Eternal Tiber

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    Winged Victory

    Victoria scribens

    (Victory writing)


    The goddess of Victory, recognizable by her large feathered wings, is intently concentrated on inscribing the circular shield that she rests against her thigh, presumably with the details of Trajan’s imperial victories in Dacia (modern Romania). Her pose and the long folds of her clothing highlight her statuesque and imposing form. The figure appears twice on the Column of Trajan, marking the end of the two military campaigns, a feature repeated also on the later Column of Marcus Aurelius (c. AD 180). In this way, the act of inscribing is not simply a statement of the victory but embedded in the telling of the narrative. Kentridge similarly includes two Victory figures: one at the mid-way point of the frieze, where the figure is multiplied and seems to crumble into the banks of the Tiber (nos. 29-31); and another at the end nearest Ponte Sisto (no. 1). He has chosen, though, to let the latter entirely turn her back on the other figures and to face the bridge. Viewers are thus left to wonder whether she marks the beginning or the end of the procession, a triumph or a lament, an address or a question.


    Inge Lyse Hansen
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    Marcus Aurelius

    Pacificator orbis

    (Pacifier of the world)


    This representation of Marcus Aurelius (reigned AD 161-180) is one of the few bronze equestrian statues that survive from antiquity. Moved from the Lateran Papal Palace to Capitoline Hill in 1538, it became a symbol of the civic administration of Rome. Today, it is depicted on Italy’s 50-cent coins. The emperor appears as a study of composite leadership, dressed in tunic and mantle rather than in full military garb, as if simultaneously civic and military. The muscular stallion seems instinctively to follow his direction, hinting at effortlessly powerful imperial authority. The pose is vigorous in profile, balanced and calm from the front. Yet the gesture of the outstretched right arm is ambiguous. Is the emperor acknowledging a public acclamation of imperial triumph, or addressing the Roman people as their magisterial ruler, or reaching out in compassion to the now-lost figure of an enemy at the horse’s foot? Kentridge has decided to sever the arm, further heightening the ambiguity of the gesture. 


    Inge Lyse Hansen
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    Horse, Laurel Crown and Triumphal Chariot

    Hominem te memento

    (Remember: you are a man)


    A general in ancient Rome could aspire to no greater glory than a triumph: a lavish parade through the city celebrating a major military victory (or victories) and displaying the resulting spoils. One of the most extravagant examples, Pompey’s triumph of 61 BC, reputedly included wagonloads of enemy weapons; litters piled with gold and ornaments; a colossal solid-gold statue of the enemy king Mithridates; 75,100,000 drachmas in silver coinage; pictures illustrating characters and events from the wars; and hundreds of captives, including defeated potentates, generals, and their children. The star of a triumph was the victorious general himself. Dressed in purple and gold and pulled along in an ornate ceremonial chariot, the triumphator was accompanied by family members; taunted by his soliders with bawdy songs; and attended, according to some sources, by a pubic slave who held a golden crown over his head. (In representations on ancient coins and triumphal monuments, a Winged Victory usually does the crowning.) The festivity culminated in a sacrifice to Jupiter on Capitoline Hill, followed by feasts for the senate, soldiers, and people.


    Lila Yawn
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    She-Wolf

    Alma mater

    (Life-Giving Mother)


    The symbol of Rome par excellence, the Capitoline She-Wolf shows the wolf suckling the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. Born to the Vestal Virgin Rhea Silvia, the newborn twins were left to die of exposure along the Tiber by the henchmen of their great-uncle, Amulius, who had seized the throne of Alba Longa from their grandfather. According to Livy, who recorded the legend many centuries later, when the shepherd Faustulus discovered the babies he “found her licking them with her tongue”(Livy, History of Rome, 1.4). Long identified as an ancient Etruscan work, the Capitoline She-Wolf was recently shown by scientific analyses to have been cast in the Middle Ages, sometime between AD 1021-1153. The statues of the twins were added in the late 1400s. In William Kentridge’s drawing, the babies have been replaced by a pitcher and an amphora without handles, receptacles, it seems, for the she-wolf’s milk.


    Lila Yawn
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    Spoils of War

    Manubia!

    (Profits!)


    After his wars in Gaul, Egypt, Pontus, and Numidia, Caesar returned to Rome in 46 BC to celebrate his victories in April of that year. The most magnificent of the four triumphal celebrations commemorated his successes in Gaul, but each triumph was extraordinary, with a parade of illustrious captives, paintings of events from the wars, and staggering quantities of war booty. Further entertainments were provided: horse races, musical contests, naval battles, combats of infantry and cavalry, and wild animal fights. One contest involved two teams of elephants, twenty per side. In the Renaissance, Andrea Mantegna created a splendid representation of Caesar’s triumphs in nine paintings, now in the English Royal Collection. These celebrated works were most likely commissioned by Francesco II Gonzaga (1466-1519) around 1486 for the Ducal Palace of Mantua. The figures drawn by Kentridge were inspired by the corselet bearers on the sixth canvas.


    Giorgia Tamburi
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    Skeletal Wolf

    Di tutte brame sembiava carca nella sua magrezza

    (Gaunt Yet Gorged on Every Kind of Craving)


    Images 6 and 41 of the frieze depict two skeletal wolves—one clearly a she-wolf, the other undetermined. While they echo the famous Capitoline She-Wolf that has served as Rome’s civic mascot for centuries, they also allude to canto I of Dante’s Inferno (c. 1308–20), where a she-wolf menaces Dante’s pilgrim as he begins his journey: “una lupa, che di tutte brame / sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza / e molte genti fé già viver grame” (“a she-wolf who, all hide and bones, seemed charged with all the appetites that have made many live in wretchedness”, lines 49–51). The irony of a skeletal figure with ravenous appetites has caused scholars of Dante to suggest that the she-wolf is intended to represent the cardinal sin of incontinence, or lack of self-control, but the allegory is ambiguous, and the she-wolf’s “true” meaning is one of the most debated in the poem.


