View the Paintings

Getting There

I set out for Italy with Whangarei painter Jenny Bennett, who had also been invited to exhibit at the Biennale in Florence. Traveling with our large paintings was at times difficult, and often highly amusing.

We careered into Rome through the brilliant early morning light and the heavy morning traffic. We were left in a tiny cobbled alleyway not far from our apartment in via Mantellate; we made a hilarious procession along the road - balancing awkward paintings, backpacks and suitcases. The suitcases would hit the cobbles and spin and turn and fly from my hands; we had to frequently cross the road to find a footpath or to avoid parked cars; although little more than an alley, the road was a busy one, with a constant stream of cars, buses and small trucks edging their way past.

Three Churches in Trastevere

On our first day in Rome we visited the very theatrical San Francesco D’Assisi, each little chapel housing its own dramatically lit diorama.  There were several life-like effigies of the people entombed there, sculpted from marble and looking very comfortable lying in their glass cases. We were really there to see Bernini’s Theresa; her’s was of course the most dramatic stage set of all, as she writhed and sighed her way to ecstasy.

Rome can be very confusing, winding around through the tiny alleyways, with high plastered facades that nearly meet above your head and no apparent landmarks to assess your position by. Eventually, and somewhat unexpectedly, we arrived at the courtyard of Santa Cecilia. This church, laden with skulls, crossbones and winged skeletons (as you are now, I once was; as I am now, you shall be) has an exquisitely carved marble Cecilia slumped in her glass case below the altar, severed head still partly attached.

Santa Maria in Trastevere is a very old basilica, with 12th-century mosaics along the outside, of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus flanked by women holding lamps. A spring of oil suddenly erupted here years before Christ’s birth. 

Castel San Angelo and the Vatican

It was a beautiful crisp autumn morning, sunlight filtered through the thick continental atmosphere making the light diffuse and soft as I strolled along the Tiber. The river was still, reflecting the arched bridges and glorious architecture and the decorative Mediterranean pines. Although it was very early, there was a huge amount of traffic, fumes and noise, sirens clanging and whooping. I crossed the Tiber at Ponte Vittorio Emanuele, stopping on the other side to draw Castel San Angelo. The light was perfect, sun and shadow defining the drum shape of the fort. Rome seemed to glow with the soft golden tones of the trees, the chalky blue-green of the river and the dark warm plaster of the buildings.

Later, we walked to the Vatican. The space inside Saint Peter’s is vast, and seems to open and unfold as you progress further inwards. The colours above are all pale grey-blues, which enhances the sense of lightness, space and distance - atmospheric perspective, one of the great discoveries of the renaissance: that’s why the Basilica seems to float, and Rakitu and the Poor Knights, too. Blue and grey limestone.

San Clemente

There is a very old bridge across the Tiber at the Isola Tiberina, where the chalky blue-green water rushes over shallow rapids. We crossed there, and walked up past the Teatro Marcello and on to the Forum through a side gate. We walked past the Coliseum, and we found the very beautiful Basilica San Clementé.

This church is intriguing, very beautiful and the atmosphere is gracious and welcoming. You enter off the noisy smelly street through an unprepossessing iron grilled gate into a colonnaded courtyard with a very simple fountain in the centre. The basilica has an ornate mosaic floor, undulating with age. The most decorative chapel is Saint Catherine’s where the frescoes of her torture are unassuming and almost party-like, in soft and fading pastel colours. Go down the stairs and you are in another church - exactly beneath; the altars line up. This is very, very old - there are records of it before 300 AD. Again, it is simple and gracious, with remnants of old frescoes and sarcophagi. Go down the stairs again, and you are in a third church; but this time it is pagan with the altar to Mithras lining up directly beneath the two Christian altars. This lowest level is a honeycomb of small rooms and alleyways, and everywhere you go you hear the sound of water. There are two places where you can see it bubbling up - probably this is how it all began, a sacred place beside a spring.

The Sistine Chapel

We almost ran through the miles and miles of elaborately decorated passages, walls and ceilings frescoed and gilded; a whole corridor of giant maps, with all the hills picked out in relief. The passage seemed to go on forever and although the temptation was to stop and gape in awe, in some ways the experience was more authentic as the grandiose décor washed over us.

In the Borgia apartments we began to hesitate; Raphael’s second room of stanzas brought us to a full stop. The rooms were quite tiny compared to how I’d always imagined them, but the paintings were BIG.

We entered at the front of the Sistine chapel, to the right of the altar and the Last Judgment. The lower tier of walls is painted in beautiful drapery, gold brocade curtains. That alone is fantastic. The Ceiling. The Prophets and Sibyls stand out as though in 3D, the effect is amazing, as convincing as those Magic Eye picture books that were all the rage a few years ago. I could’ve stayed all day. I know the pictures so well, it was like meeting old friends again, but how amazing to find them in such an illustrious place.

