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.

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