…and I Rome from Town to Town: Rome 2025, Part 3

Rome puns! Who doesn’t love ’em? Anyway… by this point in the trip, I had my sea legs under me so I was ready to get out and about. Which was fortunate, because the whole point of the trip was coming up on the agenda. A Caravaggio exhibition is a tricky thing, it turns out. Between the muddy authenticity of some of his signature works and a PR machine that has been working steadily since the artist was first brought to prominence (which is not to say ‘discovered’, merely touted) by Roberto Longhi in the early 20th century, making sure that Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio remains installed amongst the artistic firmament, getting a grip on what exactly is going on with the artist can be tricky. After all, I’m no art historian; I’m a passionate amateur who has the dumb f#*@ luck to be indulging an art education with a so-far-endless series of A+++ field trips. So, ok amateur, what did you get out of your latest expedition?

There’s two ways to look at this, and I tend to prefer the second. The first, for completion’s sake, is that the exhibition is somewhat overblown. The exhibition contains 25 works ascribed to Caravaggio from all over Europe… but 25 is also the number of Caravaggio’s paintings that are permanently on exhibition in Rome. Not the same 25, but still… it is not an exhaustive undertaking. Compare it, for example, to the Donatello exhibition Lisa and I went to in Florence a number of years ago – that one took up two separate museums that worked together to curate the thing. This was four modest rooms. Then there was the thematic break-up of the rooms, which seemed a bit helter skelter. “Making a Name in Rome” seemed to set us on a historical look at his work, but then you had “the sacred and the tragic” for themes and “invigorating the darker shades” to highlight the techniques he is most admired for. All fine, but scattershot. Not that I’m an expert, but I will say that Lisa and I have been around the block enough times that we have actually had long discussions about the curation of some exhibitions we’ve been to. I’ve got some chops, at least. So, yes, there’s a case to be made that museums gonna museum, magnets aren’t going to sell themselves, and maybe this isn’t quite the generation-defining show that they want you to think it is.

The other way of looking at it, though, goes something like this: relax. It’s four rooms full of some truly amazing work. You had to go to Rome to see it. This is not a bad way to spend your time. So yeah, take it easy and enjoy yourself. And the truth is I did enjoy it. Experience-r of field trips or not, I hadn’t seen a lot of these paintings, and certainly not in the context they were in, placed next to each other as they were.

Of particular interest was one of the most iconic “Judiths” we’ve ever seen (although I had seen this one before, who cares?). We’ve talked about this before, but in brief: the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes has been the subject of numerous works of art through the years; given its position in the Bible, it has been “allowed” by most regimes and patrons, but it provides artists a pretty wide-open opportunity. Do you feature the demure wife taking on a burdensome task? Do you minimize the murder as almost besides the point? Or, as some artists have certainly done, do you take this as a chance to depict a woman exerting her power fully in a way they rarely ever get to do? Those are the best ones, including Caravaggio’s. And yes, I even bought the magnet.

The exhibiton happily consumed, I spent the rest of the day wandering my neighborhood which, as we were adjacent to the old Borghese estate, was not a bad place to kill an afternoon. I even made it over to the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, which is fairly modest as far as state-owned art galleries go, as they forsook a dialog between the artists of Europe to instead focus on Italian artists. Totally fine, obviously, and I was in Italy, but if you scratch your memory you’ll probably come up short on a lot of notable Italian artists who participated in, for example, the Impressionist movement. This is not an error of omission. (Ahem.) Not that everything in there was bland or anything, far from it.

Heat, art, and Italian food, not actually that bad a combination really. You will not be surprised to hear, however, that I was quite ready to return home to my bride after all of this, and so I did.