Visiting the Borghese Gallery Saturday, Jul 18 2009 

art and museums and travel thisgaudygildedstage 6:28 pm

The Borghese Gallery was one of the best museums PJ and I visited while in Italy last month. We reserved a time on the last afternoon that we were in Rome, which turned out to be my birthday. Visiting this museum was a great way to spend the afternoon.

One of the things I’ve learned about myself in the past few years is that I really enjoy house museums. The Borghese Gallery is housed in a seventeenth-century villa owned by the Borgheses, one of Rome’s wealthiest and most powerful families at this time. The family moved to Rome in 1541 and came to the fore of Roman society when Camillo Borghese was elected pope in 1605. He took the name Pope Paul V. Construction of the villa began in 1612 and was completed in 1620. It’s an amazing house, and the collection is equally impressive.

The highlight of the collection for me was Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne, which was completed in 1625. This was one of the most impressive sculptures I saw during our trip to Italy. It is an amazing piece of art, especially in its intricate details and complexity.

The myth that this piece depicts is the moment that Daphne prays to the gods to deliver her from the pursuit of Apollo. Apollo had offended Eros, so the god of love shot him with a golden arrow, causing him to fall in love with Daphne. But Eros shot Daphne with a lead arrow, causing her to hate her pursuer.

When Apollo was just about to catch the woman of his affections, she cried out to her father, a river god, to deliver her. In order to do so, he transformed her into a laurel tree, which Apollo took as his official tree from then on.

Bernini’s statue captures the moment in which Daphne is transformed. In his statue, she is part human and part tree. Her fingers are sprouting leaves and her feet are taking root into the ground.

Part of what stands out about this work is the delicacy of the leaves and roots, which contrast with Apollo’s movement. Her movement is one of transformation into statis, while his is still moving toward her. It’s an amazing accomplishment.

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Visiting the Vatican Tuesday, Jul 14 2009 

art and museums and travel thisgaudygildedstage 8:46 pm

While we were in Rome, PJ and I visited the Vatican Museums and St. Peter’s Basilica. I’m not quite sure now what I expected. Gold plated everything, I’m sure. I knew that the Vatican has an unparalleled art collection, but it was hard to imagine how a religious institution is also a museum.

I’m not nor have I ever been a Catholic. I do love following papal successions, though the only one so far that I’ve actually followed live is Pope Benedict’s ascension to the papacy. During that process, I read as much as I could about popes and conclaves and the history of each. As a side note, I have to say that I expected a great quantity and a much greater quality of scholarship on these topics than I actually found. Maybe I just didn’t look hard enough, but what I found wasn’t very good. Are historians not going into papal history anymore?

We decided to visit the Vatican on Wednesday morning. We read that it’s easier to get into the museum during the Pope’s weekly audiences, which turned out to be true. We practically just walked right in.

One of the first things you see in the Vatican Museums is this lovely lady:

This is part of the Vatican’s collection of Egyptian artifacts, but it seems like a really bizarre way to start visitors through the collection. If I were in charge, I think I would arrange the art and artifacts in a more religiously thematic way. Otherwise, the Vatican Museum ends up seeming just like any other museum, which seems fine to me, but I would think that the Church would want to use it for more religious purposes. But I guess not!

The Vatican Museums have a lot of statuary. One of their most famous pieces is the Apollo Belvedere:

What sounds out to me about this statue is that is demonstrates that not all of the men have been covered with fig leaves (though this one’s lost his manhood over time!). Rick Steve’s Guide to Rome points out that all of the fig leaves could be removed at any time, since they’re just plastered on. He suggests that patrons suggest that the Vatican remove the remaining ones.

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Visiting the Capitoline Museum Sunday, Jul 12 2009 

art and museums thisgaudygildedstage 6:44 pm

On our second day in Rome, we visited the Capitoline Museum. This museum is most famous for its statuary. It was founded in 1471, when the pope donated some of the statues to the museum.

This picture is of one of the museum’s buildings. The museum sits on Capitol Hill, the main square of which was used as a religious center in ancient Rome. Michelangelo, at the behest of the pope,  transformed the square into a Christian site during the Renaissance. The statue shown in this picture is a reproduction of one of Marcus Aurelius. During the Middle Ages, Christians mistakenly identified this statue as Constantine, which spared it from destruction. The original statue was placed in the square in 1538. More recently, it was moved inside the museum and this copy was placed in the square. Here’s a closer look at the copy:

Here’s my picture of the original work, which is featured prominently inside the museum:

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First Day of Classes Tuesday, Mar 31 2009 

art and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 6:36 pm

Today marked the beginning of my spring quarter. I’m only teaching one class, a survey of British Literature to 1688. I have 50 students and a T.A. to do most of the grading, so I can’t complain too much.

