Trip to London and Italy 2/25
on February 14, 2025, Mary and I caught a flight from MSP to SNA to spend a week with our daughter and her family… we celebrated birthdays and spent time with our grandkids… it is always fun to get out of the cold of a Minnesota February… on Wednesday, February 19, we caught a flight from LAX to LHR… we were lucky enough to go first class which makes the ten hour flight a bit less of a strain… although, I do not sleep well on planes, so just watched several movies and ate too many snacks…
the weather in London at this time of year is with highs in the upper 40s and lower 50s, which is cool but warm compared to Minnesota… we are getting older, 77 this year, so we spent the first day just unwinding from the jet lag and went to bed early… we stayed in a small hotel near Paddington Station… at Paddington, we can catch buses and subways (referred to as tubes in England) to pretty much any destination in central London… so, we took a bus on Friday to Trafalgar Square… it is fun to take the buses because, even though the tubes are faster, from the bus, you can see a bit of the city as you pass through various areas… on these trips, we usually spend the day going to museums or art related venues and the evenings going to plays on the West End…
the National Gallery is on Trafalgar Square… unfortunately, the room that houses my favorite paintings at the National Gallery was closed… but, that wound up being ok because there are so many treasures in this Museum that I found plenty of amazing paintings to feast my eyes on… as a person who makes oil paintings, I love to look closely at the paintings by the old masters to see just how they created their effects… and then to step back and see the whole piece… this trip, I spent some time looking at two Vermeer paintings… especially looking for traces of his almost invisible brushwork and appreciating the tonal quality of his paintings of fabrics… there was a lovely calm to these paintings that I enjoyed… and the images are almost magical in their glow of painted light…
I also spent some time with the work of the great Spanish artist Diego Velasquez… one of the very few nudes he ever painted is there, called the Rokeby Venus… the figure of a reclining woman is so amazingly beautiful… for anyone who has ever tried to paint a nude figure, this is about as well as that task can be done… I have been painting landscapes more lately, so it was good for me to walk through the galleries and look at all the amazing landscapes that have been painted since the renaissance in various schools and styles from the renaissance masters to the great British Landscapists like Constable… I also enjoyed reseeing the Caravaggio which reminded me, I guess that light is only half the story when painting figuratively, shadow is really cool and interesting in this kind of painting…
we went to an experimental play at a little distance from the West End, and, it was fun to see what the young playwrights and theater people are excited about… in the case of the first play, called, Stalled, it was about grief and the trials facing a group of women who meet in a “ladies room” in Seattle… it was an amazingly moving and well acted piece and we both loved it… although it was pretty sad…
the next morning, we decided to do something different, so we took the bus to the Tower Bridge, probably the most famous landmark in London, and walked across it… from the bridge, you have a nice prospect of the city with the towers of glass and of the rehabbed warehouses fronting the water that look to be now, high end condos… we then took the subway to Notting Hill because that was near where our play that night would be… we planned to look around the area… when we got off the train, we found that there was a huge open air market on Portobello Road right near there… so, we spent the afternoon looking around the market… there were hats, scarfs, clothing, antiques, flea market type stuff, just a wide variety of stuff people were buying and selling in the stalls… I remembered the song from Mary Poppins about this market, “place where the riches of ages are stowed…” other than the song, I know nothing of the history of this market but it was fun to wander through the crowds and look at all the stuff on display… we had a soda in a small bar where we rested our feet and sat and watched the people… when we tired of the market, we took a bus to the actual location of the play for that night… we were hungry by then, so had a nice meal in an Iraqi café… there are Middle Eastern cafes all over London and they always have interesting and delicious food… after a lovely leisurely supper, we walked a couple blocks and had another small theater experience at an equally fine play…
