I like art galleries. I do. But I also hate them. I think I've got an internal clock that, after about an hour of drifting aimlessly through room after room, shuts my interest level down to zero, and I need to escape what was interesting but becomes stultifying.
Now, that hour of patience rule doesn't apply to certain galleries, such as Sorolla's house in Madrid, the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, the Dali museum in Figueres, the Koorie Heritage Trust museum for aborginal art in Melbourne, or any museum that showcases Impressionism, especially the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.
Conversely, the "conscious to look at art" hour doesn't last 60 minutes in a modern art museum. For example, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao, Spain, is fascinating. Well, at least the building is. The artwork inside? Throw it in the trash.
So it was some modest level of trepidation that i suggested to Carol we go to the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana to gawk at art. The oldest museum in Milan dates to 1618, and includes original paintings by Botticelli, Caravaggio, and Titian.
The two gems of the museum are a huge scale "cartoon" by Raphael and a rare, finished oil painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The museum is housed in a former palazzo, and just the rooms and staircases are fascinating to see.
After a bit of a mess getting into the museum as the docents sorted out tickets for a large group just ahead of us, the rest of it was easy. There was a mildly funny moment when the docent offered Carol and I two of the group's tickets, but after we shook our heads, they found the two people who actually had bought those tickets.
I'm certainly not going to describe everything we saw -- that would be too painful for me to do, and more importantly, too painful for you to read.
The highlight of the visit took up an entire wall -- the Raphael "Cartoon" drawing he did to serve as an outline of his famous "School of Athens" fresco that is at the Vatican Museums.
A "cartoon" back then is a full-sized sketch that is used to transfer a design to the intended surface. There is a fascinating five-minute video with English subtitles in the outer room, and then in the dark room (to protect the Cartoon) you get to see the cartoon in all its glory.
Raphael himself sketched the whole thing, and then his assistants transferred the to what was then the Pope's study wall by pinpricks along the outlines of the figures. His assistants then did the actual painting.
There was another room that has paintings by Flemish masters, featuring works by Jan Brueghel. While Flemish is a dialect of Dutch, I felt there is enough difference that I couldn't call them cheap cigar painters -- you know, Dutch Masters.
(In the 1970s, Dutch Masters ads on TV were ubiquitous, so if you know, you know.)
The most visually striking painting is in Leonardo Hall, which of course houses the only da Vinci oil painting still in Milan (The Last Supper was not oil). His painting "Portrait of a Musician" is quite beguiling -- I found myself drawn back to it numerous times.
Painted in the mid-1480s, it is da Vinci's only known portrait of a man. The face is full-on DaVinci, from the eyes to the curls of the hair to the accurate representation of the ridges of a face. The torso is believed to have been finished by Leonardo's students/assistants, because it is the only body in a Leonardo painting where the body faces the same direction as the subject's gaze, with no vibe of movement given off whatsoever.
Walter Issacson, in his short chapter of the recent book entitled "Leonardo da Vinci" (SPOILER ALERT: the book is about. . .wait for it. . .Leonardo da Vinci) makes the case that da Vinci painted the head is because "the sense that this is an emotion-laden, real person, with inner thoughts and a whiff of melancholy, whose motions of the mind are about to trigger a movement of the lips."
That well-crafted sentence also explains why Issacson wrote best selling bios about both Einstein and Steve Jobs and I'm still writing a travel blog. The Issacson book devotes over six pages to the painting, and is well worth reading. (Caution note: I read 308 pages of the 808 pages, took a break, read a different fantastic book -- "The Wide, Wide Sea" by Hampton Sides about Captain James Cook's third and fatal voyage of discovery, and have restarted the Leonardo book.)
Also in Leonardo Hall (sounds like a college dorm built in the 1950s and badly in need of a refresh) there is also a large fresco of Christ receiving the crown of thorns. It was painted by another of da Vinci's disciples, Bernardino Luini.
There is also a large replica painting by Andrea Bianchi of The Last Supper. When Cardinal Borromeo saw that original was fading, he had Bianchi paint on canvas a copy of the famed fresco.
The final touch is the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, the library, which has a daily display of da Vinci notes and sketches from Leonardo's Codex Atlanticus. He used his Codex to sketch ideas, jot notes with his observations, and test draw human and animal figures.
I managed to stay conscious the whole visit, so I considered it a win.
(Understand that the first time I went to the Museo del Prado in Madrid, I complained to Carol about having to look at paintings of "Fat, Dead Spanish Princes and Their Fat Dead Horses" -- which, in the mode of Dave Barry, would make a great name for a rock band.)
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