Summer in Florence

Kevin Henry (Art & Design) writes on the 4th July:

We have finished the first week of classes and everyone seems to be finding their groove in Florence (often accompanied by a very tattered map). The sense of accomplishment is two fold: a medieval city to successfuly navigate AND a new set of issues to learn within the classroom. I am serving as the blogmaster (for lack of better term) and will be submitting thoughts, images (presumably some video or at least links to youtube), and any thing else people wish to share.

It is the fourth of July today and hot and very busy- no fireworks (or at least none that I have heard). San Giovanni's feast day occurred last Tuesday the 24th of June so that is about as close as any expatriate is going to get to a real night of fireworks- however I could be surprised. Stay tune for materials, postings, and video from the students of Columbia College Chicago's programs in Art & Design, Arts Management, and Fiction Writing.

Virginia Heaven (Art & Design) writes on the 4th of July:

I went to La Specola yesterday to look at the wax effigies of human anatomy; and they are AMAZING!!! Really beautiful and not at all gruesome looking--there are a couple of hundred pieces in glass cases, I was only able to do a small drawing before it closed so I am going back Saturday for an all day drawing session. The rest of the museum--its a natural history collection--is a bit hokey and very nineteenth century in layout, almost like a museum of a museum. The stuffed animals are a bit moth-eaten and shabby they look like they were stuffed by amateur taxidermists; they are lumpy with bulging eyes and sad looking.

I was struck very strongly that there is something so entitled and colonial about the fact that all those mammals, birds and reptiles were killed in the prime of their lives for people to study; I realized I've been feeling more and more disconcerted about zoological specimens over the last years and even though I realize they had value in the era before photography I feel upset about the waste even in the clean, crisp and tidy Field Museum in Chicago.

In fact I was much more upset by the cases and cases of dead creatures than the anatomical sculptures which are so disconnected from anything we recognize as human beings that they are abstracted. They were used by medical students to study the human body and to avoid dissections and the desecration of human remains.

Every day is so different; I had some Jewish kosher food yesterday, kind of Israeli and very like Lebanese food--it made a nice change from pasta! the restaurant was next to a huge and beautiful Synagogue with a metal roof of pale verdigris green. Almost all the architecture here is lavish, grand in scale and right to the edge of the sidewalk which is a maximum of about 30 inches and sometimes only about 18 inches wide--the private spaces are inside the buildings. You occasionally get glimpses of gardens filled with flowering shrubs and trees through huge wooden doorways which have been opened temporarily soon to be closed again to contain the secret gardens.

The buildings, in combination with streets that sometimes smell like urinals and a lot of dog shit on the ground (very tiny pooh, dehydrated and scattered like rabbit feces) make it seem that curiously the city is still in the Renaissance; there is a visceral quality to it. The grand and the mundane in tandem; then a Vespa races by and a tiny truck filled with sacks followed by an oversized Mercedes driven down a Mediaeval alley, and whoosh! you are back in the present.

Olfactory Florence is riveting; there are stories which are immediately apparent through the nose before the eyes can get a glimpse. Fruit and vegetable markets smell fresh and have gorgeous ripe produce colorful and ready to eat. I ate fresh wild strawberries that smelled and tasted like perfume, sort of musky and unspoiled by genetic engineering. I went to an apothecary shop first established by the monks of Santa Maria Novella and the beautiful smells wafted down the streets; a combination of honey, rosewater and sandalwood. The interior was High Victorian a series of wood paneled rooms with glass cases, a huge space--it was like travelling back in time. In contrast there are also lots of street stalls with bags and jackets which are pungent with the smell of badly cured leather. The intense heat and humidity amplifies everything that has an odor.

The fashion is very interesting. The luxury stores have the most beautiful clothes, but most of the people on the streets are tourists with badly fitting cheap clothes, baggy and crumpled. We look like the peasant figures from Renaissance paintings; scruffy and out of step with fashion, sacrificing style for comfort. In contrast I went to the Farragamo museum to see Ferragamo's creations from the 30s-1960. The shoes are so incredible, so beautifully designed like pieces of sculpture made in the finest materials by a highly skilled and sensitive artist. The lasts for Katherine Hepburn, Ava Gardener, Audrey Hepburn and the Duchess of Windsor shoes were displayed in a cases with various other celebrities and there were period photographs on the wall of Ferragamo fitting various famous people.

It is common place to see women using fans to keep cool; luscious lace, silk, paper and painted fans flapping back and forth. The tourists rush and sweat or dawdle and complain taking up all the sidewalk or stand in front of the great paintings with sounds sticks to their ears facing in the opposite direction. Thoughtless, loud and often rude the tourists seem like herds of large and stupid cattle trooping around taking up space, light and air with no real understanding of where they are and the magnificence of what they are looking at. By contrast the Italians move purposely but are reasonable paced, they don't sweat and make a fuss. Florence is a combination of sublime, smelly, spectacular and sloppy, very human and really quite amazing. I think Chicago will feel oddly sanitized and pedestrian when I return...

