A small detour from the Renaissance.
In Florence, that almost feels like a minor act of disobedience.
After hours among Donatello, Verrocchio, della Robbia — all those carefully observed, increasingly individualised human figures — I walked over to Museo Novecento to see Avanti, an exhibition of prints by Georg Baselitz.
Woodcuts, linocuts, etchings. Black on yellow. Black on black. Rough, insistent lines.
Titles like Fahrradfahrer (Cyclist, 1982), Schwarze Mutter, schwarzes Kind (Black mother, black child, 1985), Meine neue Mütze (My new hat, 2002), and Die große Nacht im Eimer (Remix) (2006).
Baselitz belongs to that unavoidable post-war German generation — alongside Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Of the three, I find myself more drawn to Kiefer and Richter.
And Baselitz’ answer, famously, is to turn the world upside down.
Quite literally.
Figures inverted by 180 degrees. Motifs denied their immediate readability. A refusal to let us simply “recognise” before we actually see.
I am not entirely sure I am a fan.
But I keep returning to the gesture.
Because it is both simple and oddly radical: if you turn the image, you interrupt the habit.
You force perception to start over.
So, in a small act of quiet heresy — and with the help of an iPhone — I turned the works back again.
Re-reversed them.
And the question lingers:
When does an image become visible?
When the artist disrupts it — or when we restore it?
04/21/2026 14:02:09
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- A small detour from the Renaissance.
In Florence, that almost feels like a minor act of disobedience.
After hours among Donatello, Verrocchio, della Robbia — all those carefully observed, increasingly individualised human figures — I walked over to Museo Novecento to see Avanti, an exhibition of prints by Georg Baselitz.
Woodcuts, linocuts, etchings. Black on yellow. Black on black. Rough, insistent lines.
Titles like Fahrradfahrer (Cyclist, 1982), Schwarze Mutter, schwarzes Kind (Black mother, black child, 1985), Meine neue Mütze (My new hat, 2002), and Die große Nacht im Eimer (Remix) (2006).
Baselitz belongs to that unavoidable post-war German generation — alongside Anselm Kiefer and Gerhard Richter. Of the three, I find myself more drawn to Kiefer and Richter.
And Baselitz’ answer, famously, is to turn the world upside down.
Quite literally.
Figures inverted by 180 degrees. Motifs denied their immediate readability. A refusal to let us simply “recognise” before we actually see.
I am not entirely sure I am a fan.
But I keep returning to the gesture.
Because it is both simple and oddly radical: if you turn the image, you interrupt the habit.
You force perception to start over.
So, in a small act of quiet heresy — and with the help of an iPhone — I turned the works back again.
Re-reversed them.
And the question lingers:
When does an image become visible?
When the artist disrupts it — or when we restore it? (04/21/2026 14:02:09)
- And then there is this boy.
A glazed terracotta bust by Luca della Robbia, Busto di fanciullo, from somewhere around 1460–1470.
I must have returned to this work five or six times over the past 15–30 years.
At first, it was almost accidental. Later, it became intentional.
Because something happens here that is different from the heroic bronzes and the carefully composed Renaissance ideals.
This is not a type. Not an allegory. Not even quite an ideal.
It is a child.
When my own sons were the same age, I remember standing them beneath the sculpture and being struck — almost uncomfortably — by the resemblance. Not because they looked the same in any precise way, but because the expression felt familiar.
The slightly uncertain gaze.
The softness that has not yet become self-consciousness.
It is easy to speak about the Renaissance as the rediscovery of the individual.
But here, the thought becomes simpler.
Children are the same across centuries.
And perhaps that is why this work stays.
Because it is not about Florence in the 15th century.
It is about something that has not changed. (04/21/2026 13:43:01)
- What fascinates me most about the sculptures at the Bargello — and especially these examples by Verrocchio, Donatello, and della Robbia — is not just their beauty, but their specificity.
They are idealised, yes. But they are not generic.
Each face carries something recognisable, almost contemporary: a tilt of the head, a suggestion of character, a quiet self-awareness. These are not abstractions of “man” — they are individuals.
Standing in the large hall on the first floor, it becomes clear that something quite radical is happening here.
Because this is not only about technique, or even about rediscovering antiquity.
It is about a shift in attention.
From the symbolic to the particular.
From the type to the person.
The Renaissance is often described as placing “man at the centre”. But that can sound like a slogan.
In these sculptures, it feels more precise.
Not man in general.
But this man.
This face.
This expression.
And perhaps that is the deeper break: the recognition that individuality itself is worthy of representation. (04/21/2026 13:28:52)
- Every time I am in Florence, I return to the Bargello.
It is not a large museum. It does not have the crowds of the Uffizi. And yet, it holds something that feels closer to the core of the Renaissance: sculpture as thought made physical.
Michelangelo is there. Donatello is there.
But for me, it is Giambologna.
His bronze Mercury — balanced on a breath, one foot resting on a gust of wind, the body spiralling upward as if gravity were merely a suggestion — is one of those works that seem almost implausible. Not only as art, but as physics.
Perhaps that is why it has been copied so many times. It invites repetition, almost demands it. As if each copy were an attempt to understand how such lightness could be cast in bronze.
This time, I gave in.
I bought a small version. Not the original, of course, but something closer to the miniature variants also present in the museum — a version scaled to the desk rather than the piazza.
There is something slightly paradoxical about bringing Mercury home.
A god of movement, reduced to an object of stillness.
And yet, perhaps that is precisely the point.
Because what we take with us from places like Bargello is not the object itself, but the attempt to hold on to a moment of attention. (04/21/2026 11:27:12)
- One of the most beautiful church façades in Florence is Santo Spirito.
