Museums in Florence: the Lowbrow Tour

All these Holy Family scenes: you gotta love ‘em. You could write a whole dissertation on the expressions seen on the Virgin’s face alone. My favorite: that “How did  I get HERE ?” look of hers with Joseph’s face a close second. "How did YOU get here?!"And the Baby Jesus who sometimes looks a lot like Jon Lovitz? He often has a face only a mother could love. Sometimes in the painting he’s squeezing a bird and sometimes a pomegranate. Sometimes he’s got his fingers going in funny ways: "You got a little something right here," I thought one of them said but Dave insisted it said "YO! Keep your eye on ME, bud! I’M the main event here!" I could see it since I myself caught a look like that in the painting I call "So Whadja Bring Me?"You can entertain the daylights out of yourself with all kinds of jokey thoughts like this until one day, ONE DAY you stumble into the rotunda that houses the David and it just plain shuts you up. All around you are people sitting on benches just to be in its presence.That Michelangelo: dead on one level but still alive on so many others. Just think of David’s life: Pops Goliath with a tiny rock; plays harp for the king; BECOMES the king; takes another man’s wife, just because he wants her; sees the first child of this union die as punishment; sings in public for sheer joy though some find it unseemly. He does dumb things, he does great things, he is human. He dies and leave the throne to his kid Solomon whose Psalms are still singing in all our heads still especially that Song of Songs Which is Solomon’s, Arise my love my fair one....And all of this, all of this is in the marble that looks like flesh, like veins, like living muscle in this work that one man made. Ah!