VI.ii. Remnants

"Why are Italians at this day generally so good poets and painters? Because every man of any fashion amongst them hath his mistress."
- Robert Burton

In a contrast as stark as the opposing shafts of gloom and light that fan through its arcades, this week Bologna had sprung back to life. The legions of students, punks, policemen, and professors who patrol the streets and cafes were back from the long academic holiday, and the bustle that lately had been lacking once again invaded Via Zamboni, beckoning me out of my apartment. I went to see the Saint Cecilia chapel, where the guardian is perhaps starting to recognize me as a regular yet still lets me speak to her undisturbed.

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    "Finally, Nicholas, you are alone. Always coming in here with other people, showing me off impersonally, as if I were mere paint on the wall."
    "But that's what you are! Don't take offense; 'The paint on these walls is the blood in my veins'… as the poem goes," I answered.
    "I think that was a poem you wrote. I've never heard it before. You went to see my tomb in Rome, I see."
    "Yes."
    "But you didn't but a rose on it, like you did for Raphael. A lily for Fra Angelico, a daisy for Keats, a rose for Raphael, and nothing for me."
    "But you're not dead, you're a saint. You're not an architect of my being, like they are, you're more just part of it. Another half, a mirror. "
    "I certainly felt like I was looking in a mirror when you brought that girl in here the other day. Do you want to explain yourself?"
    "No. I have to go now." I started walking towards the door.
    "Nicholas, you can't run away from me just because I am a fresco!"
    "Yes I can," I said over my shoulder as I sped out the door.

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    At a loss for diurnal structure, I stumbled around Bologna. The daily schedules, to-do and to-see lists that had been such a part of the previous months' existence were gone, and I had little with which to occupy myself. I slid back into my routine of daydreaming, vaguely studying, and altogether not doing very much. The city, though, still had a lot to offer me. I put up only a feigned resistance, always my reaction to the Baroque, when it came to seeing Elisabetta Sirani, Pittrice Eroina (1638-1655). Though the dates alone made me shudder, I gave the exhibition the benefit of the doubt and entered under the distinctive bright red banners that in this city usually signal cultural events, communist party gatherings, or both.
    Strangely enough, this exhibition, billed as a blockbuster and sexed up with a steamy Artemesia Gentileschi type spin, was housed in the archaeological museum, perhaps the driest, most didactic monument in all of Bologna. Not much changed since the nineteenth century, except, admittedly, for a stellar new Egyptian section, the notorious second floor of the building presents thousands upon thousands of finds from Felsina, the very boring Etruscan settlement only perhaps matched in its boringness by Bononia, the subsequent and rather tiresome Roman city. These remnants, normally the sort of items sold on Ebay, are laid out on withered felt of a very particular shade of green, housed without explanation in cabinets themselves worthy of archaeology. It feels like the museological equivalent of a cold shower.
    Among the more important pieces of Roman sculpture on the first floor was the entrance to the Elisabetta Sirani show. Thankfully and refreshingly modern in its conception, it showcased the tempestuous life of the paintress, whom Malvasia, an early local art historian, named the "virgin angel" of Bolognese painting. The girl, dead at twenty-seven, was supposedly poisoned by a maidservant in a vicious love intrigue. A suitably baroque death for a suitably Baroque artist. It makes for good fiction, or art history, however one chooses to look at it.
    Bologna has long had a love affair with female painters. Saint Catherine of Bologna, not the beautiful homonymous Alexandrian martyr but the homely artistic nun who patiently decorated manuscripts for pontiffs, started a trend with her canonization. Elisabetta Sirani had many sisters in her field. Properzia de' Rossi and Lavinia Fontana, perhaps not giants of their age but certainly known to more than a few, cemented the female tradition in Bologna with their successes. That so many women painters were so prominent here baffles many a scholar, but the reason is simple. It is evident in the markets, churches, libraries, and anywhere else where work gets done. Bologna is a seductively feminine place, overrun with flocks of men but secretly ruled, from the cigarette-smoke filled examination halls to Anna Maria's trattoria, by women.