Museums: Palazzo Strozzi

The center of Florence is home to many magnificent buildings, such as the Palazzo Strozzi, a Renaissance villa completed in 1538, pictured below.

Palazzo Strozzi, Florence

Today, Palazzo Strozzi serves as home to cultural endeavors, including modern and contemporary art exhibitions.  An earlier blog post featured an exhibition of the artwork of Ai Weiwei. 

The current exhibition features the art of Bill Viola.  We recently attended the exhibition and found it fascinating.  Viola's medium is video, in the form of short filmed scenes inspired by Renaissance art and other themes.   

Entrance to Bill Viola, Rinascimento Elettronico ("Electronic Renaissance"), with some random hottie.

The signature piece of the exhibition is called "Emergence".  It is a 20 minute, slow-motion video based on Panicale's "Pietà".  (The woman pictured on the right is not part of the original work.)

"Pietà" by Masolino da Panicale (1383-1384)

To view a portion of Bill Viola's "Energence" video, click here. 

The exhibition features many other works by Bill Viola.  Most of the works are slow-motion videos with talented actors, expressing all sorts of emotions while allowing the artwork to come alive before your eyes. 

Below are photos of "The Crossing", a video that features a person walking toward the viewer.  Along the way, the person is drenched with water and later surrounded by fire.  During the fire scene, the person disappears. 

We think "The Crossing" has multiple themes.  What do you think it means?