Florence: Continued

Florence is not the eternal city, but walking its endless corridors and halls of renaissance art gives it an eternal quality, which left Mom and me limping around on our museum legs in a haze of evolving iconography and two-dimensional perspective. “Saunteritis” (Mom’s term), however, did not deter us from navigating the ticketing system and the lines and the labyrinthine nature of two of the major museums in Florence, especially with Neal as our underpaid, overburdened guide to contextualize the miles of masterpiece.

The Uffizi gallery, an old government building that was slowly overtaken by a growing art collection and finally wholly transformed into a museum, houses works by Durer, Raphael, Goya, Rembrandt, Gentileschi, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Boticelli, among others, in rooms too dark and too hot and too humid for even a layperson’s artistic sensibility. But the jungle conditions and the awkward glares hardly lessened the delicate beauty of Botticelli’s mythic heroine in his wall-sized “Birth of Venus” or the viewer’s uneasy recognition of Christ, still crowned and blood-stained, rising from the tomb in Luca di Leida’s “Cristo Coronato di spine.” Or, especially for Neal, of Rembrandt’s later self-portrait, dark and obscured from behind soft eyes, chiaroscuro lighting, and the centuries of accumulated dust. For Neal the portrait showed not only the artist’s apotheosis in his craft but also the subtle accumulation and summary weight on an artist of internal and external expectation, public misunderstanding and commodification, and the ubiquity of an artist’s sense of inadequacy. “I feel a certain affinity for that essence,” he said, and so I spent a few extra seconds folded into the sunken eyes trying to catch a glimpse of that essence.

What I caught instead was a general interest in the technical evolution of art, which we witnessed as we sauntered from room to room. Neal pointed it out in Gioto's work, which displayed a growing sense and control of three-dimensional perspective in a two-dimensional environment. Gioto gets closer and closer until he finally gets it, and this evolutionary leap comes to characterize the era and the term that later came to identify it: renaissance. Not unlike his students, Mom and I began to question our in-house pedagogue on theoretical grounds; for example, I said, perhaps Italian artists simply didn’t share an aesthetic that would embrace three-dimensional realism, not unlike ancient Egyptian artists. “Whose rules of perspective,” Neal countered, “were determined by a rich and strict symbology, like Christian iconography in the West, which dictates the size and placement of figures according to mythological status instead of mathematical perspective.” I didn’t argue long. Instead, during a brief period of rest on a bench in a corridor, Mom and I gave full attention and deference to our resident art expert, who took to giving us our first lesson in line drawing: three-dimensional perspective, that monumental discovery that, now, figures into the most basic curriculum of the would-be artist.

Mom and I made decent students and unpromising artists, but ardent believers that, as Neal told us, anyone can learn to draw if given proper instruction. The next day I put what I learned to work on a sketch of an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo in the Galleria dell’ Academia, and managed to transform one of Michelangelo’s “prisoners” into a gentrified three-armed hoola dancer. The base I put him on, however, was so completely convincing thanks to Neal’s lesson on three-dimensional perspective that had I not referenced the source of the drawing in my notebook a disinterested viewer may have thought it a decent likeness.

The renaissance of painting, as Neal pointed out, was not only a rebirth of technique on a higher plane but also an evolution of expression and thought. This point and the ultimate payoff of the Uffizi’s lines, labyrinthine layout, and humidity collided just before our exit in Artemisia Gentileschi’s famous 1567 rendition of Judith beheading Holofernes. Where Boticelli’s iteration—one of the first paintings we encountered in the Uffizi—of this same biblical story rendered the scene in the traditional format with a dainty, almost boyish Judith balancing a languid foot on the bloodless head of Holofernes as if trying on shoes in front of a mirror, Gentileschi gives Judith brawny arms and determined eyes and puts her directly in the bloody act of severing that head full of curly hair from its burly, drunken body. This is five hundred year-old feminism, and the three of us couldn’t have been more pleased with the contrast.