My Roots
8/11/06 Florence
The Leonardo exhibit reminded me that I am in fact a rather large nerd and that I needed to satisfy that side of myself. So I decided (thanks Blankie) to go to the Museum of the History of Science. Tucked away behind the Uffizi on the Arno, it is the bucktoothed younger sister of the Florentine museums - not pretty, but great personality.
aside: Mind you the back side of the Uffizi, where one exits looks bland and ugly like a tenement with no adornment to speak of. Seems like the pretty sister doesn't have much going on past the surface (which is a lesson to all you young folks out there). In hindsight it seems appropriate the merchant princes of Florence wouldn't spend money to beautify a side of the palace that only the hoipolloi would see.
It was fantastic actually. The museum is small but contains a lot of original scientific artifacts stretching back to just prior to the Renaissance, starting with an Andalusian astrolabe that had been gifted by King Alfonso of Spain to the Florentine rulers of the day. It's made of finely wrought brass and not very large but full of so much detail and mechanical skill that it had me wishing I was a machinist. The newest things in the museum are from the mid 19th century chemicals and electrostatic experimental apparatuses. Still it's the oldest stuff that's the most fascinating to me - that and Galileo's middle finger which is sitting in a reliquary of sorts in one of the first rooms.
There's a couple of reasons for my interest in the oldest instruments, but the first has to be the artful manner in which these objects were created. There was more to them than just function, they were also pleasing to the eye, which is a far cry from what I do now at Faceless Corporation. It's quite inspiring to think of a time when the arts and sciences were so closely linked; a time when people had to really make a huge leap away from the previous descriptions of the way the world worked to a more rational model. In that respect Galileo is really the main hero of the museum (a surprising lack of Leonardo objects, but he's always so hard to categorize), with his instruments that he made himself, sometimes for experiments that were the years ahead of where other natural philosophers' thinking was. What an amazing time that must have been!
The museum closes earlier than most of the others and so I just wandered around the city for a while and finally did some sketching. I'd been meaning to do that for quite a while and it seems to have been most appropriate here. The city is littered with stationary stores, selling the most amazing assortment of pens. I am obsessed with wet ink pens and have more fountain pens in my home than I have treaties to sign. It takes quite a bit of will to keep from just buying more and more of them. So far I've escaped without much damage but you never know when the urge will come upon me.