At the Galleria Degli Uffizi, Firenze, Italia
23 May 2003, 15:30-17:00
with
Muirhead’s Northern Italy 1924
and
Virtual Uffizi viewed 21 Mar 2005
by Regina Hopingardner
“The Galleria degli Uffizi is the most important collection of paintings in Italy and one of the greatest art collections in the world” (Muirhead).
Virtual Uffizi: the complete catalogue of the Uffizi Gallery of Florence. The "Virtual Uffizi" web site is brought to you by APERION S.p.A., Casa Editrice Giusti di S. Becocci which made available all texts and most of the images, Sponsors who made all this possible plus a bunch of other Internet friends who had been spidering the 'Net for images. (sic.)
[Dimensions of the paintings are given in centimeters.]
The first thing I do when I get to the top of the stairs leading into the Uffizi is try to lose Leah. She and I spent the morning together in the Boboli Gardens—and yesterday afternoon in the Archaeological Museum. It’s wearing me out being with someone else and I’ve wanted to go to the Uffizi since I was seventeen. I want to see it for myself and not risk getting crabby.
I don’t go through the rooms in order because I know that there are things further on that I want to give my time to; I don’t want to wear myself out with dozens of Maestas before I even get to the Bronzinos. I also don’t want to be stuck in a pack of people, being herded through the rooms sequentially, seeing everything and nothing.
Luckily, unlike other museums where the rooms all lead onto each other, the Uffizi was once an open loggia so the rooms each open onto the hallway. I walk up to room 15 and duck in, planning to swirl my way backwards, only stopping for things I can’t ignore.
Room 15 Andrea di Cione called Verrocchio Baptism of Christ (1470)
“According to Vasari and Albertini, the angel on the left, with a dreamy look unseen before in Italian art, was painted by the young Leonardo, and was the prototype for the angel in the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’.”
Tempera on wood, 180x152, Notes: From the church of San Michele at San Salvi; painted by Verrocchio with the assistance of Leonardo, who seems to be responsable (sic.) for an angel, the landscape and the background and part of the figure of Jesus. at the Uffizi since 1914.
It took me years of looking at photos of this to figure out which angel was the one Leonardo painted, the one on the left side as you’re looking at the painting or the one to the left if you were an angel in the painting. I don’t know why it was so confusing to me except for the fact that both angels look unhealthy to me. I could never see that one was more angelic than the other. And neither look like the well-formed but creepy angel in the Louvre version of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks.
Does anyone look long at the jaundiced figure of Christ? Would anyone even bother to look at this if it were discovered that Leonardo da Vinci had nothing at all to do with it?
Room 15 Leonardo da Vinci Annunciation (1475)
“Painted while he was working in Verroccio’s studio, a creation of the highest and most poetic beauty”
Tempera on wood, 98x217; Notes: From the church of San Bartolomeo at Monteoliveto; painted around 1472/5 when Leonardo was still in Verrocchio's workshop. At the Uffizi since 1867.
Margot Fortunato Galt’s poem about this painting has a line, “his hair a tangle of innuendo,” implying that Mary is pleased to see this dream-boy of an angel regardless of what his divine message may be.
Both Mary and the angel look like they’re suspended in a vacuum. Nothing moves. The grass like tapestry. The whole thing takes places in that kind of medieval dreamland where hedges are perfectly trimmed and dotted with forget-me-nots, unicorns and dragons arrange themselves aesthetically, and young girls never ever fidget.
It reminds me of the rare pleasant dreams I had when I was fourteen.
Rooms 10-14 Sandro Filipepi called Botticelli
These—Primavera, Birth of Venus—are all too well known for me to really see them as art. Even the pictures I’ve never seen before resemble the others too much—there is Pallas but she looks just like Primavera and both of them have the face of Venus. Also, there are tour groups crowding all of these rooms, weary Germans and Americans listening to guides tell them things they probably won’t remember in five seconds, their stomachs gurgling in anticipation of sandwiches and gelato.
I’m glad I’ve been spared that.
