Florence Italy – Cradle of the Renaissance and the Rebirth of Humanism – Part II – The Uffizi

My education in the history of art began when I was living in New York City in 1982.  A recent college graduate with a totally amateur interest in art, I was going to museum after museum, usually whichever museum whichever friend or family member from out of town wanted to visit when they were staying for the weekend, and I realized that, while I liked what I was looking at, I didn’t know what I was looking at and I found that disorienting.  So I went to the bookstore (this was long before Wikipedia) and picked up Janson’s tome titled, appropriately, History of Art and set to work (I didn't know, until reading the referenced article, that Janson categorically excluded women - a terrible error.  That said, it is noteworthy that I wouldn't have noticed it - with few exceptions - Artemisia Gentileschi being one featured at the Uffizi - women weren't prominent artists until relatively recently).

In this history, at least as I recall it, the first moment of import in the development of our ability to represent the human figure occurred when the Egyptians learned to introduce a tilt in the pelvic bone of their sculptures.  The Egyptian sculptures quickly went from being static and weirdly two dimensional to representing human beings as they actually are.  This transition, subtle though it was – and there was much refinement to be done – moved art from being pictographic – meaning that it represented an idea of who someone was – to being a representation of an actual person – an individual who would become more and more recognizable until the Greeks created sculptures that were, well, breathtaking depictions of who we are – and, of course, who it is that we might be in an ideal world.

So, thirty five years later, I suppose I was due for a refresher course.  The reluctant wife and I traveled with the younger reluctant stepdaughter to spend some time with the elder stepdaughter who was finishing her undergraduate career with a semester in Florence.  Done with her required courses, she was taking some well-earned and, I believe, tremendously educational electives, including in the history of art.  As an aside, when I was chair of our department, I was concerned when I met with students who had graduated High School in three years and wanted to graduate college in three years in order to – what?  These were bright students on a fast track to I’m not quite sure where – as I think we all are.  And some time spent meandering can help us realize who we want to become and why.  Whether this will lead to a direction for the reluctant stepdaughter is less important to me (as if this really matters to her) than that she is spending time rounding out a Liberal Arts Education.  More about what I mean by that shortly. 

Florence's Narrow Streets

One thing that became quickly apparent on landing, is that learning about Florence means learning about the Medici Family.  Before arriving, I knew very little about them – other than that they not only ruled Florence – a small town an hour and a half by bullet train from Rome (a very big city) but that they placed a number of family members in the papacy and they were the studies and student of Machiavelli, whose book, The Prince, read, to me as an undergraduate, like a how to manual on becoming a corporate take no prisoners – what I would now call psychopathic – leader.  A quick brush up and some guidance from signage in various museums helped me realize that this family ruled Florence – and the surrounding area – on and off – for more than four centuries.  They established a tiny town with narrow streets and multistory buildings on a backwater river surrounded by swampland as a world powerhouse of art and fashion – something that it retains to this day - but also of education and science.  And, as I remember a teacher of mine at Ohio State saying, they did this with a population roughly equivalent to the population of that school – and he bemoaned the fact that we were not accomplishing nearly as much, despite the vast majority of the citizens of our community being students or faculty members. 

The Uffizi Gallery - Florence

The Uffizi Gallery in Florence claims to be a living breathing history of art, and those who curate their collection are clear about both preserving but also presenting the history of art to those who would walk their halls.  Now it is also a history of art that has been collected by the Medici clan and much of the art was commissioned by them, given to them as part of a wedding dowry when they married a princess from France, or appropriated by them when they defeated one of the rulers nearby.  The Uffizi is housed in the former government offices – offices the Medici commuted to in an elevated tunnel almost a mile long.  The tunnel crosses the river high above the Ponte Veccio bridge, connecting the Uffizi to the Pitti Palace.  I think the Medici had it built and walked in it because it was not safe for them to walk the streets – they could be too easily assassinated.  The Pitti Palace, now also open to the public and reputed to be the grandest palace in Europe until Versailles was built, houses untold additional works of art – not to mention the portrait gallery that lines the entire walkway connecting the two.

