Wrestling Down Beauty (Creative Writing Assignment #5)

Like our other senses, our perception of beauty is dynamic. It sways this way and that in the breeze of our current environment. To a prisoner confined to a dank dungeon cell, the crudest image of a beached sailboat might be enough to summon an intense aesthetic experience. While to the denizen of the Louvre, even a masterpiece of painting might only be able to garner a momentary glance. Who has not entered an art museum bearing bountiful enthusiasm, studied the first few rooms carefully, trying to inhale through the eye every image, every angle, but plowed through the last rooms with only a superficial and weary glance to everything that is neither exploding from its frame, depicting the undepictable, or surrounded by a furious crowd of photobandits? Seeing one beautiful image demands that we experience something of even greater beauty, something that will cause all our thoughts to be for a second completely terminated. The bar is always being raised.

This makes identifying the most beautiful works of art in Rome particularly difficult. By the time that I had trudged to the Vatican, I had visually devoured nearly two thousand years of genius. My stomach for art was understandingly displeased. In fact I had nearly lost my appetite. It would take a visionary like Bernini to give me the kind of aesthetic meal that I had grown to crave. The bar is raised again. Yet if I must create a list of the most beautiful art works in Rome, I will at least do it in retrospect. I challenge anyone to return to the David, stand in front of that lone figure, who is capable of handing you his mental state in a glance, and say that Bernini dwells on a higher level of artistic heaven. Here then, in retrospect, I present to you the artworks in Rome that I have at one point found most beautiful.

You step forward believing that you are entering a caliginous, cavernous space. A dream of pagan gloom received by dark Caligula. You are inhaled through the door. Engulfed with the other tourists. Then you see it, the shaft of light that creates a glowing ellipse and casts everything else around it in shadows. Your eyes follow this road, this portal, upwards through the lofty places where the smoke from sacrifices once swirled. Your body cannot follow your eyes as they exit the oculus and escape the Pantheon for the cityscape of Rome and the furiously blue sky above.

His name was unfamiliar. Later I would wonder at how many other artists might be lost to me, the victims of the whims of history and fashion. I had no expectations when I entered the room. For a time I thought little because I forgot that the material that I was absently staring at was marble. That the flowing clothe was made of a stone formed from the shells of microscopic ocean creatures. Never had I known that in this crude material I could see cultivated a soft thigh, a mane of dense hair, coarse bark, a supple gown that is carried in the breeze. The figures seemed to have grown by some mysterious chain of chemical reactions. Any process besides the series of minuscule explosions that constitute the work of the chisel and hammer.

In the mountains, this is where the duomo must have been born. Here it seems as if the soaring green marble facade might have sprouted from between boulders. Here where you are always either ascending or descending. This is the only appropriate place for a duomo, where it can soar into the air and compete with the surrounding peaks. The Duomo of Siena, like the statues of Bernini, give the feel of a natural process. When one looks at the ornate textures, the intricate carvings that like fractals should be infinite in their detail, one feels the sense that these have grown out of the marble, that even now forces inside the building a stretching new grooves into the living surface.

As my toiletries, sufficient for five weeks, begin to feel sadly empty, I try to reflect upon what I have seen. Try to journey back and recognize the moment upon which the rest of my aesthetic experience could be balanced. Was it the ancient pantheon, father of domes, forger of that famous blade of ethereal light? The overwhelming and inhuman majesty of the Sistine Chapel, a place where time runs differently, where an hour seems to pass in a minute? No, for me, the beauty of Rome’s artwork finds its locus at a group of far more inconspicuous figures which stand as vigilant sentinels on the Pilgrim’s roads of the city. They have seen nearly all of the city’s history from the secret eye that some say exists on their pyramidion. They have fallen to ruin, they have been resurrected in the glory of scaffolding, hemp rope, and sweaty bodies in labor. They are so simple that I can imagine a world in which I might have formed the idea of them in my mind. But they symbolize for me what the Romans do best. They are stolen, they are made better, they are mixed with all the rest of the chaos to create something that structures a city. Something that supports the dizzying image that is at once Rome and the World. They are a blank slate that has been interpreted by generation after generation of Romans. They are the obelisks.