Tuesday 6.26.07

We went to the Pinacotea Nazionale di Siena, which is an art gallery up the street from our school. There are (as you would expect) a huge collection of Renaissance paintings. Most of the paintings were of biblical scenes or scenes depicting the foundations of the churches in Siena. The one painting that you see duplicated at every museum is Madonna and Child, or Mary and the baby Jesus. After you see it five or ten times, it become less exciting and you start noticing little things.

For example, Heather suggested that they didn’t use really babies in the portraits because the babies always looked like little people (adults). The other thing we noticed was that, at least with the Sienese paintings, the noses are very thing and elongated, in an almost unnatural way. Also, fingers are usually proportionally longer than normal. As for Mary (Jesus’ mother), she’s always depicted in blue, while Mary Magadeline is always in red. We also noticed that Mary (Jesus’ mother) is always depicted as an older women, but she is always shown holding Jesus as a baby. This was odd because Mary was young when she had Jesus.

After the museum, we had some lunch and then went to the botanical gardens. It started to rain, which was a welcome change from the heat we’ve been experiencing. Since it was a light drizzle, we decided to go the botanical gardens, which was very pretty. We only got to see half of it because some people had to leave to do laundry. I took the rest of the day to rest.