There are many proven ways to start a new year with renewed energy.
Unsurprisingly, all of them involve Italy. And outstanding planning.
The one I am partaking in now, and wholeheartedly recommend, is to replenish the spirit and soul through deep immersion in Italian art.
To prove my point, I have just lost myself for the second time in Florence’s Fra Angelico exhibition. The show concludes this month, though happily so much of what is on display remains permanently in Florence, and can be seen at any time.
Divided between two venues — the Palazzo Strozzi and San Marco — the exhibition makes abundantly clear that Fra Angelico was no lightweight painter of merely pretty or pious scenes.
Rather, he emerges as a master of daring spatial invention, extraordinarily sophisticated in his use of gold and color…
and a painter and thinker of profound intelligence.
His sacred works are magnificent in their self-containment, their perspective and emotional depth. They glow from within.
That radiance stems in part from the fact that Fra Angelico was himself a theologian, but just as much from a personal sensibility so refined that it imbues each work with an extraordinary power…
and transcendence…
.. and yet all the while, even in dramatic moments, compositions maintain an ordered rationality.
What I discovered was Fra Angelico’s gift for narrating sacred stories with an evangelical simplicity that humanizes the sacred.
This gentle, intimate approach draws the viewer into a direct and engaging relationship with the art, and to meditation rather than mere observation.
This wonderful exhibition — one I have guided many of my clients to over the last four months — was years in the making, with unprecedented loans from more than seventy museums.
Yet step outside either Palazzo Strozzi or San Marco and the replenishment continues.
These final images are representative of what, just steps from Palazzo Strozzi, you can immerse yourself in after a feast of Fra Angelico. This is the Laurentian Library, one of the world’s most significant humanist collections of ancient secular European books, texts, and manuscripts.
The staircase that leads up to the Library is the design of Michelangelo. It is revolutionary in feeling completely alive: dramatic and dynamic in its design, with an unconventional use of classical motifs, yet all the while possessing a bewitching ability to appear perfectly ordered. This is the place to come to fully awaken your mind and senses. Once you have ascended these powerful, fantastically disorienting and original stairs, you can then settle into the stillness and pure rationalist, contemplative harmony of the library room itself.
Thanks to photographer Robert Stark for capturing, with such sensitivity, the spirit of the stairs and Library.
Experiences like this don’t happen by accident; they are the result of superb planning and a genuine understanding of what makes Italian art so profoundly moving.
Every journey I plan is entirely tailor-made around your interests, passions, and priorities. If art has the power to lift you up, imagine what a thoughtfully designed immersion — crafted with insider access, timed entries and exceptional guides and my sensibility — can offer. I would be delighted to begin planning a very special Italian journey for you, one that nourishes the spirit and stays with you long after you return home. You can explore more about how I work and the journeys I design at www.insidersitaly.com.
