Raphael’s School of Athens was my favourite painting in the Vatican Museums. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement seemed so overblown and vindictive by comparison. It was my first opportunity to take a close look at the paintwork which was fresh and understated, not super smooth as you might expect from a Raphael.
But Morandi’s still lives – one of which included a blue cylindrical mallet alongside his more usual muted-colour domestic objects – seemed more moving to me than the grand set pieces. Although he went for such apparently simple subjects, Morandi was as philosophical about his subject matter as Raphael and Michelangelo:
I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.
Giorgio Morandi (1890-1964)
The ‘Unswept Floor’ Mosaic
The artist Heraclitus, who designed the ‘unswept floor’ mosaic made by Sosos of Pergamon, Greece, was equally skilled in evoking our confusion between appearance and reality. I wonder how many times a servant, sweeping up after a real banquet, mistook the actual debris of feasting for one the playful depictions of discarded shells, bones, fruits and nuts.
It was found in the ruins of a villa on the Aventine Hill in Rome, built during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, (117 to 138 A.D.) but the mosaic has been dated to three centuries earlier.
Links
Vatican Museums, you can book online to avoid the queues, although there weren’t any long queues when we arrived at about 9.45 a.m., and I’d recommend going as early as you can manage and preferably at a quieter time of year.