Rome - page 9

May 24nd

The Vatican Museums

 

There was a lot to see at the Vatican Museum, so this will have to be just a few of the highlights. 

The museum is laid out in one big winding path and at every corner there is a sign promising that the Sistine chapel is just up ahead in this direction.  The signs lie, considering all the cutbacks, there is over a mile of museum floor before you actually reach the Sistine chapel.

The primary thing you will see in the museum is statues, lots and lots of marble statues.  All of them really old and all of them beginning to look like each other.  The museum was shockingly devoid of identifying labels so we can thank my keen artistic eye for picking out the more noteworthy subjects.

 

When it comes to hair styles, women today don’t even try

Peacocks represent immortality and Julius Caesar looked like a pussy

           

This wing of the gallery was actually more interesting to me than the statues it contained.  Considering the fact that basically everything in the museum was dug up from different sites, they could really make it all fit together nicely when they tried.

 

the aesthetic created by all the natural light and marble was very nice

 

A famous statue of Emperor Augustus is on display here:

 

Augustus Prima Porta

 

In my eyes Augustus is the most respectable of the Roman Emperors.  Sure, Caesar paved the way as the first emperor, but Caesar was murdered by the senate.  Augustus is really the guy that solidified the whole thing.  He’s also the guy that transformed the Roman emperors into gods and that’s why there is a cupid at his knee – a subtle reminder that he claims to be descended from Venus.

 

Perhaps the most famous statue in the Vatican Museum is the Laocoon Group.  It dates back to BC and is known to have had a huge impact on the course of Renaissance art, influencing the likes of Michelangelo and Raphael amongst many others.  In a way, this statue was the focal point of the Renaissance’s obsession with classical art.

 

Laocoon and his sons were attacked by serpents when he tried to reveal the ruse of the Trojan Horse

 

When Napoleon conquered Italy, he snatched the statue up and placed it prominently in the Louvre.  The British were nice enough to return it 17 years later.  Laocoon’s missing right arm was discovered and attached in the 1950s after scholars and artists had debated for centuries what position it must have been in.  It’s a nice sculpture and very well-preserved, but just looking at it, there’s really no way of supposing that it was so much more important than some of the others.  I guess the similarity comes because all of the others are copying what this one did first.

 

There was a small exhibit of ancient Sumerian cuneiform.  Cuneiform was the first writing.  This tablet is from 1800 BC, although apparently another one in the exhibit was 800 years older.

 

There was some Egyptian stuff too but nothing I hadn’t already seen in other museums.

The Hall of Maps is where everyone finally realizes that the Sistine Chapel is actually not just around the next corner and chills out a little bit.

 

A really long hallway with huge maps of each region of Italy

 

There are 40 giant maps in here but they are from the 1500s so the only ones I could really identify with certainty were the islands Sicily and Sardinia.  I couldn’t stop for long as there was an entire school of kids not far behind me and advancing.  It was also around this time that I realized I had missed my opportunity to see the Etruscan exhibit.  The Etruscans were the ancestors of the Romans and in my eye, the most ancient look at Rome available.  But the way the museum was set up, the few side exhibits were only accessible from the one, singular route, and once you passed them, going back was nearly impossible.

 

At the end of the hall is a small circular room where I sat down.  I realized that there would be no keeping ahead of the school children any more and that my only option now was staying put until they had gone sufficiently far enough ahead of me.  Leaning back with fatigue, I realized there was a very cool fresco on the ceiling depicting the good angels banishing the (really grotesque-looking) fallen from heaven.

 

I guess the fallen angels transformed into monsters around the time God realized they were evil

 

The Raphael rooms rival the Sistine chapel in grandeur and were actually painted at the same time.  Although Raphael didn’t apply every paint stroke himself, these wall-sized paintings were his babies.  This one, Constantine at Milvian Bridge, was one of the more interesting:

 

Is that guy to the left of the horse fighting without any pants?

 

My eye was drawn to the fact that the two guys falling into the water aren’t creating so much as a ripple.  I’ve got to wonder if that was done on purpose for some sort of sense of ‘perfection’ or if splashing was too difficult for Raphael and his students.

Finally, I emerged into the Sistine chapel.  This is a large, dark room with a really high ceiling, named after pope Sixtus IV and packed with people.  You can sit down on a bench around the perimeter if you wait twenty minutes for a seat to open up.  The most interesting thing to see in this room is the hapless security guards as they try desperately to enforce the no photographs and no shouting policies.  If these two guys have to work shifts of more than 60 minutes at a time, I feel sorry for them.  Even though there were plenty of people leaning back and taking blatant flash photos, I sympathized too much with the guards so I snapped mine surreptitiously and without flash.  This is the blurry result:

 

Me and the Sistine chapel ceiling

 

Actually, you’re not missing much.  The Sistine chapel is way overrated.  The real focus is the small paintings down the center.  The rest of the space is predominantly filled in with naked men.  Aside from the sheer size of the whole production, it’s not very impressive.  The main thing you take away is that Michelangelo was really good at painting naked men.  You could even say he set the standard for painting naked men.  Given the fact that he was homosexual, I guess he really got to do something he loved. 

 

 

This guy is so over it.

 

 

This has got to be the best stained glass I have ever seen.  It was free standing and I checked the back to make sure that it was stained glass.

 

So after the Sistine chapel you are basically done.  There were a number of jewel-encrusted gold chalices and crucifixes but for some reason these aren’t exactly striking in photographs.  I still had plenty of time left in the day so I took another pass through the museum to see if I couldn’t find the Etruscan exhibit.  It was much more crowded this time through and I used the less popular exhibits (like the Egyptians) as shortcuts wherever possible.

 

I realized I had been seeing many versions of this guy in Rome:

 

 

Basically ugly faces with open mouths and these peculiar eyes.  Eventually I was able to deduce that these are probably representations of drama masks.

 

The Etruscans are descendants from the Greeks which helps to explain the Roman love of Greek culture.  Mostly what we have from Etruscan times (6th century BC) is bronze.  Here we have a bronze statue of a soldier in remarkably good condition. Behind him are shields, helmets and body armor.

 

Me and some stone Etruscan lions

 

As you can see, the Etruscan exhibit was basically empty (except for that creepy guy I just noticed behind the statue).  I found another nearly empty wing of the museum filled with old Hellenistic pots.  A few were amusing and one I recognized as the inspiration for the art of the board game Pente.

 

Jason of Argonaut fame is eaten by a serpent just as the golden fleece is in reach

Achilles and Ajax playing dice (I love those Corinthian helmets)

 

Scattered all over the museum were mosaics that had once decorated the Colosseum, like these:

 

 

 

Finally, I figured I’d get a picture of the huge pinecone thing everyone seems to love.  I should get bonus points for finding an angle that includes St. Peter’s Basilica in the same shot.

 

The Vatican Museum courtyard

 

Oh yeah, they have a famous double stairwell for an exit.  It’s actually two spiral stairwells interwoven.

 

 

I have a little scribbling in the margin of my notes that says:

I think part of me wants to feel guilty for lying in my hotel room drinking a 2/3 liter beer in my underwear but it’s not working.

Hey, I still made it out for dinner.

 

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