Field trips!

Home. After four weeks of sculpting and two weeks exploring Italy it is wonderful to be back home on beautiful Whidbey Island. It’s so green! Italy was so great (big surprise), I have more photos to share from my trip, so if you’re up for more about Sue’s adventures in Italy, keep following the blog.

The last week in March we (Tamara, Eirene, and I), took a couple of great field trips. We went into Florence to have a visit with David, yes, “The David.” We also visited the Medici Chapel to see the sculptures there. The following day we went up into the mountains outside of Carrara on a marble quarry tour, its too many photos for one blog so that is a whole separate blog that I will post soon, in the meantime, enjoy Michelangelo.

I hope you enjoy the photos even a fraction as much as we enjoyed these days. I plan to post a couple more blogs after this and I’ll definitely post when the stone arrives. It’s on a ship now headed this way and is due in late May.

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These are photos of the unfinished Slaves by Michelangelo, also at the Galleria dell’ Academia in Florence. It’s amazing to get within feet of these sculptures and see the tool marks as he worked to find the lines of the form in the block. You can see where he was working out the placement of the body part, pushing it deeper into the stone.

The Medici Chapel is home to the sculptures at the tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici. You probably know these sculptures as “Night and Day,” and “Dawn and Dusk,” by Michelangelo.

The David and other celebrated Renaissance sculptures are what I grew up seeing in my art books and in popular culture. To see them in person is an inspiration. I’m grateful these sculptures were recognized as masterpieces and protected. I do grieve for the losses of so many masterpieces around the world lost to time, war, and ignorance.

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So, back to more Michelangelo. Follow me on a little side track. As my trip progressed I went to Milan and while there I got to see a Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pietà. He sculpted the “Pietà” theme at least three times; the first he sculpted when he was in his 20’s, the famous Pietà which is at Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The second has 4 figures; “Deposition,” which sculpted in his 70’s. It’s in Florence but I have not see this one. The Rondanini Pietà is at the Sforza Castle in Milan and it was the last sculpture he was working on when he died at 89. Ah, it’s such a feast seeing these sculptures in person.

The sculpture is clearly unfinished, not just obvious by the lack of detail and the textures but also because he left a previous version of Jesus’s right arm that is 10 or more inches away from where the current arm and body of Jesus is. This sculpture doesn’t have to thick muscularity of many of his other sculptures, in fact, from some views I found myself wondering if he’d left enough stone to finish it. He certainly captured the drama in the pose, you can feel the weight and the sorrow.

If you want to learn more about figurative sculpture from the Renaissance, may I recommend the podcast The Sculptors Funeral by Jason Arkles. Jason is going to be one of our instructors at Northwest Stone Sculptors Pilgrim Firs Symposium in July.

There is so much to see in Florence and we were only there for part of a day. It was amazingly crowded, I hear it is always like this now but it was the nicest day of the year and a Saturday. Still, if you’re visiting Florence, get your tickets in advance (thanks Tamara) or you will likely spend a lot of time in line.

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Art everywhere, models from the Academia and sculpture from the Palazzo Vecchio.

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Not everything is old. Here’s some street art by Blub I found on the streets in Florence and Lucca.

Ciao!