Judith

As a child, of course I knew that my first name was biblical, and that it’s usually said to mean “Praise”.  There were quite a lot of other Judiths  at school, but it’s one of those names that have gone completely out of fashion, like other names that were popular then.  There were loads of Barbaras, Susans, Judiths and Margarets, but no baby is ever given these names nowadays.

Anyway, I only found out about Judith’s story as a teenager. She’s in the apocrypha; she was a widow who used her feminine wiles to seduce an Assyrian general, Holofernes, whose army was besieging Judith’s city, Betula. She got him dead drunk and cut his head off, then took the head back to the city, where it was displayed on the walls. This caused the Assyrians to lift the siege. According to the Apocrypha, she never lost her virtue to Holofernes although she was in the Assyrian camp for two or three days. Hmmm.

I had a spell of rather seeing her as a feminist icon, but then it dawned on me that using one’s sexuality to murder someone is hardly what we should be aiming to encourage.

We saw quite a number of representations of Judith in Florence. It’s a very popular subject for renaissance, and later period, artists.  I don’t quite know why, except that it often seems to have given artists an excuse to show rather scantily dressed females, disguised as a biblical subject. But they don’t seem to have needed the excuse, really; there are lots of nudes purporting to be someone classical. Maybe the association between an attractive young woman and extreme violence was what appealed.

There are at least two versions of the Judith story painted by Artemisia Gentileschi. She shows Judith as a strapping, practical woman.

Gentileschi

Gentileschi

 Well, I can easily imagine why a woman painter in a man’s world chose the subject. A lot of the representations add a maid who is helping Judith either by holding Holofernes down, as in one Gentileschi, or carrying his head in a basket as in Botticelli’s small masterpiece, where Judith and the maid are tripping cheerfully along. The basket on the maid’s head might be full of dates.

Botticelli

Donatello’s sculpture shows Judith determined, with sword raised, about to do the deed; the Gentileschi shows Judith sawing away and gouts of blood. 

Caravaggio painted her twice; once she’s shown fully clothed in a rich gown, looking very serene; once she’s shown rather more in dishabille,  with an expression of distaste, like someone having to clear up a horrible mess, as she saws at Holofernes’ neck .           

Some artists used the topic to depict dangerously seductive women. I expect Freud would see the story as representing a fear of castration. Certainly Klimt’s portrait of Judith is of a glorious, terrifically sexy, dangerous maneater. Surely Klimt’s Holofernes could have guessed  his fate?

Cranach painted several Judiths, as sexy minxes, looking rather self satisfied at having Holofernes’ head; Metsys took a similar approach, but his Judiths are rather more unclothed and more openly sexual.  See below:

 There's also a modern artist who recreates some of the paintings with models and takes photographs. I can't quite see the point, but something about the Judith and Holofernes story certainly seems to appeal to creative types, even now, when even the name is out of fashion.  

Home again, home again jiggety jig

The last full day in Florence, we were booked on a tour of the Palazzo Vecchio private bits. So we went straight there to cover the bits not on the tour, which was nearly everything. Cosimo certainly fancied himself, he’s there on the ceiling portrayed as Jupiter. I’d forgotten that Florence was the capital of Italy briefly, after the unification, until the Pope agreed to give up Rome, and Cosimo’s enormous state room, the Salone dei Cinquecento, was fitted up to be the Parliament house.

There were some nuts who had read Dan Brown’s latest fantasy and taken it too seriously, and the guide was polite but firmly discouraging. I haven’t read it myself, so I wouldn’t know how convincing it is, but I can guess.  I did try the first – I can’t  remember the name, but it was so badly written I never got more than a couple of pages in. Same with Fifty Shades of Grey – I picked it up in the queue at Sainsbury’s and thought it would have to be very rude indeed for anyone to bother to struggle through that turgid prose.

The “secret” bits were excellent. We went into two private treasure rooms, one arranged for Cosimo and one for Francesco. The guide knew his stuff, and was really thorough at explaining the iconography of the ceiling and wall paintings, which formed a kind of filing system for the treasures. Then we went up above the Salone dei Cinquecento, to see the roof trusses supporting the roof and holding up the ornate ceiling. It’s quite a sight.

