After the visit, I went for a hot shower, little lie-down and then a couple of drinks while I looked into space. So many work of genius, each one deserving at least a day to itself, but, that is what it is like to be living after at least a milenium of great paintings and in an age of so many magnificent and gigantic international art galleries. I was happy to have seen what i saw, but I know that I will have to return many times to fully appreciate the glory of La Louvre.

The post Wolfie in Paris 2025/26 Part Four – La Louvre 2025 appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I spent two weeks in the Eternal City of Rome this January. The first part is here https://wolfiewolfgang.com/two-weeks-in-rome-part-one/ I’ve been here on numerous occasions over the years, either for work or for passing visits en route to elsewhere. I’d been to the Sistine Chapel (unforgettable, of course) to St Peter’s, also for work, and to a number of art museums and I’ve had a lot of good Roman meals, but I wanted to spend a longer time here and let it get under my skin. I think I succeeded.

I’ll begin the second part of these blogs about my Roman trip at one its most famous monuments, the Colosseum, Il Colosseo (AD 80), the largest ancient amphitheatre ever built, and a place with a bloody history familiar to us all from stories and films about the gladiators. It is an extraordinary place and, for all the gruesome stories about blood-thirsty massacres of slaves, prisoners and the early Christian martyrs, it’s also the site of mass picnics and other less sadistic entertainments. But, and it’s a big but, you can’t avoid feeling a scary, even shocked, connection to all those slaughtered victims in what was in reality a blood sport. Would we have cheered too, I wonder, if we were in those massive audiences for what were highly dramatised public executions? We don’t know the answer. I had only been past it before in taxis or buses before this, and, of course, when I finally got here, it had to do more than just rain, it deluged. You get weather in Rome during January.

It’s an amazingly well-preserved ruin and there’s more than enough here of its remains to get the feeling of dread and excitement that was felt here two thousand years ago.

It’s just a short walk from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, Il Foro Romano, another expansive set of classical ruins, once the centre of the Roman Empire. Roman citizens those days called it simply the Forum Magnum, or the Forum.

How the mighty have fallen, I thought, looking at the remains of Ancient Roman glory. I was here on the day that Donald Trump was inaugurated, for the second time, as American president in Washington’s Roman-inspired Capitol building. Seeing the ruins in the rain with those broken statues of some of the Caesars, added to my despair at the American election, but then I thought that those broken statues should be seen as symbols for what will happen one day to the latest world tyrant. Is there hope for us all in the Fall of Rome? Yes! Nothing lasts forever, not even in the Eternal City.

I had brought my writer’s jotting book with me and, here in Rome, I wrote some Fibonacci Poems, Fibs, on the subject of Rome and would-be emperors. They were published in the February 2025 issue of The Fib Review. https://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell2.html

Feeling less depressed, I couldn’t resist giving my tai-chi practice a go here at the Forum Magnum, thinking that we would have had to learn how to defend ourselves in Ancient Rome.

I visited another famous Roman landmark, known as the Spanish Steps, (La Scalinata di Trinità dei Monti), (built in 1725). The Trinità die Monti is its Italian name. These 135 steps lead to the church of It comes from the church of Trinità die Monti the top, but the steps also lead down to the Spanish embassy to the Holy See, the Palazzo Monaldeschi. So thus the Spanish Steps, familiar from books (Tender is the Night by F.Scott Fitzgerald, 1933 and The Roman Spring of Mrs Stone by Tennessee Williams, 1950), and movies (mostly famously, Roman Holiday directed by William Wyler, with Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck, 1953). It is one of the most visited parts of the city. As with the Trevi Fountain, this is a place for lovers, romantics and/or just whimsical selfies. We all have our own internal movies, so why not indulge our imagination here for a moment when we can.

I hadn’t realised was the the Spanish Steps are also right next to the house where the tubercular English Romantic poet, John Keats (1795 – 1821), came for his health but really to die, at the tragically young age of just 25.

Here, in one of the most crowded parts of Rome, the poet’s house was practically empty of visitors which was excellent for me, a dedicated Keats lover since school days.

The room where Keats died can’t help but invoke the tragedy of the young genius’ death, even though the contents of the room itself all had to be burnt because of the health regulations in Rome at the time.

As a museum, it’s a splendid reminder of how much we still have of Keats’ work but, sadly, also how much we might have had if he’d lived to a full age.  Standing in the room where he died, can turn us all into Romantics.

I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call’d him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

 To take into the air my quiet breath;

 Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

 To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

 While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

 In such an ecstasy!

(John Keats: Ode to a Nightingale.)

One of the poet’s last letters is preserved here. It’s a brief and matter-of-fact epistle to his friend about the local doctor’s advice for the now rapidly ailing poet to go out. It was note to the English painter, Joseph Severn (1793 – 1879), who looked after Keats until his death a short time later. Looking down on the Spanish Steps from John Keats’ window, means that I will always associate the poet with this otherwise joyful place.

After Keats, yes, let’s think poetic, but also, maybe go for a refreshing and very Italian glass of Campari.

Just off the Campo Marzio, another of those grand Roman squares, is one of Rome’s many churches, the Basilica Santa Maria del Popolo (Basilica of Holy Mary of the People). It might not look that special from outside, but inside, on permanent display, are two masterpieces by the great Italian painter Caravaggio (1571 – 1610). This was one of three emergency ecclesiastical stops that I planned on my essential Caravaggio tour when I wanted to see all the Caravaggio paintings in Rome. It will surprises me that you can just walk into one of these churches and, yes, here’s another Caravaggio.

At this Basilica are two of the artist’s most dramatic paintings, The Conversion of St Paul (1601) and The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601).

At the Basilica Sant’Agostino, behind another discrete exterior, is another of his masterpieces, Madonna di Loreto (1606)

Here on one of the nave’s pillars, it is easy to miss this mural by Raphael, The Prophet Isaiah (1512). If you’re not careful in Rome, you practically trip over great Italian Renaissance or Baroque paintings everywhere you turn.

