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It was never possible for the Romans, who expanded to exercise their sway over all Italy, to pretend to the lunacies of racial purity that came to infect the way Germans thought about themselves.
People traumatized by colossal defeat will not be satisfied by a merely ceremonial state religion.
One can always read Cicero with profit,
The ideal was askesis, “inner calm”; the Stoic did not preach indifference or anesthesia, far from it, but, rather, a reasoned concentration on the truths of life.
There was more in common between classical Roman art and the techniques of Andy Warhol than one might at first suppose.
The extant coins and other effigies of Cleopatra do not seem to do justice to what those who knew her (especially Antony) considered her irresistible beauty. It may be that Blaise Pascal, many centuries later, was right in observing that if her nose had been shorter the entire history of the world would have been different.
In Naples, his modesty of speech and behavior got him the nickname of “Parthenias,” “the Virgin.” Of course he was no virgin, and his preference was for boys.
Originally, in Greek, a parasitos was merely a “dinner guest,” but it went downhill from there, acquiring strong overtones of contempt.
His Eclogues are the main source of the pastoral tradition in Latin, and thus in English and French. His Georgics set the mode and pattern for didactic poetry, a form abandoned in the twentieth century but of great importance before then.
The divinities of Roman religion tended to be nature spirits—Fortuna, Mens Bona—without personalities. It was Ovid who gave the Roman gods faces—and genitals to go with them.
The Maison Carrée had been enormously admired for centuries when it was first seen by an American, Thomas Jefferson, in 1784. He seized on its design as the ideal prototype of dignified official architecture for the new conception of democratic politics which he had the honor to represent in France: noble and Augustan, yet fine-boned and somehow intimate.
The stuff of power and discipline, it was ugly and always would be—the brief mid-twentieth-century vogue for béton brut produced some of the most hideous, grime-attracting surfaces in all architecture, as a visit to London’s Festival Hall will confirm. But it could be rendered with stucco or faced with thin sheets of stone, and it was very strong and cheap, allowing the construction of very large structures.
The shows they put on tended to be gross, melodramatic, and simpleminded—in the same vein, one might say, as most of the produce on American television today. There was no Roman equivalent to Sophocles or Aristophanes.
Pennsylvania Station (1902–11), by McKim, Mead & White—with its waiting room modeled on the Baths of Caracalla but enlarged by a quarter—demolished in 1963, when, in one of the worst outrages ever inflicted on Manhattan, it made room for the squalid warren that has replaced it.
The Baths of Caracalla also furnished the prototype for another nineteenth-century masterpiece in New York—the cool, august spaces of the entrance hall of Richard Morris Hunt’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
The display of precious stones by some Roman matrons was grotesquely excessive, and the matrons themselves were monsters of vulgarity, just like today’s.
One particular kind of ancient statue is associated with the villa—the naked, idealized likeness of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, the Greek homosexual pinup par excellence, whose fetching body and pouting Elvis mouth proliferated all over the Empire after he drowned in the Nile in 130 C.E.
territoriality, especially when conceived in religious terms, heightened by the hope of eternal life and sharpened by xenophobia, is a murderous and intractable passion,
Crusades were the ultimate form of that fear and hatred of the Other which underlies the sense of racial and religious selfhood,
All over Europe, and not least in Italy, men were seized by a common delusion: that, as Christians, they collectively owned a tract of territory on which none of them had ever lived, that they had an unquestionable right to it because their Saviour had once walked and prayed and died on it; and that the most meritorious of acts imaginable would be to wrest control of it from nonbelievers,
What gets ignored in this clang and rattle of poisoned stereotypes is the immense cultural heritage shared between Islam and Christianity—though not the Christianity of the ranting American fundamentalist bigots, or the Islam of the murderous lowbrow ayatollahs. As Christians once built Chartres and Saint Peter’s, Muslims once built the Blue Mosque of Istanbul and the Great Mosque of Córdoba, the courts and gardens of the Alhambra. Their librarians preserved all that we have of classical drama and philosophy. They created in al-Andalus, the Arab name for Moorish Spain, one of the supreme
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Hilaire Belloc’s disillusioned little distich: Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight, But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
In Alberti’s eyes, perspective was not merely a means toward illusion—it was a tool of empathy. It helped give painting, and its representation of architecture, the dignity of a “liberal art” and raised both above the domain of mere craft.
Gazing on masculine nakedness was, of course, Michelangelo’s unwavering obsession.
Goethe, after visiting the Sistine, wrote that no one could have any idea of what a single individual could accomplish on his own unless he had stepped inside this huge hall. It is still true, and no other work of art can deliver that.
