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January 31, 2008
The semester has fully begun...
The semester is fully underway and students have lots of assignments! They had an exam for the intensive portion (5 days a week, longer hours) of their Italian language and culture classes yesterday and today. The ones in digital photography are taking pictures of St. Peter's, the ones in my class are writing about portraiture, and everyone's reading Marshall McLuhan - and three museums this week!
Monday we went to the Vatican Museums - utter overload, of course. I concentrated on the huge sarcophagus set-up in the Pio-Gregoriano collection, trying to prepare them for the Mathews book. The advantage of a big load of real things is that it sometimes helps students to understand two important things. First, that ancient art was not all one-off pieces of creative sculpture, but was often semi-industrial production customers bought off the shelf - in other words, if you see 27 Jonah sarcophagi (and I only exaggerate slightly) you begin to believe what your medievalist professor keeps hammering on, that art is not always about self-expression. Of course, if they actually went to a Cezanne blockbuster and saw dozens of paintings of exactly the same thing they might understand that they've been lied to by the world about the Romantic Artist as Genius of Expression. You don't paint a dozen haystacks and mean anything particularly expressive by them. Second, they come to understand the art historical study of iconography a bit more clearly. Very often when our students see only the tiny selection of images in a textbook they learn to parrot our idea of iconography, but they don't really understand how the profession worked out the patterns. A BIG dose of realia helps there.
Tuesday we went to the Museo Nazionale Romano Palazzo Massimo al Therme (you can click on Flickr and see my pictures from my preview visit last week). Again, we ran through the traditional narrative of Roman sculpture - verism, naturalism, idealism, and back. I was especially pleased with the sudden introduction of the carved iris and pupil in the galleries of the 150s - they saw that novelty clearly! So then I set them free to choose two busts to analyze in terms of patronal intentions. We'll see how that turns out. We also got to run through the Rosso Pompeiano show. They liked the garden room - and then we elevatored it up to the top floor for Livia's garden room! It's hard to do comparison on the hoof, but these two are physically close enough to pull it off, I think.
Wednesday, Nick took the photo class to the Museum of Rome, the Palazzo Braschi, where there is a great exhibition of photos of St. Peter's from 1850 to the present. There are splendid photos - everything from very early work to stereo cards (three set up with viewers!) to things taken last year. More than that, though, the photos make a great starting point for a course whose secondary concentration is how photography is used to construct a sense of identity and a sense of place. I tagged along just to look!
Today, we're using the tickets from the Pal. Massimo to get into the Palazzo Altemps. The tickets are good for 3 days for a couple of buildings in the city, and since we already have them I added an optional come-along-if-you-want-to session. I know I have 3 takers already!
Posted by CrankyProfessor at January 31, 2008 9:32 AM