Meii Summi Viri

GUYS - I am so sorry it has been 3 weeks since I updated my blog. I actually wrote this entry before I went on my Campania excusrion from November 13-20, I just never got a chance to finish it. I have almost completed the Campagnia entry as well, and I will try to get that one up before the end of this weekend. This entry applies to my activities from November 1 - 13.

Over the past two weeks my life has revolved around 17 different men. So I have been pretty busy!

13 New ancient ones

Tiberius – the allusive mystery

Caligula – the closet sadist

Claudius – the fierce cripple

Nero – the psychotic pyromaniac

Galba, Otho, and Vitellius – the three failures

Vespasian – the self made man

Titus – the short-lived victor

Domitian – the megalomaniac

Nerva – the sweet grandpa

Trajan – the best I ever had

Antonius Pius – the goodie too shoes

Hadrian – the man with a temper

Marcus Aurelius – the superstitious basket case

Two new 16^th Century Artists

Guiseppe Cesari d’Arpino

Peter Paul Rubens

And one living and walking in the year 2010

Jeffrey V.D.R – the dutchman

Clearly this is why I haven’t been able to update my blog… :)

But really, I have woken up every single day this week except last Saturday and Sunday at 7:30 am and explored Rome deep down to its core daily until the sun went down. True story – despite my claustrophobic nervosa, last Tuesday at 5:30 PM when it was dark outside, I Isabel Irene Zinman climbed down a treacherous ladder behind a small hidden door under the Via Cavour to see an ancient nymphaeum of a villa.  

I have romped around in the three sets of imperial fora remains along Mussolini’s via dell’imperiale that are off limits to tourists, climbed all the way from underneath the arena of the Colosseum where the Romans used to house their gladiators and wild animals to its top most story where women and slaves would sit, spent time hanging out with hermaphrodites and boxers in the palazzo Massimo (i.e. statues in a museum hehe), and experienced Ostia and the oldest Jewish temple in the entire western world. Oh, and I sat in lecture for 6 hours, went on two more Art History marathons, gave a 20 minute site report on the fresco work in Lateran church to my intimate art history class, and completed my second Greek take home test that demanded ownership of several texts (without any helpful commentaries) that were completely out of my ability range! Also I just topped off another 20-minute presentation that I will be giving in Pompeii to my ancient cities class. I am already expecting to be eaten alive by my question firing classmates and professori upon its completion. I swear these presentations are meant to toughen you up in preparation for dissertation work in grad school.

Current Status: I am sitting in my room writing this blog entry, after listening to Nerva sing Part of Your World (from the little mermaid) at dinner. Calamari, lentil soup, vino bianco, and a bomba della pistaccio for desert. Heavenly! Have I packed anything for Campania? No.

I have learned so many things in the last two weeks I can’t choose which to mention. I am not going to take the same approach as I took after Sicily (a 10 point list). Well I could go into juicy information about each of the men I mentioned people magazine style and seriously freak you out. But I wouldn’t want to talk badly about any of them, especially the emperors, as tempting as it may be. I’m still in Rome and one of their spirits could come back and haunt me or cast an evil eye.

First I am going to focus on what I thought was the coolest and most interesting part of the ancient course so far. I am again lucky enough to have been reading the raw primary sources about this topic under the guidance of Serfass (even though doing the assigned homework translations sucked out my soul because they were so difficult).

Lets start with Nero, the psychotic pyromaniac mentioned in my first list. Nero, (Ahenobarbus – this was his cognomen and how he was known before people called him Nero) basically came to power only because his mom, Agrippina the Younger poisoned her husband Claudius who was emperor at the time. Claudius had willed the empire to Nero, whom he had adopted. So Claudius was screwed and manipulated. Upon his assumption of imperial power after Claudius' death, Nero fired and killed many administrators. He really didn’t make everyone hate him until after a massive fire demolished downtown Rome during his reign in 64 AD. Nero used the fire’s work as an opportunity to build a “neropolis” or small city dedicated to himself to replace important public buildings that had burnt down. And he erected a gigantic golden statue of himself in the middle. This complex also included his Domus Aurea – the legendary beautifully decorated structure that contains glorious wall paintings and unique grotesche patterns that Renaissance painters later emulated. Unfortunately, we couldn’t go in this complex as there are problems with the ceiling falling in. Least to say the neropolis upset Romans from all social classes, and Nero committed suicide because everyone hated him