In the French church of San Luigi dei Francesi, (St Louis of the French), there are three more Caravaggios, commissioned works on theme of St Matthew, and painted between 1599 and 1602.

The centre piece, with St Matthew and an angel, is known as The Inspiration of St Matthew.

On a moody January day, it was pleasant getting to the Museum of Modern Art (Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna) without having to get involved in the motor traffic. Walking through the gardens of the Villa Borghese, even at this time of year, is a breath of fresh air, literally, after all those albeit beautiful Baroque churches.

Here there is a permanent collection of mostly Italian paintings and sculpture from the late 19th century until the present. The late 19th century and early 20th century works are crammed together on the walls, 19th century style, but they are mostly visible to more than just a glancing eye. It was tempting to spend more time than I had in this section, but there was more room on the gallery’s walls than I have space for in this blog.

I discovered Italian artists that I wasn’t familiar with in the gallery’s current exhibition, Il Tempo di Futurismo (The Time of Futurism) exhibition, marking the 80th anniversary of the death of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Futurism’s founder, which ran at the gallery until the end of April this year.

I was drawn to the works by Sardinian modernist, Mario Sironi (1885 – 1961), whose reputation, like those of other Futurist artists have been clouded by their association with Mussolini’s Italian Fascist movement. Maybe now, after nearly a century, we should try to see the good things in the art of this period without always dwelling on the negative and disturbing trappings of history.

The exhibition was far from being only brutal and alarming, as in this room devoted to the sparkling light-saturated work of Piero Durazzo, or the photographic section on cinematic photographs of Luca Campigotto.

The relationship in the first half of the 20th century between man and machine, is shown in the most challenging and exciting exhibits in this show, which also includes some of the machines themselves – early aeroplanes and racing cars appealing to anyone who has ever liked making model aeroplanes or cars. Aeroplanes, for good or for ill, have a significant place in this exhibition, none less than a number paintings imagined from the pilot’s view of view from his cockpit, presumably on bombing raids. I haven’t seen anything like this before, that mix of Futurism, art deco abstraction, a touch of daring, and, I have to say, 1930s Fascist agitprop. This is a show that definitely made think and re-think about some of the artists, like the American poet, Ezra Pound, who working and even inspired under the shadow of Italian fascism.

Another quite different exhibition was showing at the same time, but across the Borghese gardens at the Galleria Borghese. It was quite a distance from 20th century The Time of Futurism to Poetry and Painting in the 17th Century. Giovan Battista Marino and the Marvellous Passion.

The ‘Marvelous Passion’ in the title was felt by the greatest Italian poet of the 17th century, Giovan Battista Marino (1569 – 1625), the author of an epic poem Adone (1623) about the love between Venus and Adonis. Marino also wrote an encyclopaedic poetry collection of 624 poems dedicated to, and paired with, an equal number of Baroque works of art, La Galeria (1619). The book is a series of reflections on the relationship between poetry and art. I feel slightly embarrassed to admit that this show was, at least on first glance, more my kind of thing than Italian Futurism. Call me old-fashioned, no, I won’t admit to that, I’ve learnt to love some of those Futurist pictures, and I’m certainly not anti-Modernist. But, I write poetry, maybe not as well as Marino, but I’ve even tried to write a few poems in the Italian language. I’m learning to speak the language and I have had a life-long fascination with Italian epic poetry, Taso, Ariosto and Boccaccio in particular. Add to that my enthusiasm for Italian art from the 14th to the 17th century, then I was always going to be drawn to this show. The exhibition includes paintings and sculptures from Titian to Tintoretto, Correggio to Carracci, from Rubens to Poussin, with Marino’s poems side-by-side. ‘Marvelous’ indeed, and, because of the subject matter, it is sexy too.

The exhibition places quotes from Marino’s work next to the art that he admired on the same subject matter. Here the story of Venus, the goddess of Love and her young lover Adonis, are shown in the sculpture by Cristoforo Stati and in the painting by Jacopo Palma next to apt quotes from Marino’s epic, La Galeria.

Next, and in pride of place, is Bernini’s wonderful Apollo and Daphne, seen from all angles because it is not just so beautiful, but well frightening too. Daphne, the beautiful naiad, a water nymph, from Roman poet Ovid’s story, is desired, maybe loved, by Apollo, but she has been cursed by a jealous Eros to loath sex. She tries to escape from Apollo advances and saved by being turned into a laurel tree by her father, Peneas, a river god. The metamorphosis, to use Ovid’s word for it, is an unforgettable mix of the shocking and the erotic, also caught in a moment when stone is turned into movement.

After so much passion on display here in these rooms at the Galleria Borghese, I moved on to another part of the gallery, the Silenus Room for a display of the gallery’s Caravaggio collection which matches the Marino exhibition perfectly. My epic walking tour of Rome’s Caravaggios continues.

After the famous Galleria Borghese, I wasn’t expecting to find another major art gallery on Rome’s busiest shopping street, the Via Corso, the Doria Pamphili Gallery which have three more Caravaggio paintings. I had to interrupt a trip around the bargain-laden clothes shops that line this bustling boulevard with every store declaring that there was 70% off everything – the ultimate January sales. sales. I didn’t buy anything here, it was time to look inside this relatively unsung palazzo.

Sure enough, the three Caravaggio paintings were here, in their own room, far from the shopping crowds outside. They are early works that already show the artist’s fascination with awkward poses, radical perspective, and ambiguous facial expressions.

Interesting as it was to see these three early Caravaggio works, geniuses are never boring, but, I have to admit that the star work here is definitely not a Caravaggio, but the Portrait of Pope Innocent X (Cardinal Pamphili) by the Spanish master Diego Velázquez. Portraitist supreme, Velázquez shows us a far from saintly pope, so sinister in fact, that I wouldn’t want to meet him in a dark Roman alleyway, or even in the great cathedral church of St Peter’s.