There are a number of cabinets with pietra dura inlays, and we both fell for one with every drawer decorated with birds and flowers. So Phil can have that, and I’ll have to have the Donatello of Judith with the Head of Holofernes. The original is inside the palace, it’s a copy outside. I thought the original of Cellini’s Perseus was in there too, but it wasn’t, or not on show. But if I could take only one thing home from the whole of Florence, it would be the Perseus.

It was another glorious day, so after lunch we walked across the Arno and up to Piazzale Michaelangelo, which was a bit of a disappointment. There are superb views over Florence, but it’s largely car park. 

The view from Piazzale Michelangelo

Actually, it seems to be where middle aged bikers congregate to show off – a sort of Matlock Bath of Italy. It seemed to be nearly all Harleys as well. It reminded me of giving Will an I Spy book when we went to the French Alps, and keeping finding him talking to tough looking, tattooed, German and Italian bikers, trying to establish exactly which Ducati or Triumph or BMW they were riding, so he could tick it off in his book. I must say they were all very nice to him. I expect they were flattered by the interest. 

One of the old gates. 

On the way down, we saw in a little wild bit some sort of small hutches, or kennels, painted in the city of Florence colours. There was a notice on the fence, saying that this was cat colony number three, and that no one was to harm the cats, which belonged to Florence. There was absolutely no clue as to why Florence runs at least three cat colonies. Can it be for vermin control? Semi feral cats might be a good way of keeping down rats. Maybe Boris might like the idea for dealing with pigeons in London.  

Cat Colony Number 3

I spotted houses with plaques to Elizabeth Barratt Browning, Sir John Pope-Hennessy and Andrei Tarkovsky. Garibaldi seems to have stayed in at least two places.

On the Monday, we had to take the bus back to Pisa airport at midday, so we had time to visit Santa Maria Novella, which was just round the corner from our hotel. 

Santa Maria Novella is another Dominican monastery. It's huge - the church is massive, and there are four cloisters, three large and one small. A chunk was taken to make room for the railway station and the school for carabinieri, and it also suffered badly in the 1966 floods. By the flood markers, the water was at least five feet deep. So it has been being restored more or less ever since. The buildings are fantastic, and the frescos in the Spanish chapel are in pretty good condition, but some of the rest is pretty far gone. They have taken two large Ucello frescos down and have them on frames, for restoration, in the refectory. I'd love to know how you take down and move a massive chunk of plaster without doing more damage. Also, come to think of it, how do they put it back? 

The Cloister of the Dead

There's a Giotto painting of a crucifix above the nave, all gold and light. It's high enough not to have been soaked. 

The Green Cloister

There was another good reliquary, a gilded arm from elbow to finger tips, with a gilded arrow through it and a window in the forearm with a little piece of bone - allegedly, a bit of Saint Sebastian. You have to laugh.










So then bus to Pisa, somewhat delayed by two policewomen, looking at licences and doing endless paperwork, giving carbon copies to the driver and despatcher, who were both clearly just keeping their tempers. 

Then back to England, daffodils, forsythia, magnolias, dandelions and primroses. Even the trees look as much in leaf as they were in Italy, although it's quite a bit cooler.  

Florence, Saturday

Today is Saturday, so although the school parties are missing, there are a lots of Italian families out enjoying themselves. It’s been a beautiful warm sunny day, like an English summer, almost, but we think that March may be a bit late to be really out of season. The Italian school kids are well behaved – the most they do is look bored and inattentive, or spend their time texting instead of listening – but they do mill around.  So January or February may be better.

After breakfast we walked over to the Pitti Palace. First we went into the Palatine Gallery. There’s far too much to take in, and a lot isn’t top quality.  so we scanned each room for a couple of pictures we really wanted to look at, and concentrated on them. It worked really well. There are some lovely Raphaels, not the Madonna and child religious stuff, but portraits, including Agnolo Doni and his wife, a sulky madam. Mind you, Agnolo doesn’t look an easy going bloke, so perhaps she had her reasons. 

There’s one or two superb Titian portraits, and a really haunting Fra Bartolomeo, of the deposition.

The Royal apartments are (it seemed) just about as extensive as Versailles. But you can just keep walking – they don’t need studying. Some of the inlaid table tops were amazing, and we did admire them.  Also, there was a clock restorer working in one of the rooms. He had a very fancy French clock in pieces.

Clock, with Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday!