There were huge issues after Nero’s death. Four different provincial governors vied for the throne and their armies fought against each other. Romans were fighting Romans again. In the end, Vespasian, the governor of Judea won out. But he still had a slew of other problems in Judea to deal with. Vespasian sent his son Titus to go take care of business, which Titus did but with much casualty. In Greek class, I have been reading first hand accounts of the Jewish Revolts Titus had to deal with in Judea written by a man named Josephus who was once a general in the revolting army. He was captured, but the emperor Vespasian freed him from being a POW on account of his prophetic abilities. Josephus’ accounts are intensely detailed and depressing … from the burning of the Temple to the blood dripping down its stairs and piles of bodies, and then back to the triumph through Rome. Josephus tries to put into Greek words what a menorah is (the Roman army paraded a menorah through the city). He describes it as being like the trident that the god of Poseidon carried (for lack of better words). I bet you all didn’t know that the spoils from the Jewish War in fact funded the building of Rome’s most popular and famous spectacle… the Colosseum. The Colosseum was a testament to Vespasian and his son’s victories in Judea, the ascendency of their family to the position of emperor (they were self-made men and unrelated to Caesar’s family), and the returning of Rome to the common people by trumping of Neropolis (the Colosseum sits on top of the area that Nero sectioned out as a lake feature).

Fast forward 1500 years, and you arrive at the second half of what has taken up my past two Thursday afternoons and Friday mornings: Art in the Counter Reformation with Paul Tegs. My intimate class has fallen in love with Paul. Not only is he an incredibly well dressed PENN grad, but he comes to Rome from outside the city to teach us each week. He truly is an incredible art historian, his lecturing abilities are phenomenal, and his energy constantly at an all time high. The man can go non-stop for 4 hours straight. He even makes some of the "impossible elegant and contorted" Renaissance controposto poses he describes while he lectures. I have been blessed to have him as a teacher.

Now for the two Renaissance men:

1) Guiseppe Cesari d’Arpino was in charge of a workshop that painted this fantastic fresco cycle at the Lateran church (which about a mile north of the Colosseum). I was lucky enough to be assigned to give an oral presentation on this masterpiece. I am not particularly good at public speaking – actually I kind of suck at it – so last week I basically sat in my room in the Centro and rehearsed to myself all week long. The girls who live next door are probably about to murder me, because this week I have been doing the same thing with my ancient city site report.

Anyways the Lateran is the first church in Rome that the late emperor Constantine founded. My fresco cycle depicted in 8 panels how Constantine decided against taking a bath in the blood of 3000 Christian children as he was advised by Pagan priests to cure his case of Leprocy, converted to Christianity and was baptized, and then built the Lateran Church. There are 8 frescoes in total and they span the entire perimeter of a gigantic transept of the church. Pilgrims coming through the church in the Jubilee year 1600, would have seen the art, and been moved to imitate the pious converted emperor. This is the way much of counter-reformation art worked. It was, in a sense, a visual guide and reassurance to people who felt skeptical about Catholicism because of the ongoing Protestant reformation. Out of the 8 panels, the 6^th particularly struck me. It pictures a young noble woman in a gorgeous gown helping an elderly couple within the lateran church. It’s the idea of “amor proximi” love of they neighbor, despite class divisions. 

