Galleria dell'Accademia
(Vacation day four, continued.) After visiting Santa Maria Novella, I was off to meet Original Florence Walks for a tour of the Galleria dell'Accademia, definitely a highlight of the trip. I took the tour because (a) I wanted an art historian on hand to pester with questions and (b) the outfit arranges tickets for you. (Otherwise, you have to find a time to phone the Florence museums, nine hours ahead of San Francisco--there are no online ticket sales. And you don't want to show up without a ticket; even in the slow month of March, lines for the Accademia and the Uffizi ran down the block.)
Why the queue? To see Michelangelo's David, or as the gallery's director calls him in the guidebook, "the great white fetish." Michelangelo grew up in nearby Settignano, a stone mason's town, and from an early age expressed the desire to be an artist. He was apprenticed to Ghirlandaio's workshop, working on frescoes, which he didn't like so much--he wanted to study sculpture instead. He got his opportunity at age 14. Lorenzo de Medici (whose face is on the youngest Magi in the Magi Chapel at the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi) loved ancient sculpture and wanted to revive the art, so he and his agent scoured schools for promising students and found Michelangelo. He became like another son to Lorenzo, living and eating with his family. However, Lorenzo died just three years later, and his incompetent heir made Florentines so peeved with the Medici that Michelangelo deemed it prudent to decamp to Rome. There, at age 23, he created the Pieta sculpture that made his reputation. Three years later, in 1501, he began creating David.
Michelangelo worked on the sculpture for three years, completing this commission for the Opera dell'Duomo in 1504. Our guide took us past the Duomo and showed us the nook, about two stories up, that David was originally intended for. Take a look at my Duomo photo and imagine what a waste it would have been to put the statue way up on the wall, where the front would be hard to see, the facial expression obscure, and the back completely invisible (and why did Michelangelo, that perfectionist, spent so much time refining every angle of a statue that was supposed to be seen from the front only?). Fortunately, the Opera committee immediately realized the artistic merit of the statue and placed it instead in before the Palazzo Vecchio (now there's a copy in its place), where it remained for nearly 400 years. David became a symbol of the Renaissance city--Florence, the small but mighty city-state, threatened by but conquering Goliaths. (The Duomo nook, incidentally, was left vacant.) In 1527 there was a riot in the piazza, someone threw furniture from the palazzo, and it knocked off part of the statue's left hand. But, perhaps indicating how treasured the figure was, a brave soul rushed into the fray to collect the pieces.
Realizing that the statue was too valuable to continue exposing to weather and whackos, the city moved it indoors in 1873, to a tribuna in the Galleria designed especially for him. That wasn't protection enough, though--in 1992 a crazy man smuggled a hammer into the gallery and smashed David's left toe. Now there's a clear shield all around the statue's base, which is a shame but which does not detract from one's enjoyment. David, like the Mona Lisa, is a ubiquitous image--in Florence, inescapable, it's so frequently reproduced. Yet when I came around the corner and saw it at the end of the corridor, I stopped and caught my breath. It's arrestingly beautiful. Familiarity doesn't breed complacence, either; as we walked around to see every angle, I grew more impressed with the perfection of that form. Though it's monumental, idealized, and cold marble, it also looks warm, human, dynamic, and anatomically precise--just look at the veins in the hands, the tendon on the back of the knee, the way the muscles show the distribution of weight. And look how expressive the face is, capturing the several thoughts that would have been passing through his mind as he prepared to face the giant. I could have looked at it for hours. (And to get an idea what the experience is like, check out Cafe Siena's cool video of people looking at the statue.)
Seeing David was sublime, but finding out how Michelangelo sculpted made me even more amazed. Most sculptors of stone begin by roughing out the shape from the block, then proceed to refine it. Not Michelangelo. Alone of his kind, he worked from front to back. Our guide explained with a helpful analogy: Imagine that you have a bathtub full of water, and you're slowly draining it. As the water recedes, you begin to see parts of a figure--if it were the young slave above, for example, you'd see the front of the knee first, then maybe a bit of the elbow and thigh, and so on. They're not simple, static figures but torque and stretch in unusual ways. And Michelangelo sculpted the heads last, as you can see in the Atlas--it looks like there's barely enough marble left. These figures in the photos are called the slaves (or the prisoners) because they appear to be trapped in the marble, working their way out--that's what the artist said, too, that he was merely freeing them. My mind, I have to say, was thoroughly blown. Michelangelo must have had a singular spatial sense, an ability to fully visualize in 3D--how else could he have known where to chisel, gotten the proportions exactly right, and not misjudged the figure's depth and run out of marble at the back? Extraordinary.
The narcissistic Pope Julius II commissioned the slave statues in 1505, the year after David was completed, as part of a massive mausoleum for himself that he intended to put in St. Peter's. Michelangelo immediately began work on the tomb and several statues at once, but then the pope gave him a second commission to paint the Sistine Chapel, which occupied the artist from 1508-1512. Then in 1513 the pope died, with the statues unfinished and the tomb plans eventually scaled back considerably. After Michelangelo's death, four of the unfinished slaves were donated to Grand Duke Cosimo de Medici, who placed them in a grotto in the Boboli Gardens at the Pitti Palace (I'll show you the site in a later blog about the Pitti). Finally, in 1909 the slaves were moved from the grotto to the Accademia to keep company with the David.
Michelangelo's works are so dazzling that they overshadow the other paintings and sculpture in the Accademia. It is worth looking around, though--there are Russian icons, a gallery of musical instruments, and many fine Renaissance paintings, including this early Madonna and child by Botticelli. Besides, if you walk around, you can keep circling back to the great white fetish and get your breath knocked out all over again.
