{"id":3220,"date":"2019-06-07T20:00:39","date_gmt":"2019-06-07T20:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=3220"},"modified":"2019-07-05T14:21:58","modified_gmt":"2019-07-05T14:21:58","slug":"day-12-june-7-florence-north-of-the-dome-and-oltrarno-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/06\/07\/day-12-june-7-florence-north-of-the-dome-and-oltrarno-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 12: June 7. Florence: Duomo Part 1, San Giovanni neighborhood, and a first shot at Oltrarno"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Piazza della Signoria, with view of the portal to the Palazzo Vecchio (with the replica of Michelangelo’s David and Banidinelli’s Hercules and Cacus) from behind Cellini’s Perseus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The centerpiece of the mosaic of the Last Judgment at the Baptistery in Florence<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Romanesque\/Gothic interior of the Baptistery <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The remnants of the Romanesque floor mosaic beneath today’s floor of the Baptistery (visible through a grate)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Campanile (belltower) of the Cathedral designed by Giotto and de Cambio, with replicas of the reliefs by Andrea Pisano<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View of the roof above the nave and the cupola of the Duomo from the Campanile <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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On the way back down from the Campanile climb <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The cloisters at the monastery of San Marco, designed by Michelozzo, ca. 1445<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Crucifixion by Fra Angelico in the Chapter House of the Monastery of San Marco <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Detail from the Crucifixion by Fra Angelico: the three Maries under the Cross <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fra Angelico’s Annunciation from the upstairs hallway in San Marco <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Another hallway fresco: St. Dominic kneeling at the Cross<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Madonna with child and saints, the third hallway fresco in S. Marco <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Cell 3 with the smaller Annunciation, with St. Peter Martyr in the background <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A fresco uncovered below the floor of the monk’s cell (presumably part of the decor of the rooms below) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View of the San Marco hallway, with cells left and right.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View into the library of San Marco, designed by Michelozzo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Last supper in the refectory of San Marco, by Ghirlandaio <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The demonic cat from the Last Supper (a must) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fra Angelico’s Tabernacle of the Linenweavers, now in the museum part of San Marco<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fra Angelico’s amazing angels (well, amazing to Ruskin) on the frame of the Tabernacle of the Linenweavers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Funeral of St. Antoninus by Domenico Passignano, ca. 1589, in the Salviati chapel in the church of S. Marco<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Last Supper by Andrea Castagno at the refectory of S. Appolonia, a gem hidden from view until the 19th century, because it was a convent until Napoleon came along <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A weird distorted go-pro image of an already weird, distorted staircase: the famous staircase by Michelangelo leading up to the Laurentian Library at San Lorenzo <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The Laurentian library, design by Michelangelo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The “pews” with the catalog information (along the posts) for the scholars and monks, but now without illuminated manuscripts in the cubbyholes<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The nave of S. Lorenzo, with its beautiful modular and classicizing design by Brunelleschi, untainted by Baroque overlay (except for the golden cupola stuff) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Bronzino’s VERY mannerist fresco of the Martydom of St. Lawrence, with all the muscle men<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Fra Filippo Lippi, Annunciation, San Lorenzo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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ALIEN in the statuary! (San Lorenzo, on the way to the New Sacristy) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Michelangelo’s Dawn and Day in the New Sacristy <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Michelangelo’s Night <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Reliquaries aka Steampunk Microwaves in the crypt of San Lorenzo <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The crazy tabernacle of Orsanmichele by Andrea Orcagna, ca. 1350 (after the Black Plague) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Pillar with former grain shoot in Orsanmichele, from the time when it was a grain “silo” rather than a church. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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“Our” courtyard with its sad palm tree<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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One of the many defensive towers that each important family in Florence had in the middle ages for self-defense (torre and borgo are the usual terms–this is the Borgo San Jacopo). <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Porta San Frediano, one of the several city gates that is still standing (and in this case, still used for through traffic) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

