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June 22, 2006
Once at Uffizi, Drive me From Firenze
At the end of our week at the villa, restlessness descended. We sat in a monumental edifice, surrounded by sculpted gardens, gazing at our navels, and not a few people noticed some incongruities. Some of the Accomplished Writers have spent significant time in places where a big fence around an estate signifies more than just wealth in a vacuum. The wall is there to keep things out--unwanted people, races, ideas. The audience for the readings included a count and a baroness, reminding us of some things that rub us the wrong way.
The estate is something of a monument to frivolity. The massive grounds are decorated with hundreds of statues—some of which are old, some of which are just plain hideous. The art collection as a whole is "95 percent tschotchkes," as someone there said. Some of the nicest pieces, including Impressionist sketches, are in the bathroom. Yet it all must be catalogued and protected, and the commitment necessary to do these things invest it with a solipsistic importance. So, I suppose, just as the rich Renaissance banking families or colonial powers of the 19th century built and promoted their collections as signs of--and on the backs of--their empires, we end up with places like Villa La Pietra. What kind of space do you live in if you have the luxury to travel the world and come back with nothing but goofy glass miniatures? It's not just ridiculous; it's archaic, almost barbaric.
Henry Miller wrote that Europe is full of "museums bursting with plundered treasures." The Uffizi is a good example, full of so many such treasures that they quickly become banal. It also served to remind about the provenance of such collections. When we returned from the museum one of the Accomplished Writers whipped out some Walter Benjamin on the economic and political history behind the history of art and read it to anyone who would listen.
Posted by Adam Graham-Silverman at June 22, 2006 05:50 PM