I wasn’t really sure what to expect in Florence. We only had a couple of days and I was sure it would be a whirlwind at best. It ended up being one of my favorite cities.
There was so much to love in Florence. The Ponte Vecchio bridge, the cake-like Duomo, and the Plaza Vecchio. We were most blown away by Michelangelo’s statue of David. It cost a little more than we wanted to pay and we weren’t even sure we were going to be able to do it. But we splurged a bit and it was incredible.
One of the things that I am finding more and more is how much of a difference it makes to see places and to hear the history in story form. It really makes the world come alive and the take-aways more real, more fascinating.
The art of Florence was, in some ways, the birth of the Renaissance. The power of the arts, an ineffable medium saying just the right thing at just the right time, can be a catalyst for changing the world.
Michelangelo’s theory was that their was a beauty within the stone and he just had to chip away to find what God had hidden in there. This is exactly my feelings toward writing. The truth is out there. The words are available. It is just a matter of sifting through the access, chipping away until the deep beauty is fully manifest. In fact, the statue of David (the most famous sculpture in the history of the world) was created from a rejected piece of marble, a piece all the other sculptors said was too something or not enough something else. Michelangelo basically rescued it from the trash heap and uncovered the masterpiece inside.
This is the hope in each of us, that the rejection and the dismissal that we have faced is not the end of the story. And it sure isn’t. There is an Artist who refuses to let us go, refuses to see anything less than the beauty within.
I digress a bit. I just love that part of Michelangelo’s story.
The thing that Florence taught me, the reason I love it so much, is that we are all artist. We are using the tools we have been given, the gifts and the opportunities, to express…something. Whether we mean to or not.
Art isn’t just about beauty because beauty isn’t just aesthetic. Life is about chiseling through the slab to find the truth underneath. When a piece of art expresses just the right thing at just the right thing, there is perhaps no greater catalyst for change.
All of this is truth we know. There is nothing new in these sentences. The problem is that we don’t always know what our art is or, more frustrating yet, what exactly we want to say with it.
I love the model of Michelangelo. I wish I could stop worrying about creating beauty and focus on discovering it.
Florence is a place with a long and diverse history. But at least for one moment of time, they discovered just the right thing at just the right time. It still can’t be put into words. But it was art. It is art. I suppose art at its best is the intersection of mystery and truth. A perfect collision of what can’t be said and what needs to be said.
I am so thankful to Florence for reminding me of the task of the artist, the challenge for all of us. I am thankful for hope and inspiration. I am thankful to be a part of such a beautiful world and be counted among its beautiful and gifted artisans.
