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La Grande Bellezza Roma Aeterna
Rory Sherlock Third Year
Tutor: Nerma Cridge
fig.1 – Sorrentino, Paolo, ‘La Grande Bellezza’, film, 2013
'It is all settled beneath the chattering and the noise. Silence and sentiment. Emotion and fear. The haggard, inconstant splashes of beauty. And then the wretched squalor of humanity.'1 - Jep Gambardella
As the intermittent lilting chirps of summer songbirds drift into earshot, the resonant, urgent cataclysm of a canon shot debases the tranquil tones. The daily crack of fire, expulsed from the gentle slope of the Janiculum towards the Tiber, signals the exact stoke of midday. Rome is on time, and it's time the Romans are stirring from their heady slumbers. A vivid gaggle of be-sunglassed tourists gaze absently at the noontime strike, wanly slapping hands at the inevitable spectacle of its quotidian completion. Some way behind the gathered crowd, a solitary, portly Roman gazes at the foot of the stately monument to Garbaldi. Though impeccably suited, turned out with elegant precision, this man is beset by some vexation. Above the open collar of his white dress shirt and the greying hairs of his beard, his eyes peer blankly from dark, tormented hollows, fixed on the inscription in front of him. 'Rome o Morte' – (Rome or Death). Offset a little way from the hulk of the monument, baking beneath the midday sun, a young man gazes, non-plussed, through the whitewashed busts of the founding fathers of Rome. A pearl-laden sexagenarian lady flicks through the daily paper, glassy eyes flitting incomprehensibly upwards, cigarette dangling aimlessly from her sticky lips. The vociferous calling birds are returning to their fervent song through the whistling fecund leaves of the summer plane trees. A man has not seen his bed tonight, and sleeps soundly on a bench in a blanket of dappled light. Atop the hill, an octet sings a delicate, rising chorale poignantly, 'I lie'- in the grand arches of the Fontana dell'Acqua Paola. Some of the tourists have been led to the fringes of the waters edge by a guide with a plastic headset perched high on her fatigued brow. As the escalating choral lines cascade from the octet at the top of the fountain, a bus driver profanely declares his dissatisfaction: 'Asshole!' A lone, middle-aged Japanese man breaks away from the pack, camera in hand. Snapping away as he strides towards the balustrade, at last the vista opens up. Rome stretches out, gleaming beyond the horizon, blurred by the dazzling illumination of the beating rays. The music builds, peaking in a euphoric crescendo. Overcome by the overwhelming beauty of the eternal city, the tourist, in a moment of profound ecstasy, succumbs. Conceding his human essence, he collapses, a flaccid lump. 'In a sort of ecstasy… Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty... I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations... Everything spoke so vividly to my soul. Ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the heart, what in Berlin they call 'nerves.' Life was drained from me.'2 This is the lavish opening scene with which Paolo Sorrentino's 'La Grande Bellezza' introduces itself. As the prelude to Wagner's 'Das Rheingold' (Vorspiel) elegantly ebbs and flows through the cycles and chromaticisms of the great composition, this preface encompasses the whole scale of the film, giving us a fleeting insight into a revelatory contemporary portrait of Rome. What Sorrentino gives the audience is a vivid encapsulation of the extravagance and decline of both the people and the state during the Berlusconi era in the eternal city.
