Florence: Uffizi Gallery

Duomo

I really need a cafe. My brain is pumping. I just visited the Uffizi Gallery. Rembrandt and Caravaggio both use this mixture of what looks like raw umber and cadmium red. Rembrandt remains the master, but Caravaggio is excitement and passion. I had no idea Rembrandt was there at Uffizi. Three paintings, one self-portrait as a young man, one of an old rabbi and another self-portrait as an old man. My heart can barely conceive of the love in these works. It makes me want to push past my limitations and reach that state of love. I feel so full, my brain and spirit are stretching, bursting. I also saw Botticelli, Tintoretto, da Vinci, Titian. After seeing Rembrandt and the other masters I didn't want to pollute my mind by looking at lesser masters. Oh, AND Judith Beheading Holofernes by Artemesia Gentileschi rivals the Judith by Carravaggio. The Caravaggios at the Uffizi were of Young Bacchus and Medusa's Head painted on a shield. They were first rate, but nothing in that museum compared to the Rembrandts. How could it? I did appreciate the peeled eyeballs affect of looking at a finished da Vinci, The Annunciation, but must say I prefer Jan Van Eyck to da Vinci if that's what you're going for. My brain is too full. By the time I am done with Venice I will be ready to explode.
-Oh, to top it off... We walked past the Galeria Academia and the line was crazy! -wrapped around the building. We came past the eye dazzling Duomo of Santa Maria di Fiorno then to the Uffizi. The line was out of sight there, too. We inquired about which line we should be in, speaking with a guard posted at the entrance. We could stand in one giant line if we had reservations and another giant line if we didn't have reservations. My mother said, "This line here? Oh, okay." The line for regular tickets was taped off around the corner of the entrance and they admitted groups of people at a time. My typically mild mannered mother ducked under this taped barrier and cut in front of about 400 people. Nobody seemed to notice! My sister and I followed her, slightly aghast at her deed. She turned to us and said, "If you want to get ahead in life you have to be willing to cross the line sometimes." I think she was motivated by seeing how crushing it was not to see the Borghese gallery, but, really, I would have had to sacrifice seeing Uffizi or the Galeria Academia if it took all day to wait for one of them. I needed to be in that museum.
This coffee was wonderful.
I think the blue I'm having trouble identifying in the flesh of Rembrandt and Caravaggio is probably French Ultramarine. I rarely use it. I can't wait to try using their color combinations when I get home. I took a discreet photo, no flash of course, of the hands in Rembrandt's Old Rabbi painting. They are so colorful and gauzy yet descriptive. Da Vinci's drawing in his paintings is perfect, but Rembrandt understood before his contemporaries the meaning of painting. The way he uses brush strokes says, "this is a painting with a soul."
Walking back to the hotel in Firenze (Florence), the rain finely freckled us. I paused to video and photograph graffiti that had been washed out and re-exposed from under layers of peeling paint and plastered posters that were faded and shredding. A man rode by on a bicycle. He gray beard matched the dog that rode in the front basket, barking at people on the sidewalks. We passed the botanic gardens and the air smelled green.