It is said that when John Glenn, the first American in space, flew past Italy, he checked his wallet to make sure it was still there. (Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, would probably have done the same, had he been sober; Valentina Treshkova, the first woman in space, might well have done so in between her bouts of hysterics and throwing up.) It is a cheap joke, of course – John Glenn would not have been carrying a wallet – for, after all, I have been to Italy eight times (including three times to Rome and once to Sicily) and have never had a wallet, or anything else, stolen.
Still. Like most cheap jokes, there is an element of truth in it – I mean, in addition to Gagarin being drunk and Treshkova in tears. We found that out the hard way, when I was in Rome with my parents, sister and brother-in-law.
On the morning of our third day in Rome, my mom put quite a lot of cash in the purse to go shopping. Unfortunately for her, and fortunately for some Roman purse-snatcher,* my mom did not find anything to her liking. We went for a walk, and something not so funny happened on the way to the Forum: in the literally two minutes that my Mom was looking at the inside of the Curia in the Foro Romano, someone helped him or herself to my mother's purse and glasses. Back to the apartment; cancelled the credit cards; filed a police report … and, to my parents' enormous credit, we were back in the city being tourists within a couple of hours. Naturally they were both very upset, but they put their happy faces on and enjoyed the rest of the trip.
* “Roman” in the sense of someone in Rome. Roman friends of ours insisted that it was not the Italians but some undefined foreigners who are responsible for the crime. But then they would, wouldn't they.
What is there left to say about Rome that has not been said a million times over the past two millennia?
And can one improve on Byron or Fellini?
Elsewhere I have lamented the “anecdotisation” of experience, and pointedly refused to describe those moments in my life that had to be lived through to be really understood. There have not been many, to be sure, but each time I sit down to write something about a place or an emotion or a person, I have to wonder if I am turning a moment of personal experience into an amusing anecdote for its own sake, and whether in doing so, I am somehow losing the spirit of the moment. But then, if one starts with the premise that pretty much all that needed to be said about Rome has already been said, and better, by others, what is left but the personal and the anecdote?
What is worse, I don't have any amusing anecdotes to impart. Aside from the stolen purse, the rest of the trip was fairly calm and uneventful. We managed to hit some of the major sites without too many problems; we avoided the highway banditry of Italian touristaurants by carefully following tourist guidebooks (there's irony for you), and thus ate well and relatively cheaply; and though I had excellent tiramisú, I still have not found what I could describe definitively as the best I have had.
I am left with three observations.
Galleria dell'Accademia is where, in Florence, the David is kept, as well as several incomplete works by Michelangelo. I had seen the replica of David in the main Piazza of Florence before; even so, I was unprepared for the real thing. Vasari, the great art critic, has said that to see David is to face perfection; one might as well give up on all the rest. I should not go that far, for Michelangelo's other works, Pieta and Moses, are nothing to shake a stick at. And yet, there is something haunting, deeply striking, about David. As to its technical perfection there can be no doubt – but there have been many technically proficient artists whose work have not lasted even past their own lifetimes; indeed, as Clive James has observed, technical proficiency is probably the one thing that genius and mediocrity have in common.
Michelangelo once said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” There are four unfinished examples of his work in the Accademia and, looking at those and David at the same time, you suddenly realise what he meant.
Much has been written about the sense of proportion in David's construction. Indeed, right beside David, there is a version of Pieta that, in its absence of proportion, immediately underlines the magnificence of David … and also that this other Pieta could not possibly have been the work of Michelangelo. What is striking about the proportionality of David is not so much that the hands and the feet and so on are proportionate to one another – that would be easy to get – but that, knowing that his 5 meter statue would be put on a pedestal, Michelangelo structured his David to seem proportionate from below: If looked at straight ahead, the head is disproportionately large; from below, it all looks harmonious.
And the head … we have all seen pictures of the furrowed brows, the intense look, the turned head … the sling slung over his shoulder and the rocks in his languid hands … now, this is the essence of genius. He captures a moment; a moment in movement; a moment of emotion. Standing in front of the statue, walking around it, your eyes are transfixed by that look in the eyes of the marble statue. My mom asked a question that, at the time, seemed strange to me, but upon reflection, hits the bull's eye in respect of Michelangelo's strength and artistry. She asked, “so who was he?” I asked her, “you mean, David?” She replied, “No, I mean him.” The determined youth with the furrowed brows; him. That five meter block of carved and chiseled marble was almost real, almost alive; it holds within it, and on its skin, the expression of a real young man who modelled for Michelangelo. Who was he? Who knows? And yet, like Mona Lisa's smile, those brows and those eyes convey across the centuries an emotion as raw and as immediate as if the young man were right in front of you, glaring, determined, impetuous.