  

2) Peter Paul Rubens

A shout out to my girl Alex Nerva Olsman for her fantastic presentation on a spectacular tri panel altarpiece by this Dutchman. I had no idea that he made his mark in Rome, but at the end of Art History Marathon I found myself looking at one of his masterpieces in the Chiesa Nuova in the heart of Rome. Rubens wanted to let the Italian masters know that he was just as good as them, and took the commission to paint this even though it was for cheap. He was doing it for a group of Jesuits who didn’t have secure funding to pay one of the Italian masters. Rubens is a very Raphael like figure – he is not the tortured soul Michelangelo (who in fact didn’t have anything nice to say about the painterly Dutch artists) but a pleasant man who loved commissions and patrons. Painterly in this sense means the Dutch artists used oil to render greater detail –to the extent that the works are so detailed you can even see the red marks in their figures’ eyes – as opposed to tempura (a faster drying media) that Michelangelo used to render his famous perfectly proportional sculpture bods in paint. The subject matter of Raphael’s altarpiece wasn’t particularly stimulating – just the church and order’s favorite saints – but the figures are stunning. On the right Rubens paints Saint Domitilla in a gorgeous white gown. You can see nearly every detail of the fabric and where it folds, and the ringlets of her golden blond hair. Domitilla is the emperor Domitian’s supposed daughter who refused to give up Christianity, even though she went against her own father’s demands and laws. The other thing that gets me is that this wasn’t Ruben’s first painting on the altar, in fact he had to redo the entire thing when he realized that his initial painting did not work with the Church’s lighting and audiences wouldn’t be able to see it. He convinced the Jesuits he could do it right, and painted the new piece on slate on top of the walls, and broke it up into three pieces. A nice save. By this work he won over the Roman art conouissers and proved himself. He didn’t feel it necessary to stick around though, and stayed in the Netherlands/France continuing to paint for the remainder of his career.

And finally what you guys have all been secretly been waiting for – the tid bit on my life outside of academia. So. Flashback for a second to 2 blog entries before this: the one I wrote from Amsterdam. After I finished that blog and Erica awoke from up from her nap, we went for Mexican food and then to our favorite bar near our hotel to do some vino bianco pre-seasoning before we were going out to try to go to a bigger venue. We found ourselves hanging out with a larger group of dutch guys who we learned were all on a soccer team together, and they invited us to accompany them to an area called Rembrandtplien (one of the 4 words in my slowly growing Dutch vocabulary). We took the rollercoaster (literally, it was so windy I lost my balance and wacked and bruised my knee) tram and found ourselves in a hole in the wall local place – kind of like the Dunbars of Amsterdam, Cornell readers. We were treated to death stares from the local women. It felt like they were pushing Erica and I out with the force of their eyes. But luckily three of our new friends didn’t want to stay there, so we followed after them and went elsewhere where there was American music and a younger crowd. Jeff, Bob (who had a cast – his friends told us he had gotten into a fight and lost, but it was really because he hurt it in a soccer game) and the ginger (this is not his name I just forget — he had red hair.)  We didn’t stay out too late but Jeff and I hit it off and talked for a while, his English is fantastic, and we stayed in contact after the night. Last weekend he came and visited me in Rome. For the first time I had a chance to share what I have learned about Rome with someone. He put up with me when I got lost and had to use a map (by the way its been 2 whole months without my iphone GPS everyone). I also took him to my favorite restaurant in Trastevere, da il due cittchione! It’s a shame because Guiseppe the restaurant manager was so wasted he couldn’t be funny that night, but nonetheless the food was good as always. The weekend before finals I am going to visit him in the Hague!

That is all for now readers. Stay tuned to hear the results from the battle against Campania!

Brutus was like just as cute as Caesar.

I am happier to be back at the Centro then I anticipated (even though we have been slammed with work). I feel renewed after a lovely fall break… I was slightly traumatized by the intensity of the Sicily trip and was apprehensive about returning to the Centro. Initially I was upset at the ridiculousness of having to read 40 pages in our dense History text books on the Sunday night that I returned from Amsterdam (we weren’t given the assignment before break), and having to recall for a photo Id quiz the next morning everything we saw in Sicily or studied in class the week before our trip.  But, putting in the extra work and staying up until two in the morning studying was kind of necessary for me to get back into the swing of things at the Centro. We definitely do not have time to relax, the second half of the program has gone off with a bang just like the first. I even kind of feel at home, waking up for breakfast to the bell at 8 am, having my usual Centro breakfast of yogurt and coffee (its still as vile as ever), and then climbing up to the fourth floor for Monday’s 2.5-3 hour lecture.

