First Glimpses of Italy - Turning Tuscan: A Step-by-Step Guide to Going Native - page 9

the Uffizi. I walked through room after room of religious art, unimpressed. My one “ah-
hah!” moment was when I suddenly found myself in front of Botticelli's Birth of Venus .
“Wow, it's Venus on half-shell!” I blurted out to my travel buddies. (Those were the days
before Venus was hidden beneath a thick plate of tinted, bullet-proof glass that reflected
the glare from the venetian blinds on the back wall. This effectively made one of the prizes
of the Uffizi's collection virtually impossible to view from anywhere in the room without
bright white lines from the clerestory windows bouncing off the glass shield. However,
after many years, at some point during 2011, the venetian blinds were finally covered with
a dark fabric, and, as of this writing, Venus can again be seen without zebra stripes.)
Twenty-five years later I would write my doctoral dissertation on Florentine Renaissance
art, and I am today the proud author of The Uffizi Gallery , a guidebook to the Uffizi's col-
lection. I visit with the paintings numerous times every year with the kind of pleasure one
takes in meeting with close friends. So it's somewhat of an embarrassment to admit that
nothing in the collection made much of an impression on me the first time through. I liked
modern art and French Impressionism during my early college days, but the canvases from
earlier centuries seemed dark, obscure and boring. I was no longer afraid of Christian art;
but I had no clue that it would become a driving force to lead me back into Italy's waiting
arms.