Sigh

I loved my time in Italy.  But, like Julia Louie Dreyfus, far too many of my nights ended with me wearing an outsized ten-gallon and getting pecked by a fake ostrich.  Ma c'è una bella vita...!

Department of "The Root of All Evil"

So, what are the gays being blamed for now? Why, global warming and human trafficking, natch! (HT: JMG.)

Sheesh. What won't the gays be blamed for? Well, at least they can't blame us for hurricanes - whoops, spoke too soon there. Well then, surely not for terrorist attacks - whoops again. Well, they would never say that people with HIV/AIDS got what they deserved - argh, wrong again (those who say this then run for the Senate from Delaware).

Okay, let's try one last time. To my knowledge, gays have never been blamed for the death of Jesus. In the long history of nutjob accusations against gays, this is one bomb that's never been thrown. Whew.

It's no surprise, though. We all know who is really responsible for the death of Jesus, anyway. You know - those scheming evilmongers who engage in ungodly work and who are up to their armpits in the blood of Christian babies. That's right. The abortionists. Get 'em, Glenn Beck!

The Rise of the Nativists in Italy

An article in The New York Times today sheds light on the alarming degree to which, in Italy, Berlusconi's political fortunes are tied to the hard-right Northern League. They seem to be an odd bunch: fond of quasi-pagan rituals (pouring waters from the head of the Po River into the Venetian Lagoon - why, exactly?), and of crypto-Celtic iconography that's just plain weird, to say nothing of historically rootless.

While they may be giving voice to somewhat legitimate (or at least au courant) grievances - e.g., concerning immigration and the chronic financial reliance of the poor south to the rich north - they seem to have a passion for crude gestures, if not outright thuggery. Here's a particularly galling little number:

It is openly hostile to illegal immigration, an increasingly loud theme both in Italy and Europe. One Northern League deputy provocatively threw a pig’s head on the ground where a mosque was planned, defiling the lot.

That's rather startling, no? These jackanapes are power brokers?

And the non sequitur in that sentence from the Times is a bit too kind: that gross little gesture didn't display just hostility to illegal immigration, but to an entire religion and its adherents (whether legally present, illegally present, or indeed nowhere near Italy at all).

Department of "How Fares Europe"

Two interesting articles on Europe from The New York Times this week. In the first, Germany's growing ability to be comfortable with its past is making it into a more assertive powerhouse. In the second, cash-strapped conservationists in Venice are forced to sell advertising space to keep their efforts going.

In the latter article, the author notes that other Italian cities are facing similar problems. Rome is thrashing about, looking for 25 million euros to fund a restoration of the Colosseum. And of course, the Sistine Chapel must cost something to maintain, what with all those grubby tourists about. Italy is indeed heritage-rich, and that is indeed a blessing - but not a cheap one, alas.

The Limits of Power

The New York Review of Books sees some push-back against Berlusconi in Italy.

The Statues of Rome - Part Two

Let's continue our meander through the statue garden of Rome, shall we? Last time, I trudged out some pictures of the city's heroic statues, while making a few observations and dissents from the aesthetic theories of Walter Pater. This time around, I have nothing so heady in mind: while I still have a theme, I have no theoretical axe to grind. Rather, I will merely focus on pictures of sculptures that embody the holy. (Yes, the next installment will focus on the profane.) Pack your Baedeker and let's get going!

The Holy

Halfway down the Piazza Navona sits the resplendently Baroque church of Sant'Agnese in Agone. In one chapel stands this statue of Saint Sebastian - immediately recognizable, of course, by the host of arrows that penetrate his body. I don't know when this statue was created, or by whom, but I was taken by its naturalism, and the striking juxtaposition of calm repose and physical agony captured in the work.

The Ponte Sant'Angelo, originally built by Hadrian, spans the Tiber in the shadow of the Castello Sant'Angelo. Along the rails stand ten Baroque statues of angels, holding instruments of the Passion. This statue - created by Antonio Raggi, a student of Bernini's - appears to be holding a chess piece, but in fact is holding a throne. This statue, and the others on the bridge, are a delight to photograph, out as they are in the clean Roman light.

These three statues are in the Castel Sant'Angelo itself. (The picture in the middle was included in my previous post on Rome's statues.) The marble statue, of the Archangel Michael, is by Rafaello da Montelupo, active in the 16th century; it originally sat at the top of the fortress itself. In 1753, however, after suffering damage, it was replaced by the bronze statue, executed by the Flemish artist Peter Anton von Verschaffelt. The bronze work, I feel, is far more striking and dramatic, and therefore more fitting for its perch - although the calm visage of Rafaello's statue brings to mind Michelangelo's David. It can still be seen in a courtyard in the fortress.

