Snow in Florence

The outstanding but half-forgotten sculptor of the Italian Renaissance, Giovanfrancesco Rustichi, was rediscovered in Italy in 2010. However, Lina Kostenko turned her attention to him a quarter of a century earlier, in the mid-1980s. The poetic masterpiece “Snow in Florence” intertwines the philosophy of art and piercing love, psychoanalysis and turbulent events in 16th-century Europe. Exquisitely and imaginatively seen in the dramatic poem, Renaissance Florence becomes a deeply relevant metaphor for the artist’s freedom, and therefore his ability to create a “garden of unfading sculptures” that is not subject to time.