Florence: Day Two

More Florentine stuff!
My first and main destination today was the Palazzo Uffizi, which had an enormously long line outside it.  I stood outside, ate peaches, wrote postcards, read my Kindle, and spoke with the French couple ahead of me for over 2 hours.  There were some creepy ticket scalpers, and I think I introduced the verb "scalper" into the French language.  Sorry, Academie Francaise.
Finally, I made it inside!  The Palazzo Uffizi reminds me of the Italian wing of the Louvre, only smaller, somewhat less diverse, and not as well organized.  Sorry, Florentines, but that's my judgment.  The wait might not have been worth it, had a group of American Art History students not passed by on a private guided tour.  Unlike in certain similar circumstances in France, nobody chased me off, and I got to hear the guide expostulate, at length, on Botticelli, whose work is the 3rd most important reason that I'm even in Florence (he also spoke about Lippi, Titian, and Leonardo, but not as much).  The Birth (really the arrival) of Venus and Primavera are Botticelli's two most famous pieces, and they are both out on display.  The guide described six different levels of interpretation of Primavera: to fully understand all of the ins and outs of the picture, the viewer needs to know Ovid, Platonic philosophy (specifically, the Symposium), botany, ancient Greek homophones (Ζέφυρος), and the latest gossip of the Florentine aristocracy.  So, so Renaissance...
Also interesting to see was how much this differed from Titian's depiction of Venus.  While the Florentines were beating their brains out over Neoplatonism, the Venetian school of painting maintained a much more sensual orientation: the model for Titian's Venus was a well-known Venetian prostitute.  In fact, in his own letter describing the painting, he merely refers to it as a drawing of a nude woman; it is Vasari who assigned it the name Venus, and everyone has accepted this interpretation.
I saw at least two paintings that I could have sworn that I saw at the Louvre (one of them was the famous painting of Gabrielle d'Estrees, Henri IV's mistress).  Looking online, I found that in fact there are two, very similar, paintings, of   I also saw one of a three-part series of paintings depicting a famous Florentine battle, and I recognized one of the other two pieces from the Louvre.  Perhaps it's not fair that I not use the Louvre as my standard by which to judge other museums, but I know it better than any other, even the Johnson in Ithaca.
I left, quite worn out, and trudged my way across Florence, until I arrived at St. Croce Church.  For my purposes, it was kind of a Florentine equivalent of the Pantheon in Paris.  Many of my friends are buried there: Machiavelli, Galileo, Donatello, Ghiberti, Michelangelo, Dante (actually, I looked online, and his body is elsewhere).  My definitive not-friend Giovanni Gentile is also buried there (he was Mussolini's pet philosopher), and there were also monuments to two Italian physicists which weren't getting nearly as much attention as they deserved: Guglielmo Marconi  and Enrico Fermi (sorry, Dawson).  As with everywhere else in Florence, there was very little information available, and if I hadn't entered knowing a little bit about the occupants, I would not have known the significance of the monuments erected in their honor.  That being said, my ignorance of art history meant that I didn't know anything about any of the other Italians buried at St. Croce.
At this point, it was nearly 6:00 pm, and I didn't have time for anything else, except another pass by my favorite doors, blog, and, of course plan for the trip from which I just returned, to another well-known Italian city...

~JD