A much brighter and bigger alley leads to the St Peter’s….well, they say all roads lead to Rome, and it was out of the question, while I am here, not to go back to the big church at the centre of Christendom. Before I go in, just one last reference to Caravaggio. I wasn’t visiting the Vatican Museum on this trip, but if I had, I could have seen one last Caravaggio that is here in Rome, one of his greatest too. It’s always good to leave something special for another day. The Entombment of Christ (1603), with its figure of the dead Christ, shares the pose and the tragic pathos of Michelangelo’s Pietà, a sculpture much admired by Caravaggio. It is one of the greatest of paintings. The Michelangelo Pietà, housed next-door, was one of my main reasons for returning to St Peter’s.

And so to St Peter’s itself. It was a clear January day with a perfect blue sky. Pope Francis wasn’t here, he had been unwell, and in a month he would begin his long stint in hospital being treated for pneumonia, I hadn’t been inside the Vatican since the time of Pope John Paul II, and I didn’t realise that very soon there was to be another new pope, Leo XIV.

The scale of it all is still overwhelming, St Peter’s Square is truly vast when seen from the cathedral steps, and the interior is impressive beyond my words. Leo XIV must have gasped when he walked out onto the balcony just a week ago from when I am writing this. There was hope and a relief for us all to see a modest and caring American becoming a world leader

For all the magnificence of the cathedral, nothing can be compete with the human-sized statue in a side chapel – one of the wonders of the world.

It had been a long walk from my apartment near The Pantheon, and I needed to sit for a while before the return journey. Looking for a seat, I found this chapel not far from the exit. I admired the altar’s painting of St Sebastian by Domenichino (1631) and sat here as people, in groups or alone, came in to kneel at the altar. I didn’t realise until later that under the altar here is the tomb of Pope John Paul II (1920 -2005), but I could see that this was obviously a pilgrim’s destination. A statue of the sainted pope sits watching from on his throne to the side. I am not a Roman Catholic, I wasn’t always impressed by Pope John Paul II’s announcements, but I could also admire his courage and charisma. Whatever I feel about catholicism, I felt something here, more than just being rested and refreshed.

Outside, the sky was red, a shepherd’s delight, an awe-inspiring sight in an awesome place.

Impressive too was the flood-lit Castel Sant’Angelo on the other side of the River Tiber, across from St Peter’s. It was originally built by the Emperor Hadrian for his own mausoleum. It is another Rotunda in a more brutal style than the Pantheon, and it has served as a forbidding symbol of Imperial and Vatican power over the centuries. The ashes of Emperor Hadrian and all his successors were all buried here until the year 217. The last urn belonged to the assassinated Emperor Caracalla, one of the most tyrannical of all Roman Emperors. He set the bar so high that none of his successors could compete whit his reputation for cruelty. After the Fall of Rome, the castle/mausoleum became a papal prison a carrying on the tradition of cruelty, you might think. Executions were carried out there in a small inner courtyard, as in the last act of Puccini’s opera, Tosca. The opera that had begun its story down the road from here at the Basilica Sant’Andrea di Valle, as I described in part one of this blog. The tragic heroine, Floria Tosca, jumps to her death from the tower after her lover Mario Cavaradossi was tortured and then executed there by firing squad. Before he is shot, he sings another, his second, famous aria from up there, ‘È lucevan le stelle’ (‘The stars were shining’). Knowing he will die, he sings that he has never loved life so much. The second tenor aria in the opera, and the second of the two greatest of some of Puccini’s greatest arias for tenor. I couldn’t help humming it on my way back to the Pantheon. Here is Jonas Kaufmann again from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

E muoio disperato!

E non ho amato mai tanto la vita,

I die in desperation

and have never loved life so much!

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/e-lucevan-le-stelle-stars-were-shining.html

It wouldn’t be fair to Rome, if I didn’t finish this blog with a record of all the fun I’ve had in Roman restaurants over these two weeks. Rome has the most extraordinary history, often bloody and tyrannical. It has a genius culture beyond compare, often in spite of the bloody history and an architectural history that has defined in some way almost every building that has been designed since. All of that makes it an unmissable city, but one of the main reasons why anyone should think of coming here is what it is like today. The food, the wine, the good humour and the sheer fizz of eating out in this city, makes it party town. I can’t wait until I am lucky enough to return.

After dinner, there will be a final leisurely stroll, known as a passeggiata, back via a floodlit Pantheon, to the apartment and bed. Arriverderci Roma!

The post Two weeks in Rome – part two. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

On the 6th January 2020 I returned to Naples not realising it was going to be my last foreign journey anywhere for two years. On 31st January two Chinese tourists in Rome were tested positive for the Covid virus and the Italian government declared a state of emergency. The first case of Covid was documented in the UK that day too, followed by a series of lockdowns beginning in March.

Soon we were all to be grounded, all over the world, for what was to become the worst pandemic in a century. With hindsight, I am doubly happy that I had such a good time in Naples, and in Milan a month earlier, while it was still possible to leave my small but lovely English town of Lewes.

I was staying in a small apartment on the top floor of an old house in the Avvocata district of Naples – in a wonderfully atmospheric street round the corner from the historic centre of Naples. The district, the street and the house were all set high up on a hill above the city and, the apartment too was up several flights of stairs. It was a little nest at the top of a large many-branched tree, or so it felt living there. Cosy, in a word….and very Neapolitan.

The apartment was on two floors, or one floor with a loft bedroom, accessed by a ladder-type staircase which was all fine after my vertigo subsided – which it did by the second day.

In Avvocata I was never in any doubt that I was not just in Italy, but in Naples – and by now I was already thinking Napoli, not Naples.

The street, a lively short-cut for vespa scooters and macho motorbikes, also allowed a first glimpse every day of one of those dramatic and equally quick-moving, sun-dropping sunsets. Round the corner too, there was a handy life-size crucifix plus nun. Yes, this is Napoli.

It was a short down-hill stroll to the Museo Archeologico Nazionali di Napoli, the National Archaelogical museum of Naples. This was no dull storage place for crumbling rocks, dusty artefacts and broken pottery, it has quite simply one of the great art collections in the world.

