I Cross Borders Into The Vatican

Yesterday we high tailed it to the Vatican, much like criminals high tail it to Mexico, because, as you well know, the Vatican is a separate country. They have their own flag, postal service, money - the whole shebang. Guarding the Vatican are the formidable Swiss Guard. Just look at those uniforms, purchased in bulk after a gypsy dance patriarchy disbanded. They can use excess folds of cloth both to confuse attackers and to surrender.

Five million people a year see the Sistine Chapel; most go straight there, ignoring the rest of the Vatican Museum, which, I am told, holds over twelve billion (12000000...000) euros worth of old things. And for no small reason - the Chapel was an evolution of a hundred years. The ceiling alone took four to paint. Heading towards the Chapel, visitors are funneled through a series of long hallways, capped by doors, used as screens to filter out noise. Less and less people talk, the more and more doors we went through. In one of the halls prior to the Chapel, there lies the gigantic marble tombs of Costanza and Elaine. They died immediately after being taken off the air, it seems.

The famous ceiling of the Sistine, the one with the strained fingers of God reaching out to the limp wristed hand of Adam (you know, the one parodied in Rocketman? Now that was cinema), tells the history of Genesis, from creation to the flood. It's really too much to take in, because most eyes start on the main wall of the Sistine, the one containing the Last Judgement frescoes. As you follow the paint up the wall and across the ceiling, by the time you reach the separation of the waters, you're pretty much burned out.

My favorite part of the entire Chapel was a small self portrait Michelangelo left. In the Last Judgement, admist souls being pulled up or pushed down, one angel holds an empty bag of skin, the remains of a man. This is said to be the likeness of the painter Michelangelo; that's just about the best autobiography I've ever heard of, next to Vonnegut's Timequake. After eight years of painting, who was Michelangelo but a empty shell? (And you might say, he was still Michelangelo, but you my friend are a balloon full of hot air. Well, I'm writing this blog, so pipe down.)

The Museum itself takes hours to navigate, if you have a real interest. It's mostly portraits and action shots of saints. Personal favorite: a painting of St. Nick, that's right, Santa Claus, flying by his own power, stopping a raging seastorm, while a mermaid looks on. I wanted to italicize one phrase in that last sentence for comic effect, but I can't decide which.

Obviously, Jesus takes the gold medal for number of times represented, but a close second had to be St. Sebastian. Seabass was tied to a stake by Diocletian and shot chock full of arrows, and, according to tradition, did not die. I wish artists had picked out a more photogenic torture to depict, because this one's quite gruesome. In fact, many of these grotesque paintings saw their rise during the Counter Reformation. After that one Luther raised a ruckus, the church leaders thought the best way to fight back would be to commission as many paintings representing martyrdom as possible, as a type of propaganda/recruitment blitz. Come join our blood cult!

A museum filled with twelve billion euros worth of paintings of martyrs got me thinking the way a cool ten billion could not. We really do try to justify ourselves, try to make ourselves matter in the grand scheme, and not like the grand scheme to rob three casinos in one night, but the grand scheme and endgame of the universe. With these paintings, we seem to be saying: Look, we can bleed, too. Take that, Jesus!

Or it could just be a culture thing.

I Wax At Hadrian's Villa

On Wednesday, through an architectural class, we field tripped to Hadrian's Villa. Hadrian was a Roman emperor in the early second century; it was him, then Antoninus, the Marcus Aurelius, from Gladiator, if that helps. He was adopted by the Emperor Trajan on account of his skills in administration (an aside: I was recently offered adoption on account of my skills in mathematics). One of the things Hadrian is remembered for is his villa, which he built in Tivoli, south of Rome, on his wife Sabina's land. He then proceeded to fill it with images of his lover, Antinous. Take that, woman. Or just women, everywhere.

The villa is an enormous small town, self contained, with a sampling of everything, even two separate baths. The place is overrun with angles (if I've only learned one thing this past month studying architecture, it is that all cities are planned using axises. Or is it axi? Axis's?). The three primary axises (axisz?) terminate at the Maritime Theater.