A delightful, multicolored stoup in St. Peter's, near Michelangelo's Pietà.

The Pietà itself. I wish this picture were better, but it is hard to get close to this, perhaps the most famous sculpture in St. Peter's.

A very animated depiction of Saint Veronica, in St. Peter's. This statue is part of the shrine to Saint Veronica. She carries, of course, the shroud that was reputedly used to wipe the face of Christ as he carried the cross through Jerusalem.

This is a very old statue, also in Saint Peter's, of Saint Peter Enthroned, reputedly created in the late 13th century by Arnolfo di Cambio. For centuries, pilgrims have rubbed Peter's left foot as they walk by. In the second picture, I join in this ancient tradition.

The nave of Saint John Lateran, the official cathedral of Rome, is lined with enormous statues of the Apostles, all dating from the early 18th century. This one is Saint Matthew, by Camillo Rusconi. One wonders what he is reading that seems to shock him so.

In a building across the street from Saint John Lateran are the Scala Santa (Holy Steps), said to be the very stairs in Pilate's palace that Christ climbed several times on his way to meet his fate. For centuries, pilgrims (myself included) have climbed the steps on their knees, praying as they go. These three statuary groups can be found at the base of the steps. They depict, in order: Christ's agony in the garden of Gethsemane, Judas' betrayal of Christ, and Pilate presenting Christ before the people of Jerusalem ("Ecce Homo").

The steps are marble but are covered with wooden planks for their protection. At various points, however, holes are left open in the wood; these indicate, it is said, the places where flecks of Christ's blood could be found. I didn't notice any blood as I peered through the little holes.

Filthy, Dirty, Smelly Tourists Are Destroying the Sistine Chapel

Big surprise. Present company (i.e., me) excluded, of course.

The Statues of Rome - Part One

In Studies in the History of the Renaissance, the old Oxford don Walter Pater rejected the notion that the various forms of high art were essentially interchangeable in their expressive capacity. Rather, he theorized that different arts were more appropriately suited for different kinds of expression. While "[a]ll art has a sensuous element," he explained, nevertheless, "one form of art, by the very limitations of its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of its experience." (The experience he was speaking of was the ancient Greek ideal, which Pater felt - with some justification - was most sublimely expressed in sculpture. Then again, no Greek music and precious little Greek painting has survived to our time, so our perspective may be skewed.)

Pater found sculpture to be the art form best suited to a depiction of man that is not self-analytical. I think he means, by this, that sculpture captures the intrinsic beauty of man - the beauty that is not relative, but rather is inherent - better than the other arts. Pater also found that sculpture was a weak medium for expressing situations, or what might be described as a narrative. "In poetry and painting," he declared, "the situation predominates over the character; in sculpture, the character over the situation." He continued:

Excluded by the limitations of its material from the development of exquisite situations, [sculpture] has to choose from a select number of types intrinsically interesting, interesting that is, independently of any special situation into which they may be thrown. Sculpture finds the secret of its power in presenting these types in their broad, central, incisive lines. This it effects not by accumulation of detail, but by abstracting from it. All that is accidental, that distracts the simple effect of the supreme types of humanity, all traces in them of the commonness of the world, it gradually purges away.

What to make of Pater's theory? Let's start with what he is not saying. He is emphatically not saying that there is a hierarchy of the arts - merely that the several arts have different capacities, and in this he is most probably right. He is not saying that sculpture cannot be allegorical or conceptual; and he is certainly right in his observation that the medium - any medium - imposes certain limitations that it would be folly to ignore.

And yet, Pater seems to have examples from ancient Greece too much in mind when he says that sculpture best achieves its purpose not by "accumulation of detail" but by "abstracting from it." One need only look at some of the riotous works of the Baroque to conclude that not everyone at every time took a "less is more" approach to sculpture. While Pater's theory might well describe the aesthetic values that the ancient Greeks ascribed to sculpture, it does not seem to fit so well on the aesthetic values of other places or eras.

More fundamentally, though, I believe Pater may be mistaken when he deprecates the narrative potential of sculpture. Allegorical sculpture can most certainly describe a situation, and, as such works do not depict any specific person, the situation (or at least the concept) predominates over the character. But even when specific characters are shown, the work can depict the "special situation into which they may be thrown," as well - sometimes to brilliant effect.

