Prato, December 10th, 2005

Current mood:	unwell
Current music:	'Unwell'. Hee! I actually am listening to that right now!

This is just because I said I would.
I booked my ticket from Milan to Paris. It was 70 Euro, which was less than I thought, so that's nice.
We watched Labyrinth, which was totally teh bomb and extremely funny with the David Bowie and the tight pants and the strategic shadowing. Katrina said she'll lend me The Dark Crystal when we get home. We had pizza and biscuits and cake, which was nice.
Got back to the hotel, then the boys came down at 10.30 and they, Katrina and I went out for drinks, which was quite pleasant, although a little weird - what with my social... specialness and all - and kept degenerating into a massive complaints forum. Raph and I went home early, but Katrina and Michael stayed and kept drinking, so she tried to chat again when she got back. Unfortunately this time I was more with the sleep and less with the alcohol, so I was less inclined to join in.
Think I am coming down with something, which is unpleasant. So I'm taking my multivitamins, and had three glasses of juice and a pear at breakfast and will refrain from drinking straight from our communal bottles of water, and hopefully I'll be able to supress it, or at least make it not-so-bad. If all else fails, there's a packet of panadol with my name in it.
Ummm... what else. I'm at the Monash centre because I have to write my 2000 word journal exam today. When I left, Hazel had got up, showered, had breakfast and then gone back to bed. She's been doing that sort of thing a lot. And Katrina was absolutely dead to the world.
Anyway. I don't actually have anything to say, other than the ticket thing.
TEGAN: I messaged you about Paris. Did you get it, or should I email?
Love,
Katherine
EDIT:

“Florence exceeds its masterpieces. There is about this city, frequently morose, even harsh, a mystery of implosion, as its singular forces of intellect and feeling have been forced into fruitful collision by the ring of hills, by a climate susceptible of white heat and bone-jarring cold. Genius and civic ferocity were intimately meshed… Out of catastrophes sprang energies that have, in essence, come close to defining Western civilisation.” Discuss.

It’s quite a poetic thought: the Florentine Renaissance as a glorious clash, an implosion of heat and cold, a catastrophe that gives birth to something wonderful. It encapsulates everything we want to believe about the Renaissance and more, everything we want to believe about ourselves. If we believe in the Renaissance as a time where genius flourished and if we make the vital connection between the Renaissance and ourselves, if we believe as Steiner does that we are essentially defined by the Renaissance, it allows us to believe in ourselves and our own potential. I therefore believe that we use the Renaissance as a way of understanding and believing in ourselves, and I wish to examine the ways in which we connect and identify with the Renaissance and the possible reasons for this. Steiner cites “energies” which “come close to defining Western civilisation.” I think we can safely assume he is not limiting himself to the artistic geniuses of the Renaissance, which is the way so many people understand the period. These energies were not just artistic; they covered many areas. In this essay I will briefly look at the way we relate to the art, politics, social life and intellectualism of the Renaissance.

Certainly the art of the Renaissance cannot be discounted. The work of artists such as Giotto, Alberti and Masaccio in their development of perspective, of Brunelleschi, in his revolutionary dome, and the resonant beauty and realism developed in paintings and sculptures by Lippi, Donatello, Raphael, Michaelangelo and Leonardo signalled a new understanding in the way participants in the Renaissance viewed both art and the individual. These changes have in turn informed our own art and the way we view it. Vasari revolutionised the way the artist was viewed – as an artist rather than an artisan. Art, aside from any political, social or religious messages it might convey, was also a means of competition between patrons in its beauty and grandeur. This implies the beginnings of our view of art as being sufficient as art; beauty for beauty’s sake – although, of course, all art continues to convey certain messages and biases as well. Perhaps our interest in Renaissance art springs partially from a desire to connect with the people in the Renaissance. We, as participants in a society that judges largely on appearances, feel connected more closely to people we can see. If we know how Florentines looked, if we know how they wore their hair, what clothes they wore, the expressions of their faces and their bodies, we can know them better and identify them better with ourselves. There is an enormous interest in identifying the subjects of paintings who are not identified by the title. Popular belief has it, for example, that Venus in ‘The Birth of Venus’ was based on Simonetta Vespucci, the wife of Lorenzo de Medici’s brother Giuliano. If we can look at Venus and feel some connection with her, and if we connect her with Simonetta Vespucci then we can feel that in some vague way, we have a connection with a woman of the Renaissance. One of the most famous aspects of the Mona Lisa is her eyes, which reputedly follow the viewer around the room – it is a nice thing to believe, that she is trying to connect with us, rather than the other way around.