    Carrie Beneš
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    Apollo and Daphne

    Trepidare novo sub cortice pectus

    (Heart fluttering under new bark) 


    Gian Lorenzo Bernini represented the mythological story of Apollo and Daphne in a stone sculpture made for Cardinal Scipione Borghese. The sculpture captures the moment when Apollo reaches his beloved Daphne following a long pursuit and she is transformed into a laurel tree to escape the god’s amorous advances. In the celebrated statue, Apollo grasps Daphne’s waist as he registers her metamorphosis. His face is both confused and surprised, while Daphne looks shocked, her facial expression tense, perhaps engaged in a last cry before her voice is silenced forever. Meanwhile, the nymph’s body stretches toward the sky, her skin transmuting into bark. Most famously related in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, this story from Greek mythology was interpreted in Bernini’s time as an emblem of the disappointment of those who, like Apollo, are overwhelmed by their passions. The statue’s base bears an epigram written by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, the future Pope Urban VIII, reminding viewers of how bitterly one fails when driven by impulses.


    Flavia Catarinelli
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    Cicero

    Proscriptus

    (Outlaw)


    Depictions 8 and 27 are based on a 1st-century AD marble bust in Rome identified as a portrait of the Roman politician and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero wears a Roman toga, his features are stern and serious, and his mature age is rendered in detail. Kentridge has added dark areas around the eyes and mouth and, in one version (no. 8), placed the head on a wheeled cart, emphasizing its detachment from the body. This may be a reference to the display of Cicero’s severed head on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum in 43 BC. Also on show, according to Plutarch, was Cicero’s right hand. In Kentridge’s second drawing (no. 27), the head floats in the air, fragmented (dismembered?) into four parts. Cicero was a firm constitutionalist and an outspoken opponent of Mark Antony in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s death. For this, he was executed as an enemy of the state. Kentridge has given the portrait a subtly updated hairstyle: a full, slightly tousled coiffure unlike the plain, balding pate of the ancient portrait. Might this be a quiet invitation to consider politics and the power of speech (even the silencing of political dissent) with respect to the present?


    Inge Lyse Hansen
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    (pulling figure)

    Parthian Captive

    Vinctus

    (Bound)


    Hands tied behind his back, a robed man trudges forward, leaning into a tow-rope slung around his chest. A hooded, gesticulating figure follows, pulled along on a wheeled platform by the bound man’s efforts. The ‘engine’ of this strange couple (nos. 9 & 10) has a dual inspiration: the figure of a war captive on the Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman forum – the arch was awarded to the emperor and his sons in AD 203 and embellished with reliefs commemorating their victories in Parthia (modern Iran); and a bronze relief from the 1880s illustrating the torture and execution of Arnold of Brescia, the figure on the wheeled platform. On Arnold of Brescia, see no. 10.


    Lila Yawn
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    (figure with raised hands)

    Arnold of Brescia

    Ne in eius ignem ligna struas

    (Heap not wood upon his fire)


    Arnold of Brescia (c. 1100-1155) was one of the great political-religious visionaries of the Middle Ages: a fiery, charismatic priest from Lombardy, an ascetic agitator of the masses, and an ardent proponent of evangelical poverty who met his end at the gallows. Arnold came to Rome in 1145, shortly after the founding of the Commune (an autonomous civil, non-papal government). Finding the city in open rebellion against papal authority, he joined the cause, preaching vehemently against the corruption of the clergy and the temporal power of the Church. Ten years later, when Frederick Barbarossa was on his way to Rome to be crowned emperor, the tide turned against him. Blamed for an attack on a prominent cardinal by his followers and for the resulting papal interdict, which banned all religious rites in Rome, Arnold fled the city, only to be captured, hanged, and burned, his ashes thrown in the Tiber. The echo of his long-extinguished words resounded again seven centuries later during the Risorgimento (the period of Italian Unification), when he became a symbol of the struggle against the temporal papacy. Inspired by a public monument of this period in Arnold’s native city of Brescia, Kentridge’s Arnold is pulled along by a hybrid image (no. 9) which amalgamates him to a Parthian captive (see no. 9).


    Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri (English translation: Lila Yawn)
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    The Rape of Lucretia

    So of shame’s ashes shall my fame be bred


    According to one of ancient Rome’s most famous legends, Sextus Tarquinius, son of the tyrannical king Tarquin the Proud, raped the matron Lucretia, “seduced both by her beauty and by her exemplary virtue” (Livy, History of Rome, 1.57). When Lucretia resisted, Sextus Tarquinius threatened to kill her and to make it look as if she had had sex with her slave by putting their dead bodies next to one another. To avoid this eternal disgrace, Lucretia gave in and let herself be sexually abused. She then called for her father and husband, told them the true story, and plunged a knife into her heart. Outraged, the Romans drove the king and his sons out of Rome and founded a republican government in place of the monarchy, which had been established by Romulus along with the city itself. William Kentridge’s drawing evokes a painting of the subject by the great Venetian Renaissance painter Titian (c. 1488-1576). Commissioned by King Philip II of Spain, Titian’s canvas shows Sextus Tarquinius leaping on top of the nude Lucretia, shoving his knee between her legs, and threatening her with a knife. Kentridge has replaced the knife with a tree branch and reversed the orientation of the figures.


    Lila Yawn
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    The Triumph of Death

    Io so’ colei c’occido one persona

    (I am she who kills every person)


    Here a skeletal Death on horseback, with her long hair flowing in the wind, brandishes a sword in her right hand and a scythe in her left while trampling her victims underfoot. The image evokes a fresco in the cave sanctuary of the Sacro Speco in Subiaco, the hermitage of the young St. Benedict in the mountains east of Rome. The fresco, which dates to the middle of the fourteenth century (c. 1330–70), follows a late medieval visual tradition known as the Triumph of Death. While this tradition was based on earlier medieval ideas about the importance of a “good death,” it gained horrific immediacy in the years after the Black Death, the great pandemic of bubonic plague that swept across Europe between 1347 and 1352, killing up to 60% of the continent’s population. In such “triumphs,” Death’s victims are generally depicted as young, wealthy, and privileged in order to make the point that Death overcomes everyone sooner or later, and often when least expected.


