First (and Last) Post From Indiana

So, the reports are true; Indiana is quite flat. Notre Dame is also very, very large in addition to being flat. Yesterday was a game day and from the 12th floor of the library we could see into the stadium, which was overflowing with people.

My voyage here wasn't bad, except for my flight from Philadelphia leaving an hour late. Naturally, when I got to Detroit and had half an hour to make my connection, the gate was at the other end of the airport and the express tram was broken. There was running, but I made it onto the tiny puddle-jumper airplane that took me to South Bend. My flight out leaves at 1:30, and Sean insists that we only need to leave here at 12 because the airport is ten minutes away and it's South Bend so it's not like there's a line, but I have such a fixation with being over-early for things like appointments and plane flights that it was quite difficult for me to agree to head out less than two hours beforehand. I have a 2.5 hour layover in Detroit this time, which is fine because not only do I have three articles to read for Palladio class, I could also use some time to brush up on my Italian verbs, as my translation exam is tomorrow.

I'm sad to be leaving Sean here, even if it's only three weeks till he'll be coming to Philadelphia (it had been five weeks since we'd seen each other this time). Maybe it's because his apartment is so reminiscent of the Fairfield apartments, but I've had the strangest feeling like we're back in school together, living on the same campus, and I've just been too lazy to walk back to my townhouse the past few days.

Today, of course, is also my mom's two-year anniversary. Sean and I decided it should be called "Mrs. D-Day" in honor of my mom's hostile takeover of heaven, although "Operation Overlord" was also under consideration. Here's to you, mom--we miss you.

D.C. and the National Gallery

Yesterday I got up at the (literal) crack of dawn for our trip to D.C. It was a lot of fun; I haven't been to Washington since our family vacation in sixth or seventh grade, so it was amazing to see how little my memories of the layout of the Mall corresponded to the actual thing. For one thing, the National Air and Space Museum is directly across from the National Gallery; totally didn't know that. The bus driver tipped us off that the best food was to be had at the cafeteria in the American Indian museum, so several of us went there for lunch and afterward walked from the Capitol down to the Washington monument. One of the girls, Agnes, is from Poland and this was her first visit to Washington, so she was really excited. Unfortunately, we didn't have time to make it all the way down to the Lincoln Memorial, which I remember being incredibly awed by as a kid.

The National Gallery is purely amazing. The building itself is unbelievable--when you walk in the main entrance of the West building, you could be forgiven for thinking you just walked into the Pantheon. The main difference (aside from lacking the Pantheon's amazing multi-colored marble decoration) being that here the massive, coffered dome is supported by monumental columns of a dark green marble.

The galleries themselves are likewise beautifully constructed, although a bit labryinthine; Agnes and I walked around in the morning before lunch and thought we had hit most of the Italian and Flemish galleries. Um, no: we managed to miss the Raphael room, the Titian room, Bellini's "Feast of the Gods" and van Eyck's "Annunciation." D'oh! The latter painting I had no idea was in this museum, or even in North America--I expected it to be in Europe. It's really quite marvelous, but much smaller than I imagined: less than a foot wide by a couple of feet tall, maybe.

There was so many incredible pieces to see that I really felt I was only about to see about a quarter of them. After our group met with Dr. Hall I used the last 45 minutes to dash madly through the galleries taking photos of my favorite pieces with my cell phone. I hadn't even thought to bring my camera, but they're so much more relaxed about photos there than almost any other museum--I'm looking at you, Metropolitan! (Actually, the weirdest attitude toward photos was definitely the National Museum in Athens; they're OK with photos of the objects, but you're prohibited from taking a photo of yourself with the object. Sean and I asked a guard why after we saw him yell at this couple trying to photograph themselves with a statue of Neptune. His answer was basically that the artwork is important and part of history and you have no business putting yourself in there with it. Um, OK.)

Oh, and in the room with Canaletto (who I love for the reason everyone who's visited Venice loves him, for the picturesque tourist-postcard quality of his paintings) I saw this painting by his nephew and pupil, Bernardo Bellotto (who confusingly and perhaps fraudulently sometimes signed his own paintings with the name of his famous uncle):


I'm looking at it and thinking, that looks familiar. Then I read the title, "Campo dei S.S. Giovanni e Paolo," and remembered that that's where we had lunch with Jasmine when we met up with her in Venice. I got a porchetta sandwich from the excellent shop that was across the bridge you can see in the picture (and which was sadly closed when we tried to go back the next day, a Sunday) and we sat on those canal steps and I asked her every question I could think of about Temple. Talking to her was really one of the most influential factors in my decision to choose Temple, really, so seeing this tickled me.

