Gearing Up for Rome

I’ve got a folder on my Chrome Toolbar just for Rome, where I’ve saved potentially useful sites, from art-filled villas and archeological sites to Vespa tours and food halls. These bookmarks are my gateway to inspiring, up to date information – they have replaced the guidebooks of my youth. A few of my favorite Rome-centric blogs; An American in Rome,  Revealed Rome, and Katie Parla, three adventurous women who love pasta and exploration.Spent a chunk of the weekend sorting through my desktop folders of Rome research, creating three documents that listed museums, churches, and monuments with their addresses, open days and times, websites, and one or two salient facts about each venue. I alphabetized each list and combined it into one massive document.  It’s my Theory of Everything Alla Romana, and I’ll use it to create my own Google map of the city, and plan a day-by-day itinerary. At some point, I’ll make a separate list of restaurants, food halls, coffee bars, and pastry shops and put them on my Google Map too.

I’ll paste it into an email and send it to myself.  It’s useful to find what’s nearby when a museum or restaurant is unexpectedly closed (I’m looking at you, Nabokov House Museum) or a post-it note on the ticket kiosk says ‘tour groups only’. Yeah, that’s happened too. I’ll paste the addresses in Google maps to guide me on foot, or when Uber needs me to plug in the destination. Having that list always on hand via my iPhone is by far the most helpful thing I’ve done for the last two trips.

I pulled up the St Petersburg calendar and saw that I color-coded it (museums, churches monuments and places to eat) and that was a help. I have the everyday total trip calendar and the week-by-week in depth ones set up, but all I had plugged in were the flights, and the three accommodations; two apartment rentals and a hotel.

Back to planning for Rome, I’ve plugged in the first ten days and started on reservations. Last week I tried to purchase the mandatory tickets to enter the Borghese Gallery Tuesday, March 7 (weekends and Fridays will be slammed, Mondays it’s closed.) The online calendar didn’t go past February 27. Odd, I thought. Expecting nothing, I sent an email to customer service. They responded with this;
We open reservation for march at the and of february
Servizio prenotazioni
Somehow I doubted it.  Sure enough, I checked back today and was able to book two tickets to the Borghese today through http://www.tosc.it. I had to sneak in through the Italian language site, as the English translated one blocked the calendar. Then I had to create a username and password, and it took more than one try. Persistence paid off and I’ve got my two tickets for March 7 at 9 am.

My only other visit to the Borghese was in 2004, and what I remember most vividly is Bernini’s sculpture of Apollo and Daphne. A docent told me that when they cleaned the statue, they discovered that the leaves growing from Daphne’s fingers made a pure, bell-like sound when tapped, like a crystal glass. It’s a miracle made of marble. Two hours, which is all you are allowed per visit, won’t be nearly enough. 

Free Admission for All Isabellas. Day Five, Boston

The Isabella Stewart Gardner museum is closed on Tuesday, which made the decision to go today easy. It’s my last chance to visit before I leave Wednesday morning.
Not snowing but the temperature is stuck in the single digits. Nevertheless, after four days of bad coffee, I went in search of quality espresso. It wasn’t too bad at first, as long as no skin was exposed, but after a block I couldn’t feel my face, and the two fingers exposed to tap my iPhone were going numb. I couldn’t find the local joint, Pavement Coffee – must’ve walked right by it looking at my iPhone instead of around – but I found a Starbucks. The nice barista gave me his highest rec for a local place called the Wired Puppy, and I decided to try for that tomorrow.
Uber drove me from Starbucks to the ISG museum, the Venetian-ish villa Isabella built for herself in Boston’s lowland marshes. I heard the canary that lives in the visitor’s library chirping all the way to the ticket desk. The library was bright with its floor to ceiling windows, sunlight bouncing off the snow, and hanging lamps with cherry red shades.
Light dimmed like an eclipse as I walked through the short stone alley into the main building. The mood shifted with the light and the way the eye naturally gravitated to the central courtyard’s palm trees, fountain, and medusa mosaic. The sound of water must have been the soundtrack during Isabella’s residency too.
First I took a detour to the right, and gazed at the 12 foot wide, tour-de-force by Sargent, El Jaleo.  
Next I sat on one of the stone benches beside the courtyard garden and drew a pistachio orchid, a simple act that focused and calmed me.Drawing is my gateway into the quiet, languid pace of this venue. Once the drawing is done, I’m ready to enter the space she invented to house her collection of paintings and object d’art, her storehouse of memories.
I drifted through the rooms and corridors and listened to everything the audio-guide had to offer me. I particularity loved a director’s insight into the prevalence of the female here – portraits of queens and courtesans, virgins and saints, matrons and musicians, goddesses and heiresses.