    Carrie Beneš
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    Pope Gregory VII Deposed

    Dilexi iustitiam

    (I have loved righteousness)


    The two depictions (nos. 13-14) of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) are inspired by illustrations in a twelfth-century copy of Bishop Otto of Freising’s Chronicle (Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Bose q. 6). Kentridge’s depiction reverses the orientation of the manuscript illustration. The running figure at the left represents Gregory fleeing Rome in 1084, while the recumbent figure in the cart is a development of the original, in which Gregory lies entombed, mourned by two bishops. The mural represents something of the complexity of Gregory’s pontificate: his particular vision for church reform alienated as many as it inspired. Gregory was driven from the city by the Romans and Henry IV of Germany in 1084, and died the following year in Salerno, deserted by most of the Roman clergy. To his supporters he was a martyr; to opponents, a destroyer of peace and good order.


    T. J. H. McCarthy
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    Pope Gregory VII Mourned

    Idcirco morior in exilio

    (Therefore I die in exile)


    The two depictions (nos. 13-14) of Pope Gregory VII (1073–85) are inspired by illustrations in a twelfth-century copy of Bishop Otto of Freising’s Chronicle (Jena, Thüringer Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek, Bose q. 6). Kentridge’s depiction reverses the orientation of the manuscript illustration. The running figure at the left represents Gregory fleeing Rome in 1084, while the recumbent figure in the cart is a development of the original, in which Gregory lies entombed, mourned by two bishops. The mural represents something of the complexity of Gregory’s pontificate: his particular vision for church reform alienated as many as it inspired. Gregory was driven from the city by the Romans and Henry IV of Germany in 1084, and died the following year in Salerno, deserted by most of the Roman clergy. To his supporters he was a martyr; to opponents, a destroyer of peace and good order.


    T. J. H. McCarthy
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    Fireman after the Bombing of San Lorenzo

    Si gran pianto nel concavo cielo sfavilla

    (So great a weeping sparkles in the vaulted sky)


    On July 19, 1943, ten days after the Allied invasion of Sicily, hundreds of Flying Fortresses and B-24 Liberators of the United States Army Air Force dropped more than 9000 bombs on strategic points around Rome. Until then, the city had been spared. The San Lorenzo neighborhood, one of the most populous, was hardest hit. Bombs meant for its freight yards and steel factory struck other structures, as well, including apartment blocks, university medical clinics, the ancient Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura, and the Verano cemetery. The bombing of San Lorenzo left 1500 civilians dead and thousands more badly injured. The bombing was a turning point for Italy and the war, if only the beginning of Rome’s troubles. Mussolini was removed from office on July 25 th and imprisoned; but the following September, Nazi troops marched into Rome and occupied the city in a nine-month reign of terror that saw the deporting of more than 1800 Jews to death camps, the massacre of 335 people at the Ardeatine Caves, and widespread deprivation, torture, and violence. William Kentridge’s drawing was inspired by the silhouette of a firemen walking vigorously over the smoldering rubble of a bombed building at San Lorenzo. In the photograph, several other people search the ruins, presumably for the dead and wounded.


    Lila Yawn
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    Decapitating the Prisoners

    Tradet autem frater fratrem in mortem

    (And brother will deliver brother over to death)


    Two men are being led forward for decapitation, their hands tied behind their backs; a third lies dead on the ground, his severed head some distance from his body. Facing them, the executioner grasps his sword with both hands, raising it in preparation for the next fatal blow. The full beards and baggy trousers of the protagonists distinguish them as Germanic or Eastern, rather than Roman. The striking similarities between the figures suggest that they may be fellow tribesmen defeated by the Emperor Marcus Aurelius in c. AD 175 and forced into a cruel punishment—execution of their own kind—by the Roman victors. The scene is part of a narrative of the wars that emphasized the authority and invincibility of Rome for a Roman audience. Northern tribes had crossed the borders of the Empire, entering as far as Italy, events that sparked panic and calls for walls to be built. The image on the column, showing revenge on an invading foe, defense of the borders, and strong leadership, was hence a statement of reassurance and security.


    Inge Lyse Hansen
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    Pope Celestine V Relieved of His Tiara by a Fox

    Il gran rifiuto assistito

    (The great refusal, assisted)


    This image shows the saintly pope Celestine V (reigned 5 July–13 December 1294), with a dove (which here resembles a crow) on his head and a fox leaping up behind him to pull off his papal tiara. Celestine V was a well-known hermit—founder of the Celestine Order and later canonized—who was elected pope in a last-ditch effort to end a two-year impasse among the contentious prelates of the church. His papacy has generally been recognized as a failure, however, and he resigned less than six months after taking office. The fox is a reference to his highly political successor, Boniface VIII (reigned 1294–1303), who was widely rumored to have pressured Celestine into resigning. Celestine’s pontificate demonstrated clearly that pious virtue alone was no longer enough to qualify one for the medieval papacy; virtually his only surviving edict is the one in which he declared a pope’s right to abdicate—a right invoked by no one but him until the startling abdication of Benedict XVI in 2013, over seven hundred years later.


    Carrie Beneš
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    Whore of Babylon with Bialetti Moka

    Quae sedet super aquas multas

    (She who sitteth upon many waters)


    In December of 1495, the River Tiber burst its banks. Rumors spread that the flood waters had washed up a monstrous creature with the head of an ass and the body of a human female. Its left arm was human, its right ended in an elephant’s snout, its posterior had the face of an old bearded man. Its legs, covered in fish scales, ended in an eagle’s talon on the right foot and ox’s cloven hoof on the left. Its long tail ended in a serpent’s head. News spread rapidly throughout Europe, but it took Lutheran reformers in the 1520s to draw a pointed link between the monster and papal Rome, comparing it to the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation (Chs. 17-18), thus identifying it with the city itself, or, like Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, calling it the Pope-Ass and associating it with the Pope. Kentridge’s creature holds a Bialetti coffee maker.


