Booyah!

Guess who just finished her Renaissance seminar paper? It clocked in at 24 pages, which seems so short to me now that it's done. But the important thing is--it's done!

My title , which I'm not entirely liking: "The Ties that Bind: Depicting Family Memory in Quattrocento Florence."

Now I just have to trim this down into a presentation version that I can do in under forty minutes, and finalize my slides, and then I can finally turn my attention back to my poor, forgotten Palladio paper. :-) :-)

Ghirlandaio Is My New Dead Artist Crush

This is his Visitation, c. 1491:


Look at Elizabeth's drapery! I just want to dive right into it. I'm pretty sure he used orpiment and realgar to make the yellow and reddish-orange. They were both extremely toxic and very expensive, but they make an incredible picture.

This is the Nativity altarpiece from the Tornaquinci chapel in Sta Maria Novella:


Even the donkey is pretty believable. I love the way Mary's robe pools around her, too. The expressions are what's really awesome, though--Joseph looks like he has a migraine, and the pointing shepherd seems to be "Dude, look! No, seriously!"


This may or may not be a self-portrait of the artist. He's incredibly alive, right down to the stubble on his face. In fact, I kind of think he looks like an older, peasant version of Patrick Dempsey....

Anyway, my paper is no longer triumphing over my life: I'm up to 23 pages and just about done. Tomorrow I have to get up at 6am for the Met trip (sigh) but there's a new exhibit on Love and Marriage in Renaissance Italy, plus the new medieval galleries and I never saw the Greek and Roman galleries after their renovation, so it's all very exciting. My sister even mentioned the Renaissance exhibit on the phone, and I was completely surprised that she remembered that's what I study. Of course, she then proceeded to inform me that no one else finds it interesting. Thanks, Jen.

Snowfall

There was snow on the ground and in the trees this morning when I woke up, and I didn't feel any excitement, just a little "hm, I hope there aren't leaves freezing onto my car." Just me blearily gazing out the window at 6:30 in the morning, imagining how freezing it's going to be getting from the station to the library--the tall buildings lining the street manage to function like a wind tunnel in the morning when you're walking uphill. No childish glee. As Eliot would say, I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

Things to Do When Hiding From Your Research Paper

...update your blog, I suppose. Right now I'm trying to write a section on Florentine portrait busts as compared to their Roman antecedents and it's really kicking my ass. I have class in 45 minutes, which is starting late because someone had their PhD defense today. I should have gone to see it but I convinced myself I should go work on my paper instead, and I think I wrote less than a page in the four hours I've been here. Sigh. I've decided that I will get up ridiculously, insanely, cruelly early tomorrow (meaning 6am or so) and be at school working by 8am with at least eight hours to kill before class. I will also probably be a zombie by that time, since the portrait heads are trying to eat my brain!

I went to New York Thursday night so I could go to Columbia's Palladio conference on Friday. It was a very long day in an uncomfortable chair, but I got a chance to hear from some of the best scholars in the field, so that was cool. Also, Dr. Cooper presented a paper on "Palladio and the Politics of Magnificence." She was the only woman on the entire panel--architectural history is a bit of a boy's club.

One of my classmates, who also went to the conference, took a train from Philly at 6am on Friday and went home right after the conference to maximize her working time. I, naturally, spent two nights in New York and then proceeded to get absolutely nothing done on Saturday when I got home. However, I did have a chance to have dinner with Sara, Meredith and yes, my sister on Friday night. We were supposed to meet up with Heather too to see her new blonde bob (very new--she was having it done that evening) but her hair appointment took five and a half hours, so sadly, it didn't happen. Luckily we're going to see her (and Rae!) in a week and a half for our high school reunion. Sara and I have jokingly decided that we will pretend to have lost touch over the years so we can "catch up" if we don't feel like talking to other people. Ah, good friends.

Ugh, I just remembered that I have to go BACK to New York this weekend to visit the Met with my medieval class. That means catching the train on Sunday at 7am, joy. All the more reason that this paper must a) get finished and b) DIE.

