Street Art in Florence - Insectoids, the masterpiece

This insectoid comes from the open air gallery of Viale Corsica. It is very similar to the figures from Piazza Leopoldo, Viale Lavagnini and Ponte Giovanni da Verrazzano and might be by the same author, or group of artists or from the same "bottega", as in the Renaissance. In the botteghe (workshops), pupils used to copy the works of the master and learn his style and techniques, before developing their own "maniera”.  Among the most famous workshops, there are the one of Andrea del Verrocchio from which Leonardo da Vinci came out, and the one of Domenico Ghirlandaio who had Michelangelo Buonarroti among his students. Why shouldn't it also exist in the world of Street Art?

The creature represented here is a chimera, that is, an animal made up of parts of different animals. Present in all ancient mythologies, from Egypt to the Greeks and Romans, the most famous is the Chimera of Arezzo, an Etruscan bronze dating back to the 5th century BC., preserved in the Archaeological Museum of Florence: a roaring lion with a goat's head rising from its back and a snake instead of a tail.

This one, like the other art works, has multiple teardrop eyes (11 in this case, similar to those of bees, and two-colored). It has a large yellow tongue, like the one from Ponte Giovanni da Verrazzano, with depicted 4 oval drops like the eyes, one of which very large on the tip. The rounded head is grafted onto a bluish segmented larvae body, with atrophied legs and fly wings, just like the figures in Piazza Leopoldo. Like the others, this creature is also surrounded by a halo, in this case yellow, and drops that give the sense of movement, perhaps in a liquid. The large mouth, with irregular teeth, is similar to the green snake from viale Lavagnini. The elongated lower jaw resembles that of the monster from Alien, the famous 1979 Ridley Scott film.

In our humble opinion, this figure is the most successful of the series, the "masterpiece". The little pink dog adds a quirky, farcical tone and may have been added by another writer.

Finally, a judgment on the efficiency of this new body: excellent sight, exceptional sense of taste, tremendous bite, but the wings are insufficient and the absence of legs forces it to crawl. Easy to be preyed upon, maybe it still has to grow. Let's wait and see.

Below, by the same artist or workshop, 3 figures. Two with 3 eyes. One grafted onto a grasshopper body with fly wings, like one of those in Viale Lavagnini. The other with the body of a bee or wasp. They come from Le Cure underpass, another large Street Art gallery, perhaps the most important in Florence, about which there is much to talk about.

Finally, the last one at the bottom, coming from Viale Pasquale Paoli. It has 5 eyes, a large serrated mouth like the masterpiece, green, the body is not visible, but the legs are of grasshopper. A big blue sentence completes the work: I'm a wreck (in Italian: I'm a loo). A crisis of self-pity and discouragement. Let's hope it was just a moment.