1 2
Gambardella, Jep, 'La Grande Bellezza' - film - Paolo Sorrentino, 2013 Beyle, Henri-Marie Stendhal, 'Naples and Florence; a journey from Milan to Reggio', Translated by Richard N. Coe, Calder, 2010
The overwhelming impression is one of a city of staggering beauty - enough to induce a fatal bout of Stendhal syndrome, a condition induced by beauty, the symptoms of which are detailed in the quotation above - yet also one that has reached a 'languorous impasse’3 in its development. Italy today finds itself precariously perched on the razor's edge of economic stability. Following a postwar boom, the country has seen a global recession and financial meltdown, and come under the microscope of foreign and internal affairs attention, leading to the resignation and vilification of its longest serving prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Consequently, Rome, the continuing and eternal nerve center, seems now to be faltering. As the director of the film stated himself, 'Since it’s hard to be optimistic, it’s hard to be positive, there’s a kind of lassitude that found its symbolic culmination in dancing, in conga lines, in trying to seduce the beautiful woman of the moment or the beautiful man of the moment. It seemed that this had become the principal occupation of the country.'4 Has Rome really been reduced to the conga line? Far removed from the optimism and reverie of Fellini’s ‘La Dolce Vita’, still fresh in the public mind, Sorrentino’s portrait of Rome is much darker, yet equally accurate reflection of the collective consciousness in the city today; one of a city being supplanted and drowned, dissolving into a diffuse machine, self-propagating a perpetual tide of tat-peddlers and tourists. Is the eternal city waning, or is this pessimism a fleeting hypochondriacal bout? Will the city remain steadfastly eternal, as the early poet Tibullus asserted with such gleeful aplomb at the founding of the Empire, or has Rome past the point of no return? Maybe all roads no longer lead to Rome. If this eternality, so fundamentally engrained within the very fabric and founding of the city, is indeed now perceived to be fading, then the city is undergoing a crucial paradigm shift. Such shifts have been documented before in the long history of the city, and so to understand the current situation, we must trace the origins of the idea of the eternal city. ORIGINS
Empire; Foundations for eternality
Tibullus was born almost immediately proceeding the assassination of Julius Caesar. He would therefore have borne witness to eventual collapse of the Roman Republic, immediately followed by the deification of Caesar, the ascension of his nephew, Octavian, and the initiation of the latter’s subsequent rise to an unprecedented position as the greatest emperor in the history of Rome, laying the foundations for a political regime that would continue, in one form or another, for nearly 1500 years. 'Romulus aeternae nondum formauerat urbis moenia'
3 4
Donadio, Rachel, New York Times online, September 8th, 2013 Paolo Sorrentino, (interview), Donadio, Rachel, New York Times online, September 8th, 2013
'Romulus has not yet laid out the walls of the eternal City [no place for his brother Remus]'5 So, when this axiom fled Tibullus' pen in 30-20BC, Rome had already been around for a very long time, and was undergoing a period of vast expansion, prosperity, and most importantly, political revolution. The contemporary city, so far as he understood it, was eternal from its very conception, having retained the capacity to survive, develop and prosper for a torrid 700 years since its notorious founding in 753BC. Little did he know that for the next 1500 years it would continue to be one of the dominating superpowers of the western world, spearheading the development of western culture at large, and would for at least another 650 years beyond that remain continuously inhabited, governed and preserved. Tibullus was not alive to witness the construction of the Colosseum, nor the Pantheon. He had no knowledge of what the architecture of Bramante or the frescoes of Michelangelo would eventually do to his hometown. His proclamation of the city as an eternal entity was chiefly inspired by the greatness of those that built it - politically, socially and architecturally and his faith that that such values of honour and power would continue to prosper as a result. Rome was by no means pure, or inherently great. It was worked at and developed through the resilience and indomitability of its political system and inhabitants. Through 700 years of infighting, civil war and destruction, since Romulus and Remus first began their fatal quarrel, Rome had survived. It was built well, but it was indestructible politically, weathering even the collapse of the Republic, and it was this valour that instilled such optimism in Tibullus' infamous maxim. The architecture with which Tibullus would have been surrounded was centred