Freya's Florence Tours - Freya Middleton

12/02/2025

Good morning from Venice!

12/02/2025

Perhaps the most quirky painter of the Florentine renaissance...
Piero di Lorenzo di Piero d’Antonio was born January 2, 1462, most likely in Florence, to a blacksmith father. Little is known about his life, and most of his artwork remains undocumented.
Giorgio Vasari paints a colorful picture of the artist, though many of his anecdotes are likely fantastical exaggerations. It is known that Piero studied under Cosimo Rosselli, from whom he took his surname. Throughout his life, Piero di Cosimo appears to have been a prominent, and sought-after, artist in Florence, fulfilling contracts for the Strozzi, Pugliese, and Vespucci families.
Piero was known for his professionalism, always completing his commissions. Vasari, however, describes Piero as a somewhat crazy recluse. Piero di Cosimo died in 1522, at the age of 60, seemingly of the plague.
Pictured here is one of a pair of Tritons and Nereids, both long and thin, that may have been executed around 1505 or 1507.
The pair depict nereids (sea nymphs), satyrs, and tritons—classical creatures with the upper bodies of men, the tails of a fish or dolphin, and, occasionally, horse legs. The two works are more of a frieze of characters than a true narrative.

12/02/2025

Il Porcellino, as the Italians call him, means “the little pig”. However the bronze piggy sitting at the side of the Mercato Nuovo is really a wild boar, or cinghiale in Italian. He brings good luck when visitors rub his snout and put a coin in his mouth. If the water washes the coin from the pig’s mouth and it falls into the grate below, you will have good luck and you will be sure to return to Florence. If not, try again. The coins are used to support an orphanage.
The first bronze boar fountain was made in 1634 and rubbing the snout for good luck was mentioned as far back as the 1700s. The bronze statue was a copy of a Roman marble statue which was a gift from the Pope to the Medici in the 1560s. And that statue was a copy of a Greek statue from antiquity. The one we see today is a twentieth century copy installed when the 1634 bronze one was moved into a museum because his nose was wearing thin. The current one will also probably need to be replaced soon because his snout too is already wearing through.
In 1846, Hans Christian Anderson wrote a story inspired by this fountain called 'The Bronze Hog'. In it, a poor young boy falls asleep on the back of the bronze boar and during the night, the boar comes to life and takes him through the streets of Florence. There is a plaque near the fountain commemorating the 200th anniversary of the birth of the author.
The Porcellino is also seen in 'Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets' as Harry Potter and Ron Weasley climb the Hogwarts staircase after crashing into the Whomping Willow. It reappears during the flashback scene where Tom Riddle speaks to Albus Dumbledore.

12/02/2025

Are you, like me, left-handed?
Don’t believe ancient stories about the devil’s hand!
It would be a blessing if you’d like to become an artist, like many others before you. You'd be surprised how many famous painters, sculptors, and musicians created with their left hand!
Being left-handed was considered a problem for a long time. People generally thought that the left hand was the devil’s hand: during the Middle Ages, Satan was sometimes represented with two left arms and hands. In the Last Judgment representations, the devil and the damned are always on god’s left. So, the condition was a real social stigma. People systematically ‘corrected’ children who showed a propensity to use their left hand, because underneath they could be carrying seeds of heresy and craziness, or be witches, or even bring the jinx! Left-handed people sometimes even suffered actual persecution and therefore had to hide and ‘correct’ their condition.
The stigma of being left-handed, very present during the Middle Ages, remained alive throughout Renaissance. Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) probably forced himself to learn to use his right hand when painting, but some sources report him as left-handed. One of the first biographies of the artist describes this detail.
Recently, an Italian art historian and researcher studied his hand deformities from observation of three portraits representing Michelangelo.3 All three paintings show the artist’s left hand later in his life, being affected by degenerative arthritis. This is a non-inflammatory disease affecting joints, which may be accelerated by prolonged hammering and chiselling. We cannot be sure, but these images may effectively suggest the artist’s left-handedness.
As for Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), there are even more hypotheses about his left-handedness, although no definitive answers. Many authors explained his left-handedness through his mirror-handwriting, i.e. from right to left. In their opinion, it was not (only) a brilliant idea to hide his discoveries and projects, but “just” a comfortable habit. However, throughout centuries, a new hypothesis emerged: he was ambidextrous. In other words, he was left-handed in writing and sketching, but he actually used his right hand when painting.
This hypothesis seems to find confirmation in his later life and work. In fact, in older age, he suffered from a paresis in his right arm, and although his production continued to flourish, it was mainly composed of sketches and drawings rather than paintings. The origin of his paresis is still unclear, but it might have been due to a stroke, to Dupuytren’s contracture, to an ulnar nerve palsy, or to focal dystonia.
During recent years, the art historian Svend Erik Hendriksen analyzed Vincent van Gogh’s oeuvre. He observed that Van Gogh (1853–1890) was always very careful with reversing his paintings, i.e. most likely painted using a mirror, and he only used to do it on self-portraits. Some very famous ones, one in particular from 1889, seem to suggest that the painter actually was left-handed.
In this and other works, palettes and brushes are in his right hand, leading to the logical deduction that he worked using his left hand. Moreover, it was and still is traditional that men’s jacket buttons are fixed on the right side of the garment. In these works, they are on the left side, strengthening the hypothesis of reverse portraits and therefore of his left-handedness.
Paul Klee (1879–1940) and Maurits Cornelis Escher (1898–1972) lived in the era of photography, so in addition to written documents about their hand preference, we can visual proof of their left handedness.
A very famous photo of Paul Klee clearly shows him painting with his left hand, while realizing one of his iconic works with vibrant colors and child-like shapes. In the same way, an exemplary photo of M. C. Escher represents him while working in his atelier using his left-hand, creating one of his masterpieces which indissolubly linked mathematics and art.
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/left-handed-artists/

