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 16th 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 6th 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!
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