Friday morning, I was awakened by a very concerned Karen. There was a museum exhibit in Memphis we'd planned to see one of these days — Masters of Florence: Glory and Genius at the Court of the Medici — and she'd just discovered that it was ending on the third of October.

Now, we had plans on that weekend, as well as the weekend before that; neither of which we could change. So we decided to do it that day. I scrambled to take care of some things before she was done with her classes, and we set off for Memphis.

It took eleven hours to get there. We stopped along the way at a roadside stand, as we had on our honeymoon, to get peanuts. Karen, as is her wont, chose boiled peanuts, whereas I went with dry roasted. (Yes, even after twelve years in Florida, I'm still a Yankee. I don't like grits either.)

The hotel was amusing. The pictures on the walls were an example of their cost-cutting measures:

The "art" was generated on an inkjet printer, on letter-sized paper, and then drowned in a sea of matboard in order to fill up the enormous frame. The bed was as hard as a rock, and the pillows barely thicker than a Kleenex. But the room had a refrigerator, so I'll give them that.

The exhibit was excellent. Sadly, photography was prohibited, and Karen had to give up her camera before we were permitted in. I heard one of the other patrons tell his wife that the museum was much better than going to Florence, because it was all right there; you didn't have to walk all around an entire city in order to see everything. I think, if given the choice between going to a museum and going to Florence, I'd choose the latter, but that's just me.

The gown of Eleanora de Toledo drove home (once again) how screwed up the SCA's ArtSci judging standards are. In a Trimarian ArtSci, it would fare poorly; the trim isn't machine-even, there are wrinkles and puckers, you can see some stitches on the top. And yet the techniques were masterful; the trim was all couched work — not something woven by machine, bought by the spool and then just slapped on. Oh well.

One of my favorite pieces was an iron strongbox. This thing put modern "strongboxes" to shame; instead of a lock with a single catch, it had iron claws which extended all around the lid's circumference. Once that baby was locked, there was no way to pry the top off.

They also had a piece of the shirt Giuliano de Medici was murdered in, still crusted with his blood. Brunelleschi's model of the Duomo, his masterwork which resurrected the ancient techniques of building enormous dome roofs. Incredible stonework. And some later paintings in which every Medici had the same face (such as Sacconi's Death of the Virgin, mourned by the Medici family). Inbreeding? Or just lazy artists?

And then another drive home on Sunday. But I didn't mind all the driving so much; it gave me a chance to plan out parts of a novel I want to write.