The week-long constant and occasionally torrential rain broke earlier this week, just in time for our excursion to Monte Testaccio. This artificial hill was created in ancient Roman times by the discarded fragments of circa 53 million amphorae, which had been used to ship oil (apparently they couldn't be re-used since the terracotta was lightly porous and the oil would turn rancid). Rather than a random trash heap, excavations have shown that the fragments were laid in careful strata with frequent buttressing, to prevent the entire mound from collapsing. There wasn't a terrible amount of stuff to look at (you've seen one pot shard, you've seen them all) but there was an interesting view of southern Rome, a more industrial district, and really incredible interactions of light and post-rain clouds, particularly over the Colli Albani.
On Wednesday we had another excursion, one that had to be booked months in advance: the Aula Gotica of SS. Quattro Coronati, a still-operating convent that was once an Augustinian monastery. In the 1990s, routine conservation of a Gothic-style room revealed that under the white-washing lay an incredible fresco program covering the entire wall space and the vaults. Painted in the 13th century, it had probably already been covered over by the middle of the 14th, meaning the frescoes had less of a change to be damaged and degraded (vs something like the Sistine, subject to constant use for centuries). The colors are extraordinarily vivid, including a green shade that I'm not used to seeing in medieval painting, though it is frequently found in fresco.
One half of the room has a "secular" theme, with a cycle of the months as well as the four seasons. Pagan figures, gods and goddesses appear, but often with Christianizing elements. For example, January is represented by the Roman god Janus, but aytpically he has three faces, not two, making it a trinitarian figure. On the other side of the transverse arch, the program is explicitly religious. Female Beatitudes, dressed as soldiers, carry aloft tiny figures of saints on their backs (it's weird), and trample on figures representing the opposites of their good values (Mahomet and the Jews appear, for example, but also Alexander the Great as the opposite of "fear of God"). In the center of this cycle, on one of the short walls, Solomon appears alone. This detail has led to an interpretation of the room (which was constructed for a cardinal) as a place not only for banquets but also of the dispensation of justice.
Finally, this morning our walk-and-talk took us to Villa Farnesina, built by papal banker Agostino Chigi and frescoed by Raphael, Peruzzi, and Sebastiano del Piombo. The whole complex has been beautifully restored. It's a little over-the-top for me, but I love Sebastiano's heavy-limbed Polyphemus, looking mournfully at the escaping Galatea, who is looking over her shoulder from Raphael's adjacent scene like "whew, see ya later, creeper!" Giovanni da Udine's fruit and vegetable-laden swags, which divide the compartments in the Loggia di Psiche, are also really incredible to look at. Peter reminded us that since this was painted around 1511, we're seeing some of the literal "first fruits" of New World exploration--corn, squash, etc. I had never made that connection before!
Aside from these excursions, which really do help frame my understanding of the city (although if I have to hear the phrase 'Rome is a palimpsest' one more time...) I'm still feeling really at sea about what I'm doing here. I have a massive list of secondary literature that I'm slowly tackling, but I feel rudderless somehow, like I should have burning questions that I'm constantly applying to the material in front of me. There's no one else at the Academy who's at the beginning of their dissertation, which kind of sucks. I'm vacillating on reaching out to Lindsay, who as Mellon Professor-in-Charge is technically supposed to advise us...but she's never had grad students, and also, I admit, I'm a bit nervous about admitting how lost I feel. That goes for talking about it with other fellows, too. When you're constantly surrounded by very accomplished, very driven people who are buzzing on about their latest dissertation chapter or their book or their article, it feels weird to raise my hand and say "um, I'm still confused about whether I have original ideas to offer this discipline..."
It also sucks that there are no other early modernists here. I met a Fulbright scholar who is tangentially linked to the Academy today at the Farnesina.. She works on Raphael, and I may have slightly thrown her off by my over-enthusiasm. Someone who literally speaks my language! She said it herself, on hearing I'm working on Titian: "Someone else who works on canon!" But she also clearly has that sense of direction and drive that I feel like I'm lacking--she buries herself in the Vatican archives every day, working on reconstructing the contents of Julius' library (which was housed in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura, and informed the fresco program). Le sigh. I've been putting off reaching out to Coop about this, but I think I have no choice...
''One morning, I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.''
