Friday, December 10, 1999

Part One: lessons about life from art history...

There are some works of art that seem to be particularly significant with regards to life, how it is lived, how things might be afterwards, etc....

So this is the first blog of a few that will tell you about these works from Renaissance masters, one was mentioned in a previous post....

Located in the new sacristy of the San Lorenzo basilica, two blocks from my apartment are two tombs commissioned by the pope in the honor of two Medici family members. The artist commissioned was Michelangelo, who hated the Medici but was also extremely pious and could not refuse the pope. The first tomb is that of Giuliano Medici: he lived his life in action, visible by the sculpture in the middle. He looks ready to move and act. Underneath him lie the sculptures of night "la notte" and night "il giorno".

The second tomb belongs to Lorenzo Medici. This depicts a contemplative life. The statue of Lorenzo in the center is very different from Giuliano's, showing deep thought and a life that is pensive, filled with knowledge, studies and thoughtfulness. Underneath Lorenzo lie the statues of dusk "il tramonto" and dawn "la alba".

Michelangelo was able to show two contrasting ways of living, that both accomplished morality. The secret of life through these sculptures shows that there are two ways of life: one of action and one of thought, both equally moral. Michelangelo also represented the idea of eternity through day and night and dawn and dusk. These subjects suggest the cycle of life, that has no actual beginning or end...the eternity of the soul. I very much like this idea presented, that however you choose to realize your life, it is moral and good, and that there was more to you than what came to be on earth, and still more to come.

Some days, it just hits me...

Today, I was reading my mom's blog about making our Christmas card, and she mentioned my grandfather, "papa", who passed away in 2006. He was the most amazing person I've ever known...I usually saw him on holidays, like Christmas and Easter. Christmas at Nanny and Papa's was the best growing up, well....Thanksgiving was hard to beat. Being between the 2 holidays, I think it a good time to reminisce...

At Thanksgiving, the entire family would go up to a cabin in Wawona, Yosemite. That's where I learned the importance of the Elliott family tradition of making pomegranate jelly--actually, the importance is really just that it gets made :) haha....all the kids would play around, and if we were lucky it would snow and we could make home-made snow cones. Papa was sure that no body broke the initiation of poker. Everyone had to earn their right to sit at the table on Thanksgiving to play poker with the adults...us kids could be seat warmers till we earned a seat--meaning we got to play while someone was in the bathroom.

But christmas was particularly nice. The tree was always so beautifully decorated, and having presents for the whole family made it look like we had billions of presents!! Papa would always have a drink in his hand at christmas...tom and jerrys are another tradition--papa always made the drinks strong, you know, sharing the christmas cheer. As I grew up, I sat closer and closer to papa, he would teach me things I never thought about, like the price of bees. (These conversations were very different from the ones we would have at our cabin in Huntington Lake which usually involved some horror story about firearms or weapons or fires to teach my sister and I not to play with these types of things). Santa Claus himself always came to Christmas...I'm pretty sure it was Papa sometimes, but I think my godfather dressed up once too...I'll have to ask my dad about that...then all the adults would have cigars while all the kids played with everything they had just unwrapped.

Papa's always around, he probably plays tricks on me hah, but today was one of those days when it just hit me, out of the blue...I miss Papa

Here's my dashing dad and papa: