{"id":3367,"date":"2019-06-10T20:00:20","date_gmt":"2019-06-10T20:00:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/?p=3367"},"modified":"2019-07-05T14:19:07","modified_gmt":"2019-07-05T14:19:07","slug":"june-10","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/06\/10\/june-10\/","title":{"rendered":"Day 15: Monday, June 10: Florence: Bargello, Duomo Take 2, and San Miniato al Monte"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Courtyard of the Bargello <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Michelangelo’s early Virgin and Child ((?) relief <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Donatello’s famous bronze David, made for the Medici courtyard <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Detail of Donatello’s David, with the lascivious feathers of the helmet of Goliath going up his leg<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A 16th-century “CASIO” in the Bargello “small stuff we also have” exhibit <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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A beautiful ivory diptych, about 10″ high, from the 5th century AD<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Detail of an Italo-Byzantine micro mosaic of Christ Pantokrator (12th century) with tesserae of only about 1 square mm in size <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The line for getting into the Duomo (all along the side of the cathedral)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Mosaic from the early Christian layer of the excavated foundations in the crypt under the Duomo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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More crypt excavations: Fresco from the former apse of S. Reparata, the Romanesque church that stood here until the much bigger Duomo was built around 1300. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The interior of the Duomo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Paolo Uccello<\/em>‘s fresco of an imagined equestrian statue of a Sir John Hawkwood, who helped the Florentines in military conflicts in the late 14th century.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Dante with images from the Divine Comedy and a Florence he never saw (Duomo and all), since he died in 1320, in exile. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The cupola fresco of the Last Judgment, designed and partly executed by Giorgio Vasari, from below<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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One of the Duomo’s stained-glass windows, which have survived since the 15th century. <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The nave of the Duomo from the inside of the cupola<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The cupola fresco close up: Cerberus<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Brunelleschi’s herringbones, one of the engineering tricks to build a cupola bigger than any since the Pantheon, visible on both sides of his double wall (another trick, which created the room for the staircase we still use to go up to the top today).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The view down a curved support of the octagonal outside shell of the cupola, onto the nave of the Duomo (with the campanile to the left)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Spiral staircase for the last portion of the descent.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The pavement across the Ponte Vecchio with (temporary) gold leaf<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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San Miniato al Monte <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The mosaic in the apse of San Miniato al Monte <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Detail from the huge presbytery that occupies the apse of San Miniato <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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View down the nave of San Miniato, with the Roman columns and the beautiful black and white Romanesque decor, plus the little “add-on” Renaissance altar by Michelozzo<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Marble decor and beautifully restored painted along the wooden roof beams at San Miniato <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Another sunset beyond the Arno<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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The beautiful “zebra Gothic” fa\u00e7ade of S. Maria Novella <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