around the Forum. This was Rome as it was before the Colosseum and the Circus Maximus. There were no 'Ludi', (Games), as they were later to be more whimsically dubbed, but conflict. The city was engrossed by debate, and commercial affairs. A venue for both vociferous political battle, and ferocious personal encounters, the Forum was described as, ‘The most celebrated meeting place in the world, and in all history.'6 The scale and form of the architecture of the building was derived from the tentative early comprehensions and emulations of the Greek orders, at the time being documented and illustrated by the young Vitruvius. The Forum was designed to be the beating heart of a powerful and civilised society, and as such was intended to impose, invoking a sense of gravitas and awe in the inhabitants of the city. However, at this stage in the development of Roman architecture, though they had a great deal of respect and admiration for Greek philosophy and design, they had not yet mastered its beauty. Plato famously espoused his aesthetic philosophy in stating that, 'When he looks at Beauty in the only way that Beauty can be seen - only then will it become possible for him to give birth not to images of virtue (because he's in touch with no images), but to true virtue [arete] (because he is in touch with true
5 6
Tibullus, 'Tibullus and Sulpicia: The Poems', Translated by A.S Kline, Poetryintraslation, 2001 Grant, Michael, The Roman Forum, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970, pp.11
Beauty).'7 Beauty, for the Greeks was a physical manifestation of a greater truth, limited by materials and means. As John Keats declared, 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'8 The Platonic beauty that the early Romans were attempting to emulate was aspirational; a physical approximation of something beyond human comprehension. However, at this point in their history, Rome was pre-occupied with more grounded and tangible sensations. Beauty, though an obvious criterion to be satisfied, was not the sole dedication of the architecture, and thus it achieved its experiential intentions via other means. Though the Forum would have been vast and stately, the architectural orders from which it originates fig.2 - The Forum Romanum, Source Photo 1899 are difficult to divine, slightly muddled and unclear. The scale and heft of the building made up for its lack of formal sophistication and mastery of the Greek tradition. After all, it was not ‘designed’ as it were, but was
‘Developed gradually, organically and piecemeal over many centuries’9 The notion of eternality crossing the lips of the Romans treading the steps of revolutionary Empire in Rome, then, was one of polity, of humanity and of budding cultural potential. However, Tibullus' expectations for the eternal glory his Rome symbolised, encapsulated in the heft of the Forum, would not materialise in the way he anticipated. After an initial period of peace and prosperity under the Pax Romana, established by Augustus, the city was reluctantly and painfully forced to endure a string of disastrous, tyrannical leaders, including Caligula and Nero; its inhabitants subject to some of the most awful crimes to humanity ever to grace the pages of history. Throughout this time, the Empire continued to rapidly expand, while Rome itself burned. Such demise was met with nothing but indifference by Nero; infamously fiddling his fingers as the fire raged through his capital. The Antonine Plague of 165-180 subsequently wiped out as much as one third of the entire population. Eventually, due to the perpetuating demise of the city and its governance, Rome was sacked in 410 AD by the Visigoths under Alaric I, the first time the city had been successfully overrun by an invading force in over 800 years. At this point, the city was no longer even the capital of the Empire; resigned to the prestige of
Plato, 'The Symposium', CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012 Keats, John, ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’, 1812 9 Watkin, David, ‘The Roman Forum’, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009, pp.22 7 8
Constantinople. Sure enough, in 476AD, the Western Empire collapsed. Edward Gibbon later wrote that, 'The decline of Rome was the natural and inevitable effect of immoderate greatness. Prosperity ripened the principle of decay; the causes of destruction multiplied with the extent of conquest; and as soon as time or accident had removed the artificial supports, the stupendous fabric yielded to the pressure of its own weight'10 As the Empire continued to expand, according to Gibbon, Rome could not sustain its own prosperity, caving in under the weight of its own success. The architecture of the old city was consigned to ruin and ransack, capitulating alternately to the domination of Byzantine and Germanic forces for the next four centuries. SHIFT No. 1
Renaissance; The succession of beauty.