Friday, November 21, 2014
Wednesday, November 12, 2014
Archaeologists Are Cool
Last night we listened to a lecture by Brian Rose, an archaeologist from Penn who spent 25 years excavating Troy. He's been a fellow and a Resident here, and is now a trustee (meaning, I assume, that he has lots of money). When the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan started, he was also the head of the Archaeological Institute of America, and helped set up a training program to educate US military about identifying and preserving cultural heritage in conflict zones--particularly in terms of helping stop looters. The photo that showed him in Afghanistan in 2003 wearing a flak jacket was really hard to reconcile that with the short, soft-voiced, smiling man who has absolutely zero of the 'Me Big Important Scholar' ego about him. Seriously, this guy is awesome, and the other archaeologists here confirmed that he has a reputation for being a genuinely wonderful person who is always interested in helping others, particularly students.
He's also a fantastic speaker. This is the second time I've heard him talk; he gave a very informal presentation to some of us in John's studio a couple of weeks ago, both about his work with the military and his work in Troy. This talk specifically addressed the practices adopted both in his 25 years working on Troy (the excavations were completed last year) and in his current site, Gordion, also in Turkey. For example, he talked about the challenges presented by working in international teams, which is now the norm. His Troy partner was a German Bronze Age specialist. As they excavated Troy's nine city layers, Brian was most interested in the Roman stuff, but Manfred was interested in tearing through that to get to the older material--meaning they'd have to battle it out over whether a particular Roman house or floor mosaic should be preserved, or removed to allow further investigation. Archaeology, he reminded us, is by its nature a destructive form of inquiry, even though they've pioneered using non-invasive techniques like magnetic imaging to let them identify the presence of a Roman city under the fields surrounding the citadel, without having to tear them up.
The two most pressing challenges for archaeologists today seem to be the constant threat of looting, on the one hand, and diplomatic issues on the other. Working in Gordion (which, I learned, was the home of King Midas, who was a real person! They've excavated the huge burial mound belonging to Midas' father, and discovered, in testing the garments found there, that they were covered in a mineral called goethite that gives off a golden gleam...since they've found exactly zero gold at Gordion itself, this might offer an explanation for the famed 'golden touch'--what if the city elites were simply walking around shining like they wore clothes of gold?), Brian told us they realized they could be endangering sites merely by paying attention to them, because that told looters in the area that there could be something valuable there. He said once they mapped out some of the most significant tombs in an area and gave the list to the local Turkish police force to guard during the off-season--only to return to find that the police themselves had looted the sites! Looters often use backhoes indiscriminately, and at night, to tear apart burial mounds, stopping only when they hear the metal hitting stone. He showed us a photo of a sarcophagus with surviving painted sculpture--something I have NEVER seen before--but with one half of it broken off: the backhoe had sliced it in two in the rush to open the tomb. I just emailed Brian to see if the photo has been published or if he can send me a copy, because that would be awesome to use in teaching.
Perhaps Turkey is increasingly aware of its status of as one of the few places remaining in the ancient Near East where it's still safe to dig. That would explain their increasing use of bully tactics to force repatriation of artifacts--they know they've got everyone by the short hairs. According to UNESCO's rule on the subject, if something has been in a collection since before 1970, it's not up for repatriation claims, unless there is clear proof of looting. Turkey, however, doesn't care about that, and has been going after objects that have been in museum collections for 50 or 100 years--and then threatening to cut all access to Turkish sites for that country's or that university's archeologists if the object isn't handed over! They did this successfully to Germany a couple of years ago, and then they tried to do it to the UPenn museum over some gold jewelry which had been bought in the 1960s.
On grounds of style, the gold had always been linked both to Troy and to the Greek isle of Lemnos, but recently analysis of some bits of dirt found inside one of the pieces suggested it really was from Troy. The Turkish government then threatened to ban all UPenn archaeologists from ever working in Turkey again if they didn't get the gold back--gold which was not even conclusively proven to be from Turkey, and to which they had no legal claim by UNESCO standards. The university trustees refused, and Brian was summoned to Ankara to meet with the culture ministry, who had refused repeated offers of long-term loans on the museum's part. Faced with the possibility of losing his life's work in Turkey, the day before the meeting he called the Greek culture ministry and basically begged the officials there, who had no interest in the gold, to put in their own claim of interest in the jewelry! The gambit paid off, because when the Turkish officials heard that they might have to fight the Greeks for rights to the gold, they immediately accepted the long-term loan offer (which means the museum didn't have to surrender its ownership rights and thus create a precedent)! Brian said that since then Turkey has become even more warm to UPenn, offering them higher-prestige loans than ever before. High-stakes international diplomacy is not something that scholars typically imagine having to engage in, so the aplomb with which he manages to navigate these kinds of situations seems really incredible.