 

Giotto's adoration
In the Uffizi Gallery

Cimabue's adoration
in the Uffizi Gallery

Our tour began with our tour guide, the reluctant stepdaughter herself, introducing us to the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance by having us compare two depictions of the Virgin Mary and Child – Cimabue’s from 1280-1290 and Giotto’s of 1310.  In that span of 20 to 30 years, Giotto, a student of Cimabue’s, learned the craft of creating an icon, which Cimabue’s work is, but radically changed it.  The angels that march up the sides of Cimabue’s Adoration are arrayed one on top of the other like cutouts put in place – but in Giotto's there is depth to the two dimensional representation – indeed, he was working as a perceptual scientist working out how perception occurs and applying those principles – just being generated – of putting people in front of each other to indicate depth but also the beginnings of using linear perspective in painting – the top figures are smaller than those at the bottom. 

But there is more going on here that that – the angels surrounding the figure are no longer looking out towards the viewer – they are looking in towards the mother and child, directing the viewers gaze in and creating a warmth to the experience of viewing – we are supporting, surrounding and adoring the child together.  The representation is not just moving towards three dimensionality in space, it is becoming lively in terms of our engagement with the subjects.  We are drawn onto the space that is beginning to be created.

But there is more going on here than that – the faces of the angels are becoming specific – and the face of the Virgin Mary has softened – she is moving from being an Icon to becoming a person – someone with specific features that we recognize as human.  And she is holding Jesus more comfortably.  Even though Giotto has come far, there is still a long way to go.  As the Reluctant Stepdaughter pointed out – the Baby Jesus still looks more like an adult than an infant.  This is hardly a Botticelli or a DaVinci – but we are headed there – just as that first tilt of the pelvis would propel sculpture towards a more realistic representation, so these tools would move us – in very, very short order – with the help of education and creating workshops and supporting the individuals who were learning the rules and sharing them with each other, despite the plague killing more than three quarters of the residents of Florence, including most of the masters of the early part of the century, to a culture that supported the growth of an entirely new way of representing the world.  

Lippi's Madonna and Child
in the Uffizi Gallery

Just 45 years and two rooms later, Filippo Lippi’s 1355 Madonna and child are in a completely different world, and we are now well on our way to being able to represent (or are we creating?) new ways of seeing not just the objective world, but each other.  Or, perhaps more accurately, of being able to represent ourselves – to describe our internal world in such a way that we can communicate it directly, through pictorial representation, to those who are viewing what we have created.

Rembrandt's Portrait of a Rabbi
in the Uffizi Gallery

As we took in the rest of the art history lesson, we wandered forward in time, by fits and starts, and ended up in one of my absolute favorite places – standing in front of a Rembrandt.  Even though there was a Medici commissioned Rembrandt self-portrait in the room, and his self-portraits are my all-time favorites, the star of the show was his portrait of a Rabbi.  Like many of his self-portraits, the Rabbi’s eyes followed you as you moved about the room – but also like the best of his self-portraits, it is not just the eyes, but the face of the Rabbi that turns with you.  And the wisdom and the pathos – the change in expression as you move, as you engage in a dialogue with the subject, is breathtaking.  This long dead man is alive in the room with you – and will be long after we are gone.  He will be interacting with people for centuries to come, letting them know just what it was that started in this little town – and others like it in the middle of Italy and, through communication and teaching, spread throughout Europe, and culminated with a master having at his disposal the tools that he needed to be able to deliver on the promise of human intimacy that Cimabue and Giotto set in motion. 

A couple of notes at this moment from the worlds of psychology and psychoanalysis.  Rorschach noticed that observing depth in the artworks that he created were indicative of the psychological ability to take some distance – to get some perspective on things.  He also noted that using Chiaroscuro to enrich what we see is related to inhibiting ourselves – it is like an emotional biting of the tongue.  Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Rorschach experimented with the two dimensional representation of human movement and with what it means when we are able to perceive these representations as movement.  He discovered – as we did in observing the paintings in the Uffizi – that when people pose in ways that evoke those poses within us – when we mirror those poses – we are in a position to empathize with their felt experience. 

The works of these artists – through the use of artistry (and I don’t doubt that they were also using tricks – I wonder if Botticelli’s odd way that the subjects in his masterpieces, which are much more impressive in person that in reproduction – are odd because he was experimenting with a camera obscura – the use of a pin hole to project into a dark room an exact picture of the model to be reproduced) – and that this artistry and the weird - and I’m certain sadistic but also terribly generative – relationships between these artists and their benefactors allowed for a realization of a kind of psychological representation – and perhaps experience – that the world had not previously known.

Michelangelo's David
in Florence, Italy

I think that figuring out how to induce an emotional response with a two dimensional picture took more development than did learning how to do that with sculpture.  Not that Michelangelo’s David, which we spent a chunk of a morning admiring, wasn’t an emotionally rewarding and awe inspiring experience that required tremendous skill and training to achieve, and it was certainly the case that the sculptural representation of Hercules fighting the centaur that was in the Uffizi paled by comparison to the representation of the same tale nearby on the Piazza (in large part because of the use of human movement), but I think that the developmental arc of two dimensional art requires more artifice – including such things as the camera obscura, but more centrally understanding how our perception of distance works. 

An odd result of this art history lesson was that as we went to various churches after having been to the Uffizi, I found myself more taken by the earlier works - the iconographic pre-renaissance paintings - than I had been before going to the museum.  I had a better sense of what they were about and what the painters were trying to portray.  I also had a better sense of the language of the images, as it were.  While I expected to and, I think, was able to better appreciate renaissance painting - and the painting that went on after it - as a result of the teaching by the Uffizi and the reluctant stepdaughter, the deeper appreciation of the earlier works was an unexpected bonus.

In the middle of going through the Uffizi, we stopped to watch three short films that an Italian artist had shot on the streets of Florence and in the Uffizi using a cell phone camera – in most cases on a tripod.  The films, together, were titled, "Grand Turismo".  The camera recorded people recording their experiences of Florence on their own cell phones.  In one movie, the people were taking pictures of the pictures in the Uffizi.  In one, they were walking around on the streets taking selfies and pictures of each other in front of landmarks and art that have stood the test of time.  In the third, a boy sat on a bench on the side of a building and looked at his two cell phones as the world passed him by.  

We live in a world that is hurtling us forward at a pace that even the great minds who graced Florence – Da Vinci, and Galileo – a tutor to the Medici’s children – would not be able to imagine.  They would appreciate the ways that we have realized their dreams and gone even further beyond them than Rembrandt’s vision surpassed Cimabue’s.  But our hurtling through life is also coming at a cost.  We are flitting from distraction to distraction in ways that don’t allow us to tap into the levels of ourselves that a liberal arts education does.  We need more than just access to facts – that Wikipedia thing again – we need to know something about the world so that we are ready to learn and integrate more of it.  We need to slow down and immerse ourselves in the world around us.  Thank goodness the reluctant stepdaughter is doing that – and that she was willing to share her learning with us.




For a post from the same trip that focuses on Rome, link here.

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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Florence Italy – Cradle of the Renaissance and the Rebirth of Humanism – Part I - Rome

Two and a half years ago, immediately after the election of Trump, I was walking my dog and commiserating with a neighbor about the state of things when she said flatly, “You know, we’re not Greece, we’re Rome.”  So I should have been prepared to discover our American roots when we traveled this week to visit my stepdaughter who is doing her final semester abroad in Florence.  But, as we crossed the Atlantic for only the second time in my life (my grandmother brought my cousin and me to Europe when she and I were twelve), I was thinking more about exchange rates and not having time to grade midterms during spring vacation than being prepared to be immersed in the history of the Roman Empire – and the Church – and the art that the latter spawned – art that opened the door, or at least marked that the door was opening, to a new broad humanism that has culminated in a vast human awakening that is ongoing and that has contributed to our being able to be aware that this progression is intimately related to inhuman levels of oppression.

Let me start in the middle of the story.  We arrived Saturday morning after a largely sleepless and significantly shortened Friday night flight.  After two days getting oriented to Florence and the Medici, who had a stranglehold on political power and the Papacy and oversaw the transition from the middle ages to the Renaissance, we traveled to Rome on Tuesday.  Flying along at 250 km/hour on tracks that were as smooth as butter, we were hurtled back into the hurly burly days of Rome, starting with the Coliseum. 

