We visit Florence to see the cradle of the Renaissance. Botticelli's Birth of Venus. Michelangelo's youthful optimism of David. The uninhibited celebration of the human form. Of life.
But what happened to Botticelli for him to paint Calumny of Apelles? The darkness of medieval man overwhelms the innocence of the Renaissance. That's not how the story is supposed to go.
And how could Michelangelo, he who saw beauty as the embodiment of heaven, paint the grim foreshadowing of the Last Judgement underneath his creation story masterpiece which sprawls across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel?
Maybe Florence's veneer of eternal spring is best pierced with the pain of a miscarriage. No. That last word is not a metaphor.
The luminescence of each brush stroke of the Renaissance has been replaced by the glowing fluorescence of tourist's iPhones reflecting off their slack faces while they gorge on a first course of tagliatelle and a second course of tripe. Ghosts contemplating death in the city of eternal youth. The lonely couple, sitting in the orange glow of Italy's street lights, staring silently at each other-- wondering what went wrong.
Cobblestones. Narrow lanes. Santa Maria Novellas on every block. Old women, eyes gleaming with the spark of adolescence. Domes and gothic spires. And the Piazzas which keep the city confined to a pedestrian scale-- the Rennaisance's human-centric influence on urban planning. Florence is just like the guide books, except nobody mentions the gross self idolation of the tourists.
"Selfie stick?.. Selfie stick?" You can't approach a famous European sight without pushing through a maze of vendors hawking that ultimate expression of our own vanity.
Where the Romans erected Egyptian obelisks in front of their greatest creations to show how they conquered the Pharohs-- we now snap photos of ourselves in front of their masterpieces simply to show that we exist.
While Renaissance man reveled in the glory of human form, the modern human form revels in the glory of itself.
What drove Botticelli to burn his own art? And Michelangelo to paint himself into the Last Judgement as an empty skin being dragged into hell? Could they have begun to doubt the same humanity who's form they idolized?
We did David.
We did the Duomo.
We did the Uffizi.
Even our language and the dysfunctional relationship between subject and predicate justifies the tourist's domination over art. In just 48 hours I've lay claim to the entirety of the Renaissance. I cringe when I have to share her with the gawking crowd. And the vanity of the Selfie Stick feels like rape. But there have been 500 years of tourists like me, all laying ownership to someone else's creation. How could Botticelli do anything other than burn his work? And what could be left of Michelangelo but an empty skin?
Yet, I do understand the urge of the Selfie. When we look in awe at these masterworks of creation we need to justify our own feeble existence. It's the same creationist urge that is pushing me to record my own anger. It's the same urge that pushed Rennaisance man through a fury of creation. Social media has just channeled that human desire towards self vanity.
I write. And so I exist.
Here is my face. Please like it. And so I exist.
But, what about the child that we conceived six weeks ago that we just flushed down the toilet of a cheap B&B. She, the masterpiece of my life, no longer exists while Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Venus still do. While our Selfies will still haunt the web long after we're gone, our child never even had a sonogram. And so, as we face mortality in the city of eternal youth, we do all that we know how to do.
We hold out our arm and snap the picture. And so we exist.
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