Rome Away From Home

The Sistine Chapel and the Sant Ignazio are two important frescoes in terms of subject matter and style. The Sistine Chapel was finished in 1512, before the Council of Trent took place in 1545-1563. The Sistine Chapel exemplifies the High Renaissance and mannerism with its emotion and emphasis on the perfection of the  human body. The ceiling of Saint Ignazio is the ultimate example of trompe l’oeil and quadraturra as well as following the decrees of the council of Trent. The Council of Trent was a meeting of Cardinals to clarify debated issues within the Catholic church as a response to the Protestant reformation. These meetings are critical to the history of art because they established certain decrees pertaining to art. The Catholic church found that the mannerist style was too sensuous, scandalous and too focused on the human form and nudity. They decided they wanted to simplify religious art, by reasserting the Catholic church’s triumph, power, and  righteousness. This ...

Alright, it’s our last week in Rome and effectively our last blog post we have to do. To anybody not in the class that has been keeping up, I hope you’ve been enjoying our little lessons because it’s been awfully fun to be here! So just as our time in Italy is coming to a close, the time of the Renaissance has been coming to a close and you know what that means? The Baroque period is starting to pop up with all its theatrical goodness and joy. Need I say it again? If it ain’t baroque, don’t fix it! (I’m truly sorry for saying that again, really.) Now our first stop for this little trip was the Triton statue in the Palazzo Barberini. This lovely little statue was made by the same baroque artist who popped up last week: Gian Lorenzo Bernini! It was commissioned by his patron, Pope Urban VIII who (if you couldn’t tell by the Palazzo name) was a Barberini. The statue was suppose to invoke the power and triumph of Triton that was mentioned in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The statue itself is ...

Jimmy Guardiola        It's hard to believe that we finished our last day of classes in Rome. In some ways, it seems we just got here and I'm no where near ready to leave. In others, looking back, it seems our visits to the Colosseum or even Pompeii were ages ago. Nevertheless, it has been an amazing time and experience and I am so grateful to have been a part of it. We finally wrapped up the tail end of the Baroque period where again we focused on Bernini and now his rival Borromini.      We started in Piazza Barberini to look at Bernini's first fountain work in Rome. The sculpture work is that of Triton, the son of Neptune. He is depicted as a merman, a being the the torso of a man and the legs of a fish or sea creature. We see his scaly, curvy legs slender down his pedestal. He sits on top the combined tail fins, forming a platform, of the large fish beneath him. In the pedestal, we see the triple tiara of the Pope, papal keys, and the famous Be...

Unfortunately our last days in Rome have finally approached us. On our last day of class, we looked almost exclusively at Baroque art and focused on what that period was, why it came to be, and what are signifiers of the period. Baroque art has an intense emphasis on emotion and evoking emotion from the viewer. Italian Baroque art, in particular, was constructed to give the Catholic viewers a closer emotional connection to the religion and the theatricality of the artworks served to give a better understanding of the stories being told. A checklist for considering what is and is not Italian Baroque art is as follows: emotionally intense, capturing a moment in time, dynamic, the use of diagonals in the composition, energy and movement, closeness to the subject, realism, interrupted contours, and strategic use of light.  A prime example of a full Baroque production can be seen in the Cornaro Chapel of Santa Maria della Vittoria. Bernini expertly captured the St. Teresa’s accou...

            For our fourth and final week in Rome, we set out to learn all about Spectacle, Patronage, and the Jesuits in Baroque Rome! This trip has been so amazing and so educational that I don’t want it to end, but this was certainly an incredible way to tie it all together. To learn all about our theme of the week, we went to the church of S. Vitale, Bernini’s Triton fountain, The Ecstasy of S. Teresa, the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, and the Palazzo Farnese.             Our first stop of the day was Bernini’s Triton fountain, which was actually Bernini’s first freestanding fountain. It is remarkable to see and I wish that the water was on when we walked past it, but I have been lucky enough to see it with the water on as different times in this trip. Bernini was a Baroque artist who had been inspired by the mannerist period. This fountain features the son ...

Spectacle, Patronage, and the Jesuits in Baroque Rome Our final week in Rome was exciting and hectic as we have been winding down on assignments and trying to fit in the last few great meals we can find around the city. Finishing our course work, we traveled to Baroque churches and monuments and went out with a bang studying a few of Rome’s most notable works that embody the theatricality and style of the Baroque period. Baroque art, as we should be very familiar with by now, is a style of art that came about after the Mannerist movement and after the Catholic Reformation. It focused on grandiose, theatrical presentations of art and similarly dramatic portrayals of these traditional motifs and iconographies. In the Baroque period, two of the most prominent artists and architects of the period were Francesco Borromini and Gian Lorenzo Bernini. The contemporaries were both peers and rivals, Bernini being the more sociable, amiable of the two. This week we saw examples of both of...