The End of Renaissance Art Escapes

I've been working from 8h30 in the morning until 20h, 21h or 22h in the evening due to the desperate attempt to finish my PhD thesis by Christmas. Therefore, my enjoyment of Florence has been restrained to speeding through Piazza SS. Annunziata and having a glimpse of the Fiesole hills surrounded by thick grey clouds before reserving my desk at the library.

Bronzino: Portrait of Eleonora of Toledo and her son Giovanni. A painting of Cosimo de Medici's wife and son; Eleonora's brocade clothes look so real you wanted to touch them and her face so undecipherable that you wanted to be her best friend.

Though I had detailed a long to do -list for the weekend, I didn't have the force to sit by the computer anymore (well, here I am again!). At the market I bought gorgonzola, pecorino stagionato, fresh pasta filled with artichokes, asparagus cream, red pesto sauce, and flowers – I decided that I have to make the most out of these last three weeks in Florence.

I started by visiting the Uffizi gallery in the afternoon before a concert at the Teatro della Pergola. I had been waiting for November and the end of the tourist season to get in without queuing. It was already my sixth time in the museum, but it's still not enough to give all the paintings the contemplation they deserve. On this occasion, I only wanted to spend some quality time with my favourite pieces. Sandro Botticelli's Primavera and The Birth of Venus are of course one of them. A couple of weeks ago, I actually felt personally a bit offended when a friend of mine said that she preferred seeing them in an art book. Of course, the colours might have faded but standing in front of these absolutely beautiful masterpieces is something completely different from sitting on your sofa and flipping through your copy of "1000 art works you need to see before you die" (by the way, if this book exists, I want it for Christmas). It's like my dad who says: "Why should I travel abroad if I can see all the different places in the world on a TV."

I actually didn't like Renaissance art before coming to Florence. It is not necessarily as accessible as Impressionism, but now, after three years of indulgence in Florentine art through visits in the museums and churches, I can define myself as a Renaissance lover and I would like to call myself an aficionado. Things were not always like this, my first visit to Palazzo Pitti's wonderful collection was with a charming intellectual who wanted to share his love for Caravaggio and other great masters with me. However, I was feeling sick because of the lack of air condition and the drinks the day before and I could only focus on the slightest currents of air every now and then. Instead of art, we had pizza slices in the garden of Boboli.


But yesterday, in front of the majestic Madonna and Child and Two Angels by Filippo Lippi (above), I almost wanted to cry. The beauty of the work and the realisation that soon I wouldn't be able to admire these amazing paintings hit me. I stood in front of the Madonna for a long moment as if to memorize the lines and colours of it by heart (I later also bought a post card and book on the Uffizi gallery to help me with this task). By the way, it's probably no coincidence that I find the women in both Botticelli's and Lippi's works so beautiful and serene as Filippo Lippi was Botticelli's teacher.

Today, I continued my cultural exploration and visited the exhibition dedicated to a later Renaissance painter Bronzino in Palazzo Stozzi. Coincidently, I had seen an exhibiton of his drawings earlier this year in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York where they had managed to collect almost all the existing drawings by him. But this was a first ever exhibiton of his paintings. Bronzino (1503-1572) worked in the Medici court and was also a poet and a member of Accademia Fiorentina. Already after the first room of the exhibiton, I knew that he deserves a place in the same category with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, and perhaps after this great exhibition he will be acknowledged as one of the great masters of the Renaissance and not only a peculiar mannerist. He also seemed to have a good sense of irony as shown by his work of the Medici court's dwarf (below).


This double-sided painting was Bronzino's reply to the on-going dispute about the primacy of different art forms. His contemporary, Benedetto Varchi had solicited that sculpture was the most noble of all arts. Bronzino responded with Portrait of the Dwarf Morgante that can be placed in the middle of the room as a statue but moreover, it can depict more than one time dimension. Hence, one side shows Morgnate going to hunt birds and the other side illustrates him afterwards with his pray. As a curiosity, the bird in front of Morgante's private parts was painted later by an unknown painter.


When seeing the magnificent tapestries that Bronzino designed and Flemish masters wove for the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, you couldn't help but wonder how they were done and how they had survived five centuries. Indeed, this was the first time after the 1980s that they were on public display. These tapestries and their restoration provoked a little dispute between me and my historian friend who joined me for the exhibiton. She considered restoration of art as an act against the normal flow of history. If art creations deteriorate (and they do), we are not suppose to restore them. Art should show the signs of time, she argued continuing that restoration is like a translation of literature, it can never offer the exact same feeling or represent the original work fully. In contrast, I felt this was complete non-sense; the majority of the works on display in this exhibiton wouldn't have been there at all without some restoration or they would have been only a shadow of the things we were currently examining. The whole preparation of the exhibiton had been accompanied by difficult and important restorations. In fact, I think we have the responsibility to restore the works of art for the future generations before they are ruined forever. Obviously, there's a chance that something of the original piece will get lost even with high standards and modern technologies, but to refer to her analogy on literature, I rather read the Finnish translation of Crime and Punishment than not read it all (or study Russian for ten years to be able to read it in its original language / build a time machine so I could see the paintings when they were still fresh of recently applied paint). However, I do not agree with Berlusconi on giving the antique sculpture of god of Mars his manhood back in the form of magnetic and removable penis (probably I wouldn't agree with him on anything else either).

