Archive | June 2021

The Florentine Mystique

Continuation of: The Greek Connection

Wherever you go, there you are – Confucius

Mindful walking during daytime is a pursuit we engage in whilst we are in Firenze. Such legwork on days of less tourist frenzy not only helps to face fewer hustle and gearbox but also inspires to look around through the eyes of Love. Getting out and about here would reward one the opportunity to reflect on the barometers of a community that was fashioned by this architecture of mediaeval characteristics – originated from the various strange phases of Florentine history.

Unlike passeggiata, the Italian tradition of taking an after-sumptuous-meal leisurely stroll for fun, socializing or for health reasons, an observant visitor on easy-going walks around the streets and piazzas of this City of Flowers proffer a distinctive Italian atmosphere and colour.

Since olden Italy was divided into small States and constantly at war with each other. On that note, the dwellings of great families were generally composed of a double wall of strong stone masonry to turn them into strongholds. And so, some of the greatest architectural achievements in Firenze of that period were houses so outsize they were considered as palaces.

The mediaeval characteristics are much evident in Firenze’s piazzas, courtyards, gardens, open arcades, etc. Distinctive features of the buildings reveal deep-set windows protected by heavy iron grills, arches, porches, and curves that express feeling in design.

While the roof line below the terracotta is adorned with heavy, ornamental cornice, the walls are divided into sections with vertical pilasters and horizontal strips of mouldings. The street front has the popular round-headed windows while the ground floor windows, smaller in size, are appropriately defended with barred grills.

In the photographic viewpoint, there are fabulous shots of varied angles all around which includes after-rain puddle reflections and curious modern day sights.

There are numerous Tuscan Romanesque arches, frescoes on the walls, decorative street lamps, old horse tethering wrought iron rings on the walls, bas-reliefs on lintels, iron holders on the walls for torches to illuminate the street, etc (1).

In the architectural point-of-view, the kind of marbles, including Carrara marble, and other materials for construction and architectural adornment used all around here are of varying characteristics.

Of the two main types of sandstones, pietra forte, the fine-grained, brownish-yellow sandstone of considerable resilience is the primary material and used widely as well as in the construction of prominent edifices such as Basilica di Santa Croce, Palazzo Pitti, Santa Maria Novella, Palazzo Vecchio, etc.

At Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, pull focus and take another look up at the Cupola of Filippo Brunelleschi (1379-1446). Pietra serena, the silvery grey sandstone much favoured by Brunelleschi, is used widely there – particularly at the three girdling belts of the Cupola.

All this may seem rather nostalgic pictorials of old architecture and ornate details and may seem looking backwards. Better still, we understand Città di Firenze clearer as our perspectives evolve to the realisation that the splendour and flair of the past goes with you at every step in Firenze, which the illustrious Dante Alighieri praised as ‘La bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma’ (3).

Follow on: M as in Michelangelo

Notes:

Some of the cast iron piazza/park bench supports, lamp-posts, sewer covers, are still marked with Fonderia delle Cure – Giovanni Berta in Firenze (likewise in Rome), relates to the earlier century.
Pietra serena: Mainly used as ornamental, art, architectural decorations, etc, pietra serena or pietra di macigno is an elegant variety of calcareous sandstone composed of sedimentary layers of different colour. Because of its good mechanical strength it is used also at Cappella dei Pazzi and Cappelle Medicee. The archives of the Opera del Duomo will be of much use to those interested more on this subject.
La bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma: Beautiful and famous daughter of Rome.

(© Joseph Sébastine/Manningtree Archive)

The Greek Connection

Jun22

Continuation of: A Procession of One

Each day is a little bit of history – José Saramago

Firenze, the name Florentines love to call their city in Italian is used by us only during our visits and in our writings. Like the ancient Florentines did, between my wife and I, we call it in its older and most beautiful form: FIORENZA, because she flourished exceedingly and was the Flower of all Italian graces. Fiorenza has music to it for those who listen in the pleasantness of old tradition.

