National Museum of Rome - The Terme Boxer and more.

In my previous post was an essay on todays main viewing opportunity seeing The Terme Boxer, or Boxer At Rest. It was also the first time I have ventured past the Villa Borghese gardens into the busy city streets of Rome, the traffic is silly, pedestrian crossings are not! they are bulls eye targets for mopeds! seriously though once you get use to just closing your eyes and stepping out they do work. I've been in Rome since 2nd July, the weather is very warm, at the height of midday its 30 plus, so I set out early, although it was still warm, a slow pace required with my destination, The National Museum Of Rome a little over 2 miles away.

The Museum is set over 4 floors on Palazzo Massimo, a vault level, one down from the entrance level, 2 floors from the entrance level up with Roman and Greek busts and sculptures and a top floor of mosaics and frescos. The Boxer is on the first floor, the entrance floor. Seeing the sculpture for real was one of the most moving experiences I have had viewing art, the piece is stunningly beautiful, there is nothing else like it, all the other male sculpture are what you could heroic nudes, depicting power and victory, this rare bronze sculpture depicts a reality, a fighter having a rest, his dark hollow eyes are tied, he is bruised, he has scars, he has bleeding cuts, a broken nose, cauliflower ears, it has a sorrowful gladiatorial the end is nigh feeling, very moving. Here are some photos and a sketch, I probably spent over an hour looking at this magnificent piece.

As mentioned previously the top floor was full of frescos and mosaics, I was quite taken with these, not so much the mosaic but the frescos, the simplicity of the painting, reinforcing the saying less is more. Look how many thousands of years they survived. Seeing the, what look like to me, the depiction of ordinary folk, probably slaves, going about their daily lives is giving me a seed of an idea for some work. What now is The Villa Borghese park could well have been the area the original frescos images was inspired by, so I thought a few water colour sketches of the folk who frequent the park in the 21st century, and those folk from the frescos could make a nice comparison, then and now, just a thought, now in blue, the past in brown.