Art Week II

Well, so much for my good intentions. I must apologize again for the long delay in writing, especially after promising more in the coming days after my last post. Although, perhaps you should thank me. I am giving whomever cares a God-like experience; how often do we apologize for our sinfulness and promise God that we will do better, only to fall again and again? I will ask you all to be Christ to me and forgive me each time I fail to deliver; perhaps one of these times I will deliver.

With that aside, I would like to talk about Art Week II. The focus of these four days was on the Renaissance and Baroque styles. The art of these periods is incredible. The details and realism achieved by the sculptors and painters is unbelievable, and the architects built some absolute marvels.

The interesting thing to me about the art of these periods is the transition from flat, unrealistic art in the Middle Ages (still beautiful and masterful in its own way) to the highly detailed and realistic art in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Here is an example of the transition, first in paintings, then in sculpture:

Madonna and Child, Berlinghiero, 13th century

Kiss of Judas, Giotto, 14th century

Painting by Fra Angelico, 15th century

The School of Athens, Raphael, 16th century

Medieval Pieta

Pieta, Michelangelo, Renaissance

The Ecstasy of St. Teresa, Bernini, Baroque Period

Michelangelo is another incredibly interesting part of this period. He was incredibly talented, complicated, and worked in a huge diversity of fields. While most sculptors made small models of their sculptures, working up in size before going to the final product in marble, Michelangelo would take the block and start working right away, producing masterpieces without a model to work from. David, Pieta, and Moses are just some of his famous sculptures. Michelangelo painted the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but he did not want to do it. He had originally come to Rome to build the epic tomb of Pope Julius II, but was switched to the Sistine Chapel when the Pope decided against building the tomb. Michelangelo did not want to paint, so he went home to Florence, but the Pope convinced him to return and work. Michelangelo had a large group of help at first (it was a huge task), but he ended up kicking everyone else out and locking himself up in the Chapel to work. Incredibly, he painted the entire ceiling, by himself, in four years. That means he came up with the design, drew it out, put up scaffolding for one section of painting, prepared the ceiling, painted the ceiling, and moved the scaffolding to another part of the Chapel. It was only at that point that he was able to see what his work looked like in full. The paintings were done by candlelight (there were no windows above his scaffolding) and much of it was done with him lying on his back. All of this in four years. He would later paint one wall of the Sistine Chapel with the famous Last Judgement. To top it all off, Michelangelo was one of the last architects for St. Peter's Basilica. This job he took as an old man. He did it for free on the condition that nobody would tell him what to do. Overall, he was an impressive, fascinating, and confusing man, and incredibly interesting to learn about.

The visits were mostly to museums, churches, and villas where there are collections of art (the buildings themselves often being a work of art). I will close with a list a few of my favorite churches, as well as some of my favorite artists in case anyone is interested in getting a taste of what I saw.

Churches:

St. Peter's Basilica (Renaissance/Baroque)

The Gesu (Baroque)

The Church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (Baroque)

Painters:

Fra Angelico (Early Renaissance painter and Beatified Dominican Friar)

The Virgin of the Annunciation

Raphael (High Renaissance painter and Ninja Turtle. I especially like his works in the Vatican Museums)

The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament

Madonna of the Meadow

Caravaggio (Baroque painter with a very interesting and intimate painting style)

St. Jerome

The Crucifixion of St. Peter

Sculptors:

Michelangelo (High Renaissance sculptor, painter, and architect)

David

Bernini (Baroque sculptor and architect. Check out Apollo and Daphne, David, Apollo and Daphne, The Rape of Proserpina, and Ecstasy of Saint Theresa)

Detail of The Rape of Proserpina. The realism of the fingers on the thigh is incredible.

David

Ah, Bulgaria

Apologies for the obnoxiously long delay in writing. I posted my last blog, went to Bulgaria for a few days, had the second week of art week (which left little time for anything), and then just neglected to write for a week. Hopefully that will not happen again. I am going to cover one thing in this blog, and then a few more tomorrow and this weekend.

Bulgaria:

Ethan, Nick, and I decided to go to Bulgaria from February 1^st through the 4^th. Why Bulgaria? The inexpensiveness of the flight and lodging mainly. The whole trip cost around 150 dollars per person. Besides that, the city we would be in, Sofia, has a lot of interesting influences. Greek, Christian (mostly Orthodox), Muslim, and Soviet influences can be seen all over the city. We mostly cared about seeing the Christian churches and experiencing a very different culture from our own and even Italy (they use a different alphabet in Bulgaria, not just a different language).

We flew out of Rome early in the morning on February 1^st and were in Sofia a little before noon. We had not had breakfast, so our first mission was finding food to eat. We ended up at a burger joint called Boom!, chosen mainly due to the fact that it had a menu that was partly in English. The burgers were good and really cheap. The unit of currency in Bulgaria is the Lev (spelled how you would say it as I have no idea how to spell it), and the meal for all three of us cost between 50 and 60 Lev. That is the equivalent of about 30 or 35 dollars for three really big burgers and more fries than we could finish. It was awesome. After eating, we proceeded to walk around the city. We ended up in one of the many Orthodox churches in the city and it was beautiful. None of the churches we visited were like the Catholic churches that Americans would be used to seeing, and they were even quite different than the churches in Rome that we had seen. These churches were completely covered in icons of various saints. They were truly incredible. We happened to enter that church at around the time for vespers (evening prayer), so we decided to stay for it. The chanting was enchanting. We stayed for an hour (we had places to be so we left early), but the time certainly flew. We stood in place for the entire time, and I could have stayed much longer without any complaint. It was one of the highlights of the trip for me.

The next day was spent looking at more churches and going to a military history museum (just a park with a bunch of tanks and fighters). The day after that we had a Bulgarian guy drive us into the mountains in his van (aka, we paid for a tour) to visit an Orthodox monastery. It was an awesome place. We saw snow for the first time since leaving the States (aside from a random pile in Ravenna), and it was kind of nice. The church for the monastery was beautiful. The inside and outside were completely covered in icons. One thing that struck me was how the Orthodox Christians do not shy away from gruesome icons. Several of the icons depicted souls being tormented in Hell, while others showed martyrdoms (including blood, heads, etc.). Our tour guide had told us that there were bathrooms we could use at the monastery, but that they were uncomfortable. We had no idea what that meant (did they cover the seats in nails to mortify the flesh?), but we found out when Nick decided to use one. The toilets were actually just holes in the ground, so standing or squatting were the only options for use. We also decided to try the monastic donut things (more like funnel cakes than donuts) and they were very good. After the visit, we went back to our lodging, slept, and woke up at 4 am to catch a flight back to Rome (using Wiz Air as our airline), thus concluding our trip to Bulgaria.