    Massimo Gatto
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    Rome as a Widow

    Cesare mio, perché non m’accompagne?

    (My Caesar, why are you not at my side?)


    Although many earlier popes had spent time away from Rome, a city with many disadvantages ranging from malarial damps to rioting aristocrats, the papacy’s fourteenth-century residency in Avignon (1309–77) was prolonged enough that contemporaries referred to it using the biblical analogy of “Babylonian exile.” Those who sought the pope’s return to Rome, such as Petrarch and St. Catherine of Siena, often characterized the city as a wife abandoned by her husband (the pope). This image comes from a manuscript of Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo (c. 1355-64), in which he describes the “once grand and noble” city (“grande e di nobile contegno”) as a decrepit and grieving widow (“una donna…vecchia in vista e trista in costume”)—an image based on the biblical Lamentations of Jeremiah. Wrapped in a black widow’s mantle, a wizened Rome squats amidst churches and ancient ruins in an otherwise bare cityscape. When this manuscript of Fazio degli Uberti’s poem was copied in 1447, the papacy was already back in Rome, but it was only just beginning to rebuild its standing in the city and its trust among the faithful after the crises of the Western Schism (1378–1417).


    Carrie Beneš
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    An Angel Resheaths His Bloody Sword

    Mira serenitas et aeris puritas

    (A wonderful calmness and purity of air)


    Late in AD 589 the Tiber flooded much of Rome. Buildings were gutted and the papal granaries destroyed. According to Gregory of Tours (c. 538-c. 594), innumerable snakes and an enormous dragon washed down the river to the sea. The bubonic plague followed, claiming the life of Pope Pelagius II and many others. Pelagius’s successor, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great) ordered the Roman clergy and people to gather and pray, but the epidemic persisted. In one assembly eighty people dropped dead in an hour. Many centuries later (c. 1260), Jacobus de Voragine reported a famous variant on the story: Pope Gregory organized a procession around the city led by an icon of the Virgin Mary reputed to have been painted by St. Luke. The pestilence fled before the icon, leaving a purified, plague-free air in which angelic voices sang. Hearing the music, Gregory prayed to the Virgin Mary and suddenly saw an angel above the “Castle of Crescentius” cleaning the blood off of a sword and resheathing it. Gregory understood this vision as a sign that the plague had ended. From then on, the “castle,” which had been built as a mausoleum for the emperor Hadrian (died AD 138), was called Castle of the Holy Angel. Today, Castel Sant’Angelo is crowned by a colossal bronze angel by the Flemish sculptor Peter Anton van Verschaffelt. This work replaced an earlier statue by Raffaello da Montelupo, which had been made to substitute a still earlier marble angel destroyed in 1497 when a keg of gunpowder exploded.


    Lila Yawn
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    Rearing Horseman

    Flagellum Dei

    (Scourge of God)


    Raphael and his workshop painted this fresco in the papal apartments at the Vatican soon after Giovanni de’ Medici succeeded Pope Julius II with the papal name Leo X in 1513. Like the other scenes in the Stanza of Heliodoros, the painting illustrates an instance of heavenly assistance against a menace to Church authority—in this case, an attack on Italy by Attila the Hun and his army. The Huns, a pastoralist people from central Asia, invaded southeastern Europe in the 370s and rapidly acquired a fearsome reputation for their fast and unpredictable onslaughts and superb skill as mounted archers. In 451 they advanced into Gaul, where Roman and Visigothic forces defeated them at the Catalaunian Plains. It was Attila’s only loss. The following year, the Huns besieged and sacked Aquileia and other towns in northeast Italy, but Attila withdrew after meeting with Leo I and other Roman ambassadors on the banks of the Mincio river, near Mantua. Raphael’s fresco evokes Jacobus de Voragine’s version of the story (c. 1260) on updated terms. The apostles Peter and Paul, patrons of Rome and symbols of papal authority, brandish their swords in the sky above Leo I, who has the facial features of Pope Leo X. William Kentridge’s horseman evokes a figure on the far side of the composition: a mounted soldier in barbarian armor.


    Lila Yawn
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    Aldo Moro’s Body Discovered in a Renault (left)

    Il capo di cinque governi

    (The head of five governments)


    Aldo Moro (1916-1978) was an Italian statesman and a protagonist of Italian political life in the mid-twentieth century. A professor of law and a longtime leader of the Christian Democrat Party, he participated in creating Italy’s 1948 Constitution, held a variety of important cabinet posts, and served five times as prime minister between 1963 and 1976. On March 16, 1978, members of the Red Brigade, a left-wing militant organization, kidnapped him after massacring his bodyguards. Fifty-five days later they executed Moro, as well, having failed to pressure the Italian government into releasing thirteen Red Brigade members who were on trial in Turin. On May 9, 1978, Moro was found dead in the back of a Renault 4 parked in Via Caetani, not far from Piazza di Venezia in Rome. Several Red Brigade militants were convicted of the crime, but the “Moro Affair” is still riddled with unresolved questions.