This was acually on display at MET, it's a design for the tapestries that we saw now in Palazzo Strozzi.

One of the great works of Bronzino Descent of Christ into Limbo (below) was restored after it was badly damaged in the 1966 floods. It wasn't on display at the exhibition but the copy of it in my new Bronzino book inspired me to go to the Church of Santa Croce to have a look of it. It's a powerful painting where Christ is saving the souls of the unbaptized. Bronzino had basically depicted all his entourage in that painting, among which himself with the blue robe behind Jesus and some of the most beautiful young ladies of Florence. Obviously resulting in a scandal in those days. Raffaello Borghini, an important Florentine, criticized it because of the "figures excessive nudity, sensual poses and supple limbs, and very fair colours" that would distract the uncultured from prayer. Not to mention the modern cartoon-like monsters in the top left corner. But the women are purely beautiful and each face is paint with such a painstaking attention to detail and naturalism that Bronzino was so famous for.

A detail from Descent of Christ into Limbo.

Indeed, Giorgio Vasari, the art authority of the time and the writer of "The Lives of Artists", which could be considered as the first art history book in the world, already wrote of Bronzino's portraits: "They were all very natural, executed with incredible diligence, and finished so well that nothing more could be desired". Below is a portrait of Cosimo's illegitimate daughter Bia who died already at the age of 6. This was one of my favourite portraits in the exhibition.


Conclusion of the weekend: it's always so much easier to get inside an artist's head or a moment in history of art in general in an exhibiton with a more focused theme. While I believe that Uffizi gallery is one of the best museums in the world, even there the collection spanning from Giotto to da Vinci and Tintoretto, or from Christian art to the full bloom of Renaissance and Venetian masters, is sometimes too much to grasp (hence the limited focus of my last visit). I never get to Venetian masters or Caravaggio with some energy left and this is only the history of Italian art during around 300 years. What about Louvre or MET: in one afternoon you go through Egyptian art and Impressionists with a deviation to Asian culture. What kind of sadist built these museums? Small is beautiful – and intelligible.

Ognissanti all'Isola di San Michele

Free vaporetto boats connected Cannaregio to Isola di San Michele during the weekend of All Saints (1 November in Catholic countries). People were carrying huge bouquets of crysanthemums to replace the artificial flowers on the graves. Isola di San Michele is Venetians' cemetery where the people of La Serenissima have found their last place of rest ever since Napoleon ordered the island to be used for this purpose.

Once again, without flowers, I was an outsider in the flow of Venetians cleaning their family graves and ordering flowers. Somehow I always find myself in places where I feel a bit like an intruder. Especially in Venice, where people must hope that at least with death they will have peace from the tourists occupying the city by millions every year (18 millions to be exact). However, in 'the island of death', the Saturday before Ognissanti was busy. In Finland, candles are lit in the cemeteries in memory of the dead ones, but in Italy, as the weather permits, graveyard is decorated with flowers.

Cemetery of San Michele stores the graves efficiently in many floors...

I find cemeteries an interesting cultural destination in different countries. I have done the usual tourist paths in search of the graves of Jim Morrison (Come on baby light my fire) and Édith Piaf (Je ne regrette rien) in Père-Lachaise in Paris and marvelled the huge burial monuments in Buenos Aires' La Recoleta (Don't cry for me Argentina by the grave of Eva Perón). I have been amazed by the kitch decoration of a cemetary in Punta Arenas, in Chilean Patagonia. And by kitch, I mean plastic Santa Claus puppets and Christmas lights behind the glass vitrines (this was in January). In front of our high school, we looked inspiration for creative writing from the age-old grave stones from the 18th century. In Warsaw, I witnessed the collapsed stones and rampant plants in a Jewish cemetery. In Mostar, I was saddened by disproportionately many graves from the beginning of the 1990s, young and old Bosnians alike. In Normandy, I visited the American cemetery full of simple white crosses, soldiers of 20 years old from Ohio, California and Minnesota, so far from home. You can't think of any excuses or reasons for wars in Verdun, where in the ossuary rest the remains of 130 000 French and German unknown soldiers from the battle of 1916. You can't visit a cemetery without a little thought for all the dead ones that lie below the ground (or in the little walls as in Venice) and that's why it is probably so intriguing visit, home or abroad.

In the cemetery of San Michele you can find only a few "famous" graves: one of Ezra Pound and the other one of Igor Stravinsky (I spotted the two of them). However, even without some famous graves or monuments to look for, I was quite dazzled by the place: walls filled with name tags and photos, family graves decorated with mosaics of the family head (like the one above) and completely destroyed tomb stones. And then, the three crosses of a Norwegian ambassador's family (below); the daughter died at the age of thirty and the parents a bit later. Nobody took care of these graves long forgotten. "But still", I thought, "if I can choose, I want to die in Venice" (but not drowning in the waves of the turquoise lagoon).