The museum is home to not just some extraordinary artworks from the nearby remains of Pompeii (more of that in my next blog), but it also houses a collection of famous Greco-Roman sculptures known at the Farnese Marbles. The Farnese here being Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, later to become Pope Paul III (1534 – 1549), who purchased, confiscated or, let’s face it, stole, many of these important works from rich Renaissance families from all over Italy. The Farnese family, the Pope’s family, also became Dukes of Parma and then on the female side, a Queen of Spain. Her descendants became kings and queens of Naples and Sicily. Well done that Pope. Thus, the Farnese collection moved first from the Vatican to Madrid and then finally arrived in the baggage of Ferdinand IV of Naples. I. don’t know – these rich people! – nothing ever changes. We, however, have the benefit of seeing these amazing statues, probably Roman copies of Greek originals, which are among some of the most influential sculptures in Western art.

Pope Paul III and his Grandsons, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese and Ottavio Farnese, Duke of Parma in a painting by Titian (c.1546). This triple portrait can be seen in Naples’ other major art gallery, see below, with a major collection of other portraits by Titian.

Hercules, massive but exhausted after the last of his The Twelve Labours, leans on his club which is draped by the skin of the Nemean lion. This is probably a Roman copy, by Glykon, of an original Greek work, now lost, by Lysippos.

The two matching bronze statues of athletes-in-motion, found in the ruins of the Villa dei Papiri in Herculaneum, near to Pompeii, are Roman copies of 4th or 3rd-century-BC Greek originals. They will run forever.

This bronze head of Doryphorus, a Marlon Brando look-alike, is a find from the Villa of the Papyri in Pompeii – a Roman copy of one of the famous Spear-Bearer statue by the Polykleitos, a Roman copy of the statue with torso is also here at the Archaeological Museum.

Atlas was one of the colossal Titans of Greek mythology, condemned by Zeus to hold up the sky, not a globe of the world, but a spherical representation of the constellations of the stars. The statue, which is certainly colossal, is a 2nd-century-AD copy of the Greek original that is the probably the oldest surviving representation of the celestial skies. The museum put him into a mirrored space that emphases his size and, unsurprisingly, dwarves the humbled but impressed photographer.

Lastly, the Farnese Bull, the largest single sculpture recovered from antiquity, or so I read. It’s a first-century-AD copy of a second-century-BC Greek original, showing the death of Dirce, whose niece, Antiope, was impregnated by Zeus and gave birth to twin sons, Amphion and Zethus. Dirce hated her niece and ordered her to be killed, but, instead, Amphion and Zethus kill Dirce by tying her to the horns of a bull. The dog and the child are probably later additions, but there is no denying the vitality and drama of this masterpiece which can only be fully appreciated by seeing it from all angles.

Back outside, on a fine January day, Naples was showing off its ripe oranges that line even the most inner-city of its streets.

It is difficult not to stroll here, to take in not just the architecture and the verdancy, but to explore the churches, cafés and bars along the route.

Il Vero Bar del Professore, the true Professors’ Bar – as opposed to the false ones, I assume, was a very civilised place to stop for a coffee.

The Church of Pio Monte della Misericordia was the first stop in my pilgrimage around Naples’ collection of paintings by everyones’ favourite painter, Caravaggio, well, you know what I mean. Here in its original position, is Caravaggio’s Seven Works of Mercy, seen as if it was a private view, with no one else around.

I took the opportunity to look round the rest of the church which has a museum of church plate, chalices, monstrances , pots and pans. If you like these things, then you will find plenty of them here in Naples. I’m afraid I just thought of all the silver polishing.

Another church, another restaurant – I could get into the habit of this Neapolitan passeggiata (Italian for an evening stroll).

After a few days in the historic centre, this titan set of escalators at Piazza Garibaldi railway station reminded me that I was still living in the 21st century.

Walking down the Via Toledo, in Naples’ well-known Spanish quarter shopping street, I came across the second stop on my Caravaggio adventure. Here at the Palazzo Zevallos, is Caravaggio’s last painting, the darkly moody Martyrdom of Saint Ursula. Once again, I had left a crowded street to spend quality time, alone, with one of Caravaggio’s masterpieces. Here the King of the Huns, who has slaughtered her eleven thousand virgin companions, is bewitched by Ursula’s beauty and, even more so, by her modesty, says he will spare her life if she agrees to marry him. She refuses, so he kills her with a well-aimed arrow.

Caravaggio would have been familiar with these dark Naples streets and, maybe, they were threatening places in those days whereas now they are safer, atmospheric and intoxicating.

Intoxicating too is the Piazza Bellini, which is now a centre for excellent and unpretentious restaurants and bars and an unlikely place to encounter a statue of the great Sicilian opera composer, Vincenzo Bellini (1801 – 1835) – writer of some of my favourite operas – especially the almost perfect, Norma (1831). I think the highly romantic Bellini would be happy that his figure is at the centre of a slightly bohemian and edgy piazza where, I like to imagine, anything could happen.

Mostly this part of town is a student, or a student wannabe hangout and, at night, it is the vibrant place to be if you want to be cool – or fool yourself for a moment or two that you are cool, or were once.

Just a short walk from those revelling students, off a tiny street is another sharp Neapolitan contrast. The highly ornamented Cappella Sansevero, a bit too much Rococo for me and I wouldn’t have bothered looking inside if I hadn’t wanted to see the famous sculpture that is at its centre. The Veiled Christ, by the 18th century sculptor, Giuseppe Sanmartino, is an eerily realistic image that, once seen, is difficult to forget. It draws crowds to this little church – on the day I visited there was a queue out into the street, as if, at this time, they were lining up to go to a nightclub. Once inside, people stood in solemn silence, it was as if a real body was lying there.

After the solemnity of the chapel, it was just another street corner before, Naples’ street life sprang back into action with a fine group of street musicians – continuing a long tradition.

Then, as per usual by now, during this week in Naples, it was dinner and then a few drinks, or a few drinks too many, in the many dimly-lit and characterful bars in the Centro storico. Here, everyone, including me, I like to think, simply blends into the background like extras in a Caravaggio painting.