Florence was also, crucially, a republic. Their massive pride in this fact indicates that it was a crucial part of their identity, just as our position as ‘free’ citizens defines how we see ourselves. Their republicanism was certainly not republican in our sense of the world. It was extremely oligarchic, excluding the lower rungs of society and women and it was more open to corruption than many of our democratic governments in this day and age – or at least we like to think so! However their republicanism, and their utter conviction that it was the best way to be, has no doubt fed into the general modern belief in the superiority of democracy. No matter how we may admire the political machinations of the Medici for the pure political prowess they displayed, and no matter how many times we may read ‘The Prince’ in slightly horrified fascination, there is still an implicit commendation, albeit patronising, of Florence for clinging onto their illusion of republicanism. They are, once again, our forerunners; and if Western civilisation had turned out differently, and we were all under despotic rule, then we would have identified Lorenzo, Piero and Cosimo de Medici as our forerunners. As it is, we can identify them as usurpers of freedom, and identify their propaganda, hoping that this means we can identify whatever propaganda is presented to us in our own society. Of course, we can also identify and laugh at the incredibly rose tinted views of Bruni and his ilk, but we can also understand that this springs from a deep seated pride in their own government, and believing in democracy as implicitly as we do, we can understand and excuse this kind of propaganda far more than we can accept, for example, the Medici having themselves painted into the Journey of the Magi in their private chapel.

Social life in Renaissance Florence is perhaps one of the most difficult aspects of the subject to connect with, particularly as a woman. How can a woman born and raised in our liberal society possibly understand how life is when you are, perhaps unwillingly, married to a man many years your senior and expected to immediately start producing heirs, who you will not be able to connect with at anywhere near the level women today are allowed to connect with their children? How can we understand what it is to be convinced that your gender is responsible for man’s downfall, and for this reason you have to stay inside for most of your life? How can we understand the extent to which Florentine’s relied on one another, in Bill Kent’s classic three categories of parenti, vicini and amici? Perhaps this is why the social history of Renaissance Florence is of such interest both currently and in the near past. Because this society is sufficiently removed from our own to be almost incomprehensible we feel the need to study and to understand this most crucial aspect of the Renaissance; to understand what they did, how they interacted, how they thought about each other.

The intellectual aspects of the Renaissance are often overlooked by the common view of the Renaissance, but again, much of the writing and philosophy developed in this period can be seen as a precursor to our own intellectual culture. Petrarch wrote beautifully in the Italian vernacular, popularising poetry and learning for those who were not conversant in Latin. The neo Platonists and humanists revived classical thought, questioning their society’s view of a complete person and came up with a new, although mostly unreachable ideal of what a man should be – which was, in short, everything. Athletic, handsome, witty, charming, politically involved, artistic and, importantly, fully educated in the humanist tradition. A complete man had to be learned. Men eligible for office were generally educated to some degree, and outside Florence, rulers were often highly educated and encouraged to engage in and patronise intellectual circles. The reflections of this belief in our own society are clear – we would be unlikely to accept a Prime Minister who was not at least educated to the end of year twelve, preferably with a tertiary degree as well. A successful person without what we see as a full education is an anomaly, to be admired for overcoming their lack.

These connections and more implicitly compare Renaissance Florence with whichever society to student or writer has been brought up in. This means that to a certain extent, we are always identifying with our past – and it is our past. We believe on some level, even if our personal ancestors didn’t go anywhere near Italy that the Medici, Brunelleschi, Leonardo and so on were in some way our spiritual ancestors. Glory in our past implies glory in our present and more importantly, glory for our future. Essentially, the common vision of the Renaissance is sophisticated propaganda, just as Bruni perpetuated a contemporary view of Florence that was not necessarily the Florence that existed, but the Florence contemporaries wanted to believe existed, or perhaps that they wanted others to believe existed. As a community that prioritises the individual to a greater extent, perhaps, than the mediaeval world ever did, a concept of ‘Renaissance man’ as someone who is good at everything feeds into our dreams of self sufficiency. With ancestors like Alberti, the iconic Renaissance man, how can we fail to evolve? Because the Renaissance was a time of massive (arguably) positive change in areas such as art, architecture, science and philosophy, it becomes our proof that we too can change, and that all we need is the right place and the right time for an explosion of genius, to move out of our dark age and re-enter, as the Florentines believed they too were re-entering, “the pure radiance of the past”.

It’s been twenty four days. Twenty four days spent in Florence, both the city proper and some of the surrounding towns and countryside, many of which came under Florentine rule over the period we have been looking at. Twenty four days to cover centuries of history: political, social, religious, economic, cultural, all intertwining and meshing until distinctions become almost meaningless. A wonderful twenty four days that I spent starry eyed looking at what I want to have evolved from: these wonders, these miracles, these geniuses. At the end of the course I still believe, to some extent, that we are all results of the developments of the Renaissance. I also believe that we desperately want to be these results, and that this colours the way we study – but that it is impossible, to refrain from imposing ourselves on the period, and therefore impossible to ever fully and objectively understand Renaissance Florence.

I really really don't like that. Not only because it's overanalytical and bsing, but because I don't even know if it will pass. But I am so tired and there's only another hour and twenty on the computers, so I might go with it. (Apologies to Renne for this addendum. I know they drive you crazy.)