Roman Art

Sorry for the lack of posting during the week. Not much has been going on except for school. We had our first Italian test on Monday, did pretty well, and then a History of Food and Culture Test on Wednesday. We went into our history test thinking that it was going to be multiple choice and some writing, but when we got to the exam, our teacher informed us that there could be more than one answer to the multiple choice question and if you got a question wrong, you got negative points. We started out with 0%, and for every question right, we moved up in percentage points, but every question wrong, we got negative points. In reality, we could have gotten a negative percent on this exam.....Also, you had to choose all of the correct answers to get full credit for the multiple choice questions, and if you didn't, negative points. The only test we have taken like that was the ACT/SAT, so we were angry. We do not know our grades for the exam yet, but we don't think we did well. Lets just say that we had an hour long conversation with our coordinator about the format of the exam, and it got ugly.......

On a lighter note....

Today, my Layers of Rome class visited the Palazzo Massimo de Terme museum. Instead of looking at exterior buildings/architecture, we looked interior designs of paintings, mosaics, and sculptures that describe Roman history. The collection of ancient art, on the ground, first, and second floors of the museum include many examples of Roman art from the late Republican period to the end of the Roman Empire, as well as original Greek art discovered during excavations in the Gardens of Sallust. We looked at fresco Roman garden paintings, one specifically, Empress Livia's, wife of Augusto, villa at Prima Porta, which is one of the best conserved illustrations of an ancient Roman garden. The word fresco refers to painting a mural with plaster on a wall or ceiling. The painting used buon fresco, which is a technique of painting on a thin layer or wet fresh plaster. The pigments are absorbed by the wet plaster; and after a number of hours, the plaster dries and the painting is created.


We also looked at Roman mosaic which were floor coverings in villas of Romans. Roman mosaic is different from Christian mosaic because Christian mosaic is always on the walls of their villas. Mosaic art is made of "tesserae" which are individual stones. The scenes and display of the mosaics were beautiful. Some were very detailed, while others were simple black and white stones.


Our last part of the class was to look at Greek/Roman sculpture. Greeks sculpt humans in an "idealistic" way, while Romans sculpt people realistically and make their expressions and posture look like real human beings. For instance, we looked at a male God and noticed that he was in the contrapposto pose, the shifting of the weight onto the hip and twisting of shoulders and head. Humans always stand with more weight on one leg, so the Roman’s tried to portray this look. Michelangelo sculpted this stance for the Statue of David. Shown below is The Discus Thrower of Myron, a famous Greek sculpture which portrays an athlete throwing the discus incorrectly. Myron sculpted it this way to show his artistic skill, but portrayed an unrealistic pose of a discus thrower. Feet and hands are hard to sculpt, but Myron wanted to show off that he could create them even though it made the discus thrower look impractical.


I learned a lot today about Roman interior design and I am excited to learn more about Christianity Mosaic in comparison to Roman Mosaic next week. Tomorrow, eight of us are going to Brussels, Belgium. I cannot wait for the chocolate!!! We are squeezing eight people in one hotel room and we do not know much about the city (except for the waffles, fries, beer, and chocolate), but I cannot wait for this adventure to start! Everyone else in the program is staying in Milan because all of Grinada is coming here and there is a soccer game, Naples vs. Roma Saturday night. I will update you on my trip to Brussels when I return on Monday morning after taking a 6am flight back to Roma!

Ciao

-Marisa