    Lila Yawn
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    St. Teresa in Ecstasy (upper right)

    Dulce dolor

    (Sweet pain)


    Canonized in 1622, along with Ignatius of Loyola and Francis Xavier, Teresa of Avila (1515-1582) did not seem the ideal candidate for sainthood. A Spanish mystic, a woman, and the granddaughter of a converted Jew, she was investigated repeatedly by the Inquisition and held suspect even after death. In 1589, Inquisitorial theologians called for the burning of all of her books. For her supporters, these tribulations made her canonization all the more urgent. Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680) was entrusted by Cardinal Federico Cornaro (1579-1653) with rendering one of her most controversial miracles in a work of art. According to the saint’s autobiography, an angel appeared to her and pierced her heart and entrails with an arrow, filling her with a spiritual feeling of pain and pleasure. The holiness of Teresa’s ecstasy was questioned due to her gender and radical departure from the institutional path of salvation: she did not need the Church in Rome to reach God. Bernini’s sculpture of St. Teresa in ecstasy is the centerpiece of the Cornaro Chapel (1644-1652) in the church of S. Maria della Vittoria. The saint appears to float above the viewer on a slope of clouds. Only Teresa’s feet, hands, and face are exposed; a voluminous robe conceals the rest of her. Although the sculpture was criticized for its seemingly sensual facial expression, which radiates divine euphoria, Bernini went to great lengths to show Teresa as otherworldly, floating on a cloud above the criticism of her detractors.


    Linda Nolan
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    Romans Slaying Barbarians (lower right)

    Wunns!

    (Affliction!)


    The lower right corner of the amalgam of figures (nos. 22-23-24 in the frieze) is a quote from a monumental sarcophagus (c. AD 260) discovered in 1621 just outside Rome near Porta Tiburtina. The sarcophagus depicts a battle between Roman soldiers and Barbarians, as well as scenes of Barbarian submission to the clearly mightier Roman forces. The deceased himself is portrayed in military attire galloping on horseback in the upper center of the relief, arm extended in a gesture of victory. The scene chosen by William Kentridge is from the lower right corner of the composition. It represents a Roman soldier in a short tunic and helmet stepping over a naked Barbarian who has fallen to the ground. The soldier is wielding a sword with which he is threatening his fallen foe. The Barbarian’s bare torso is upright, barely propped up by his right hand, while his left arm wraps around the leg of the striding soldier in a gesture of pleading. His head is set at a sharp angle, looking upwards at the soldier with an emphatic expression of despair and piteous beseeching. The Barbarian is disarmed, and his nudity and full, unkempt beard and thick locks make a striking contrast with the purportedly more civilized, clean-shaven, fully dressed, sword-wielding Roman. If the Barbarian’s angst is clear, clear too is the Roman’s right to annihilate him if he so chooses.


    Sharon Salvadori
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    Remus, Dead

    Quicumque transiliet moenia mea

    (Whoever leaps over my walls)


    This image depicts Remus newly slain by his brother Romulus. According to a legend reported by Livy and other ancient authors, Romulus and Remus desired to found a new city in the place where they had been found as infants (cf. the entry for figure 4: She-Wolf). However, only one brother could give the city its name. To settle the question, the twins waited for signs from the gods, but the results were ambiguous: first, six vultures appeared to Remus on Aventine hill, then twelve vultures appeared to Romulus on the Palatine. The meaning of the number of birds and the timing of their arrival caused a violent argument, which resulted in the killing of Remus. The tribes that had supported Remus united with their opponents behind the victor, who called the city Roma, after himself. Kentridge’s drawing evokes an engraving in an illustrated history of ancient Rome published by the French government in 1799 for purposes of “educating” the public. The accompanying texts cast Romulus as a despot who preferred sole power to the bonds of fraternal blood and who went on to rule with the trappings of religion and royalty—aspects despised by the French Revolution (1789-1799). In Mirys’s engraving, Romulus (not pictured in Kentridge’s image) runs away, brandishing a spear and looking back at his brother. Remus lies on the ground in dramatic perspectival foreshortening, violated by a tyrant in the making.


    Laura Foster
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    Benito Mussolini

    Disarmed


    This image is based upon a little-known fresco in a building called the Cubo d’Oro (Gold Cube), which was part of an enormous exhibition space in Naples, the Mostra d’Oltremare. Comprised of a number of exhibition halls, the Mostra was intended to celebrate Italy’s imperial pursuits in East Africa in the late 1930s and early 1940s. In the fresco, Mussolini is at center surrounded by his army, dressed in ancient Roman military regalia. With its right hoof, Mussolini’s horse crushes a vanquished soldier, generically representing a North African. Kentridge truncated Mussolini’s gesture, the Roman Salute (saluto romano), a gesture prohibited by the Scelba Law (Legge Scelba) of 1952. The imperious image of Mussolini is also interrupted by a series of round marks, indicating damage to the fresco from bullets during World War II or shortly thereafter. While the fresco in the Cubo d’Oro was deliberately disfigured, other Fascist images remain intact and in place throughout Italy.


    Laura Foster
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    Cicero

    Proscriptus

    (Outlaw)


    Depictions 8 and 27 are based on a 1st-century AD marble bust in Rome identified as a portrait of the Roman politician and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero. Cicero wears a Roman toga, his features are stern and serious, and his mature age is rendered in detail. Kentridge has added dark areas around the eyes and mouth and, in one version (no. 8), placed the head on a wheeled cart, emphasizing its detachment from the body. This may be a reference to the display of Cicero’s severed head on the speaker’s platform in the Roman Forum in 43 BC. Also on show, according to Plutarch, was Cicero’s right hand. In Kentridge’s second drawing (no. 27), the head floats in the air, fragmented (dismembered?) into four parts. Cicero was a firm constitutionalist and an outspoken opponent of Mark Antony in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s death. For this, he was executed as an enemy of the state. Kentridge has given the portrait a subtly updated hairstyle: a full, slightly tousled coiffure unlike the plain, balding pate of the ancient portrait. Might this be a quiet invitation to consider politics and the power of speech (even the silencing of political dissent) with respect to the present?


