Hard Times

Hard times make strong men. Strong men make easy times. Easy times make weak men. Weak men make hard times. 

And this cycle could be found throughout history. But one of the things that I have noticed is that this aphorism can be slightly tweaked to hard times make strong art. If you look around at really any dark point in history, the interwar period gave us Dadaism, the guerras sucias in Latin America brought us magical realism, and the Great Depression gave us abstract expressionism.  

In my opinion, there was no stronger art than Renaissance Florence. It was a time of immense strife. All one has to do is read a copy of The Prince by Machiavelli to know that in that new age of a proto-civil society, even unintended slight offense, could be met with the destruction of one’s family and the salting of their Earth. Such occurred where the Palazzo Vecchio, Florence’s seat of government, stands today.

But long after the daggers were sheathed, the art of Florence and the Renaissance remained. It went well beyond what was painted on a wall or chiseled in marble. The art spread from the ethereal (Da Vinci’s Notebooks of things that were possible but would not be,) buildings (the mixed styles of the Duomo,) and even to the world of business (the Medici dual ledger system.) Nowhere in the history of the world had so many geniuses of their crafts been found in one place. As their power increased, breaking the monopoly of the church, it was those that had mastered the business world that paid for all of it, whether it was that they truly loved art or truly loved themselves (and thus what they could buy,) it really did not matter; the art was made. 

When I got on the train leaving Florence back in August of 2013, I knew that it would be a city where I wanted to spend a considerable amount of time in the future. I did not know when or how, but I decided that I would spend at least one month seeing everything I wanted and live the Florentine lifestyle. The idea was kicking around in my head and every few months, I would look to the copy of Birth of Venus I had hanging in my bathroom and wondered when I would make good on it. After the first trip, my life had been relatively easy. In those halcyon days, I had a business and a job, houses, and apartments, girls to love, food to eat, and everything was fine. Until it wasn’t. 

I had no idea it would take a car accident, a breakup, a cancer scare, desertion, quitting a job from a company that was going down the tubes, and an ever metastasizing weakness of ennui to get me back to the city I loved six years later. But from those hard times, I would like to think that I became stronger. I had packed up everything I knew, said goodbye to my family, and started rounding out the hard edges of my life hoping to make it something more beautiful. Whether it was because it was an escape or the desire to have an adventure of a lifetime, it really did not matter; the art was made.