$116 Worth of Boooo

That's how much I had to pay to buy a new power cord for my laptop, which mysteriously gave up the ghost last night. I suspect it might have had something to do with the outlets at school, because it was acting funny there yesterday, but if there was a surge of some kind, wouldn't my computer itself have been affected? I should be thanking my lucky stars on that score, I suppose. Although my laptop is five years old, I'm extraordinarily fond of it. It's not just that I don't want to spend money on a new one--which I certainly don't--it's that I don't want to have to get used to a new one. This one and I are good friends now.

Anyway, the cost was so high because I had to buy a universal adapter, since Best Buy doesn't sell ones for Dell only. If I weren't attached to my laptop at the hip, I could have waited and ordered one from Dell, but I am, so I couldn't wait. In fact, I was out the door at 9am this morning to see if Target had one, and I learned that Target is a nice place early on a Sunday. No crowds for once. Alas, Target failed me in my quest, so I had to drive a few towns over to the Best Buy. It was a fabulous day to be out driving--blue skies, bright sunshine, plenty of leaves still on the trees but enough swirling around in the street to remind me of how much I loved fall when I was a kid.

In happier news, something awesome happened yesterday! I sent Sean a picture of a painting that I thought he'd like, and he did. He liked it enough to put it as the desktop picture on his laptop, which means little to most people, but Sean hasn't changed his background picture in all the years I've known him: it's always been a default image of trees in autumn. Now it's this:



This is St. Jerome by Ghirlandaio in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence. I thought Sean would like it because he just looks so scholarly--in addition to the Latin in the open book, there's Greek and Hebrew writing on the pieces of paper on the shelves. His pose and expression make him seem real in a way that few Quattrocento paintings have ever done for me. Doesn't he look like he's just paused in writing some letter because he can't figure out how to phrase what he wants to say? He's looking out at us like, "A little help here?" Or maybe he's just itching to tell us to get the hell out of his study, who knows.

Anyway, the important thing here is that Sean and I have agreed on a piece of art! This is extremely momentous. Jerome will always have a place in my affections from now on.

Happy Halloween

My mom would have been 57 today. I was doing a periodic clean-out and reorganizing of my file cabinet and I came across a copy of the program from her funeral mass. The picture of her on the front is probably one of the nicest pictures I've ever seen of her--she's actually smiling, which is something she rarely did in photos; that is, when she wasn't ducking them entirely. Sean and I have fond memories of a time I had a photo of her and she asked to 'see it'--and then promptly ripped it into shreds. Vintage Mrs. D!

Palladio's Tempietto at Maser

As I said to Sean last night, who would have thought that the project I would enjoy working on the most is the one about architecture? I'm doing my paper on this charming little edifice:


Isn't it cute? I really dislike the belltowers, though. Carlo Maderno was apparently inspired by this building to stick a couple of towers onto the front of the Pantheon, which were ridiculed so much by the Italians (who called them "asses' ears") that they were eventually taken down. Someone should have told Maderno that just because Palladio did it did not make it a good idea. Thinking you can 'improve' the important architectural monument in Western history = epic fail.

For such a small building, there's a surprising amount of arguing over its original purpose, the dedication of the main altar, even the placement of various saints in the church (eg, my sources can't even agree on whether St. Paul or St. Andrew is on Christ's right hand at the main altar). There's also its rather unique design, which looks Pantheon-inspired from the front but which actually is a hybrid of a central-plan church with a Greek cross plan.

Hm, if I were better with Photoshop, I would try to take off those towers and see what it would look like. Unfortunately, I think that would make the lantern look painfully out of place. He should have just made it an oculus and been done with it.

With a Cheshire Cat Grin

I got an A on my presentation! Whoot! Dr. Cooper said that my presentation style was excellent and that I definitely have a future as a speaker (I hope at this point that I managed to keep the grin off my face; I did not, however, manage to contain the "ka-ching!" when she told me I got an A. I'm not entirely professional yet: sue me.). Her only criticism was with regards to the non-conclusion that I reached about whether Palladio had any influence on Sinan; she didn't have a problem with a non-conclusion in itself, but thought I should have taken it further and pointed out how scholars can be so determined to find these connections that sometimes we're willing to take on faith links that are, in reality, extremely tenuous.

