A Question

So what would change, do you think, if a middle-aged white man came back from the dead and said, "It's true. He who dies with the most toys actually does win"?

Hmmmmmm.

This past week, Bruce and I celebrated our (3)4th anniversary by checking out the Revealing the Early Renaissance show at the AGO. This was a rare night out for us frugal early-to-bed-early-to-risers. But Bruce had gotten me an AGO membership for my birthday, so, technically, admission was free.

The show was completely comprised of the fourteenth century Florence version of toys: lavish, stunning, exquisite and, for the most part, small pieces of devotional artwork commissioned by the burgeoning Christian middle class of that city, recently grown rich on the textile trade. 

Worried that their wealth might turn Heaven's Door into something smaller than the eye of a needle, these good merchants paid quite a lot of money for gorgeously wrought triptychs and altar pieces and fabulous illuminated manuscripts. Workshops headed up by famous artists churned these pieces out in vast profusion.

Over the next seven centuries, these beautiful treasures were wrenched from their original installations (many of the pieces still bore signs of forcible removal), cut up (manuscript illuminations removed from their pages), chopped up (a large crucifix, for example, had its arms removed) and scattered to the four winds.

Then someone associated with the Getty Museum in Los Angles started a painstaking endeavour to find these pieces and bring them back together. Throughout the galleries, descriptions of provenance often included a note that the panels, or pages from the manuscript, were together again for the first time in centuries. 

Five rooms of this pretty stuff evokes feelings of appreciation for the craftsmanship, and a degree of marvel at the longevity of some of the fragile materials. But not devotion. But that could just be me.

The most thrilling moment for me was when one of the AGO volunteers stepped up and held out for me to touch a 700-year-old sheet of parchment. The sheet had musical notations on it and some script. It was big - maybe eleven inches by seventeen - and did I mention it was about 700 years old? 

I held the piece of processed calf gut in my hands and caught a sensation - like looking into a still pool and sensing depths you can't see - of the time since the parchment had been a young cow, munching grass on a hillside above the prosperous post-Medieval settlement of Florence.

Have a great week!

Karen