 In another room, there was a concert – piano, clarinet and violin or viola. It was quite an ambitious programme – too ambitious for Phil, who took a dislike to the Ysaye. But we enjoyed the other pieces and it was a very nice extra.

Another nice extra was a small display of documents from the archives; for example, there was the correspondence from Santa Croce about the reburial of Galileo there. It made up a bit for the accounting museum in Siena being closed. Phil is always talking about the lecture he plans to deliver on cruise ships, to be called “Adventures in Accountancy”; and of course Italian banks invented double entry bookkeeping.

Then there was the modern art gallery. Well, I suppose it’s all relative, but Florentine ideas of what counts as modern are not the same as, say, the Tate, or the Pompidou Centre. But we didn’t need to spend too much time there.

We had a fairly quick gallop through the costume museum, which concentrated on the clothes belonging to a few women, rather than showcasing designers. It was quite interesting, but there wasn’t much I coveted. The hat displays were fun, though there was hardly one I could imagine wearing.  A slightly yucky bit was the display of the remains of the clothes that Cosimo de Medici and his wife had been buried in. I don’t know why they dug them up to undress them, it all seemed very undignified. They even had Cosimo’s codpiece on display.

Fountain in the gardens

Then we went out into the Boboli Gardens. As I said, it was a beautiful day and the views from the top are superb. Also the lawns were covered with daisies, buttercups and anemones, so they looked lovely. Otherwise, all those hedges, shrubs and paths are quite boring, I find.

The Duomo, from the Boboli Gardens

Looking away from the city form the Boboli Gardens 

Then we thought, since we were over the river in Oltrarno, we should see Santo Spirito. It’s a magnificent building, high, elegant and austere, designed, like the cathedral, by Brunelleschi.

By this time we were knackered – there are an awful lot of flights of stairs in the Pitti, never mind the climbs in the garden. So we gave up and went back to the hotel for a rest before dinner.  We have found a very nice place, Ciro & Sons, a few minute’s walk away from the hotel, and we are sticking with it. If a place is good, they deserve for you to return. 

Siena

The place I remember most clearly and with most affection from my 1969 student trip to Italy, was Siena. I can’t remember anything very specific, just the Piazza del Campo and the music floating out of windows as one walked past, the men in medieval costume practising their banner twirling and throwing  and catching, and the gloriousness of it. I didn’t want to leave. Phil found that there is a bus from Florence to Siena, about once an hour, which takes about seventy five minutes. So today, off we went.

It was quite interesting to see the countryside, as it’s still really green. There are a lot less wild flowers and blossom than in Britain. Hurrah for Natural England.  Mind you, there are less flowers in gardens than in Britain. Perhaps the Italians are less keen on them. You needed to stare out at the countryside, as it is one of those old autostradas, built for Fiat Cinquecentos, with narrow lanes and tight corners, so the lorries just can’t keep in lane. I remember driving one around Genoa, and my blood pressure and heart rate going through the roof.

Siena, from the loggia of the Palazzo Communale

Siena is just as gorgeous as I remembered. Phil remembered the Duomo – I could only remember the green and white marble stripes, nothing about the inside. There’s a great chunk of building, less than half finished, where the Sienese started to build an enormous extension to the church. The building was halted by the Black Death, which killed two thirds of the inhabitants, and was never resumed. Mind you, the cathedral is large enough. A Sienese Pope, Pius II, left his books to the cathedral, and just off the nave is his library. It’s beautiful. There are superb frescos and ceiling, and lots of early antiphonals on display.

Ceiling of the library

 Pius II lived in the mid fourteenth century, but it’s all in the brightest, clearest colours and superb condition.  It’s been open since 1999, so neither of us had seen it and it was worth the trip almost by itself.

The cathedral museum has an arresting reliquary, with a skull grinning out of a crystal case, and bones bundled together with elaborate silk ribbons,  like some sort of macabre gift wrapping. If you visit Siena you mustn't miss that.  

We toured the Palazzo Communale. Siena lost to Florence (Hawkwood was involved, naturally) and development sort of stopped. So the Palazzo Communale was built at the end of the thirteenth century and looks untouched. Inside, the Chapel was completed at the very beginning of the fifteenth century, and has kept the same furnishings, including stunning choir stalls decorated with marquetry, the original hanging lamp, candlesticks and so forth. Phil wanted to take the whole chapel home. I don’t know if that is permitted in the rules of the game, but it’s such a perfect whole that you couldn’t have a bit of it. I chose an exquisite piece of goldsmith’s work – a golden rose bush, given to the city by Pius II.

