The Minims and the Capitoline

We had a small field trip during class today (which meant class reconvened after lunch, which sucked) to SS. Trinita dei Monti, to see the anamorphosistic painting discovered on the corridor walls, done by Minim brothers during the Renaissance. SS. Trinita would be the church at the top of the Spanish steps, giving the steps their distinctive double bell-towered look. This would have been great, if we hadn't been grouped into a French tour, and only one person in our group, Alice, could translate any French. Nor was it a brief tour, either; the Sisters of the Sacred Heart, who run it now (it's still French property) were determined to give their countrymen a thorough tour of the property. Anamorphosis means distorted image; basically it's what appears to be an image of St. Francis di Paolo from down the loooong hallway, but when you walk past it, turns into a landscape with clever, tiny little vignettes everywhere, like a cow standing on what was, from another viewpoint, the saint's nose. Alice told me that part of the complex explanation was that this actually had something to do with the Reformation-era conflict over consubstantiation vs. transubstantiation, with the anamorphosis demonstration the changing of one thing into the reality of another thing...anyway, it was pretty cool, if annoyingly unclear due to the language barrier and thirty French people yammering on all around me.

After class, Bailey and I headed down to the Capitoline Museum--we cheated by taking the metro to the Colosseum on the pretext that it looked like rain, but considered the amount of walking one does within the museum complex, and how utterly exhausted I was by the time we reached the Pinacoteca anyway (so tired that I saw Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese, and went "meh, can we go home?") it was a really good idea. Dear God, half of the ancient statuary with which I am familiar is in that museum (technically plural, because they are housed in two Michelangelo-designed palazzi on the Campidoglio hil! The Dying Gaul, Capitoline Brutus, Capitoline Venus, Commodus as Hercules, the Flavian Woman (love her). Meanwhile, the emperor Trajan, in particular, seems to have left behind more busts than any other emperor put together. I'm getting a little tired to seeing his bearded face bedecking every niche in every museum in this city. Take a seat, sir, let Caracalla have some spotlight--I love his angry, over-the-shoulder look; you always know it's him!