He's also a fantastic speaker. This is the second time I've heard him talk; he gave a very informal presentation to some of us in John's studio a couple of weeks ago, both about his work with the military and his work in Troy. This talk specifically addressed the practices adopted both in his 25 years working on Troy (the excavations were completed last year) and in his current site, Gordion, also in Turkey. For example, he talked about the challenges presented by working in international teams, which is now the norm. His Troy partner was a German Bronze Age specialist. As they excavated Troy's nine city layers, Brian was most interested in the Roman stuff, but Manfred was interested in tearing through that to get to the older material--meaning they'd have to battle it out over whether a particular Roman house or floor mosaic should be preserved, or removed to allow further investigation. Archaeology, he reminded us, is by its nature a destructive form of inquiry, even though they've pioneered using non-invasive techniques like magnetic imaging to let them identify the presence of a Roman city under the fields surrounding the citadel, without having to tear them up.
The two most pressing challenges for archaeologists today seem to be the constant threat of looting, on the one hand, and diplomatic issues on the other. Working in Gordion (which, I learned, was the home of King Midas, who was a real person! They've excavated the huge burial mound belonging to Midas' father, and discovered, in testing the garments found there, that they were covered in a mineral called goethite that gives off a golden gleam...since they've found exactly zero gold at Gordion itself, this might offer an explanation for the famed 'golden touch'--what if the city elites were simply walking around shining like they wore clothes of gold?), Brian told us they realized they could be endangering sites merely by paying attention to them, because that told looters in the area that there could be something valuable there. He said once they mapped out some of the most significant tombs in an area and gave the list to the local Turkish police force to guard during the off-season--only to return to find that the police themselves had looted the sites! Looters often use backhoes indiscriminately, and at night, to tear apart burial mounds, stopping only when they hear the metal hitting stone. He showed us a photo of a sarcophagus with surviving painted sculpture--something I have NEVER seen before--but with one half of it broken off: the backhoe had sliced it in two in the rush to open the tomb. I just emailed Brian to see if the photo has been published or if he can send me a copy, because that would be awesome to use in teaching.
Perhaps Turkey is increasingly aware of its status of as one of the few places remaining in the ancient Near East where it's still safe to dig. That would explain their increasing use of bully tactics to force repatriation of artifacts--they know they've got everyone by the short hairs. According to UNESCO's rule on the subject, if something has been in a collection since before 1970, it's not up for repatriation claims, unless there is clear proof of looting. Turkey, however, doesn't care about that, and has been going after objects that have been in museum collections for 50 or 100 years--and then threatening to cut all access to Turkish sites for that country's or that university's archeologists if the object isn't handed over! They did this successfully to Germany a couple of years ago, and then they tried to do it to the UPenn museum over some gold jewelry which had been bought in the 1960s.
On grounds of style, the gold had always been linked both to Troy and to the Greek isle of Lemnos, but recently analysis of some bits of dirt found inside one of the pieces suggested it really was from Troy. The Turkish government then threatened to ban all UPenn archaeologists from ever working in Turkey again if they didn't get the gold back--gold which was not even conclusively proven to be from Turkey, and to which they had no legal claim by UNESCO standards. The university trustees refused, and Brian was summoned to Ankara to meet with the culture ministry, who had refused repeated offers of long-term loans on the museum's part. Faced with the possibility of losing his life's work in Turkey, the day before the meeting he called the Greek culture ministry and basically begged the officials there, who had no interest in the gold, to put in their own claim of interest in the jewelry! The gambit paid off, because when the Turkish officials heard that they might have to fight the Greeks for rights to the gold, they immediately accepted the long-term loan offer (which means the museum didn't have to surrender its ownership rights and thus create a precedent)! Brian said that since then Turkey has become even more warm to UPenn, offering them higher-prestige loans than ever before. High-stakes international diplomacy is not something that scholars typically imagine having to engage in, so the aplomb with which he manages to navigate these kinds of situations seems really incredible.
Monday, November 10, 2014
A Lovely, If Not Quite "Fall" Weekend
After the cold snap at the end of October, the temperature has gotten mild again, hovering in the low-to-mid 60s. Although I have a sweater on now, for example, I also have the window open! It's hard to think of it as being November when you're still sweating carrying home groceries. The lack of foliage changing color--and the continued presence of flowers--is another mental stumbling block. On our bike ride yesterday I finally saw a few sparsely distributed examples of leaves turning a brilliant red--but they looked like vines, not proper trees at all.
