The view from the iPhone - Florence night

There is a note at the beginning of the 'Florence day' entry about making use, deliberately or by relaxed exploration of the possible, of the iPhone's limitations. These are especially evident as it struggles for light at night...

the view from the iPhone - Florence day

The iPhone is limited as a camera, but also has many advantages over a camera in being discreet. It also, being slow and inflexible in exposure, able to produce some very interesting if you exploit these qualities, for example with slight (intentional or accident) movements of the camera while taking the picture. Its lens is also quite unprotected from sunlight or other sharp direct light, which has interesting effects. Admirably, though it lives naked in pockets and I give so little attention to the care of the lens, there are no signs of dirty lens, perhaps because it is pretty close to pinhole size anyway.

Here are some daylight pictures from Florence and getting to Florence. Some of the 'effects' are deliberate, some accidental.

Florence: a final word, about the police

There are lots of police about in Florence, in cars and on foot. As elsewhere, they show a character to be admired, a gentle strength. Helen noted with delight that the policewomen women have their hair down, not severely dragged back (click on photo to see enlarged). In Bolsena last Wednesday we parked in the middle of a square to duck in for a coffee. I looked out to see a police car alongside our car. I went in haste to ask the policewoman (maybe 50, glamorous, hair down, no mighty hat) if it was OK to park where we were parked. With a smile she said it was OK for a bit but not for too long. I said we were just having coffee. With a grin, she said that's fine then. I do not sense in the photo above any official anxiety about full frontal art.

Not that there isn't anybody concerned about decency in Italy, remember this?

Florence - so much to see...

We went and saw certain things, some selected, some incidental, the people and current life as well as the historical.

In the rain, you run on the way to the Uffizi, past the doors of the Baptistry.

Perhaps to show respect and give sufficient attention, one should take the trip to Florence for the day and give that day to just one door, or one other collection of art. In this case, Ghiberti's Gates of Paradise,

As a tourist, you can expect that often enough there will be someone looking over your shoulder, especially if you are a couple of young women out for the day...

It does tend to glaze, it all becomes too much, the indigestion is evident as one of you works out where to go next while the other slips into torpor.

and you decide in fact it's time for lunch.

beauty and violence

Is it a human dilemma - the work of beauty entangled with articulation of violence.

In this first of two beautiful works in this blog entry we see one of the earliest sculptures in this piazza, completed in 1583, specifically able to be seen from any direction, a new notion in design and execution. Consider this as an example of how the world, at the time, began to see, began to think, began to imagine, construct, speak of matters, in new and multiple directions. And this work balances - something still not often achieved 400 years later in art, science, politics, ethics or other ambition.

Some person of importance later decided this work should be called The Rape of the Sabine, but what it really is is a depiction of the young man trampling the old man to get the girl. Call it rough it you are old, call it appropriate if it is more appropriate for the young man and woman to be together. But did if have to get the rape label, or does that reflect pre-viagra aged man dribble, or some customary preference for the addition of violence to entertainment. Is there some statement about the difficulty of capturing beauty?

a beautiful sculpture...

Then this item below, also in the next Loggia dei Lanzi, depicts a bloke who is dragging off a girl, having done in her boyfriend and now snarling at her whinging mother... Wikipedia says: "The group The Rape of Polyxena, is a fine diagonal sculpture by Pio Fedi from 1865"

See in the photos below the extraordinary detail of the large and beautiful sculpture in marble, notably the skirt, see also (click to enlarge) the sinuous texture arising from the natural colour of the marble.

The execution is exceptional; yet there seems to me to have been little change in general style from the first to the second of these works, over 300 years; an upward shift in the R-Rating violence content, even more evident in other work in the Loggia.

If one notes in the context of modern war, those wars for which we hanker and in which we dabble, that the poisons of war in which one dips one's military 'might' tend to spread back into and poison the society of the protagonists, then note that over so many centuries central Italy had been host to so many princes in hilltop castles plotting mischief and survival. Note also that this work of 1865 is put in place five years after the plebiscite by which Tuscany (of which Florence capital) votes overwhelmingly to join a united Kingdom of Italy under the King formerly of Savoy up in the French corner of Italy, and Florence is now, for a time, the capital of a united kingdom of Italy.

