Looking at my Google calendar, almost every night until my departure is booked, a fact that makes the introvert in me a little uncomfortable! Last night we met TJ and a very-pregnant Anna in South Norwalk for dinner at Mama's Boy, a delicious Southern restaurant; tonight my very last Danny G dinner; tomorrow night the Greek festival in Orange with my sister; Saturday night to South Norwalk again with the rest of our Fairfield friends; Sunday to Linda's camper with Jon and Kathy to go hiking. Etc., etc. Meanwhile, if one more person asks me "oh, are you packed yet?" I will strangle them with a luggage tag.
Getting to dinner last night was a wee bit stressful, as I wound up driving down I-95 trying to focus both on driving and on listening to Frederick Ilchman give me advice on how to structure my time in Rome. He's a curator at the MFA who was one of David Rosand's most successful proteges, and I'd emailed him earlier this month to see if I could meet with him if I went up to Boston. Dr. Cooper had suggested it, since she'd been talking me up to him when they were together in Venice this summer. Unfortunately, he didn't respond until this week, and I don't have time any more to go north, so we talked by phone instead--which, having experienced an hour-long, rapid-fire phone conversation that was no less surprising for length than intensity, I am actually happy about. He could only talk at 6pm, and I assumed it would be a quick get-to-know-you chat, but instead we left at 6:45 and he was still talking!
He was very enthusiastic about my research, which was great, and had lots of useful suggestions. Some of the best weren't even specifically about research, but rather how to make the most of my time in Rome. His chief point was guard your time, particularly when you have people visiting: make clear boundaries about when you're available; accompany guests to places you actually want to visit--not the Borghese or Vatican for the 17th time; don't make hotel reservations for people as it will end in disaster, but do encourage people to stay in your own neighborhood, so you're not constantly schlepping cross-city. He even suggested that if you have an academic friend visiting, you shouldn't feel bad about taking them along to the library for a couple of hours; in the Marciana he once gave an Americanist friend a copy of one of DR's books to occupy herself with for a couple of hours and she loved it.
He also reminded me of the importance of seeing things, something that PFB had mentioned in her "Home From Rome" talk in New York; just experiencing the city and its monuments itself can have a powerful impact on what you think and write. His suggestion was libraries and archives in the mornings, and "real things" in the afternoons. He also told me to take advantage of Rome's cosmopolitan status to see all kinds of art, ancient to Dada, whatever comes my way (an appropriate stance for a museum curator!)
I also took the opportunity to ask him how he approached connoisseurship. I mean, I knew the answer he was likely to give (see lots of works), but I suppose I wanted some kind of assurance that he didn't absorb it from DR via osmosis consider himself born with it, or something. I even told him about my awful embarrassment in front of Bernard Aikema! He outlined his notion of the totem pole of art snobbery: people at research institutions looks down on the liberal arts people; liberal arts people look down on the museum people; museum people look down on the auction house people; and auction house people look down on the dealers. Ironically, he said it's often the dealers who have the best "eye", simply because they see a torrent of this stuff at every level of quality.
He asked me if Dr. Cooper had told me that he'd just completed his dissertation. I tried to be careful in my reply, because I certainly knew from the grapevine that he'd just gotten around to finishing it, more than a decade after the fact, but she didn't tell me that explicitly. His response: "I took seventeen years to write my dissertation. Don't take seventeen years to write your dissertation. That's my advice." Haha. Of course, he still managed to rise to a level of prominence in the field, and a coveted job at the MFA, without his PhD--and he's probably one of the last who will be able to do so, since a doctorate is pretty much a prerequisite for a curatorial job these days.
Finally, we talked about DR, and Ilchman said that as the deadline for submitting his dissertation approached, and he was still iffy on the final intepretation, he and Rosand happened to be on a four-hour train ride together. They went through his dissertation page by page, until he was fully confident in it. He was a nice man. Ilchman said "well, if he'd lived five more years he would have been on your committee too." Honestly, I'd trade that (cool as it would have been) for a visit to Venice with him in the flesh.
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