I want to strangle each and every one of you with my hair ribbon.
December 2, 2014 11:05 AM   Subscribe

 
You know, we did visit the Uffizi on our honeymoon, so ...

(Although it was in Rome, next to the Pantheon, where an old man asked us, "Honeymoon, yes? You make a baby yet? No? Maybe tonight, eh??")
posted by uncleozzy at 11:22 AM on December 2, 2014 [3 favorites]


I was traveling solo when I saw the Uffizi. Strangely, that trip is one of the few trips I've taken in the past few years when I didn't get the opportunity to engage in, er, hijinks.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 11:25 AM on December 2, 2014


MetaFilter: You make a baby yet? No? Maybe tonight, eh??
posted by surazal at 11:48 AM on December 2, 2014 [8 favorites]


Of the Greeks as they really were, of their difference from ourselves, of the aspects of their outward life, we know far more than Botticelli, or his most learned contemporaries; but for us long familiarity has taken off the edge of the lesson, and we are hardly conscious of what we owe to the Hellenic spirit. But in pictures like this of Botticelli's you have a record of the first impression made by it on minds turned back towards it, in almost painful aspiration, from a world in which it had been ignored so long; and in the passion, the energy, the industry of realisation, with which Botticelli carries out his intention, is the exact measure of the legitimate influence over the human mind of the imaginative system of which this is perhaps the central myth. The light is indeed cold — mere sunless dawn; but a later painter would have cloyed you with sunshine; and you can see the better for that quietness in the morning air each long promontory, as it slopes down to the water's edge. Men go forth to their labours until the evening; but she is awake before them, and you might think that the sorrow in her face was at the thought of the whole long day of love yet to come. An emblematical figure of the wind blows hard across the grey water, moving forward the dainty-lipped shell on which she sails, the sea "showing his teeth," as it moves, in thin lines of foam, and sucking in, one by one, the falling roses, each severe in outline, plucked off short at the stalk, but embrowned a little, as Botticelli's flowers always are. Botticelli meant all this imagery to be altogether pleasurable; and it was partly an incompleteness of resources, inseparable from the art of that time, that subdued and chilled it. But this predilection for minor tones counts also; and what is unmistakable is the sadness with which he has conceived the goddess of pleasure, as the depositary of a great power over the lives of men.

"As a goddess, I command you! Go! Worship me in your cheap hotel rooms with their lump-filled beds; your package tour busses with their crumb-filled seats; your bargain ferries with their chum-scented berths. Make offerings to me at overrun beaches and abandoned monuments. Do it with your spouse or the person or people you met yesterday at the gelateria. Fornicate! Copulate! Alleviate my suffering!"
posted by Doktor Zed at 12:28 PM on December 2, 2014 [2 favorites]


Tourists! What a bunch of rubes.
posted by IndigoJones at 1:06 PM on December 2, 2014


I'm going to confess that although I took a good long look at it while I was there neither The Birth of Venus nor Primavera (another major Botticelli canvas nearby) got the reaction from me that they probably deserved. The scale was somewhat surprising -- they're both physically immense -- but familiarity had robbed the images of a lot of their potency and museum fatigue had taken some more..

I'm still very glad I had the chance to visit, though, and I would never describe my experience at the Uffizi as "just checking an item off my bucket list" because while The Birth of Venus didn't astonish me there were several other works in the collection that I'd never heard of or seen before that made my jaw drop. On the whole I think I shouldn't even say which ones, because yes, it is kind of taking away from a piece of art when you've seen it many times already in tiny reproduction form.
posted by Nerd of the North at 1:34 PM on December 2, 2014


"The zephyr that has been refreshing me for more than four centuries emits only the weak exhalation of a table fan in a budget hotel."

This was an enjoyable conceit. Loved the writing - it sort of went on an insult-bender at the end there, spiraling because where else could it go?

Nice bit of work.
posted by joseph conrad is fully awesome at 3:31 PM on December 2, 2014


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