The Bartlett Yard Mural Fest is tomorrow. I’m going to paint this.
This is actually a reworking of an older outline. It’s pretty cool, I think. I’m going to add some bits and bobs to the T, but otherwise it’s good to go.
I’ve been using Google Keep recently to track to-dos and URLs I want to revisit across devices. It works pretty well.
Anyway, some of the things I’ve collected might be of interest to people other than just me, so I thought it might be cool to share some of them.
I’ve been reading Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History, so these are all related to that. Future editions of this, if there are any, will probably be more varied.
There are no easy illustrations in the kindle version of this book, so I’m constantly looking things up to get some context. Here’s a small selection of the works and artists I’ve checked out after being mentioned in the book.
Hughes talks about this painting in detail because of the symbolic details and Goethe’s stature in Rome at the time.
A very influential piece of antiquity.
More on the Chiswick House and Gardens
He painted a lot of portraits of Brits in Rome on their Grand Tours and is less well known than he should be because of it. He’s also pretty good.
This guy did a phenomenal altar in Santa Maria del Popolo (top photo), so he’s the unluckiest painter in Rome— Santa Maria del Popolo being much more famous for the $500,000,000 worth of Caravaggio hanging on the walls.
Hughes name checks this painting specifically when talking about Poussin.
Went from being compared to Michelangelo and Raphael to obscurity. Also a weird dude. Hughes describes him like this:
…his personal life was disastrous, a swamp of neuroses. Reni had the misfortune to be a gambling addict, always badly in debt, and turning out masses of hackwork to stay afloat. It has been surmised, no doubt rightly, that his gambling was inspired by masochism— losing was a form of self-flagellation for the sing of being alive. [...] At the same time, he was socially inept, agonizingly aware of his poor education (which hampered him as a history painter and made him hopelessly awkward with sophisticates and scholars) and an extreme close-case. It was commonly assumed that he lived and died a virgin. He was not only a daily churchgoer but morbidly superstitious. Women terrified him— he suspected them all of being witches. a suspicion they could only allay if they showed themselves to be the Virgin Mary, a hard thing to prove— and he could not bear it if anyone except his own mother touched his laundry.
Hughes, Robert. ‘Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History’ Vintage 30 Oct. 2012
I was already very familiar with Piranesi’s Vedute di Roma, etc. I’ve bid on a couple over the years and will eventually own one or two.
I was unfamiliar with these dark, imaginary prisons. They’re pretty crazy. I was surprised to see how influential these imaginary spaces were in the design of real prisons and other real world spaces.
