LOYAL READER,
Here follows, after a long hiatus, Part XIII of PARADISE, PURGATORY, AND HELL: A DANTESQUE JOURNEY THROUGH NORTHERN ITALY. I should not attribute any particular meaning to the interruption. Here, at Priceton.org, we believe that if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing slowly; and that a meandering path, punctuated by excursions and indirections, is better than a straight one to any destination on the road of life. (We demonstrate this wisdom every time we travel to Europe, and get hopelessly lost.)
Those who wish to refresh their memories will find the first twelve parts of PARADISE, PURGATORY, AND HELL: A DANTESQUE JOURNEY THROUGH NORTHERN ITALY in the Archives, under January, February, March, June, September, October, November, and December, 2015.
La Scala…
Illicit Photography…
Selfie-ism…
Photographic Gunslinging…
Museum Guard Lassitude…
A visit to Milan’s La Scala is worth the trouble, in spite of having to book in advance, tolerate the always intolerable “guided tour”, and pay an entrance fee that seems to be indexed to the cost of an opera ticket (though the house, of course, was dark). About ten of us were assembled on the steps in front of La Scala’s austere, neo-classical façade—whose chasteness intensifies the effect of its flamboyantly rococo interior—, then ushered up the back stairs and past a row of portraits and busts of famous nineteenth-century impresarios and prima donnas, before whom the cognoscenti mentally genuflected. All of this was contrived to instill in the operatic devotee the appropriate emotions of reverence and high expectation, leading up to the epopteia, in which we were led from the dimly lit hallway into the opulent light of the hall. From one of the boxes, we were then invited to gaze over the orchestra and stage for no longer than the permissible three minutes. It was indeed an impressive sight: the gilded rings of balconies stacked one upon another in a triumph of architectural geometry.
It was here that I first heard the solemn warning pronounced by our guide, in the International Language of musaeology, NO PHOTO. Whereupon I snapped the first of hundreds of illicit pictures on our trip.
Most of the galleries and museums (and almost all of the churches) in Italy allow photography without flash. (NO FLASH is the other English command in which all Italian museum guards and guides are more or less fluent.) There is neither rhyme nor reason as to why some institutions are camera friendly and others aren’t. (But then these decisions are made by government bureaucrats.) Photography is permissible in Rome’s St. Peter’s Basilica, but not in the Sistine Chapel a few hundred feet away. You’re welcome to take selfies in front of the altar in Siena’s Duomo, but in Padova’s Arena Chapel (home to the famous Giotto frescoes), photography is perpetrated on pain of being drawn and quartered. (In the Arena Chapel, visitors are hardly allowed to breathe. The Chapel is air-locked at both ends of a long entrance corridor, and the ambient atmosphere is changed during every half-hour interval between tours.)
I wouldn’t entirely object to a wholesale ban on photography in all of these sacred loci, if only to be rid of the tourists who enter them with the sole purpose of documenting the evidence of their own high culture, and broadcasting it to the world on Facebook. Almost all of the photographs they take are the aforementioned selfies, with the world’s greatest art treasures subordinated to their own glory as background. In St. Peter’s, I recall a line-up of selfi-ists in front of Michelangelo’s heart-stabbing Pieta, their narcissism reaching fully sacrilegious proportions. If Dante were writing today, he’d surely have assigned them to a separate bowge in the lowest circle of Hell, where demons would beat them eternally with their own selfie-sticks.
For the less prideful, however, photography is an indispensable mnemonic aid and art-historical resource. Mrs. P and I took 1600 photos in Northern Italy, 1200 in Rome, and another 1500 most recently in Tuscany. The great utility of digital photography (to which I was a late convert—here my besetting aversion to the modern betrayed me) is that, viewing them at home on the computer monitor, one can zoom in upon details (reading the inscriptions in phylacteries, for instance) which, in the far-away vaults of churches or palazzi, were inaccessible to the naked eye.
That is why being able to take photos surreptitiously when it is forbidden is so essential a touristic skill. It requires only a camera small enough to be inconspicuous, a partner who stands sentry and shields the photographer from the view of the authorities, and, above all, the talent to compose and shoot from the hip–without raising the camera’s display to one’s eyes, that is–, like the gunslingers of the wild west. Aiming approximately in this way, and tilting the camera to the vaguely correct angle, I was able to fire off two dozen shots of the Sistine Chapel, capturing Michelangelo’s entire iconographical program in a more or less continuous sequence. By the time we visited Padova (four years later), my gunslinging skills were perfected, and I covered the Arena Chapel in a mere eight images.
The only time Mrs. P and I were caught was in a lightless gallery in Verona, when we were betrayed by my camera’s faint red pre-focus beam. But this is rarely a problem, since Italy’s museum guards are invariably unionized. As a rule, that is, they passed the hours gazing at their cell phones or chatting loudly with one another—an unpardonable intrusion, when so much of Italian Renaissance art invites, or demands, religious meditation–, visibly bored to death by the transcendent beauty that surrounded them. If today’s museum guards had been at their posts when the original Vandals flooded into Italy, I doubt that they’d have noticed that a lot of stuff was getting broken.
To be continued…