We got up bright and early to be at the Bargello right as it opened, at 8:15. By this time, our 72-hour clock had almost run out on the FirenzeCard, but we were hoping to just get in before it expired. That worked and I have to admit that the Bargello was more impressive than I thought, since there are many additional sculptures that were once outside or otherwise didn\u2019t find any room in the big museums. As the \u201cgovernment building\u201d in the early early 13th century, before the decision to build the Palazzo della Signoria (i.e. the Palazzo Vecchio, which wasn\u2019t \u201cvecchio\u201d = “old” then) and then later the police headquarters of Florence, it looks a lot like a very imposing and strong castle and has always been a public building\u2014now the receptacle of public things from all over Florence. I was most excited to find both of the Donatello Davids there, and really impressed by how close we could get to inspect the bronze David he made for the Medici courtyard, with the feathers from the helmet of Goliath that sensuously creep up David\u2019s leg all the way to his crotch. But there were also two early Michelangelos, and the unfinished tondo relief of the Madonna and child was quite beautiful. I am really intrigued by the unfinished pieces and the way you can see all the different ways he carved the marble (not that everyone else isn\u2019t! But they weren\u2019t into showing workmanship in the Renaissance, so only his incredible fame even while alive made people preserve his half-fine work and his sketches.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But beyond the super famous things, there were so many more things to see, starting with the massive cube of the Bargello itself with its big square courtyard and the upstairs loggia, and the huge sculpture rooms. The collection of little things (watches, locks and keys, earthenware, jewelry, carved ivory…) intrigued Mark as well as me, but I was only truly awed at seeing some very early ivory tablets from the early Christian Era, especially at the detail and precision of the diptych of St. Paul, 5th century AD, with the two ivory panels together only about as large as the size of a regular-size sheet of paper. There was also a micro mosaic of Christ Pantokrator (from the 12th century) with tesserae only about a millimeter on each side. Not to mention the 17th-century Casio e-piano that Mark discovered. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We then did go for the tourist glutton-for-punishment thing and lined up for the Duomo, behind probably 500 other tourists. Since it is free, priority access doesn\u2019t help at all, but we actually only had to wait in line for less than an hour, and chatted with an interesting (and obviously quite wealthy) young Australian couple with a very quiet 4-year-old. They were touring Italy for a month and then wrapping up with a Disney cruise that would take them to Barcelona. Wow. Actually, that conversation was probably more interesting than the interior of the Duomo itself, which is really just big and at the same time with little too see\u2014a few select works (like the weird Dante portrait and the frescoes pretending to be equestrian statues that I had to learn about in Art History 102, one of them the British mercenary soldier Sir John Hawkwood, by Paolo Uccello) and a lot of roped\u2013off space. The stained-glass windows were really too far off to be clearly visible except to Mark\u2019s camera, and the Last Judgment<\/em> in the cupola was really not that exciting from so far down below although Mark took an awesome shot of it looking straight up (more about the close-up views later). But luckily, they still let us into the crypt (although our tickets had technically still expired) and that was very cool! There were four different layers of excavation\u2014one Roman, one early Christian, one Romanesque, and then the actual dome crypt from the 1300s. To see all those layers was really fascinating, especially the large swaths of early Christian mosaic floor, and the half-round of the apse of the Romanesque church, S. Reparata, that was torn down once the cathedral went up. There was even a bit of a fresco visible that was \u201crefreshed\u201d and stylistically updated really close to 1300, when the new cathedral was already going up around S. Reparata.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After we were done with our quick tour of the Dome and the Crypt, we found ourselves a little side street cafe where you could get tosta, which is basically a very dry and large panini, and we ate those on the street sitting on little stools in front of the shop, with hungry tourists eyeing our meal rather hungrily. We had just enough time to wander a bit East from the plaza by the dome, and check out a couple of sites from the outside that I wanted to at least see and decide on\u2014the Palazzo Rucellai, which was built before the Palazzo Medici, and has the iconic Renaissance Florentine 3 tiers of huge sandstone blocks, and also Santa Maria Novella, another church with a beautiful Romanesque \u201czebra stripe fa\u00e7ade,\u201d which we\u2019ll return to in a couple of days. Then it was time to line up again, but this time only for a short half hour, because we had reservations for the climb of the Cupola at a fixed time, 1:30 pm\u2014they had to be made over 3 days in advance because there is such demand, but we had done that first thing we came to Florence. It took a bit until the young man who was checking people through the turnstile could get his boss to approve that we could go in, because of course our tickets had, again, technically expired, but in this case, that\u2019s the norm.