The next day, it was all blue skies and palm trees with the mildest of Italian January temperatures, when I made my way up to the highest point of Naples, the top of the mountain, the capo di monte.

The Capodimonte Gallery or, more correctly, the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte ( The Museum and Royal Forest), is Naples’ principal art gallery. Once a royal palace, now a people’s palace with art and recreation combined here – inside and out.

Here too was the final stop on my Neapolitan Caravaggio pilgrimage. Once again, I could admire the painting for as long as I wanted, in relative solitude, fully exposed to the drama and agony of this most dramatic and characteristic of Caravaggio emotional exercises in Chiaroscuro – the balance of light and shade.

I was alone too in this room, home to nine portraits by Titian. I felt like I could move in with a bed, a kitchen and a tv, and settle down here for life.

Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, Pop Paul III’s grandson, by Titian (c.1546)

Back in Avvocata, there was time for a glass of wine before bed and then, tomorrow, the journey back home to the UK. None of us knew then this was going to be the end of travelling for a couple of years.

The post Back in Naples – weeks before Covid -soon we were all told to stay home. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

Titian’s Six Masterpieces reunited after over 400 years

In early March this year, I was looking forward to going to see the National Gallery’s much anticipated Titian exhibition Love Death and Desire. The great Italian Renaissance painter’s six masterpieces painted for King Philip II’s private pleasure were sold off after his death and this exhibition was set to reunite them in one room for the first time in over 400 years.

Before I got there, pandemic hit and the exhibition closed after only three days. Thanks no doubt to a lot of anxious and dedicated arts curators and galleries, the paintings were allowed to wait together until we could go back in. This has now happened and the show will remain at the National Gallery until January 2021. After then it will travel to Boston and Madrid. Don’t miss it.

I booked tickets for 10th August and joined nine other people for our own very exclusive social-distanced viewing. We were honorary Kings of Spain, alone for a couple of delicious hours with these magnificent paintings. I hope, or do I, that the, not always very cheerful monarch who ordered the Spanish Armada got as much pleasure from them as we did.

Titian, or Tiziano Vecelli (c.1488/90 – 1576), was a favourite painter of Charles V (1500 – 1558) Holy Roman Emperor, King of Spain, and Philip’s father. When the old Habsburg emperor retired to a monastery and then died, the relationship between great artist and Europe’s most powerful monarch continued as young Prince Philip became King Philip II of Spain.

These rather grumpy portraits of Charles and Philip, show them as surprising enthusiasts for one of the most erotically-charged painters not only of the Renaissance but of any period. Titian, who looks pretty grumpy too in his self-portrait, had an instinct for putting sensuality into his work.

The National Gallery isn’t being sensationalist calling the show Love Death and Desire. All of these words are writ large in these late, so-called Poesie (poems) .

Titian was the master sensualist painter. Charles and Philip must have enjoyed having his provocative, but also philosophical work, hanging in their private rooms. Titian called the set of paintings for Philip, Poesie because he wanted to use painting as a visual form of poetry, expressing emotion and meaning through image and colour – sometimes verging on early predictions of abstract art and even Cubism.

In the self-portrait of himself as the old man who painted these works, we see the image of the profound artist, the famous man who was, to his mind, the equal of kings as well as his fellow artists. He was, as we can see in the Poesie paintings, exploring his own mature originality rather than merely following royal fashion.

His younger self-portrait gives us a clue to his intense sensitivity and, yes, sensuality. This is a young man who had felt the pleasures and pain of love and desire and possibly death too. We are lucky that this young man lived into his eighties or even nineties, his birth date is uncertain, still at work developing his inspiration and adding new levels of subtlety and ambiguity to his art. He was still at work when he and his son succumbed to the plague in 1576.

King Philip II (1527 – 1598) looks all too human in the troubled portrait of him in his early twenties. He’s a young Actaeon, perhaps, who sees more than he understands. Here is the young prince known for his passionate and voluptuous interest in women. The elderly Titian knew Philip well and understood his desires and frustrations.

The Poesie paintings were, lavish studies of the nude, designed for Philip’s private apartments. They were not exactly the kind of soft porn posters seen on the walls of modern adolescent males, but, amongst their many meanings, their sexual allure is unmissable. The king’s prudish descendants were responsible for selling off the paintings separately after his death. It is only this year that they have been brought back together again so that we, like Philip, can enjoy them in the same room, as they were intended.

The six paintings, based on stories from classical mythology were conceived as a set with underlying themes of, as the National Gallery, calls them, love, death and desire, and also, of course, about the impact of the gods on their playthings, human beings. Maybe there were lessons here for the King. Royal power, uncontrolled, includes the power to destroy, Titian warns. The crown should be worn with wisdom and compassion.

The first of the Poesie is Danaë, the story, like most of the six, is based on one from the Roman poet Ovid (born 43 BC) in his Metamorphoses, where the princess is locked in a tower by her father, Arcas, the King of Argos, to prevent her having a child. The famously randy god Jupiter can’t be kept out. He appears as a shower of gold which descend from heaven and impregnate her with the baby who would become the hero, Perseus. It is quite clear what Danaë thinks about this. Her face is a mix of fear, anticipation and desire as the gold descends into her opened thighs and her fingers and toes tighten on her silky sheets. She has become one of the most famous and influential nudes in art history., reappearing in, for example, the work of Goya and Manet.

Danaë’s maid, an older woman, tries to catch some of the gold in her shawl – maybe because they are gold or, possibly, because they are the god’s potent juices which might have the power to restore her own youthful beauty.

The picture is smaller than the others because the top part was cut off after Philip’s time. Luckily there is a Netherlandish copy showing that in the original painting Jupiter was seen in the sky with his symbol, the eagle, also a symbol of the Habsburg empire. The eagle may have appealed to Philip, but it looks awkwardly stuck on and, thus, maybe, the next owners of the painting made an aesthetic decision to cut it. Certainly, without the god, the golden shower has an abstract subtlety that, like Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, holds more power, rather than less, in its truncation.

