Today was technically our last day for the Firenzecard, and wow, did we max it out (although we will get the 2-day extension on Tuesday to do some of the additional museums we haven’t seen yet and that I want to get to). We started around 8:30 again and walked around a bit in the eastern part of downtown, even checking out a random convent with fresco remnants on the way, as well as Santa Maria Maddalena de’ Pazzi, a super baroque convent church with the weirdest veiled (or hairy? hard to tell) statue of Magdalene in it. But otherwise just getting our bearings on the way to the Accademia dell’Arte, where we had reservations for 10 am. Because the David is there, it is very overrun, and of course it was fun to see him in all his glory in the famous cupola, even though I do think there is something absurd about a GIANT David, since he is supposed to be small. But when you have a 17-foot block of marble… I could say a lot about the various placements of the sculpture, but I think I’ll remember without writing it down, because I read so much about the David. (Michelangelo would have liked to see it at the center of the loggia de’Lanzi but he didn’t have any say about this; a committee did and it liked the spot right by the palazzo door.) It’s still hard to imagine anyone ever wanting to hoist it up the cathedral to the side of the cupola. Where it stands now, it is of course just worshipped in the round, but it was fun to see his butt and especially the giant hand hiding the rock he’ll put in the sling.
Besides the David and some of the unfinished pieces by Michelangelo, including the awesome unfinished prisoners (“Awakening Slave” in particular) that were meant for the tomb of pope Julius, the Accademia actually doesn’t have that much to offer—some second-rate baroque, more of the gold altarpieces from the 13th and early 14th centuries, and a large collection of especially detailed plaster casts from the 18th century that were used as material to be copied by the artists-in-training. A lot of the things that George Eliot saw here were later moved to the Uffizi, including the famous Giotto and Cimabue Madonnas, so I was excited to see a painting dated ca. 1860-1870, by an artist named Odoardo Borrani, of the entrance to the plaster-cast room, which shows female visitors in the gallery with the placement in which Eliot would have seen them. I am glad that my focus re: the museum as a space for women to explore in the 19th century is about the Uffizi, because the Accademia doesn’t yield that much, but that painting will be hard not to talk about.
After this relatively short visit, we went back to what I had already “bookmarked” as our next stop on the way to the Accademia—we backtracked to the BEAUTIFUL plaza of the Santissima Annunziata, with arches and slender columns in gray stone (pietra serena) along the front, a design by Michelozzo, but finished by Alberti, which extends to the loggia on the right and to the left (the Ospedale degli Innocenti). Again, just as with the INSIDE of San Lorenzo and the library at San Marco, I just love this style and find it incredibly calming and balanced. The baroque interior, though, was complete overkill (finished in 1664; even the Chapel to the Virgin on left, allegedly by Michelozzo seems to have lots of baroque overlay. So that was not to my liking at all—BUT the two cloisters frescoes with their frescoes!!! Wow. They are by a number of different artists, but some of them are by Andrea del Sarto (like the Madonna on the flight to Egypt in the Cloister of the dead) and also by Pontormo (in the entrance cloister)! Although in varying shape, really quite beautiful, fitting with the architecture really well. There is also some trompe l’oeuil fun with a painted monk looking down into the courtyard from an upper window.
From there, we went to the Casa Buonarotti, which once belonged to Michelangelo, although he didn’t live there (he designed it, and then some of his progeny did. One of the more lavish rooms has a number of ceiling paintings after his design, but executed much later, and I was delighted to find that one, called L’Inclinazione, is by Artemisia Gentileschi. Mark’s comment was that the figure “looks more like a woman” than most he has seen, which makes total sense to me, since many painters never got to work off female models—while Artemisia presumably knew what, for example, boobs look like. ADD The battle of the centaurs and also the early Madonna with the chilled
After the short visit there we went to the nearby apartment / business complex created from the former jail and former-former convent, Le Murate, which is now apparently a pretty hip and cool place, and has some really cool features that combines old and new features. We had a simple but excellent lunch (salad and yummy ravioli in cream sauce with mushrooms and prosciutto) there at a restaurant called “Le Carceri” (The Jail), and then made our way past various family “castles” (the borgo) to Santa Croce, which is mostly just big. It actually feels bigger than the Duomo, partly because people can walk around much more freely and see much more.
I had Mark take a photo of me with the all the altar gold behind me demonstrating that I was there “with no Baedeker” like Lucy Honeychurch from E.M. Forster’s Room with a View, but that I had an I-phone to orient myself, so that I didn’t have to “walk[ ] about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date.” Instead, I could disdain the bad second-rate baroque and admire the Giottos—although I am not sure which of the gravestones Ruskin singled out for praise, making Lucy trying to find it. I know the novel is beyond my period of study for the M.A., but it is a perfect little sketch of the innocent late Victorian (really Edwardian) lady tourist in Florence, and hilariously right about the way that the educated tourist (like me) is forever anxiously looking for the “right” things to admire, with whatever script for what is “right” in mind. Thus, we dutifully looked at the chapels to the side of the altar with the Giotto frescoes, and at the grave / memorial markers for Machiavelli, Dante, and Galilei (disinterred from the Medici Chapel of the Novices, where Duke Cosimo found a place for him, and buried in Santa Croce 90+ years after his death) but in a way, we found the old marble graveplates that are worn down by hundreds of years of people walking across them. Santa Croce is one of the churches which were majorly affected by the flood of 1966, especially visible on a horribly damaged Cimabue Crucifix, which now hangs REALLY high up. But there are also now restored art works that were damaged even more by the flood in 1966, including a beautiful Bronzino with two very beautiful girls practically hanging over the edge of the painting, which presumably was massively restored since it looks like it was painted yesterday. The Medici Chapel of the Novices was a pleasant surprise, since it was a super simple Michelozzo “modular” design of the kind I like so much, from about 1445
When we were done with Santa Croce, we decided to spend our last allocated museum visit for the day at the Museo Galileo, which is, unsurpringly, a display of the scientific collections of the Medici — fun times for both of us, but especially for Mark, who admired the Armillary Sphere by Antonio Santucci (1588) as “one of the messiest things ever,” not to mention Galileo’s telescopes. Among the strangest things in the collection were the wax and TERRA-COTTA anatomy studies of babies about to be born in some wrong way or other, for obstetric training. Pretty horrifying but very precise. We admired some rare books from Florence’s libraries that would have corresponded to Leonardo’s collection of early print and manuscript books, and then wrapped up by taking an odd “science selfie” in an object obviously designed for the purpose.
Then we headed home, stopped by the grocery store and had lovely salad and bread for dinner, which also gave us a chance to cool down. It was sunny and hot all day, and being in the museums and churches was always a blessing—and so was being in our cool apartment where the sun never shines. We were very excited to find nice fresh bread we liked—basically baguette—and I couldn’t help it and bought a pot of basil—for 1.98, that was an allowable luxury.
After dinner, we went back out and explored the hill behind us (the one that has the Piazzale Michelangelo on it) a bit more, going a little further west, seeing the city walls from afar, as well the walls of the old fort near San Miniato al Monte from close up as we went all the way around this old complex (which is apparently not open on any side!). We finished the day with a lovely gelato on the way back into San Niccolò, and called it a night!