It sits on the Oltrarno side of the river, in what is now a slightly paradoxical mix of Renaissance calm and contemporary hipster life — natural wine bars, small ateliers, people who look as if they have carefully not tried too hard.
And then, in Museo Novecento, I unexpectedly encountered it again.
Not as architecture, but as memory.
Ottone Rosai’s Santo Spirito (bozzetto) from 1954 is almost dissolving. The façade is still recognisable — the calm geometry, the round window, the quiet authority of the structure — but it appears as if seen through time rather than space. As if the building is less an object than an impression left behind.
Standing later in front of the actual church, the comparison becomes unavoidable.
The real façade is precise, almost austere. The painted one is hesitant, softened, already slipping away.
Perhaps that is what painting does best: not documenting what is there, but what remains.
And perhaps cities work the same way.
We return to the same places — Santo Spirito, Teatro della Pergola — and think we are revisiting something stable.
But what we are really encountering is a layered accumulation of versions of ourselves. (04/21/2026 11:07:02)
- More than 30 years ago, when I was studying at the European University Institute in Florence, I used to come often to concerts at Teatro della Pergola. Mostly because tickets were made available to EUI students — but also because the place itself seemed to insist that you stayed a little longer in the world of music than you perhaps intended.
The other day I returned.
This time with Jeanne and Vilhelm, and with a programme that felt almost too carefully composed to be accidental: Arvo Pärt’s Für Alina, Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie, Mozart’s Sonata K.404, another Pärt piece (Mozart-Adagio), Gija Kancheli’s Middelheim, and, after the break, Beethoven’s “Archduke” Trio.
Performed by Gidon Kremer (violin), Giedrė Dirvanauskaitė (cello), and Georgijs Osokins (piano).
It is a strange experience to return to a place where your younger self once sat, convinced that you were “taking it in,” only to realise how much of it you probably didn’t understand.
I know this may be close to sacrilege — and forgive me, I plead my own lack of musicality — but I couldn’t help feeling that Gidon Kremer sounded a little… worn. Not in a dismissive sense, but almost as if the music had passed through him so many times that something had shifted. Less precision, perhaps. Or something else entirely.
And yet, maybe that is the point.
Because the evening was not really about technical perfection. It was about continuity. About sitting in the same theatre, decades apart, listening to the same repertoire, and realising that what changes is not the music, but the listener.
Or perhaps both. (04/21/2026 10:52:15)
- Standing in one of the monks' corridors at Museo San Marco in Florence last week, looking at Fra Angelico's fresco of Christ's descent into Limbo — the quiet gesture of a hand extended toward the waiting souls, the broken gate of Hell at his feet, the demon lurking at the edge — I couldn't stop thinking about Joakim Skovgaard's Kristus i de dødes rige at Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen.
The two works are separated by four and a half centuries, yet the iconographic conversation between them felt almost too deliberate to be coincidence. The same subject: Christ descending to the dead, the crowd of souls reaching upward, the vanquished serpents underfoot, the strange suspended light breaking into a dark space. Skovgaard's version is more turbulent, more Symbolist, more Nordic — but the compositional DNA is unmistakably there.
I found myself wondering: did Skovgaard visit San Marco? He traveled to Italy in the 1880s and 1890s — the timing would fit. And if he stood in this very corridor, looking at this very fresco, what did he see that he later carried home to Copenhagen?
Sometimes the most interesting conversation in art history is the one that was never written down. (04/20/2026 21:15:26)
- Standing in front of this painting at @palazzostrozzi #rothkoinflorence I kept thinking about a line from #christopherrothko ’s Rothko: From the Inside Out:
“Without input from the screen, the twenty-first-century being faces a profound and existentially unbearable uncertainty.”
It’s striking how relevant that feels today—maybe even more than when it was written. We’ve become so used to constant input, constant direction, constant distraction. The screen tells us what to see, what to think, what to feel next.
But Rothko does the opposite.
He gives you almost nothing—and in doing so, everything. No narrative, no instruction, no escape. Just color, silence, and yourself. And maybe that’s exactly why it feels uncomfortable… and necessary.
Perhaps we should spend less time scrolling and more time standing still in front of paintings like this.
Yes, I’m aware of the irony of posting this here. (04/19/2026 16:32:58)
- During our trip to Nepal, we visited the ChangTang workshop in Kathmandu through Pia Dams, a Dane living there. The artisans weave carpets and clothes from the wool of Tibetan goats and yaks.
I was deeply fascinated to see the Jacquard loom in use — a direct ancestor of modern computing — and it immediately brought to mind Amalie Smith’s book Thread Ripper.
Thread Ripper is a multi-threaded story about weaving: about creating a digitally woven tapestry while simultaneously weaving through love and life. It recalls Ada Lovelace, who during the first industrial revolution foresaw the link between the loom and the computer.
Today, Smith writes from the edge of the fourth industrial revolution, where biology and software intertwine — nerve tissue, plant tissue, the fabric of screens, the webs of love, of ancestry, and of digital networks. And the small bugs that can creep into these digital textiles. (10/18/2025 15:56:28)
- Yesterday, I had the great pleasure of joining @morten.kjaersgaard for a podcast conversation about digital sovereignty — a topic close to my heart and also the theme of the upcoming book that @bovenielsen and I will soon publish.
Morten is producing a new podcast series on digital sovereignty as part of his platform digitalsuveraenitet.dk, and I was honoured to be the first guest in the series.
It was wonderful to revisit our shared history — from when Morten and I co-founded Open Source Leverandørforening back in the 2000s — and to reflect on how those early discussions about openness and technology have evolved into today’s debates about sovereignty, infrastructure, and control in the digital age.
I look forward to hearing the rest of the series and to continuing this important conversation! @michellehorstboell (10/18/2025 10:50:34)