We loved the Room of the Nine (the council of nine who governed Siena), and spent ages examining the wall paintings of the Allegories of Good Government and Bad Government.   

So then we just sat in Il Campo. We had a coffee at a pavement café, and then decided we really ought to have an ice cream. I chose a scoop each of dark chocolate, coffee and hazelnut. I actually think having three scoops was being greedy, and two would have been enough, because I was really full, but I wouldn’t be able to decide which flavour I could do without.

Piazza del Campo

It was so wonderful to return, and not be disappointed, but more in love with the place than ever.

Florence again.

Yesterday, we had prebooked, timed tickets for the Uffizi Gallery. So after breakfast we set off in the right direction, but slowly, so we could stop to look at the Loggia Dei Lanzi and anything else we passed which seemed of interest. Phil’s imagination was particularly stimulated by the bronze plaque marking the spot of the Bonfire of the Vanities, and the burning to death of Savonarola. It gave him the creeps.

Palazzo Vecchio

I’m busy trying to remember all the people who have a plaque on one of the palazzi to mark where they stayed in Florence. So far, I’ve noticed ones to George Eliot, Hans Christian Anderson, Mozart, Longfellow, and John Milton. Of course Florence Nightingale got her name because she was born here. Her less fortunate sister was born in Naples, so got landed with the name of Parthenope. But I suppose “Florence” sounded  pretty exotic as a name in those days; it’s just that it caught on, thanks to Nightingale’s fame. It’s not one I’d go for. The English (British?) habit of shortening names is too strong. My gran had a friend who was always called Florrie. Why is it that the French go for these hyphenated names and still no one shortens them, whereas in England even a two syllable name will be shortened to one syllable? Or, as in the case of “Florrie” a different, less attractive set of two syllables.

Back to our tour – the Uffizi has been refitting since 1999, and there is no end date, but this is actually fortunate, since the tour of what was open took us four hours; you get museum feet and backache, and you just can’t appreciate any more in four hours, so if there was even more to see ……

Actually the crowds congregate round certain pictures, so you can get a good look at others without being harried. But when you want to see one of the hotspot pictures, it’s difficult. At least nearly all the guides and their groups have headsets, so they aren’t yapping away, spoiling it for everyone else.  But when I went to see The Birth of Venus, I was driven away by a loud American father telling his son that this painting had been judged one of the three most famous paintings in the world by the New York Times! I presume that was his reason for wanting to see it – he didn’t seem to appreciate anything else about it. Over coffee and a rest, Phil and I had fun wondering what were the other two most famous pictures. We’re pretty sure one must be the Mona Lisa, but we couldn’t settle on a third at all – far too many candidates. 

It’s all very different from 1969. You can enjoy the rooms at the top of the building, which are immensely long corridors with fantastical painted ceilings, and the paintings are very well displayed, whereas I remember a series of smallish, darkish, rooms. So we concentrated on the early stuff – Giotto and Cimabue and so forth – and the Botticellis. I can take or leave Raphael. There were some fantastic portraits of Florentine bankers based in Bruges, by Memling, and a wonderful Cranach pair of Adam and Eve.  Phil’s going to have the small Botticelli of Judith with the head of Holofernes, so as he’s having that, I can choose a Cimabue. Or the Cranachs, as long as I can have them both. Although there was a very lovely sleeping child sculpture, a Roman copy of a Greek original; but it made me feel very sad, so probably not the best thing to have in your home. 

Finally we went across the Ponte Vecchio for a very late lunch, and pottered back to the hotel via Orsanmichele, which has an incredibly elaborate altar and altarpiece by Daddi, well worth seeing,  and the posh shopping street. Both Salvatore Ferragamo and Gucci have museums, believe it or not. I feel we could give them a miss.

 

Today, Thursday, has been very full, but there’s just so much to see, and we do like to be thorough.

