A trip to Roma is better than home-a. . beauty where you find it

Every place has its own beauty, in Rome for me, it was the spaces. How lucky to be in the beauty of Rome. Where the spaces can be monumental, but still within reach, still human. London, for example, of the Empire, is so huge to me. The Albert Hall area, Trafalgar Square, those areas. They are so collosal, one becomes puny. And Manhattan too, for a small place, sometimes has that grandiosity, that gets you tired. Not that either of those wonderful cities don’t keep you from wanting to come back.

I watched my students this year creating positive and negative spaces. It is wonderful that some kids have a natural ability at really feeling space in their work. Some just place things, but others have this affinity toward space. They perceive relationships between things. I guess I am more aware of it, because I am grading so many projects, certain elements stand out more than others.

You can’t photograph inside the Palazzo Barbierini, but you can walk around for the price of nothing and it is a pleasure

There are so many things that strike you. The Trevi Fountain in such a cramped space. The Colloseum, inside and outside, late at night. Just places on the street, where it is always beautiful just to be. Where color and light just seem to merge together and this wonderful space. Every so often, I will get a kid come up to me and ask me for a piece of oil clay. I will say, what are you bothering me with that for? Their answer always is, I want to make a person. They are trying to represent scale and it is wonderful to see.

This is in the Quirinale area.

Did you ever see anything as goofy as the tourists at the Trevi Fountain?

Chiesa della Santissima Trinità

Wow.

Near Museo Criminologico

At first, I ddn’t know whether to laugh or what?

Rome has a wonderful beauty to it, whether classical, medieval or recent. Many more things to show later, even though no one really reads this thing to begin with.

A trip to Roma is better than home-a. . .agony/ecstacy

Side view off main street, Santa Maria della Vittoria

In what has to look like one of the least assuming churches in Rome, the Santa Maria della Vittoria, is the home of the famous statue of St. Theresa, with that closed eyed- gone hither look, with the slightly parted lips. All art students over the past million years, have seen a still photo of that Bernini statue. The famous statue, however is eaten alive by the surroundings. In a no-expense-spared extravaganza, you are subject to every local marble ever found in Italy, as well as gilding, frescoes, etc. This includes statues of patrons flanking the famous statue, as if watching from theater boxes.

St. Theresa and friend: no satisfaction among the marbles

Overall, it is a very beautiful church. Quite a shock, in fact, from it’s exterior, with the character that makes Bernini so a part of Rome.

Bernini Fontana del Tritone at Piazza Barberini and the Fontana della Api of Via Veneto

So funny, I am shooting the Fontana della Api and a guy bends over getting a drink right out of it.  So we went to the  Cappuchin Crypt, where you really should get to take pictures and it is weird as all get-out, but tastefully done. If you want to think organizing thousands of human bones into tasteful symmetrical designs is a lost art. After that the Spanish Steps, from the top down and another Bernini, Barcaccia Fountain.

Bernini worked with his dad on the Barcaccia Fountain

I laughed a lot over the Via Condotti. I had read about it, and it is all high end, but it’s kind of not that pretentious, as I expect say from a Milennia mall. It really struck me less high end fashion than kind of Victoria secret.

A Lauren Bacall wannabee for Dior.

My personal favorite!

Don’t even ask, but I knew I would never have a second chance to shoot.

This was I think, the Chiesa della Santissima Trinità

Back to normalcy along via Corso.

Is that St. Catherine along the via del Corso?

The via del Corso is a lot different at night, than the day. The textures of things, stone, for example get lost and it takes on a different flavor. That part of Rome uses a lot of ochre for walls, which works well with stone. At night it grays. Rome is also amazing to see the height things between past monuments and present. I heard they used to flood Piazza Navona during ancient times.

Speaking of which, I rushed over to the Piazza Navona the first evening, just to see what had happened. Ten years ago, I remember shooting a large televised billboard by Sony(?), which I thought was weird. This time there was only the Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi under plexiglass. Gee, I come back to Rome with a new camera and this happens!!!! A riot. The Pantheon facade is also going through a facelift.