Anyway, there is going to be much rejoicing in the land, because I also had a chat with Dr. Bolman, my medieval professor, and she complimented me on my contributions to the class discussions--which is pretty interesting, considering before last week I don't think I said a damn thing in the discussions. I only started forcing myself last week because I realized she was kind of taking notes on who said what and I was like...crap. Now I have to talk.

We've been talking about seeing through medieval eyes when you're looking at the art, and a really interesting concept that she introduced was the idea that in the early centuries, sight was considered a tactile sense. It was believed that when you looked at someone, rays went out from your eyes, touched the object, and returned to you, so when you looked at an icon, or a holy man, or a holy site, you were actually touching it with your eyes before you got close enough to touch it with your hands. I wanted to know from her whether this concept had any influence on the practice of veiling women, which has as much of a basis in Christian culture as it does in Islamic, even if it's not generally practiced by laypeople anymore; did women need to be veiled because if men looked at them, they were considered to be touching them as well? She didn't have an answer for me, but she seemed really excited by the question, so I was like "holy crap, did I just have an original idea? Yipee!!" Because one of my main fears about grad school, if I haven't expressed it before, is that I will have No Original Ideas and will be cast out into darkness forever and ever. So even if that's not something I'm going to follow up on myself, it was good to remind myself that I at least have the capacity to generate lines of new inquiry!

Sinan and Rain

Yesterday I gave my first real presentation of the year in my Palladio class. At the beginning of the semester we picked from a list of topics that Dr. Cooper had prepared, each of which had an article to use as a 'jumping off point;' I chose Palladio and the East, because that sounded pretty interesting. The article was about possible Ottoman influences in Palladio's Redentore church in Venice, and since the point of the presentation was to move in some other direction based on the theme (although I felt like a lot of people just reiterated the thesis of the article they read) I decided to lgo in exactly the opposite direction and look at Western influences on the Ottoman architecture of Sinan. Lo! a presentation was born.

Ironically, despite the fact that my entire presentation was based on circumstantial evidence and suggestive possibilities (for example, Palladio's treatise I Quattri Libri might have been available to Sinan, because his patron Marc'antonio Barbaro was in Constantinople as a consul when it was published in 1570 and he was buddy-buddy with the grand vizier, and wouldn't that have just made a swell gift? Not only was the plan for his very own country home in it, there was even a staircase he'd designed himself!), as well as one single concrete example of a time that Sinan seems to have seen something Western and used the idea in one of his mosques (support piers, very exciting stuff) I think it went off rather well. I tried to show that there was at least a context of cross-cultural communication in both directions, not just the East-to-West influence we're always led to believe, even though I couldn't actually say that Sinan ever directly adapted anything from Palladio in the way that Palladio might have adapted ideas from him. I've noticed that in academia you can get away with a lot of postulating as long as you're clear up front that you can't necessarily prove what you're saying.

I'll find out tomorrow how I did, but the feedback I got from the older students was positive, which was really good to hear. In addition to reading it aloud a few times beforehand, I had made Sean sit through the presentation, slides and all, while he was here on Saturday evening, even though he was suffering a cold and probably falling asleep. And then I made him look at a few of Palladio's buildings, which he was a good sport about, lol. At least I didn't make him look at mosques...it's probably my Euro-centrism, but I just don't find mosque architecture appealing, especially from the exterior. They look like weird blobs. For example, this is one of Sinan's most famous works (and incidentally, the one that may have been an influence on Palladio), the Selimiye in Edirne:


It just doesn't work for me; too many protrusions from the central mass, I think. Kind of like really symmetrical tumors.

Anyway, now that I'm done insulting masterpieces of Ottoman architecture...there's a one-day symposium on Palladio coming up in November at Columbia that I'm going to go to. Dr. Cooper is presenting a paper, and also a couple of the major names in the field (whose work you can't help but trip over no matter what) are going to be giving papers as well, so it's kind of exciting, even though I'm not really into architecture in general. Oh, and David Rosand will be there giving a paper on scenographic architecture in Venice--he's the guy from Columbia who works on Titian, and I met with him when I was applying, but of course then I didn't get in, so boooo to him. Yeah, except his work is amazing. Curses!

