Rome LIves!

The hagenart sklog for 11/11/07, which happens to be Veteran's Day, which I celebrated by reading excerpts from a book about World War II, but did not employ any veteran's themes in the sklog, which I drew while we waited outside the Borghese Museum to go in and view the Bernini sculptures which my uncle had so fervently recommended to me as being superior to anything by Michelangelo.

Well, I couldn't honestly tell who was better than who. The Michelangelo's and the Bernini's and the Donatello's were all amazingly detailed and lifelike, but by the time we went home I'd seen so many other statues that I could hardly bear to look at them. They had halls and halls of them in every museum over there, and after a while they kind of blurred together, good and bad.

I think the statues were like billboards in ancient rome, that they put them up everywhere and most of them were garbage by hacks and people going home from the market or the forum would look at them and sigh and say; "Another goddamn statue - why do they have to do that?" and shake their fists at them and try to get the senate to pass laws against them and the senators all agreed, it was a damn shame, all those statues cluttering the city, you couldn't even see the sky or the trees anymore, and they shook their heads but the head of the sculptors union was a sleaze ball businessman who shook his head and told the senators that the statues were actually helping the city by encouraging citizens to win wars or do well in business to get their own statue made, and disarmed opponents by thoughtfully sketching their heads and telling them how excellent their image would look in marble, overlooking the Via Sacra, and when all else failed asking senators if they wanted to see a small sculpture he was particularly proud of, a little two-dimensional profile of ceasar, and why yes, it was sculptured in gold, and yes, it was in fact a dinari, and yes, he did have a large chest full of such sculptures available - why, senator, are you a supporter of the arts?

I'm actually quite fond of statues, especially big ones, but Italy gave me my fill.