The imposing sculpture of Baccio Bandinelli’s Hercules and Cacus at Piazza della Signoria depicts Hercules holding the hair of Cacus, the giant kneeling in defeat before him, while he held a club in his right hand, the famous weapon he had cut for himself in the forest of Nemea.

I have always looked at this Renaissance sculpture in a wholesome way – certainly not in awe of it. Short of any pretention as a scientific expert on Arts or scholarly expert of Greek antiquity, I prefer to merit it as nothing less than an admirable work although it can be said that the artist’s projection of strength is mere bulk.

Conversely, in what I have scrutinized and thought of this sculpture aside from the comments and reactions of its onlookers I came across at the Piazza della Signoria, one can hardly disregard the many serious, biased, cultivated kind of art-writings from Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) and Benvenuto Cellini (1500-71) down to our modern day scientific art critics which strengthen one’s conviction that the sculpture lacked that exceptional magnetism that could turn the heads of onlookers and fixate their attention on it.

Although Hercules clad in the skin of the Nemean lion is a popular image; he is often represented naked as he is portrayed here by Bandinelli: a powerful upper body with rigid set of shoulders, short necked, head smaller in proportion to full muscular limbs, a curling beard which does not mar the serious expression from the general area of his face. One could note a similarity of those features on sculptor Giambologna’s (Giovanni da Bologna, ca. 1529-1608) Hercules slaying the Centaur Nessus (1599) displayed few feet away under the right-hand arch of the noble Loggia dei Lanzi (1).

Installed as a pendent to Michelangelo’s biblical hero David (popularly called Il Giganté), the naked Hercules parallels the stark nakedness of David who stood with his body’s weight resting on right leg, his gaze divulging an inner anticipation for the next course of action to take. Taken together, the nudity depicted here bespoke of the period when nude studies of male figures was the norm for gods, heroes and even renowned mortals.

Very early on, nude and partially nude artworks based on antique characters have shown their presence in Italy. It took wider popularity with the rediscovery of art of ancient Greece and Rome. In effect, the Greek sculptors’ main interest was to portray man at his idealized best since man was particularly considered as the noblest measure of all things to them – undifferentiated from the gods they conceived in man’s likeness. The representation of Gods, warriors and mortals in heroic nudity was the sculptors’ open admiration for the perfectly formed male body which is hardly a sensual aspect in the society of a time where athletes openly workout in scant clothes for events like Olympics.

Hercules being a favourite hero and symbol of the Florentine Republic, it’s hardly surprising to come across many such representations in Firenze. One cannot ignore the Trecento Florentine Seal which bore the image of Hercules since about 1281, as a testimony to the familiarity of Hercules in the Florentine culture.

Since we usually rent apartments for our Florentine visits in the vicinity of Piazza del Duomo or in the area between Il Duomo and Piazza S. Marco, we cannot avoid touching upon Piazza del Duomo almost every day of our stay in Firenze.

The group of ecclesiastical buildings which form the center of Firenze comprise of Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore (Il Duomo); the octagonal Baptistery (Battistero di San Giovanni) (2) and Campanile di Giotto (belfry tower).

Il Duomo was named Santa Maria del Fiore in reference to the lily (the emblem of Virgin Mary) in the red shield of the Republic, which indicates the tradition that Firenze was founded in a field of flowers. This edifice was built on the site of the cathedral dedicated to S. Reparata who, at the tender age of 12, had undergone martyrdom in Cappadocia during the persecution of Roman Emperor Decius in 3rd century AD. From 680 to 1298, she was the primary patroness of Firenze, following which the city was placed under the tutelage of Virgin Mary and S. John the Baptist. According to a legend, Santa Reparata itself was erected on the ground occupied by the parish church of San Salvador. Subsequently, when Santa Reparata was raised as the parish church, the Baptistery became pro tempore the Cathedral for a few years.

