Trip to the PMA

Today I finally got to visit the Philadelphia Art Museum. Haley was as excited about the prospect as I, so we made sure to spend one day of her visit there.

I was particularly impressed by their European and Asian Art wings on the second floor, which each had architectural representations built into the exhibits. Haley and I especially liked a stone window used as a door. The parts of European churches and buildings made me want to go back there, and the Asian rooms made me want to visit the buildings in their original contexts.

I discovered an artist I'd never seen before, Giorgio de Chirico. Some of his more extreme Surrealist paintings I'm not as interested in, but I do like his many representations of an ancient (or classicizing) sculpture of Ariadne in a piazza in Italy with modern elements peeking in, like a steam engine. Here is an example, but I saw two others of the same theme that I preferred at the museum.

Haley and I both liked William Maw Egley's paintings "Just as the Twig is Bent" and "The Tree's Inclined." I couldn't find good representations of them online, but the images tell an age-old story. The first has three young children-- two sisters, a blonde and a brunette, and a little boy playing soldier. The boy clearly prefers the blonde, while the brunette sits back at a table looking at the pair. In the second painting, the trio has grown up. At first you only notice the boy, now a real soldier, and his blonde love. In a small mirror above the scene, however, you see the reflection of the brunette sister, looking at the pair in jealousy.

Also on display was a painting by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo called "Venus and Vulcan." The image is from Book VIII of the Aeneid, when the goddess of love asks her metalsmith husband to forge an epic shield for her son. The description on the wall at the PMA described Vulcan as her "estranged" husband, and referenced the book from the Aeneid as the source of the story. Having just read Book VIII last week for class, I don't remember anything in Vergil's text to suggest that Vulcan and Venus were having marital difficulties. The only thing I can think of is that perhaps, as the scene is vaguely reminiscent of the adultery scene in the Iliad between Mars and Venus (Ares and Aphrodite there, of course), this is to what the description referred. My objection to the word "estranged" is the subsequent reference to Vergil's Aeneid VIII, where Venus easily convinces her husband to do this task for her, she is the goddess of seduction, after all.

The museum itself is beautifully designed, and the blue-pink sunset yesterday only aided in the appreciation of the architecture as we left. As I remarked to Haley at the time, things tend to look different for a while after visiting a museum. Haley agreed that we tend to see the world for its forms, at least for a while.