the next morning, we took the bus to the Tate Britian to see my favorite pre-Raphaelite paintings… unfortunately, the museum was closed as they were setting up cameras on the outdoor steps and also inside the museum for some kind of fashion show… since the venue was closed, we decided to do a boat ride to Greenwich… so, we took the bus back to the Embankment ferry stop and got on the ferry for Greenwich… it was a particularly chilly, blustery and rainy day but we had warm and rainproof layers, so were fine… after enjoying the view of the city from the river, we got to Greenwich… disembarking from the ferry, we stopped to look at the Cutty Sark… the famous old clipper ship that is in drydock there… we last saw this ship in 1972 on our first trip to England… it looked as stately and elegant as I remembered even though I knew that the ship had been extensively damaged in a fire in 2007… fortunately, the bow and the stern of the ship had not been much damaged by the fire and from the outside, the ship looked as good as new… as a child, I had been much fascinated by sailing ships, drawing them and making models for example, and it was fun to learn that, even at 77 the sight of the lovely old clipper gave me a bit of a flutter… the play that night was also a small theater production at a small playhouse at Elephant and Castle, which is across the Thames from Central London, and was very interesting, a musical based on the movie Edward Scissorhands… the first three plays were these small theater productions away from the West End because the West End theaters were all very expensive for those days… the last three plays we saw were in huge old West End theaters…
Monday, we went to the Guildhall Art Gallery to see one of my favorite Rossetti paintings… La Ghirlandata (the garlanded one) is a painting Rossette made in 1873, when he was at the height of his powers as an artist… it portrays one of his favorite models, Alexa Wilding, one of the pre-Raphaelite super models, with garlands of flowers and two portraits of May Morris, daughter of Rossetti’s girlfriend, Jane Morris (who was married to his friend William Morris, the famous wallpaper and furniture designer, poet and stained glass manufacturer)… Rossetti considered it his best painting… I love this gallery, not only because it holds one of my favorite paintings of all time, but because it is clean and quiet and I can go there and enjoy that painting without distractions of other compelling favorites to look at… it is located near St. Paul’s Cathedral so, it was nice to see that building again too… then after a great pub dinner, we found our way to the beautiful old Prince Edward Theater… our seats were high up but we could see the stage perfectly… the play was basically a concert performance by a Michael Jackson impersonator… it was an interesting blast from the past, and had us remembering when those songs were everywhere back in the day… and certainly gave us a fresh appreciation of the unique talents of one of the most successful pop artists of our lifetime…
the next morning, we went back to the Tate Britian and I got to look again at all those pre-Raphaelite paintings that I have known and studied for so many years… I especially took a close look at the GF Watts painting Hope… and at the two Rossetti paintings now facing each other in a corner of the room, one of his wife and one of his lover… funny how through a hundred and forty years, the passions and lives of those people have survived to some degree in these paintings… the painting Beata Beatrix is a posthumous painting of Rossetti’s wife Elizabeth Siddall painted in fits and starts from the time of her death and finished around 1870… the painting on the facing wall is a painting of which Rossetti made several versions called Proserpine… the one on the wall in the Tate Britain is the 7th Version painted in 1874… this painting portrays Jane Morris, who was married to Rossetti’s friend William Morris and with whom Rossetti had an affair with the apparent approval of his friend… these paintings have titular subjects, but the real subject is the personal relationship the artist had with the women…
so after another great dinner, we went to another of the great old West End theaters to see the play by John Cleese based on his British television show, Faulty Towers… it was very funny… and fun, at the Apollo theater in the heart of the West End theater district….