To put it simply, I suspect that Pater's theory suffers from a lack of universality. While I only read his book after returning from Italy, my still-fresh memories of the sculpture I saw there sprang immediately to mind as refutation. Italy is littered with such refuting sculpture, expressing very clearly the interiority of man and the situations in which he finds himself. Perhaps nowhere is this more true than in Rome, where a wild confusion of styles and periods abounds - in sculpture, certainly, but in all of the plastic arts as well.

What follows is a brief tour of some of the sculptural highlights of my time in Rome. While my favorite sculptures from my Italian tour are actually in Florence, those of Rome are more variegated. And while they do nothing to counter Pater's suggestion that sculpture is the ideal art form for an objective, extrinsic depiction of man (and he may in the end be right on this anyway), they do at least suggest that sculpture's depiction of man can penetrate to his interior life or can capture his relations with the world around him - and can do either very well. Sculpture can, in other words, depict man in a self-analytical way.

More importantly, though, sculpture can be beautiful - and that's the real purpose of this post. This will be the first of several posts treating the sculpture of Rome, and I have decided that we should begin with depictions of the active, the moving - the heroic. Let's get started.

The Heroic

Here are two images of one of the most famous statues in the world: the Apollo of Belvedere.

This statue is a Roman copy of a Greek original from the 4th century BC. It stands in the Vatican Museum. It depicts Apollo, just after he has let fly an arrow that will kill Python, a monstrous serpent that lived near Delphi. (For this reason, it is also known as the Pythian Apollo.) The god is not captured in a moment of tense activity, as one would suspect; rather, he maintains a calm and poised demeanor. Even the folds of his cape, while realistically depicted, are remarkably unruffled. This statue is an exquisite rendition of elegance in action.

Much the same can be said of this work as well - which shows Perseus holding aloft the severed head of Medusa. This statue, also in the Vatican, dates not from antiquity, but from 1801, and is the work of the Venetian sculptor Antonio Canova. Canova's Perseus, like the Apollo before, is gracefully restrained. And once again, the folds of the cape betray only the merest hint of action. But the head of Medusa, by contrast, is a frightful thing. She wears a face not of wrath or hatred, but terror - not unlike, one must imagine, the faces of those unfortunates who caught her eye while she was living. How neatly, by Canova's hand, have the tables been turned on her!

The heroic is not always so confident, as this grouping shows. It flanks the northern edge of the gargantuan, bombastic, and unloved monument to Victor Emmanuel II, first king of a united Italy. Begun in 1911 and completed in 1935, the pompous monument expresses the insecurity of a nation late to statehood and to the imperial game that was then beginning its wretched decline. The central figure, a warrior, brazenly struts, spear in hand and chest thrown forward. (In his arrogance, he seems to have forgotten the purpose of the shield he holds.) He barges before the two other figures, one pensive, the other watchful - action pushing its way to the front. And he brings to mind another Italian of the same era who also liked to puff his chest out.

Let's return to a more credible expression of the heroic - and for that, what could be better than the famous Laocoön, in the Vatican, dating from the first century BC? Laocoön was a Trojan priest who warned his countrymen against accepting the Greeks’ gift of a wooden horse (“beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” he said); they ignored his advice, with dramatic consequences. Spiteful even in victory, Athena, the protector of the Greeks, sent two serpents to kill him and his sons. This sculpture was discovered near Rome in the early 1500s, and Michelangelo was present for its unearthing. It helped to fuel the revival of classical notions of aesthetics in the late Renaissance.

The drama in this sculpture is breathtaking – especially in the sinuous movements of the snakes, which seem to come from everywhere. The fear on the face of the son to the viewer’s right is, I think, especially moving. When I read Pater's statement that, in sculpture, the character predominates over the situation, I immediately objected: "but what about the Laocoön?" Pater must have anticipated this, for a page after making that observation, he noted:

The Laocoön, with all that patient science through which it has triumphed over an almost unmanageable subject, marks a period in which sculpture has begun to aim at effects legitimate only in painting.

It is, he seems to say, the exception that proves the rule - though a remarkable exception, he implicitly concedes. Perhaps he is right; though I would consider any painting that achieves half the level of drama as this sculpture achieves to be a resounding success. Contrary to Pater's suggestion, this work - notwithstanding the limitations inherent in sculpture - does indeed capture an "exquisite situation" - exquisitely terrifying.