The Vatican houses two of Michelangelo's other masterpieces, the Sistine Chapel and the Pieta. The Sistine experience is one of those moments that defy description; in fact, I think all art commentary and all movies about the famous ceiling should be banned. (There is, in the awful movie The Agony and the Ecstasy, a particularly odious scene where Michelangelo, played by Charlton Heston – the marbles in the quarry he was working in had more character than he did – sees the “creation” scene in the moveme nt of the clouds. I choked and had to stop the movie for a few minutes to regain my breath. Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II was excellent, though. I mean, a pope in full military armour – how could you go wrong?)
The Pieta sits behind bullet-proof glass in St. Peter's Basilica. I am not a big fan of St. Peter's. I find the “mine is bigger than yours” lines in the middle aisle (“Notre Dame of Paris comes to here, while St. John's of New York only manages to be half as long as St. Peter's”) unseemly and faintly grotesque. The fine bronze Baldacchino might well have impressed me if I did not know that the bronze to make it was stripped off the roof of the Pantheon, in my view the finest building in Rome and among the finest I have ever see. And then there is marble to the right of us, marble to the left of us, marble in front of us; into that valley of death rode – ahem, sorry, got carried away. That's the problem: the architect got carried away. Almost everything in St. Peter's is too much; not as much of a too much as the Gésu or the St. Ignatius Loyola churches – that would be even too much of a too much – but still, too much. Almost, for there is the Pieta, which is just perfect.
And I mean perfect not just in a technical or an artistic sense. Here is where I am not certain Vasari had it right. Because while David packs a big wallop of artistic and emotional impact, the Pieta has all of that, and more. For one thing, it is on a human scale; for another, both in composition and in construction, the Pieta is far more fluid than the David. If one observes a moment – strong, though it may be, but still a moment – in David, in the Pieta there is a whole drama that is unfolding in the folds of Mary's robes and the falling arms and legs of the dead Jesus. The Pieta is behind bullet-proof glass because it has been attacked several times. Attacked. A statue. Unthinkable, in the abstract. But then, stand before it for any length of time, and the thing overwhelms you. More than all of the blood and torture in Mel Gibson's Passion; more than all twisted crucifixes; more than all the Sunday morning sermons of the agonies of Christ: this piece of inert marble moves you; makes you tremble with pity, and then with rage; and across four hundred years, shakes you to your foundations. Even for a rationalist like me, the Pieta is powerful propaganda; good then, that it is hidden away, behind bullet-proof glass, in a corner of a an all-too phallocentric church in Rome.
The Moses is not, at least in my view, one of Michaelangelo's best works. It is impressive, to be sure. But, I confess, seeing it left me unmoved. Certainly my lack of reaction was not because of its history. The Moses was meant to be part of a far larger group of statues made for the tomb of Julius II, the warrior pope (who had also commissioned the Sistine Chapel). But when Michelangelo and Julius were not fighting over money, they had artistic difficulties, and this battle between the stubborn artist and the pope-in-armor went on for a decade – until the good pope died. And then there was no money; and Michelangelo was in one of his funks; and there were other priorities … well, in the end, even though Michelangelo lived on to be 80, he did not finish a lot of the statues in the group (and three of these ended up in the Accademia, one in the Louvre). The only one that was finished was the Moses, which ended up adorning the tomb of Julius, now dead for thirty years. (The smell must have awful ….)
The interesting thing about the statue is that Moses appears to have two horns. I actually do not know Michelangelo's reasons for the horns, but there are two intriguing precedents, neither of which, I am certain, Michelangelo knew of, which makes the whole thing even more interesting. The first is this: coins struck under the rule of Alexander also show him with horns – in one set they are highly stylised, but in another, they are clearly ram's horns. What does this mean? Not clear. Even more fascinating is the only extant image of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire. It is indistinct, battered by sandstorms and rain and wind and the hammer of the invader over 2,500 years. And yet, unmistakable: his crown is resting on two horns on his head. What could this possibly mean?
And the most spooky thing of all: Machiavelli, whose tomb is practically next to that of Michelangelo's in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, noted that the two greatest law givers in human history were Moses and … Cyrus of Persia. Did the horns symbolise anything? How could Michelangelo have known of Cyrus's horns? Did he know of Alexander's? Are we in Dan Brown territory?
Or is there some other, totally benign, explanation?
After Rome, I went back to the English castle at which I taught international trade law last year. The programme was slightly different this year; but the students, much like last year, were bright, articulate, curious and motivated. It is a strange thing, to be teaching first-year law students nearly twenty years after I myself first went to law school. It is a humbling experience to come across students already so accomplished; it is exhilarating to be challenged by their idealism; and their optimism is not only refreshing but positively infectious. It is a hokey thing to say, perhaps, but at the end of every class and every course, I become slightly more optimistic about the future of my profession, but also of the world we live in. If a refurbished Tudor Castle in the bucolic East Sussex country were a microcosm of our troubled world, we should have nothing to worry about. I will banish any contrary thoughts from my mind, at least for the next few months.