A Private View

Florence or, as the Italians would say, Firenze has always held a special place in my imagination. Anyone who has read Vasari's Lives of the Artists knows how central this medieval seat of learning and culture is to the history of art. A roll call of the masters who practised there from the 13th to the 17th centuries is very impressive indeed. Giants such as Michelangelo, Donatello, Giotto, Bernini and Botticelli will forever grace this city with their presence. Monuments such as the Baptistery and the Cathedral, not to mention the Cappella dei Principi, pepper the urban landscape and attract millions of tourists from all over the world.

In 2009 I spent some time in December visiting the city and seeing the main sights. I travelled two weeks before Christmas and even though Tuscany was cold, there was no rain and the sun sparkled from time to time. What was fantastic was that I was one of only a small number of tourists enjoying the atmosphere. I visited the main gallery, the Uffizi (above), one bright morning and wandered through the rooms entirely on my own under the laconic gaze of the attendants. Each happily nodding to my acknowledgments. It must be rare indeed for a visitor to have ten minutes alone with Botticelli's Birth of Spring and the Primavera. At the Duomo museum there is Michelangelo's third and final Pieta. Whilst examining this moving depiction, where the artist - a deeply religious man - depicts himself cradling the dead Christ, I was joined on my solitary watch by an elderly English couple. We all agreed that it was very surprising indeed to have one of the world's key masterpieces all to ourselves without having to push through throngs of tourists goggling and guides berating us with whole extracts from Wikipedia! The life size sculpture would have struck it's Renaissance audience by it's spirituality and demonstration of Christ's sacrifice. A 21st century viewer is struck more by the modernism of the Florentine's holding the body himself and by the fact that having decided that the work was not up to his lofty standards he took a chisel to it and sought to destroy it before abandoning the marble. An assistant later tried to complete it. The original passages of Michelangelo's carving stand out in the torso and composition highlighting that even in a failed vision the artist could not be equaled.

Having seen a number of the sculptor's works (such as the famous David, (above) I decided to visit Casa Buonarotti. Here are found a number of his earliest works including the Madonna of the Stairs carved when he was 16 as well as a great unfinished torso. Whilst admiring his work I said hello to one of the room attendants. This guard was a woman of certain years who managed to make her utilitarian uniform appear as a work of haute couture. As her solitary charge she admonished me for arriving in Winter when half the museum was shut and missing it. I agreed it might not have been good from that perspective but that I got to see so many things in comfort and could spend ten minutes in front of each of the master's drawings as a result without being pushed aside by the inexorable swell of tourists hailing from Beijing to Boston. The lady snorted, then let out an exasperated sigh and told me to wait where I was. She then darted off, perilously high heels clicking on the marble, and locked the entrance. Returning to me she ordered me to follow her and then gave me a complete tour of the house through the closed sections and behind the scenes. Amazing and another proof that travelling on your own and taking the time to talk with complete strangers pays off.

Following my once in a lifetime tour I dusted off my guidebook in a swish restaurant on Piazza della Republica and identified all the sculptures by the artist around the city and visited each one (below is his Genius of Victory from the Palazzo Vecchio). There is no place like Firenze!

Canal Reflections

The beauty of Amsterdam is that there are two cities, not one. For every stretch of Golden Age merchant's houses there is another reflected in the placid waters of the canals. The elms that raise watery green leaves against the skyline reflect again waving slowly in the silent depths.

Canals are elemental, a mixture of water and sky, made all the more profound by being angularly framed by man. A perfect picture of what lies above.

Ireland has a mere handful of canals to compare with those of the Netherlands. They stretch like a belt across the central plain and form a necklace around Dublin's girth. Those of Amsterdam ripple outwards from the Palace forming a maze of refracted and reflected worlds. The grachten are present in all the Western cities from Utrecht, to Leiden and the Hague. Each metropolis marked by a thumbprint of waterways. There seem too many to name.

Dublin has the Grand and Royal canals. The Grand ambles along the south of the city viewing Ballsbridge, Ranelagh and Rathmines on the way. Near Baggot Street a seat is set, allowing the observant to sit and watch. Here a statue of the country poet, Patrick Kavanagh, looks on. The bench was a response to his fantastic request, O commemorate me where there is water, Canal water, preferably, so stilly. The poet imagines the canal as a passageway and journey to Arcadia. In quite summer evenings his words come back to life: A swan goes by head low with many apologies... He ends the elegiac text with... ...O commemorate me with no hero-courageous Tomb - just a canal bank seat for the passer-by.

The Northside of the city boasts the Royal Canal. Sitting with his back to Drumcondra Bridge the statue of Brendan Behan sits vigilant eyeing passing ducks and the distant bulk of Mountjoy Gaol. A very different writer to Kavanagh, Behan circled the political, mocked the heroic and settled uncomfortably into his vision of Every (Dublin) Man. His poetry is all about Republicanism, prisons and politics. The anger of the little man in the larger scheme of things.

Both writers, although very different, share a genius for contemplation and it is this quality that inspired them to seek beauty and Arcadia and solace in these man made waterways. My canal pictures, I hope, do the same.

Green Door

The photograph is of the door of an old music shop on one of my favourite Dublin thoroughfares, Capel Street. This is a street dating from the late seventeenth century even though the buildings, for the most part, have eighteenth century facades. These are punctuated, here and there, by Victorian pubs and modern offices. Nothing is particularly out of place and nothing has particularly changed over the past two hundred and fifty years - with the exception that the street has taken a decidedly downmarket air.

In the eighteenth century it was a fashionable parade with dukes and dandys strolling along and purchasing lottery tickets - wealth was a given and the people inhabiting the street led unimaginable lives to the 'mere' Irish as they were known. Along the way gentlemen in frockcoats pranced, ladies sauntered and servants dashed invisible.

Meanwhile five miles in any direction from this spot people lived in abject poverty and suffered a series of famines in the lead up to the Great Hunger of the mid-nineteenth century. This was when over a million people died in five years.

Over the passing centuries this brilliant avenue began to drift from the raffishness of the lotteries to gambling clubs and side street inns. Gradually a middling crowd took over and the great public houses such as Slattery's appeared and provided a convivial pleasure for real working class Dubliners. In between grocers, tailors and merchants plied their wears only beginning to lose ground as the late Victorian suburbs spread outwards dragging the better class of customer with them.

The Rising against Britain, the subsequent destruction of the city centre by the Empire and the catastrophe of the Civil War played out within an ass's roar of the street and pushed the wealth of the area further downwards.

In the 1930s the route was famous for haberdasheries and builder's providers as well as furniture. The Emergency, as the Second World War is known in Ireland, killed off another layer of businesses and the street saw the erection of some new out of character buildings as planning and design were luxuries that the country could ill afford. Emmigration sapped the lifeblood of the island. By the 70s, when I first remember Capel Street, it was reduced to a steady stream of furniture shops, a well-known garden shop and an equally famous tailor. There were some less than salubrious pubs as well. All was snarled up in the beginnings of the angry love affair between Hibernia and the car. Come the 1980s, stripped pine showrooms with bunkbeds lined up on the footpaths became a common sight - readily parked to scoop up the baby boom. Then crazy happened.

Sex came to Ireland! Sexshops appeared, protests began, the church ranted, little old men railed, rosaries were proffered and yet these purveyors of sin survived - albeit dyslexically - Uthopia (and perhaps they are).

But through it all from the 1920s onwards this little shop sold musical instruments. Fiddles to be loved and played and the soul of the street resided in that brass handle as musicians, decade by decade, came to view and buy lutes, guitars and all manner of melody makers.

Now the shop, too, has passed.