12/02/2025

Good morning from Florence!

12/02/2025

📌 Accesso gratuito al Museo Zeffirelli nel giorno del compleanno del Maestro

Mercoledì 12 febbraio, 102° ricorrenza della nascita di Franco Zeffirelli, il Museo Zeffirelli in piazza San Firenze 5, sarà accessibile gratuitamente a tutti i residenti della Città Metropolitana di Firenze.
➡ Per accedere sarà sufficiente esibire un documento che attesti il proprio indirizzo di residenza.
Durante il percorso all'interno della Collezione, i visitatori potranno inoltre scaricare gratuitamente l'app Zeffirelli Museo sul proprio telefonino per accedere alle esperienze in realtà aumentata, disponibili al pubblico da dicembre 2024.
L'applicazione consente di avere individualmente accesso al materiale d'archivio inedito (bozzetti, disegni,audiovisivi, oggetti e foto di scena) inqudrando 10 opere selezionate contrassegnate nel percorso museale.

➡Il Museo è aperto tutti giorni dal martedì alla domenica, dalle ore 10 alle ore 18. La biglietteria chiude alle ore 17.
Fondazione Franco Zeffirelli Onlus

11/02/2025

FYI: This Tuscan toilet tissue is subtly perfumed with Organic Olive Extract: a breath of unique softness!

11/02/2025

There are plenty of good reasons why you should visit Poppi but here's another!
Casentino Golf Club Arezzo
Via Fronzola, 6, I-52014 Poppi
Phone: +39 0575 529810
The 13 hole course is situated on a hill with a magnificent panoramic view on the Arno Valley, the green heart of Tuscany. The nearby national park as well as numerous historico-cultural sights like medieval castles and monasteries make a visit, not only to golf, worthwhile.
They have a great restaurant too!
+39 0575 529739

11/02/2025

One of my favourite places to visit in Florence is the Palazzo Davanzati, which is now a museum, and open Monday to Sunday, from 8.15 am to 1.50 pm and closing on the 2nd and 4th Sunday of the month and on the 1st, 3rd and 5th Monday of the month.

The Davizzi family, wealthy merchants in the late fourteenth century, built their palace in Florence which was later bought by the Davanzati family in the late sixteenth century. Visiting the palazzo is a fantastic step back into the golden merchant age of the city when the Florentine business men held a hegemony of power in the wool manufacturing and banking sectors in Europe.

The Florentine palaces should be viewed as a physical display of the family's power, wealth and desire for longevity in an age when the European continent was emerging from centuries of 'darkness' and forming city-states, governments and international trade centres and when the individual was returning to be a central focus of study and importance.

Here in the Davanzati palace one can see the beginnings of domestic activity of the modern age with a dumb waiter system enabling fresh water from their private well to be taken easily to all five floors, elegant reception rooms, dining rooms and even private bathrooms. All is arranged around a central courtyard which lights the palace and the rain water is collected through the holes on the stone floor in a cistern below for domestic use, such as cleaning.