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We were both very excited about the cupola, because we had read part of Brunelleschi\u2019s Dome, <\/em>in addition to what I knew from my classes on the Renaissance. With a diameter 144 feet (44 meters) the dome of the cathedral was the largest to be constructed since the Pantheon in Roman times, and without knowledge of how to make Roman-style concrete. When Brunelleschi started it in 1401, no one had the faintest idea how to build a dome that big, and there was quite a bit of guesswork as well as engineering brilliance. When you walk up, you walk up between the inner and the outer shell of the cupola, and although you can\u2019t see much of the engineering secrets, you CAN see the herringbones once you get into the dome. The stairs were fun and Escher-sequel, and then the view from the top. We also got to walk both the balconies inside the cupola, right underneath the fresco, and Mark got a great shot of Cerberus, and of course the view down was awesome, even with the plexiglas we had to peek through. But if I try to imagine what it would have been like to work up there as a bricklayer\/mason, on a suspended platform, no scaffolding below, I\u2018d rather have a railing and plexiglas. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After our Duomo climb, we headed back toward the other side of the river, and weren\u2018t even quite done with the climbing. We went back to the river, across the Ponte Vecchio, which in honor of a fashion show that is starting here on June 11 had a huge roll of goldleaf-covered \u201crunway\u201d going across it, so that it was literally paved with gold (appropriate for the fashion show, the enormous tourist traffic, and the jewelry stores that famously line the bridge on both sides), and got a few supplies for a later dinner that we dropped off at home.  And then we went back up the hill to San Miniato al Monte\u2014really only 10 minutes away\u2014we are so close this area it is almost ridiculous\u2014but it is a climb. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

If San Lorenzo was my favorite of the several Renaissance churches with the modular, geometric style and really simple lines of pietra serena (the less baroque overlay, the better), San Miniato is absolutely my favorite of the older, Romanesque churches. We had already admired its placement on the very top of the highest hill of the Oltrarno neighborhood south of the river and its black-and-white marble fa\u00e7ade multiple times from near and far on our walks. But now we actually went in, and I was amazed at how gorgeous it was\u2014it\u2019s incredibly simple and just very serene\u2014from the interior black and white and the gorgeous mosaic carpet (all from the 12th and 13th centuries) to the amazing color accents of the roof beams, from the little separate Renaissance altar (designed by Michelozzo) to the Italo-Byzantine Christ Pantokrator mosaic in the half-dome of the apse over a huge presbytery to the frescoes with their many Benedictine monks in white in the sacristy, beautifully restored, it is just amazing. But the biggest surprise came later, when I read up on an unresolved question in one of my guidebooks. Since this was really an early, pre-Renaissance church, I couldn\u2019t figure out why it had these amazing columns supporting the apse that had classical columns complete with \u201cleafy tops\u201d (Corinthian capitals), because as much as I could tell that the altar was a Renaissance addition, it would simply not have been possible to \u201cretrofit\u201d those capitals on weight-bearing columns. Only the Blue Guide made me realize that this is because they were taken from Roman temples of the surrounding area (how they hauled them here, I have no idea). That was mind-boggling to me, especially given that it\u2019s hard to see the faint Roman traces beneath Florence at all anywhere in the city.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After this amazing visit to San Miniato and the minor \u2018next-door\u2019 church that is also on the hill, we walked back down to our apartment, stopping at a beautiful little rose garden half-way down. Then I made salad and pasta with pesto for a delicious dinner (I have to say I am really proud of myself for making us these fabulous Italian dinners every night have full-time and overtime tourism, and I have now mastered the LaVazza at least for espresso, although it must be actually defective when it comes to steaming milk, which makes me sad. And then we went out right before 9 pm for one more (marginal) sunset from the Ponte Vecchio and another gelato. We\u2019ve been having gelato twice a day, which is a lot, but we always get the smallest portion (which in a good gelato shop gets us two flavors), and we have been walking an average of 10 miles a day, so I think it\u2019s justifiable. 
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We got up bright and early to be at the Bargello right as it opened, at 8:15. By this time, our 72-hour clock had almost run out on the FirenzeCard, but we were hoping to just get in before it expired. That worked and I have to admit that the Bargello was more impressive than … Continue reading “Day 15: Monday, June 10: Florence: Bargello, Duomo Take 2, and San Miniato al Monte”<\/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-3367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2019italy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367","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=3367"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3692,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3367\/revisions\/3692"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zjunk.net\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}