Our 20-mile trek took us down the Via Appia Antica, riding first on cobblestones, which jar every bone in your body, and then on treacherous basalt paving stones, which can only be ridden on safely if you do so at relatively high speed (otherwise you risk getting your tire stuck being two of them and falling over). Later on we got off the main road and were on trails, which had their own mud-and-loose-rocks dangers. I had several very close calls, and have a baseball-sized bruise on my left from where I think I slammed the pedal into my calf when I was trying not to fall over, but I survived! It was a lot of fun and a beautiful day but by the last 30 minutes of the 4.5 hour ride, as we were heading back into the city and on the cobblestones again, everything hurt. When I got back home, I plunked down in my desk chair and went "OWWW!" This morning parts of me hurt that I wasn't even expecting--my wrists, from working the brakes, and my shoulders. The fact that I went jogging anyway is a point of no small pride.
I spent a lot of the ride with Stefania and Tommaso, who taught me a few finer points of Italian cursing. For example, although 'cazzo' means dick, you have to say 'cazzone', big dick, if you want to call someone an asshole. Also, 'n'do cazzo vai' is Romanesco for 'where the fuck are you going?' which was used freely against cars who tried to cut off our right of way. Seriously, I would never have ventured on a lot of the route we followed had we not been with the guide, since it involved a lot of crossing and riding on busy arterial roads with drivers who did not give a fuck. One of my close calls came while we were riding against traffic, in fact; trying to hug the massive wall to my left, a dangling vine actually managed to snag around my handlebar and jerk my bike to a stop! I almost fell off into the road, not to mention almost causing a pile-up behind me.
But again, the important thing is that I lived to tell the tale. Our worst injury happened at the outset, to poor Sarah, who stopped to take a photo of some extremely realistic-looking Roman legionnaires; in her hurry to catch up to us, her bike slipped in a muddy patch and she fell off and cut up her palms. Eeep.
Our 20-mile trek took us down the Via Appia Antica, riding first on cobblestones, which jar every bone in your body, and then on treacherous basalt paving stones, which can only be ridden on safely if you do so at relatively high speed (otherwise you risk getting your tire stuck being two of them and falling over). Later on we got off the main road and were on trails, which had their own mud-and-loose-rocks dangers. I had several very close calls, and have a baseball-sized bruise on my left from where I think I slammed the pedal into my calf when I was trying not to fall over, but I survived! It was a lot of fun and a beautiful day but by the last 30 minutes of the 4.5 hour ride, as we were heading back into the city and on the cobblestones again, everything hurt. When I got back home, I plunked down in my desk chair and went "OWWW!" This morning parts of me hurt that I wasn't even expecting--my wrists, from working the brakes, and my shoulders. The fact that I went jogging anyway is a point of no small pride.
I spent a lot of the ride with Stefania and Tommaso, who taught me a few finer points of Italian cursing. For example, although 'cazzo' means dick, you have to say 'cazzone', big dick, if you want to call someone an asshole. Also, 'n'do cazzo vai' is Romanesco for 'where the fuck are you going?' which was used freely against cars who tried to cut off our right of way. Seriously, I would never have ventured on a lot of the route we followed had we not been with the guide, since it involved a lot of crossing and riding on busy arterial roads with drivers who did not give a fuck. One of my close calls came while we were riding against traffic, in fact; trying to hug the massive wall to my left, a dangling vine actually managed to snag around my handlebar and jerk my bike to a stop! I almost fell off into the road, not to mention almost causing a pile-up behind me.
But again, the important thing is that I lived to tell the tale. Our worst injury happened at the outset, to poor Sarah, who stopped to take a photo of some extremely realistic-looking Roman legionnaires; in her hurry to catch up to us, her bike slipped in a muddy patch and she fell off and cut up her palms. Eeep.
Sunday, November 02, 2014
Lazy Sunday (Finally)
I woke up this morning and watched four episodes of Buffy, lying in bed under the massive down comforter that I was finally forced to pull out of the closet this weekend. It is cold here, and the heat won't go on for another two weeks. After the Halloween party, and after the after-party (which I miraculously stayed awake for, thanks to lots of Coke Zero), I didn't go to bed until 5am. 4:45am saw me angrily shopping for a space heater on Amazon.it, while swathed in numerous layers and a blanket. I threw in an electric blanket for good measure!
