Beautiful Day

All the pictures I took today happened outside. Cameras weren't allowed inside where I went. But the outside was lovely.






















I'll separate the Villa Borghese by piece, because it really was a piece-based trip. A lot of the pieces spoke to me, so I have the ones that we did for class and the ones that I wrote down to look up later. I've never really looked at art critically before and never had art history or anything, but I think that it's very interesting. Besides these pieces, we saw a lot of other pieces, including the art on the villa itself. It got overwhelming after a while, and I think I get overwhelmed if I'm in a museum for too long--especially one like this--because there's just SO MUCH to process that my brain has trouble, and I get tired. However, I think I'm learning a lot more than I think I am, because I type these things up every day, read them back, and there is just SO MUCH information. I feel like I can't keep up with it all, but I'm definitely learning.

Ultima Cena, Jacopone Bassanto



Painted in 1542, this painting of the Last Supper was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci's. This takes place right after Jesus says that one of them will betray hi, so everyone's trying to figure that out. The piece I found of it on the Villa Borghese website says that the light passing through the wine glass stains the table red, representing the betrayal as well as the oncoming death of Christ. If you notice, the figure on the right is looking out toward the audience and isn't really involved in the painting. Is that Judas? It was customary for the artist himself to put himself into the picture, often looking out. It was also customary for the artist to put himself into a not-so-good position in the picture.

Other things I found on the website are that the painting has recently been restored to its original colors, which were painted over because they were too vivid and not in fashion. I personally like the bright colors.

There's also the effeminate person sleeping in the table, which we talked about a little a few days ago. We don't know if it's just another disciple, the beloved disciple, or Mary Magdalene. Carlyn brought it up while we were talking, and I thought it was interesting. I think it's also interesting to look at another portrayal of the Last Supper. We're all really used to Leonardo da Vinci's, but there are a lot of portrayals out there.

David with the Head of Goliath, Caravaggio



We led right into this one from the previous picture, as Caravaggio put himself into the painting as the head of Goliath. A lot of the analysis from this painting came from us, though Kristin pointed out the stark lack of light, which causes the painting to be very striking. The expression on David's face is an interesting mix of pity and...almost righteousness. Like he didn't want to do what he did, but he knew he did it for the greater good. He also looks a little struck by the head. After all, he's just a young boy. Antonia pointed out that Caravaggio put so much more effort into his own head (Goliath) than David. It was a little humorous. Caravaggio put himself into the painting to ask for clemency, which get got, but not until after he died. So it was kind of a win/loss.

I looked on Wikipedia for a little more insight into this particular painting, and it says that it was in the collection of Cardinal Scipione Borghese, which I forgot to mention. That's the guy whose house we were in. Or his family's anyway. That's how they had so much money to turn their house into a museum. There's an inscription on the sword that says Humilitas occidit superbiam, or "humility kills pride." The fact that Goliath's head drips blood creates drama. Also, David's expression is described as "sadness and compassion" by Catherine Puglisi, which describes it way better than I could. Also, the model for David was Caravaggio's young assistant, so the painting is kind of seen as an apology for Caravaggio's wild youth.

This is not Caravaggio's only portrayal of David and Goliath. Here are the others:





Rape of Proserpina, Bernini

I think this was by far everyone's favorite piece. I have pictures here, but it really doesn't do it justice.







It was so terrifyingly realistic that I was struck. Look at the indentations he makes on her skin with his fingers. I don't know if you can see her expression, but she's crying. There are tears on her face. He's so much bigger than she is; his hand is her entire side. And beneath them, this dog-monster's witnessing the whole thing. I got a teeny bit emotional.

This was made in 1621 or 1622. Bernini was only twenty-three when he made this piece, a Baroque piece, out of marble. It uses "rape" in the old sense of the word, meaning "kidnapping." But does that distinction really matter? Proserpina prays to her mother to help her, and you can see that in this too. Just...wow.

