Florence: The Art That Built
June 2005
Each one impressed me more than the last. That’s how Chris had planned it, I think — a sequence, not a checklist. You don’t start with the thing that will flatten you. You build up to it.
After Donatello’s bronze David at the Bargello, we went to the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo. That’s where I saw Donatello’s Mary Magdalene — carved from wood, not marble, not bronze. Wood. She’s gaunt, hollowed out, her hair matted and hanging in ropes around her body. She looks like she’s been in the desert for years, which is the point. There’s no beauty in the way you’d expect from a Renaissance sculpture. There’s something harder than beauty. She looked like she’d survived something that almost killed her and come out the other side stripped down to bone and faith. I stood in front of her and thought about what it takes to carve something that honest out of a single piece of wood.
At Santo Spirito, across the river, there was a wooden crucifix attributed to Michelangelo — carved when he was young, before the marble, before the fame. It’s small and quiet and easy to miss in a church full of other things to look at. But I didn’t miss it. The body on that cross had a tenderness to it that I wasn’t expecting from Michelangelo. It felt like something made by a person who was still learning what he could do with his hands, and that uncertainty made it more human than anything I’d seen in the slides back home.
Santo Spirito became one of my favorite places in the city. Not for the crucifix alone — for the piazza outside. One afternoon a local school group was there and the kids got into a water fight, just soaking each other and screaming and laughing in the heat, and we sat on the steps and watched and drew. That’s what I remember most about that side of the Arno. It felt less traveled. The tourists thinned out over there. You could sit and sketch without being in anyone’s way.
The Pitti Palace was the opposite — exhausting. Hall after hall of paintings and portraits stacked floor to ceiling in gilded frames. Room after room. My eyes gave out before my legs did. There’s a point where you’ve seen so much beauty that it stops registering, and you’re just walking through a warehouse of masterpieces feeling nothing. The Boboli Gardens behind the palace saved me. I walked out into the green and the air and the gravel paths and felt my brain start working again.
But nothing competed with the David.
We went to the Accademia and walked down the hallway toward him — Michelangelo’s unfinished Slaves lining the corridor on both sides, these figures still half-trapped in their marble blocks, struggling to get out. And then the hallway opens up and there he is.
The scale is the first thing. He’s seventeen feet tall. You know this from the books, you’ve read the number, but standing under him is different from reading a number. He’s enormous in a way that makes you feel the size of your own body. And he’s perfect — not in a sterile way, but in the way that a thing made by human hands shouldn’t be possible and yet here it is. The veins in his hand. The tension in his neck as he turns to look at Goliath. Every muscle coiled and waiting.
He was Florence’s national emblem. The symbol of a city that believed a young man with nothing but nerve and skill could bring down a giant. I was a thirty-year-old farmboy who’d retaken algebra to get into college, standing in a room full of tourists, looking up at the most famous sculpture in the world, and I understood why they chose him. Not because he won. Because he stood there and decided to try.
I went back to see him three more times before the summer was over.