... And still the highest art form reflects the desire to murder the other bloke and drag off his girl, kill her mother if she gets in the way. Hardly a multidirectional, balanced perspective on life.

Also, perhaps some reader has the time to revise this Wikipedia discussion of the rape of the Sabine women, which says that they weren't really getting raped, they were being acquired as wives by abduction.

The Uffizi

The Uffizi Gallery occupies the pinnacle among art museums.

Not least because, having been built as the offices - uffizi - of the republic, the Florentines took the Greek word 'muses' and invented the word for a place for their exhibition: 'museum'. So this is the original museum.

And the building itself is a work of art, see the first photo below, of an external corridor.

One walks through an extraordinary building to see extraordinary things displayed in chronological order. Two pictures stand out in the field, for both of us, Botticelli's paintings LaNascita di Venere [Birth of Venus] and La Primavera [Spring]. The accompanying photos are from the public domain, see here, here and here. The history of the paintings is worth reading. Up close they distinguish themselves as large paintings with wonderful detail, delicacy and design.

Accademia, David

We gave our time to two major galleries in Florence, the Accademia and the Uffizi.

The Accademia di Belli Arti (Academy of Fine Arts) is a teaching institution, its exterior full of Florentine understated refinement.

Inside is perhaps the most extraordinary of sculptures, Michelangelo's David. Elsewhere in the blog we have photos of the copy of David in the Piazza della Signoria, we were astounded how much more beautiful the original was (no photos allowed). Furthermore, it is placed wonderfully. You enter a gallery, with unfinished figures, more than life size, intended for the tomb of Pope Julius II. These give a powerful impression of the business of carving marble, with the figures emerging - there is one photo here. A sense of the muscularity of the work and the product, both. Then at the end, David himself. The frontal view is so well known as to be tedious, and often exploited. Walking around the figure, seeing it from different angles, shows its majestic qualities.

stylish city

Unashamedly we recommend that if you want hats - men's, women's, berets - you should go and say hello to Roberto Calamai, with his stall right at the farthest end of the market away from the cathedral.

We've all seen panels to hide building work...

Smartly dressed women on bicycles

Waiting to go into the Uffizi

Elena in fact tired at the end of day, after we got home...

Dino had been more than cold.

Having left his long-johns at home he had to borrow

some more dainty items

but then had to buy some heavier tights in brown to keep warm (under trousers)

Banking

It is reassuring when one looks at the video display of one's ATM to see that one's bank has been around for a bit, history of that ATM bank here. This brass plaque next to the ATM is easier to read.

If you want to know some more about local knowledge of money, read Ms Choi's term paper. And realise these people are the cause of this whole Global Financial Crisis thing, having invented credit, non-existent money.

Dogs of Florence

A cheerful and intelligent waiter made the observation to us that apart from what is here for the tourists, Florence is not much good any more. He had bought a house out of town several years ago. The increasing numbers of tourists are increasingly rude and make the city dirty. Plus there is now such a large number of schools for foreigners and "pardon me for saying so, but most of them are Americans."

But it is the most remarkable of cities and has about it a special refinement, sense of colour and confidence.

And a self-importance. The labels to major art works are clearly addressed to those with at least masters degrees in fine arts (better mind you than the National Museum of Australia where the interpretation is apparently more important than anything else).

So to avoid the sin of ponderousness in writing about a place of great beauty and importance we should begin with Helen's observation in both Rome and Florence that dogs are more evident in the city centre than in an Australian city centre. And begin especially with a photo of a creature who in so many ways reminded Helen tearfully of George, reluctant to surrender his ball, back there in the dog home in rainy Nowra.

... and now for an assortment of actual Florentine canines, photos which put the big picture tourist items in homely perspective.