Once more with feeling

 

 

 

 

Nearing the end of my current series, I decided to revisit its source – Il Giardino Italiano.     The forecast called for morning sun and afternoon showers so I set off early.  Then the weather made a 180-degree turn, just giving me time under cloudy skies to catch the garden in a different mood than in the season when I'd first seen it.

 

I greeted familiar sculptures along the Opera Walk – as shown above, the clown of I Pagliacci who was given a lighter role in my first-of-series painting, "Clowning Around".  Fortuitously, in the real garden, he's paired with the subject of my final painting, the dark power-princess Turandot.

 

Not part of my series but oh-so-intriguing are the paired sculptures from "A Masked Ball" and "Rigoletto."   The stories told in operas are inevitably intense and sometimes borderline unbelievable.  Even the opera aficionados among this blog's readers might not know that "Un ballo in Maschera" was almost set in Boston!

 

 

I'd particularly wanted to check out the structure of Turandot, knowing that the photos I'd worked from couldn't quite capture the 3-D details of this striking sculpture.  Just incidentally, I've been wondering if the Italian sculptor of Il Giardino worked from the cover design of the original 1920's score.   Probably not – but who can resist this Art Deco version?

 

When I first decided on Turandot (the final "t" is silent, by the way), I knew I'd have to find a classical Italian painting of a woman with an extravagant hairstyle or head-dress.  How about Caravaggio's "Medusa"?

 

No!  Too creepy – I didn't give those snakes a second thought even though there's plenty to be learned from this artist, himself a study in darkness.  But I can spend hours happily viewing on-line images and, as luck would have it, I came across Perugino's "God the Father with Prophets and Sibyls."

 

Perugino might be an unfamiliar name – not to be confused with Perugina chocolates which connects with him via the Italian city of Perugia.  He was no slouch, though – a classmate of Leonardo's and a teacher of Raphael's.  And how about his two sibyls with mega-headgear on the right side of this fresco?

 

 

You'll definitely want to read up on the prophesizing sibyls, won't you?  The somber one is the Libyan sibyl – yes, another version of the one chosen by Michelangelo for the Sistine Chapel Ceiling.  His ravishing chalk study is beloved by serious students of drawing.

 

 

A teacher-mentor of mine claimed that as a young 1970s art student visiting the drawing collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, he was allowed to hold this drawing in his hands.   You can be sure it's under closer supervision these days!

 

But it is Perugino's Tiburtine sibyl who I fell in love with for this series.  Look at this face!!

 

 

Taking liberties with the scale of Il Giardino's Turandot, I tried a couple of early possibilities:

 

 

I decided to stick with the side-by-side sibyls and then found that the horizontal stonework in front of them looked rather bare.  Okay.  How about a medieval lute, just about to be picked up?

 

 

At least I resisted the temptation to add a Latin inscription to the Tiburtine's white scroll – maybe "Audentes Fortune luvat"?  No.  All things considered, I should have left the blank scroll out all together.  Here's the final version of "Sound of Silence at Il Giardino Italiano" (copyright 2022).

 

 

I know that the silence also holds the unasked question from some of my viewers:  "WHAT is she thinking?"  But people do crazy things when they're enchanted with art.  Take a look at this small garden feature I found when walking in another direction a few weeks ago:

 

And DO take a look at the website of Canadian artist Laara Cassells and her series, "After- ".  Now here's an artist who *brilliantly* combines personalities from classic paintings with contemporary lookalikes.

 

If you're also silently wondering, "What's next, after the Il Giardino" series?" …Only the sibyls know…

 

 

Barefoot in the park

 

 

 

 

It's still too cold to go barefoot, but when this photo was taken in milder weather, there were shoe-d and shoeless kids on the sidelines, splashing to hearts' content.  We're back at Il Giardino Italiano, this time at the Upper Fountain which is "peopled" with many dynamic sculptural characters.

 

I couldn't resist the long-haired bearded guy.  My first thought was to find a comparable beard among classical paintings, place a seated figure on the bench to the right, and place two females in the foreground, splashing in the shallow water.  I did a small quick study of the darks and lights of such a composition.

 

Luckily, common sense kicked in at that early stage.  It was really too much, and I went back to the idea of one seated figure.  Then very coincidentally, looking for something else in one of my sketchbooks, I found a little sketch I'd made in March 2021.  Wow.  Could this be the man I was waiting for?!

 

I remembered finding him as I skimmed through the Greek Art section in the 11^th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica and marveling at the "wonderful pose!"  Luckily I'd kept track of volume and page number.

 

If you're a bibliophile, do view the link and see why our family's 32+ volumes have always commanded five feet of prime bookshelf space – ever since (before my time) an ecstatic graduate student managed to snag a very battered set at a reasonable price. 

 

Yeah, this guy would do nicely.

 

"The Boxer at Rest", alternately called "The Boxer of Terme", deserves a volume of his own.  He was literally unearthed in an 1885 excavation of the Quirinal, one of Rome's Seven Hills.  Read the first paragraphs here for the impact of this discovery on the famous archaeologist on the site – who was also the one to take this almost surreal photograph.

 

Classicists, please note:  The "Il Giardino" series aims to repurpose Italian masterpieces, and an exception has been made for The Boxer, who is Greek.  His permanent home is the National Museum of Rome at the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme.  Cleaned up nicely and recently re-bronzed, he sometimes travels internationally now – as he did to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2013.

 

Well!  I'm getting carried away – as I did by the possibilities in paint.  That wonderful pose and turned-up head wasn't quite right for the front side of the Upper Fountain, so I walked to the other side that opens on the expanse of the garden.

 

By taking some liberties with the overall structure, I could make this work.  And no, I never even dreamed of including the round-cheeked guy with ??grapes in his hair.  (Is he Bacchus?  And My Guy is Aeolus?  Hmmm….that would mean more Greeks on the premises.)

 

So here are the early plans:

 

 

And early colour lay-in:

 

 And the finale, "Ringside at Il Giardino Italiano" (copyright 2022).

 

There are lots of problems with this, as there usually are by the time I've called it a wrap.  However, you can see how imprinted I've been with de Chirico and his fascination with elements of architecture and antique sculptures.  I flipped through images of his works, wondering if mine would meet his indulgent approval.  How about this? – same hairstyle!