Florence is where art history stops being a book and starts being a queue. Everyone comes for the big names, and fair enough… David is here, the Uffizi is here, half the Renaissance was invented within shouting distance of the Duomo. I am staying up a steep little lane on the Oltrarno side, the workshop side of the river, practically leaning against the Boboli Gardens wall, and I would not swap it for a suite over the Ponte Vecchio.
Sunday is free-entry day at the Boboli, so the whole afternoon went in there with the plan I wrote before I left home: animal subjects, people interacting with the space, quick sketch series. Turns out the local wildlife is mostly lizards and the people mostly melt onto benches in the heat, which is honestly perfect for gesture work. Slow models are a gift. And from the top of the gardens you get the payoff view:
But you know me. In a city full of certified geniuses, I fell for the con man.
This calm marble lady was made by Giovanni Bastianini, a stonecutter’s apprentice from the quarries at Fiesole. In the 1860s his dealer sold one of his busts, a portrait of the poet Benivieni, as a genuine Renaissance work. It was praised as “school of Verrocchio” and the Louvre paid 13,600 francs for it. The Louvre! The scam only came apart because the dealer got greedy about his cut and told everyone. Bastianini himself never presented the work as old… he just carved like a man born 400 years too late, and the experts did the rest.
I stood in front of that bust for a long time thinking about hands and credit. In animation we made whole films where nobody outside the studio could name a single artist who drew them. The work was real. The names were optional. Bastianini would have understood us completely.
The afternoon was the businesslike bit: walking the creative side of the river, poking my nose into the contemporary galleries along Via Maggio, noting prices, sizes, and who actually stops to look. That research matters as much as the sketching… if I want my ink work hanging in rooms like these one day, I need to know how these rooms think. Between galleries I filled pages. Fast, messy, honest pages, the kind you do standing up while your gelato melts. Thirty-seven photos and one very inky thumb later, I think Florence and I understand each other.
Next stop: north, to the lake. The quiet end of it, where the plan is a fresh page every single day.
Sunday was meant to be a rest day. Instead: a red train over the Alps, a walk through a century of melting ice, and two donkeys with the best address in Switzerland.
A sketching day in Varenna on Lake Como. Train up, walking trail through the olive trees to Castello di Vezio, eagle owls at close range, then gesture studies on the ferry pier as the lake week wraps up.
A business day in Como and Cantù, where silk built a city and lace built its neighbour. Talks with a silk printing house about printing ink work on fabric, plus 62 reference photos for the studio year ahead.
