Happy New Year

2008 has been the kind of year that defies synopsis. There was the whole long wretched winter, the loss of far too many beloved people, the layoff, the car. But there was also clowning, working with Strange Tree, going to New York with Joe, starting a couple of really exciting writing projects, and of course studying in Italy.

I haven't yet made any resolutions for 2009, because it feels as though as soon as I came back from Italy I dove into something quite like the life I want to have. I've been pursuing performance and writing opportunities with a vigor (and, to my own surprise, an enjoyment) unlike anything I've had before. It feels strangely good. Really good. Strong.

To some extent, I guess, this is just the confidence born of experience. I've been out in the world doing this stuff for about ten years, now, and apparently that's the magic amount of time. And it's hard not to emerge from a program like the ADA without some concrete knowledge of your own abilities.

Some of this confidence, though, comes from the really astonishing and wonderful support of my friends and family. This was a big, risky year for me, involving several giant leaps of faith. It would have been so much harder, if not impossible, without all the little messages of support, the hugs, even the comments on this blog--to say nothing of the car trips, the visits, the mail collection, subletting the apartment, watering the plants, saving copies of the November 5 Chicago newspapers.

For 2009, I wish you all this kind of sustaining love, support, courage, and passion. And I hope you use it to challenge yourself in some crazy, ridiculous, wonderful way.

R.I.P. Harold Pinter

Theater lost a giant yesterday, one of its definitive voices. In tribute, here's his 2005 Nobel lecture.

It's now incumbent on each of us to speak up, speak out, speak the truth, and speak it in our own impossible voices.

Ciao bella

I landed in Chicago Thursday night, after a clown journey that eventually involved 19 hours of travel, one taxi, a train, three buses, three planes, and a hired car. Chicago was its pretty, sparkly winter self. Since then, of course, the weather has turned awful, has plunged into the sort of cold that makes you question every event in the series of decisions that brought you here. I've promptly developed a head cold, and the impending fact of Christmas seems entirely unreal.

Some farewell views of Arezzo and the villa:

The Christmas lights on the Corso, and our constant companion, the Duomo, settling into shadow on my last evening.

From an upstairs window, here's a view of our courtyard, and the Teatrino, the studio where the theater students spent long hours.

And, also from upstairs, some views of the land around us. In the first shot, the lean-to roof at the bottom left is the area where we ate when the weather was warm enough.



I could have chosen to stay there, and I didn't. I guess that merits an explanation. It's not as simple as the one given by an Aretino student I talked to one day at the bus stop. "I hate Arezzo!" he said, in plaintive English. "There aren't any funs." By this he meant nightclubs, concerts, that sort of thing--and it's true that Arezzo is fairly small, about the same size as Las Cruces, and after a mere three months we students routinely encountered acquaintances on the street. But it's also beautiful, and the proximity of city to farm is something special. And the Accademia is full of people I adore and respect.

No, it's just time to be back here, to do the work that is before me, to brave the cold and use everything I've learned and be a full-time writer and actor and musician. Had I stayed, I'd be an administrator, surrounded by art and learning but not really participating, without even the mitigating possibility of nighttime rehearsals and shows. That was what it came down to: A desk job in paradise is still a desk job.

So I'm here, in this great chilly studio of a city. It'll be very interesting to see what happens next.

Lexicon of the Accademia

Most of the students have just left for the Florence airport. I'm here for a few more days to clean and inventory. It feels impossibly lonely without the whole ensemble. I realize too that we have developed our own special language, that only 34 people on the planet speak it, that my friends in Chicago will probably look at me oddly if I greet them with 'giorno, and that Ciao bella! will come off as an affectation rather than a sincere compliment.

A sampling of this language, dying even now:

Dov'è...? Where is...?
The first Italian words many of us mastered. Used in a number of creole questions: "Dov'è the hell is my roommate?" (in Venice), "Dov'è my sword?" (in a commedia scene with a Capitano). Also misused with remarkable versatility: "Hey, I have to go dov'è the bagno."

Ma... But...
Used especially to separate and emphasize two halves of a difficult choice, or two mutually exclusive options: "My recital is tomorrow night, MA I have to stay up tonight studying for music history. And I've just had a liter of vino."

Pregs, short for Prego You're welcome.
Also, depending on context, can mean any number of the following: Hello; don't mention it; what sort of coffee would you like; of course you should have some more wine; you go first; I am holding the door for you; it doesn't matter that you have trodden on my foot; you butcher my language, American girl, and your clothing is remarkably unflattering compared to what an Italian tailor could do, but I will maintain civility.

