YOUR FLORENCE EXPERIENCE

FINE ARTS AND
CULTURE ACADEMY

Street Art in Florence - The blue angel and the red skull

A very long wall along the railway, entirely painted with tags, writers' signatures, many extremely complex and imaginative. Few figures emerge from the chromatic interweaving of the tags, two are particularly interesting.

The first is a blue angel. He is represented as a beardless young man with long hair, half naked, an adolescent face, broad wings and a rapt, lost gaze. The blue color is generally attributed to the cherubs, the wise angels, while the seraphs are red. Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, in canto XXVIII of Paradise, places them in the sky of the Zodiac or of the Fixed Stars, as guardians who filter the divine light down from heaven, rotating very fast around God. But ours is probably a guardian angel, protector of writers. In fact, he holds a mini paint roller in his hand, one of their fundamental tools, along with brushes, sprays, sponges and stencils.

The other figure a few meters away, from another hand, is a subject much loved by writers, perhaps due to the dark aura and the emotional impact it causes. It is a fiery red skull and has a more detailed construction and a more complex structure than the angel: it is smoking and the smoke circulates through the empty cracks of the bones. It has strange canine ears erect on its head and emerges from a background of menacing black figures, with the same strange ears. Finally, it is waxy and melting. What can it mean? Perhaps that smoking is bad for your health? As always, the interpretations of Street Art works are free.
Florence, via di Terzolle.



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