Apollo and Daphne, Bernini

This piece, made in 1622-1625 (they're not sure), actually struck me the most. Daphne, a lot like Proserpina, is terrified. But she's turning into a tree. SHE'S TURNING INTO A TREE. Part of her side if bark. Branches are sprouting out of her fingers. Her hair is turning into leaves. Like...I don't even know how this guy came up with this, but it's ridiculous. Just...look at it.



Apollo's very androgynous, which was common. Also, it kind of showed how for some reason, Apollo just wasn't lucky in love. Like ever.

La Verita, Bernini



I found myself struck by this piece, called La Verita. In English, the title is Truth Unveiled by Time. Apparently, Time was supposed to be in the upper part of the sculpture, but Bernini didn't finish it because he was going through a stressful time, being blamed for structural problems with St. Peter's Basilica and all. It was very personal, and the article I read on the Borghese Gallery website hints that it was probably made in response to those accusations. He bequeathed the statue to his eldest son in his will, probably as a warning. It's considered his most personal statue.

Madonna and Child with St. Anne (Dei Palafrenieri), Caravaggio



This is also one of the pieces that I saw that struck me. It's a late Caravaggio, done around 1605 or 1606, and it shows Mary, Jesus, and Mary's mother St. Anne. It's very interesting, because the painting is supposed to honor St. Anne, but she is shown as an old woman in the picture and takes the passive role as her daughter and grandson together battle the snake, which is original sin. Mary's cleavage is showing, which shocked people who looked at it, because Mary is usually seen as fully covered. Jesus is uncircumcised, and people wonder if his phallus is meant to battle the snake's.

I don't know...I think that in St. Anne's case, her grandmotherly role is filled with honor and wisdom. I'm not so sure how I feel about her being stuck in the corner like that, but she seems fine with it.

Other Things

I learned that the word "hermaphrodite" comes from a supposed child born of Hermes and Aphrodite, who had both male and female parts. I also saw three different forms of Artemis--a more traditional one, one repainted to look like a muse with a mask, and a third one that was a little more ambiguous. Lauren pointed out that in the traditional one, Artemis's hand grasps something, being more masculine, while the other hand remains more dainty and feminine, representing her kind of dual nature. Mary was based off Artemis, I learned too, and it's interesting because Mary has pretty much no masculine traits. She is always the epitome of femininity.

After the villa, we went to lunch, where I had a sandwich with green olives, artichoke hearts, mozzarella, and cured ham. It was extremely good, though different than you usually see back home. I realize I haven't been talking about food enough on here. I need to fix that. For dinner today, I had a rice ball, which is kind of like a really big mozzarella stick with rice and cheese and tomatoes inside instead of mozzarella. :P

After lunch, we went to the Catacombs of Priscilla. MOST BEAUTIFUL THING EVER. All the paintings in there, made somewhere in the 2nd-5th centuries, were all pretty much perfectly preserved. We had the most creepy tour guide ever. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

The catacombs included the burial of all the members of the community, and the one we visited was one of the oldest. Everyone used them, including Jews and pagans, and they were buried underground because there was a lot of room underground. The soft volcanic rock was easy to dig through. The graves were dug into the sides a lot like shelves, and they were short because the people were shorter back then. A lot of the graves were made for babies because infant mortality was especially high back then. Bodies were wrapped in linen and sprinkled with lime, which hastened the process of decomposition.

People began putting bodies on top and began to dig down as they needed more room. The catacomb we went to extends 13.5 meters underground. When we went in, all the bones had been removed so that tourists wouldn't take them.

And the paintings...there was the earliest Madonna and Child painting down there, along with burial pictures, the three boys in the fiery furnace (shoutout to the choir--He never failed me yet? :P), the Good Shepherd, and so many more.

Oh, and our tour guide was creepy. Way creepy. Like...ghost-leave-us-down-there creepy, but it was okay. Because he took his lunch break (or part of it) to show us the catacombs, so I was happy.

