Northern Tour- Day 3

After another night in Siena, we departed early this morning for Firenze (Florence), about an hour and a half away by bus. Firenze is a bustling tourist city absolutely full to the brim with rich, elaborate Renaissance art and arcitecture. Indeed, Firenze is the gem of Tuscany. The city of Medici. The city of the Renaissance. From Giotto to Michelangelo, from Dante to Boccaccio, from Machiavelli to Galileo and Leonardo DaVinci, Firenze gave Italy her greatest artists, writers and scientists and out of her soul was born the whole of humanistic aesthetic. Vasari attributes it all simply to the purity of Tuscan air, which is probably as good an explanation as any.

the Firenze duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore

During our short excursion through Firenze, we go to the Convent of San Marco, which was completed in 1445 for the Dominican monks at the expense of the Medici family, who were wealthy bankers and art patrons. In each cell of the convent there is a different fresco of a devotional image painted by one of the monks who lived there. Though the rooms are roped off to prevent people from entering more than a foot or two into the space, Tom Mills, always the advocate for getting into places for artistic purposes by any means necessary, defiantly goes into the roped off are to sit down and draw his favorite painting. At on point the security guard walks over and peers into the room to see what is going on in there but says nothing about him actually being in there, which just astounds me. I am beginning to see how, in this country at least, artists are regarded with a certain reverence and often are able to gain privileges and access to places that are closed off to the general public. I really like this idea and I wish the concept were a lot more wide-spread, especially in the US where artists struggle to gain any sort of respect for their studies.

Loggia dei Lanzi in the Piazza della Signoria

The last place I stop by to see while in Florence is the Piazza della Signoria, where they put all of including the Perseus; the Rape of the Sabines, Donatello's Judith and these famous sculptures, Holofemes and the copy of Michaelangelo's David, placed in the same location in front of the town hall for which the work was originally intended. Of course, being an art student in Florence, I, as well as a couple of others in my small group, fell it the properly stereotypical thing to do to pull out our sketchbooks and attempt to do some studies of these masterworks. Such a world-famous work as the David can be rather intimidating to even attempt to capture when it is standing right in front of you, and in doing so it is important to accept the fact that your sketches will never be able to do the work justice. Instead, they are meant to be used to study the form and proportions of the body in hopes of gaining an understanding of what it is that gives the David its power and life force. It is rather surprising to note how big his head and hands are in proportion to the rest of his body, which in my mind is an anthropomorphic style meant to symbolize the surety and strength of his hands with a rock and sling, as well as his intelligence and sharpness of mind.

With about a half hour left before we have to meet up with the rest of the group and head off to our next destination, I decide to sit down on the floor of the piazza right in front of the David and continue doing sketch studies, accompanied by Chris, who was working in water colors. Being that there was a constant stream of tourists and large tour groups coming into the piazza, we found ourselves in a rather awkward position to be situated, and if I hadn't had someone else to do it with me, I doubt I would have had the courage to keep it up for very long. It's an interesting feeling when any artist is doing his own work in a public setting such as this. Chris,who has done this a lot more often than I, tells me that he has always felt that whenever he is doing any sort of sketching or painting in public, he feels as if it almost becomes like a performance piece as well. No matter how much you try to ignore the people around you watching and commenting on your work to their friends, you must realize that you are inevitably making a spectacle of yourself, and do your best to try and not let that effect your work. Indeed, the entire time I sat there, already being fairly self-conscious about my rather rough sketchwork, I had to hear tourists behind me making comments (probably not realizing that I speak English and could understand everything they were saying) and it is rather funny that of the few times I turned my head to look around me, I saw people taking pictures of the pair of us working just as much as they were taking pictures of the David statue.

Florence is a beautiful city, and a wonderful place for any artist or art historian to go and study, but it is all together too touristy for my taste. One girl in my group actually lived here for about a year as a painter's apprentice and she says that she never really had to learn any Italian the entire time she was here because the mass of the tourist industry makes it so that all the Italians living here must learn how to speak English for their benefit, which in my mind is a rather sad stae of affairs for the people, the culture and thehistory of this place. At 5:30 we leave Firenze and, crossing the Appenine chain, we reach Bologna, the capital of the Emilia-Romagna region, where we spend the night.