Day 6

Thursday, March 15, 2018

Today we took a train from Florence to Milan. Our train was delayed, so we arrived in Milan later than expected and had to miss going to the Ambrosiana and seeing da Vinci’s sketches. However, we did arrive in time for lunch, which was fantastic.

Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna

Self Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola

After lunch, we visited an art museum called Pinacoteca di Brera. I saw a couple of pieces we discussed in class, including Lamentation over the Dead Christ by Andrea Mantegna. My favorite piece was Sofonisba Anguissola’s self portrait. She was one of the few women painters during the Renaissance to be recognized internationally. It’s really inspiring to see that a woman could have a successful career despite living in a time when women were considered property.

The Pinacoteca di Brera has a painting restoration room that can be viewed by the public, so I watched someone restore a painting. I think he was cleaning it because it looked like he was applying the same thing to the whole painting and he wasn’t being terribly careful about it. I knew old paintings had to be restored so they continue to last, but it was really cool to watch it happen. The restoration room is set up like a lab. Everything looks very clean, and the man restoring the painting was wearing gloves and a lab coat. It was really cool to see science and art come together.

Duomo

Because our train arrived late and we missed the Ambrosiana, where some of da Vinci’s sketches are housed, we got to choose if we wanted to visit the Duomo or the Ambrosiana after our exam. I chose to visit the Duomo because we passed it on our way to lunch and it looked really interesting. This was the wrong decision. We were told it would be a short wait, and it was cold and raining the entire time we waited. We were in line so long that we had to leave before we got in so we didn’t miss our train. I’m pretty disappointed that I didn’t get to go inside the Duomo or see da Vinci’s notebooks.

I spent a lot of time on trains today, which reminds me of Foucault’s essay on heterotopias. “A train is an extraordinary bundle of relations because it is something through which one goes, it is also something by means of which one can go from one point to another, and then it is also something that goes by” (Foucault, p. 24). While on a train, I normally only think of it as something that takes me from one location to the next. I don’t think about how it is just something that briefly passes by to those outside of the train. If I get out of my seat, I very quickly remember that I am moving within something that is also moving because I have terrible balance and I’m always terrified that I’m going to fall into someone else’s lap. I experienced another interesting relationship between different heterotopias that Foucault didn’t account for. While I was on the train, I worked on my blog posts about Venice; while I was in a heterotopia, I was thinking and writing about another heterotopia.

I had a fantastic lunch, and I got to visit a really cool art museum today. Unfortunately I missed seeing da Vinci’s sketchbooks because I chose to wait in line for the Duomo. I didn’t get to spend much time in Milan, but it seemed like an interesting city. If I ever get to go back to Italy, I’ll try to spend some more time there.

Sources

Foucault, Michel, and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, pp. 22–27. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/464648.