The Stuff that Slips Away

I started taking yoga classes a few weeks ago. It was about time, flexibility has become something that lives only as a vague and distant memory, but that’s not what I want to talk about. (And don’t worry, there will be no yoga photos. Nobody, not you, not me, wants to see that.) Anyway, while I value and enjoy the practice, one of the cooler aspects of the experience is the fact that the studio is in one of the upper rooms of the Chiostro de Bramante, a three story courtyard and accompanying structure designed by Bramante, the original architect of St. Peter’s Basilica. It’s a lovely building with a rather unusual design of more columns on the second than the first floor.
Cooler still is the building next door, the church Santa Maria Della Pace, the current façade with its semicircular, columned porch, being the work of the baroque architect and painter Pietro da Cortona (more on him later). While the outside of the church has a stately and harmonious grace, it’s what’s inside that draws the most interest. Partially because the church houses a small but remarkable fresco by Rafael but also because it is just about impossible to get inside.

There’s a sign out front that states it’s open from 10:00 AM to 12:45 PM daily but prior to a couple weeks ago, I’d never seen the gates unlocked. For that matter, I didn’t even know anyone who’d ever been inside. (Although I have to admit that’s not usually something that comes up in most conversations.) However, and I don’t know whether it’s because I’m in the neighborhood now a few mornings a week, or because the custodian has given up over sleeping for Lent, but I’ve been inside twice in the last few weeks although since then it’s been locked up tight every day. (If you are in town, you can catch an angled glimpse of the fresco through a window installed in the tea room of the Chiostro.)



The Story of Aeneas (about as close as you can get)

 Santa Maria della Pace isn’t the only building holding impressive works but for all intents and purposes blocked off from the general public. The aforementioned Pietro da Cortona seems to be particularly snake-bit in that regard. Along with Bernini and Boromini he was one of three key baroque architects, but his current popularity and recognition lag far behind his contemporaries in part because his two key buildings, della Pace and Santi Luca e Martina, are basically never open. Not only an architect, he is better remembered as a painter of frescos but his fame doesn’t fare much better in that regard. His most important work, The Story of Aeneas, adorns the ceiling of the Long Gallery of Palazzo Pamphilj, which currently serves as the Brazilian Embassy and isn’t open to the public. It can only be seen through the high windows that front Piazza Navonna. Thankfully his fresco in the Palazzo Barberini can be viewed directly and without obstruction.
Of course, there’s always the chance that a change of policy or organization will open some of these buildings up. Last fall some new areas of the Colosseum were sporadically reopened to the public. The few remaining rooms of Nero’s Domus Aurea are currently quarantined for safety’s sake but they were open to the public just a few years ago and probably will be again before too long. Some say that only about 30% of the city has been excavated so who knows what else will turn up.
Still, there are plenty places that aren’t coming back. If you walk up the Palatine Hill and look through the ruins of Domitian’s Palace, you find just enough to intellectually get an idea of how magnificent a building it was, but it’s been little more than floor plan since the Normans wrecked the joint back in the 12th century. Don’t get me wrong, I love walking through the ruins of this city but looking at the forum at night and mentally trying to reconstruct it is a different experience entirely than walking into a near-fully preserved building like the Pantheon. I hear grunts of appreciation on the hill and in the forum, in the Pantheon I hear gasps.
When I was kid, I was particularly captivated by the Colossus of Rhodes. I remember reading about all seven wonders of the ancient world but the Colossus was the one that really captured my imagination. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the renderings always showed this inaccurately huge statue astride the harbor entrance. Regardless, I had a difficult time accepting that it no longer was and that actually may have been my first protracted experience of yearning (but I could be getting carried away).

From the sublime to the ridiculous, lots of things don’t last, get lost, or we just miss ‘em by that much. I remember visiting the Parthenon back in the 70’s and wondering if the mammoth statue of Pallas Athena would ever be retrieved from its watery resting spot somewhere in the Atlantic and what it might look like now. Similarly, but not at all, a couple years prior, half way through an all-night road trip from Granville, Ohio to Austin, TX, I sat staring into the darkness of Natchez Trace State Park in TN, where a posted sign informed me that the world’s largest pecan tree was somewhere just beyond the reach of my headlights. (Actually, I didn’t much care about the pecan tree but I know a metaphor when I don’t see one.)
One way or another, things slip away. There’s a great but little seen movie called Funny Bones in which one of the characters asks “Why is it that all the good things are in the past?” Fair question, but where else would they be? The future’s an unknown and the present moment is such a small window (probably a good thing), most of what we know is in the past and often out of reach. I remember hearing some smart guy say that all literature is about the loss of the past. Off the top of my head I can think of a number of things that I really miss or missed entirely. The original McDonald’s fries, the United States steel industry, and the Pittsburg Crawfords warming up with a game of shadowball immediately come to mind.
There’s an interesting exchange in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, itself currently being revived on Broadway. At one point, a young and brilliant character bursts into tears while studying her lessons and when asked as to their cause by her callow and not as brilliant tutor, she responds that she is weeping for the lost volumes from the great library of Alexandria. He’s unruffled by her concern, responding matter-of-factly that over time other people have rewritten them. There is, of course, a lot of truth to his point, but probably not enough to invalidate that feeling of loss. Ideas do float around and come back again but the manifestations are a onetime thing. When the Taliban destroyed those Buddhas a few years back, it didn’t change the basic tenants of that religion but even the Dalai Lama said that was a very hard thing to accept.
Then again, sometimes things that you would swear were gone, come back again. Did anybody who remembered Bonomo Turkish Taffy expect to see it back on the market? In the fall of ’09, archeologists actually found Nero’s famous dining room with its revolving constellation studded ceiling, a structure that had drifted into near mythology. I suspect that one of these days somebody is going to turn up an old kinescope of a shadowball routine, and for that matter, I was reading the other week that after carefully sifting through the pieces, researchers were reasonably certain that they could reconstruct at least one of those Buddhas.
So there’s comfort in that. I doubt that fifty years ago, anybody expected that we would see the Titanic again. Now if only the same holds true for my flexibility.