In Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, German king of spectacle Anselm Kiefer meets his match. His exceptional exhibition Fallen Angels begins in the vast colonnaded courtyard with archangel Michael, a huge dynamic figure with outstretched wings, swooping across an eight-metre translucent gold ground. Below, rebel angels plummet into Kiefer’s chaotic charcoal, shellac and fabric surfaces — our own dark material world, animated by the crowds thronging this inner square in the city centre.
As Kiefer turns the popular Strozzi courtyard, with its wide benches and ample sheltered spaces, into an arena for a sumptuous collision between heaven and earth, this gleaming opening painting “Fall of the Angel” stops in their tracks those ambling in from fashionable via Tornabuoni or the bars on Piazza Strozzi. Kiefer’s is a brand new mixed-media piece, but his archangel is a Renaissance interloper — he is an enlarged version of Luca Giordano’s St Michael — and, for a moment as you enter, it seems that an old gilded altarpiece has wandered in from a church or the nearby Uffizi.
In the first upstairs room, the rebellious angels return, this time as so many empty three-dimensional tunics, hanging off a toxic blue-green canvas. A gigantic sharp-edged wing — an actual dented wing from a military aircraft, relic of wartime disaster — juts out menacingly, sorrowfully, across the grand piano nobile gallery.