It was an exhausting week, even though it was an interesting one. After Naples, I joined Dr. Hall on Thursday for a conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Sistine cleaning campaign. I think that represented the most time she and I have ever spent together! Only the morning sessions actually focused on the 1980s cleaning itself. Listening to the head restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, almost come to tears as he recounted some of the key moments in the 14-year campaign (which he described as having altered the course of his life) was really incredible, but the afternoon--four hours of the current scientific team discussing calcium deposits and air pressure and showing more charts and graphs than I've seen since high school science classes--was distinctly less awesome. If I never hear the words "calcio" and "sbiancamento" again, it will be too soon. There was a whole second day of the conference, too, focused just on technical presentations on the new lighting and filtration systems, but I quickly decided to say "fuck no" to that.
The only reason I stuck around...why most of the hundreds of people in the audience stuck around, in fact, was because the attendees were invited to a visit of the Sistine Chapel after the day was over. It was kind of surreal, since the conference happened on Via della Conciliazione, just a short distance from the Sistine, but they loaded us onto buses and drove us all the way around the perimeter of Vatican City, dropped us at the museum entrance, and required us to walk allllll the way back to the chapel. Since I was with Dr. Hall, who was grudgingly escorting Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, a very elderly, very famous Michelangelo scholar who was about 5-feet tall and walked with a cane, it was slow going. Then Dr. Hall spotted another Michelangelo scholar, Bill Wallace, whose fabulous lecture I enjoyed at RSA in March, and straight-up abandoned me with this woman! Not cool, Marcia, not cool.
On the plus side, our visit did include the chance to visit the Sala Regia (begun by Paul III as a demonstration of his temporal power) and the Paoline Chapel (the pope's private chapel, which contains Michelangelo's last two painted works, done on Paul's orders). I even got a peek down Bernini's Scala Regia, though it was blocked by a scowling Swiss Guard. The crush waiting to get into the Paoline chapel (which is a small space) was intense, though. I actually felt for a hot second like I might pass out or something--I couldn't breathe, it was really hot, and people were pressing so tightly against me. Luckily it passed, and since most Italians are short I quickly found some breathing space!
The downside was that once I got into the chapel itself and could really breathe freely, I was a little too worn out to really focus deeply on the frescoes themselves. Their color was extraordinarily bright (they were cleaned in the early 2000s, I think), and they were much less ugly than they appear in reproduction--even though the ugliness is actually a structural part of their compositions! Michelangelo seems to really have lost faith in humanity, and shown them in both paintings (the conversion of Paul and Peter's crucifixion) as gross, graceless creatures, perhaps unworthy of the salvation that the apostles will eventually offer them. Still, there is a power to Michelangelo's work that can never be denied, particularly the Peter fresco, because Peter, as he's being lifted onto the cross, wrenches his head around to stare angrily at...well, the Pope, it seems, because he meets your eyes only when you go and stand near the altar. This space saw the actual ballotting for a new pope, and in fact the victor, in the Renaissance, would first be physically enthroned on the altar of the chapel before going into St. Peter's. It's as if Peter is warning his new successor, and it's quite striking. It's also cool that I just saw the surviving cartoon for three of the soldiers from this fresco in Naples!
After the Paoline came the Sistine, where we saw the new LED system, which seems super-bright but in fact really renders the paintings so much more legible and beautiful than ever before. I was very impressed, but I was also very tired, and hungry, and the prospect of hors'd'ouevres in the Vatican garden was less appealing than a delicious Academy dinner. Bill Wallace and I ended up trotting back the length of the museum together, he to meet his girlfriend and I to race to catch a cab to make it in time for dinner. I arrived with five minutes to spare! And then overdid it on the wine at dinner and paid the price. Ah well.
Skipping the Friday sessions meant that I had time to actually help set up for Friday's Halloween party, not to mention put the finishing touches on my Coke Zero costume (ie, paint my nails black, which I haven't done since I was in college). The party was a lot of fun, even though it was freezing in the front courtyard. Carla's van Gogh painting came out incredibly well--she reminded me that this was the benefit of scene-painting training at Theater Fairfield. The theme was inanimate objects and there were lots of great costumes, both among Academy folk (Falke's shrimp, Dave's boat-in-fountain, Ruth's incredible pasta headdress, the Panino Five) and outsiders--the prize went to the fellows from the Spanish academy, who came as a group of classical busts, but I also liked the group who came as a Rembrandt group portrait, complete with carefully-crafted paper ruffs and picture frame and the Bocca della Verita' girl from the British School. The Germans came with no costumes. Go figure!
