Art Week

At the University of Mary we are blessed to have a president with so many connections. One of them is a French woman named Pascaline who studied and worked at the Louvre in Paris. She now teaches the Art of Rome and Paris for the UMary students studying in Rome. She is incredibly smart and clearly loves the class a lot. One of the most impressive things to me was Pascaline's ability to synthesize art, history, and theology, all while making it accessible and interesting to us. She says that her goal is to help us to really see the art; she wants us to know what a piece is, what the goal of it is, when it was made, what it was influenced by, etc. Remarkably, one week later, we were in the early stages of being able to do all these things.

A brief note about how the class works. Because she lives in Paris, Pascaline is not able to teach on a regular schedule. The solution to this is to have three weeks that are completely dedicated to the art class. Our first week of class was one of those weeks. It was absolutely crazy (we were usually doing class related stuff for 7-9 hours a day) and incredibly interesting. I thought going into it that it would be one of the most interesting classes I have taken because I know so little about art, and I was very right. I took more notes in one week for that class than I do in entire semesters for other classes, and every bit of it was fascinating.

The general structure for the class is to trace art historically from Antiquity (Greeks and Romans), to Early Christian/Byzantine, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, etc. Each unit receives about a day in the class and a day-and-a-half or two days in the city. In the city, Pascaline shows us ruins, museums, etc. and has us work individually or in groups to work out what an old building looked like or describe a fresco/mosaic/statue. This was incredibly difficult and awkward at first, but became somewhat more natural by the end of the week. Just this past weekend I was in Ravenna, Italy (home to some of the most amazing mosaics in the West), and myself and those I was travelling with were able to read the mosaics pretty well if I do say so myself. We were certainly better at it than we would have been without the class, and that was an awesome feeling.

Some of the sites we visited were the Colosseum, the Roman Forum (center of ancient Roman life), the Palatine Hill (where the palaces of the emperors were located), the Baths of Caracalla, the National Museum of Rome, the Church of Saint Clement, St. Peter's Basilica, and the Vatican Museums.

It was an incredible week and left me with some thoughts about modern art and architecture that I will try to convey soon.

God bless.