Walking through a metal detector with a crowd of people to get into the Coliseum felt not unlike entering our local baseball or football stadium on game day.  Once inside, this edifice, which I had seen on the first trip, came to life this time in a different way.  Depictions of it in its glory days helped me realize that it was closer in appearance and size to our current arenas (the name arena derives from the Latin word for sand – which was used to cover the floor of the area that the gladiators fought on - according to the younger stepdaughter - in order to soak up the blood).  The guidebook claims that the best guess about the Coliseum’s capacity was about 60,000 spectators and that it was largely covered in an awning.  Contrary to its’ current appearance, in antiquity it was symmetrical, so it looked very much from the outside like the round space ship looking stadia that were so fashionable in the US in the 1970s.  That said, it was slightly oval in shape and the fighting space was perhaps a bit smaller – so it may have felt more intimate – like a basketball arena with many more fans than fit into any of those spaces.  Oh, and one other difference, there was a prison outside in which the captive gladiators trained.

We walked up from the Coliseum to the Palatine Hill, the place where the Emperors had their palace (which, along with palazzo, palatial, etc. is derived from the word Palatine - as we speculated - might be the name of the emperor in the Star Wars series).  To do this we had to take a left turn before going to the forum.  When I was here before, we just went straight to the forum which, then as now, was disappointing – more about that in a moment.  We turned left because I wanted to see the Circus Maximus, which I had not seen before.  This huge race track seated 200,000 fans in the day – double what the largest football stadia hold – close to the numbers that see the Kentucky Derby or the Indianapolis 500.  If you saw Ben Hur as a kid, this is where that took place.  What I was unprepared for was the acreage (literally) of land we needed to cross that had been the footprint of the Augustinian palace.  Huge.  And now largely vacant earth with some brick walls poking their heads up.  In the middle of the building was a large space for exercising horses, as well as many enclosed atria with gardens.

A sign caught my eye.  It stated that the Augustinian palace was purposely small (the acres I was treading across) to avoid the appearance of ostentation compared to the palaces of others at the time.  But after the fire, Nero tore down tons of fire damaged tenements below the Palatine to expand the size of the palace to suit his vision of the empire (he also erected a 210 foot statue of himself).  Sated by the mere size of the Augustinian palace, we proceeded to the Forum.  There’s not much left standing here, and what is standing is not of much interest because the things that mattered here – the stuff that took place within the Senate – like Caesar stating “Et tu, Brute” – had been replaced when the rulers transitioned from a representative form of government – with Senators – to one with a supreme and unquestioned leader – the emperor.  (Comparisons with our own recent history of Senators (and Congressmen) failing to check our leader were hard for me to avoid making).

From the Forum, we walked up the hill, taking in one of my favorite spots from last trip, the Pantheon.  We learned that this is the only ancient building in Rome that has remained intact from inception in part because it was converted to a church and the Popes funneled money into maintaining it through the middle ages.  I also appreciated that they did this for another reason – since it is a church, there was no admission charged to go inside and marvel at the architecture.  Hadrian built the church and, according to the signage, not only was it an engineering marvel in its day, but that with our current tools, it would still be a difficult building to erect.  I have always appreciated that the dome, if turned upside down, would just fit into the bottom space, making the room both circular but also oddly spherical.  This, then, becomes a place to worship all the gods, each of whom has their niche in a democratic space – though presumably Saturn had the place of honor opposite the entry where the altar now sits, with various statues of saints and portraits of the Christ story occupying the niches.

Walking further up the hill, we sprinted through the Vatican museum to immerse ourselves in the Sistine Chapel (the link is to the Vatican Museum's website - not only were we not allowed to take pictures, a snap shot could, in no way, do it justice).  When last I saw Michelangelo’s masterpiece, it was dark and had an almost sinister feel to it.  After the relatively recent cleaning, the colors are bright and the palette is more that of Easter eggs than Lent.  Pastels dominate – but there is still plenty of sinister feeling to the work as a whole.  We listened to three audio descriptions of the frescoes.  The first clarified that the frescoes done before Michelangelo that line the walls are intended to connect the story of Christ’s life with that of Moses – essentially clarifying that Jesus was the second great prophet of the Jews.  There are six panels on the left of the altar and six to the right – and each panel on the left, telling a story of Moses, has a corresponding story on the right – with a story of Jesus – including Jesus handing the keys of the kingdom to Peter – the first Pope – who then hands those keys down through the successive Popes to the current one.

