Sculpture Exchange

One day we had occasion to be out of our apartment for several hours while work was done there, and the agent suggested that la Biblioteca delle Oblata would be a pleasant, quiet place to hang out--a library open to the public free, and much frequented by students. I had actually been there briefly once before, when I bumped into my friend Vicky on the sidewalk as I started to walk home to my then apartment from la Scuola Leonardo da Vinci, the school Steve and I attended for several years, which is quite close to the Biblioteca. Vicky was on her way to the library (to return books? I forget) and I went along with her for a bit.

In the courtyard in front of the library there are several pieces of sculpture, and on Steve's and my way out this time I examined one of them more closely. It's a bronze monument, life size or maybe a little bigger, to Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861), a Ukrainian poet, writer, artist, and public and political figure, considered a founder of modern Ukrainian literature and culture. The inscription below the sculpture says, "Poet, Painter, Thinker, Humanist and Ukrainian." The big swirl of metaphorical bronze that surrounds the figure includes at the very top of it is something resembling a bird, representing perhaps freedom of thought, elsewhere there are swirls of flowers, for beauty? The metal can't deny its weightiness so I don't think it's the best part of the sculpture, but the figure is nice and the inscription is touching.

After a hard childhood, at 24 Shevchenko was released from serfdom, with some initial success as a writer and painter in St. Petersburg, but he was arrested for writing in the Ukrainian language and for his membership in a group opposing Ukraine's oppression by Russian upper classes. He was imprisoned and exiled, and on his release lived for a while in St. Petersburg, where he died of long chronic illnesses at 47; his funeral was attended by literary greats including Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Not long afterwards, as he had wished to be buried in Ukraine, his body was transferred by his friends to Kaniv, near the Dnipro River.

I wondered why this monument to him should be in Florence. The answer is that since 1967 Kiev and Florence have had a twinned-city relationship, with cultural exchanges of various kinds, and this sculpture was given to Florence in 2021 in thanks for a sculpture of Dante given by Florence to Kiev in 2015. It was made by the Ukrainian artist Oleg Pinchuk. It does not appear that there was any connection of Shevchenko with Florence or Italy during his lifetime, nor for quite a while after his death!

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https://cultura.comune.fi.it/dalle-redazioni/la-citta-di-kiev-dona-una-statua-firenze