At Piazza di S. Giovanni, it’s delightful to remember Lorenzo Ghiberti’s (1378-1455) artistic works on the gilded doors of the Baptistery situated across from Il Duomo. Ghiberti most likely cast it in a process the French called, encirage, using the same enormous furnace in his workshop in Via Sant’Egidio, nearly opposite Santa Maria Nuova, where he had created the Northern Gates. Taking in the astonishing beauty of these celebrated doors of the Eastern Gates, Michelangelo once praised them as fit to be “the Gates of Paradise.”

On the southern side of the Baptistery was a representation of Hercules amongst the eight depictions of virtues belonging to the 28 gilded bronze reliefs on Andrea Pisano’s (ca. 1270-1348/9) bronze door, probably the earliest in Firenze (3). Another representation from the workshop of Andrea Pisano is the relief of Hercules and Cacus (Lower register No 2: Social Justice) on the eastern side of the Campanile di Giotto which supposedly occupy the site of a small oratory of S. Zenobius, the first bishop of Firenze.

Follow-on: The Florentine Mystique

Notes:

Loggia de’ Lanzi is so called from the Swiss lancers who were placed here by Grand Duke Cosimo I.
Although the date of Baptistery is lost in uncertainty, legend has it that theedificewas supposedly erected in 589 by German-born Theodelinda (Theudolinde, 570-627), daughter of King Garibald of Bavaria and queen of the Lombards who was devoted to the Christian faith of the Catholics. In about 1229, works under Jacopo de’ Lapi took place to level the ground around Baptistery and replace the old brick pavement with stone. A book relates the occasion as: “At that time the Baptistery stood at a higher elevation than afterwards, and at the base were steps. Around the building were ranged Roman sarcophagi, which were used by Florentine families of distinction for internment, as well as for monuments, when the entire Piazza between the Cathedral and Baptistery constituted the cemetery of Florence.”
Since December 2019, all three sets of bronze and gold doors of the Baptistery are displayed next to one another at the Sala del Paradiso of the Museo dell’Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore after completion of the restoration project began in 1978 by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Firenze.

A Procession of One

Jun13

Continuation of: Distant Fire, Delightful Gleams

There are certain things in life one feels to be good and beautiful and must hunger after them. Throughout the 15th century Italy (1), it had become fashionable for men of wealth, influence and of the church to decorate their premises with fine arts of those derived from the classical Greco-Roman cultural heritage – collections primarily of Greek art from finds in mainland Italy and Sicily.

It is no small matter how much the architectural and artistic achievements of the ancient Greeks have set its effects on the Western culture in general. The renewed interest in the classical past and in the grammar of Greek architecture came not only with the progress in trade and banking activities of both Venetian and Genoese families in the Aegean, but also from the steadily growing awareness and appreciation in Western Europe for Greek literature. While, amongst other aspects, this was fostered by the printing of Greek type initiated by Aldus Manutius (ca. 1449-1515) in Venice’s Sant’Agostino neighbourhood, it also spearheaded an increase in the influx of visiting scholars between Western Europe and the Greek lands.

The taste for art collecting per se aroused far reaching expectations for a brilliant coterie of sculptors, painters, and goldsmiths which occasioned burgeoning of an imposing series of reproductions of Greco-Roman art, etc.

On an equal par with Genoa, Milan and Venice in northern Italy, Firenze of that time was one of the richest, liveliest regions of varied economic activity. Primarily a manufacturing centre with booming export trades, its principal foundation of wealth lay in the cloth industry. Furthermore, the Medici Bank which ranked as the biggest and most respected financial magnets of Europe was a prestigious laurel to Firenze’s singular privilege as the top most banking centre.

