I give up. I can’t locate a word for it. Leo-mania? Highly contagious for camera lenses, particularly when held in the hand of a Leo.
Whatever the appropriate label might be, Romans through the centuries appear obsessed by lions. Ancient art, classical art, papal art, Renaissance art and even contemporary art continually focus on the lion. Lions are everywhere.
The lion is considered a symbol of strength. A powerful hunter devouring animals. An opponent for gladiators. A way to dispose of Christians, although not employed as often as numerous other methods of torturing them to death. By the time Romans felt the need to dispose of Christians, lions were becoming rather scarce in what we now know as Italy. They had to be imported for sporting events from Greece and, more often, from Africa.
But even when behaving savagely, as with a severed human head under-paw, the lions found along the streets of Rome and in her palaces and churches generally appear gentle. As lovable as the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz. Pet-able. The stylized Egyptian lions in the fountain surrounding the obelisk at the center of Piazza del Popolo rarely are permitted a moment’s rest from children eagerly climbing atop their backs.
Time out. I wandered around Rome for almost three weeks before it hit me in the face, just as we were about to exit the Diocletian Baths. The sculpture above, the photo included in the prior post, did it.
I had been viewing remnants of ancient Rome in black and white, completing forgetting photographs in magazine and newspaper articles about exhibitions making the rounds in the United States a decade ago. The ancient Etruscans, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans – they had no inhibitions about applying color to their art. We have been brought up in an art world dominated by the influence of Renaissance artists reviving classical sculpture using the whitest of marble.
But we can guess that Phidias would be brokenhearted to see his sacred relics dragged so far from home, in such a fractured state. More to the point, the bare stone would look ravaged to him, even cadaverous.
Listen to Helen of Troy, in the Euripides play that bears her name:
My life and fortunes are a monstrosity,
Partly because of Hera, partly because of my beauty.
If only I could shed my beauty and assume an uglier aspect
The way you would wipe color off a statue.
That last point is so unexpected, one might almost miss it: to strip a statue of its color is actually to disfigure it.
I was still processing this concept as we wandered through the National Etruscan Museum of Villa Guilia (more to come later), where we encountered a couple reclining on their sarcophagus, circa 500+ years B.C. The accompanying text mentioned that the “twin” to this housed in the Louvre actually shows remnants of colors.
National Etruscan Museum in Rome
Louvre in Paris
But the Louvre couple (on the right) still does not burst into a full technicolor-type bloom. Based on decades of work by Vinzenz Brinkmann of the Glyptothek Museum in Munich, Germany, replicas of ancient statues colorized are probably as shocking to our senses as people accustomed to black-and-white films almost 80 years ago felt in theatres viewing the vividly bright yellow brick road in the midst of The Wizard of Oz.
This Carsten Muller video for Capitol City Media Design helps somewhat with visualizing the changes:
I got on an absurd jag in Rome of photographing statues of lions (more later). They are everywhere. I am so conditioned to thinking of them from a monochromatic perspective, I never once pictured the ancient ones in what to me is amusement-park merry-go-round colors, as is this reproduction of a Greek lion Brinkmann uses in exhibitions.
lion on a tub in the Diocletian Baths
reproduction of lion from Loutraki, Stiftung Archäologie, Munich
Color changes our perceptions about ancient civilizations. But ouch, with the following description in mind, would you really want to see the featured relief of Mithras or the statue of Mithras pictured below fully restored in color?
Diocletian BathsStatue of Mithras, Diocletian Baths
But my imagination fails to make the Crayola transition on its own. My color-blinders remain in place unless confronted by the images side by side.
Which brings me back around to San Antonio. And her missions. The Native Americans herded into the flocks of the Spanish friars nearly three centuries ago were not monochrome in their tastes.
Years back, I rudely shoved through a motion at a San Antonio Conservation Society board meeting for the society to go on record supporting “colorizing” the outside of one mission the way the Native Americans originally did. The not-well-thought-out motion probably still languishes at the bottom of a list of active motions.
I would withdraw it now in favor of a different approach. Illuminate the facades of Mission Concepcion and Mission San Jose often and on a regular basis, if only for an hour at a time right after sunset to show for those of us who stand colorblind in front of these incredible landmarks failing to envision the imprint of our Native American population on them, and, by extension, the city San Antonio has become.
The City of San Antonio has worked several times now with the San Antonio Missions National Park to spotlight the missions “Restored by Light.” The photograph on the left of Mission Concepcion colorized was taken by Bonnie Arbitter and appeared in The Rivard Report, September 8, 2017. Scott Ball took the second one of Mission San Jose that appeared in The Rivard Report, September 6, 2017.
Mission Concepcion by Bonnie Arbitter for The Rivard Report
Mission San Jose by Scott Ball for The Rivard Report
Please let the light shine on these more often.
Meanwhile, this unimaginative soul will return to viewing Roman antiquities in monochromatic tones. Am hoping your imagination adds a richness to the palette where applicable.
Visualizing times gone by is difficult, even when surrounded by highly visible ancient remnants.
Baths to accommodate 3,000? That number finally hit me for some reason. Wait, how big was Rome?
The Diocletian Baths, built beginning about the year 290, could accommodate 3,000 people bathing, getting a shave and a haircut, exercising, reading in the library, gathering for gossip and, well okay, visiting the brothel. Not sure in which order these activities were engaged.
But the Diocletian Baths were not the only baths. There were hundreds and hundreds of them in ancient Rome.
Which finally sent me back to try to understand the immense size not of the sprawling Roman Empire, but of Rome itself.
The AlamoDome in San Antonio seems large to this girl; it can accommodate 64,000. The Coliseum in Rome could house somewhere in the range of 75,000 people, who could all exit within a 15-minute period after Emperor Diocletian (244-311) had executed some of the thousands of Christians he made into saints during several prime years of persecution.
But that was still a small house in Rome. Other special events attracted even larger crowds; close to 300,000 could gather to watch chariot races at Circus Maximus.
Wait, where did all those people come from? The majority were just locals. The population of Rome then was well over 1,000,000. So hard to envision an ancient urban environment that dense.
Things would change dramatically in only a view years. The collapse of the empire, invasions by those pesky Goths. The population evacuated for new opportunities or was devastated by pestilence. During the 1300s, with schism in the papacy between Rome and Avignon, Rome had fewer than 20,000 inhabitants.
But I digress, once again.
The photos below are from the collection of the Museo Nazionale Romano housed on the grounds of the former baths and portions renovated/remodeled into cloisters for a Carthusian monastery, commissioned in 1561 by Pope Pius IV (1499-1565) of the Medici clan and designed by Michelangelo (1475-1564).
More recent remodeling to house the collection and special exhibits was completed in 2014. Thousands of the museum’s holdings once crammed akimbo into this one location are now spread out for improved viewing around several locations.
And, by the way, sometimes there was a lot of r-rated activity happening on the outside of those sarcophagi.
Postcards from Barton Springs 