Discoveries in the Fields

Today, I woke up at the crack of dawn (not really but 8am) and went to the Uffizi and heard some pretty interesting stories, one of which was the story of an innovator who thought outside the box and succeeded from it. I love those kinds of stories.

My favorite of the bunch is that the paint that they used, each artist would make personally, crushing precious stones. They would smash rubies into dust, add egg whites and water, and a touch of olive oil and mix it up. Every color was made by a different stone, except for gold of course. The gold was made with grinned gold leaves.

One painter, however, found this too expensive. Most of the stones needed were shipped from the middle east, and especially in those days, it took a buck to that. He decided to put some honey on a pan and attract bugs. He would kill them with a needle, dry them out in the sun for weeks, take their wings off, and crush them, add egg yolk, water, and oil, and there you have it. Instead of rubies, people started using lady bugs. Instead of, well, whatever the black stone was, they used beetles. For emerald, they used grasshoppers. The most interesting part, is how he discovered blue. There were certainly no blue bugs flying around.

Gentilis, the innovator of this new process to make paint, had to go to the bathroom one day. He was passing a field, and since there were no bathrooms in the Golden Age, he started to relieve himself outside. It was a particularly windy day, and his cloak was blowing in the wind along with some, well you know. His urine hit a flower which was next to his fabric and suddenly, his fabric was turning blue! He gathered all of these blue flowers and tested out mixing them with other liquids to make blue, but nothing would work.

All in all, pee is all over many of the paintings the Medici owned that is now in the Uffizi, the most popular museum in the world having four million visitors a year. That is the equivalence of every Florentine endtering the Uffizi 11 times a year!

Its funny because back home in Freehold, people talk about how old New England is. I mean there is a church from 1683! These paintings in the Uffizi are from 1280 to 1330, and there are thousands of paintings and sculptures which create the greatest collection of art from the golden age.

Beat that Jersey.