The Bandini Museum: Botticelli's Virgin and Child

Ciao my readers,This is my third week in Italy and i am proud to say i have finally acclimated with Italian culture: I know some wonderful places for food and gelato; I am on the friends of the bar list at my local coffee bar and i can order food and go shopping at the market without speaking one word of English.  Along with this acclimation came some travels to see some  museums and churches.
I wish i could update my blog more regularly but i am just so busy experiencing the culture of Italy that i seldom have some quiet time for introspection.

Last weekend i was invited to travel to the Etruscan ruins of Fiesole, I must say if you ever are staying for more then a week in Florence you should check out the Etruscan ruins of Fiesole, they are absolutely beautiful, also if you go up for a full day they have the most amazing walking tours. I was in sheer awe of seeing the ruins of such a quaint village, i wish i could have held that feeling with me for the rest of the day.  Sadly, that was not the case. I have seen many different museums in my lifetime and experienced many different aesthetic environments but  i never expected i would ever have a drunk museum tour guide.

The Bandini Museum  was a very small museum with two floors featuring Italian Renaisance church works. As written before in a previous post i want to find these small hidden treaure museums since often those are the ones that are the most inspiring. Yet, one cannot find inspiration amongst the guide of a drunken person.  Thats Right, Our tour gide was drunk and even admitted to being drunk. I wouldn't normally complain about this since i rarely ever take guided tours because i experience art with my eyes and not with my ears. While i appreciate others knowledge on art, once i am in a museum i like to let the art speak for itself and  the moment i walk outside i become a giddy ball of energy going on and on about the artists and there paintings. ( my grandmother can attest for this many a time). However, while i am in the museum i am in my own world.  This may have been a one time thing which i very much hope so for the sake of the Botticelli and Giotto's at the Bandini museum but once my friends and i entered the museum immediately one of the workers who happened to be drunk felt it was her obligation to show us every work in the museum and describe it in full detail to "her knowledge".  Now i say "her knowledge" because everything that she described was inaccurate except for the most basic of facts.

When i look at paintings i like to look at symbolisms, i will see the oranges amongst many Italian Renaissance paintings and know they are to pay homage to the Medicee family, I also love religious and mythological symbolisms as seen in many works by the great artists of the Italian Renaissance. Yet, when i hear," This is one of the evangelists and clearly he looks angry so i would not put him by your bedside or else when you wake up in the morning you will wake up to his angry face." or "this apostle was painted green i don't know why he was painted green but clearly the artist wanted to paint him green." a part of me dies inside because if i ever described that to my art history teacher or wrote that on an art history exam i would be immediately discredited and lose all points for that section of the exam. I am also taking fresco restoration and clearly that apostle was green due to improper restoration. Yet, what broke my heart was when i found an unexpected Botticelli work within the museum and instead of allowing myself to have that aha moment and really reflect on Botticelli's brushwork my tour guide had the nerve to educate me on the conception of the painting. 

 I was staring eyes agape into a beautiful Virgin and Child by Botticelli .  when my tour guide decided to tell me about the muse of the painting who i already knew was supposedly Simonetta Vespucci, but the story i was told was as far away from the truth as i have ever known. My drunken tourguide interupted my aha moment to tell me a "vital "fact" She is very beautiful, No? " i replied" of course she is,  she is the same face of the Venus as well." then comes the saddest thing i have ever heard in regards to art history.... "Did you know that she worked in a bakery and every day when Botticelli would go in to get a brioche he would see her and wave to her and they fell in love and so he painted her." at that moment a part of me wanted to scream well i guess i was screaming inside for the humanity of art everywhere. To my fellow readers who are unaware about Botticelli. Here is the actual truth Simonetta was a noble woman who was admired by many men including the Giuliano Di Medicee in no way would she be working at a bakery let alone at one.  I apologize for my elitism readers but things like this cannot go unsaid, i really want to know how this tour guide got her job and how many people have left that museum thinking Botticelli's muse worked in a bakery. This was the first Botticelli work i have seen while in Italy  and sadly its viewer-ship had to be ruined by a drunken tour guide.  I understand this experience was most likely one of a kind, but i have wanted to be a  museum guide for a  summer job and was rejected because i was to young. So i just can't help but feel broken to see someone with the summer job of my dreams abusing the privilege. 


A Presto, 
~Gianna