Also, I think this church was on the route between our hostel in the remoteness of Castello and basically everything else in Venice, so it was one of the few landmarks that began to look familiar as we routinely got lost and walked in circles. That, and Rialto. That damned bridge!

Yay Kids, Learning Time!

Tomorrow I have my first class presentation in Making of a Renaissance Painting. All of the presentations are about articles detailing conservation efforts on particular works of art; the one Jasmine and I are presenting dealt with the 1967-9 cleaning and restoration of Titian's "Bacchus and Ariadne" of 1520-3, now in the National Gallery in London. This is the painting as it was in 1967 with cleaning tests:



And this is the painting after it was cleaned and restored:


Pretty amazing, right? The article pointed out how hard it must have been hard for people looking at the painting in the "before" stage to recognize Titian as a master of color and paint. The culprit here, in addition to age, flaking paint, and dirt, was the layer of varnish that yellowed with time. It wasn't the original coat of varnish by any means; this painting had seen numerous cleaning and revarnishings in its lifetime, as it was possible to determine thanks to the detailed records of the National Gallery (they had records on this painting dated 13 years before they even bought it--how English!) While it's impossible to know if Titian originally varnished it himself when he was finished, varnish has been applied to virtually every painting up until the 20th century, both as a protection against the environment and also for the pictorial effect it has of giving everything the same sheen. Unfortunately, every couple of decades it turns yellow and has to be painstakingly removed and replaced.

The other focus of the article we're discussing is the set of scientific tests performed on the painting before beginning the restoration process. This includes X-rays (they can show damage to the paint layers and also changes made to the composition by the artist), infrared photos (they can show you underdrawing by reflecting off the carbon in black ink or pencil) and paint samples, which were extracted via syringe near areas of damage, photographed and blown up 200x so you can actually see the layers of paint and analyze the pigments contained in each.

For example, in the X-rays of this painting the figure of Bacchus was quite clearly defined, while the figure of Ariadne was an illegible mass of white. Because X-rays bounce off the lead contained in white paint of the time (which they unsurprisingly called lead white) it can be determined that Bacchus was probably painted early and not changed, while Ariadne was re-positioned, painted out, and re-painted while Titian tried to figure out what to do with her body, a process involving much more lead white than with Bacchus, hence the blot on the X-ray. The paint samples supported this conclusion by revealing in the Bacchus sample just a few thin layers of pigments over the gesso ground, while in the Ariadne showing first the ground layer, then layers of paint for the sea and sky, which were topped by several layers of flesh colors interspersed with lead white from the re-painting.

Chemical analysis of the pigments themselves can also provide interesting results. In this case, the conservators determined that not only was Titian using the fanciest, most expensive pigments, he was also using them in their purest form, which contributes to the boldness of his colors. The blues, for example, are depicted using ultramarine (crushed lapis lazuli, practically more expensive than gold at the time) for the sky and the cheaper azurite for the sea; the really cheap blues, indigo and smalt, make no appearance whatsoever. This makes sense considering the fact that he painted this work and two others in a series of Bacchanals for the Alfonso d'Este, Duke of Ferrara; the patron had deep pockets and wanted the best.

So that, in a nutshell, is what I'm going to be presenting in class tomorrow. As it was pointed out in our class last week, since conservation info is rarely, if ever, included on a museum label, you have to be careful in writing a painting off for looking dingy or having dark, faded colors, as it may simply be in dire need of restoration; although on the other hand, it could be a Leonardo and then the smudgy darkness just all part of the "sfumato" effect.

I do find the topic of restoration quite interesting, although I would go insane if it were my job, both from the stress of worrying that I'm going to destroy a world-class painting with the wrong cleaning solution and from the amount of patience required to sit there for hours on end pressing down individual paint flakes with a heated spatula. God bless those people, because it's only through their efforts that we can appreciate a painting like this one in the way it was intended.

Party and a Cross-Town Journey

Last night Dr. Hall hosted her annual welcoming party for new graduate students. Her house is kind of hard to describe--one of those very modern, flat-topped constructions. The patio and yard were very nicely laid out,with definite a Asian-garden theme going on, and the interior sported a highly eccentric collection of paintings, sculpture, and other objets d'art, which apparently stemmed not only from Dr. Hall but also from her husband, a rather intense guy who has worked as an art restorer all over the world. For all that, the house definitely had problems with flow, and the rooms felt very boxy and cut off from everything else. It wasn't an organic design, I guess you could say.