The second painting, Venus and Adonis, is also a tale from Ovid and it also tells of the dangers of love between gods and humans. Venus, the goddess of love, has sustained an accidental injury when she was grazed by one of Cupid’s darts. The result was her falling in love with the handsome young huntsman, Adonis, who, even in his own opinion, was more handsome than the gods. Cupid is seen sleeping idly under a tree while Venus pleads with her lover not to go hunting.

He is bursting with confidence and pulls away from her as she swivels her body to pull him back. We can tell by his hunting dogs that danger is afield. The dog on the right can smell blood – it will be Adonis’ – as darkening clouds begin to blot out the blue sky.

Adonis has the muscular body of a young man but also the innocently arrogant face of a child. He pulls one way while Venus pulls the other in Titian’s version of a tug-of-love. Her naked body is displayed, almost both front and back, simultaneously, pre-echoing Cubism, and challenging the limitations of a two-dimensional canvas. Her pose, swivelling provocatively on her seat, legs splayed, buttocks squeezed, is the very image of frustrated passion after what appears to have been an equally impassioned sexual encounter.

There is another innocent young man in the next picture, Diana and Actaeon, which is also taken from a story by Ovid. Diana is the goddess of chastity as well as being goddess of hunting. Actaeon is another of those handsome young huntsmen whose bodies have grown up quicker than their brains. He is out hunting for stags when he is separated from his friends and stumbles onto the scene of the naked goddess bathing with her equally nude ladies-in-waiting. The young man’s expression shows his amazement, his confusion but, also, his fear. If you study Diana’s expression, you can see why. Never has the female nude shown such imperious anger. His fate is sealed in this brief but dramatic moment. He is about to be turned into a stag and then devoured by his own hunting dogs. A punishment much too severe for the young man’s accidental act of trespass. Monarchs beware, Titian says, one day you too will be judged for your acts of cruelty. The brutal reality of being torn apart by hounds, would not have been lost on hunt-loving King Philip II.

Diana is at it again in the next painting, Diana and Callisto, usually seen as the second half of a pair with the Actaeon picture. It shows one of the dramatic highlights from Ovid’s tale of the unfortunate nymph Callisto. She is another of Diana’s ladies-in-waiting. She has been raped and impregnated by the god Jupiter. Yes, him again. Her pregnancy is exposed in the most demeaning and cruel manner when she is stripped and forced to join the other bathers in their nudity before Diana expels her from her court.

The painting has suffered over time and, unfortunately Callisto’s face is the most damaged, but not so much that we can’t identify her agony as she is stripped and exposed in front of her cruel judge.

Callisto’s child by Jupiter grew up to be Arcas, King of Argos, the same king, as in the first picture, who locked up his daughter Danaë where she too was to experience Jupiter’s sexual passion. Arcas, like Actaeon and Adonis, was also an enthusiastic huntsman and when Callisto is turned into a bear, she became the oblivious King Arcas’ intended prey before Jupiter relents and turns them both into constellations of stars – Ursa Major ( the Great Bear) and Arctophylax (The Herdsman).

The drama of the scene, as in many of Titian’s works is not lessened by the use of the nude figures as a variety of innovative experiments in depictions of the human body that will have consequences later in the works of, amongst others, Rubens, Cézanne and even Picasso.

The next picture, Perseus and Andromeda, also draws on a story from Ovid. This time it is Perseus, the son of Danaë and Jupiter begotten in that golden shower, who is also therefore the grandson of Arcas, King of Argos and nephew of poor Callisto, who, by now, is shining from the night sky as a constellation of stars and, believe it or not, he was also the grandfather of Hercules.. Titian portrays him as a youthful hero with superhero characteristics as he plunges from the sky to free a damsel in distress and to kill the threatening monster.

Andromeda had the same problem with the gods as unfortunate Adonis. Her mother claimed that her daughter was more beautiful than the already very beautiful Nereids (the sea nymphs) and being more beautiful than the gods is never a good thing. Andromeda, naked, of course, is chained to a rock as a tasty morsel for the local sea monster. Perseus happens to be passing and sees this beautiful woman and, as in all such stories, immediately falls in love with her and kills the monster. He became one of the superstar monster-slayers of classical myth after his famous killing of Medusa, she of the serpent hair and the killing look. Perseus’ polished shield, that mirrored Medusa’s death look back on her, is here used to in the attack on the monster.

Monsters, threatening clouds, rough seas and chains are combined as dark contrasts to the highly vulnerable Andromeda’s white skin. She shines out from her background of black rock. She dominates one side of the canvas. The other side is bisected by the diving hero who is as over-dressed in yellow and pink, as Andromeda is naked. He is also as athletically active as she is passively helpless. The world of classical gods, as Titian tells us, our world, is a dangerous place when the elements turn nasty.

Andromeda demonstrates that Titian never tires of finding interesting and provocative ways of posing his nudes. She is allowed to turn her captivity into a sensuous dance of seduction, even a table dance, for her young rescuer’s benefit. Perseus has the look of another Adonis or Actaeon, an impetuous and muscled youth. His fate was brighter than their’s. He actually got to marry Andromeda and live happily with her, if not ever after, for a very long time.

In the last of these six pantings, The Rape of Europa, Titian gives us frolicking cherubs who are even more airborne than Perseus. They are excited to see the fun going on beneath them in the sea. Another mischievous cherub is riding a dolphin in imitation of the main action. Jupiter, yes, him, disguised as a bull, abducts the princess, Europa. The cherubic observers might find it fun in the way that Cupid enjoys playing with human emotions, but this is serious business. The bull is stealing the alarmed princess and taking her across the sea to Crete where her rape will lead to the birth of a baby, Minos.

He will become the first king of Crete. Thus founding the long and often bloody history of Europe, the continent named after the unfortunate Europa. In Titian’s time, and so often since, Europe was a turbulent place dominated by its most powerful monarch, Philip, King of Spain.

