After talking to David Lowenthal about John Brinckerhoff Jackson last night, I went back to the Material Culture section of my library to find out more about Brinck as he was known to his students.   He was a remarkable figure:  born of wealthy American parents;  educated in Switzerland and then private schools (Choate and Deerfield) before studying history and literature at Harvard and, briefly, architecture at MIT;  was interested in the baroque;  became interested in the study of landscape, maps and aerial photographs while working as an intelligence officer in World War Two;  inherited a farm in New Mexico from an uncle;  established the magazine Landscape in 1951 which pioneered the study of the vernacular;  taught intermittently at Harvard and Berkeley;  ended his life after retirement doing labouring jobs at gas stations.   Published many volumes of essays, beginning with Landscapes (1970) and including The Necessity for Ruins (1980).   Good holiday reading.

J.B. Jackson in Cienega © Mariana Cook 1990

I did the last of the events to promote my East London book in Pages of Hackney, a small, well stocked, neighbourhood bookshop established in 2008 on Lower Clapton Road, then known as Murder Mile.   Nearly in the front row was David Lowenthal, the great historian and geographer (The Past is a Foreign Country), father of the proprietor.   He turned out to have belonged to a movement of documentary photography in the 1950s, believing in photography as a medium of social and geographical record (in the early 1950s, Lowenthal was teaching in the Department of Geography in Vassar, before moving to the West Indies).   The group, which included John Brinkerhoff Jackson, took photographs of rural America, which have recently been rediscovered and exhibited in Montpellier under the title Notes on the asphalt:  A mobile and insecure America:-

After exploring the north of the Isle of Dogs a couple of weekends ago, we ventured further south, across Millwall Dock and up onto the Mudchute, which was constructed out of the mud removed from the dock, which stank and caused diphtheria.   It was sold off by the Port of London Authority in the early 1970s and converted into a farm and nature reserve:-

I find it hard to leave the subject of Florence without a few photographs of its streets.

The rustication of the Palazzo Strozzi:-

The same of the Palazzo Medici:-

And a few odd bits and pieces of sculptural decoratiin as I walked to the trattoria Cibreo, which was James Bradburne’s recommendation of where to eat:-

I have now found out the architect and verified the identity of the strange bulbous tower which has appeared on Millwall Dock.   It is indeed Baltimore Tower and was designed by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill on the site of the London Arena:-

It’s not the first time that I’ve admired S. Gaetano with its crumbling, seventeenth-century baroque façade and vividly white urns and statuary, built for the Theatines between 1604 and 1648.   It doesn’t seem to get into the standard tourist guides, no doubt because it’s seventeenth century, but is described with great enthusiasm by Michael Levey as ‘rising like a tree peony in a prison cell’:-

I had arranged to see Bill Viola’s big retrospective exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi well before he was elected an Honorary RA, having been an admirer of his work ever since seeing The Messenger in the nave of Durham Cathedral in 1996, the date of The Crossing, the first work in his current exhibition (he also has exhibitions in Hamburg and Bilbao).   The Crossing is a powerful introduction:  stripped back to the essentials of the desert and pillar of fire.   Next door is The Greeting, shown alongside Pontormo’s Visitation, borrowed from Carmignano, a tough double act which demonstrates, if it’s necessary, how much his work is imbued with Renaissance imagery.   I liked The Four Hands (2001), a very simple, black-and-white work about the expressive power of hands – fingers clasped, touching and in prayer.   Then you come across Uccello’s Flood  and the effect is that you very much want it to move.   Viola certainly knows how to use the sacramental qualities of slow-moving film to powerful visual effect and is not at all afraid of – in fact embraces – traditional biblical imagery with its layers of history and meaning.

I was the first person in to the Medici Chapel, an early morning pilgrim before a morning flight, enjoying for a few moments before the other tourists arrived an opportunity to see and survey Michelangelo’s great tombs of Giuliano de Medici, Duke of Nemours, and opposite, Lorenzo di Piero de Medici, the Duke of Nemours, both so stately, symbolically composed, sitting alive above the lying statues of Night and Day or Dawn and Dusk, in the heart of a grand and balanced architectural composition, a great statement of funeral elegy:-

On recent visits to Florence – and not so recent – I have tended to avoid the Cathedral, taking it for granted as it’s so dominant in the still medieval surrounding streets, so full of tourists, and so well known.   But one of the benefits of going to the Museo del Duomo is that it forces one to engage with the Cathedral as a historical artefact, the product of well over a century of construction, beginning with Arnolfo di Cambio in 1296 (the first stone was laid on 9 September 1296).   In 1334, Giotto was appointed to oversee its construction, which led to the building of the campanile, and he was succeeded by Andrea Pisano.   By 1418, only the dome remained to be built.

The Baptistery:-

The Cathedral:-

I also took photographs from the terrace on the top of the Museo del Duomo:-

I have wanted to se the Museo del Duomo in Florence ever since it was reinstalled by Timothy Verdon in 2015 and described by many as a model of good quality museum display.

It includes Ghiberti’s east Baptistery doors, won in competition in 1401 when he was only twenty one, beautiful, but still essentially gothic images:-

Next door, the Gates of Paradise.   I don’t think I’ve ever seen the originals before or studied the combination of full and half relief and quality of the bronze modelling:-

This is Brunelleschi’s death mask, as he was on his deathbed, exhausted from the effort of constructing the dome, in 1446:-

One of Donatello’s prophets, very early:-

Habbakuk:-

I liked the chalice of Cardinal Giulio de’ Medici:-

And the opportunity to see Donatello’s Cantoria:-

Bandinelli’s Self portrait:-

You end with Michelangelo’s Pietà:-