Ragazzis. Teenagers, especially in groups, especially smoking, or doing what they are not supposed to be doing, or not doing what they are supposed to be doing.
The real plural is ragazzi, but Ryan started using ragazzis and it just stuck. This was how the music director of The Persians referred to the liceo students with whom we were collaborating.

San Fab San Fabbiano, the winery up the road, or its red wine, which one purchases by the liter from a gas-pump-style dispenser.

The Salad The Sala Danza, or dance room, one of our movement studios. A.k.a. (of course) the Tony Danza.

Va bene. It's all good.
Notable especially for the permutations among American students: Va bens; Va bensies; Va benzo, Lorenzo (the last of which Joe invented as a parody of the others; it's even better if you imagine the look of horror on the face of the Italian man backing away from your high-five). Students also coined no bene to indicate the opposite, "Not good" or "That's awful," but it is such a departure from true Italian as to horrify even some of the American students.

Ciao. Hello, hi.
Also "goodbye." In this latter usage, when all the other students are hauling their luggage out of the villa, it becomes the hardest word in the world to say.

Paghanini

I have a new clown. His/her name is Paghanini--one of those ambiguous-gender clowns. Not at all bright. Variously described as a hound and a Neanderthal when angry, which happens often and suddenly. But also really joyous when dancing. Paghanini's dance is a sort of stiff-armed popping and flapping; Allie called it a bouncy penguin dance. Paghanini is much more impatient than my other clowns. That's an interesting feeling to work with; though it's hard to say, given the brevity of the vignettes we're working on, I think it means in a longer scene Paghanini would make more things happen. So he/she may eventually be higher-status than other clowns I've had. Too much of a spaz to be the #1 (or, as Eli calls it, an In Clown), but conceivably a #2 in a trio.

We're working in nose and whiteface. No talking in nose. My clowns have always been fairly quiet (or limited to tiny, tiny vocabularies, like okay and please and that's it), but the discipline of total silence is really instructive. There is just so much you can do with gesture when it's honest. And I think the absence of language lets us mostly avoid the trap of trying to be clever.

It's been amazing, too, to see the changes whiteface wreaks in my classmates' faces. Rich--who's typically pretty bouncy and cuddly--turns into something scary; the makeup brings out all the sharp points in his face. Ryan, normally animated, becomes an incredibly deadpan neutral clown named Lars. His head is shaved and he never smiles. He drew in his eyebrows exactly parallel to his mouth. You could actually draw an oval with two lines for brows, two dots for eyes, a red dot for the nose, and another line for the mouth, and you'd have a reasonably accurate portrait of Lars. Liza, a Hermia type, becomes a wide-eyed three-year-old who's wandered out of bed and into the grown-ups' cocktail party. Vanessa is about the same size as Liza, but she turns into Margherite, who's stone-faced and humorless, the highest-status clown in the room. She looks like the ballet instructor who doesn't mind telling you that you should probably progress to anorexia, because the bulimia is not doing enough for your thighs.

Other aspects of clown don't change. It's exhilarating work, but outside the classroom you do start running into everyday actions that suddenly seem fraught with comic or tragic import, and you've lowered the barriers that would ordinarily keep you from expressing those feelings fully. Picking up a dishrag thrusts you instantly into the trauma of daily domestic life, for example. It's good that we're all living and working together, because all the theater students are going through the same thing, and we don't have to explain these moments to each other.

The Persians

We had the performance of The Persians yesterday. The day also included a speed-through, a tech run, and an open dress rehearsal, so that meant we went through it four times; that's a long, exhausting day.

Over the course of the rehearsal process the production seemed to get bigger and bigger and bigger, with more and more musicians and instrumental interludes and spoken interludes in Italian--and ancient Greek--and so forth. I think none of us really knew until yesterday afternoon what the whole thing was going to be like. To our relief, it turned out to be be beautiful.

Playing Atossa turned out to be sort of a combination of choreography and classical text and and something resembling Butoh--heightened, stylized, not always comfortable. The nearest experience I've had is probably Prospero in the circus Tempest. But even that was not like this.