It was an exhausting week, even though it was an interesting one. After Naples, I joined Dr. Hall on Thursday for a conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Sistine cleaning campaign. I think that represented the most time she and I have ever spent together! Only the morning sessions actually focused on the 1980s cleaning itself. Listening to the head restorer, Gianluigi Colalucci, almost come to tears as he recounted some of the key moments in the 14-year campaign (which he described as having altered the course of his life) was really incredible, but the afternoon--four hours of the current scientific team discussing calcium deposits and air pressure and showing more charts and graphs than I've seen since high school science classes--was distinctly less awesome. If I never hear the words "calcio" and "sbiancamento" again, it will be too soon. There was a whole second day of the conference, too, focused just on technical presentations on the new lighting and filtration systems, but I quickly decided to say "fuck no" to that.
The only reason I stuck around...why most of the hundreds of people in the audience stuck around, in fact, was because the attendees were invited to a visit of the Sistine Chapel after the day was over. It was kind of surreal, since the conference happened on Via della Conciliazione, just a short distance from the Sistine, but they loaded us onto buses and drove us all the way around the perimeter of Vatican City, dropped us at the museum entrance, and required us to walk allllll the way back to the chapel. Since I was with Dr. Hall, who was grudgingly escorting Kathleen Weil-Garris Brandt, a very elderly, very famous Michelangelo scholar who was about 5-feet tall and walked with a cane, it was slow going. Then Dr. Hall spotted another Michelangelo scholar, Bill Wallace, whose fabulous lecture I enjoyed at RSA in March, and straight-up abandoned me with this woman! Not cool, Marcia, not cool.
On the plus side, our visit did include the chance to visit the Sala Regia (begun by Paul III as a demonstration of his temporal power) and the Paoline Chapel (the pope's private chapel, which contains Michelangelo's last two painted works, done on Paul's orders). I even got a peek down Bernini's Scala Regia, though it was blocked by a scowling Swiss Guard. The crush waiting to get into the Paoline chapel (which is a small space) was intense, though. I actually felt for a hot second like I might pass out or something--I couldn't breathe, it was really hot, and people were pressing so tightly against me. Luckily it passed, and since most Italians are short I quickly found some breathing space!
The downside was that once I got into the chapel itself and could really breathe freely, I was a little too worn out to really focus deeply on the frescoes themselves. Their color was extraordinarily bright (they were cleaned in the early 2000s, I think), and they were much less ugly than they appear in reproduction--even though the ugliness is actually a structural part of their compositions! Michelangelo seems to really have lost faith in humanity, and shown them in both paintings (the conversion of Paul and Peter's crucifixion) as gross, graceless creatures, perhaps unworthy of the salvation that the apostles will eventually offer them. Still, there is a power to Michelangelo's work that can never be denied, particularly the Peter fresco, because Peter, as he's being lifted onto the cross, wrenches his head around to stare angrily at...well, the Pope, it seems, because he meets your eyes only when you go and stand near the altar. This space saw the actual ballotting for a new pope, and in fact the victor, in the Renaissance, would first be physically enthroned on the altar of the chapel before going into St. Peter's. It's as if Peter is warning his new successor, and it's quite striking. It's also cool that I just saw the surviving cartoon for three of the soldiers from this fresco in Naples!
After the Paoline came the Sistine, where we saw the new LED system, which seems super-bright but in fact really renders the paintings so much more legible and beautiful than ever before. I was very impressed, but I was also very tired, and hungry, and the prospect of hors'd'ouevres in the Vatican garden was less appealing than a delicious Academy dinner. Bill Wallace and I ended up trotting back the length of the museum together, he to meet his girlfriend and I to race to catch a cab to make it in time for dinner. I arrived with five minutes to spare! And then overdid it on the wine at dinner and paid the price. Ah well.
Skipping the Friday sessions meant that I had time to actually help set up for Friday's Halloween party, not to mention put the finishing touches on my Coke Zero costume (ie, paint my nails black, which I haven't done since I was in college). The party was a lot of fun, even though it was freezing in the front courtyard. Carla's van Gogh painting came out incredibly well--she reminded me that this was the benefit of scene-painting training at Theater Fairfield. The theme was inanimate objects and there were lots of great costumes, both among Academy folk (Falke's shrimp, Dave's boat-in-fountain, Ruth's incredible pasta headdress, the Panino Five) and outsiders--the prize went to the fellows from the Spanish academy, who came as a group of classical busts, but I also liked the group who came as a Rembrandt group portrait, complete with carefully-crafted paper ruffs and picture frame and the Bocca della Verita' girl from the British School. The Germans came with no costumes. Go figure!