the next day was our last in London, so in the morning, we found a laundromat near our hotel and did our laundry… then we went to visit the Leighton House in Holland Park which is in the Kensington area of London… this is a house where the Victorian and sometime pre-Raphaelite painting Fredrick Leighton lived… we have visited it before… it is kept as a memento of that artist, his life and work… Leighton was friendly with the pre-Raphaelite group but never really a part of the group… in his lifetime, he was immensely famous and successful… he eventually became president of the Royal Academy and earned a vast fortune from his painting, part of which he spent on building the splendid house which is his monument… like all of the Nineteenth Century painters, he was an expert at drawing the figure… his most famous works are beautifully painted figures of nude or semi nude women in classical settings… although he also painted expertly done landscapes and large set pieces of historical and mythological subjects for the annual shows of the Royal Academy, and lovely portraits… Leighton lived alone in this large house with a few servants… the entire upstairs is taken up by a huge studio with big north facing windows… the floor is planks and there is a stage at one end with a grand piano… his drawings and paintings are displayed around the studio… it was great to me to see his beautifully done drawings of the figure… one of his lovely nude paintings is in the Tate Britian near the Rossettis… his most beautiful and famous work is titled Flaming June and is in an obscure art museum in Ponce, Puerto Rico… many years ago, I made a pilgrimage to Ponce to see that painting… funny that Mr. Leighton was so enormously successful in his own lifetime but by 1950, only fifty years after his death, he was almost totally forgotten and even today, his work is only known to a handful of people like myself who have a special interest in painting of that era… I guess there is a lesson for those who seek fame here in how fleeting fame can be…
that night, our final play was Mean Girls at the Savoy, a large old theater on the Strand just a few blocks from Trafalgar Square… it was lively and entertaining…
the next morning, we got up at five and headed into Paddington to catch the Elizabeth line tube to Heathrow… there we got a British Airways flight to Florence, Italy… the Florence airport is fairly small… they do not use jet bridges, so we embarked via stairway onto the ramp to get a bus to the terminal which was kind of fun and old school, for those of us who love air travel… there is a tram that runs from the airport to the train station in the center of Florence… we had a hotel within walking distance of the tram so, after a brief tram ride, and a bit of a walk, we were at our hotel… the hotel was just a block from the Duomo, the mighty multicolored cathedral which is the center of Florences tourist district… I had last been in Florence in 1972, and it was interesting to see how much busier and bigger the city had gotten…
in the tourist area, there were many many shops selling designer clothing, shoes and accessories… and people from all over the world loaded down with shopping bags with designer logos… the tourists were very fashionably dressed and certainly seemed very affluent… there were restaurants everywhere and the Italian food was, of course, terrific… we walked around and looked at the cathedral that first evening, had a light dinner and went to bed… the next morning, I figured out how to get a bus, so we caught the bus to the Uffizi Gallery… I had not booked tickets in advance, but we were lucky and there were no lines to get in… we had not eaten yet, so had a nice light brunch at the rooftop restaurant overlooking the famous crenellated bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio…
for anyone interested in Renaissance art, the Uffizi is ground zero… Titian, Botticelli, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael are all well represented along with a host of lesser masters… when I go to an art museum, even one as enormous and filled with masterpieces as the Uffizi, I like to look at mostly my favorite paintings, paintings that I have known all my life and not spend a lot of time exploring… so we went straight to the room where Michelangelo’s only complete easel painting, the Tondo Doni which is… this piece is a 47 inch in diameter circular painting… the subject is religious, but what interests me is the immense beauty of the figures, how the light caresses the draperies and the perfectly drawn arms, hands, etc… I believe that this painting has a deep and complex symbolic meaning both related to the religious story on the surface and going deeper into the psychology of the family and the nude figures in the background… anyway, what a treat to see this painting from only a few feet away… a true masterpiece by Michelangelo who considered himself more of a sculptor than painter!!!
in the next room is Leonardo’s famous unfinished Adoration… with this painting being left unfinished, it is possible to study Leonardo’s drawing and preparation for a finished painting… again to stand a few feet from a piece that the master worked on and to see his ideas coming together in the moment, is, for me an enormous thrill… my two favorite paintings of all time just a few steps from each other….
