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Published: April 12th 2010
Florence is Fun, Part 2, by May Tomorrow is our last day in Florence. The last ten days or so we’ve had company. That has made Florence even more fun than before. Our first company in 7 ½ months; that’s about 230 days without talking to anyone but ourselves. It was nice to have different dinner conversations, nicer than anyone can probably imagine.
Joy and Mark (our niece and brother in law) and Peyton (Mark’s niece who is practically like our niece too) came all the way from Asheville to visit us during Spring Break. Joy is Ella’s age and Peyton is Jordan’s age. It was such a gift to have them here. We had a lot of fun.
Just sitting around in the morning over our cups of tea, coffee, egg sandwiches and cereal was fun. We weren’t in a hurry many mornings so just to relax and chat and wake up together was sweet.
Every day we did something fun. We took several walks up a hill and around a circuit that led outside of town. The walk had views back over the Cathedral dome and then turned down a little country lane with walls
on both sides. On the other side of the walls were birds and olive trees and you could feel the freshness. The flowers started blooming while our guests were here and it really warmed up, so by the end of their week, we were in shorts and short sleeves. Spring hit Florence.
We also saw early Renaissance masterpieces around Florence. Mark, who knows the Bible well, was a great addition to our art studies. Paul knew the “why this is interesting art” stories and Mark knew the Bible stories that the interesting art was illustrating. They were a great team.
We also took a couple of day trips. Everyone but Jordan and May went to Venice for a day. Mark had studied in Venice for a semester in college and was a great tour guide. They wandered around and enjoyed the different-ness of the waterways and bridges. Jordan and I used that day to visit a nearby town, Fiesole, up the hill from Florence. We took a hike through the woods and thoroughly enjoyed the forest.
We also all visited San Gimignano, a small Tuscan hill town. We enjoyed wandering the cobbled streets, eating three scoops of
San Gimignano
San Gimignano is a classic medieval Tuscan hill town. It's small, but gorgeous. It still has tower houses from the Middle Ages.“the World’s Best Ice Cream” (wouldn’t that be a fun contest to judge?) and taking a walk around the ancient town walls, past olive tress with views over beautiful countryside. The nice weather made these day trips especially enjoyable.
Finally, we had fun eating dinner together. Our dinner conversation was often silly and the food always delicious. It’s hard to go wrong with good company, fresh pasta, good salad and Chianti wine.
Joy, Mark and Peyton left this morning and it rained hard as we walked them to the train station. Florence was crying and we felt like crying too. It will be nice to be home and see our friends and family again.
Day after tomorrow we head to Paris. It’s hard to be too sad about leaving when Paris is your next destination, but I am a little sad. Florence has been more fun than I expected.
I knew Paul liked the early Renaissance art, but I actually liked it too. After seeing the Byzantine art in Istanbul, I could really see how radically different these Early Renaissance Art Dudes were. I especially liked Masaccio’s frescoes (see Paul’s comments below) and felt almost sad
that he died so young (he was supposedly poisoned by a jealous rival).
I also liked the architecture of the Cathedral’s dome. I liked that the church was built with no dome (because the technology to build it hadn’t been invented yet) and that the people of Florence trusted that someone would figure out how to do it. I had fun climbing the dome and seeing the zig zag brickwork and walking between the two layers of the dome that Brunelleschi invented.
Finally I enjoyed the smallness and pedestrian-ness of Florence. Walking was always a pleasure and after being in such mega cities with crazy traffic, I really appreciate a walk-able place.
Florence was a great tourist destination and I can see myself visiting again someday.
Fun with Early Renaissance Art, by Paul I have a bit of an obsession with Early Renaissance Art. That’s mostly why I wanted to come to Florence: To see the first baby steps in sculpture and painting that led to the Renaissance.
I think painting is important - not in a high-brow, art-appreciation sort of way, but in a fundamentally human, we’re-all-alive-together sort of way.
Pretty art is pretty. First, pretty art is just pretty. That’s fairly obvious. But sometimes pretty art is so pretty that it takes your breath away. Or so raw with emotion and realness that you shiver. Or so serene and peaceful that you feel a bit swoony and dizzy, like you’re going to wobble over. There’s something to great art, when it does that to us. It matters.
Visual representation is important. Second, there’s something important about the way we represent things and tell stories visually. Now we have photographs, movies, videos, travelblogs, and YouTube. Now we continuously represent our own lives visually, and we post our representations up on the web almost immediately for the whole world to see.
The first attempts at Renaissance Art happened between 1250 and 1350. At the time, there were no photos, movies, videos, blogs, or YouTube. There weren’t books - only a few handwritten books, the printing press was 100 years away. When the seeds of the Renaissance were planted, there were no bestsellers, comic books, or manga.
The Early Renaissance Art Dudes invented a new way to represent our lives and tell stories visually. The sculptors looked back to sculptures from
Greek and Roman times; ancient sculptures were “re-born,” which is what “re-naissance” means in French. The painters, though, took what the sculptors were doing and invented something totally new.
