Lots of Art

On Sunday we saw the Verrocchio exhibition at the Strozzi Palace, followed on Tuesday by the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella, and on Wednesday we spent four hours at the Uffizi. Lots of art, and a major reason why people come to Florence. It's necessary to take breaks from time to time to digest it a bit, and intersperse some other experiences, or else all the art may run together and you won't remember where you saw what, or when.

On the other hand, why not let them run together a bit, as facilitated by the "mosaic" function of this blogging software, which I'm kind of getting a handle on by now? These images are just details of certain pictures I happened to to think were rather wonderful for one reason or another, and to photograph, at those places this week, and it's not necessary to go into a lot of detail about them all.

I do want to point out that at Santa Maria Novella I did observe a monument to an actual female person not a saint: Maria Anna Testard Venturi, who died at 59 in 1809, was memorialized for her many good works--fourth down on left side; the whole monument is much bigger and fancier, this is just the inscription. Her husband, from a noble Florentine family, was a senator in the Napoleonic period and is buried next to her. Also, at right in the row above that picture, there's the "Baptism of Christ," by Verrocchio, but Leonardo was working as an apprentice in his atelier at the time and is known to have painted the angel who's in profile, the muscular body of Christ, and the background. It was not in the Verrocchio show at the Strozzi but at the Uffizi.