I’ve only taught this class one before here at OU. That was the first time the course was offered here, so it was a much smaller class of only about 30 students. Because of the size, that time I was able to spend most of class time discussing the reading material rather than lecturing. It went well enough, but it wasn’t a class that I immediately wanted to teach again.

This time, I’m pretty much going to have to lecture during the two lecture days and then let the T.A. meet with the two discussion sections on Fridays. This means the bulk of my work this time will be in preparing the lectures, something I don’t regularly do in my other classes. It will be interesting to see how this goes. One motivating factor will be that I’m teaching the class again next winter, but that time it will be one of two classes I’m teaching. If I work hard this time (i.e., if I write great lectures now), it will mean less work in the winter.

So, I started class today with a lecture that surveyed some key issues from the three literary periods we will cover this quarter: the Medieval period, the Renaissance, and the Restoration. I decided to organize the presentation around three images. The first was an illustration from the Aberdeen Bestiary (which has a great website, by the way):

This image depicts Adam naming the animals. We talked a little about the way in which Adam is portrayed in this image — the fact that he’s clothed, that he resembles more familiar images of Christ, and the kinds of animals included in the naming. The point of our discussion of the image (and ultimately of Medieval literature) is the Christianization of pre-existing, non-Christian texts.

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Chris and Don: A Love Story–A Review Sunday, Mar 1 2009 

art and documentary and movies and queer culture thisgaudygildedstage 7:47 pm

Yesterday, PJ and I watched the 2007 documentary Chris and Don: A Love Story, which is about the 30-year relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy. Isherwood was, of course, a famous British writer who emigrated to the United States in 1939. Bachardy is an artist who specializes in portraits; his work is also familiar to anyone who follows queer art. It’s a great documentary.

Here’s the trailer:

As the trailer makes clear, the relationship between Isherwood and Bachardy began in controversy: the former was 30 years older than the latter. The age disparity in this relationship takes up a lot of the documentary’s time, but it’s not the only, or even the most, interesting part of this love story.

It is really interesting to hear about how Isherwood and Bachardy met. The latter was still a teenager, and Isherwood was already an important author who had started working for Hollywood films. It’s also interesting to see how beautiful Bachardy was as a teen — I can see why Isherwood was initially attracted to him. Here’s an early portrait of the couple:

Seeing an image like this and knowing that the two are lovers raises a lot of issues and questions in our culture. The film doesn’t shy away from these issues. But the really interesting part of this story is watching Bachardy narrate the rest of their lives together.

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Passion Works Studio Sunday, Oct 21 2007 

art thisgaudygildedstage 11:37 am

Yesterday, PJ and I visited the Passion Works Studio for the first time. He’s long wanted to stop by, learn more about the studio, and maybe buy something. They were having an art sale, so we decided to go.

passion flower Passion Works is a local studio that supports artistic collaboration between artists with and without developmental disabilities. They are best known for their passion flowers, pictured here. In fact, the Passion Flower is the official flower of Athens. It’s kind of amazing to see all of the passion flowers lined up throughout the studio. Not only is each flower unique, but there are different genres of passion flowers: painted ones, rust ones, and stainless steel ones, as well as large and small. We intended to buy one, but I was a little overwhelmed by the prospect of choosing one, so we ended up delaying that choice until a future visit.

Since this was a special sale, the studio was a) full of people and b) full of art. The art sale was distributed throughout the building, which was a great way to expose people like us to the full range of the studio’s activities and space. I liked that we were forced (in a good way) to move beyond the usual gift shop and into the other work spaces and conference rooms in order to see the various kinds of art that were on sale.

The NacklaceWhile we didn’t buy a flower, we did buy a painting, “The Necklace” (2003), by Carolyn Williams and Visiting Artist Mark Hackworth. This isn’t a great picture of the painting — we spent some time this morning trying to get a good picture, and this is the best of the bunch. I had to take it from a slightly side angle in order to avoid getting my own reflection in the glass. I also had to use a flash. But you can get the general idea of what it looks like.

The image is of overlapping yellow, green, and red rectangles which, by overlapping, create a purple rectangle. The green circles and lines have been exposed from underneath the purple area. There are also black lines and circles overlaying the purple patch, but they’re not as visible in this photo.

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