Bloody Mary Tudor

Virgin Mary and her posse of lady saints

The founder of the visual feast

It’s a veritable citadel of the feminine.

I broke for lunch at Cafe G; two bowls of soup. I loved the window view, but it was freaking cold. 

Back in Isabelle’s world, I thought these devotional works, on a smaller scale, were potentially interesting shapes for metal boxes.

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I found an actual reliquary on the third floor in a glass front cabinet. Thrilling.On my previous visit, I saw the illuminated manuscripts that are also an inspiration for my own reliquaries.

Before I left I made time to sit quietly before a startlingly contemporary portrait of Christ, and just beyond it, Titian’s sensual masterpiece, Europa.

Europa is underlined by a swath of white silk taken from a gown designed for her by Worth in Paris. 

This juxtaposition of the sensual and the spiritual seemed to sum up the competing forces that drove Isabella, her thirst for both kinds of satisfactions. Her character rejoiced in contradictions and we are the fortunate beneficiaries of it.

For some reason, lots of people called me today. My message ringtone kept firing off, and, even though it was quiet and muffled by my pocket, I was embarrassed to be that person. Next time, I’m hitting airplane mode when I cross the museum threshold.

Back at the hotel, my room was cold. I’d set it for 70 degrees but the thermostat showed 62. Hated to complain but when the night guy dropped off bottled water I asked about it. “Off in all the rooms,” he said cheerfully. “They called a guy. He’s going to reset it. Should be good soon. Get a blanket.” I did and it was.

Can hardly believe tomorrow is my last day. My plan is hit the Wired Puppy then MFA all day, baby. I have that double pull – wishing I could stay another week and longing for home.

Oooh...Shiny! Boston, Day Four

One of the perks of a room on the ninth floor: the view over the city at dawn was lovely.

Breakfast: sustaining oatmeal, doctored with cinnamon, maple syrup, raisins, and bananas, and more brutally bitter espresso. I need get to  The Wired Puppy or even Starbucks.
Summoned Uber,  and rolled back to the MFA. Not nearly done with it.
Started through the European painting rooms and right away was transfixed by a Greco portrait of a young monk, Fray Hortensio Felix Paravicino. I started sketching his sensitive, expressive face…and there went the morning. I tried to keep moving forward – so many masterworks to see – but could not resist.

More happy than productive, I sketched the morning away. An excellent use of my time.

I didn’t capture what I was after, the marvelous ambiguity of an expression both tender and haughty, aesthetic and sensual, but I was rewarded with the opportunity to look closely for as long as I wanted to.

Moving along, I talked with a woman behind a little pushcart with implements of metal work; hammers, chasing tools, wooden dapping form, a pot of tar for repouseé. She was parked in front of a pyramid of silver pieces mounted on the wall and was explaining various silversmithing techniques. As we spoke, I realized that over the last year I’ve become familiar with that vocabulary. It’s one thing to have an intellectual grasp of the words,  it’s another to understand planishing* from muscle memory.
Somewhere at the crossroads of several rooms, I found this display of glass vases in rows. It was brilliantly lit and the perfect lure for a painter – all bouncing sheen and ricocheting shimmer. Oooh, shiny. Now this would be fun to paint. Famous last words.

Returned to the incomparable painting Automedon with the Horses of Achilles by Henri Regnault and soaked it in. It’s not so much I dislike all art made after 1800, aka ‘modern art’, it’s that it killed this – it made skill and technique and purpose and narrative unfashionable, obsolete and unwelcome. That’s what makes me cranky. But not a hater! That screen modeled on a grater is terrific fun, it’s just not this.