There's a long sequence--longer in this production because of a Shostakovich string quintet--in which Atossa mourns silently at Darius's tomb while the chorus is summoning the king's ghost. There is really nothing for it but to sit there and grieve. I've lost several people I loved in the past couple of years, and I mourned for them all on stage. Kevin said that at one point he was sure the mask was crying. If it's the point I think he was talking about, then there were a few tears under the mask as well. I'm really happy to have achieved, however briefly, something I admired so much in the Flöz show. I'm also glad to have grieved, and to have put those emotions into the service of something beautiful. One doesn't always get to.

I don't, in point of fact, know how anyone deals with grief without some sort of artistic outlet. But maybe that's part of why we make art--to help others come to terms with the senseless fact of their own death, and the eventual disappearance of everything and everyone they love.

It's getting cold here now, although Tuscany tends to the foggy and wet rather than the leaden cold I associate with Chicago at this time of year.

This is our last week of classes. It doesn't seem possible. Without a constant barrage of Santa Claus kitsch, Christmas still feels remote. Italy has Babbo Natale, but it's just not the sort of country that goes in for giant inflatable lawn ornaments. It's funny what you wind up being homesick for.

This afternoon, we started the clown intensive. Eli Simon, from the U.C. Irvine theater program, is teaching. There are a few slight differences from what I've done before, but we're starting with entrance work and status and all those good things, and so far I can't say much beyond YES. CLOWN. LIKE.

Vatican III: This Time It's Personal

A series of clown events attended my efforts to visit the Vatican Museum--from booking the pensione room for the first trip before learning that the museum would be closed for All Saints Day, to oversleeping and missing several trains for the second trip, and then watching a train enter and leave the station while I was trying to get the ticket machine to take my card. So yesterday was my last chance, and dammit, I was not going to miss it. I hauled myself out of bed early, and stumbled through Arezzo in the predawn rain.


In Rome I promptly got lost, despite having walked to the Vatican before. I was afraid that this would be the crowning clown moment: that I'd arrive too late to get in. Fortunately Rome was also pretty dreary and wet, and though there was a long line of tourists with umbrellas outside St. Peter's, none of them seemed all that interested in the art around the corner. So I got in with no wait--no wait! at the Vatican Museum!--and went wandering through halls that were so empty I kept expecting someone to tell me the place was closed.

I hit the Pinacoteca first. I sneezed very loudly in a medieval gallery, and thereby struck up a conversation with a friendly guard (does the "bless you" count extra at the Vatican Museum, do you think?). He showed me the Forli angels, and the cracked plaster on one face that had always reminded him of cigarette smoke. It was true--among all these lute-playing cherubs was one who clearly had a future in jazz. This is apparently a you-had-to-be-there moment; that's the one angel whose image I can't find on line. (It tells you everything you need to know about my personal theology that I will take photos in a cathedral but not in an art museum.)

The Guido Reni paintings were among my favorites, not least because I'm not as familiar with Reni as with other artists. His depiction of a wild-haired St. Matthew receiving the gospel as divine dictation is lovely.

Of course, anyone who's ever written knows that the inclusion of the angel is an act of supreme mercy on Reni's part. Replace the angel with a coffee mug and the painting becoes far more realistic. But Matthew's face is just perfect; and evidently I'm not the first to realize it, because the same image adorns a bunch of notebooks in the gift shop.

Quite a lot of tourists have no qualms about taking snapshots, even with flash, in an art gallery. The Vatican Museum seems fairly resigned to this; I suppose it's more of an issue for a typical not-for-profit institution that derives much of its income from reproductions of the art. But it was still jarring, once I encountered the tourists, to see them pose in front of, say, Raphael's Transfiguration, with a hip thrust out and lips pursed into a campy kiss. I think the snapshot impulse is something akin to the graffiti impulse, the desire to say, Look, I did this, I saw this, I was here. (I could get into the longer discussion of how we as a society tend to view the photographic media as conferring legitimacy and importance upon people, but I should probably save it for the actual philosophy paper I have to write today.)

I went on through the halls of maps and tapestries. There's also probably a lot more to be written about Maria de Rivera, the weaver who executed all those giant tapestries from the life of Urban. Hers was one of the few female names I saw in the course of the day, with, of course, the exception of the other Maria. (In one of the Baroque galleries there's even a painting by Ortensio Gentilleschi, but none by his rather more talented daughter.)

Of course the whole thing ends with the Sistine Chapel. This was where all the tourists were, it turned out. Ceding to the inevitable, the museum now plays a booming recording requesting silence in six different languages. It doesn't work. It's splendidly ironic, of course, but between the irony and the throngs of people the chapel has lost something of its capacity for spiritual might.

