Day 30
Trip Start
May 08, 2008
1
29
59
Trip End
Jul 08, 2008
Florence, Italy
Sunday, June 8, 2008
The museum itself was created by the Medici family during the peak of their power. It included a lot of beautiful paintings on the ceilings, but I couldn't look at them for too long. Plus, Evan wasn't told a lot about them in his art class. He was told a lot about the paintings, however, and I got some good nuggets of information from him. There's this painting of the spring, "Primavera," by Botticelli that Evan had viewed with his class. It includes 49 different types of flowers on the floor. The flowers shown all grow at different times of year, so the fact that they are all represented at the same time in this painting shows that it is an ideal garden where all beauty grows year-round. There is a representation of the rape of the nymph Chloris by the West wind; The wind, represented by a blue-green human figure coming through the trees, fell in love with the woman, but she wouldn't give in to him. The subsequent rapes turned her into a god for a short while after each time. Flora, the goddess of spring, is scattering the flowers to the left of Chloris. Cupid is top center, with an arrow set on the three graces below. The graces are represented by three red-haired virgins, and they are in a circle holding hands in a traditional Florentine dance (rondel). Oranges are in the trees, since citrus fruits were used at one point by doctors to "cure" all sorts of diseases. Venus stands in the middle, the god of love and springtime.She is guarded on the far left from some dark rainclouds by Mercury. There's more to this picture, I am sure, but this is not an art lecture.
Most paintings in there were equally in depth with interesting stories to go along with them, and many paintings and sculptures were commissioned by the Medici family themselves. Most were bought or taken by the family and put up there; The museum is displayed upstairs, for the most part, based around the tunnel that the family used to get from the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti so that they wouldn't have to walk with the commoners, those aristocratic jerks.
After the Uffizi, we went to the Bargello museum, and I got in free there, as well. It focused primarily on the works of Vincenzo Danti, who was taught by Michelangelo. The center of this nondescript building was covered in coats of arms carved into stone and set in the walls. Also included was the three great bronze statues of The Beheading of The Baptist, as well as many sculptures of of for the Medici family, specifically Cosimo I who was the big cheese of the family. Big surprise there. I can not believe that I had not heard of this family before I got here, because they have their hands in just about everything.
Anyway, after that we headed back home and I tried to catch up on this blog (didn't really work, though, I'm still way far behind). We waited for Tai and Dhru to come back from their bike ride, kind of wanting to see how wet they were going to be because right after we got back it started pouring. They were lucky enough to just miss the rain, as well, and walked home during a short dry spell. Evan and I went to this restaurant that we walk past every day to get to CAPA called CentoCanti for dinner. It was about the price that we were used to paying for dinner, and the servers spoke almost no English. Since that was what we were looking for, we had a pretty good time there. After dinner, more reflections and Family-Guy watching, then bed.