I was up too early again (sigh) but we officially got up around 7:00 and had some yogurt and tea (I made a big old mess trying to make coffee\u2014this fancy Lavazza-Mio espresso maker is just not making friends with me) before we set out to go to the Duomo\u2019s ticket office and get reservations for the Dome climb. The earliest we could get were on Monday, but that was great for us\u2014we have 72-hour tickets that cover basically all of Florence\u2019s museums (the \u201cFirenzeCard,\u201d a pretty slick way of funneling people through and, despite the expense of 85 euro per person, for us definitely worth it), but the dome climb is so popular they give you dates beyond that 3-day window. That\u2019s really tough for people who can\u2019t be in town for that long, but we have plenty of time\u2014and we may even have to get the add-on FirenzeCard extension for another $28 a person for the stuff we just didn\u2019t have time for. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then we got started on today\u2019s round of museums by looking at the baptistery, which is under restoration and was actually much smaller on the inside than I thought. The Italo-Byzantine stuff on the ceiling was pretty (Eliot thought the enormous Christ was \u201cawful\u201d but I don\u2019t think in the modern sense\u2014more like \u201cfilling me with too much awe,\u201d) but I know so little about it\u2014intriguing to find out, though, that we could see some even older floor mosaics  through the grates in the floor. I like the shape of the baptistery and the \u201cold-style\u201d black and white coloration, but it\u2019s hard to imagine, given the size of Florence now, that once upon a time every Florentine was baptized there. We went from there to the campanile and climbed its 421 stairs. That was fun, and I think that the stair climbing I was doing at home for exercise last winter and spring when the weather was too crappy to run really paid off. But Mark, who didn\u2019t do that, also held his own! The campanile is beautiful and the view from up there is of course really impressive in all directions, including directly at the cupola, where the other tourists can look across at us from the other high place. What is it about always getting up to the highest point?  Mastery? Maximum 360 view? At any rate, it was fun, especially since I am recognizing at least some of the landmarks, if not nearly as many as I should by now. I was certainly excited to see San Marco from there, north of the Duomo in the \u201cMedici hood\u201d of the 15th century, the San Giovanni quarter, where the family had extra much influence, built their first palazzo (now Medici-Ricardo) and San Lorenzo as well as sponsoring a bunch of convents and monasteries, including of course San Marco. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

That was where we headed next, and as one of the spaces I have already studied and that I will be working on further for my masters\u2019 thesis, I was especially excited. It is also a bit more of a specialized taste to look at Fra Angelico\u2019s work, so while we were not alone, this was not a museum with the usual masses. It was, however, as beautiful as I expected and more so. The building was designed by Michelozzo, with two cloisters downstairs and simple monk\u2019s cells upstairs, but also a library where the monks once illuminated manuscripts, and which has those beautiful well-proportioned arches and columns accented with pietra serena (a dark sandstone) that I love so much. And the frescoes that decorate the walls of many cells and some of the public areas\u2014over 50 of them total\u2014are by Fra Angelico and his workshop. I researched them and their 19th century reception pretty intensely last spring, because they a) became super popular starting in the Romantic period as people were discovering late medieval and early Renaissance sacred art as noteworthy and beautiful. This continued into the Victorian era, and Ruskin in particular went completely apeshit over Fra Angelico when he first discovered his art in the 1840s (later, he cooled down a little, but he was just raving about Fra Angelico\u2019s angels and their wings, especially about the angels on the frame of the Tabernacle of the Linenweavers (Mark took pictures of the whole line-up of those angels for me). The hitch was that while Ruskin could see the frescoes at San Marco, women couldn\u2019t see any but the ones in the cloister and the chapterhouse, where there is a huge crucifixion with saints and church fathers. George Eliot went and sent George Henry Lewes, her significant other, to see what she couldn\u2019t, and then she built descriptions of paintings she couldn\u2019t see into her novel Romola<\/em>. That\u2019s super exciting to me (I\u2019ve already written a conference paper and a seminar paper about this) and seeing the frescoes as well as many altar pieces by Fra Angelico at San Marco was amazing. The most famous of the frescoes are the huge chapterhouse Crucifixion<\/em> (which Eliot did see) and the big Annunciation<\/em> in the hallway upstairs (which she didn\u2019t) but I like the little frescoes in the cells as well (many of them are done by the workshop and repeat the same few motifs over and over for the contemplation of monks, novices, and visitors that stayed in those cells). The chapterhouse Crucifixion<\/em> has been pretty recently restored and is beautiful. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Many non-fresco paintings by Fra Angelico were also gathered here from elsewhere in Florence when the monastery became a museum in the 1860s, and when women were finally able to go see the works, and those were interesting to compare to the frescoes\u2014even though they are tempera and not oil, they are much more detailed and the simplicity of the faces in the frescoes is traded for much more facial expression. Not to mention the fact that there is so much gold. Ruskin, Eliot, and also Anna Jameson saw a number of these altarpieces etc. elsewhere, because some were in the Uffizi in the 1800s, and others still in situ in various churches. It\u2019s nice to have them all in one place instead. