Museums: Rome and Florence

Georgio appreciating ape art in the Vatican Museums

We took Georgio to the Vatican Museums and the Villa Julia collection of Etruscan art in Rome, and the Uffizi, Academia, and Pitti Palace in Florence. He wanted to go to the Borghese in Rome but when we got there we found that it was sold out. WARNING: If you want to go to a well-known museum in Italy BOOK ON-LINE FIRST. The queue for the clueless I-didn't-reserve-on-line crowd when we went to the Vatican was 1/2 mile long. I measured it on Google Earth.

Part of la gente stupida who didn't book a prenotazione (reservation)
lined up under the rather impressive wall of Vatican City

George had a mixed reaction to the museums of Italy. It wasn't just the lack of significant monkey art in the Italian canon, but the fact that sometimes you had to endure plenty of bad art to find the good stuff. (If you've been to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston you'll know what I mean.)

Here, in any case, is George's take on the museums he saw.

Vatican: So overrated (says George). Ancient Roman statuary is almost uniformly awful and so are the Baroque imitations. Lots of it on view at the Vatican. We escaped into the Etruscan and Greek rooms: art from a simpler and less triumphalist age. But, as in so much of Rome, it's the space itself that matters. These places were made to impress (as in the hall of maps):

The hall of maps at the Vatican

Villa Julia: The museum of Etruscan art. There's something very appealing about the little-known Etruscans--who occupied Tuscany before Rome became powerful.  Modern Italians seem much more Etruscan than ancient-Roman.

Etruscan wall painting

In Florence...

The Uffizi: The best museum of the lot. One thing George liked is that the art is arranged chronologically so that you get a good overview of the development of Italian art fro the earliest Byzantine influences to the more recent centuries.

Pitti Palace: OMG what c**p. There are a few good things--an Annunciation by Andrea del Sarto that I (I mean George) really liked:

A disheveled Gabriel looks like an apprentice on his first big job. The virgin is taken aback...

The Annunciation is a common theme in early Italian art, and why not: an event full of promise and magic renewal. A new world is being created.

The Academia: Where Michelangelo's David steals the show.

George went and spoiled it for me by saying: "You know, Paul... From a certain angle he kind of looks like Donald Trump."

That's the last time I take George to a museum.