La Seconda Settimana

Week two of our program was a short week, but very rigorous and fruitful. On Monday we had presentations on-site from two of our five graduate students, Kit and Meg. We first traveled to Santa Maria sopra Minerva to view the Filippino Lippi's Carafa Chapel. Kit asked us to recall our reading on chapel and consider the strange placement of the patron in relation to the Annunciation. The patron seemed to be dividing the attention from the Virgin just as she is visited by the angel, Gabriel. This is a most unusual arrangement for such a scene.

The same afternoon we continued on to San Clemente for Meg's presentation on Masolino's Branda Chapel. We managed to all pile onto a Roman city bus together for a ride across town, catching views of the Roman Fora and the Colosseum on the way. When we arrived at San Clemente, the church was unexpectedly closed for another half hour. We decided to make a quick dash up the street to Santi Quattro Coronati, a medieval church home to a beautiful cloister and a well-preserved fresco cycle of the Donation of Constantine. Bonus church!

Returning to San Clemente, Meg led us in a discussion of Masolino's early fifteenth-century chapel for Cardinal Branda. We discussed the patron's specific architectural and narrative programs to communicate his presence in the church despite the fact that he spent very little time in Rome or in the church itself.

On Tuesday we had a whirlwind day of Etruscan sites with visits outside of Rome to Cerverteri and Tarquinia. We saw the round tumuli of Cerveteri and the sunken painted rooms of Tarquinia. We discussed the difficulties in studying a culture for which we have so little evidence and we engaged in the methodological issues of projecting our contemporary views back onto that of a society we do not totally understand yet. We had a great lunch in the town of Tarquinia, paired with a sarcophagi-rich trip to the Etruscan museum. It was a long day, but the weather was spectacular and everyone agreed it was a worthwhile addition to our study of Italian art.

On Wednesday we had another classroom day, which was a welcome respite after our Etruscan marathon. We did some preparatory work for our upcoming visit to St. Peter's by discussing Michelangelo's Roman Pietà. We also engaged in some challenging scholarship on Michelangelo's London Entombment, which ties into our continuing consideration of the changing status of the image and the altarpiece in the early modern period.

We were lucky enough to have our only four day weekend of the program this week. Many students took advantage of the opportunity to travel. We had groups visiting Pompeii, Naples, Vicenza, Bologna, and Barcelona.