As at St. Peter's, what struck me more than anything else was the sheer dogged ability of Michelangelo. I think he might have sensed something of this too, from his self-portrait as the flayed, empty skin in the Last Judgment; amid all that grand scope is one exhausted man. The image reminds me of Marcello's proverb, which he'd repeat whenever one of us finished a scene gasping and sweaty: "The mask begins to live when the actor begins to die." Maybe we all, ultimately, sacrifice ourselves in order to create; maybe that's the only way to make something bigger than ourselves. Michelangelo, more than most of us, knew that this wasn't poetic exaltation but simple workaday fact. I think if you asked him he'd acknowledge it with a nod and a grunt and then go back to painting. That's what the self-portrait hisses to the attuned ear: This is what one person can achieve. Get to work.

Rome, again

On Saturday I went to Rome to see the National Gallery of Modern Art and the Galleria Borghese. Both are in the Villa Borghese, a large park complete with zoo and ponds and trails and so on.

In some aspects it reminded me very much of Central Park. But every so often I'd remember that this all used to be the private compound of the Borgias, and think, Damn, it feels good to be a gangsta.

I was delighted to discover that the park contained numerous statues of post-Borgia literary figures--notably Victor Hugo and Nikolai Gogol. The inscription on the base of the Gogol statue was in both Italian and Russian, which seemed entirely appropriate.

The National Gallery of Modern Art is fantastic. I think I needed a bit of a palate-cleanser after the amount of medieval and Renaissance art I've seen lately. The twentieth-century rooms felt bracing and clean. (I had much the same sensation at the Venice Guggenheim in October.) At the same time I was thinking of our discussion in philosophy class of the economic forces that shape the arts today; Scott pointed out that, for example, the C.I.A. helped popularize abstract expressionism, because they wanted to divert attention from art with more explicitly political content. I was conscious of wondering which artists were trying to shake me from my bourgeois complacency, and which might have been funded by people who would really prefer that I stay complacent, and so on. But there's a point at which all those questions become inimical to the whole point of art, which is to experience it with every sense and let the mind catch up later. When I hit that point was when I really started having fun.

I didn't know, going in, that the gallery had Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (the notorious urinal). But it did, along with a whole host of other read-made Duchamp compositions (if "compositions" is the right word for them). What's funny is that when I saw it I felt a little shiver of recognition, the same one I feel when I round the corner and see a Michelangelo (or whatever) that I know. I knew instantly this was the piece to mention when people asked me about the trip. This mass-produced thing, the defiantly anti-Aura piece of art, most definitely has its own Aura now. I hope Duchamp would be amused by that.

There were several Italian artists I'd never heard of--it's wonderful, of course, to stand in front of an acknowledged masterwork, but in some ways it's even better when a gallery introduces you to a painting or a painter you don't know at all. (This happened at the Uffizi with the fantastic Feast with Lute Player. That link doesn't really do it justice; when you stand before the painting in person you have the sense that you're at the pub with all these people, who are your best friends.) I loved Carlo Levi's portrait of the poet Umberto Saba, which seemed to glow; it was mostly the choice of palette and the way the light hit the oil paint, but it suggested wonderful things about the vitality of the subject. The rhythm of Giacomo Balla's Espansione dinamica + velocità made me wonder why he isn't better known among the cubists. Among the works of the later twentieth century I especially liked Alberto Burri's giant experiments with different materials and surfaces--great knots of canvas and paint, blocks of wood, cracked slabs of pigment, and so on.

The piece that hit with the most immediacy, though, was Ivan Mestrovich's marble statue Vecchia. It's an old woman, nude. It's the antithesis of the heroic nude. She is dessicated, slumping; the line of her lips shows her nearness to death. But the heartbreaking thing about it is her utter defeat. There's no humor left in her, no strength left in the back or the hips or the arms. She has given up. If, after an absence of years, you met a friend and found her looking like this, you would weep. I very nearly wept for the marble stranger.

Then on to the Galleria Borghese, one of those places that helps you understand why Italy has as many laws at it does. Rules are very important at the Galleria Borghese. You can't get in without a reservation; the reservations are only at odd-numbered hours; you can't get in before your reserved time slot; you can't stay past it; you have to check your bags (but not your coat); if you somehow make it past a guard with your backpack and an upstairs docent sees you, you will be sent downstairs to check the backpack before you continue looking at art; and God help you if you forgot to turn off your cell phone.