Saw a few things I made note of with my trusty iPhone camera:
Naughty Bread: For some reason, when artists paint bread they appear to have other things than yeast rising on their minds. Seriously, did Luis Meléndez think rendering this in dough would give him plausible deniability?Condiment holder: I inherited one of these, only nicer. It was passed down from my grandmother Irene Lake. Seeing something you cherish presented as a treasure in a museum is a thrill. Weathervanes: I’m planning to make one for the screen porch. A spaniel, of course. These will help get me going.St Luke Drawing the Virgin: Because he’s the painter’s patron saint, yo. And the curator on the audio guide speculated it was a self-portrait of the artist Rogier van der Weyden because of the care and detail with which the sketch beneath the head of the saint was done.
I ate lunch at the fancy restaurant, Bravo. It was pricey but decent.
I was about finished for the day and hastening past the impressionists when I saw this painting of a man toweling off after his bath.

Out came my pencil and the next thing I knew, the museum was closing. Ubered back and spent some time trying to find an easy way to upload photos (use the damn cable) and searching for information about Mrs. Chase.

On another, much cheerier subject, let us now praise modern technology. I’ve never had much luck with binoculars (they bump against my lenses) and magnifying glasses are not much use in museums when you are supposed to stay at least 12 inches away. But I can take a photo with my iPhone, enlarge it, and see details clearly. This was a small painting (perhaps 5-7”) at the Isabella Stewart Gardner in an obscure corner wall in dim light. I could barely make out the subject. I tapped my  Camera+ app, took a photo, cropped and enlarged it and OMG. There it was! Buried treasure, lifted into the light. Thank you, Steve Jobs.
And when you ask a kind passerby to take your photo and the backlight obliterates you? Filters are fun too.

I had this bright idea

 

*Planishing (from the Latin planus, “flat”) is a metalworking technique that involves finishing the surface by finely shaping and smoothing sheet metal.

 

Snow Day - MFA, Day Three

Woke to cottony skies and promises of a blizzard. Deciding that fortune favors the bold, I called Uber and set off. Streets were still clear, and by 10 am I was trotting up the swept and salted steps of the MFA.
I usually avoid large museums on the weekend when they’re the most crowded but today I had the MFA nearly all to myself. I began in the Asian rooms. My interest in all things oriental has broadened and deepened with the engagement of my son to Julia Liu, and I found myself paying close attention to the distinction between objects from China, Japan, Tibet and Laos. The calm and dignity of the Buddha, especially the bodhisattvas, has appealed to me since my hippie youth. I want mercy more than justice, Give me compassion, every time.
And there was this casually seated fellow with that glint of amusement in his expression. A moment seated before him calmed my mind.

This stone tomb gave me some ideas for another box.

If only my skill set allowed my production to keep up with my ideas. Alas, t’was ever thus, even my paintings.
I got lost looking for coffee and found myself in the ‘modern’ rooms. Okay, I appreciate the cleverness of this screen, even more so the play of shadows through the piercings. And this entrance door to the France Stark UH-OH exhibit attracts and repels.
Sure, it tickles me – pure, gleeful naughtiness- but it dismays me too, Is this what women have to do to have an exhibition in a museum and attract the attention of patrons?
Whatever.
I skipped breakfast and went the atrium for brunch. Ended up with a disappointingly stingy bowl of mussels that tasted weirdly astringent.  Like the old Woody Allen joke; “Two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of ’em says, “Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.” The other one says, “Yeah, I know; and such small portions.””
Snow was falling now. Not fat swirling flakes, but tiny particles, steady and dense, like confectioner’s sugar shaken from a sieve. Hypnotic to my southern eyes.
Afterwards I took another pass through the exhibition that lured me here, William Merritt Chase. The breadth of his collection of textiles and exotic props speaks to my own love of tactile elements. His paintings and pastels of his family life recall the painter Carl Larsen, a favorite of mine, and warms me up to him. I’m fascinated by his paintings of his studio. His position as an educator of painters, particularly female students, inclines me toward him. There’s an undercurrent of worry as I examine the parade of idyllic innocence and beauty – did he abuse the vulnerability of his students, his wife and her sisters, his daughters? My trust in surface respectability has been shaved down to near transparency. I’ll do a little Googling. It doesn’t count as stalking if he’s dead, right? And I want to know what became of the pretty girl he married and painted ever after.*
By 2:30 the snow was still relentlessly falling and the streets mimicked Childe Hassam’s famous work. Only bluer. With cars.

