone wins. [back]