This probably doesn't pose as much of a problem most years when the weather is nice, but it was raining last night, so all forty-odd guests were crammed inside, where it was quite warm and very loud. Eventually about eight of us first-years settled in a den/office that was cool and quiet and where we could actually hear each other talk. It was really the first chance any of us had had to talk to other "novices" about all things graduate school. It was a relief to hear the same concerns that have been running through my mind these past two weeks come out the other girls' mouths, and it was equally instructive when one of the older students in the doctoral program came in and started giving us the low-down on various things. A bunch of us are in the Palladio class together, for which we have an insane-sounding assignment due Monday that basically entails surveying the scholarly literature on Palladio since 1980 and developing a bibliography of ten sources that we feel best identifies current and future trends in the field. Our feeling on this: WTF. However, our informant told us that Dr. Cooper likes to assign these mind-blowing projects, without feeling that they're really all that difficult, and that we shouldn't stress over it too much, which was yet another relief.

All in all, it was a really good time, but as I had predicted to Sean earlier it didn't go too late; in fact, we emerged from the den around 9 to discover that most people had already left. What can I say, art historians just really don't party hard. Today I got up early, determined to snap a copy of Dr. Cooper's book from the Central Library in Philadelphia to tide me over until the copy I ordered arrived. This turned out to be more of a trek than I had anticipated. It did give me my first experience of Philly's subways, which aren't bad but which everyone's kind of leery of right now because some guy randomly attacked another rider with a hammer last week right in front of a security camera--and none of the other riders helped, naturally. After the subway it was about a five block walk, which isn't bad in itself, except that it was along a service street-slash-expressway, so more like a place where you feel you're going to be run over by a semi at any moment than a nice pedestrian avenue. The library, when I got there at last, was absolutely gorgeous. Unfortunately, the book I wanted was reference only--they don't like letting expensive art books circulate. So as not to make my visit pointless, I picked up a different Palladio book instead:the one she had mentioned was a good text for someone outside the field who knows little about architecture. Sold!

As the Italians Would Say, "Madonn'!"

Today I attempted my first full-scale article translation: an article on the three models created for the Redentore project. Several hours later, I'm on page five. Page five of nineteen. At the beginning of page three I decided to clock myself: it took me thirty minutes to get through the page--and this is while using an online dictionary to save the time of flipping through pages, mind you. At that rate it's only going to take me seven hours to read the rest of it! Yes!

Doomed to a Life of Early Evenings

News bulletin: graduate school is hard. Quite hard, in fact. I knew it would be, I expected it, but the view from underneath is certainly daunting. For today's seminar, which was Making of a Renaissance painting, we read two hundred pages of text on techniques of 15th and 16th century painting, which was interesting, if rather dense. With that much material you usually wind up with the over-arching themes fairly well-imprinted in your mind, but a lot of the specifics inevitably slip through. Not so with my professor, who responded to a question about the precise definition of a glaze with "It should be on page 237." It was. She didn't have a copy of the book in front of her; she hadn't even re-read these chapters recently, having put her copy in our grad lounge last week. That's just the kind of memory Dr. Hall has. Needless to say, that is not the kind of memory I have (far from it). Intimidating. She personally is not, though; in fact, all of my professors are great.

I think Dr. Cooper's class may be my favorite--that's a seminar on Palladio, this being the 500th anniversary of his birth. We chose research topics this week (which can be a rather tense jostling for the most popular choices, often with Dr. Cooper deciding which topic would be best suited, based on everyone's interests) and I managed to get the one that I wanted, which was Palladio and the East. Venice is a great laboratory for the co-mingling of Western and Eastern influences, having always had strong trading ties with first the Byzantine and then the Muslim worlds. There was actually a really interesting article in the Art Bulletin a few issues ago about a glass vessel in the treasury of San Marco that juxtaposed classicizing reliefs and Islamicizing script in its decoration.

