Rejsedagbog. Firenze 1846

This page comes from a travel journal, made by Johan Thomas Lundbye likely during his travels in Florence. The primary materials here are paper and ink, humble constituents when compared to the Italian Renaissance art he encountered. Lundbye used these ordinary materials in a most meticulous way, carefully filling the page with dense, looping script. The very act of handwriting, with its rhythms and pressures, infuses the page with a sense of immediacy and lived experience. It's an intimate record of encountering Florence, filtered through Lundbye's own observations. Consider, too, the social context of such a journal. Travel became increasingly accessible to the middle classes in the 19th century, fueled by industrialization and expanding trade networks. Lundbye's journal then becomes a tangible artifact of this era, bearing witness to the democratization of cultural experience. In foregrounding these materials and the circumstances of their making, we recognize that even an everyday object can offer profound insights into art, labor, and society.