Monday, March 30, 2009

Ovid Ovid Everywhere









Above is a picture my brother took of a statue of Neptune in a public square in Florence. Greek and Roman mythology is very abundant there and you see references to the gods and demigods all the time. I found it to be especially prominent considering I am in this class right now and was glad I was able to reference some of the statues before I read their captions.


I have to say that The Death of Cygnus was one of my favorite stories by Ovid. Perhaps because I have a special fondness for the oceans and I like the idea of there being a god to govern the seas which seem so sporadic and unpredictable. I wonder if there is a god for the mountains and if so what his or her story might be. I don't know if that is a possibility for the final paper, but it would be an interesting assignment to have the class write their own stories of the gods and demigods. I think that there are some very imaginative people in our class and it could be very entertaining.

While at Academia seeing David, a side room exhibited a number of smaller statues by less prominent sculptors. There I saw a sculpture of Narcissus falling in love with himself in a mirror, he was a very cute little sculpted boy indeed. Below are some art students we saw that were recreating in chalk some pieces of art that were at the Museum of Florence. The whole idea of doing this I found very intriguing because part of the idea of that art is that it will live forever, but here all the time spent in recreating these will be for a very short time and they will eventually be washed away in the rain like much of our lives.


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