Posted on 12/21/2007 11:46:49 AM PST by WesternCulture
My daughter was able to spend a semester in Florence studying fine art. Her apartment faced the Il Duomo. Her favorite painting hangs in the Galleria degli Uffizi where she was able to enter with her student pass as often as she liked. She came home not only a better artist, but much more fashionable (high end) and polished. The experience was worth every penny.
Yeah, but these were paintings from Pompeii, not statues, and showed some of the typical tricks of artists in painting a scene to give the illusion of depth perspective.
I hadn’t seen many Roman painting from this era that were clear enough to show this.
There’s a really cool mural in one Pompeiian house, a trompe l’oeil of balconies and columns, that appears to be a Roman stage (y’know, where plays would be performed), perhaps it was used for that (private performances by players) or perhaps the owner of the house just loved theater.
“My daughter was able to spend a semester in Florence studying fine art. Her apartment faced the Il Duomo. Her favorite painting hangs in the Galleria degli Uffizi where she was able to enter with her student pass as often as she liked. She came home not only a better artist, but much more fashionable (high end) and polished. The experience was worth every penny.”
- You ought to be proud of your daughter and as a parent, you should be proud of yourself as well!
By today, I have visited Florence several times, but even before I went there the first time, I was aware of the most important aspect of this unique city:
The impact Florence has had in the history of Western Civilization.
Florence is indeed a city of art, but Florence goes beyond art itself.
Renaissance Florence was, simply put, the embryo of our modern world. The ideas of the Renaissance revolutionized the way we Westerners view ourselves, it changed the ‘picture of man’ in our culture.
Before the Renaissance, claiming that humanity is at the center of creation and that the world actually is at humanity’s command would have been considered as blasphemy.
The Renaissance brought forth a belief in a new golden age and the conviction that man can do more or less anything.
The above mentioned Florentine cathedral, ‘Il Doumo’, (La Basilica di) Santa Maria del Fiore, is in fact of a certain importance in this context. The completion of the magnificent cupola of Il Duomo made people realize that they did NOT live in a ‘dark age’, but in an age which could construct something not even the ancient Romans could have erected. It is hard to overestimate the impact of what this engineerical triumph meant to a city that some decades ago, during the Black Death, had been staring into the dark depths of Hell.
Without the kind of spirit that gained ground in Europe during the Renaissance, the Enlightment as well as modern science are more or less unthinkable.
In this passage, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463-1494) expresses this ‘new idea of Man’ in a much admired manner:
``We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.’’
“Oration on the Dignity of Man”:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/Mirandola/
About Florence Cathedral, Santa Maria del Fiore:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_cathedral
Finally, as a European I’d like to welcome all Americans to Florence and Tuscany.
It is your cultural heritage too.
Thank you for your contributions to Free Republic!
Thanks a lot, fellow FReeper and Merry X-Mas!
“Ett bra jobb!”
- Tack så mycket!
“Thank you for your contributions to Free Republic!”
- From Europe to America:
Thank you for your contribution to freedom and Western Civilization!
Merry X-mas!
you know what I have to say to your Social Democratic art advisor...... “bite me” America Rocks!
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