    Inge Lyse Hansen
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    Pasolini, Murdered

    Vengo da te e torno a te

    (I come from you and I return to you)


    A prolific poet, literary critic, novelist, political writer, journalist, theater director, and filmmaker, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Bologna, 1922 – Rome, 1975) was also highly controversial—an idiosyncratic Marxist expelled from the Communist party for his open homosexuality; an unsparing and graphically provocative narrator of contemporary Italian society, especially working-class suburbia and the underclasses. Pasolini promoted the use of dialect as a means of depriving the Church of its power over the common people, whose purity he believed modern consumerist culture had not yet spoiled. Like his life, Pasolini’s death was, and still is, controversial. Kentridge’s drawing evokes a photograph taken the morning of November 2, 1975, when Pasolini’s dead body was found on the beach at Ostia, near Rome. A young man, Giuseppe Pelosi, was arrested for the crime that same night, but even now, after more than forty years, the case remains unsolved and suspicions that other people were involved persist.


    Giorgia Tamburi
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    Winged Victory

    Victoria scribens

    (Victory writing)


    The goddess of Victory (nos. 1 and 29), recognizable by her large feathered wings, is intently concentrated on inscribing the circular shield that she rests against her thigh, presumably with the details of Trajan’s imperial victories in Dacia (modern Romania). Her pose and the long folds of her clothing highlight her statuesque and imposing form. The figure appears twice on the Column of Trajan, marking the end of the two military campaigns, a feature repeated also on the later Column of Marcus Aurelius (c. AD 180). In this way, the act of inscribing is not simply a statement of the victory but embedded in the telling of the narrative. Kentridge similarly includes two Victory figures: one at the mid-way point of the frieze, where the figure is multiplied and seems to crumble into the banks of the Tiber (nos. 29-31); and another at the end nearest Ponte Sisto (no. 1). He has chosen, though, to let the latter entirely turn her back on the other figures and to face the bridge. Viewers are thus left to wonder whether she marks the beginning or the end of the procession, a triumph or a lament, an address or a question.


    Inge Lyse Hansen
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    Winged Victory Decomposing

    Quando cadet Roma

    (When Rome falls)


    Here Winged Victory starts to crumble.


    Lila Yawn
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    Winged Victory Decomposed

    Cadet et mundus

    (The world also falls)


    Here Winged Victory has crumbled further, becoming a ruin.


    Lila Yawn
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    Cola di Rienzo

    L’ultimo dei Romani!

    (Last of the Romans!)


    Cola di Rienzo (Rome, 1313-1354) is arguably the most famous Roman citizen of the Middle Ages. A man of vast culture, he was a friend of Petrarch and an orator with incredible powers of persuasion. Having taken over the government of Rome in a coup d’état of 1347, with the title of “august tribune” (tribuno augusto) he attempted to reform the city’s institutions in a popular sense. Endeavoring to restore Rome to the greatness of its ancient past, Cola even cultivated the dream of having himself elected emperor. His efforts only last a few months, however. After extraordinary wanderings and changes of fortune, which led him to become a visionary and a prophet and to return to governing Rome for a brief period, his life ended on October 8, 1354, with a terrible lynching.


    Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri (English translation: Lila Yawn)
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    Haile Selassie

    Nĕgūša Nagašt

    (King of kings)


    The Ethiopian victory at the Battle of Adwa in 1896 stunted Italy’s effort to make Ethiopia, like so many other African countries, a European colony. Forty years later Mussolini invaded again, this time establishing a foreign occupation that lasted five years (1936-41). Haile Selassie, “king of kings,” was emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 to 1972 and maintained a government in exile throughout the occupation. Despite his eloquent plea for defense by the League of Nations, the heavy sanctions the League imposed on Italy were ignored by many member countries and thus ineffectual. Only with Italy’s entrance into World War II did Haile Selassie gain assistance from Allied powers and, with British and Ethiopian forces, oust the occupiers. In 1963 he helped establish the Organization of African Unity (now the African Union) and served as its first chairperson. A symbol of African resistance to and independence from European colonialism, Haile Selassie is venerated by Rastafarians as the Messiah in his second coming. His characteristic hand gesture, which Kentridge features at right, is often used by Rastafarians to invoke the Trinity (a part of Haile Selassie’s throne name) and the emperor himself.


    Samantha Kelly
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    The Spoils of Jerusalem

    Omnia desiderabilia eius

    (All her desirable things)


    In AD 70, the Roman general Titus, son of the Emperor Vespasian, conquered Jerusalem after a long siege, a feat for which he was awarded a triumph. Among the spoils paraded through the Roman Forum were the treasures of Herod’s Temple, which had been rebuilt in about 20 BC and which was destroyed after the Roman army broke into the city. The treasures were eventually displayed in Vespasian’s Temple of Peace. Titus succeeded his father as emperor in 79 but died two years later. To honor his memory, his younger brother and successor, Domitian, erected the marble Arch of Titus at the southeastern end of the Forum. Its lavish sculptural decorations include two reliefs showing the triumphal procession with the Temple treasures prominently displayed. Rome’s Jewish community, the oldest in Europe, grew significantly after the Roman sack of Jerusalem, but there were already Jewish residents in Rome long before.


    Massimo Gatto
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    Carnival

    Guardati commo ben beffar ci seppe?

    (See how well he mocked us?)


    In Renaissance Rome, Carnival was above all “The Festival of the Jews”: a pre-Lenten revelry in which Rome’s Jewish inhabitants were publicly humiliated in ritual games— unless they were able to pay an exorbitant “Carnival tax,” which exempted them from participating. In Piazza Navona, Jews were ridden piggyback. At Monte Testaccio, an elderly Jew was forced inside of a barrel and rolled down the hill amid carts full of pigs. In 1466 Pope Paul II instituted races (corsi) along the ancient Via Lata (present-day Via del Corso). On some days Jews were made to race on foot; on other days the contestants were animals: horses, asses, or buffalo. Eyewitness accounts of the palio of the Jews, a footrace, describe the participants as scantily clad (1512) or even nude (1519-20). To evoke these and other such public humiliations, Kentridge chose an image of a man on horseback, bound with a placard around his neck and led by a figure in a pointed hood.