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Called Uber and behold a driver was dropping off passenger outside the door. Bam! My Somalian driver got me back to the hotel going five miles an hour, without incident. The sidewalk was like a bowl of slushy snow soup. Proof:

*Sad to say, there are details about his private life they fail to mention in the hagiographic audio tour. I did a bit of scouting on the internet for more biographical information. My source is not TMZ, it’s from an article published by the Smithsonian.

“During their courtship, Alice, by then 20, became pregnant, and she and Chase, who was 37, were married in February of 1887. Their first child, a girl, was born the next day. It was obvious that Chase had put off marrying his love until the last moment.”

“Gallati, the curator of the current Chase exhibition, believes that he was caught in a dilemma. On the one hand, a wife and child “conflicted with the public image of cosmopolitan sophistication that he was so industriously constructing for himself.” Yet, a refusal to marry the mother of his child would cause a scandal and harm “his reputation and therefore his prospects for professional success.” Alice, a beguiling beauty, would become his most important model.”

Chase was 37, Alice was 20. Well, that explains why his wife looks like a child in her portraits. She was barely adult.  How very Rubensesque of him.** He knew her family since she was 13. He married her the day before their first child was born. The day before. Let that sink in.  I searched for what became of her, that pretty girl he painted and knocked up so very often. Not much on the internet – she survived eight births, don’t know how many pregnancies. He summered in Europe. I need to find an unbiased biography. But, you know, it’s what’s missing from his work, that stream of domestic bliss and erotic beauty. The dark side, the struggle.  His desire for fame, his profligate spending, his struggle for money and social position, his fall from favor as patrons’ tastes changed, none of that is visible.

He died of cirrhosis of the liver at 66. She vanishes from the record.

**Hélène Fourment married Rubens when she was 16 years old and he was aged 53.

MFA, Day Two, Part Two

PART TWO
After lunch, I threw myself into the arms of W. M. Chase. The first room was multiple views of his studio, filled with luxury textiles, object d’art, the various exotica he used for props, and the women he liked to paint. His self-portrait – with rumpled hair, and a truly luxuriant mustache – has a glowing saffron background and a nonchalant dash of red.

Whistler befriended Chase, but their association ended after Chase’s’s portrait of him. Like Velasquez’s of Innocent X , it was apparently troppo vero.

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Chase’s wife, daughters and female students often posed for him. The painting of his daughters playing ringtoss compares unfavorably to Sargents’s brooding The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, but hey, the Indian yellows and phthalo blues in Chase’s portrait of Dora Wheeler are the definition of lush, and his nudes are as tempting as Bourgereau’s.This exhibition has many paintings of his studio, his students and his family, and his focus on the pleasures of daily life endeared him to me.

Around 4pm it was time to sit and pulled out my sketchbook. I plonked myself on the comfortable couch in front of Washington and sketched the answer to one of the first jokes I ever heard (What color was George Washington’s white horse?). Fell into drawing for, it turned out, over an hour. When a voice spoke over my shoulder I jumped. It was the guard going off his shift, wanting to see what I’d been doing. He approved. I was not so happy.Upstairs to cruise the Sargents. I fervently hope his life gave him as much happiness as his work has given me. Paused in front of a oil study of a model he used for multiple works in Boston. Stood and sketched quickly. This time, I was happier.

Now it was 6pm and I was hungry. Thought I’d have dinner in the atrium. Walked through the doors and into music blasting at ear bleed levels – Mustang Sally, Lady Marmelade, 24K Magic. What the what? It was first Friday and a dance party for patrons, mostly middle-aged and older, was in full swing. Booty’s were primly shaking and uncoordinated white people awkwardly danced. I fled. I was going to take my chances on the mean streets when a docent assured me the museum’s upscale restaurant was out of earshot.

All righty. Seated by the elegant hostess who wore discreet black sequins, wide leg velvet cargo pants, and a marvelous slouch chapeau. I ordered the seared duck, only later aware of the irony of this choice in a museum that was featuring a retrospective of the illustrator of Make Way For Duckings. It was…chewy, but so is jerky and I was hungry.

No difficulty summoning an Uber. Back in the hotel, I watched the weather channel and fell asleep wondering whether a blizzard in Boston is anything like what Laura Ingalls Wilder described.

MFA - Boston, Day Two

Boston was frosted with snow while I slept.