The private life of the family starts on the first floor where the walls of the main rooms and the exquisite bedrooms were covered with frescoes and tapestries. These, in winter, would be covered by fur for greater insulation.

Fireplaces are in nearly every room and the kitchen, on the top floor, has all the necessary tools for some good Tuscan cooking, such as the grain grinder for bread making, the metal apparatus for turning polenta and the iron spit with pully in order to rotate the roast suckling pig!

The palace is intact from the 1300's; business took place on the ground floor and the front doors of the palace date to this period. If they were being attacked there are trapdoors on the first floor placed directly over the three entrance doors in order to pour down boiling water and tar to stop the enemy advancing any further.

Don't miss the ceramic painted shoes that were used as hand warmers displayed on the second floor and the little room off the main reception room on the first floor dedicated to lace making, fascinating.
http://freyasflorence.blogspot.com/.../medieval-living...

11/02/2025

This lovely Coronation of the Virgin by Tommaso del Mazza (1480) belongs in Florence, in the Convent of the Santissima Annunziata, but it was stolen by the French in Italy at the time of the Napoleonic plundering and is now on display in the Louvre, Paris!
When Napoleon began his military campaigns in Italy in 1796, the intent was not only political or territorial, but also cultural. The goal was to plunder Italian cities of their artistic treasures and transfer them to France, where they would help consolidate Paris as the new cultural centre of Europe, shifting the focus of knowledge and art from Rome and Florence to the French capital. Napoleon’s armies regarded art as spoils of war, to be taken from enemies and displayed as a trophy.

https://www.finestresullarte.info/en/works-and-artists/how-many-and-what-are-the-italian-paintings-requisitioned-by-the-french-today-exhibited-in-the-louvre

11/02/2025

The original gilded copper orb on the dome was designed, cast, and set in place between 1466 and 1471. Lightning destroyed it around 1600. Today’s orb is protected by a modern system of lightning rods.

10/02/2025

Today's trivia...
The word "ghetto" is commonly used to refer to the Jewish district of different cities, but the term originated in Venice when, in 1516, the Jewish community of Venice was forced to reside within a restricted area of the city. This area was previously known as "l'isola del getto" (the island of the metal casting) due to the presence of several public foundries. It is believed that the mispronunciation of the first Jewish inhabitants of the district, who came from Central Europe, transformed the word from "getto" to "ghetto".

10/02/2025

Am now re-reading, and absolutely loving, 'Pallas & the Centaur', the second novel of the Botticelli Trilogy by Linda Proud...
We are by nature dual, no-one wholly good, no-one wholly bad. Everyone has access to reason (Pallas Athene); everyone is more or less governed by his appetites (the beast). The figure of the centaur, half man, half horse, symbolises this duality.
The enigmatic figure of Lorenzo de' Medici has for centuries been considered a force for good in Renaissance Florence. In recent times he has been re-evaluated and damned a tyrant. He was neither; he was both; he was a centaur.
It is the time of the Pazzi War, which Lorenzo enters with confidence, but the events, the signs, the omens are against him, building up to a pitch where suddenly his confidence is replaced by crushing self-doubt, undermined by a wife who believes that the disaster befalling the family is the fault of his heresies. The only choice seems to be ignominious death or glorious death, and he chooses the latter.
Linda Proud Pallas & the Centaur
Botticelli's painting represents the moment when Lorenzo approached Naples by boat to surrender to the enemy. The centaur symbolizes not Lorenzo but the be***al forces of greed and power which were attacking him. In this painting, Lorenzo is Pallas Athene.
We are by nature dual. The story is told by two narrators, one male, one female, in a duet that weaves and spirals towards its conclusion that, although we are dual, we are one, and when a man and a woman are in harmony, unity reigns.
This, the second volume of The Botticelli Trilogy, covers the life of the chief poet of the age, Angelo Poliziano, from childhood up to 1482. His father was brutally murdered when Angelo was just nine. According to the custom of the age, his mother married again immediately and her son became legally an orphan. Although everyone knew it was the fault of custom, it was still common for men to grow up resenting their mothers for having abandoned them. Poliziano was one such. This psychic break with his own mother reflects in all his other relationships with women, and he is torn apart like Orpheus. Against the custom of the time, he strives to recreate his family of brothers and sisters, but he cannot make himself whole until he has forgiven his mother.
It is the book of the Renaissance Woman, and she is seen in all her aspects through Poliziano's eyes. There is Lorenzo's mother, whom he adores for her intelligence and wisdom; Lorenzo's wife, whom he abhors for her dogmatic piety and illiteracy; his sister, who enchants him with her eccentric desire to be just like him; Cassandra Fidelis, a learned woman who frightens him; and the Virgin Mary herself, whose image torments him with its ideal of perfect motherhood. Woman twists and turns before the eyes of this confused and unhappy man, until he learns to see her true nature.
Following the Pazzi Conspiracy, Florence finds itself at war with Rome and Naples. Lorenzo de' Medici, whose brother was murdered by the Pazzi, has no doubt that he has God on his side. His wife, Clarice, is not so sure. Roman-born and pious she is in every way a medieval woman and believes that the troubles besetting the family are due to Lorenzo's 'heresy', that is, his Platonism. Lorenzo sends her to safety, under the protection of Angelo Poliziano. Powerless against her husband, Clarice sets out to destroy the poet.
The domestic conflicts reflect - in fact, are intimately connected with - world affairs. As Lorenzo's marriage falls apart, so does his hold on the power-politics of Florence and Italy. Events move to dramatic conclusions that explode each character's beliefs and certainties.
The war is not just between Florence and Rome but is a battle between the medieval world and the Renaissance, between superstitious Christianity and Christian Platonism, between faith and reason, between a woman and a man. It is the battle of Juno and Zeus.

