Wednesday Outing

Florence has so many churches and museums, it is totally overwhelming. We are fortunate to be here long enough to take things slowly, absorbing one place per day (or every other day, depending). Two places we wanted to see are farther away than most we've been in so far, so we decided to do them both in one day:  Santa Croce Church and Casa Buonarroti. The idea was to do one in the late morning, have lunch, and then the other. But in the end, we did them both and came home for lunch. It was a long three hours of walking and viewing! But it was good to be back at our place for lunch and some rest time.

After reading The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone, I was eager to visit the Casa Buonarroti to see some of Michelangelo's earliest work. This home is not where he lived, but was the family home later on. His great-nephew was an avid collector of art, and the building is truly a museum as well as his home. 

Michelangelo's earliest known work was done while he was apprenticed to the painting workshop of Ghirlandaio. It is called the Madonna of the Stairs. He was 15 years old.

Not long after, he carved the Battle of Centaurs, which was commissioned by Lorenzo de Medici.

Those two carvings were in a room by themselves and I sat there for quite a while just taking them in. They aren't very big, the Madonna about two feet tall and the Centaurs about 3 feet (less than a meter) in both directions.

Around 1890 Cesare Zocchi carved two sculptures of the young Michelangelo. This one is working on the head of a faun. I think it makes Michelangelo look even younger than he was when he began sculpting.

One of the rooms in the Casa had a fresco frieze on all four walls. It was as if the people of Florence were looking down on us as they went about their daily business.

The two  Noli me Tangere paintings shown below, one attributed to Pontormo and the other to Battista Franco, derive from a lost cartoon by Michelangelo, executed in 1531, which depicted the risen Christ appearing to the Magdalene. (Noli me tangere ('touch me not') is the Latin version of a phrase spoken, according to John 20:17, by Jesus to Mary Magdalene when she recognized him after his resurrection.) The cartoon was made into a painting by Pontormo at the suggestion of Michelangelo himself. Entering the Medici collections, it was used again by Battista Franco (1537), who reproduced the landscape of Albrecht Dürer’s print of Saint Eustace in the background.

Pontoformo

Franco

The museum has an extensive collection of drawings by Michelangelo, primarily sketches for his works. Only a few are shown at any one time, and they weren't very photogenic. I think they would only be of interest to scholars.

This wooden model of his design for the San Lorenzo church facade was interesting.

Tomorrow:  Santa Croce