But for all that it has Bernini's David. I've lost count of the number of Davids I've seen on this trip. Michelangelo's, nerving himself (I agree with several critics that he has not yet thrown the fatal stone); Donatello's, boyish and balletic, his innocence seemingly undamaged by the sight of the giant's severed head; and any number of others, in paint, fresco, bronze, marble, and glass. The stance of Bernini's David is a big deal, I know--the torsion and action of the muscles, the slenderness of the taut sling--but for my money the exciting part is the face, the lips compressed with effort, the eyes being willed not to blink. I've seen this face. I've made this face. He is so alive.

Masks, day four

New faces greeted us in the studio this afternoon--the work of the students from the morning session.

There seems to be a revelation at every stage of mask construction. Today's was one of the most exciting: peeling the actual latex mask out of the plaster negative.

People were visibly delighted to meet their masks at last. Ryan let out a laugh like a new parent. Before long the studio was full of new characters--a Capitano and a Magnifico...

...and a Pantalone, a Pulcinella, and another Capitano.

We used scissors and rotor tools to trim off the excess latex and fiberglass. The eye sockets are really difficult. I'm not sure what sort of tool might make them easier. Possibly a really sharp X-acto, in combination with a face-shaped cutting mat. Not that face-shaped cutting mats actually exist, as far as I am aware.

The last step was priming the masks with some sort of lacquer, the genuine gommalacca made by dissolving beetle dung in alcohol. (Lino explained all that in Italian, complete with a diagram of the pooping beetle. I love commedia.) Tomorrow we paint. The first masks we'll be painting to look like leather; the second ones we can paint as we wish. On half an Arlecchino mask, Lino demonstrated using acrylics to accentuate the contours.

The other half of the mask is still brown. Beetle poop will do that.

Expat Thanksgiving

Everyone at the villa is a bit homesick today. Some people say it outright. For others it's not as obvious, but I get the sense that more people are gathering in common areas, needing some sort of family. There's going to be a turkey dinner tonight, but we have classes the same as any other day, and our European faculty seem quietly bemused about the whole concept of Thanksgiving. Lunchtime conversation turned to the foods we missed--pumpkin pie, barbecue, green chile--and then to more general lacks such as being able to cook in a kitchen, watching the football broadcast, taking a break from eating to toss around a football with your dad--all these unremarkable moments that somehow turn out to be rituals.

But it seems much more in the spirit of the day to turn my attention from what I don't have to what I do. I'm in Italy, living out an artist's dream of education and exploration, and I'm here because of the emotional and practical support of several wonderful people who I am lucky to have in my life. I'll be coming home to a different president-elect, and--even more important--the knowledge that I am not at all alone in wanting to work for social change. I am surrounded by beauty, by people who stimulate my mind and my creativity and my compassion and my funny bone, and that's pretty amazing. Thanks, everyone.

Pulling faces

Under the watchful eyes of former students, we proceeded with making our actual masks--pulling them from the molds, to use the studio argot.

First we dug away the slabs of clay forming the frame, and then prised the plaster from the clay positive. I was a little sad to realize that this meant the end of the clay positive. Few of them survived the process. On detailed features like my mask's eyebrows, the clay tended to lodge in the tiny hollows between the ribs of plaster, which meant a fair amount of excavation with wooden tools, wire tools, and wet and dry brushes--like some combination of an archeologist and a dentist.


Once the plaster negative was clean, we coated the inside with liquid latex. We started by turning the nose into a sort of reservoir, and then swirling the latex around the negative. (I couldn't do that and take pictures at the same time, so this is an image of Zach's Magnifico negative.)

With a brush, we added more latex, and spread it around more. Then we added a thin layer of fiberglass and tamped it into place with more latex. Maybe this part of the process comes naturally to some people. Not to me. The bristles of the brush and the bristles of fiberglass kept getting tangled and messy, and I kept having to stop and peel boogers of dried latex off my fingers so that I wouldn't stick to things. But eventually I dried the latex with a hairdryer, and added another layer of latex and fiberglass and got it dry too.

Then it was time to be good artists and take care of our medium. So that it could be reused, all the clay from the positives had to be washed--torn into small chunks, immersed, and kneaded until the bits of plaster floated free. This is long, repetitive work, but there's something to be said for chatting with three friends with your hands together in a tub of mud. Anything that makes you laugh until you cry can't be all bad.