We're watching The Gladiator right now. I think we get extra points because we're watching it in Rome. :)

"I'm not buying food for the drunken whores."

^ Said by the lovely Kathryn Lambeth, on the fact of all the crap that's been going on in our dorm. Let's list them, shall we?

- Some girl sleeps in the lounge (what up, XI?) on this mattress and sleeps through all of her alarms. That go off. Loudly. Beginning at 5:20 in the morning. This is the third night in the row it's gone on, and Sebass and Hutch WANT BLOOD. We'll see what happens tonight. For the most part, our RAs are kind of useless and yeah.
- We have a refrigerator where we can keep food we buy from the street and supermarket. You know, food we spend money on? And someone's been taking other people's food. Particularly my roommate's (I don't stick my food in the refrigerator because I didn't trust the people in our dorm to begin with). Food's been disappearing in the middle of the night. We think people are getting drunk and going through and eating all the food. Some girl put this lovely note on the refrigerator that said something about making the people who broke her eggs lick them off the floor, which made me so happy. That fridge is disgusting. Both of them, but particularly the one on our floor.
- DRUNK PEOPLE. LORD HAVE MERCY. WHY IN THE WORLD WOULD YOU COME TO ROME AND GET S**TTY EVERY NIGHT AND DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING DURING THE DAY? Do they even have class?

So notes have been sent and RAs have been brought into the situation. We'll see what happens. There's a St. John's graduation tomorrow, and our translator Dominica is graduating! They have a stage set up outside our window and I'll try to get pictures up at some point. :)

Kylee Goes to an Embassy!!!

Today was a little different, in that we got to wake up late (we left at 9:30 which meant I got up at 8:30 and I LOVE EVERYTHING!!!), take the Metro (because we didn't want to not look classy where we were going), and dress classy. So I got classy. Complete with a fan.



Today we met the American ambassador to the Holy See. Essentially, he deals with all kinds of things Vatican. He's a theologian who's lived all over the US before this, and he has a wife and four kids. He was a very nice guy who explained some things that he was working on with the Vatican and the White House to get some interfaith stuff going as well as awareness for HIV and AIDS. We got free bookmarks and plenty of pictures of his staff. Also, he told us that y'all should go like the American Embassy to the Holy See Facebook page, because they're currently beating Italy and want to keep it that way. The man is a pretty cool guy and speaks like more than five languages. Go him.

AND HIS HOUSE HAS AN AMERICAN FLAG IN IT. He said we were a little piece of home, and he kind of was for us too.

On the way, we passed the ancient Roman baths, where people used to go to get clean. People can still use them now. I was excited to see them, because not only were they beautiful (especially juxtaposed against the stormy sky), but it also brought me back to flashbacks of Mr. Zoch's Latin class, where we learned about the baths. The baths were public, though you didn't see everyone there. Rich people or equites were definitely more common than slaves. Large ones were known as thermae and smaller and more private ones were known as balnea. They were places for bathing as well as socializing. Each town had at least one, and villas (or the really rich people houses) often had a private one. You were more likely to find slaves working there. Water usually came from an aqueduct, a channel used to convey water. In some cases, they were able to use water directly from a nearby stream or river.

The bath was laid out around three rooms: the caldarium, the tepidarium, and the frigidarium (hot, warm, and cold, respectively). Though not featured in the old baths, newer baths had two other rooms: sudatorium, the warm and moist steam bath, and the laconicum, the dry steam bath, which was a lot like a sauna.

Before the bath, the slaves would come up and scrape the dirty oil from your body. Then you would go into the three rooms: caladarium, tepidarium, and frigidarium. There was a set of baths for men and a set for women. The women's were slightly smaller.




LOOK IT'S THE AMERICAN FLAG!!!





The soldiers outside let us take pictures of them, which was ridiculously fangirlish, but they were really nice about it.