Afterwards, we ambled slowly down all the many many corridors towards the uscita, taking the opportunity to admire the Vatican gardens from the open windows. The cross at the top of Michelangelo’s dome blazed, incandescent in the sunlight.

There was an exhibition next to the inevitable souvenir shop, based on the Book of Revelations. The artists illustrating the words and concepts ranged from Gothic to Modern, and included several of Albrecht Dürer’s (slightly crumpled) woodcuts and a large, colourful Matisse collage; I found the imagery and interpretation of the revelation mysteries totally absorbing.

Back in Rome, we lunched together at a curbside café on panini and cappuccino while the bagpipes played merrily in the souvenir shop next to us.  We were jammed between an amiable Spanish family and the souvenir-shop proprietor, who argued aggressively with a succession of Italian men, all smoking incessantly. Priests and nuns swayed past us in elegantly cut robes, part of the endless procession of tourists and pilgrims making their way to the Vatican.

Towards the evening we took a river cruise from the Island to a bridge miles and miles up the Tiber. The evening light was glorious. Thousands of swifts made a spectacular display in the evening sky - clouds of small black birds, like schooling fish - against the full moon, great smoking skeins across the sky.  As the sun set, they roosted in the plane trees that line both sides of the river so that the tops of the trees looked as though they had thick black foliage. Shags roosted in the lower branches over the water, and ducks on the little rocky islands.

The Capitolene Museums

Our second to last morning in Rome Jenny and I explored the Capitolene museums. On the way, we digressed through Piazza Navona to San Luigi di Francesci, another large, flat-walled edifice in its own small piazza. Through the small plain door and we were inside another huge, breathtaking cavern full of treasures. This one had a small fresco by Raphael: Isaiah as a beautiful young man in fresh and lovely colours, all beautifully realised, glowing from high atop a pillar. Plus - the reason we were there: THREE paintings by Caravaggio in the left hand diorama near the main altar. They shone out - so much power and energy, they cease to be just pictures - they seem to tap something else in us that transcends picture making. Vast areas of dark - it has to be burnt umber and Prussian blue, but the area is huge, probably more than half the painting. He is spare with the symbolism, but its there and to the point. His compositions are elegant and concise. And the flesh just glows with life. He painted. The three images dealt with Christ calling Matthew to be a disciple, an angel giving St Peter an important message, and St Peter being prepared for crucifixion. They were all very, very convincing.

He was also in the Capitolene. The Capitolene Museums were astounding. We saw hugely outsize marble sculptures of body parts in the courtyard; the beautiful bronze boy inspecting his foot; the ORIGINAL wolf mother with Romulus and Remus; the ORIGINAL Aureolis (there is a replica in the Campidoglio , the Museum courtyard) it is HUGE, bronze with patches of gold leaf still, and it does truly look like a horse, accurate and magnificent. There were rooms and rooms of marble statues, but the best was a dog, seated, a hound, almost Egyptian in its pose but like the Aureolis, very truthful, the quintessence of dogness. We marveled at the excavated ruins Temple of Jupiter, the actual foundations of which rise up through the museum. Huge as the museums are, they would have been dwarfed by the Temple of Jupiter.

A passage underneath the Campidoglio connects the museums; partway it branches off to the middle side of the courtyard and gradually morphs into the actual old crumbling arches of whatever the ancient building was on the Capitolene Hill that looks out over and is part of the Forum. So the Forum, all the way up the Via Sacre to the Arch of Titus and the Coliseum, becomes part of the museum, a living diorama. Amazing.

All the rest of the ancient statuary that isn’t in the first part of the museum is in the third wing. Gorgeous., Centaurs. Fauns. A huge Satyr in the courtyard forms the basis of a fountain. Minerva. Hercules with the crossed legs of a lion at his neck, the pelt his cloak; always a club in one hand and three golden apples in the other.

We reeled from the museum late in the afternoon and ate gelato on the walk home.

Florence

 The day of our departure for Florence, in spite of the taxi drivers strike and the demonstration, with streets clogged with taxis, our clever van driver took us on a circuitous, convoluted route to arrive at the railway station in plenty of time.

As we unloaded and assembled our higgledy-piggledy luggage on the pavement, a pair of porters with a tractor and trailer materialized. For a fee, they took all our luggage to the right platform, looked after it while we waited, put it on the train for us (our carriage was right outside the waiting room, and it was a very long train). Amazing. My paintings fitted perfectly in the luggage rack above my head. At Firenze we team-worked the luggage off; I took my paintings out the back door, and there on this vast empty platform was a trolley, the only trolley to be seen. Unbelievable.

The Biennale

We hung the paintings the next day at the Fortezza da Basso. There were very few figurative landscape paintings, so my work stood out. People always remembered them when I gave out the postcards. There was a lot of abstract expressionism and surrealism and lots and lots of angst. But there were many joyful works as well. In the midst of all the doom and gloom, these shone out like beacons.

