Venice, again.

so yesterday, the trip to Cortina and Dolomites was cancelled, much to my disappointment, as I had seen just about everything I could think of in Venice. So, I gave myself a lesson in dichotomy. First I went to an exhibit devoted to DiVinci, and it was really cool, as I thought it would be. It was mostly about his engineering and architecture works and not much about his art. I didn't realize how much stuff he actually invented - the ball bearing being one of them, and still used today in much the same form. He also apparently had a fascination with water systems, a man after my own heart ;) He made several inventions to use water as a means of making some things automatic, like an excavator. It worked by filling up a tipping bucket, which lifted a weighted hoe-like thing and then when the bucket filled and tipped, the weighted digger fell into the trench, dislodging the soil. I know that I'm starting to get a little geeky here, even for the geeks out there reading this.

From there, I took a stroll over to the Peggy Guggenheim museum, which houses a lot of modern art painting, sculptures and things like that as well as a tour of her house, which was pretty gigantic for the city of Venice. I stared for a long time at the Jackson Pollack paintings and tried and tried to get it. But I didn't. I can say that the one called "Circumcision" in 1946 felt like a really angry painting. There was one called "Eyes in the Heat" that was cool because of the texture he made with the oils but it made me wonder whether or not each stroke was deliberate or not. Now, painters like Dali, I can sort of get. The geometric and cubic painters like Picasso don't do a whole lot for me though. In some of the work, I could really appreciate the media used, like sand and pebbles with oil on cardboard, that was kind of cool too. Anyway, it was a world apart from DiVinci's methodical and detailed sketches of war machines.

k