We started at the Medici chapels at San Lorenzo. Well, they did think a lot of themselves. The workmanship is very beautiful, with all the inlaid marble and and semiprecious stones, but the total effect is way over the top. And I’m concerned to say it, but I’m beginning to be more than a bit disillusioned with Michaelangelo. First, he didn’t seem to finish much; and second, it doesn’t look as if he’d ever seen a naked woman in his life. No one at all ever had breasts like “Night”. The figure of “Dusk” is better, though. And the statue of Guiliano is finished and good – hagiographic, but then it is a tomb and the family were paying!  Perhaps he saved the good stuff for Rome. I don’t remember feeling the same way there.

There’s also a lot of reliquaries, sometimes with recognisable body parts, and although the goldsmiths’ work is often incomparable, Phil really hates them. I find them gruesomely funny, which obviously isn’t what I’m meant to feel. They even have a whole mummified corpse on show in the church. In a glass case under the altar of course, but its discovery ended our tour rather abruptly.

Then we went on to the monastery of San Marco. Fra Angelico and others painted each cell; there is a crucifixion repeated in lots of the cells, with lots of blood, that I really wasn’t keen on, but also a beautiful, serene Annunciation, which I’m sure you would recognise. But the gripping bit was the glimpse into Dominican life in the fifteenth century. Talk about the past being another country – the Ellora caves seemed less weird. Or at any rate, no more weird.

The cloister

Savonarola was a Dominican, and they have various portraits of him, and the banner carried at Savonarola’s sermons. In a case, there are his rosary beads, and a belt and vest for the mortification of the flesh. The inscription was only in Italian, and I can’t now recall the exact word, so I can’t look it up, but they were covered with scratchy stuff next to the skin. It might be horsehair – I know that’s what Thomas More used – but the inscription  also added something about “spina di pesci”. Fishbones?  Whatever, the man was a dangerous fanatic. He was right about the Pope being corrupt, though, and that was why he was burned.

The heretical bell

They also have the bell which rang to let people know Savonarola was going to preach. After his fall, the bell – the bell!- was dragged through the city and flogged, and afterwards exiled out of the city. See what I mean about it being weird?

Next the Bargello. The building is well worth seeing in itself, with pretty pristine medieval ceilings.

 The museum is mostly sculpture. There’s an early Michaelangelo, of a drunken Bacchus, which I did like, but what they do have is a number of Cellinis. I don’t know why, exactly, but I just love his work. It’s so graceful, but full of life and energy, and he knows just what a naked woman looks like. His bust of Cosimo is wonderful, and not hagiographic – I can’t help feeling I would have had rather mixed feelings, if I’d been the sitter.

Upstairs they have two Donatellos which were fascinating in the contrast they provided. They’re both of David. The early one is an awkward mix of Gothic drapery and a classical style head; the second, later, one is pure renaissance. And all within a few years.  There’s lots of Della Robbias, and I can see the quality, but I’m afraid they don’t appeal. They won't let you take photos in the gallery, but in the courtyard was this fountain, from one of the Medici's gardens.

I thought you ought to see it. Just to add to its charms, the women spray water from their nipples, and the men from their penises.

Then, Santa Croce. I said it was a full day.

Santa Croce

The square is huge, and there were photos of the “calcio storico” which takes place in June. It seems a lot more organised than the Ashbourne  Shrove Tuesday  football match. Here, there are teams, medieval style football strips, a pitch, and it’s only men. In Ashbourne, everyone joins in, I’ve no idea how you know who is on each side, and the goals are at either end of the town, so something like a mile apart.

The church is also huge. It seems to be a sort of pantheon or Westminster Abbey for the great of Italy. So there are the tombs of Puccini, Michaelangelo, Ghiberti, a monument to Dante, although he’s not buried here, and Galileo. I hope he’d be alright with that, even though they used to burn heretics in the square outside. But I don’t think he thought of himself as heretical.

Santa Croce - cloister and campanile

There are frescos by Giotto,and a crucifixion by Cimabue, all in pretty poor shape – Santa Croce suffered really badly in the 1966 floods. But the cloisters are lovely. 

Phil, looking lost, in the colossal Pazzi chapel

The Pazzi chapel is amazing high renaissance. Unfortunately the Pazzis conspired against the Medicis, lost and fell, and the chapel was never properly completed. I don’t know where the Pazzis were buried, but it wasn’t in their chapel.

Finally, we wandered back to the hotel. We can’t go anywhere fast in Florence, there’s always too much to see.