Leah rushes up behind me. “I almost lost you.”
I have to be cruel. I have to do it because I’m selfish enough to want my Uffizi experience to be my own. I don’t want to think about anyone else. “You know, I’m annoying to go through galleries with. I don’t go in order—I’m all over the place. ADD-girl, totally. So you should just look at stuff on your own and I’ll see you later.”
I see her face droop and her trying to not make a big deal about it. “But what about the paper store. I was wanting to go there with you after the museum.”
“Oh,” I say, pretending that paper is the only issue involved. “Let me write down the address and you can just stop there on your way back to the hotel.”
Room 18 “Tribuna” Agnolo Bronzino portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi
[Muirhead only lists the portrait and gives no details]
Tempera on wood, 102x85; Notes: Painted around 1540 for the famous Florentine family, together with portrait of Lucrezia's husband Bartolomeo. At the Uffizi since 1704.
I enter the dark, bloody hexagon of the Tribuna. Ropes guide everyone along a narrow path near the walls: “Enter Here,” “Exit here.” I feel like I’m on a forced march, everyone moving along step by step, looking more at the feet of the person in front of them than at the portraits on the wall. People behind me get annoyed when I break out of line and press myself up against the ropes to look more closely at the Bronzino portraits. I hear a fat man exhale and grunt at me as he squeezes past.
I stay solid, refusing to be bullied into a conveyor-belt gallery experience.
I love the name Lucrezia. It contains the Italian words: luce (light), crescere (to grow), reale (real or Royal), zia (aunt). Lucrezia Panciatichi herself is less compelling. From a name like that I would expect more crescendo, more zing. This lady looks worn out even framed by her autumnal red hair.
On my way out of the Tribuna a guy sitting on one of the benches calls out, “Scuzi.” I look over at him. He stands and takes a step toward me. “You speak English?” he asks with what sounds like a German accent. I nod. “You are working here?” he asks. I shake my head. “Ah, but you are Italian.”
I think for a second. This was one question I never imagined anyone asking me here. I’m a typical Danish-American looking girl with sunburnable skin, reddish-blonde hair and green eyes. “No.”
He smiles and says, “Sorry.” Then he sits back down next to his friend on the bench.
Maybe it’s because I’m not carrying a guidebook; I’ve just got pages from books xeroxed and pasted into my notebook to guide me. I open my notebook and write the encounter down as I walk back to the first rooms in the gallery, wanting to make sure I don’t forget exactly what he said to me, secretly trying on the idea of being an italiana.
Room 9 Antonio Pollaiuolo Hercules and the Hydra (1470)
[Muirhead only lists the painting and gives no details]
[Virtual Uffizi lists it with Hercules and Antaeus and gives no notes for either. Other sources describe it as: Tempera on Wood, 16x19]
It’s so tiny, I think as I look down into the glass case Hercules calls home. I’ve seen this picture in art history books many times: burly Hercules wrapped in a lion skin (with the back paws tied around his waist, improbably resting directly over his privates)—Hercules stretched out in mid-leap, his arm ready to bash his club over one of the snaky heads of the Hydra. Drama, adventure, violence on a grand scale. Yet here it is before me, the size of a dinner plate.
Somehow as familiar as I was with this picture, I had failed to notice the caption under the photos of it: Tempera on Wood, 16cm x 19cm. Hercules with his burly, snarly, truck-driver physique, is six inches tall. Looking down at him here in person, he seems to me more like some spore-seeping, bog-drenched, mushroom-sized homunculus rather than the son of mighty Zeus.
It’s all about scale. On the other end of it, you’ve got people like Stendhal passing out in the shadow of Michelangelo’s fourteen foot tall David.
Room 7 Piero della Francesca Double Portrait: The Duke and Duchess of Urbino (1465)
“Two entirely delightful portraits, finely drawn and wonderfully characteristic: on the back of the picture is their triumph”
Tempera on wood, 47x33 (each panel); Notes: On the front the two panels show profile portraits of Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino, and his wife, Battista Sforza. The reverse shows allegorical representations of their virtues. To be dated around 1465/70. At the Uffizi since 1773.