Jupiter’s bull is a beautiful garlanded creature who beguiles Europa and persuades her to go for a ride on his back. She is expecting the kind of pleasure that I used to enjoy on a seaside donkey-ride. Once she mounts the beautiful beast, the awful truth dawns and she clings onto the bull for her life as she’s carried away, followed by a menacing sea monster, reminiscent of the one in the Perseus and Andromeda painting.

To suit Titian’s plan for all six paintings, Europa is wearing the loosest of revealing dresses which offers her body very little cover. This is the kind of clothing you could call the new naked. While the cherubs frolic, Jupiter looks round. We see just one of his eyes. It shows the god’s ambivalent emotions. Is that look lustful and yet fearful? Is he looking at us, incriminating us, and, maybe Philip too?

These ambiguities are exactly why the paintings were designed as poetry where not everything is as it seems. If King Philip II was meant to learn lessons from the Poesie, then maybe he was meant to recognise the moral as well as political responsibilities and dangers in ruling an empire. We too can see ourselves in the writhing body of Europa as she is dragged against her will into what looks like chaos.

A seventh painting, The Death of Actaeon, was never a part of the six Poesie. It is included in the exhibition because there is documentary evidence that Titian had planned to include it in the series but then either changed his mind or never got round to it in time before his career took him elsewhere. The ageing and increasingly experimental artist produced one of his most memorable works in this weirdly disturbing picture with its muted brown and burnt orange tones and the extreme economy of the brushwork.

The hunting dog behind Diana, if it is Diana, has blurred legs which highlight the speed of its movement. Merely hinted at too is the shadowy figure of the disappearing horseman seen in the distance through silhouetted tree trunks and the shimmering abstractions of foliage. Actaeon himself, in mid-transformation from living human into dead stag, is at the moment of his gruesome death, is painted in an almost sketchy style. His legs, sprouting fur are merely hinted at in a scene that is a minimalist paraphrase of a catastrophe in a moment of flashing imagery.

Diana, the goddess of hunting, is deprived of the string for her bow and even an arrow. Has it already sped away towards her prey? She is over-dressed compared to the female forms in the other pictures but her right breast is revealed. Maybe is was because the picture was meant for Philip’s private rooms, or just because this is a Titian. The exposed breast is made the centre of attention, a symbol, as in Europa’s picture, of the nude barely hidden beneath a dress that ripples with the speed of the action. That breast is a reminder of what Actaeon has seen and what the sight has cost him.

The ferocious goddess of chastity is also a relentless hunter and here, she is sending one last and redundant arrow into the savaged body of hapless Actaeon. We are all warned, I think. Beware of the gods and other powers-that-be in a world where danger is real and life itself can be lost in a flickering moment.

We will probably never know what Philip thought as he gazed at these paintings in his private room. I wonder if he understood Titian’s implied messages in these painted poems.

As the king grew older, maybe pressures of state weighed him down with anxiety and disappointment. Ageing may have led to the realisation that his youthful passion and hope for the love of a woman had been left unfulfilled by dead wives and dethroned mistresses. He may have taken some comfort from Titian’s great parade of nudes, but he would also have seen their warnings. No matter how great the ruler, under the trappings of state, and no matter how who thrilling the passions of youth, we are all as vulnerable as Actaeon and Callisto – whoever we are, our destiny is not in our own hands and our lives share the same ending.

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I have finally got round to writing a blog now that, wisely or foolishly, the great British lockdown is being eased. Until now, I haven’t quite managed to write about this, the strangest of times. I was last on here in February for the launch of my poetry collection, Remembering Blue, http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-poetry-colin-bell-remembering-blue.htm After that memorable event, my last public adventure was when I went to London to see the impressive Troy exhibition at the British Museum.

Then the curtain came down on my life outside my home here in Lewes.

Here are some photographs and thoughts to mark the passage from then to now. Just one person’s view on the extraordinary and, for many, the often tragic interruption to normal life that was, and still is, Covid-19. I know that I have been very lucky.

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Diana and Actaeon (1556 – 1559)  by Titian

Titian’s great painting of Diana and Actaeon has been one of my favourite paintings ever since I went to the great Titian exhibition at London’s National Gallery. It tells the story of how the young man Actaeon, who is out hunting stags, stumbles upon the goddess Diana at her secret bathing pool. She is outraged to have her nakedness on display and in her anger turns Actaeon into a stag with unfortunate consequences. It is, of course, one of the most famous stories from the Roman poet’s collection of stories gathered from Greek legends and known as The Metamorphoses. I decided to write a set of three Fibonacci poems on this and two other stories from Ovid and they have just been published in that excellent poetry journal The Fib Review.

Other stories in Ovid’s work are also very well known, maybe none more than Narcissus, the handsome young man who is loved by all you see him but who can’t return offered love. He is cursed by the gods to fall in love with his own reflected image. This has become the second of my three Ovid poems.

Narcissus (c.1597 – 1598) by Caravaggio

The third is Alcyon and Ceyx, the dramatic story of how Ceyx, Alcyon’s young husband is shipwrecked by the angry god Jupiter, and his drowned body floats close to shore where his wife sees it and rushes to save him. The god relents and turns them both into immortal birds. I hope you enjoy the metamorphosis of these great stories into my humble Fibs.

Ceyx and Alcyone (1768) by Richard Wilson

You can read all three Fibonacci poems and poems by many other Fibonacci poets in thie new issue of The Fib Review http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell1.html

You can also see the brilliant animated film of the last of my three poems made by Joseph Nussbaum – here it is:

The post My 3 latest Fibonacci Poems are Tales from Ovid’s The Metamorphoses. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I can’t tell you about the wonders of Venice, especially as they struck me on my recent two week holiday there, without showing you some of the art. There wasn’t enough time to see everything let alone digest so much but here are some of the highlights I discovered in three special buildings. First of all the Scuola Grande di San Rocco – the Italian equivalent of a medieval Guild, dedicated to Saint Roch, or, in Italian, San Rocco, the Frenchman who was invoked after his death during an outbreak of plague which then, miraculously ceased. Venice had more than its fair share of plagues in the medieval period, so San Rocco was especially honoured and the Scuola di San Rocco,  a charitable institution set up to aid the victims of pestilence, is a truly spectacular realization of that ideal. Visually magnificent due to the series of Jacopo Tintoretto’s paintings made for the ceilings and walls of this opulent building between the years 1564 – 1587

Next door to the Scuola is the church known as I Frari, worth a visit in itself but famous for one of the greatest paintings of the Venetian Renaissance – Titian’s Assumption Of The Virgin beautifully restored since my last visit here and now gloriously radiant by the high altar.