we also looked at a marvelous painting by Raphael and a beautiful Titian, all of which I remembered fondly from our visit here so many years ago… perhaps the biggest treat of the whole trip for me was seeing the Portinari Altarpiece by Flemish painter Hugo Van Der Goes… this painting was commissioned for a chapel in Florence and remains in Florence, now at the Uffizi… this is a wondrously weird painting with the odd looking “realistic” faces and figures of the people portrayed, but there are double images hidden in the background, one of a howling face (the entrance to Hell?) and one of giants hidden in the rocks in the background, which, once you see them, you cannot unsee and which give the painting a whole new level of psychological meaning in addition to the very complex symbolism of the details of the objects and people portrayed… not a lot is known about Van Der Goes except that he suffered from mental health disorders, and was actually considered to be mad before he died in 1482…
the next day in Florence, we went to an open air market and enjoyed seeing all of the fancy leather goods for sale… and then walked on to the Medici Chapel… the chapel itself is an uber fancy high roofed building of multi colored marble, but spectacular as the chapel is, down a hall and into another room, you come to a room of Medici tombs in which there are 7 statues carved by Michelangelo… the four reclining figures are if not Michelangelo’s finest works, certainly his weirdest… the twisting torsos of two hugely muscled women and two equally twisted and muscled men defy gravity and seem to exist in some primal, erotic natural order far beyond the normal… Michelangelo, what were you thinking when you carved these gorgeous unsettling figures??? maybe I will someday write an essay about these figures… there is also a Madonna and child by Michelangelo in the room and two conventional figures by lesser artists… I left the room gobsmacked by the beauty and power of these figures and the “terriblita” of Michelangelo…
On the upper floor of the Uffizi, there is a long hallway that leads past the rooms of Renaissance masterpieces… this hallway is lined with Roman statues… some of which are Roman copies of Greek originals… these statues are made of carved and polished white marble, but it is interesting to note that in Ancient Roman and Greek times, these statues were colored, polychromatic…( https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture ) although this has been known now by at least some scholars and art historians since the late 1700s, it was not known in the Renaissance… during Michelangelo’s time, Roman statues (including the famous Laacoon) were being found and dug up all over the area that had once been the city of Rome during the time of the Roman Empire… in fact, Michelangelo was often called upon as an expert when one of these statues was found and was actually in attendance when the Laacoon was dug up… while these statues had almost certainly all been painted with lifelike skin coloration and various colors and patterns in the fabrics, the time underground had removed most of the pigment from these pieces, so they appeared, when pulled from the ground and cleaned, pure white… so, the aesthetic of the Renaissance sculptors including Michelangelo was based on the erroneous notion that ancient statues were created in the white marble and not intended to be painted…
there is great beauty in these white marble and bronze colored statues, even if it is not the way that the classical sculptors intended them to be seen… if Michelangelo had known that these pieces had been polychrome 1500 years before they were dug up, I wonder if that would have changed his own work… creating marble carvings of figures, Michelangelo thought he was following in the aesthetic footsteps of the ancient sculptors and even though his aesthetic was based on a lack of our modern knowledge of how the ancient statues were finished and presented, Michelangelo took the aesthetic he had with its limitations and its possibilities of creating powerful art and did what he needed to do to make the art… had he been aware of the polychrome nature of ancient statuary, my guess is that he would simply have shrugged his shoulders and gone on cutting stone acknowledging that the colorlessness of the work he saw around him from the ancient world and the work he was crafting anew in his own workshop had such infinite possibilities of expression that he would just continue carving and not take time to worry whether he was redoing the ancients in an archeologically accurate way, or creating a new aesthetic of monochrome “classical” pure marble sculpture… but, just maybe, he would have painted his statues… an interesting thought when looking at his sculpture…
the next morning, we caught a flight to Rome… we stayed in a lovely resort hotel in Fiumicino, Italy, next to the airport of the same name… we had a nice walk around the residential area and around the lawns and gardens of this lovely hotel and the next morning went to the airport… unfortunately our ten hour return flight to Atlanta was delayed, but eventually we got out and were in first class again which makes the flight much easier… the delay caused us to miss our connection to MSP, so we spent a quiet night at the Holiday Inn and caught a flight the next day back home… it was a great trip and at our age, who knows when if ever we will get to travel again to these great and interesting destinations… we arrived in Minnesota the day before a ten inch snow storm… so, back to reality and a chance to give my new snow shovels a workout…