Mindful of the historical personalities of the wealthy merchant families of Firenze, foremost amongst men from the long line of bourgeois Mediceans includes: Cosimo de’ Medici (Cosimo di Giovanni de’ Medici/Cosimo the Elder (Pater Patriae, 1389-1464), his grandsons: Lorenzo de’ Medici (Lorenzo il Magnifico, 1449-92), Giuliano de’ Medici (1453-1478) (see profile pictures on the title card (2)), and counting two of their family popes: Pope Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de’ Medici, 1475-1521, pope from 1513), and Pope Clement VII (Giulio di Giuliano de’ Medici, 1478-1534, pope from 1523). As Mediceans, theirs was a procession of one – all too princely a Medici to neglect their great patronage for all kinds of arts and science.

Essentially, the Medici transformed art’s status to “fine arts”. There is some modern-day appraisal that this view could be a myth created by the Medici themselves. Then again, to appreciate the many-sided aspects that could outshine this view, of course, one should go to Tuscany and Italy on the whole. Where better to do it than there?

The Medici’s endeavours helped to remove the impediment on opportunities at hand for their contemporary sculptors, painters, architects, and thereby enriched their earnings, career success and recognition. Above all, they paved the way for most of the artisans to demonstrate their brilliant talents and expressions through so many artistic treasures of the Renaissance. One such personage was Baccio Bandinelli (Bartolommeo di Michelangelo Bandinelli/Brandini, 1493–1560).

Baccio Bandinelli was one amongst the most favoured by the House of Medici which included the great maestro Michelangelo (Michelagniolo di Lodovico Buonarroti (1475-1564), Donatello (Donato di Niccolo di Betto Bardi, ca. 1386-1466), Bertoldo di Giovanni (ca. 1440-1491), Giuliano da Sangallo (Giuliano Giamberti, 1443-1516), Sandro Botticelli (Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Ca. 1444-1510), Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) amongst others.

Being one of Firenze’s principal mannerist sculptors, it was Baccio Bandinelli who created the sculpture: Hercules and Cacus(1525-34) which stands guard on a pedestal on the right side of the portal of Palazzo Vecchio while, a marble replica of Michelangelo’s David (1501-04) (3) stood in pride of place on the other side along the old Ringhiera (4).

Follow-on: “The Greek Connection” (Part 3)

The term Italy in this write up refer to the country as a whole since Italy finally became a unified nation-state only in 1871;
Picture credits of Title header: Source: commons.wikimedia.org: From left:

1) Ritratto di Cosimo il Vecchio – Portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici the Elder by Jacopo Pontormo (1494–1557) – Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze;

2) Ritratto di Lorenzo Il Magnifico – Portrait of Lorenzo de’ Medici by Giorgio Vasari (1511–1574) – at Galleria degli Uffizi, Firenze;

3) Portrait of Giuliano de’ Medici by Sandro Botticelli (1445–1510) – at Accademia di Belle Arti G. Carrara, Bergamo

3) This substitute of Michelangelo’s David was created by sculptor Luigi Arrighetti (1858-1938) with Saul Fanfani (1856-1919) and installed here in June 1910. The original David (installed in May 1504) was removed in 1873 to the shelter of Galleria dell’Accademia Firenze to avoid further weathering and damage. A bronze cast of David by Clement Papi (1803-75), can be seen at Piazzale Michelangelo, Firenze, where it was on view from September 13, 1875

4) Only the remnants of the original Ringhiera of the 14th century remains after its removal in 1812.

Distant Fire, Delightful Gleams

Jun5

I have come where I have long desired to be…. – Charles V

Within the wide Piazza della Signoria and its Loggia dei Lanzi (1), the open-air museum on the southern side, there are many sculptural art from a time when Arts enjoyed extensive prosperity in Firenze (Florence), Italy.

This area was frequently bustling with activity before the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic took over globally and triggered significant precautionary restrictions such as traveller mobility, health-related formalities, border closures, travel bans, etc.