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Again, I was surprised to discover some of the \u201cextras\u201d\u2014in this case, some older frescoes that can be seen through the floor, in areas that must have been part of the ground floor and were covered up, and also the fact that the monk\u2019s cells were open at the top to the rafters above. I am not sure that was always that way, but our apartment is actually set up the same way. I\u2019d also forgotten of the beautiful Last Supper fresco with Cat by Ghirlandaio that\u2019s there. And then, on the way out, we were suddenly in an area that was full of old carved stones from buildings that had been demolished, without any further documentation, as well as a room of fresco fragments from all over the place, which even had a decorated wood ceiling that was taken from some other building and preserved at San Marco. We also took a quick look at the church itself, which was very much baroqued-up after Fra Angelico\u2019s time, with only one piece by him left (another Annunciation<\/em>) and didn\u2019t do much for me. But it did have an interesting fresco by ??? with an illusionistically interesting leg sticking out between two doors. Amazing stuff everywhere, and a will to preserve a lot of it that I do appreciate but that also makes Florence overwhelming. Every square inch is history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We, however, needed at least a little break from all that history and art, and just had a simple bistro thing (sort of a cross between a pizza and a pizza romana) across from San Marco, and then walked the 200 feet or so to the former convent of Sant\u2019Appolonia, where a quiet bunch of nuns lived for centuries with gorgeous frescoes in their refectory and didn\u2019t really think much of it. While San Marco was at least sort-of known and visited because Vasari wrote about Fra Angelico, these were not really discovered by the world until the early 19th century, when the convent was decommissioned. But now the beautifully restored Last Supper by Andrea Castagno is a famous fresco that predates Leonardo\u2019s by about 50 years. It was impressive to see; quite large and with an interesting investment in making the perspective work right with people seated in the space, so they looked up from below at Christ and his disciples (with Judas on the other side of the table from everyone else, just in case we miss the names underneath). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since we were already in the \u201cMedici neighborhood\u201d we went across the (new\/19th century) indoor\/outdoor marketplace near San Lorenzo (super touristy)  and into all the different parts of San Lorenzo that can be toured. The church itself, along with the old sacristy, by Brunelleschi, the library with its crazy staircase (both by Michelangelo), and the New Sacristy, also by Michelangelo (along with the horrible Baroque Chapel of the Princes), and the crypt with some relics and treasures. Like San Marco, San Lorenzo is a sacred building complex commissioned by Cosimo de Medici in the first half of the 15th century, but with much more Medici stuff and an all-star team of artists and architects involved. I have to say that my favorite part were not the two famous sacristies\/side chapels (the old and the new) and not even the library, but the church itself. The design is really simple classicizing designs, all lines and very much about long rather than high, all white offset with the pietra serena I love so much, and without all that curvy decorative overload of the baroque. The way later cupola painting is actually complete overload and jars badly with that design. The other works of art are just almost stand-alone, rather than integrated into an elaborate decorative \/ framing structure. I don\u2019t know why I like this so much and can\u2019t make friends with the late Renaissance and the Baroque drive to decorate everything with gold and swirlies, but in architecture, the Renaissance is just a clear preference for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The highlights in San Lorenzo for paintings were the Bronzino fresco of a Martyrdom of St. Lawrence with the huge muscled Michelangelo-esque man in the corner and an Annunciation by Filippo Lippi. On the way to the New Sacristy, Mark found a fun statue of a beheaded guy with the alien from Alien<\/em> sticking out the gullet, but of course the big-deal statues were the Michelangelo pieces in the New Sacristy, in particular the Night with her interesting posture and her weird boobs. In the crypt, we actually started to get a bit silly, because the treasure of San Lorenzo so many ridiculously sumptuous reliquary shrines, including two that looked for all the world like steampunk microwaves that toasted their saintly contents a bit too long. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were pretty much done with our art viewing at this point, but for good measure, we looked into Orsanmichele to see the CRAZY tabernacle by Andrea Orcagna made for the Daddi Madonna after the Black Plague hit Florence. I also showed Mark one of the columns where you can still see the grain shoot from when the church was a granary. Then we walked home and took a well-deserved nap. We had dinner at the apartment about 6:30 (pasta and salad; I am really making this work for us), and then we headed back out for an evening walk on OUR side of the Arno. We had fun discovering tons of the old family towers from the Middle Ages, all converted into apartments of once sort or another. We also walked by several churches we know we need to return to, including S. Maria del Carmine (with the Brancacci chapel), and another couple of city gates with parts of the wall on the west end of the old town with the last wall ring that was built. We turned back by the pseudo-gate called the Rondinello right by the Arno, and then made our way back via the Pitti Palace and through winding streets past a good gelateria, while also trying to look out for parts of the old passage that connected the Palazzo Vecchio to the Palazzo Pitti in the 16th century. I have to admit that I didn\u2018t realize until Mark pointed it out to me that you see the traces of it above<\/em> you, on the second or higher floors of various buildings and churches and also along the Ponte Vecchio. By the time we got home, it was already quite dark and we were ready to wrap up the day with showers and a last look at the day\u2018s photos. We are being busy tourists! 
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I was up too early again (sigh) but we officially got up around 7:00 and had some yogurt and tea (I made a big old mess trying to make coffee\u2014this fancy Lavazza-Mio espresso maker is just not making friends with me) before we set out to go to the Duomo\u2019s ticket office and get reservations … Continue reading “Day 12: June 7. Florence: Duomo Part 1, San Giovanni neighborhood, and a first shot at Oltrarno”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2019italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3220"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3693,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3220\/revisions\/3693"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}