It's in the Details

Tourism often means cramming it in at breakneck speed, and sometimes becomes part scavenger hunt, part endurance test. Did you see the Duomo? Santa Croce? Santo Spirito? Santa Maria Novella? Yes? Can you remember anything about them? Well… they were all important Florentine churches, right?

One of the great things about visiting a place twice is that you have an opportunity to see something different on the second round. It can be that you skip your nth peek at the Mona Lisa to spend some time instead in a room full of Dutch Masters that you didn’t catch before. It can also be that you again visit your favorites, but instead spend some time going deeper, seeing the things that are hidden from the high level pass.

So these are some images of my second pass at the Duomo here in Florence. The word for the day was DETAILS. It seems that it wasn’t enough to make a grand cathedral, it had to be crammed full of decorative elements, and even then, the patterns were changed up. It was almost as if they looked at the available geometric shapes that could be cut from marble and decided to see how many ways they could be combined to make different patterns. Hmmm… sounds like quilting!

Understanding that they had no power tools, this feat becomes yet more remarkable. Craftsmanship becomes as important as design – it’s all very well and good to have a top notch architect dreaming up the impossible, but I think the heroes include the nameless stonecutters who could knock out perfect pillars for the nave, and hundreds of perfectly sized diamonds for the pattern around a window. Think about what magic must have happened between Frank Gehry’s crumpled ball of paper “sketch” and the reality of swoopy steeled Disney Hall – and you know it wasn’t him figuring out how to route the plumbing!

I’m always impressed by details that are almost hidden from view. A rosette under the corner of an eave, way high up. A flourish on a capital. A row of faces that are not cookie-cutter same. Carving all the way around something we only see from the front. Elegantly rendered details in the backgrounds of the most minor scenes. These are the wonders you see when you slow down a little.