Uffizi overload

One of the challenges of traveling Europe with kids is that museums are just so big, and the kids don't have a lot of context yet for what they are seeing. How many Madonnas and Child can one kid see before they all start to run together? Heck, even we adults can get a big glassy eyed at all the Raffaello's and Ghirlandaio's &c.

So we've adopted a strategy when we hit the large museums like the Uffizi or the British Museum or the Vatican. Everyone in the family picks one or two items in the museum, does some preliminary research on them--who made it, what's the story behind it, why is it interesting--and then presents their piece to the family using slides and a television monitor.

For the Uffizi, the draft resulted in:

• Ognissanti Madonna, by Giotto - Scott
• Venus de Medici (standing Venus), ancient - Katie
• The Annunciation, by da Vinci - Becca
• Hercules pair, by Pollaiolo - Luke
• Dondo Toni, by Micahelangelo - Alex
• Laocoon and his Sons, by Bandinelli, copy of ancient - Scott
• The Birth of Venus, by Botticelli - Katie

Then each of us makes a blog post about our piece(s) as a retrospective.

Ognissanti Madonna

Giotto can be described many ways, as the father of Renaissance art, or the spark that lit the Renaissance, or the intuitive master that presaged the scientific art of the Renaissance. However you describe him, paintings by Giotto and his studio in the early 1300s revolutionized European painting. It's worth noting that this took place only a few years after Edward built Caernarfon Castle in Wales (if you are following our family timeline).

There are a number of notable features of this piece. Mary is set in a chair that has depth and looks almost three-dimensional, though Giotto had no knowledge of the perspective techniques and math that would become so important in the next century. The facial expressions and postures are natural, in contrast to the stiff Byzantine style that had dominated for centuries. The saints and angels all draw your gaze to the Mary and Jesus, as does the triangular pattern joining Mary's face with the foreground angels. Even Mary's clothes look more "Renaissance" than "medieval."

Yet the piece is clearly a transition piece. The gold leaf looks Byzantine. There is no real background. The figures, while realistic, would never be mistaken for Botticelli's or da Vinci's.

Laocoön and His Sons

The Uffizi Laocoön has it all--it's a magnificent sculpture, it's a Renaissance era statue with a storied history, it's a copy of an ancient statue which itself has a storied history, it's an embodiment of a tragic moment from the Trojan war. And on and on.

First, the backstory for the statue. The original Laocoon statue was famous in ancient Rome, and was described by Pliny the Elder. It was lost for centuries, but Renaissance artists knew of it from the description in the ancient texts. One day in 1506 a farmer discovered a buried chamber with a large statue in it, and sent word to the Vatican. When he heard the description, Michaelangelo is supposed to have said, "It's the Laocoon!" and, with a couple of other artists, rushed to the excavation to confirm the find.

The ancient statue was an instant sensation in Rome, and a few years later the pope commissioned a copy to be sent to King Francois I of France, and selected an artist named Baccio Bandinelli. Bandinelli spent many years working on the copy, and by the time he finished, in 1525, a new pope (who happened to have been named Giulio de Medici) decided that the statue was too grand for France and had it sent, instead, to the Medici palace in Florence, and it remains in Florence to this day. (The ancient statue is still in the Vatican, after a brief detour to France in the Napoleonic years.)

The statue itself is quite striking. The story of Laocoön appears in Virgil's Aeneid, in Book II, and is worth reading. But here's the short version: Laocoön warns the Trojans not to accept the wooden horse, and tells them that they cannot trust the Greeks, who have left the horse and sailed away. Shortly after his warning, two serpents come out of the sea and attack his sons, Laocoön goes to their aid, and all three are overcome. 

    They move
    on a set course towards Laocoön: and first each serpent
    entwines the slender bodies of his two sons,
    and biting at them, devours their wretched limbs:
    then as he comes to their aid, weapons in hand, they seize him too,
    and wreathe him in massive coils...

It gets worse from there. Because Laocoön was the spokesperson for the don't-trust-the-Greeks camp, and given what happened to him, opposition to accepting the gift evaporated and the horse was hauled inside the walls of Troy and to the temple of Athena. A few hours later, Odysseus and friends jump out, open the gates, and the city is destroyed.

Today it remains one of the most famous statues in the world. We have already seen modern copies in Cork on this trip and in Stockholm last year. We expect to see the original in Rome, and perhaps another copy in Rhodes (where the original was said to have been carved).