Maybe this is a stretch, but it feels right to me that the new ways that The Early Renaissance Art Dudes began to tell our stories has had a profound influence (both directly and indirectly) on the ways that we have since told our stories through paintings, photos, movies, videos, blogs, YouTube, books, comics, and manga.
Renaissance painting “won.” Another odd point that I could probably never verify: The way that The Early Renaissance Art Dudes began to paint around 1300 eventually “won” throughout the world, and became the standard way of representing our lives visually.
In 1250, there were three well-established, culturally rich ways of representing our lives visually: Byzantine painting and mosaics (based in Byzantium or Istanbul and spread throughout most of Christian Europe), Islamic miniatures (based in Persia, then later Istanbul and Delhi, and spread throughout most of the Muslim world), and Chinese painting (based in China and spread throughout the Chinese world).
Then between 1250 and 1550 the Renaissance began in Florence and
Siena and Pisa, and a new form of painting was created. In Europe this new form of painting spread, developed, and went through many iterations.
By the period between 1700 and 1900, there were painting academies in most large cities throughout the world, where students were taught to paint in the European way, and local museums began to fill up with local painters using the tools and techniques of European painting.
This Renaissance way of painting, this new way of representing our lives visually, was basically developed and invented in Florence. Well, Florence, Pisa, and Siena. Three small towns in Tuscany, each an hour apart.
Before the Early Renaissance: Byzantine Art. Byzantine Art comes from Byzantium or Constantinople, now called Istanbul. In 1250, when the Renaissance began, Byzantine Art was the default form of art in Italy and throughout Europe. Byzantine painting is characterized by gold backgrounds and a lifelessness, stiffness, un-realness, and etherealness to the figures. Most of the paintings look the same; it was the norm and the expectation to basically paint the same painting over and over again. It is beautiful painting. I have included in the blog (see page 2 of the pictures)
a few pictures of Italian paintings that are Byzantine, so you can see what the status quo was when The Early Renaissance Art Dudes began their innovations.
The Early Renaissance Art Dudes: Painters Follow Sculptors. As a general rule, sculptors first figured things out in early Renaissance art, and the painters tried to figure out how to paint what the sculptors were sculpting.
In 1260, for instance, a sculptor named Nicola Pisano (Nick from Pisa) carved a pulpit in the Baptistery in Pisa. There had been some Roman sarcophagi (coffins, basically) laying around near the Cathedral, and they were carved wonderously with alive-seeming, active, emotional scenes of Roman life, hunting, war, and religion. Pisano must have thought, “Hmm, wonder if I could re-create that energy on this pulpit, but make it a Christian energy?” He did just that, carving scenes of Jesus’ life and death, with figures that were pulsing with life and emotion and action.
Pisano told Jesus’ story through his sculpture panels on the side of the pulpit in Pisa, and he told it well. Renaissance Art was born. It would be fifty years or so before somebody figured out how to paint with the
energy and real-lifeness that Pisano was sculpting.
A few years after the Pisa pulpit, Pisano created a second pulpit for Siena’s Cathedral. You can see a picture of one of the panels here (see page 2 of the pictures), and get a sense of the energy of these earliest Renaissance sculptures - especially compared to the stiffness of the Byzantine paintings.
Early Renaissance Art Dude #1: Giotto the Blotto. Giotto was a painter from Florence, and the first great Renaissance Art Dude. He painted between 1300 and 1325 or so. His masterpieces include chapels where he painted on the walls (frescoes) in Florence, Padua, and Assisi. We call him Giotto the Blotto, because that was just what we decided to call him in our Early Renaissance Art Dude Tour.
Giotto was the first painter to try to paint bodies that looked heavy and full like bodies, and to paint backgrounds that looked like backgrounds (with both real-ish landscapes and buildings that made baby steps towards perspective). He was the first painter to try to capture the emotion of an traumatic event like the death of St. Francis of Assisi. In some ways, Giotto was trying to capture
in paint, on a church wall, what Nicola Pisano had captured in stone, on the side of a church pulpit.
Immediately Giotto was recognized as the greatest painter of his day. Dante names Giotto as the greatest painter in his Divine Comedy, written around 1320.
I went to see Giotto’s chapels in Assisi, but the church requested that tourist not take photos. We also went to see Giotto’s chapels in a church in Florence, but they were being renovated. So I don’t have any pictures of Giotto’s paintings.
There are, however, several pictures (see page 2) of paintings that were done by followers of Giotto, and they give a feel for Giotto’s innovations (especially when you compare them to the Byzantine paintings). After Giotto, painting was changed, and there were many painters in Florence and Siena who learned from what he was doing and used his innovations to create new visions of their own.
Early Renaissance Art Dude #2: Masaccio the Galaccio. The second giant of Early Renaissance Art was Masaccio, another guy from Florence. Masaccio only lived to be 27, and he only painted only two masterpieces (part of a chapel in one church in
Florence and a fresco in a second church), but his impact on later painting was huge. We call him Masaccio the Galaccio because we like nonsense, and because we needed some sort of stupid mnemonic device to remember his name.
Masaccio painted around 1425, around 100 years after Giotto. Giotto’s style had been the main style from 1300 to 1350 or so, but then a more colorful, golden, aristocratic, precious, Gothic sort of style had become more popular.