These angry rhymes were known as “pasquinades,” because they were traditionally affixed to a worn antique statue named, since time immemorial Pasquino.
Caravaggio saw things and set them down with uncanny accuracy: how people move, slump, sit up, point, and shrug; how they writhe in pain; how the dead sprawl.
Looking at certain Poussins, where a sturdy figure in a plain-colored garment is walking through a leafy landscape, you cannot help remembering the last words of “Lycidas,” as the shepherd takes the rural path, having sung his song, “With eager thought warbling his Doric lay”: “At last he rose, and twitched his mantle blue:/Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.”
the rich enjoyed seeing pictures of the poor on their walls in the seventeenth century, just as they would in the twentieth century with Blue Period Picassos.)
For an ambitious artist with the skill and determination to work out its lessons, seventeenth-century Rome was indisputably the school of the world.
There can never be another Rubens, because the intellectual and ethical backgrounds to his work, not to mention the educational systems and reverence for historical prototypes that supported and infused it, no longer exist. Nor can they be willed into being. The enormous fish has no water to swim in, and the estuary is dry.
art itself is a lie—a lie told in the service of truth.
Anyone who thinks of the young Picasso as a prodigy should reflect on the young Bernini, and be admonished. There was no twentieth-century artist, and certainly none of the twenty-first century, who does not look rather small beside him.
The baldacchino is the world’s first incontestably great Baroque monument. No wonder Bernini’s enemies derided it (behind his back, of course) as a “chimera”—it fell into no agreed category of décor, sculpture, or architecture. It still strikes the viewer with awe, through the richness and complexity of its detail no less than its astonishing size—the largest bronze sculpture in the world.
In Bernini’s sculpture, Saint Teresa is levitating, borne up on a marble cloud. Only three parts of her body are visible: her face, one bare foot, and a single nerveless hand. The rest of her is a mass of drapery, a near-chaos of folds and pleats, beneath which no sign of the body’s form is discernible. All is agitation, the swirls and crumples of marble cloth standing as signs of the intense emotion caused by the vision’s arrival.
If one thinks of the soldier-saint as a puritanical opponent of lavishness, which he certainly was when alive, it is a good idea to see what became of him in death: this is one of the most costly and extravagant tombs in all Rome. Its columns are entirely sheathed in blue lapis lazuli, and a globe of this rare and semi-precious stone, the largest in the world—“blue as a vein on the Madonna’s breast,” in Robert Browning’s words—surmounts the whole confection.
Gaulli was born in Genoa, but he came to Rome early, before 1658, and worked there for the rest of his life, very much under the spell of Bernini, who connected him to influential patrons like the Pamphilis. His Triumph reminds one how fatuous the Victorian and modernist objections to Baroque art as “too theatrical” are. One might as well decry theater itself as “too theatrical.” Theater, on this ceiling, is of the very essence: emotion and seduction on the grandest scale, achieved through a billowing range of bodily contortion, facial expression, and gesture.
The Hanoverian King George IV bought his work, and as prince regent presented him with a diamond-studded snuffbox bearing his royal portrait in miniature. Canova did not take snuff. He was urged to try a pinch, and on opening the box the sculptor found a five-hundred-pound banknote in it. And in the early nineteenth century, a pound was very much a pound.
Did more cautious souls object to these hot harangues? “Me ne frego,” was D’Annunzio’s response: “I don’t give a toss.” It became one of the nationally popular catch phrases of Fascism.
(It is still common for some critics, residually enthralled by the promises of radical socialism, to prefer its ideology to that of Fascism—even though the left, when it achieved power, could be and was as brutal to aspirations of freedom as the right.)
the playwright Pirandello, an undoubted Fascist in his idiosyncratic way, was awarded the Nobel Prize.
Mussolini did God’s work (as the Church saw it) in suppressing both Freemasons and communists, sworn enemies of the Church. Pius XI therefore spoke openly (against the advice of his more moderate lieutenant, Cardinal Gasparri) of the Duce as “a man sent by Providence,” and unambiguously told the lower clergy of Italy to encourage their congregations to vote Fascist, which they duly did. This seemed so threatening to the priest-leader of the moderate Catholic Partito Popolare, Don Luigi Sturzo, that he fled to London and remained there.
several giant heads of the Duce remain in subterranean storage in Rome,
when paintings have little or no anchorage in the world as seen, they will end up looking pretty much the same; the “freedom” of so much abstract art actually leads to monotony.
We cannot make the mistake with Romans of supposing that they were refined, like the Greeks they envied and imitated. They tended to be brutes, arrivistes, nouveaux-riches. Naturally, that is why they continue to fascinate us—we imagine being like them, as we cannot imagine being like the ancient Greeks.
