awed-frog:borderlinecynic: awed-frog:vizuart: Filippo Palizzi - Thoughtful girl at the Pompeii’s e
awed-frog:borderlinecynic: awed-frog: vizuart: Filippo Palizzi - Thoughtful girl at the Pompeii’s excavations (1865) Filippo Palizzi wanted to paint ‘the truth’, which means he was probably there in Pompeii and this girl is not someone posing in his atelier, but an actual worker doing a job. And the contrast Palizzi was capturing in 1865 is still fascinating today: on one side, the rich Roman lady parading her silks and jewels, and on the other, a young barefoot girl labouring under the unforgiving sun for a pittance. Like the women standing behind her, this girl was probably illiterate (a national program for compulsory education was still in the future at that point). She likely had little to no idea of what Pompeii represented, who the Romans were, how they lived, and how their lives were related to her own. She was hired because she was local and way cheaper than a man, and she worked there, in extremely unsafe conditions (look at what she’s walking on: shards of pottery, rocks, glass, God knows what else - and that’s not to mention the risk of collapsing walls) for months and months, hoping to help her family or feed her children. I don’t know what Palizzi was trying to say, exactly - if he was just fascinated by the stark colours, the opposition of life and death, the obvious significance of the historical moment. Or maybe, like many men of his generation, maybe he did see the bitter irony of this scene: the uneducated labourer as a symbol of the failure of history (of human society). Because as much as we all want to believe in it, there is no constant push towards Good; progress is not inevitable. (There she was, the Pompeian lady, living in the prosperous town of a cosmoplitan empire. She was probably bilingual, bought her silks from Eastern traders, her amber jewelry from the Baltic nations, entertained her husband’s guests with witty conversation about Plato and Horace. And two thousand years later, here she is - her descendant: working barefoot for next to nothing, probably married off at thirteen, and staring uncomprehending at the greatness surrounding her.) Progress is not inevitable. There’s actually more more similarity between those time periods, to the point where I would argue that progress under a capitalist lens is largely just about the unequal distribution of the fruits of labour, and the people we focus on in that distributive network determines whether or not we see progress. What @awed-frog missed is that in 1865, this woman would have been living in close proximity to noblemen and villas and estates and maybe even worked in vineyards during the picking season. She may have daughters who work in the kitchens of those villas and estates. And inside those villas and estates you would find rich Italian women, still wearing silks from the east, amber from the Baltic nations, entertaining her husband’s guests with witty conversation about Dante and Machiavelli. Posing for portraits with artists only the very wealthy could afford. (And if we look closer still, at the mural on the wall of that Pompeiian lady, you might catch a glimpse of the illiterate slaves and servant girls, standing just out of frame, working barefoot for next to nothing, probably married off at thirteen, staring uncomprehending at the silks and amber that could put food on her family’s table for a year, and yet are just pretty rocks and fabric) You see progress is an illusion that happens whe you stand too close. When we step back and see that humans have always exploited others to get luxuries for themselves, you start to wonder what progress really means, and why it is that we call the only societies who look after their whole communities “backwards”. Thanks for the great addition, @borderlinecynic! Just to clarify, I was trying to guess at the painter’s mindframe here, so that’s not my opinion of the Roman empire at all. Personally, I think that entire system was rotten to the core: I love the language, but I’d be hard pressed to come up with a single redeeming quality the Romans possessed.(Okay, the rotating ceilings were quite nice, but that doesn’t really make up for the casual torture, casual viciousness and casual cruelty that were on display in virtually every aspect of Roman life.)Still - Palizzi was a classically trained painter of the late 19th century, Iso ’m sure Rome would have been an ideal of sorts for him. And: you have to look at these early archaeological digs through the lens of Italy recently became a unified nation - for the first time since the end of the Roman empire. On top of that, in the region of Naples there was an ongoing war against the ‘Northern’ regime and Palizzi, who devoted most of his art to portraying (and thus deliberately or indirectly romanticizing) Neapolitan culture and traditions, certainly had an opinion about it.(I honestly don’t know enough about this painter to guess at it, though. He was born in the Abruzzo; maybe he was resentful about how Italian unity had been ‘forced’ on the Southern regions, or maybe he would have preferred the South to abandon its dated monarchic ideals and step into the modern world. Depending on which it was, the interpretation of this painting changes dramatically. Is this girl rediscovering Neapolitan greatness, and how the region was a pearl of the Roman Empire, or is she looking in dismay at a wheel that just won’t break - at some distant mistress who looks just like the woman scorning and oppressing her now?There’s also the possibility this painting was a commission, which would mean most of this analysis would concern the commissioner, not the painter.)So, yeah. From our modern point of view, progress is not linear because we now look at both sides of the coin - for instance, the Roman Empire was wildly successful but also based on slave labour and genocide - but to men like Palizzi the darker corners of the past were less clear. Politically speaking, this painting surely has surely more to say about the present - and, specifically, about the ‘Questione meridionale’ and about Southern Italy’s meaningful role at the very centre of ‘Italian’ identity through the ages - than it had about the past. -- source link