The unmistakable broken nose of the Duke of Urbino presented, as always, in profile. Piero painted him more than once—that’s the kind of thing one does for a patron. The Duke with his prize-fighter nose feels much more real than his wife. Her portrait looks like a porcelain death-mask.
I like that the museum has these in a free-standing glass case instead of hanging on a wall. The other side shows their “triumphs,” triumph here meaning, as far as I can tell, being enthroned on horse-drawn carriages, riding along like the Homecoming King and Queen. Federico even gets an attendant angel to stand behind him and place a crown on his head. How lucky to have an artist who can paint your divine benediction.
I like the strangeness, the way the two of them are set up as if they are looking at each other, but the landscapes don’t quite match up, even considering the missing land that takes up the gap in between the two portraits. What lies in that hidden landscape?
At first the two of them seem to belong together but, when you look more closely, they are really living in different worlds.
Room 25 Michelangelo Buonarroti Tondo Doni (1506)
“Large and sculpturesque in treatment; the nude figures in the background show the influence of Signorelli”
Tempera on wood, diam. 120; Notes: Painted in 1506/8 for the merchant Angolo Doni and his wife Maddalena Strozzi. The frame is original and was designed by Michelangelo. At the Uffizi, in the Tribune in 1635.
Who is Signorelli, I think, looking up from my notebook. I’m fairly knowledgeable about Italian painters, but that name means nothing to me. Obviously, he was something to somebody somewhere.
On either side in the background of this round portrait of the Holy Family, there are groups of nude men who seem to be flirting with each other. Whenever I’ve seen this painting in books, I’ve never looked past the family scene in the foreground. It seems a strange thing to put into such a picture. Mary Mother of God, Joseph, Baby Jesus, and … rent boys. Perhaps it’s meant to be allegorical, right Mr. Angelo?
An American girl and her mother are standing to the side of this round masterpiece. “Do you think the frame is original?”
I want to ask, “Are you even looking at the painting?”
Room 28 Tiziano Vecellio called Titian Venus d’Urbino
“Painted for Guidobaldo della Rovere and inspired by Giorgione’s ‘Venus’ in the Dresden Gallery”
Oil on canvas, 119x165; Notes: Commissioned in 1538 by Guidubaldo della Rovere. Arrived in Florenze in 1631 with the della Rovere inheritance; at the Uffizi since 1736.
It seems a normal enough picture of a nude girl, like thousands of others hanging in museums all over the world. Until you start to wonder, what is she doing with her hand down there?
The more bawdy daughter of Giorgione’s, this Venus is the grandmother (on the “wrong side of the sheets” I suppose) of other naked prostitutes in art, Manet’s Olympia being the one that shows the most family resemblance to her.
It’s hard to get respectable women to model naked.
Lots of college boys are hanging around this painting. This was the painting that Dan Ackroyd made fun of on Saturday Night Live pretending to be an adult-movie producer (I think) on cable access saying something like, “Here’s a really nice picture of a naked broad. It’s by a guy named, and I’m not making this up, Tittie-an.”
As much as I try to act like a grownup and look intellectually at this work of art, I keep hearing Dan Ackroyd in my head so I have to move on.
Room 43 Artemisia Gentileschi Judith and Holofernes
[Muirhead does not list]
[Not listed on Virtual Uffizi; the painting went with a Caravaggio exhibit to Australia in 2004 which might explain its absence from the site listings.]
I like that she has chosen to show the moment just before Judith has totally cut through Holofernes’s neck. His eyes can still see and his legs kick. In a second she will be putting his head onto a platter and sneaking away into the night.
A guy looking at the painting turns to me and says, “That blood spatter. You know, she had to have seen that somewhere. It looks so real.”
I shrug. I don’t think I’ve ever seen blood spatter so how would I know?
