Botticelli at the Uffizi
The first order of business in Florence is to go to the Uffizi Gallery. And the first order of business at the Uffizi is Botticelli! Below, the Birth of Venus, and some ceilings.
Tintoretto Masterpiece
Finally, here is a masterpiece by Tintoretto, a work which has haunted my imagination since I first saw it 16 years ago, here at the Uffizi: The Expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden. There are so many aspects of this work that are arresting: the light from God that nevertheless casts a shadow on the figures, particularly Adam; the stark asymmetry of the painting as a whole; the light on the Adam and Eve figures, contrasting with the darkness into which they are cast, highlighting their new-found shame; and the fine brushwork of the human figures compared to the crude, almost unfinished quality of the painting of God (those white lines on God’s arm are squiggles that you might get by squeezing a tube of white paint onto the blue arm); and finally, as the attached commentary notes, there is no gesture of expulsion, as commonly occurs in other renderings of this scene from Genesis 3, but rather, a necessary and organic separation, as with the light and the darkness: the Garden was no
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