Art Sights of Sicily

            Our eight-day visit to Malta and Sicily was co-sponsored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so it stands to reason that art would be a major focus of our trip, at least when we weren’t on board the magnificent schooner Sea Cloud. These are among the memories:

            1. Valley of Temples, Agrigento. We read that there are more Greek temples in Sicily than there are in Greece, and this ridge, with five temples in different states of ruin, would be hard to beat, numerically or esthetically. The setting is spectacular, worthy of the gods who were worshipped: the plain below stretches off to the sea; the modern city is set apart, on the hill rising above, but the temples have a vast area unto themselves. The best-preserved, the Temple of Concord, is a thing of beauty, dating from 450 B.C. in the heart of the Greek Golden Age. It simply can’t take a bad picture. The Temple of Hercules is a century older, and the columns that remain are not as graceful. When I derided this lack of elegance to our two German-born archaeologists, Susanne and Alexandra, they both said they preferred this example, where you could see the architect/artists striving, learning. By the time of Concord, the Greeks had obviously mastered the form, which took some of the excitement away. For them.

            2. Perseus Krater, Regional Archaeological Museum of Agrigento. Mark Stansbury-O’Donnell, the University of St. Thomas classical art specialist, told us the week before we left how eager he was to see this vase, by the Boston-Philae artist; so I thought of this as a grail I would have to dig out of the museum bowels. Instead, we found it in its own vitrine, the subject of our tour guide’s presentation, and I couldn’t take a picture until the groups had cleared away. It is remarkable, first, as a white-ground krater, with white-ground, a fugitive medium, mainly used by the Greeks on burial ceramics, like the leukythoi that capture mourners’ tears before being interred. Alexandra estimated that there are only about 25 extant. More remarkable is the delicacy of the drawing – the wings on Perseus’s feet have the light touch of a Matisse or Picasso line – and the psychology of Perseus’s expression. Our guide claimed the artist captured the moment that Perseus’s lust for Andromeda turns to love. Maybe so, maybe not, but the image creates a remarkable moment of affinity between a Greek artist and a modern viewer, 2,400 years apart. A second thrill at this museum was seeing a marble child’s sarcophagus from the 2d century A.D. with a composition that recalled Poussin’s Death of Germanicus.

            3. Caravaggio’s The Execution of St. John the Baptist, Valetta (Malta).  The chance to see two large and major canvases by Caravaggio that never travel was a significant selling point for this trip, and while one was a major disappointment, the other was compelling, but as an introduction only. The problem in both instances was the distance from which it was necessary to view the paintings. The Burial of St. Lucy, in Syracuse, is not only one of Caravaggio’s darkest works, it was temporarily displayed as the altar in a church without spotlights. Only after letting our eyes adjust a long time was it even possible to make out the main figures. The impact was zero. The Beheading of St. John the Baptist is a more interesting work to begin with: the main actors are arranged in a hemisphere in the lower left quadrant, with, again, a massive dark background, and two figures in the upper right looking on through prison bars. (Our guide called them soldiers; my book calls them prisoners.) Because the viewing public is kept 50 feet from the canvas, it is big enough to decipher, but the facial expressions are clearer in reproductions. The originality of Caravaggio’s vision and the torture of his psyche are clear enough; but the main benefit of seeing both works in situ is the personal connection I will feel when I am exposed to them in books or prints in the future.

            4. Annunciation, by Antonello da Messina, Palazzo Bellomo, Syracuse. In marked contrast to the Caravaggios, the Antonello painting is newly restored, brilliantly lit, and can be viewed at leisure, albeit through a case, from a distance of less than two feet. (The case, however, is transparent enough that Jerry Gaab, the serious photographer on our trip, bumped his camera into it. As at most of our museum stops, photography was prohibited, but policing was lax, to say the least.) Unfortunately, much of the lower portion has been lost, but what remains is as pure a Renaissance picture as you will find. Gabriel’s and Mary’s faces are duly angelic, the room is pristine, and what is so intriguing are the glimpses through the barred windows of life as usual taking place: people boating on the lake, etc. The National Museum exploited the work’s importance by placing it in a darkened gallery, with related objects around it: for instance, a Book of Hours similar to the one Mary had been reading in Antonello’s depiction is in a nearby case, under similar halogen spotlight. There was nothing else of this quality in the museum (or, for that matter, that we saw in Sicily) but there were several other sculptural Annunciations that would have merited inclusion in the dossier show.

            5. The Palatine Chapel, Palermo. Jerri Dodds, one of our lecturers, is expert on the hybridization of Medieval art styles, and this could serve as her textbook. It was also, it seemed, the main reason to visit Palermo, a city of traffic, postwar housing, ugly office buildings and considerable confusion. (With so much unemployment in Palermo, wondered our guide, why are there so many cars and motorcycles drinking up expensive gas on every street? One highlight was watching a doubleparked nun creating gridlock at a main intersection.) Moorish art and Norman art melded in beautiful tilework, mosaics, a “stalactite” ceiling and Byzantine scenes from the Old Testament. The fauna surrounding the building was lush and exotic, South American in origin, adding to the Arabian Nights atmosphere. It was hard to focus on any one artwork, but the overall effect was dazzling.