We have finally begun our study of the Roman Empire! This week we focused on Julius Caesar and his adopted nephew/heir Octavian (later known as Augustus, me!). After surviving the photo quiz, amazingly I didn’t find myself tired, but rather very into the Head Professor Scott’s lecture on these two Roman celebrities and the other men contending for power at the time with whom they butted heads. Scott did a great job of laying out the historical background, and then Professor Chris gave us a nice taste of the artistic culture at the time, especially as it pertains to the men (most was done by their patronage). We spent time looking at busts. I particularly enjoyed putting names to faces. It helped consolidate my understanding of each persona, and I will use these images to supplement my brief interpretations of the men. Here is the catch - I’m going to do this in the style of my favorite column in Cosmopolitan magazine –

Sexy VS Skanky.

Sexy: Julius Caesar

Caesar was both a great general (he conquered all of Gaul) and smart politician. He had the fervent love of the entire Roman population, a Latin term called “auctoritas,” which is difficult to put into English words. It basically means clout. However, Caesar kind of sucked at communicating with the Senate (the old ruling party) and never asked for their permission. So they conspired against him and brutally murdered him. Despite his untimely death, Caesar’s boldness – in the sense that he rejected the traditional authority – and clout are kind of sexy.

 Skanky: Marcus Antonius (Antony)

Marcus Antonius, Caesar’s co-consul at that the time of his death, had a good shot at becoming ruler after the assassination. Antony initially worked with Octavian (Caesar’s nephew who was named as heir in Caesar’s will) to get rid of the Caesarian conspirators. But after Antony and Octavian did this successfully, the two were at odds with each other. Each wanted to rule the state alone. As a solution, they split up the empire into two equal parts and Antony went off to the eastern provinces to “deal with the Parthians.” Instead, he drank like a fish and screwed around with, and fought wars (he was whipped!) for, the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Antony made the huge tactical error of cheating on his wife Fulvia, Octavian’s aunt! Octavian read Antony’s will to the Senate, thus proving that Antony wanted to rename Alexandria, Egypt as the new capital of Rome! This did not sit well with the public and gained Octavian, who had been assigned control of Italy and the West, major brownie points. Mark Antony, you are skanky.

 Sexy: Octavian

Octavian was Caesar’s named heir, and despite being very young (he was only 19) and less experienced, the way in which he consolidated his allies throughout Italy while Antony frolicked in the eastern provinces reveals his aptitude for diplomacy and desire to rebuild the Roman Empire out of the ashes of civil war. At the end of the day, everything worked out well, Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra and became the princeps, or the first citizen by 27 BC. He was voted by both the SPQR (the Senate, and the Roman People!) to receive a number of duties that had previously belonged to high magistrates, such as the power of the tribunes and the right to declare war (a power called imperium, hence the name imperator). In this way he learned from his uncle’s mistakes, and set a precedent of peace and stability with the result that the population voted these rights for each of Octavian’s successors, and the position of emperor officially evolved. 

Back in Roma

 This week for field trips we stayed in Rome – revisiting the Forum and walking through the “remaining remains” of the other forums (of Imperial Rome), which unfortunately Mussolini leveled when he constructed the Via Imperiali running through them up to the Colosseum. For example, Mussolini aligned the “important” end part of the Forum of Augustus, containing the Temple of Mars Ultor, with the road. For a long time, people thought there were two “exhedrae” or gigantic semi circular niches at its side giving it a phallic connotation, but more recently there is a realization that there were really two exhedrae perside. The forum of Augustus was perpendicular to the Forum of Caesar, which intersected at the Curia Julia, or the new Senate House that Caesar built. A walk through these was intended to be a memory theater, a message of Roman dominance, a representation of the state’s wealth. Statutes of the summi viri – the highest men – were lined up through the forum of Augustus for people to view, and at one time all of the fora (plural for fourm) were decked out in colored marbles – pinks, yellows, purples, greens and reds, that hail from the countries the Romans conquered! You kind of have to use your imagination here – but after doing my pre-visit site readings I had a pretty good idea of what to envision and boy the fora would have been decadent.