I got stopped by tourists today and asked for directions. “I am not from here but I can help you. Where are you going”?
“To la stazione,” one of the four fair-skinned women said with a British accent.
“Do you have a map?” I asked.
They smiled while keeping their distance. Then I realized they were not as close as Italians get to you.
Everything is so close together in Florence—the city of flowers—where you hardly see flowers or trees, at least in the historical center, mostly covered by stone, cement, marble and metal. People walk with determination but not as if they were in a hurry to get anywhere. I see an array of expressions on the faces of the locals; there are not just smiles. I can observe contemplation, parsimony, peace and a touch of boredom, probably because of the daily routine.
Bodies, faces, cars, bicycles, armpit odor, breaths are in constant contact with you. A smell of urine at the corner of Piazza della Anunziata crosses my path. It doesn’t particularly bother me but it is definitely different from the space notion we have in the American Midwest. However, a person needs to be much more aware of the surroundings. Sometimes I think we need a second set of eyes on the back of our heads. Everything from a car, a bike, a scooter, a pedestrian or even a “little Gypsy thief” —as the carabinieri (police) said— can come out of nowhere.
Streets are narrow and sidewalks even narrower. I think about a Hummer trying to get through one of these streets at the same time thousands of tourists roam around the city in search of Michelangelo, Raffaelo, Bruneleschi and Boticelli while carrying their cameras and water bottles.
—Elio Leturia

Kevin Henry (Art & Design) writes:

I took this photo while making my daily trip in to teach at LdM. I often see rowers on the Arno and it is in stark contrast to the frenetic buzz of Vespas over the Ponte Alla Carraia (two bridges west of the Ponte Vecchio). This particular day the boat looked bound for heaven with a Cimabue sky reflected in the otherwise 'murky' waters of the river. I especially like the way in which the oars created these perfect rings as the rower moved through the river.

I have been prompting my students to take notice of the everyday world around them which is at times hard to see with all of the art in the way. Florence is a mystery mired as it is in the past and overrun by the 'pilgrims' who come to see it in the present and try to imagine what it must have been like when Brunelleschi was inventing perspective and Michelangelo Buonarroti was carving what would become not only great sculpture but also symbols of civic pride.

It is hard to see the present Florence beyond the designer stores, the congested air, and the omnipresent water bottle that will not last more than a few hours if that. This city was about innovation and creativity and I assume there is still a lot of that going on under the skin if one could only find it. In the meantime I comfort myself with the rowers working skipping the surface of the Arno like some strange underworld.

July 10th 2008

Rachel Corsini, Fiction Writing Major

A Step Back In Time

The one thing I hate about Florence would have to be the mosquitoes. My legs are chewed up as though they were a scrumptious piece of filet mignon, now that my only complaint is out of the way, onto the Pitti Palace.

Walking up to the palace, as soon as I set foot on the massive cobblestone drive it was like I stepped back in time. Once inside we went to the Boboli Gardens. I couldnʼt help staring slackjawed at the majesty of them. They seemed to stretch into the distance for miles and never end. it was a medieval green wonderland sprinkled with marble statues. The mini coliseum at the front had its own rows of seats with statues in oval alcoves. The Medici tortoises were found in random places as was their crest.

We wandered the gardens until we found this tree lined path which seemed to lead to nowhere. Every moment of the gardens felt like I was melting out of the present and each step against the gravel paths felt like I was stepping my way into the past. As we wandered we stumbled upon a place where neither of us was supposed to be. We came upon a crumbling bridge, stones collapsed in the pit underneath.

Inside the Pitti Palace each room had brightly painted frescos depicting biblical or mythological scenes. All of them were elaborate and bright, the gold literally shimmering. Nothing that I can possibly write about it can do it justice; there are no words to get its extravagant wonder down on the page. The power and wealth of Cosmo and Eleanora De Medici is incomprehensible. If I could spend the rest of my life at the Pitti Palace I probably would, the lavish furnishings and clothing must be included. I was literally picturing Florentine maidens in richly colored gowns walking arm in arm with the husbands or escorts up the steep hilled paths of the Boboli Gardens.

Today I went to Santa Croce for class, all of the churches and cathedrals in Florence and beyond have spectacular frescoes and medieval art with gold inlaid into the paintings, but what made this church stand out were the tombs in the floor. I had yet to see that at any other place of worship Iʼd been to.

As Iʼm walking around inside Santa Croce I decide to stop and admire one of the monuments, so I look down at the insignia. Low and behold the guy's a Corsini! My dad had told me once about one of our ancestors being friends with a Medici, but I wasnʼt too sure about the story, now I donʼt know. If it is true this has to be the guy! He had to be extremely important to be buried inside Santa Croce. I knew about a street called Corsini, but then again my name also means little path. I really didnʼt know about this person buried inside the church. I might have to look more into it since it involves my family.

I had to photograph this bit of graffiti in the toilet of the Uffizi gallery even though the light was not great. I have spent a good deal of time in my class (The Art of The Visual Journal) talking about drawing and in particular perspective in part because Florence is the birthplace of perspective and also because I have been working every day while in Florence on a book devoted to drawing, perspective and design visualization. It was outside the Baptistry (adjacent to the Duomo) that Brunellschi validated his hunch with regards to perspective by drilling a hole in the back of a painting of the building and holding a mirror behind the painting to reflect the actual building back to see if his perspective in the painting fit exactly with the actual reality of the building. It did of course and years later Alberti codified that validation in his book Della Pitura (On Painting).

The 'real' David as exhibited at the Galleria dell'Accademia is now accompanied by a computer model (simulation) which allows the computer version of David to rotate as it is projected on a small screen......all of which is made possible by perspective and the science of optics (not to mention computer code- another entry for later). So it was hard not to cringe looking at this display when the work itself was ten feet away and far more majestic. You have to draw the line somewhere and I would say draw it there- let the work speak for itself instead of interpreting it through the computer software that relies so heavily on the codification of perspective. Though linear perspective is now really old (over 500 years) and we have replaced it with virtual tools, the real thing is often far more compelling than anything technology could provide at this particular moment.