jere7my | Church of the dead

Thursday, July 2 - Florence

It's taking me longer and longer to upload photos. On the one hand, I keep learning new things to do in Photoshop to spruce them up, and each new technique adds time. On the other, once they're prettified, I'm compelled to research each photo, so I can accurately tag them — Who painted it? Where was it? When was it built? So, for instance, I know that the funeral monument above was Félicie de Fauveau's last and greatest work, sculpted in 1858, and that the ascending soul is that of Louise Favreau. This takes time, enough time that I could probably be called self-indulgent, but it also deepens my appreciation of the places we visited on our vacation. I see connections I wasn't aware of before (Brunelleschi is everywhere!), and I feel I'm adding to the sum total of knowledge on the internet.

Louise Favreau's funeral monument is in Santa Croce, which is all about tombs and cenotaphs: Michelangelo's tomb, Galileo's tombs (the secret one and the public one), Dante's cenotaph (he's buried in Ravenna, as you may recall), Machiavelli's cenotaph. Dozens of heraldically splendid floor tombs. Monuments to Marconi and Florence Nightingale, and the monument to Niccolini that was the basis for the Statue of Liberty. It's not as opulent as St. John Lateran, but it's not for nothing that it's called the Temple of the Italian Glories. There are also two perfect cloisters, hatfuls of grand frescoes, and quite a nice museum, to boot.

Santa Croce outside, and inside:

The reliquary of Saint Humiliana, sitting atop her glass sarcophagus. There's a hinge in the top, which can be opened for viewing of her skull.

Toes of an angel.

Galileo's tomb. He was moved here from a tiny room off the Medici Chapel almost a hundred years after he died, after the popes settled down about him. Note the little heliocentric solar system. This was his hidden tomb:

Michelangelo's tomb. The three sad chicks are Sculpture, Painting, and Architecture.

You run a risk with floor tombs, what with all the tourists walking on them for five hundred years....

"I lift my chains beside the golden door."

Grand fresco in the sacristy.

The ambulatory of the Greater Cloister, which looks like this:

I love the details in Agnolo Bronzino's Descent of Christ into Limbo (1552), from the gauzily erotic:

...to the fantastical:

Check out the contorted anatomy of that pointy-nippled demon, the flippered turtle-demon, and the faded, incomplete tentacle-demon in the left corner.

Outside, in the Piazza Santa Croce, cranky-pants Dante glowers while his faithful eagle sidekick asks, "What's next, boss?"