Even if you’re not a fan of 16th Century religious paintings, there is a sublimity and drama to this painting that sublimates the silliness of stories about miraculous ascents into Heaven. Those dark clouds or drapes shielding God from those below always stir me with foreboding. This is all about mystery, fear, and joy, to me.

The other essential desintation for any lover of Renaissance art is Venice’s Accademia Gallery – housed in what used to be a convent and benefiting from the wonderful ecclesiastical ceilings preserved from the building’s original purpose.

The early Venetian paintings from the 15th Century look wonderful in this setting achieving something of the spirit of their original purpose.

Later, you will find some of my favourite Venetian paintings. Cool, poignant and tranquil works by Giovanni Bellini, the very palpable painting of the great Titian and Giorgione at his mysterious best as well as my new enthusiasms, the dramatic style of Jacopo Tintoretto and the sensuality of the Renaissance Renoir, Veronese.

There was a special exhibition of the work of the early Baroque Venetian artist Carlo Saraceno (1579 – 1620) while I was at the Accademia. I was unfamiliar with this artist’s paintings but he was inspired by the lighting effects of Caravaggio but brought his own very individual sense of drama to paintings like his San Rocco Cured By The Angel. Note the dog, usually associated with San Rocco, this animal is reputed to have been given special power to lick San Rocco’s wounds and to heal them. It’s appropriate enough to finish this tour with an image of San Rocco, a very Venetian saint.

STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

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When I woke up the other weekend, I had forgotten that I was in Venice but the view from my hotel room soon reminded me.

On my trip round Switzerland and Italy, I had come to Venice for the weekend and found a small hotel off a back street in a part of the often very over-visited city that was definitely far from the madding crowd.

I was even able to do my early morning taichi on a nearly deserted space by the Grand Canal with a backdrop of essential gondolas.

Then, panama hat essential of course,  it was time for a wander round this wonderfully beautiful place which can also be infuriatingly complicated to navigate with its crisscross of canals, tiny alleyways interspersed by startlingly dramatic glimpses of magnificent medieval and Renaissance palaces.

This is the city of the great Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni (1707 – 1793) whose comedies, especially  The Servant of Two Masters (Il servitore di due padroni), written in 1745, can still make us laugh in the modern theatre – well when I saw it, I loved it and laughed a lot. Goldoni’s comedies are full of intrigues, confused identity, stolen back street conversations and all the things that we can still imagine in this labyrinthine place.It is quite right that Goldoni has a very jolly statue right at the heart of the town.

This is a place for confusion certainly, intrigue too no doubt, and, as I wandered down small alleyways, over tiny canal bridges and then found that I wasn’t where I thought I was, I was quite convinced that Goldoni found his inspiration here.

It is also, of course, very beautiful but, if you are there in August like I was, it is essential to keep away from the crowded parts if you want to savour the atmosphere of the place. Venice is crowded for a reason, it is really somewhere everyone should see at least once in their lifetimes but, as I was lucky enough to have been here a few times before and seen Saint Mark’s square on a rainy November day when I was the only person there, I decided that I would keep well away from the crowds and that meant trying to make sure I was never within five minutes walk of  the main square or the Rialto Bridge that leads to it. San Marco is large enough to accommodate, or so it seems, every other visitor here at this time, except me. It is great that most tourists in Venice stick together – almost literally in this heat.

Elsewhere there were all those moody streets, some too narrow for more than one person at a time.

The play of light on water and the shadows on Venice’s wonderfully decaying bricks was always changing and alluring…

and those tempting little bridges ahead always drew me onwards, deeper and deeper into this ancient urban landscape.

Looking up at those shuttered windows or wondering what was going on behind closed doors, I often thought of Goldoni and sometimes more macabre thoughts too.

Then, seeing a church tower behind a row of houses, I decided to find out where I was.

There were two people inside this vast and awe-inspiring building which had plunged me into darkness as I stepped in from the blazing sunshine outside. I had read in my guidebook that the Venetian painter Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488- 1576),  better known as Titian,  had once painted an altar piece for this church but I assumed that it would have been packed off to a major art gallery centuries ago but, no, there it was. Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin Mary, in its original setting, in a church that I nearly passed by.

It is easy to get swamped by religious paintings in Italy but this dramatic masterpiece stopped me in my tracks. I, maybe for the first time, sympathised with Mary as she is whisked up into Heaven. She is leaving a panic-stricken and distressed crowd behind her lit with a lurid front light whilst she is drawn upwards to a terrifyingly golden sky with the dark clouds of her maker directly above her head. She is disturbed, confused and awe-struck. It is a frightening image of death.

Then I was outside again, walking through empty squares……

….to the sound of distant and very near bells ringing in conversation with each other over an other-wise silent car-free ambience.

There were times when I thought that Venice had really lost all of its visitors and then I came across Giorgio.

This solitary gondoliero was looking very morose until we agreed a price for a forty minute gondola trip around the Venetian canals.

He led the way down another alleyway to where he moored his gondola……

…and soon I was seeing Venice as it is meant to be seen – from the water.

Giorgio cheered up remarkably as soon as he got into action and maneuvered his gondola down various canals which were only navigable by boat.

This, I suggest, is the true spirit of Venice….even if a gondola ride is also the ultimate in tourist luxuries.

We were constantly travelling between darkness and light……

to the excitingly broad and palatial Grand Canal itself.

….and there it was, the Rialto bridge which leads to Saint Mark’s Square with its glorious Byzantine cathedral.

You follow this guy if you want to…..he was one of the hundreds of tour guides leading long and exhausted looking files of weary tourists around Venice’s main attractions.

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