    Lila Yawn
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    Execution

    Se ‘l cieco traditor mondo fallace

    (If the blind, false, and treasonous world)

     


    This image was drawn from a photograph made during the Second World War. In the photo, two men stand facing a wall, their backs to the camera. To the left, a Nazi soldier (not present in Kentridge’s drawing) leans forward with a rifle. One of the condemned men holds his hands in the air while the other grasps his head and seems to lurch slightly forward. Stains on the white wall in front of the right-hand figure suggest that the photographer’s shutter opened and shut a split second after the man was shot. The names of the men and the location are unknown. Whatever the reason for their execution (desertion?), in the context of the frieze they represent the millions of people executed during the Second World War.


    Lila Yawn
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    Quello che non ricordo

    (That Which I Do Not Remember)

    Lethe


    Invention of William Kentridge


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    Partisans

    Bella ciao


    Three Partisans hold their hands above their heads. Kentridge has distilled a photograph in which six fighters were caught on the Via Laurentina in Rome by German paratroopers. These civilians had joined the Granatieri di Sardegna Mechanized Brigade to fight against the Germans after September 8, 1943, when Italy had signed an Armistice with the Allies, switching allegiances. Fighters in the Resistance came from different social backgrounds, with a number of movements—for example the Bandiera Rossa—developing in the borgate (poor suburbs) of Rome. We do not know what faction these Partisans belonged to, but Kentridge has given them an iconic stance. They are huge, imposing, revolutionary, in comparison with their perhaps more disorientated counterparts in the photograph. You cannot see their facial expressions, which gives them an unreadable, even powerful, air. There is something laconic about their postures and, with their half-open shirts, masculine. Kentridge’s frieze has given them another life, at a time when the meaning of the Partisans’ struggle is waning and often instrumentalized to political ends.


    Martina Caruso
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    The Great Tiber Flood of 1937

    Et ducit remos illic, ubi nuper arabat

    (And he rows where he lately ploughed)

     


    Rome has flooded several times since the Embankment Wall was built at the end of the nineteenth century. The areas south of the historic center are always hardest hit, as they have little protection from the river. Over 7000 people living along Via Portuense, the area around San Paolo fuori le Mura, and at Fiumicino were rendered homeless during the December 1937 flood. Mussolini’s Black Shirts and the Governor of Rome mobilized a rescue effort and built canteens and shelters for the homeless. Rome was without electricity, and the railroads ceased to function for several days. A marker at the entry to the church of San Bartolomeo al Isola reminds us that although the right and left banks are protected, the Tiber Island is still vulnerable. Two meters of water surged through the church, and patients at the two hospitals on the Island had to be evacuated. As recently as 2013 the Tiber’s waters have risen and threatened to flood the island.


    Katherine Wentworth Rinne
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    African Migrants Arrive in Lampedusa

    ተስፋ [tesfa]

    (Hope)


    One of the most treacherous migrant journeys is the boat trip from North Africa to Europe. This depiction is drawn from a specific event in August of 2008, when 355 illegal Eritrean immigrants arrived on a boat in the port of Italy’s southern island of Lampedusa. Migrants and refugees continue to flee Africa and the Middle East to Europe in one of the greatest waves of migration in Europe’s history. Over a million people crossed into Europe in 2015. Civil war, human rights violations, and poverty are the main factors that drive people to undertake the perilous journeys away from their own countries, often crossing several borders before they make the dangerous passage by boat across the Mediterranean to Greece or Italy. During 2015 alone, it is estimated that more than 3,700 people drowned or went missing while making the crossing in unsafe fishing boats or dinghies. Survivors often describe violence and abuse by human traffickers. Nevertheless, people continue to risk hardship and death in the hope of finding a more sustainable life elsewhere.


    Nicola Brandt
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    Skeletal She-Wolf

    Di tutte brame sembiava carca nella sua magrezza

    (Gaunt Yet Gorged on Every Kind of Craving)

     


    Images 6 and 41 of the frieze depict two skeletal wolves—one clearly a she-wolf, the other undetermined. While they echo the famous Capitoline She-Wolf that has served as Rome’s civic mascot for centuries, they also allude to canto I of Dante’s Inferno (c. 1308–20), where a she-wolf menaces Dante’s pilgrim as he begins his journey: “una lupa, che di tutte brame / sembiava carca ne la sua magrezza / e molte genti fé già viver grame” (“a she-wolf who, all hide and bones, seemed charged with all the appetites that have made many live in wretchedness”, lines 49–51). The irony of a skeletal figure with ravenous appetites has caused scholars of Dante to suggest that the she-wolf is intended to represent the cardinal sin of incontinence, or lack of self-control, but the allegory is ambiguous, and the she-wolf’s “true” meaning is one of the most debated in the poem.


    Carrie Beneš
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    A Procession of Migrants

    Unless home is the mouth of a shark

    (A meno che casa non sia la bocca di uno squalo)

     


    A composition by William Kentridge (cf. image no. 34: Spoils of Jerusalem)


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    St. Peter Crucified

    Tropaion

    (Trophy)


    According to tradition, St. Peter was crucified upside down in AD 64 to avoid dying just like Christ. In that year, a terrible fire broke out in Rome, ravaging ten of the city’s fourteen regions. Emperor Nero, after seizing his lyre and singing about the sack of Troy as he watched the flames (leading to the saying “fiddling while Rome burns”), pinned the blame for the disaster on the Christians. When they had been rounded up, Nero declared public games in which they were subjected to brutal punishments in the circus that he and his predecessor Caligula had built an area called the Ager Vaticanus, Vatican Field. The punishments included crucifixion in various positions—tradition says that St. Peter numbered among these victims. Other Christians were drenched with pitch and set alight as torches to illuminate the games at night. ~Massimo Gatto

     