As in the case of Italy, the world’s fifth-most visited destination, the crisis inflicted a heavy toll on its tourism, plunging it into the worst recession since World War II. But the recent popular expression, “Even George Clooney doesn’t come anymore with this pandemic,” is now giving way to optimism among the population as there are efforts to reopen the country to tourism from June forward owing to the progressive easing of restrictions and the awaited EUDCC (EU Digital COVID Certificate) Gateway for safe movement between countries.

Being constant visitors, Firenze is always linked to our minds with summer and sunshine. When the blue Tuscan sky is magically clear or whenever we do not entertain any intention to swap Firenze (its palaces, monuments, galleries and piazzas, etc) for a full-field investigation of the towns and cities nestling in the hillsides of Tuscany, this here is one of the places where we often spent time during the Florentine leg of our visits.

A certain pleasing ambiance prevails at this sprawling Piazza with its public-space displays which are more conducive to us for serious reflection than just to sit elsewhere in Firenze and people-watch – even though, at times, with the pleasure of listening through earphones to the delightful masters of Italian opera: Gaetano Donizetti (1797–1848), Vincenzo Bellini (1801-35), Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901), or Giacomo Puccini (1858 –1924), in their home settings.

Compared to the public squares of Firenze such as Piazza del Duomo, Piazza Santa Croce, Piazza della Repubblica, the show-place of Firenze is Piazza della Signoria. This is reputedly the place where almost all the Florentine history probably has passed.

Adding to its plus side are all those strenuous sculptures executed with the most delicate mastery, as well as the great “Neptune” fountain (Fontana del Nettuno/il Biancone) of Bartolommeo Ammanati (1511-92). In many instances, it leaves distinct impressions and memories on the visitors.

During high tide of visitors in the Piazza, few may fail to notice an inscribed circular plaque on the pearl grey Pietra Serena (2) paved pavement which marks the spot of the Cimento di Fuoco, the ordeal of fire on May 23rd, 1498 when Girolamo Savonarola (1452-98) was hanged and burned.

Before the Loggia became a day-to-day controlled area for certain hours following an episode of vandalism to the marble statue of Pio Fedi’s “The Rape of Polyxena” (3), we used to sit on the left stone-terrace that runs between the two Corinthian columns, closer to the lion by F. Vacca (4), one of the two colossal marble Medici lions which flank the entrance of the Loggia.

The imposing Palazzo Vecchio loomed to our right. Its principal doorway with an overhead decorative fronton is conspicuous in the center of the two “termini” posts, which formerly served as supports to the chain to bar the entrance.

From where we sat, it was easier to clearly admire the topic of my present write-up located on our right side of Palazzo’s entrance: the white marble sculpture of the most celebrated of all the heroes of antiquity in the Renaissance’s colourless view of the Classical nude: Hercules.

Continued in Part 2: “A Procession of One”

Notes:

The loggia was variously known as Loggia dei Priori, Loggia della Signoria, Loggia dei Lanzi, Loggia di Orcagna, D’Orcagna – not necessarily in this order. By Benci di Cione and Simone di Francesco Talenti, the Loggia (1376-82) was originally designed to shelter the Signoria from adverse weather conditions during civil and religious ceremonies or to accommodate the Priori for their convocations of the people. In contemporary times, it suits as a venue for Live Orchestra concerts, etc.
Pietra Serena: Sandstone typical of Florentine Renaissance architecture and building mainly extracted from the hills of Settignano and Gonfolina area/Lastra a Signa, in the northeast and in the west of Firenze.
Pio Fedi’s “The Rape of Polyxena” (1865/6) depicts Achilles receiving Trojan princess Polyxena when she offered herself for the return of her brother Hector’s body. Having secured Polyxena in his left arm, Achilles’ sword is raised to beat Queen Hecuba, who is desperately trying to protect her daughter. The dead person under Achilles’ feet is the corpse of Prince Hector.
The right lion is of Grecian origin brought from Rome together with the 6 antique sculptures placed against the inner wall.
This is for Carina, my travel companion and wife, who understands perfectly what ‘dedication’ means.