Sono ritornata in Italia!

 

Benvenuti!

I arrived in Rome a few days ago after a pleasant trip and absolutely NO issues at passport control.  All the documents I prepared they were like, “meh,” in a very stylish but disinterested Italian manner.  Che bello!  I am staying in an apartment in the Via Veneto.  It is in a 19^th century building, molto bello, and with plenty of room, all mod cons and Italian TV.  I have discovered that Italy is mad about the American TV show “Blue Bloods” and I have been watching it, dubbed in Italian, and enjoying it v v much.

There is an exhibition at the Palazzo Barbarini that is concise and so well curated.  It takes one through developments in art, featuring Italian artists of course, from the Middle Ages to the 19^thcentury.  Tracing the ways that philosophical and theological shifts are rendered in the arts, it takes you (AND several groups of Italian teenagers) through a marvelous journey of glory and beauty.

The exhibit begins with a quote from St. Paul (of course, like it would begin with a quote from RuPaul which would have set a different tone altogether…).  Saint Paul wrote, “Christ crucified was unto the Jews a stumbling block and unto the Greeks, foolishness” (1 Cor 1:23).  What does that mean?  Well, as we all know,  Saint Paul’s big task in life was to make Christianity make sense because, frankly, much of it did not make sense.  How can God be eternal and die?  And such an ignoble death… crucifixion was how they executed criminals, lunatics, hooligans.  Paul would have been stunned to see how the cross would become such a potent and well-loved symbol.  These painted crosses that populated Italy’s churches in the 12^th and 13^th centuries captured the seemingly irreconcilable inconsistency between the humiliation and the glory of death:

The next room features another theological problem to wrestle with: the baby Jesus, which is actually the baby God, which is another issue altogether because how can God have been born if He is the original "unmoved mover"?  Oh dear.  It's complicated.  But for the medieval artist, how could one capture the vulnerability of the baby, the very human love between mother and child, and also the glory of the Divine?  Early depictions of JC are oftentimes rendered like so, he looks like a grown man in miniature:

OH, there is so much more to think about and contemplate.... but really, lunch.