Breakfast at the hotel; oatmeal, much improved with cinnamon, and a decent latte even though served in a glass. Mournful emo music, which I muted with my earbuds and my playlist for Prague, chiefly Mozart.
Off to the Museum of Fine Art. Waved my member card and swanned right on in. The Nubian gold exhibit was located right across from coat check, so after a brief orientation moment in the rotunda I examined what this exhibit had to offer. Onward to undertake my methodical survey of the museum’s holdings, after a brief consult with a volunteer about my interest in reliquaries and metal boxes, and a moment to swoon over sketches by Sargent like this one.The docent recommended the Kunstcamera, a room for small treasures. Paydirt! This marvel of a 17C miniature portrait on copper reminded me why I’m doing oil paintings for my metal boxes on copper. Proven longevity.

Elaborate spoons, including this one with an enamel bowl with the image of a sly fox preaching to a flock of credulous geese. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, eh?

Along with multiple amber boxes and the adventures of Hercules carved in a wooden frame, there’s a pair of elaborately decorated Sicilian cabinets with sides paved with cabochons.I’ll be back to soak in more of this room.

Onward. This striking portrait deliberately evokes  17C portrait gestures.
The Americana wing includes recreations of period rooms. This couple cracked me up.

Trying to decide whether to hit Costco or take a nap

I watched a series of short videos on carving and gilding that made me itch to try both. Trying to find my way back to the atrium for lunch, I came across a room of objects from an Egyptian tomb It was half an hour before I could move on. Excellent wall photos with accompanying text told the compelling story of a couple who were confidently prepared for their afterlife. Photos of the pre-restoration heap of detritus left by grave robbers contrasted with the carefully pieced together figures. The name was the kicker. “A middle Kingdom official named Djehutynakht (pronounced Ja-hooty-knocked )”. Loved this feisty trio of ladies. 
It took me until nearly 2pm to tear myself away, but I finally sat down to a decent lunch of cod cakes because—Boston. A brief respite, then I forged on to see more. Yeah, I’m talking about you, George Washington.

 

To be continued…

Isabella - Boston, Day One

Easy breezy ride to the airport. Booked an aisle seat on a three seat row, ended up the only one on my row. Urbered into the city and given a complimentary upgrade to a suite upon check in.

It’s got bags of charm, a feeling of intimacy and those quirks I prize about boutique hotels, worth putting up with minimal outlets, no place to put your toiletries in the bathroom, and folding crane bedside lamps with enough lumens to perform surgery.

Ubered straight to the ISG. On impulse turned left into the artist in residence gig. Visitors were encouraged to draw on a large board, reminding me of Emily’s Collabadoodle days. The artist, Maurizio Cannavacciulo, handed me a print ‘for inspiration’ that resembled a cross between Gauguin islander children and a Japanese woodblock. Adored the pencil he gave me, which made a gorgeous black; not having an eraser, not so much. The artist was a skinny, bald gnome of an elderly Italian. “Do what you like, decapitate them,” he chortled. Oh, artists. Urk. No. Still, had an unexpected deeply pleasurable quarter of an hour, focused on hand/eye.

Walked into the heart of Fenway Court, just as the dusk deepened to violet.

Such a gorgeous, haunting time of day.
The lingering impressions were still in the details. Found my gilt-over-iron pair of bears, just as marvelous as I remembered.

A unicorn battling a dragon carved into a stone mantle.

This pair of Isabella’s purple silk shoes, narrow as blade, small enough for a grammar school child.

Given my pleasure in romance novels, this book cover.

This little sketch below the glorious Europa.

Like music that makes you want to dance, this makes me want to draw and etch.

Loved watching the light shift, examining the architectural fragments and speculating on the why of their juxtaposition. Fell in love all over again with the panels of drawings and the surprises of scale. And all those virgins holding their doomed children. I wonder if she found consolation in their sacrifice that echoed her own loss.

Fenway court itself breathes, still alive. Some of the groupings, especially the cases of yellowed, faded letters under glass, feel moldering and static. Without a readable text to consult, like the pressed rose from Browning’s funeral bier they are brittle memento mori.

Went room by room and up floor by floor until 5pm, then my eyes and energy gave out.

Collapsed into a chair in Café G and ripped through the tasting menu – tiny albeit delicious morsels. By then my feet ached even sitting down and my eyes felt boiled. Long day. Urbered back crawled into bed, typed this up and conked out.