Hyperion to a satyr
Today I finally found the Renaissance. Walking into the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi is like walking into the Hypnerotomachia. Walls inscribed with fragments of fake classical memorials in forgotten languages, all the work of Michelozzo allegedly. An attempt to recreate the architecture of a Roman villa in the heart of the city, in an attempt to recreate the thoughts of the ancient world, to re-enter that civilisation and bring it to life over an evening stroll between the orange trees.

To contemplate the dignity of man surrounded by cool marble statues, and at the summit of the eye's horizon, to look at the audacity of Donatello's David and feel that they were really living at the beginning of a new age of human potential.

And to turn from that to the chapel, where the world in its natural state, present and eternal past and future are embodied in glorious inescapable enclosed technicolour...

So what do you do after that? I went to an exhibition on couture fashion which I found a hell of lot more difficult to understand than the allegorical references of the Renaissance.

And I haven't even mentioned the Uffizi...

Before I forget: the glories of a sunset over the Ponte Vecchio, the hidden sun suffusing the clouds with colour no artist in this palace could recapture... spending a half-hour with Botticelli almost alone and uninterrupted... walking in solitude down the dark corridor waiting for the statues to spring to life around me ... Andrea del Sarto's so warm paintings overturning Browning's judgement.... remembering why I thought Ghirlandaio was wet and weedy and at the same time finding his Magi the celebration of the Renaissance as the triumphant fusion of the old classical world and the new life of Christianity... seeing in Botticelli the visionary and yet the man enraptured with the beautiful teenagers whose faces can be seen in his angels and madonnas, the poet of female desire for the unattainable male...