With a little ingenuity, I managed to hang my paintings on my own. I found that if I propped one end of the painting on my packaging while I climbed the stepladder I was able to secure the other side. There was lots of juggling to get things straight, but luckily I had brought my tape measure, and some copper wire. There was a young Parisian painter in my “room”, who shared the stepladder with me. Jenny and Phil came later to hang, so I left my useful bits and pieces with them and walked home with my packaging over my shoulder. Once home, I sat on our roof top terrace, with the Duomo and Giotto’s campanile for company.

San Marco

San Marco was very close to our apartment, just one block off the road that runs from our apartment to the venue. We walked through the Piazza Santissima Annunciata and admired the spandrels at the orphanage, and the fountains with their weird sea goblins.

The monks’ cells in San Marco are profoundly tranquil. Each has a superb fresco by Fra Angelico, whose tomb and effigy we’d seen in Rome along with Caravaggio’s paintings at San Luigi di Francesci.. Mostly the frescoes are crucifixions; Christ suffers with dignity, blood flows and spurts freely, generously, his gift to us. The cells are in the upstairs floor, whitewashed with tunnel vaulting. Small arched windows look down into the formal garden surrounded by colonnaded cloisters.

There is a spectacular Annunciation by Fra Angelico on the stairway to the cells: Mary incredulous but still totally trusting.

Downstairs we saw his tempera and oil paintings, delicately embellished with gold leaf; very human images. Understated gestures and expressions, and the more moving for that reason. The backgrounds were simple Giotto-esque interpretations of the imagined desert landscape.

San Marco was a Dominican Friary, where Savonarola was once the Prior. He burnt the books and paintings and treasures of his victims in the middle of the Piazza della Signoria, where he too was eventually burned. We walked there later, outside the Uffizi. At the very same spot, we hesitated, torn between aperitif and gelato, finally settling for a shared hot chocolate a little further on.

Il Papiro

We walked down to Santa Croce to see Giotto’s frescoes, especially the Saint Francis Lamentation. Daddi and Gaddi were there too, more lively and complex. Michelangelo’s bones lie in Santa Croce, as well as those of Galileo and Dante, and Florence Nightingale. The wooden ceiling appeared to have red and black kowhaiwhai patterns on the rafters. Brunelleschi’s little chapel and cloisters were uncluttered and elegant; students perched there, drawing.  There was a torso by Henry Moore in the garden near the gate.

Walking home along Via Faenza from the venue that evening, the sky beyond Brunelleschi’s orange Duomo was a deep velvety blue. For a change, I continued behind the Duomo and found myself in a bookbinders shop. I couldn’t resist the gorgeous papers; intrigued by the frieze of famous buildings I asked what the purpose of the paper was. The girl explained that this was a bookbinders, and the papers were for covering the books, on the inside covers when they are bound with leather.

 The owner materialized and took me through to the studio and showed me the tools and processes and presses and lectured me about the papers and the different methods of printing. It was engrossing. I bought some papers, and a card printed as a three colour lithograph of a painting of the Duomo that he had made himself.  He had made the sky the same deep velvety blue that I’d just seen it.

Michelangelo’s David & Giotto’s Campanile

Michelangelo’s David is in the Accademia, on the same street as San Marco. He is at the end of a hall, and they have made a sort of colonnade of the unfinished stones, contorted figures struggling their way out of the great blocks of marble.

David is beautiful. For a start, because he is indoors, the marble is very clean and glows with a sharp translucence. And also being indoors enhances the sense of hugeness. The artificial lighting creates a dramatic chiaroscuro.  Massive, he stands poised so lightly with the subtlest of contraposto. The delicacy, strength and crispness of the carving is incomparable. I spent over an hour there drawing from the sculpture, and I think I learnt more about anatomy than in three years of life drawing at Art School. It amused me that many people came in and spent as much time looking at my feeble scratching as they did at Michelangelo's glorious achievement.

In another room there were fabulous guitars made of marble, and a real Stradivarius violin.

I staggered out of there with little hope of matching the rest of the day with anything else; I went to see inside the famous Baptistery by the Duomo, but the ancient mosaics did not move me as David had.  But when I walked out, I had to walk past Giotto's bell tower, which I have always loved and which I had been drawing from our rooftop terrace. So what choice did I have? I climbed the 414 steep stone steps to the roof. Awesome! It is SO high - higher I think than the Sagrida Familia in Barcelona, but without the relief of the little bridges that soar from spire to spire. We seemed to zigzag across the South face, with steep spirals at each side. Three times we came out to a central flat area, and I thought we'd finished, but in fact the steps went literally right to the top, to the tiny flat roof and lightning conductor. I could've touched the roof tiles. The view was astounding - Florence lay at my feet like a map. And because I had come to know the old town really well in the last week, I could identify the streets and buildings, and even our little rooftop terrace.

My knees were really shaky by the time I got down.

Going to the Biennale was a fantastic experience. I learnt a lot that I had not intended to; not all of it was about art.