Poetical Hair

 

 

“Oh Rome!  my country! city of the soul!

The orphans of the heart must turn to thee.

Lone mother of dead empires! And control

In their shut breasts their petty misery.

What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see

The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way

O’er steps of broken thrones and temples. Ye!

Whose agonies are evils of a day _

A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.”

--Lord Byron, Childe Harold

 

Il Giardino Borghese is a large public park that became the property of Rome and Romans around the first part of the 20^th century when the Borghese family could no longer afford it, apparently.  Peccato!  But the upside is that it allows anyone to wander through what used to be a completely private paradise.  It is a wonderful place per fugare, to escape, the noise and constant movement of Roma.  Come and enjoy endless lanes, picturesque statues and fountains, the sound of parrots (quite a large population of parrots) chirping joyfully.  The Galleria Borghese is here, as you saw on a previous post.  It was the home of Cardinal Scipione Borghese and houses such a splendid collection.  But equal to the collection is the villa itself.  SUCH a beautiful place.

If you keep walking westward, you will find the Villa Medici.  This was repurposed by none other than King Louis XIV and sort of switched gears through the years to become the home of the Prix de France, an award for artists to come and live here for a year while they are working on projects.  Boise’s own Tony Doerr won the Prix many years ago.  He had an idea for a novel, set in WWII, blindness, hope,…. Hmmmmm..  Anyway, while he was living here he suffered from a bit of writer’s block and so began to journal, which became his book Four Seasons in Rome.  I highly recommend it!  So good!  It all ends well because that “idea” he had turned into All the Light We Cannot See.  BOOM!  Pulitzer Prize, bitches!!!

The Villa was chock full of French tourists.  The exhibition was interesting.  It was about scribbling and the role that it played (and plays) in creativity and innovation.  It featured oodles of doodles, by famous artists.  And I love doodles.  These are so intimate.  You can feel so close to the artist because you can see how it played with the pencil or charcoal, and then putzed around with form and caricatures.

The exhibition takes a gnarly turn with the work of some modernists like Cy Twombly.  Now to me, this is …. Crap.  Sorry.  Even Peggy Guggenheim drank the Kool-Aid with this stuff.  Ugh.

And then, just when you think you’re all sassy and know everything, the exhibit calls upon da Vinci who wrote about the importance of componimento inculto (untidy compositions) as a way to explore movement and form.  And then you are prompted to think about how, during the early 20^th century, Europe’s avante garde became enamored of children’s drawings as a font for ‘primitive naivety’ and escape from academic conventions and long-standing ideas about taste and beauty.   They had an early 20^th century film installation as well. 

You know, maybe I’m just a dud but I love convention.  So this girl walked over to the Palazzo Altemps for the antidote:

Oh yeah….. I could live there.

Where I couldn’t live is Keats’ tiny apartment by the Spanish Steps.  Tiny. Hot. Airless.  I know that consumption is a very Romantic way to go, but ugh.  This little gem of a museum is really worth visiting, seriously though.  It is full of ephemera: letters, journals, drawings, edited manuscripts.  One thing I found very poignant was these two locks of Keats’ hair, along with an excerpt from a letter by Leigh Hunt in 1833: “Mr. Keats’ hair was remarkable for its beauty, its flowing grace and fineness. … It was a kind of ideal, poetical hair and the locks we possess are beautiful specimens, …. They are long, thick, exquisitely fine, and running into ringlets.”

The exquisite death bed of tubercular splendor:

*****