But it's not really a theater. It's Hadrian's private residence. You see, Hadrian built an ideal, perfect place, a getaway from Rome, and it still wasn't enough. So he created a perfect circle, erected a Pantheon-like building, then surrounded it by a moat (when I get back home, 1915 Wedington is gonna be moated). He retreated to the Maritime Theater when he wanted to be alone to write poetry, or when he got in a mean disposition, which, according to people who know about such things, was quite frequent.

We were instructed to take some time out and sketch the Maritime Theater. What? Sketch? All the architecture students took this in stride, and immediately sat down and went to work. After some hesitation, I began to draw a column, but this column ended up looking so much like Boba Fett's helmet that I decided to finished the whole figure.

After I was done with the bounty hunter, my thoughts began to wonder, till I arrived right back in the place I was originally, thinking about how funny people act. How Hadrian built an ideal place, found out it wasn't enough, then tried to build a getaway from his getaway. How people try to fill that hole inside them - the one right between the chestplates, in the middle, at the bottom of the breast. You feel that? That gap, right smack in the middle, that empty space? People try to put the strangest things there. I try to put the strangest things there.

But that's all fancy talk.

I Validate the Relics of St. Paul

It turns out that the Rome program is for architects, and people interested in architecture. I don't really belong here. But I don't mind - buildings are starting to grow on me (be built on me? No, too forced), and there's a lot of outside class time, like today, when we toured St. Paul Outside the Walls. It's a beautiful big church, which houses a marble and granite forest of pillars, with stone from three different continents. It also has a room strictly for relics.

The main relic is the purported iron chains that Paul wore right before he was executed. These chain links are housed in a little gold bird house in a room that many people have knelt in. In fact, when the church was first built, people used to scrap shavings off of Paul's chains and put them in medicine.

I'm not sure about now, but in previous years the Catholic Church used to require all churches under it's jurisdiction to house a few relics as proof of something - divine right, archaeological interest, thriftiness, who knows? Churches were shut down because of the lack of relics, or the presence of false relics.

It's not just the Catholic Church, but it seems humanity as a whole has taken what Jesus said and just ran with it, like Jim Marshall, the Minnesota Viking who picked up a fumble and ran it all the way back, the wrong way. Humans are so desperate to insert themselves into the gospel and justify themselves to God, like the story told of Paul's decapitation, where the newly separated head bounced three times, leaving three new springs of water. Then his eyes turned to dollar signs and out of his mouth came one thousands nickels, like a slot machine.

And it's me too; whenever I cling to absolute rules or concentrate on strict purity, I'm just trying to make myself matter to something who's intrinsic scale is on a different level.

That's probably all just fancy talk, though.

I Explore the Forum

Today we, as a class, followed our professors, Davide and Emilio, to the Roman Forum, on an architectural tour. Did you know that the area of the Forum used to be under 9 meters of dirt? Apparently everything in Rome is built upon something else, like science or legos. People kept knocking buildings down, filling in the cracks with dirt, and rebuilding.

Also, did you know that Mussolini was responsible for the excavation? He wanted to connect his Fascist regime with the Roman imperial glory of the past, or something or other. That's why he partially instigated the war: in order to reclaim Roman territory. So he excavated and restored not only the Forum, but countless Roman structures and artifacts all over the city and state. Evidently he's not such a bad guy.

So we saw the Temple of Saturn, referred to as the Fort Knox of Antiquity, because it seems the god Saturn was modeled after a leprechaun, and the altar where Julius Caesar was burned, and where now people lay flowers, in honor of his salad, but the thing that interested me the most was the Temple of the Green Gods.

It isn't much; just two perpendicular rows of columns. But it was the last pagan temple in Rome before the Christians shut it down. The Christians, who previously were horribly persecuted, now in power, were persecuting everyone else. It always sounded like Christians do their best thinking while under fire: Paul, the apostles, the pastor from The Patriot. Other times we don't think so straight, like lighting heretics on fire. It makes me think maybe this environment we've cultured is a bit unhealthy, where sometimes we are concerned more with politics and boycotting movies than forgiveness.

That's probably all rubbish, though.