Masaccio, echoing Giotto from 100 years before, brought emotion, alive-ness, solidness, and human-ness back to painting. He was also the first painter to paint perfect perspective (depth-in-painting: or, as Ella put it, “when a tunnel looks like a tunnel”). He also was a master at telling stories in paintings, almost like a comic book, or the shots or frames of a movie. Telling stories well was a major goal of Early Renaissance painting.
Masaccio, like Giotto, learned from sculptors, especially his friend Donatello. Donatello, also a Florentine, was the first sculptor since Roman times to create life-sized, real-looking statues. He started doing this around 1415, ten years before Masaccio tried to bring the realness and solidity of Donatello’s statues
into painting. Donatello also figured out how to sculpt perspective in a flat relief panel a year or two before Masaccio figured it out in painting.
Both Donatello and Masaccio learned from their mutual friend Brunelleschi, an architect who designed the Florence Cathedral’s dome and solved the math problem that allowed painters and sculptors to create art with perfect perspective.
Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi: There was a whirlwind of artistic creativity in Florence between 1400 and 1425 or so.
On page 2 of the blog, I have included pictures of Masaccio’s frescoes, Donatello’s statues, and Brunelleschi’s dome. I’ve also included one of the colorful Gothic-like paintings that were popular at the time that Masaccio steered painting back to Giotto’s earlier innovations, so you can see how radical Masaccio’s work must have seemed.
Michelangelo - a later, famous, famously big-headed art dude - claimed that there were two (and only two) great artists before him: Giotto and Masaccio.
Two Final Early Renaissance Art Dudes: The Painting Monk and The Other Painting Monk Who Was a Great Painter But Not Such a Great Monk. Most people think of the Renaissance starting in 1400. For the stuff I’m interested
in, the innovation started in 1260 and was largely over by 1425 - between Nicola Pisano and Masaccio.
There were two painters just after Masaccio that I like a lot: Fra Angelico (The Painting Monk) and Filippo Lippi (The Other Painting Monk Who Was a Great Painter But Not Such a Great Monk).
Fra Angelico was head monk at a monastery in Florence. Around 1440 or so, he painted scenes from Jesus’s life on the walls of the cells that the monks lived in. Fra Angelico’s paintings are probably my favorites. He combined the solidity and realness of Masaccio with the color and detail of Gothic painting, and added in a serenity and peacefulness all his own. The combination makes me feel swoony and dizzyish. He was the most important painter in the period just after Masaccio’s early death.
Filippo Lippi was another monk who painted. He liked pretty girls, he liked to paint pretty girls, and he was good at liking and painting pretty girls. When he was 50, he fell in love with a beautiful young nun. They got permission from the Pope to get married, even though he was a monk. They had a
child named Filippino Lippi, who grew up to be a masterpiece-painter in his own right. Among many other masterpieces, Filippino painted the Fresco of The Farting Dragon. But that is another story, for another time.
Filippo Lippi was also the teacher of Sandro Botticelli. Botticelli painted the well-known and achingly beautiful “Birth of Venus” and “Primavera,” which are on coasters and posters throughout the world.
Unfortunately, we don’t have pictures of Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, or Botticelli. The museums asked that tourists not take pictures, and we heeded that. Instead there are pictures of paintings by two of their contemporaries: Ghirlandaio and Benozzo Gozzoli. They give a sense of what painting was like in the period after Masaccio but before Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
The Famous Renaissance Art Dudes. When we move from Filippo Lippi to Boticelli, we move from the Early Renaissance Art Dudes to the Famous Renaissance Art Dudes: Boticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, all of whom were from Florence and based in Florence. These guys are the poster and coaster club, whose paintings you see on posters, bags, T-shirts, coasters, and little cutesy objects all over the world.
Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and
Titian (from Venice) perfected Renaissance painting. They are the masters. But they never would have been able to do what they did without the earlier work of Nicola Pisano, Giotto, many painters from Siena around the time of Giotto, Masaccio, Donatello, Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, and Filippo Lippi, and many others.
And it all basically happened in Florence (or Siena or Pisa). All of it.
In the Louvre, in Paris, the museum labels the Italian painting before Leonardo as “Primitive” Italian painting.
I suppose I see their point. Giotto and Masaccio aren’t as “good” as Leonardo. But to me, the radical breaks with the past came with in the early stages of the Renaissance, not with the famous guys. I like that.
I also like how the early paintings are primarily concerned with the power, passion, real-ness, drama, and life-full-ness of the storytelling that they are trying to do through painting. Or the serenity and loveliness that Fra Angelico is trying to convey. I don’t often see either of these in later, more famous, more technically adept paintings.
So, anyway, that’s why I like this stuff. Big Fun with Early Renaissance Art. Woo-hoo!
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Jeanine
non-member comment
Hello Castelloes! Great write up and pictures. Can't wait to see the weary travelers tonight, and it was wonderful to get a preview of their time with ya'll. I would love to be able to download some of the pictures to my computer. Any easy way you know of that I could do that? I'm sure I'll also get some from Mark. Thanks again for being such welcoming hosts. Happy trails as you adventure on! love, Jeanine