Anyway, this topic is of course different because it's architecture, which is obviously not as easily diffused as doing faux-Arab writing on a dish to make it look exotic. The article assigned to the topic as its "jumping-off point" was on possible Ottoman influences in the church of the Redentore (redeemer) on the Guidecca in Venice:



Basically it argued that Marc'Antonio Barbaro, a friend of Palladio's who at the time of the commissioning of the Redentore had just returned from five years as a consul in Constantinople, might have been the means for transmitting some aspects of Ottoman-style architecture to Venice. I didn't find the article entirely convincing (a couple of minaret-like structures do not an Ottoman influence make, especially when they've been done elsewhere in Italy beforehand) but, as with all things in grad school, you can't form an opinion until you've done about five thousand pages of reading. However, my lack of familiarity with architecture beyond the basics made itself known when I sat down with a book on the Redentore and had to spend fifteen minutes staring at the ground plans before they started to make sense in terms of what the book was describing. When it got into a really theoretical discussions of spatial relationships within the structure, though, my eyes simply started to close.

Reading Italian is also going to come quite in handy, if I ever doubted it--this book was the kind that quotes directly from period documents with no translation, either in the text or in the footnotes. Of course, it's a lot easier for me to figure out modern Italian than 16th century Italian (think of how people wrote in English in the sixteenth century, ie, in needlessly complex sentences that went on for freakin' ever) so I'm lucky right how that I can get a general idea of what's going on.

The result of getting up early and spending many hours each day in a library is that I'm tired at a very early hour in the evening. I could totally go to sleep now, and it's 9:30. I am OLD!

Raining, Pouring

This is definitely a day when I wish I were a napper, but I'm not. I did finally buy some curtains (green, of course) for my bedroom today, so if I don't want the five-year-old boy who lives in the house next door constantly waving at me and yelling "Hi!", I can block him out.

This morning Phyllis and I checked out a rummage sale at a church nearby that had to be one of the biggest sales I've ever been to (is it a coincidence that the Episcopalians have all the best sales?) The church itself was really striking. It's Gothic style, like a lot of Episcopal churches, but this one actually observes more of the forms than just having pointed arches and stained glass; there are buttresses on the external walls, a 'crossing tower' where the nave meets the transept, and the tympanum over the entrance even had sculptural decoration, although, alas, Jesus was not depicted within the full-body halo called a mandorla. Every time I see one I think of Lucia Giardino, a very eccentric professor I had in Italy who always called it an "almond of glory." In fact I got so used to thinking of it like that I had really forgotten the actual name for a while.

After getting drenched coming out of Target later(thank you storm Hanna) I was quite cheered to return home and find a package waiting from none other than my dear expatriate roommate containing an(early) birthday present purchased in Malta. In just a few weeks I'll be 23, which is hard to believe--harder still is believing that it will be two years since my mom died. I thought of her this morning at the church sale (which she would have thoroughly enjoyed). Walking in with Phyllis, who is middle-aged and is about my mom's build and coloring from the back, I wondered if the women at the door thought I was her daughter when she paid the admission for both of us. It reminded me of so many rummage sales and flea markets when I would run up to my mom with whatever treasures I'd found and try to wheedle her into paying for them. Today, of course, I was paying, so while I looked longingly at a gorgeous baroque-style mirror, it was not worth $50 from my own pocket.

I think my mom and Phyllis would have gotten along quite well. I wish they could meet.

First Day of Class

I don't think I have ever seen as many students milling about at one time as I saw when I got to campus today. I think I hit right around the change of classes and lunchtime, which I was warned about by one of the older grad students. It was like a stampede! Although I knew the numbers already (Temple's entering freshman class of 4,000 just about equals the entire number of students at Fairfield) it was a fresh reminder that Fairfield was really quite small.

So I have my first class today at 4:10, the making of a Renaissance painting. I checked the syllabus and there's a field trip to the National Gallery in Washington on the 20th, which is really exciting. During our family vacation to Washington we saw many museums, including the Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian, and one very long day spent entirely in the Air and Space Museum-- thanks to my dad, who managed to take dozens of pictures just of fragments of the Enola Gay. Of course, we skipped the big famous museum with the paintings in it, because my parents were not art people (to be fair, at age 12 or however old I was, I probably wouldn't have cared, so I can't hold it against them.) But I'll get to see it now!

Travel

Thanks to the wonderful flexibility of my class schedule (classes end for me Wednesdays at 11am) I'm planning to fly to visit Sean in Indiana later this month. By plane it's about four hours and a couple hundred dollars; by train, however, it's the same price, but fifteen hours! Madness. Meanwhile, for Sean to travel between Philly and New Haven when he's here, it's the same price for a train and a bus, but the bus takes twice as long. I don't understand how they're able to maintain those prices...who would opt for the bus in that situation?

As an aside for those of you living in New York, Amtrak to Philadelphia is rather expensive, but Bolt Bus is just $10!