jump to navigation

Unforgettable Florence Tour continue… June 20, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Europe, Hotels, Museum , trackback

I would like to examine the Lucca Choirbook, that treasure of illuminated music manuscripts from fifteenth-century Bruges, given to Lucca Cathedral by the banker Arnolfini, whose face, as rendered by Jan van Eyck, may be the most familiar from all Europe of the period. The thirty or so bifolia that survive from a codex of some 300 folios are in the Lucca

State Archive, but no one there has heard of it and my accreditation is questioned. We go instead to see the controversially restored tomb of Ilaria del Carretto.

The Villa Puccini in tawdry Torre del Lago is at the end of the Via Giacomo Puccini, which is intersected by side streets called Via Schicchi, Via La Rondine, Via Tosca. The home of the century’s most popular serious composer, on the shore of Lake Massaciuccoli, is a museum in which music manuscripts are exhibited side by side with the composer-cacciatore’s guns. Not on view is the letter Puccini wrote in June to “Dear Margit,” on Ruegen in the Baltic, saying that “if Stravinsky pleases, the sun of Puccini has gone down.”‘ The view of the lake and, on the far shore, of the gashes and scars of the quarries on Carrara Mountain, is partly blocked by the “Butterfly Ristorante and Bar.” The nearly life-size bronze statue of the maestro all but conceals the handsome face between the fedora and the upturned coat collar.

Travel GuidebookThe snow-white cathedral of Pisa is closed, but the exterior is even more beautiful, the four registers of façade, arcades, the twelfth-century columns, cornices, and capitals with sculptures of lions, dragons, humans, and the tall bays with lozenges, circles, and inlays, reminiscent of Islamic art. The bronze reliefs in the doors, though only half as old as the beginnings of the basilica (1064), are difficult to make out, apart from the disconsolate rhinoceros and the quizzical stag. In contrast, the restored bronze relief sculptures in Bonanno Pisano’s twelfth-century Porta S. Ranieri on the south side are distinct in all twenty-four panels. Bonnano’s Sicilian (Monreale) background is apparent in the turbaned prophets between palm trees, and in the Baptism in which a dozen rolling waves cover the Christ from head to feet like a blanket.

The road out of Pisa, from the great white buildings on open expanses of green, passes a still-active U.S. military base (half a century after the war!).

Is this where Ezra Pound was caged? Four World War II U.S. prop planes are parked at the edge of the modern airport nearby.

To San Gimignano and Siena, the former totally tourized (the main attraction is a “Museo Di Criminologic Medioevale Strumenti Di Tortura”), the latter, great city of the Piccolomini and Aldobrandeschi, slightly less so, but its hills are steeper and its crowds denser.

The Villa San Michele, Via di Doccia, Fiesole, a monastery converted into a hotel, lacks elevators, TV, and light stronger than low candle power. The rooms are cell-like, and the canopied bed, the museum- piece dark-oak desk, the rusted iron window bolts date from the cinquecento. The W.C. is equipped with a quiver of long-stemmed wooden matches to dispel emphytic odors, a down-to-earth touch. If the rain were to stop, the garden, the cloisters, woodland walks, and the views of the viale from the loggia, might be worth half the price. The concierge’s brochure indexes Florentine art by subject matter: Adorations, Annunciations, Circumcisions, Crucifixions, Descents from the Cross, Entombments, Journeys of Magi, Last Suppers, Resurrections.

At Monterchi, the Madonna del Parto has been removed from its cemetery chapel to a bleak room in a new building on the main street where it is exhibited with photos, diagrams, and a video of the stages of its disastrous restoration. Not merely the color but also the drawing, as shown in the 1911 photos of the Madonna’s crooked finger, is grotesquely wrong.

Luckily for us, an exhibition devoted to Luca Pacioli at Borgo Sansepolcro draws off some of the Piero traffic. The steep road to Caprese Michelangelo, the artist’s birthplace, commemorated by a modern museum at the top, crosses both the Tiber, a torrente, and the Arno, a flume. Chiusi La Verna, much higher still, is a haunting and, in its rock formations and trees, other-worldly place, so close to heaven that on the crag where tradition locates Francis receiving the stigmata—surely the picture of it in Uccello’s

Thebaid in Florence was painted from “life”—our ears crackle and our hearts pound. The monastery at Vallombrosa displays a plaque commemorating John Milton’s stay in 1638, his description of the Etrurian Shades in Paradise Lost supposedly having been inspired by the surrounding woods, but Milton scholars today contend that he did not visit or even see the place.

To our inexpert eyes, and in spite of complaints that the colors look like Day-Glo, the Brancacci Chapel restorations are successful, but the only other viewer during our forty minutes here is a woman who never removes her sunglasses. The area of Masaccio’s Saint Peter Healing with His Shadow has been identified as S. Felice in Piazza, and the cut-stone building as the Palazzo Vecchio on its Via della Ninna side. But the perspective seems askew between the foreground figures, the most memorable of them the kneeling old man with crossed arms, and the windows of the nearer overhanging house. In the Raising of the Son of Theophilus, the five figures to the left do not have enough feet to go around, Filippino Lippi having overlooked the requirement in the case of the Carmelite friar. Among the real people portrayed in the picture are Botticelli, Pollaiuolo, Lippi himself, and the father of the historian Guicciardini, but the features of the one identified as Cardinal Branda are utterly unlike those of the Branda in Masolino’s Castiglione Olona portrait.

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Unforgettable Florence Tour continue…

Comments»

no comments yet - be the first?


LogoAlexa CounterFeedBurner Counter