Feet. They have been on earth for thousands of years and
outnumber humans about 2:1. There are many different shapes, sizes and types.
Over the centuries people have tried to change them, from strapping toes in
China to forcing half the foot far too high to be comfortable, creating
blisters, rubs, painful feet and legs in the obsession women have today with
high heeled shoes. Some people love them, some people hate them. Though perhaps
not the prettiest things to look at they serve an incredibly important role in
our day to day lives. But rather than thanking them for carrying around our
bodies all day, we usually just forget about them.
I was among the many people who are not so fond of their
feet mostly due to a larger than normal gap that I have between by first and second
toe which never seems to go unnoticed. Once I was even asked if I had had my second
toe amputated! To that I politely answered that no I have never had 6 toes or
any feet operations thank you very much. The only time my toe gap has ever been
useful is in summer when I am able to wear jandals (flip-flops) with ease and
always managed to avoid in-between- the-toe blisters.
I am sure by now anyone reading this is completely confused
why I am writing about feet on my travel blog, but patience, please. It is
related to travel and all will be revealed shortly. But first I want to quickly
discuss an image that made the round on Facebook a few years ago about feet. It
showed different foot and toe shapes and stated that each one had either or
Roman, Celtic, Greek, Egyptian or Germanic heritage and if you had that shape, well
that was likely to be your ancient family. I found though none had the toe gap,
mine was probably closet to the Egyptians. I would have preferred to be told it
was a Roman shape but I guess you can’t choose your heritage.
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| Feet Heritage Image |
I had naturally completely forgotten about this image and
the fact that I was possibly from an ancient line of Egyptians when this
thought was brought back to me in perhaps the strangest of places; the Louvre,
Paris. A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about my weekend in Paris during which Laura
and I spent a few hours at the Louvre. We had been looking at the statues for
some time when all of a sudden Laura gasped.
“Belinda!” she said, dragging me over to some statue of an
old man I had already seen, “he has your feet!”
.. “What!?”
“He has your feet. Look a skinny big toe and a big gap!”
“Yeah.. Thanks..” I monotoned, but looked anyway. And she
was right, he did! There, expertly carved into the marble was my foot. A
slightly too high arch which led down to a slim big toe giving the impression
of length. Then between the first and second toes was my perfect-for-jandals
toe gap before the rest of the slim toes slopped gradually down. Having seen
this I decided to check the toes of the other surrounding statues and to my
surprise and delight almost every sculpture had my foot. Feeling rather pleased
with my feet and their anatomy, I let them carry me past the sculptures to the
next room which was filled with paintings from a similar time. And there again,
painted on old canvas were men and women alike, whether in scenes of war,
extravagance or even in the heavens, all modelling my feet.
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| My Foot in Stone |
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| My Foot in Stone |
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| My Actually Foot (for reference!)
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Once home again in Italy I became curious whether the
sculptures and paintings here also happened to have my feet. Looking back on my
old photos of sculptures and paintings and with a bit of help from Mr. Google I
found that they did. In Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam both Adam and God modelled
the toe-gap, as did the philosophers in Raphael’s School of Athens. I even
found that arguably the most famous sculpture in the world, David himself, also
had toe-gapped feet.
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| The Creation of Adam |
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| School of Athens |
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| David's Feet |
Then, as luck would have it, whilst trying to find evidence
of my feet in Italy, I found something that I was not expecting. A clearer origin
of my feet which I felt fitted better than that picture stating they were
Egyptian, and which seemed to indicate a more Roman heritage after all. I found
that the paintings and the sculptures in which my feet appeared most obviously
was in that of the Renaissance art. The Renaissance Era (meaning re-birth in
French), it turns out, was a period of time from about the 14th to
the 17th century. It was an era which principally fulfils its name
in being a time of new ideas, philosophies, culture, music, self-awareness, and
basically a time when art became unbelievably beautiful and just pretty much
amazing. It was the time of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, and
William Shakespeare. And where did this start? In Italy of course! And where in
Italy? Well, just an hour from where my toe-gapped-feet now live, in the beautiful
city of Florence. So somehow, in an incredibly unrelated turn of events it
would appear that my uncommon feet have returned home to their place of origin!
Just like that all those years of hating my toe gap have disappeared.
I have decided here and now that if anyone again ever joked about my toe I
would tell them, go to Italy. Go to Florence and look at the Renaissance art,
look at Michelangelo’s David, go to Rome and study Raphael’s School of Athens
in the Vatican. So while you may laugh, it me and not you that has the feet of
the Renaissance!
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