The Italian word permesso – or permission – became a new part of my vocabulary this week. We pretty much crossed over every single rope and fence to enjoy a close look at the monuments because, as the Intercollegiate Study for Classical Center, we have the auctoritas to do stuff like that. I had amazing close-up views of the detailed features of each monument we studied. The highlight of the day – climbing up the hill and checking out the remaining fresco’s in Augustus’ home on the Palatine hill. The low point – doing a face plant as I stepped off the 75 bus in front of the Colosseum, 100 (literally 100) Italians and half of the centristi. We were already late due to a traffic jam, so this really messed up my sprint to catch the professors as I had two rolled ankles and a scraped knee.  Another low point this week – Greek class. The author we translated, Cassius Dio, was freaking hard and made little sense until I read an English translation.  I think everyone was in the same boat, but unfortunately I was called on in Serfass’ “nonoptional” volunteering scheme last.  As last, I was left to deal with the hardest sentence in the entire passage. Luckily he helped me and nicely reassured me that he even had trouble with it. He hinted that Dio isn’t a great writer, and that we are only reading him to see what kind of thoughts were circulating about the new position of Imperator. This was insightful, but the experience was still painful. A third low point – I accidentally skipped over a whole week’s homework and did the wrong assignment, only to have to gun it for three hours before class to finish the right one.

I am looking forward to reading more Josephus, who wrote the Jewish War and Jewish Antiquities. We are reading his pieces about the revolt in Jerusalem and how the generals (who would become future emperors) Titus and Vespasian react to them. Vespasian, who thought Josephus was a prophet, captured Josephus in Galilee and brought him back to Rome, where Josephus became a part of Roman society and commenced to write in Greek and Aramaic his histories.

A special permesso came in hand again on Friday when I embarked on an all day Art History field trip to the Palace of the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese just north of Rome in a town called Caprarola. We spent the morning visiting each room of the palace (via the permesso), examining the Roman imperial style mythological frescoes on the ceilings of the upper class apartments and thereby determining the functions of the rooms, and hanging out in the ornate garden. Cool things I found intriguing.

1) Our teacher Paul showed us how the building’s architect, Vignola, cleverly incorporated secret service stairways and massive utilitarian rooms (kitchens, stables etc) among the grandiose chambers for the servants to run the place. The architect focused not only on ornate things such as with spiral staircases lined with intensely carved colonnades, but also the simple things that would make the palace run!

2) When we studied the differences in the wall frescoes between the two apartments occupying the different sides of the palace. There were two sets of symmetric rooms – one set used in summer and the other in winter due to the way the sun heated them (very genius way of keeping guests comfortable). The winter apartments, painted during the counter-reformation, contained frescoes with entirely Christian subjects that had the agenda of proving the church’s power to occupants. The walls of the public meeting room on this side were filled with equally sized, amazingly detailed maps of every major continent. These were a testament to the church’s duty to spread its message all over the world, and a display of the beauty of God’s creation. The summer apartments were frescoed in the mannerist time period before the counterreformation – and thus were in the neoclassical imperial style (scenes of very particular myths) that were intentioned for wealthy erudite guests to struggle to depict.

3) The fountain filled hill. I can’t even begin to describe the intricacy of this hill. Fountains, fountains and more fountains dotted the hillside from the top to bottom. One was even in the style of a giant long stone serpent, and water flowed through its curves. The cardinal and his guests would have feasts in this ‘natural’ (it was really man-manipulated) wonderland, which was full of devices that would shoot surprise beams of water from the most random places! This would make guests scream, and contribute to the delight of the afternoon. There were scattered grottoes, which the cardinal lined with perfectly evenly grafted stalagmites from local caves. In these he placed more fountains, mythological surprise squirting devises, and ancient or anciently influenced statues. I could definitely be a member of the papal retinue and hangout here on weekend afternoons. It was an especially unique experience because Paul arranged for our escort (because of the permesso) to turn on some water spouting devices for us to see. So cool!

And now it’s the beginning of another regular week of city centered field trips. I am sorry for the lack of exciting non-academic stories – I have been spending many late nights studying and pulling together oral reports in the library for my Art History and Ancient City classes. It is going to be a lot of work until we leave for the week-long excursion to Campagnia in two Saturdays.