Siena, times two

I never posted the photos from my first day trip to Siena (back in October), so I'm combining images from that trip and the one this past Saturday.

The zebra-striped Duomo is one of my favorites in Italy so far.

The interior shifts between solemnity and a sort of brilliant goofiness, as if people just kept adding pretty things without knowing when to stop.

This is probably what a cathedral would look like if Strange Tree Group decorated it.

Of course, there are marvelous pieces of art...

...and vertiginous views of the city from the top of the arcade above the Duomo museum, on the wall that would have been part of the Duomo's nave if the Black Plague hadn't wiped out half the city and the cathedral-building workforce.




There's also food. The ceiling of this shop is thick with wild boar sausages, hocks of prosciutto, strings of garlic, and everything else you could want. Behind the counter are ten different kinds of pecorino. The air is redolent with cinnamon from the bakery on the premises. The owner--of course--wears a tall white paper hat and has a wide, curling moustache and gives you slices of salami his sister has made.

The other wonderful thing I tried--and it was probably made exponentially more wonderful by the freezing weather--was a traditional soup called acqua cotta. It's vegetable soup (broccoli, carrots, tomatoes, onions, cabbage, celery, and something--probably peperoncini--with a kick) that has been put in the broiler for a bit, and is then served over grilled bread, all topped with a poached egg. This, too, I will be making in the depths of the Chicago cold.

Day two of the mask intensive

It seems somewhat anticlimactic to say that day two began with much of what we did on day one: refining the clay features, checking for symmetry, getting the face the way you want it. My Dottore began to feel very much like me. In fact, twice I sprayed water on the cheeks to smooth out the clay, and almost instantly I felt as though I were close to tears. (I chalked it up to the plaster dust in the air, but no mistake, there's something spooky about the kinship between actor and mask.)

Once the faces were in good shape, we constructed frames for them out of flat slabs of clay. Rather than simply framing the face positives, the frames went around the edges of the final mask (more or less from the upper lip to the earlobe at the bottom, and a couple of centimeters above the hairline at the top). So suddenly our masks all looked like bib-wearing conquistadores--with the exception of Zach's Magnifico, whose frame and props looked like flowing hair and so turned him into a distant kinsman of Michelangelo's Moses.

The frames had a purpose, which was to contain drips of plaster. We mixed up great tubs of it--you stir it with your fingers, an experience that rivals kneading bread for sheer pleasure--and then drizzled it over the faces, with the same gestures I remember using to make mud-drip sand castles as a child. Once the face is covered and you've carefully blown on all the bubbles until they pop, you dip strips of fabric--coarse burlap in this case--into the plaster. Then you put a layer of plaster-coated fabric over the whole face.

By then, the plaster was thickening, so we had to hurry through the best part: scooping up fistfuls of plaster and splatting them over the fabric. (It's fun because, well, you're scooping up big messy fistfuls of plaster, but also because plaster gets warm as it dries, probably because of some oxidation process I should remember from chemistry.) Each mask turned into a featureless mound of white plaster; the long-nosed Capitano masks were slightly distinguished by a peak in the middle of the mound. We smoothed out the mounds with a spatula. Zach pointed out that they looked like nothing so much as a window display of gelato. All vanilla.

Tomorrow the plaster will have hardened into a negative, which will be the basis for the latex mask itself. I hope that will yield some good photos--the closeup of the featureless white lump didn't quite make for a riveting image.

Masks and snow

The villa has spent most of the day in a dark, cold rain only one step removed from sleet. There's snow in the hills nearby. The radiators are doing their best, but heat is state-rationed in Italy, so everyone's hunkering down in multiple layers of sweats and scarves.

Today we started our mask-making intensive with Lino. Each of us has chosen one commedia mask to make; from this mold we'll each pull one copy for future students of the Accademia and one for ourselves.

Everyone starts by smearing clay on a plaster or cement positive. The Accademia has a number of cement positives in varying sizes and shapes, and most students are working with positives that approximate their own faces. Zach and I, since we had molds taken for The Persians, are working with those positives. It's a disconcerting, alienating experience to sculpt upon your own features. If the masks weren't grotesques, I think I'd be tempted to correct certain aspects of my face.