There are always those people who when you read their work, you really, really wish you'd written that, or thought of that; right now I can think of Billy Collins in the poetry department, as well as Rosand and also Patricia Brown at Princeton, especially "Private Life in Renaissance Venice". With her, though, it's not even so much her research that I admire (although that's stellar, of course) but the way she synthesizes different aspects of Venetian culture and relates them to the art and architecture of the period, and still manages to make it really readable and fascinating. I want to write books that people will actually want to read, books they'll enjoy reading, and I think she manages to do that really well.

On another note, it poured today, icy sheets of rain that were being propelled practically sideways by the strength of the wind. Very unpleasant to be walking in, especially with a $10 umbrella purchased at an airport gift shop that threatened to give way at any moment. I wound up spending the entire day in the library, which is fortuitously connected on the ground floor to the building where my classes are. The only time I left was to dash out to a kiosk for a Diet Coke--Temple's greatest flaw is that it is a Pepsi campus. Luckily, there are independent vendors on every corner. However, I did have to forgo my lunch of choice, which is a meatball sandwich from this little cart near the art history department. It's literally just bun and meatballs with some sauce, not even any cheese, but they're really good, and even better, they're $2.25. Who loves cheap food? Me.

I was also delighted to hear that a couple of my classmates, Alice and Agnes, are applying to the Rome program as well. Agnes is from Poland and is very friendly, and Alice is kind of like an awesome den mother. She's older, has several children our age and is a high school history teacher who already has two, count them, two other master's degrees, history and I think economics. Anyway, if we all get in we agreed to look for a place to live together, which would be a lot of fun, I think. Not anywhere near as much fun as Florence--for one thing, this will actually be real coursework, not 'study-abroad' coursework--but that's to be expected.

Finally, my dear Carla's first performance in an opera is on Youtube! Brava! She's the nun in the white habit.

Next Semester's Menu Features...

...a class on obscenity and censorship in modern and contemporary art, a class on Albrecht Durer and the Baroque in Germany, and a class on "visual performances of femininity and masculinity" in Eastern Mediterranean art. The last one sounds really interesting, since I've never really worked with gender theory before.

I can't believe I registered for next semester already--it throws into relief exactly how much I still have to do for this semester. Eep.

Cherish the Little Triumphs

I passed the Italian reading exam! Whoot! Let's ignore the fact that it was a ridiculously easy biographical essay on Raphael and instead focus on me not having to take it twice. Which leaves me staring down the specter of the German exam in December...and most likely again in February...and let's be honest, probably a third time next May. I don't foresee an easy victory, since most everyone who took it this time failed terribly. Suddenly I find myself wishing they would let me do French as my second language instead of German. Damn them for pioneering this field and making themselves and their stupid subordinate-clause-heavy language indispensable!

In other news...well, there isn't much. I have an entire day of studying in front of me, since my one class ended at 11 but I have a grad student meeting at 7:30. Sean suggested I just go home, but I know that I'd begrudge having to return again this evening, so here I stay.

That reminds me of a scene from the "Emily" series from LM Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. In the first book, Emily's aunts are explaining how the family came to be living in whatever picturesque corner of Canada they're in: their paterfamilias was on a ship heading for New York, but after the crossing they stopped in Canada. His wife was terribly seasick the whole way, so they took pity on her and let her go ashore for a little while, but of course as soon as she got there she announced "Here I stay" and refused to go back on board. So the husband is forced to unload all their baggage and settle down in the hinterlands instead of cosmopolitan New York to his great dissatisfaction. The coda to this is that years later when she died, he had inscribed on her tombstone, a little bitterly, "Here I stay." Anyway, that was completely unnecessary and totally irrelevant to anyone who hasn't read those books (they're not as good as Anne, but I still enjoyed them) but as my own aunt would say (to Jen's great irritation): 'it is what it is.'

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!