I met the public affairs officer of the embassy, Nathan Bland, and he told us that before this, he'd worked in China. I told him that, even though I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with my life, China's definitely in my future. He gave his business card to me and told me that he would put me in touch with the university he studied abroad with when he was in college, which is in this small village in Northwest China where you learn the language very well because there's hardly any English. :D

After the embassy, we visited the Doria Pamphilij Gallery and saw a lot of cool stuff.













^ That's Caravaggio's "The Penitent," which was one of several paintings in a room full of Mary Magdalenes and St. Jeromes. This picture was unusual for Caravaggio because it uses a lot of light, which the card next to the painting said was indicative of Caravaggio's earlier (and lighter?) days. She actually has the same pose that Mary has in an earlier painting of the Holy Family, which was interesting. Kristin, who presented on it, said that he told the model to pose the same way and that the model happened to be drying her hair at the time. Mary Magdalene is richly dressed, but her pose shows that she feels poor on the inside.

Sister Terri filled in our knowledge about Mary Magdalene, saying that it never says in the Bible that she was a prostitute or a loose woman. There was an attempt to silence Mary Magdalene around the 4th century. She has her own gospel, and they found her house on the Sea of Galilee (or a temple?) next to where Peter's spot was. They found it and stopped excavating it when they found out it was hers. However, the recent stir with Dan Brown's The DaVinci Code influenced them to start excavating it again. Mary Magdalene also has her own gospel, though it's not in the bible, along with the Gospel of Philip (and I think the Gospel of Thomas?). In the picture are perfume and jewels, also signs that she's a loose woman.

In the gospels, Mary Magdalene shows up at the end as the witness to Jesus's burial in the tomb and his resurrection. Women were not reliable witnesses at the time, so this is very interesting. I need to look up the gospel accounts and see what else is going on.

I found more information about the painting here. In addition to what I saw, Sister Terri told us, and what Kristin presented, this website says that the warm colors are indicative of her passion for Christ and Christ's own passion. It also says that the perfume is a sign of when she washed Christ's feet with her hair, but I'm not sure if that was her or Mary, Martha's sister? I'll look that up too. Hold me to this!

From the website, I also got a much better picture of her:





^ This one's kind of dark, and I wish that I'd taken down the name and artist, but I didn't, so I can't look up anything else about it. It was this hellish, dark, demon scene that was very disturbing. It caught Antonia's attention, and she, me, and Jacob sat there trying to figure it out. It was interesting but also unsettling. But I guess that's the awesomeness of art, that it can evoke those emotions like that.



^ Dr. Sebastian almost pushed me out of his way on the way to this painting, which is a medieval painting of the Annunciation. Thanks to Hutch, I have a little information on Medieval paintings: flat faces with little to no expression. In this one, Mary's getting pregnant in the process of the picture. Dr. Sebastian said that it's common for Mary to be reading in medieval paintings, especially for the Annunciation, the passage in Isaiah that talks about a Savior coming.



Here's the Caravaggio about the Holy Family!!! The focal point is actually the angel, which is interesting for the painting. Personally, I thought it was interesting that Joseph was the only one interacting with the angel, holding music up for the angel to play as Mary and Jesus sleep.

Also...random, but it never says anywhere that there were three Magi. That was something that was made a thing as years went on.



The ceiling in the room this statue was in actually fell in, breaking this statue into pieces. It was put back together in one of the most successful restorations in history. It's amazing. It looks like it's never been broken.

After this, we were set out on our own, so Antonia and I headed for San Ignacio di Loyola, or St. Ignatius of Loyola Church. :) It was gorgeous.







^ SO CUTE.







There was a wall of hearts in there--like fake ones. And there was an altar of bones--real ones.

Pantheon! We went there after Ignatius. :) For longer this time, since we weren't lost. :)











We also went to Piazza Navona after that. Actually, come to think of it, Antonia and I had a very productive day.

So, after this, we were exhausted and went back.