Florence (Firenze)

Orsanmichele, Firenze, 11 Dicembre 2017

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My subtitle would be: I love Florence in the winter!

I wandered into Orsanmichele today and had the masterpiece all to myself.  I lit candles for some beloved family members and took a pew, gazing at Orcagna’s magnificent altarpiece for a long, long time.  It was a gorgeous moment in Florence, the kind of thing I live for.

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I started thinking about the name: Orsanmichele.  It is not a common name for a church.  What is the significance, I wondered?

“San Michele” or Saint Michael is easy to extract from the name, but I had to head to Wikipedia for the full answer.  Orsanmichele (or “Kitchen Garden of St. Michael“, from the contraction in Tuscan dialect of the Italian word orto) is a church that was constructed on the site of the kitchen garden of the monastery of San Michele, which no longer exists.

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Located on the Via Calzaiuoli in Florence, the square building was constructed as a grain depository and market in 1337 by Francesco Talenti, Neri di Fioravante, and Benci di Cione.

Between 1380 and 1404, the building was converted into a church, to be used as the chapel of Florence’s powerful craft and trade guilds.

From the exterior, the ground floor contains the 13th-century arches that originally formed the loggia of the grain market.

The second floor was devoted to offices, while the third housed one of the city’s municipal grain storehouses, maintained to withstand famine or siege.

Late in the 14th century, the guilds were charged by the city to commission statues of their patron saints to embellish the four facades of the church.[1]’

Orsanmichele’s sculptures are a relic of the fierce devotion and pride of Florentine trades, and a reminder that great art often arises out of a competitive climate. Each trade hoped to outdo the other in commissioning original, groundbreaking sculptures for public display on Florence’s most important street, and the artists hired and materials used (especially bronze) indicate the importance that was placed on this site.

The Renaissance sculptures have been removed to museums, but faithful copies of each work of art have been placed in the niches.

Another day I will illustrate the niche sculptures, but today I felt like sitting inside the church and studying Andrea Orcagna‘s seemingly bejeweled Gothic Tabernacle (1355-59), which encases a repainting by Bernardo Daddi‘s of an older icon, the ‘Madonna and Child’.[2]

I don’t think there are actual jewels in the tabernacle, but the encrusted mosaics make it seem that way.

One of the first things I noticed is that the exterior of the cupola of the altarpiece is shaped and decorated like a Fabrege egg.  You can see what I mean in the photo below.

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Here’s a detailed look at the egg shape, right behind the triangle of the facade:

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If you are ever fortunate enough to spend the winter in Florence, you can enjoy Orsanmichele all to yourself as well.  Here’s info on opening hours.  The museum on the upper floor is NOT to be missed.

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Opera in Florence

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Opera in Florence has often functioned most successfully when pursuing the intellectual curiosity of a cultivated elite rather than the lowest common denominator of popular taste.

In 1933, when conductor Vittorio Gui initiated Italy’s first large-scale festival, the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, he conceived it in terms of a cultural mission: reviving forgotten masterworks (such as Spontini’s La Vestale, starring Rosa Ponselle in her only Italian performances) and revisiting the standard repertory with a teasing touch of sophistication (De Chirico’s provocatively modernistic sets for Bellini’s I Puritani).

Two years later, Rossini’s Mosè and Rameau’s Castor et Pollux were staged, and for three decades Florence became one of the few places in the world where Baroque opera and rare works by Rossini got a hearing with any regularity.

It was in this city that Renata Tebaldi had a chance to sing Rossini’s Assedio di Corinto (1949) and Spontini’s Olimpia (1950), and it was here alone that Maria Callas could be heard as Haydn’s Euridice (1951) and Rossini’s Armida (1952).

From that same period, Bruno Bartoletti — who has himself enjoyed an incomparably long and decidedly fruitful association with the festival — recalls the revelatory musical cogency of Dimitri Mitropoulos’s conducting in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (1954). And Bartoletti himself was protagonist — as conductor of Berg’s Wozzeckand Shostakovich’s The Nose — of the innovative 1964 Maggio Musicale, devoted to Expressionism.

Since then, Florence has continued to attract some of the world’s greatest musicians. Riccardo Muti was principal conductor here from 1968 to 1980, and since taking over in 1985, Zubin Mehta has upheld the highest standards of orchestral playing; but the festival has undeniably lost its cutting edge.

One of the reasons is that Gui’s highly individual mission has by now become standard strategy for many music festivals worldwide, making it difficult for the Maggio Musicale to stand out amid the competition. Another reason is that increasingly cumbersome productions have made it arduous to stage two or more operas simultaneously.

In spite of intermittent use of the intimate seventeenth-century Teatro della Pergola, as well as the much larger Teatro Comunale (an acoustically problematic venue, first opened in 1862), it has seldom been possible in recent decades to see at least two operas on consecutive nights — for most visitors, the principal appeal of any festival experience.