            6. Cathedral, Monreale. Having viewed this back-to-back with the Palatine Chapel, it is hard to keep straight, in memory, the mosaics and Norman-Moorish decorations of this edifice, built only 40 years later, also in the 12^th century. There cannot be two more important examples of this style of art in the world, can there? Cosmati pavement of beautiful Moorish designs adorned the floors. The mosaics of the Old and New Testament seemed more assured than Palermo’s; a six-part series on Noah was especially fun. The cloister featured beautifully decorated columns, in gold and colored glass, in the arcade, with interestingly carved capitals, but this seemed no different than examples we were familiar with from southern France. On the other hand, the exterior of the apse was as pure a definition of Norman-Moorish architecture as you will ever see. Without a good view, I particularly admired the six figures on the altar from 1771, the metalwork (I was told, but can’t confirm) of Luigi Valadier, in whose workshop the MIA’s Vincenzo Coaci trained.

            7. Temple of Segesta, from Trapani. Segesta the city was destroyed by the Saracens in 1000 A.D. and now, as Michelin describes it, the temple “stands alone among mountains cleft with ravines and scorched by the sun. The impressive silence is broken only by the wind and goat bells.” We didn’t hear goat bells, perhaps because of the many tour groups. Even so, the temple stood majestic and worth both the drive and the short hike. This was another “perfect” Doric monument, with 36-column peristyle, from 430 B.C. From any angle, including the parking lot below and the hillside above, one could admire the perfect proportion and golden hue. The exquisite rhythm of triglyphs and metopes was broken only by the occasional pigeon, landing on the frieze as they have for centuries.

            8. Archaeological Park, Syracuse. Of the several theaters we saw – Taormina, Segesta – this was the best, cut into the limestone hillside that served as a quarry. Nearby was our only amphitheater, and it, too, was a beauty, with the green grass floor setting off the white seats. The Ear of Dionysius, a huge Richard Serra-like curve carved into the limestone was just as monumentally scaled. To have this all in a verdant park setting in the middle of the city, with birds calling and paths beckoning, made this a theme park where history came alive.

            9. Piazza del Duomo, Syracuse. The streets of Ortygia, the “old city” of Syracuse, are narrow and winding. Little sunlight gets in, and when cars tried to bring elderly congregants to Sunday mass, they couldn’t turn around and got stuck, under our noses. What a surprise, then, to come upon the piazza in front of the cathedral – open, bright, with handsome two- and three-story palazzi in a facing crescent row. So much for the Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Normans; we were reminded that no one designs better piazzas than the Italians.

            10. Hypogeum, Hal Saflieni (Malta). The world’s only know prehistoric underground temple, this rose from fascinating archaeology, with its feast tables and in-wall burial niches, to the status of art because of the architectural elements that the mysterious creators had carved into the subterranean walls five thousand years ago. The false fronts of Petra came to mind, although here the style was basic post-and-lintel, beautiful in the installation’s lighting which evoked the torchlight that would’ve created magic. The echo chamber that perfectly resonated my basso “ommm” was early aural art, as well.

            11. Dancing Satyr, Mazara del Vallo. Full-length Greek bronze statues are among the most amazing works of art that exist. There may only be a dozen, yet the ones that have survived, often miraculously, are so different, so sophisticated, and often so lifelike. I am thinking particularly of the Riace warriors, which I was fortunate to see when they were first displayed in Florence, and the boxer in Rome. The MIA’s Roman marble copy of the Doryphoros can only make you imagine the power of Polykleitos’s original bronze, long lost. So I couldn’t pass up the chance to see the newest addition to this canon, a Dancing Satyr fished up from the Sicilian Channel in 1998, painstakingly cleaned and now installed in its own museum in the seaport town of Mazara. It has none of the power of the best Riace warrior, and the bright white of its eyes are disconcerting. Somehow, also, I don’t think it was meant to be looked up at, raised on a pedestal. The leg that touches the ground is missing, and an arm was lost in the recovery process, but there are other body parts, including an intact phallus and gorgeous buttocks that you can linger on. For me, an extended big toe was the strongest part of the piece, perhaps because it was so real, perhaps because it was closest to eye level. In short, it was a remarkable object, but mainly as an addition to my personal collection of Greek bronzes (unless, as some suggest, this is Roman).

            12. St. John’s Co-Cathedral, Valetta. What a spectacular ceiling, the Baroque in full flower, adorned in paint by Mattia Preti with scenes that opened to the heavens above! The gold arches and carved wall panels bespoke the wealth of the Knights of St. John, and the Bernini-esque altar capped the ecstasy of religion the worshipers must have experienced when they entered this majestic interior. This is about as far from the Greek temples as you could get, the extreme swing of the pendulum we saw on our trip.

            13. Corinthian bronze horse, Regional Archaeological Museum, Syracuse. The fun of splitting from the group on a museum tour lies in the ability to “discover” a work on your own. When I came upon this Geometric-style horse with impossibly skinny midriff, no more than five inches long, I anointed it a personal favorite. I was mildly disappointed to see the tour guide point it out in detail to our group, and I had to relinquish all claim to it upon leaving the museum when I saw that it was the store’s only postcard and the cover object for the museum catalogue. My second discovery was a less-publicized “proto-Corinthian oinochoe” (wine pitchers, two examples), a shape, like the more common but also beautiful olpe, that was new to me: more full-bodied than squat, with a trefoil opening and stopper and nice painted decoration.

            14. The Oratory of St. Lawrence, Palermo. Baroque and white, with diverse putti and an elaborate sea battle of Lepanto, this chapel by Serpetta was unusual enough to merit inclusion on this list and to keep me from ending up with an unlucky 13. I can’t say the same for the Armory in Valetta, the Greek/Roman theater at Taormina, or the Cathedral in Palermo, the other major art stops on our tour.