Light, Sky, and Color

Almost immediately upon arrival in Rome, I was struck by the intense and pure quality of the light. As Rome is essentially the beginning of the south, it shares a part of the glorious sky for which the Mezzogiorno is so famous. In none of the cities of northern Italy that I visited did I see a sky with the same persistently rich and saturated hue. Not only was the Roman sky itself attractive, but it brought out to full effect the wondrously deep hues of the city as well - cerulean blues, luscious ochres, warm salmons, vibrant yellows, living greens.

Here is a collection of pictures from my time in Rome, in which the sky and light are as much the subject as the sites.

This was the view from my hotel room, near the Spanish Steps, in the northwest of the city.

A procession of trees in the Pincio Gardens. The gardens run along a ridge and provide spectacular views over the city.

In front of a church in the Campo Marzio - I believe the church is St. Rocco. My real interest, however, was in the cheerful pink building in the background. In the foreground, under the statue, is a typical Italian hard at work.

Delightful ochre. I believe this building is somewhere near the Pantheon.

An illuminated statue on the Ponte Sant'Angelo, opposite the papal redoubt, the Castello Sant'Angelo. To the northeast, a few straggling clouds were massing themselves, something they did not often do - and they could never make more than a minor dent on the otherwise undiluted purity of the sky.

The angel from which the Castello Sant'Angelo gets its name. The shaft of light was unintentional, but I think it nicely echoes the diagonal of the angel's sword.

The papal apartments in the Vatican. Note the tart lemon color of the wall in the foreground. Many of the buildings in Rome are somewhat dilapidated, but this only adds to the city's charm, oddly enough - like an old grande dame whose face is lined but who can still look resplendent in her finery.

Roses and a well in the gardens of the Villa Borghese. I took a delightful morning stroll here. The Villa Borghese is directly behind the Pincio, but does not provide the same vantage point for views over the city. For morning strolls, take in the Villa Borghese; at dusk, the Pincio.

The grande dame's faded beauty on the Palatine Hill.

One of my favorite pictures - the Temple of Castor and Pollux in the Roman Forum. It took me a while to take this picture. I love its pure elementalism: porous rock, cool marble, azure sky.

Two pictures taken on the Via dei Fori Imperiali at dusk.

The campanile of Santa Maria in Cosmedin, near the Circus Maximus - catching the light of the late afternoon.

The Sienese Palio

The Palio is an awesome festival that takes place twice a year in Siena. The centerpiece is a 90-second horserace around the Piazza del' Campo in the heart of the city, but medieval-style parades and festivities go on all day. Each neighborhood competes vigorously against each other and entertains fierce rivalries with enemy neighborhoods.

Here's video number one, the parade of my adopted Sienese neighborhood (Nicchio):



And here's video number two, of the victor being paraded around the city's narrow streets:



Sadly, my neighborhood didn't win. Surprise, surprise! At least I got some eye candy at the end of it all.

Words I Didn't Know

On my previous blog, I would occasionally post definitions of new words (new to me, anyway). I'm going to keep that ball rolling on this blog. The first installment is (drum roll):

Pasquinade. (n.) A satire or lampoon, especially one that ridicules a specific person, traditionally written and posted in a public place. (tr. v.) To ridicule with a pasquinade; satirize or lampoon. [From the Free Dictionary.]

The word, it seems, is derived from the nickname - "Pasquino" - for a fragmentary statue in Rome. The statue, shown here, dates from the third century B.C. and was erected in a public

square in Rome in 1501. It supposedly depicts Menelaus holding Patroclus. (For those who slept through your Great Books courses, Menelaus and Patroclus were Greek heroes in the Trojan War.) Since the early sixteenth century, Romans have been in the habit of placing anonymous parodies and lampoons on the base of the statue; they can be seen in the close-up.

I came across this word while reading The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy by the nineteenth century Swiss historian Jacob Burkhardt. Burkhardt was the first eminent scholar to address culture as a proper subject of historical inquiry; thus, in this great work, he describes the intellectual and social life of Renaissance Italy, rather than the great men and great battles of that time. Burkhardt recounts the "unhappy reign" of Pope Adrian VI, who was elected in 1522 but who died within two years. Adrian was a Dutchman - in fact, he was the last non-Italian elected pope until John Paul II - and the people of Rome never forgave him for this infelicity. The poor Adrian was an early target of Pasquino's eloquence.