Room 43 Michelangelo Merisi called Caravaggio Bacchus , Medusa [After 2003, the Caravaggio and Artemisia Gentileschi paintings were re-hung in a different room on the first floor of the museum.]
[Muirhead only lists the names of the works]
Oil on canvas, 95x85; Notes: Discovered in the storerooms by Marangoni in 1916; attributed to Caravaggio by Longhi.
Bacchus’s baby-face doesn’t match that bicep he’s leaning on. The body seems real to me but not the face. Somewhere I read that this is a self-portrait. Maybe the face is Caravaggio’s and the body belonged to some Roman boy he found at the docks. He took one look and decided, “You will be my body.”
Oil on wood covered with canvas, diam.55; Notes: Commissioned from the artist by Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and presented as a gift to Ferdinando I de' Medici. In the Medici Armoury at the Uffizi since 1631.
It’s a shield. A real shield. I had never realized that. Some rich Medici guy might have played dress-up and held it before him just like Perseus, shouting, “I will turn you all to stone, evil-heads of Rimini.”
Medusa herself has a perfect look of indignation and the snakes in her hair even look outraged. Blood hangs like icicles from her neck. Her gaze will turn anyone to stone, but her blood is also bad business. In the story of Perseus, when the blood dropped onto the sand, it turned into hundreds of deadly serpents, they didn’t hurt Perseus himself though. He was the master of Medusa’s head and used it over and over, anytime he came up against someone stronger than he was.
How lucky for those Medicis that Caravaggio gave them their own Medusa head. I wonder if it was anyone they knew.
Room 3 Simone Martini and Lippo Memmi Annunciation with Two Saints (1333)
“A lovely work”
Tempera on wood, 184x210; Notes: Signed and dated 1333, the painting originally hung on the altar of Sant'Ansano in Siena Cathedral. It was transferred to the Uffizi in 1799 by Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo.
I can go back to the things I skipped at the beginning, now that I’ve seen the things that called me here to begin with.
Mary in this painting looks like she’s going to vomit. If I had an angel apparate in front of me, I might feel queasy too.
I don’t understand why this is a “lovely work” and Caravaggio’s Medusa doesn’t even get a note in Muirhead’s guide. I think he’s prejudiced in favor of the Medieval artists and those gold-encrusted, quiet, tableaux of holy moments.
I’m not sure I get it. Maybe it’s because I’m not Catholic and these aren’t objects of veneration for me. I try to remember what the Annunciation even is. I think it’s just when an angel came to Mary and told her she was going to have God’s son.
I know more about the Greeks than this. Zeus’s victims never got advanced warning like Mary did. The art depicting his conquests always shows the act itself: Leda with the swan wrapped around her, Danae watching a shower of gold descend upon her. Maybe artists show the Annunciation because it would be unseemly to show God impregnating Mary.
The angel takes the place of the lover, that’s why they always have some kind of gift for Mary and they look at her with wooing eyes.
Is it heretical to think of Mary and God and Jesus in this way? It does really sound a lot like Danae, Zeus and Perseus.
Room 5-6 Gentile da Fabriano Adoration of the Magi (1423)
“A fairy vision of gold and iridescent color”
Tempera on wood, 300x282 (overall including frame), 173x288 (central panel only); Notes: Signed and dated 1423, it was painted for Palla Strozzi's chapel in Santa Trinita. The scene showing the Presentation in the Temple in the predella is a copy, since the original is in the Louvre. At the Uffizi since 1919.
I find Margot sitting on the bench in front of this “vision.” I heard her mention this piece earlier to our class. I suspect that she’s been sitting here looking at it the whole time I’ve been wandering the other galleries. I sit next to her.
There is so much gold on this that it takes me a minute before I can see anything else. Then it comes into focus: the animals, the faces of the people. Everyone is individual, even the tiny faces in the back.
Margot sighs without looking away from it.
The whole world of this painting has come to be blessed by God’s son. Monkeys, hawks, cheetahs, something—a dog, a small horse—in the foreground that’s about to be stepped on by the brown horse.
I nod and look along with her.