The catalyst for the reaction against the stagnation of cultural progress in Rome following the decline of the Empire was the relocation of the centre of the Renaissance to Rome from Florence. This, it seems, coincided quite profoundly with the nigh simultaneous final surrender of the Eastern Empire to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. It was as if with the capitulation of the final forlorn tendrils of the old Empire, the city found itself liberated to once again begin to ameliorate and progress, in an additive move harking back to the fundamental architectural and artistic principles so lauded by the Ancients. The singular consistent visage of power that resided in Rome throughout this cultural transitionary period in the early middle ages, was that of the Papacy, empowered by the creation of the Papal States in 756. Under the control and influence of the Catholic Church, spearheaded by the Papal seat, it is during this era of Renaissance that Rome would really begin once again to blaze the trail for the development of western culture. Through the Empyrean ambitions of architects such as Bernini and Bramante, the Roman urban landscape once again underwent an overhaul, resulting in another fundamental paradigm shift in the conception of eternality in the great city. Under the profound influence of the papacy (both divine and monetary), the Renaissance took to Rome with vivacious aplomb. Renaissance artists and architects were given - within reason - all the funding they desired, with the aim of returning Rome to its status as a cultural nucleus for the West. Rome became fertile ground on which to develop a progressive architectural ideology, emergent from the sacred foundations of the existing city. The architects approached this potential through a renewed admiration of the platonic Greek tradition. However, unlike their ancient predecessors (owing to the source of their funding) they dedicated themselves to the design of religious buildings and sculptures, intended to convey an other-worldly awe. Religion became the artifice through which to
10
Gibbon, Edward, 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', 1776, Modern Library, 2003, Vol. 6, Chapter 38.
achieve this Platonic beauty, to which the old Empire so aspired, and it is through religion that they achieved it, creating architecture of unparalleled beauty. Let us return to the Janiculum, the scene of the unfortunate fate of our Japanese, camera-clad victim. The Tempietto at San Pietro in Montorio is one of the finest manifestations of this harmonious classical beauty in Renaissance Italy. The church and its commemorative tomb were commissioned by Ferdinand (the Catholic, as he was known) and Isabella of Spain, to be constructed on the traditional site of St. Peter's crucifixion. This modest monument is understood to be 'Considered by Bramante's contemporaries and successors to be an architectural triumph of the first magnitude. It made him at once famous all over Italy. Sixteenthcentury artists amongst the greatest in history, like Michelangelo and Palladio, flocked to see it, measure it, draw it, discuss it and write about it. With what you may think their exaggerated reverence for antiquity these men pronounced that it vied with, no, even excelled the architecture of the ancients'11 fig.3 - The Tempietto, Donato Bramate, 1502
It would appear to be considered in this same firmamental regard by Sorrentino, who returns to the building later in La Grande Bellezza. Jep, the unflappable, immaculately turned-out protagonist, searching for meaning in his life and in Rome itself, visits the building immediately proceeding a recurring dream in which he recalls the single experience of unfathomable, Platonic 'great beauty' attained in his life, sliding seamlessly from the beauty of his experience to the beauty of the architectural form. The Tempietto stands as a physical symbol of purity of form and intellect, and of transcendent experience, invoking sensations beyond its physical self. It is one of the most meticulous and consistent examples of the use of the Doric order, described by Vitruvius as, 'The relationship between the Order and the nature of the divinity to whom the temple is dedicated to.'12 In this case the divinity is St. Peter, the first Bishop of Rome and thus a figure of vast significance in the Catholic Church. Considering the great talisman to whom the monument is dedicated, it is not a large thing. Nor is it particularly grand, or lavish. What it is, is beautiful. The principles applied to the Forum all those years
11 12
Lees-Milne, James, 'Roman Mornings', Wingate, 1956 Vitruvius, ‘Ten Books on Architecture’, Rowland and Howe, Cambridge University press, 2001