A trip to Roma is better than home-a. . .Musei Vaticani

To get a look at a roughly 400 year old set of sketches by Bernini has to make a trip to the Vatican the real Magic Kingdom! Straw armature and all, give a wonderful insight into the most flamboyant Roman sculptor of them all. Forget the lines, forget the crowds. If you love this sort of thing, the Vatican tops a day at the Met in NY, or even an afternoon stroll through the Louvre. And this time, I only saw a certain chunk of it. On those lists of 10 things to see in your lifetime, all jokes aside, the Vatican Museum should be one of them.

Not priggish at all to the shutterbug, like the Prado, the Rijksmuseum or the van Gogh Museum, it is a wonderful day to look, and then resee later. Overwhelming and wonderful, the collection is the premier Whitman sampler of painting, sculpture, architecture, etc. The cherry in the center being Michelangelo and the accompanying works in the Sistine Chapel. Get a load of the wonderful Perugino’s Christ Delivery of the Keys to St. Peter on your way to understand the maestro’s wonderful student upstairs.

Visualizing that famous student: Stanze di Raffaella

A wonderful irony occurs as you go through those wonderful rooms, and one wonders if Raphael had the sense of humor to see how the hoards visiting his rooms would become part of the images. When one see what the masters had to actually had to put up with cacabash architectural embellishments.

When I was 19 or so, I found a copy of School of Athens somewhere mounted on an illustration board. I brought it home and put it up in my room and looked at it about a million times. And again, I was able to enjoy the real things dodging the heads of a kizillion other people. One watches how Raphael following his maestro, takes the medieval formula of compacted figures (learned from the Romans) and with a few carefully placed arches (and that corkscrew pose of Michelangelo) shoots open the space Leonardo could never quite get in the Last Supper.

Pinturicchio Borgia Apartments, Hall of the Mysteries of the Faith

This time I was lucky enough to get to see Pinturicchio’s Borgia Apartments, and so another Tuscan helps shape the art of Catholic Rome, as well as, shaping Raphael. The ceramic floor was so worn, I have never seen anything like it. The sad part, no one really bothered as they rushed to the Sistine Chapel. So one  guard stood around cursing so much (the other guard caught my knowing smile), that even my father (who sang these slogans often, especially the one about going to Naples) might have even looked up!

The beautiful gallery of maps is also wonderful. Ornate as it can be, the attempt at partitioning pre-Republic regions of Italy is quite wonderful. A little much with the gilded ceilings and lots of ornate flourishes, it is provoking and the crowds loved it.

You can catch the same pope, done by Velasquez or redone a few hundred years later by Bacon in the modern wing. You will also find later religious Dalis and de Chiricos, Shahn, Chagall and even a Jacob Lawrence. The only thing missing is women painters, as I think of it now. I could be wrong because near the Borgia Apartments there was a big selection of Italian artists.

If you get bored the scenery is always wonderful.

Young Spaniards setting for a shot on the bottom of the spiral staircase

You can always leave and go next door. If you go late you may not find a rock star, but someone some might think is.

i ♥ dc: no chit.

How’s this for style? A Degas and Whistler in a sitting room setting?

I hate bullshit. I hate that crap on CNN about Washington all the time. As if the ogres in Congress were the only reason to be there. There is something about an area that houses that much stuff, that you have to love. One has to take your hat off to the Smithsonian for that amazing museum complex. But little gems like the Phillips, the Women’s Museum and the Corcoran make it a worthwhile art adventure. The wonderful Hirschhorn is more cutting edge than MoMA sometimes (and more interesting than PS1).

Phillips: (above) Interesting new work. (below) The kind of  “in” joke: I’m Vaticany.

You can’t not admire the housing of the Phillips, which is more inviting, than the actual claustrophobic housing of the Gardner in Boston, or the patinaless walls of the Ringling in Sarasota.

This intriguing Gerhard Richter’s Annunciation after Titian: I think I saw at the Chicago show early 2000s, now in the Hirschorn.

Whistler’s actual Peacock Room at the Freer Gallery

Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway

If you are a type that doesn’t want to be in a museum, what would be cooler than the National Portrait Gallery? There is lots of stuff, but what is cool is some of the shows and an installation like Electronic Superhighway? Or the Aviation Museum.

The newer American Indian Museum is interesting inside and out.

The National Gallery has a great collection and the new wing is always interesting. There is the sculpture galleries of both of the Hirschhorn and the National Gallery.

Off the Mall you can find oddball public art pieces.

And if you want something more visual, why not take in the old United States Botanic Gardens, video link below.