Archeology, Architecture, Art History, Empire, Out of Town, Rome
Tweet I’ve mentioned (here and here) my fondness for clambering improbable staircases to view long bricked-in frescoes. Just as good, if not better, is making an appointment through the city heritage office to meet a key-bearing guard in an unlikely looking spot. One...
Art History, Early Renaissance, Melozzo da Forli', Vatican
Tweet Anyone visiting Rome over the next week or so may have been dismayed to find that at 1pm today the Sistine Chapel closed to allow preparations for the conclave to take place, and will remain closed as long as is necessary. The next time it opens there will be a...
Art History, Baroque, Michelangelo, Renaissance, Rome, Vatican
Tweet Recently I’ve been thinking about ceilings. Elaborately painted ones to be precise. A couple of weeks ago I took a group of 41 seventeen-year-old girls from the James Allen’s Girls’ School, plus their teachers, to see two of them. In the morning we visited the...
Archeology, Architecture, Augustus, Empire
Tweet If you find yourself entering Rome by the via Ostiense, you might be surprised to see a large white marble pyramid, not perhaps a form one associates with the city. It certainly struck Thomas Hardy, and in his poem Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves...
Art History, Early Christian art, Roman Forum
Tweet The verdigris door in the photo above belongs to a temple in the Roman Forum, traditionally said to have been dedicated to Romulus, the infant son of the Emperor Maxentius. About a century after the mosaics at Santa Pudenziana (about which I spoke in my last...
Recent Comments