ago, have been entirely subverted. What it lacks in size and grandeur, it surpasses through dedication of formal composition and architectural arrangement. One of the most accurate and encapsulating descriptions of this monument can be found in James Lees-Milne's 'Roman Mornings'. 'The body is surrounded by a peristyle of sixteen Doric columns of grey granite, their capitals and bases being of marble. The columns are made to diminish at the tops and bottoms and swell to their fullest diameter at the lowest third of their height. The exterior of the body is divided into alternate shallow niches with shell heads, and square recesses. The frieze of the peristyle is carved with much vigour and delicacy. Between the triglyphs (and you will notice how every third falls accurately above the centre of each column) the architect introduced emblems in flattish relief pertaining to Saint Peter – namely a chalice, lamp, cross, open book, mitre, cross keys, etcetera. The peristyle is finished with a feature entirely unknown to the ancients, which gives it a crowning beauty, namely the continuous range of wasp-waisted balusters. Of these every fourth carefully falls into place above a column. His peristyle is moreover set on a very squat platform, raised on three steps which descend evenly into the pavement. Bramante's need of a balustrade was of course the consequence of his major innovation, the drum and dome. The grace and loveliness of his dome surpass all the tributes that four and a half centuries have lavished upon them.’13 It was no longer the polity, and the people that embodied the eternality of the city, but the beauty of its architecture and of its art. Rome was now symbolised by its buildings. With the Renaissance, then, Rome underwent another revolution funded by the church, establishing an architecture and a revised conception of eternality based now on a revised conception of eternality based on the sublime beauty inspired by transcendental Catholic deity. Crucially, it was not the polity of the city and the resilient nature of its inhabitants that was perpetuating its eternality, as it was when Tibullus first penned the term, but the continuance of Catholicism, through the awesome beauty of its architecture and art forms. Rome, following the Renaissance, was now symbolised by its buildings. So, what changed between then and now; between Bramante's Rome and Sorrentino's? Why now does the Tempietto bear 'the recent scars and graffiti…the ubiquitous hall marks of the tourist industry'14? Has Rome's reverence of the beautiful regressed? SHIFT No. 2
Contemporary City; The embrace of crassness
Unfortunately, this cultural explosion in the Renaissance came at a great cost for the papacy. In its desire to transform Rome into a Western nucleus of the arts and architecture, the Popes were chastised heavily by the wider faith for the innumerable expense of the projects undertaken. This dissatisfaction, in conjunction with the increasing dissemination of the corruption of the Papacy resulted in the reformation (1517) and counter-reformation of Catholicism. The Renaissance subsequently disseminated elsewhere, and once more the city was sacked in 1527, this time by the Landsknechts of Emperor Charles V.
13 14
Lees-Milne, James, 'Roman Mornings', Wingate, 1956 Ibid.
The attack spelled the abrupt end of the golden age of the Renaissance in Rome. What followed was a prolonged period of political and ecclesiastical in-fighting, in which Rome again spent almost four centuries changing hands. Though it was eventually reinstated as the centre of the reformed Catholic Church, divisions of power and control of the city were never simple, making significant contributive progress increasingly difficult. Appeasement for the desire for progress was meted out in the form of Baroque enrichment. However, the Baroque movement was hardly a progression to the sublimely beautiful constructions of the Renaissance. Where Renaissance classicism aimed at higher truth beyond its physical limits, summed up by Umberto Eco as the ideal that, 'Beauty does not participate in truth, but is its artifice.'15 The Baroque, however, thought different. ‘contrariwise, the Romantics held that it was Beauty that produced truth.'16 In other words, where the work of the Renaissance architects was the shadow of some higher entity, the Baroque was but a shadow of a shadow. Where the Renaissance revolutionized, the baroque added frilly bits; a prime example being the superfluous addition of a flourishing façade at the ancient Church of Santa Susanna, on the Quirinal Hill. It was beauty for beauty's sake.
fig.4 –Facade, Santa Susanna, Maderno, Carlo, 1602
It seems that the effect of this stunted development from the Renaissance and the superficial decorative attempts of the Baroque, was a crystallisation of the city in the minds of its inhabitants and its gradual transformation into an object. Rome is constantly talked about in historical papers in terms of what it symoblises, in a given period, or in what the city finds its ‘symbolic culmination’. However, Leonard Barkan states that 'Rome is almost purely a symbol. With the exception of a very brief period, the history of Rome is a history of the idea of a city that used to be. Through a simple mechanism, the more depressed the reality of Rome, the more potent the symbolisation. This is, of course, a universal phenomenon in regard to any widely perceived historical construction; Rome merely happens to be among the most
15 16
Eco, Umberto, ‘On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea’, MacLehose Press, 2010 Ibid.
