back in arezzo

let me be brief. i got back from the farm on sunday evening. on tuesday, i went to siena for the famous palio - a bareback horserace around the semicircular campo in the center of the city. if i start talking about it, i'll be here for an hour, and i have to go. but suffice it to say, it was absolute madness. a girl passing by bumped into the guy next to me, who took offense and said something, so without a word, she just punched him in the face. that is how invested the sienese are in this: emotions were running high. when the 10 riders finally started, 2 were thrown in the first lap, their horses still tearing around the track shaking their manes - even they couldn't believe it. there was confusion at the finish - first the flag of the nicchio contrada was flown out of a window of the palazzo pubblico, but they took it back in after a just a minute. oca was the official winner and the place exploded. young girls were consoling their sobbing brothers. when the nicchio flag was flown from the palazzo, two middle-aged men from that district standing near me screwed up their leather faces and embraced as if they had both just become grandfathers. when that flag was taken back, their joy turned to a rage i had never seen.

yesterday i spent part of the day in florence, taking pictures for my dante project. i was just going about my business when i came across a piece in the Museo dell'Opera in Santa Croce that really rocked me back. preparing for a bronze bas-relief with scenes from the life of the Virgin Mary, the late 16th century sculptor giambologna made some studies in terracotta, two of which are preserved in the museo. in the first, joachim is being chased out of the temple. the piece was pretty beat up, and so was the second. it was entitled 'the meeting of joachim and anne.'

i did some research on this, and while i knew that anne was the mother of mary, according to apocryphal texts, joachim was her father. he was chased out of the temple because he and anne had been unable to bear children: not having 'given children to israel,' he was publically humiliated. just as i would have done in that situation, joachim left the city and went to live with shepherds. but he was called back to his wife when an angel appeared to him in a dream; at the same moment the angel appeared to anne telling her that a child would be born. joachim and anne met at the gates of jerusalem - this is considered by commentators to be the moment of the immaculate conception of mary.

i didn't know any of that when i was looking at the sculpture. i just knew that giambologna knew what he was doing: this little terra cotta bas-relief was so obviously a study, a rough rectangle of baked clay, and yet the two central figures were so animated, reaching out to embrace each other. their movement and their desire were palpable. and the figures had no heads or arms: broken, lost in the last four and half centuries.