It's been years since I've worked in an art studio, and I didn't realize how much I missed it. The visual and plastic arts have always been able to take me to a place of happy calm akin to a runner's high or the mental state immediately after yogic meditation. Working with clay, in particular, is so immediate and tactile that you can almost bypass your brain and let your eyes and hands do all the work. (Lino says, in fact, that the eyes are the more important factor: being able to observe matters more than being able to work with your hands.) It's especially gratifying to sculpt after spending so much time in the past three months looking at and thinking about the great sculptures of the Renaissance.

Once the positives were coated evenly with clay, we began to build up the characters' features. You start with the nose and work out. The nose is obviously the salient point of most commedia characters. Some historians draw correspondences between nose size and stupidity, with the long-nosed Capitano as the biggest idiot on stage. The nose is also usually where the character's traditional resemblance to a particular animal becomes clear (though not always, as in the infamous case of the Arlecchino mask with the forcibly enlarged cat eyes). And on a purely practical level, it's the most exaggerated feature on almost every mask, so you have to use it as the basis for the rest of the proportions.

I'm working on a Dottore mask, since that's the character I tend to play best.

Lino commented that almost every first mask tends to look somewhat like its creator. He singled my mask out as an example. And everyone else agreed: apparently I make this face all the time as the Dottore.

Tomorrow we'll refine the clay molds. Then they'll become the basis for negative molds, which we'll use to create the actual latex masks. I think I'd be happy to keep working in clay forever.

Florence in the cold

Apparently winter comes even to Italy. This weekend garlands of Christmas lights and pine boughs appeared in the streets of Florence. Joe came to visit, and on Friday--bundled up--we set out to meet the Renaissance. The first stop was the Duomo, whose exterior reminds me of an elaborate sugar confection.

I was expecting a similarly ornate interior, but it's actually pretty spare inside. Apparently it was always somewhat restrained, and then it was cleaned out because of the flood of 1966. There's no such restraint, however, in the Vasari frescoes in the dome, which depict the Last Judgment. Several panels feature sinners either being flayed or peeling off their own skins.

At the top of the cupola--after a series of steep, twisty, low-ceilinged staircases that are pure nightmare fodder--is a lovely view of the city.

There's also an incredible amount of graffiti. Even though Italian gave us the word graffiti, I've been surprised at how much of it I see here, especially on monuments. The statue in the Arezzo Prato, for example, which shows (I think) native son Petrarch receiving his laurel wreath, is spray-painted with legends such as "Emo Lesbos." But I digress.

We went to the Science Museum, which we'd both been looking forward to. As it turned out, two of the three floors were under construction and therefore off limits. But we did see Galileo's middle finger. Apparently one need not be a saint to ignite obsessive interest in the preservation of one's body parts, or else someone wanted to prevent his posthumously flipping the bird to the Church. We also saw a fantastic exhibit on the development of the Galilean and Newtonian telescopes.

From there, in the thickening rain, we headed to Santa Croce.

It, too, is currently under construction--what looks like a restoration project for the frescoes behind the altar. Major sections of the interior are hidden behind scaffolds and drapes.

But the side chapels and frescoes--especially those by Giotto--are still wonderful.

Santa Croce also houses the tombs of Machiavelli, Michelangelo, and Galileo. Minus his finger, of course.

Dante would have been entombed here if he hadn't been banished from the city--nothing like carrying a grudge past the grave, although you could argue that Dante himself did a fair amount of that in the Inferno. But there's a memorial statue of him outside.


When we came out, dusk was falling--early, because of the rain--and the whole city seemed chilly.

By night, the Duomo looks much less like candy.


We spent Saturday in Siena--which will have to be a whole separate post. This morning Florence was brilliantly sunny. You can just see the Ponte Vecchio in the background here (the foreground bridge is the Ponte San Trinità).

We crossed the Arno and headed to the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, which houses the Brancacci Chapel. In this chapel are the Masaccio frescoes that changed everything, that decisively brought human emotion and individuality into Renaissance art. From art history class I remembered the image of Adam and Eve expelled from Eden, but it's another thing altogether to see the actual fresco on the wall, the matter-of-factness of this revolution, off to the side in a silent, almost deserted church. This I suppose is what Walter Benjamin means when he talks about the aura of a work of art, and I have to admit that in this case he seems to be right. Anyway, I long for my art history textbook and notes; I have the sense that all these works have suddenly come to life around me.

On the way back we happened to glance into an open doorway, and so discovered an item that clearly belongs on the list of Best Things Ever: the pasta vending machine.

I wish I could report that we were brave enough to try it.