extravagant examples'17 This assertion is absolutely crucial to the comprehension of how the city is perceived by its inhabitants. Though we can now reflect on the Renaissance and say how revolutionary it was and how beautiful the architecture was, is that what they would have been saying at the time, when the fraudulence and extravagance was undergoing a prolonged exposure, undermining for many Romans their elemental religious belief system? It somehow seems unlikely. Rome has always looked back at itself. And a lot of the time, it has been less than pleased with its state in the present tense. ‘Mass tourism was already annoying Romans in the days when trouser-clad Gauls brought down the tone in the Colosseum—real men, after all, wore togas and plucked their armpits’18 Even Tibullus, in spite of the sub-textual optimism his primary axiom conveyed, his assertion was based on a reflective historical analysis of the imperfect development of the city. However, the distinction between the self-reflective consciousness of Tibullus, in the early days of the Empire, the architects of the Renaissance and the contemporary portrait of Rome portrayed in La Grande Bellezza, lies in the notion of reverence. In both of the prior grand shifts in the collective notion of the eternality of the city previously established, there has been a distinct reverence and admiration for what preceded the revolution. However, the grand shift we are witnessing today is predicated on a fundamental irreverence for the precedent, precipitated by this objectification of the city as a whole. The panels of the vitrine have separated the contents from the viewer to such a great extent that they seem not to care any more. It’s as if there is so much going on now in Rome, so much sensory bombardment and human activity, ad so much monetary valuation of artifact, that the civilians have become indifferent to it, through over exposure. As Georg Simmel stated, ‘A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all’19 and that due to this constant economization of objects, ‘This does not mean that the objects are not perceived, as is the case with the halfwit, but rather that the meaning and differing values of things, and thereby the things themselves, are experienced as insubstantial’20 On a recent trip to the Capitoline hill, a friend of mine witnessed families of Romans bowling up, music unceremoniously pouring from the windows of their tricked out Bentley, (gone are the patriotic days of the Alfa Spider) shouting at one another; at the world; at everything. When approached, ironically enough, by a tourist to keep the noise down, the retort flew back ‘Rome è Bella’ – ‘Rome is beautiful’.
Barkan, Leonard, ‘Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the making of Renaissance’, Yale University Press, 1999, pp.20 Rowland, Ingrid D., ‘The Crass, Beautiful Eternal City’, The New York Review of Books, www.nybooks.com, 2011 19 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, ‘In Translation: Interdisciplinary Border: Crossings in Culture and Modernity’, Cambridge University Press, 2006 20 Ibid. 17 18
Irreverence and objectification, then, have found themselves locked in a cycle. The worse the socio-political climate and future for Italy looks, according to Barkan, the more the past will become objectified. In turn the more it is objectified, the more tourists will flock to the city in order to view the contents of this vast vitrine. This in turn spurs on the motion of the merchandise machine, and further debasement of the great wonders the city contains. It is precisely this opposition between objective beauty and human crassness that Sorrentino so repeatedly hammers home throughout the film. Jep, functions in the film in the same manner as the sublime architecture in which the scenes unfold. Jep is an object, through which to frame the salubrious acts of the ‘squalour of humanity’. This is illustrated with unmistakable clarity in his introductory scene. There is a party taking place on Jep’s roof, and as the hedonistic activity reaches its climactic peak, the men on one side of the terrace, the women on the other, dancing and shaking back and forth opposite each other in a barely contained sexual explosion. Jep stands alone in the middle; his top button done, pocket square elegantly folded in his top pocket, smoking a cigarette. The party that has so enthralled the audience for the past six minutes, all of a sudden takes on a dirty patina. The absurdity of it all reveals itself, and the revelry in which all of the guests are entirely indulged, seems deeply crass. This crassness saturates every scene in the film, starting with the Wagnerian prelude mentioned earlier. And it is this crassness that appears, at least for Sorrentino, to be the principal driver of his deep malaise for the present state of his beloved Rome. However, it must be made quite perfectly clear that when we look to any period in the history of the city, crassness manages in every case to rear its ugly head. However, it is the fundamental embrace of this crassness that has enabled Rome to survive as long