10/02/2025

Amor Vincit Omnia by Caravaggio...
Virgil’s famous saying amor vincit omnia means “love conquers all.” Famous Baroque painter, Caravaggio, clearly inspired by the famous sentence painted this young and reckless Cupid. He triumphs over science, music, fame and power – all these symbols are scattered at his feet. The boy has eagle wings and is captured in motion, as if sitting down or climbing down from a table covered in cloth. This daring depiction is one of the highlights of the Gemäldegalerie collection and you can visit it in Berlin.
Cupid’s position indicates a ho******ic note of the painting. His legs are spread, so that his ge****ls are exposed almost in the center of the composition. There is a striking resemblance to Michelangelo’s The Genius of Victory, which is now at the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The subject was common for the age. Naked boys could be seen on any riverbank or seashore, and the eroticization of children is very much a cultural artifact of the present-day rather than that of Caravaggio’s.
Caravaggio painted directly from a live model. The painter Orazio Gentileschi, whom you might know as the father of Artemisia Gentileschi, lent Caravaggio the props (such as wings) to use in the painting. This allows the scholars to precisely date the work.
The painting proved to be a great success among Rome’s gentiluomini and litterati. Interesting fact is that it was not initially entitled Amor Vincit Omnia. The Virgilian sentence was first linked to the painting by the critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who mentioned the work in his biography of Caravaggio from 1672.
https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/caravaggio-amor/

10/02/2025

How gorgeous is this...
This extraordinary gondola-shaped pendant is one of the oldest jewels in the collection of Anna Maria Luisa de’ Medici.
A large elongated pearl was transformed by the goldsmith into a gondola decorated with enamel and rubies, with an eagle’s head on the bow, on sea waves from which the heads of two fish emerge.
The gondola is the symbol of Venice and one of the most well-known events in the lagoon city is the Carnival.
Here on board this precious gold enameled boat are two famous Comedy dell’Arte masks: Pantalon and his servant Zanni serenading two lovers sitting in the centre of the boat.
The chains that support the gondola are embellished with diamonds, emeralds, coloured enamel and a small pearl which hangs above the lovers as if it were the full moon.

The pendant can be found in the Pitti Palace among the Granduchi's Treasure.

10/02/2025

Coffee is a mood unto itself

09/02/2025

Recognise her?

In diretta Carnevale di Viareggio ♦️♦️♦️

09/02/2025

Some Michelangelo trivia...
It awasn't wise to cross Michelangelo. When a church official criticised his work during a preview of the artist's acclaimed Last Judgement fresco, he discovered an unwelcome surprise in the final artwork. In an act of revenge, Michelangelo used the official's face on the figure of Minos. This creature, which resided in Hell, was the judger of souls and is depicted with two donkey ears and a serpent biting his ge****ls. Although the official complained to the pope, he was calmly told that the pope's jurisdiction didn't extend into hell.
Pictured is a detail of “The Last Judgement” with Biagio da Cesena as Minos by Michelangelo.