Published Newspaper Columns On Travel, Museums, Art, Movies and Music, 1998-2019

She Just Couldn't Say Goodbye To David

One advantage of spending a leisurely day at the museum is that you get to see not just great works of art, but also peoples' reactions to them.

At the Galleria dell'Accademia in Florence, a man stood in front of Michelangelo's David as though he was mesmerized. He could have been a study for another artist's canvas or block of marble.

Quite in contrast, a group of tourists who had a bus to hop back on, moved like a school of tuna in a neat circle around the statue snapping pictures now and then.

Some in the group sported a facial expression of triumph: they'd finally seen Michelangelo's masterpiece. Others carried a visage of frustration at not being able to spend more time with David.

Then there were a few people, not of any tour group, who seemed somewhat detached from their surroundings. I imagine they came to Florence to do some shopping. They would have preferred being out in the streets schlepping handsome purchases.

Or, perhaps, the museum was a stopping point for them before heading to the corner cafe for some tiramisu and macchiato.

In the midst of this deliciously diverse panoply of visitors, I spotted the ubiquitous youngster who was sitting on a bench behind David fully engaged in a video game on his mobile device.

"Oh, David, who's that?" he might have asked, if someone had startled him out of his virtual reality.

Most of the people, though, had come to the museum with a steady purpose. They had time on their hands, and heart and mind enough to push aside the world in favor of a paradise of stone.

A young woman sat on a folding chair with a sketchpad in her hand. She looked at David as though in anticipation of a sudden flash of enlightenment, and every now and then brought her pencil down to capture a sensuous curve, or some sublime geometry.

You cannot define greatness, but you can recognize it instantly.

I looked for signs of Stendhal syndrome, and found mild examples of it here and there.

An elderly lady clutched her daughter's arm in excitement when the hallway in the gallery opened up to David, as though she needed support to absorb the full impact of the experience.

"This is so cool," shouted a young man, and kept repeating that phrase to several of his friends, as though he was on a mission to convert them to a recognition of some seminal truth.

He was like Lucy in C.S. Lewis' novel who discovers the portal to the magic kingdom of Narnia inside a wardrobe, and wants her siblings to join her in the adventure.

And then there was the lady who just couldn't say goodbye.

Like Fabrizio in the movie "The Light in the Piazza," who runs alongside the train to keep his young love in his sights until the platform runs out, the woman in the museum simply couldn't let go.

She walked backward slowly, unmindful of the traffic, keeping David in her sights all the while, and when she got to the end, she turned neither left nor right, but came forward again for one last tete-a-tete.

The stronger the passion for something, the harder the goodbye.

Some things speak to us because God is in them. A blade of grass with morning dew or an angel carved in stone can be a staircase to heaven when we recognize in them the earth's loveliness and God's grace.

"The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection," wrote Michelangelo.