as it has. It is this crassness that leads Robert Hughes to assert that, ‘For all its glories, and for all the legacy it left in art, thought, and politics, Greek civilization did perish. That of Rome is still somewhat with us’21 For the Greeks desired a purity of moral and beauty that was fundamentally unattainable, whereas Rome developed a beauty that was altogether more human. Bernini’s ‘The Ecstasy of St. Theresa’ illustrates this so clearly, with its contrast between the purity of the angelic form, and the total obscurity of the human in a cascading fig.5 –St. Theresa in Ecstasy, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 1652 ruffle of cloth, exposing simply the contorted feminine face in the grips of ecstasy, and a limp hand and foot. The contrast of the imperfect, expressive humanity with the perfect deic form provides the perfect metaphor for the contextualization of beauty in Rome. The sculpture is self-reflective, and yet honest. Through the contortion and imperfection of the human in the
21
Hughes, Robert, ‘Rome’, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2011, pp.479
depiction of a historical scene, the whole visage becomes crystallised as a thing of beauty. It is this contextualization of objects and architecture in historical, self-reflective context when contrasted with the people and actions that surround it, that we decide upon something as being beautiful, and worth preserving. It is precisely through this historical, reflective comparison between the imperfection of human action and the architectural beauty, and the embrace of this playoff, that has made Rome last as long as it has. It must also be noted that it is indeed for just this reason that the Fascist architecture of the Mussolini regime (such as the iconic Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana) is still so prominent in Rome, accepted into the collective consciousness of its inhabitants, historically sealed by its architectural objectification in opposition to the disgraceful human action with which it is associated. It is for this reason that I believe Rome will remain eternal, though through a new paradigm shift in the collective understanding of its status. The city has always has been ‘a city of what used to be’, and will remain so. It will thus continually fulfill its own eternal prophecy, as by the time something comes to be categorised as good, bad, beautiful or otherwise, it has already passed. Furthermore what we are currently witnessing the start of is a combined eternal rationale of Tibullus (the Empire) and the Renaissance. There is faith, albeit not necessarily too gleefully admitted, that the people of Rome will continue on its eternal prophecy, though those people are no longer politicians, but tourists. The objectification and transformation of the city into the contents of a vitrine will make it endlessly and increasingly popular, more so the more rarified it becomes. However, this also relies crucially on the eternality of the beauty so perfectly achieved by the Renaissance architects. Contemporary Rome is so invested in its own symbolic status – manifested in its architecture – that this will be preserved at all costs. The risk is that this emphasis on the city's iconic bricks and mortar will overshadow the very real social and political upheaval that is being played out in its streets. The struggles of Rome's people were central Tibullus' founding myth of the eternal city. If Rome is to survive its current period of decadence, it would do well to remember this. Rome will go on.
Bibliography Barkan, Leonard, ‘Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the making of Renaissance’, Yale University Press, 1999 Beyle, Henri-Marie Stendhal, 'Naples and Florence; a journey from Milan to Reggio', Translated by Richard N. Coe, Calder, 2010 Gibbon, Edward, 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire', 1776, Volume VI Modern Library, 2003 Grant, Michael, The Roman Forum, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1970 Hughes, Robert, ‘Rome’, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2011 Keats, John, ‘Ode on A Grecian Urn’, 1812 Lees-Milne, James, 'Roman Mornings', Wingate, 1956 Plato, 'The Symposium', CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012 Simmel, Georg, ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’, ‘In Translation: Interdisciplinary Border: Crossings in Culture and Modernity’, Cambridge University Press, 2006 Tibullus, 'Tibullus and Sulpicia: The Poems' Vitruvius, ‘Ten Books on Architecture’, Rowland and Howe, Cambridge University press, 2001 Watkin, David, ‘The Roman Forum’, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 2009
Images fig.1 – Sorrentino, Paolo, ‘La Grande Bellezza’, film, 2013 fig.2 - The Forum Romanum, Source Photo 1899 fig.3 - The Tempietto, Donato Bramate, 1502 fig.4 –Facade, Santa Susanna, Maderno, Carlo, 1602 fig.5 –St. Theresa in Ecstasy, Bernini, Gian Lorenzo, 1652
Filmography Sorrentino, Paolo, ‘La Grande Bellezza’, 2013
Webography www.poetryintranslation.com www.nybooks.com www.wikipedia.com www.nytimes.com www.listverse.com