It was here that my art history and history appreciation began to sprout.  Art was intended, it dawned on me, to tell a story – one that “worked” not just for the priest and noble class – the class that could read and write - who ordered the artists to create it for themselves, but also for the rest of humanity – the illiterate class that did the muscle work.  They needed a pictographic representation of the stories that were binding them to the religion.  Even here, where the commoner would not, until current times, be allowed, the pictures supported the stories that the priests were telling.  The common man, though, who worshiped and worked for and with the priestly and noble classes also built the palaces and the stadia and the churches – as well as the homes and aqueducts and roads – and fought for the rulers to build the nations that would sustain them all. 

The artists – like the priests – though drawn at first from the higher class – advanced based on their skills – they were a meritocracy – and the brightest lights – Michelangelo and Da Vinci – ended up at the top of the heap.  And there they did the work of the priestly class, who at this point were also the noble class in part because they had the economic resources to hire them - and this work was educational.  On one level they were telling religious stories in pictures - the language people spoke.  On another level, the were indoctrinating the masses into a narrative that interwove reverence with service to God, and therefore to church.  Christ, then, became a symbol of the church – and the order that men created to promulgate Christianity, but also to pass on the spiritual power.  The narrative woven into the walls became a significant component of the force by which this was accomplished.

The next two narratives (to pick up my own narrative before it gets completely dropped) were about Michelangelo’s ceiling, which was painted when Michelangelo was in his early thirties, and then a separate description of the Last Judgement, the fresco that dominates the wall behind the altar, that the artist painted when he was in his sixties.  Michelangelo’s masterpieces – and there is no other word for them – tell two very different stories – the ceiling tells old testament stories – and the last judgement tells a story that unites the old and new testaments.  The ceiling speaks to the stories it is supported by – but tells a very different version of what it means to be human than the stories below.

The stories on the wall, though painted in renaissance style, are stories of the middle ages – intended to tell people how to live as subjects of a world that is ruled by others.   The ceiling above is a true renaissance tale – one that speaks about how to live as a subject – as a person who is privy to a creation that is divine – the creation of the world that we live in – but also the creation of ourselves – and the importance of celebrating that life that we live.  Perhaps the central narrative of the ceiling is the creation story.  God, in what some believe to be a self-portrait by the artist, creates the heavens and the earth, then separates the light from the dark and, in the iconic moment, creates man – reaching out across the void to bring the divine to life in a human form.  Michelangelo also depicts the creation of woman from man, but then the fall – with original sin leading to the expulsion and to continued difficulties, including the covenant with Noah, but also Noah's failure to maintain himself as a godly and upright person. 

The commentators point out that Michelangelo has human observers (ignudi) throughout the ceiling noticing the failings of humanity and their varied reactions consistently portray (at least according the commentator I was listening to) disappointment with the human condition.  Meanwhile, the countenances of the featured prophets and Sybils are more measured – they appear to be able to take the long view.

While the ceiling also contains a pictorial representation of the family history of Christ, giving him the required pedigree to assume the mantel of the King of the Jews, and thus is connected with the intent of the paintings on the side walls – the tension here is not between rulers who need subjects who will follow them and the need to educate those subjects (and, from a psychodynamic perspective, convince themselves that they are the rightful rulers – and therefore suppressors – of others) – the tension is between the glorious beings that are being depicted – this truly is a celebration of the human form in all its variety of expression – and the failings of these potentially divine beings.

The last Judgement, then, suggests a sort of resolution to the tension – but it is not a stable one.  Instead it is a swirl of motion as Jesus – who now, finally, enters Michelangelo’s piece, is transformed – on judgement day – from the loving, caring, available person who was martyred and destroyed into the idealized human form that is capable of judging good from bad – who uses the counsel of the saints who surround him to cast, via the oar of Charon, the boat’s captain, sinners into a massive and undifferentiated pit in hell and to raise those who have lived good lives to live with him.  This intensively spinning piece revolves around the resplendent and glowing Jesus -  a representation of a man who is functioning in a fully human and divine way simultaneously.  

Perhaps most importantly, the artist in both the early but especially the late version of the work is not taking orders from the rulers – he is asserting himself as an interpreter of the Bible – but even more directly – as an interpreter of creation itself.  He is functioning as a theologian – one who is independent.  I think that, at just the moment when Luther is suggesting that humans don’t need priestly or papal intercession to commune with God, Michelangelo is articulating that in the most sacred space at the heart of the church – the very chapel where the popes are chosen.  And he is suggesting that it is not just Peter – but also he – Michelangelo – and, perhaps by extension – every other human – that is capable of a sort of divinity – or at the very least, reaching out to connect with the divine and to interpret it in a way that is uniquely his or her own.

I found it interesting that, when a critic published a list of all the ways that the Last Judgement was inconsistent with the theology of the day and was further upset about the extent of nudity depicted, Michelangelo, who was still not finished with the work, depicted the critic as being cast into hell and covered his naked body with a snake entwined about it.  When the critic complained to the Pope about this, the Pope is reported to have responded that, because the depiction was in the part of the fresco that depicts hell, the Pope had no jurisdiction over that area and the depiction would stand.

I found it interesting that the description of the Last Judgement made only passing reference to the possibility that the second self-portrait in the two works might be the one attached to a skin that is hanging from the hand of a figure immediately below the Christ figure.  The figure holding the skin is St. Bartholomew, who was flayed alive.  This may have to do with Michelangelo feeling martyred by having to spend four years in the prime of his life working on a fresco at the behest of the pope when he would have preferred to have been using his powers to sculpt – something that he felt he was better at.

We left the Sistine Chapel and went to St. Peter’s.  As we were entering, I overheard a group from the States saying, “What is it that we are seeing here?”  The professor in me kicked into gear and I explained that this was the church that was built above the place where Peter, the first Pope, was buried.  It also was the Pope’s church (I have since learned this isn’t quite accurate, but it is the church where the Pope is crowned and it is the lead Papal church or Basilica).  I explained that most of the Popes – an unbroken line from Peter – were buried there.  Soon after this, I heard a docent explain to his audience that the Basilica, which covers a number of acres and is the largest church in the world, can hold 60,000 people.  Saint Peter’s square, in front of the church, can hold 300,000 people.  In the square, there is an obelisk that was in the area where Peter was martyred by Nero.  When Peter was crucified, he chose to be crucified upside down so that this crucifixion would not be like that of Jesus.  I was struck by how similar the numbers who could fit into the spiritual spaces were to the numbers that could be held in the Coliseum and the Circus Maximus respectively.  When the guide book noted that Constantinople, in his role as first Christian Emperor, began a process of transitioning political power in Rome into spiritual power, there was a sense of continuity in space as well as the political sphere.

The irony, in my mind, in this transition, is that the political power and muscle that had oppressed Jesus and his fellow Jews would be harnessed to proselytize him as the Christ.  When watching a documentary recently about the theologian behind the Civil Rights movement being brought up short by a trip to India where the locals confronted him about being a man of color who was proselytizing for a religion that had oppressed people of color all over the globe, he responded by working to articulate the differences between the historical Jesus and the Christ figure who had been used as a vehicle for suppression.  Consistent with this, there is perhaps no greater depiction of Jesus the man than the shrunken and very human body being held by his mother after his crucifixion - Michelangelo's Pieta that is tucked inside the front door of the Basilica.  Mother and son are seemingly carved, as the reluctant wife so eloquently put it, from milk.  I think that the current Pope, a Jesuit, is working to help the church reconnect with the historical Jesus.  He has a lot of work to do and that work will not, in the words of the Romero prayer, be completed in his lifetime, but it is important work if we are to realize the vision of Jesus, Michelangelo (as I am naively interpreting it), and many other enlightened people – including, I think, Freud.  This is a vision that includes the dignity and worth of each individual's subjective experience of this grand creation- one that is even more spectacular than the marvels of a place like Rome can possibly represent.

As a mundane example of what I am talking about, I was struck, while walking through the Uffizi today, back in Florence, by the number of people who stopped to look out the windows– to take in the vistas – whether the jumble of nearby rooftops – the grand vision of the nearby Duomo – the views of the Arno River – or the vistas of the distant hills – and that each of these images competed with and frequently surpassed the masterful canvases and sculptures for visual interest.  Arguably some of the greatest creations of man approach the liveliness of experiencing life as it exists in front of our eyes – if we only have the ability to see it.    

More on Florence and the complications of mixing political and spiritual power here.    

To access a narrative description of other posts on this site, link here.  For a subject based index, link here. 

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