News Reporter: Act Four: What Italy taught me about culture criticism

Wednesday, 21 February 2018

Act Four: What Italy taught me about culture criticism

Alyssa Rosenberg on culture and politics

The Forum and Colosseum in Rome. (Alyssa Rosenberg for The Washington Post)

I just got back from two weeks of travel in Italy, and while I won’t torture you with pictures or descriptions of all the gelato and pasta I ate when I was there*, I did want to share one recurrent thought I had on the trip.

Italy is a fabulous country to travel in for many, many reasons, but I think it’s an especially useful place to visit if you’re interested in history and culture, and the history of culture. Not only is it chock-full of artistic masterpieces from many different eras, but it’s a perfect place to see how artists learned from their predecessors, and how regimes tried to craft political narratives and bolster their credibility through the arts. As you wander from one museum and site to the next, you see the Romans borrowing from the Greeks, Renaissance painters and patrons rediscovering the techniques that the ancient Greeks and Romans used, and Baroque artists moving beyond those lessons, their images bursting out of conventional framing on church ceilings and creating three-dimensional illusions. A place like the main Forum in Rome will show you all of these eras at once; individual churches will incorporate elements of medieval mosaic, Renaissance sculpture and Baroque painting.

I hope it’s not a lesson I’ve ever forgotten, but this trip was a valuable reminder to keep history in mind when writing about culture, and to be cautious about declaring anything new or first. Just as “Black Panther” isn’t the first movie to star a black superhero, Michelangelo and Gian Lorenzo Bernini weren’t the first people to convincingly capture human musculature in sculpture. At a cultural moment when we’re obsessed with breakthroughs and firsts to the extent of declaring even the smallest innovations milestones, Italy was a reminder to step back and look at how artists circle around to the same themes and techniques. Being first is nice, but just as valuable is being a practitioner of a distinguished tradition who finds a small but significant way to move that tradition forward.

*Although let me just say, if you want amazing pasta in Florence, make every effort to get reservations at Osteria Vini e Vecchi Sapori, and if you want tremendous gelato while in Rome, skip the inexplicable lines at Giolitti and head straight for a branch of Il Gelato di San Crispino, where you should order the pear sorbet.

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