    The depiction of St. Peter’s Crucifixion in Rome is inspired by a Renaissance predella panel that comprised a large altarpiece by Masaccio (1401-29) known as the Pisa Polyptych (1426). In its original composition, the predella stood at the foot of a colossal central panel showing the enthroned Virgin and Child. It was pendant to the small, emotionally charged panel of Christ’s crucifixion that crowned the whole work in gold. Kentridge eliminates the executioners who surround St. Peter in Masaccio’s version, emphasizing the protagonist’s spiritual isolation at the time of his martyrdom. As in the original, Kentridge’s depiction has the Saint’s eyes somehow looking past the viewers, as if engaging in a determined, private conversation with an otherworldly being. The moment is of his transition from earthly Rome to heavenly Rome. ~Mari Yoko Hara


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    Lampedusa Widows

    ጓሂ [gWahi]

    (Sorrow)


    William Kentridge’s drawing depicts three Eritrean women, their heads covered with shawls, walking in solemn procession at a memorial service in Tel Aviv in October of 2013. The Eritrean community living in Israel came to mourn the loss of over a hundred Africans who had drowned tragically on October 3, 2013, in a shipwreck off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa. Among those who died were friends and relatives of the Eritreans attending the service, many of whom were, and are, asylum seekers themselves. “They were hoping to live free and dignified lives,” describes a participant of the service. Over the past few years, countries in Africa and the Middle East are experiencing an exodus of people seeking life elsewhere, particularly in Europe. For those who make the treacherous journey from North Africa, Italy is often the first point of entry. As the Somali-British poet Warsan Shire describes, “You have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.” Tragically, hundreds of refugees and other migrants continue to drown each year attempting to cross the Mediterranean Sea.


    Nicola Brandt
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    Jeremiah

    Quomodo sedit sola civitas plena populo

    (How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people!)

     


    Tradition ascribed the Biblical book of Lamentations to the prophet Jeremiah. In bleak, powerful verse, the text describes the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BC and the leading of the Jews into captivity. The prophet admits that the sins of Jerusalem have brought on this punishment, but he pleads for God’s mercy. Renaissance Christians believed that the Biblical prophets, like the ancient Sibyls, had foreknowledge of Christ’s coming, and for that reason Michelangelo painted them on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel along with stories of the Creation and the Hebrew ancestors of Jesus. Michelangelo portrayed Jeremiah as a powerful old man overcome by sorrow, with a bowed head and a hand covering the lower part of his face.


    Massimo Gatto
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    Giordano Bruno

    Accademico di nulla accademia, detto il Fastidito

    (Academic of no academy, called “The Exasperated”)


    On February 17, 1600, the philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori for “obstinate and pertinacious heresy” after a turbulent life, which he had begun as a Dominican friar in Naples and which took him to Calvinist Geneva (where he was excommunicated), to Paris, (where he tutored the King of France), to Elizabethan England, back to France, to Prague, and then to Germany. Homesickness brought him to Padua and Venice, where he was arrested, extradited to Rome, and tried by an Inquisition that included the Jesuit (and future saint) Robert Bellarmine. His philosophy, conveyed in both Latin and vernacular, prose and poetry, centered on an infinite universe composed of atoms, and his work influenced both Kepler and Galileo. A symbol of free thought against an obscurantist Church, he is commemorated in a statue by Ettore Ferrari (1889) in the Campo de’ Fiori, which shows him in the Dominican habit he abandoned in 1576.


    Massimo Gatto
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    Marker of the Tiber Flood of 1557

    Hvc thyber advenit

    (The Tiber came up to here)


    On the night of September 15, 1557, the Tiber River flooded Rome with a vengeance; more than five meters of water stood inside the Pantheon for three days. The inner embankment of Castel Sant’Angelo was completely destroyed, and in Piazza San Pietro people moved about in boats. The rush of water carried away many houses. People and animals died. Turbulent waters swept the grain mills from their moorings, and the grain supply was destroyed. The Tiber was so ferocious that it actually cut a new course to the sea below Tor Boacciana, near Fiumicino, where the airport is located today. Once the floodwater receded, Rome’s streets—filled with rotting animal corpses and other noxious elements—were ruinous and impassable. Wells and cisterns were polluted, buildings were reduced to rubble, and disease was rampant. Even so, commemorative inscriptions were mounted on buildings, to commemorate God’s intervention in protecting the people of Rome from greater damage.


    Katherine Wentworth Rinne
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    Anita Garibaldi

    Pistol Packin’ Mama


    A Brazilian national, Anita Garibaldi gained fame in her fight for Italian unification alongside her husband, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Kentridge’s image is based upon the statue located on the Janiculum hill, in the park that honors the heroes of the Risorgimento. Anita is not posed for a portrait here. Instead, the scene is taken from a story of her participation in a rebellion against imperial Portuguese rule in her home country. With the horse rearing back, she holds a pistol raised in one hand and cradles her infant son, Menotti, in her other arm. The equestrian image of a woman is unique in Rome. The sculpture itself was commissioned in 1932, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s death. The female image of both militant patriotism and maternity were useful as revolutionary symbols for the Fascist regime. Anita did participate in a battle in Rome during the short-lived Republic of 1849 but died of malaria while in retreat shortly thereafter.


    Laura Foster
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    Victor Emmanuel II Posing for His Equestrian Portrait

    Cavalletto

    (Sawhorse/Little Horse)


    Vittorio Emanuele II, the first king of Italy as a united country, peers over Piazza Venezia astride his horse from the tall pedestal at the center of the monument dedicated to him. The enormous bronze equestrian statue is framed by a temple-like colonnade, each column representing a region of the new country. On the pedestal of the sculpture are personifications of the major cities of Italy. Inscribed on the western side of the pedestal is “Vittorio Emanuele, Padre della Patria” (Victor Emmanuel, Father of the Country). The entire ensemble of symbols, mostly taken from ancient Roman imagery, seeks to relocate Italy at the start of a new Empire. In this image, Kentridge has chosen to imagine Victor Emmanuel posing for the official portrait while sitting on a model horse. The pose is based on a photograph taken of Kaiser Wilhelm II (a generation younger than Vittorio Emanuele II), who also posed for an equestrian portrait. The imitation of imperial Roman images reached its height with the burgeoning European nation-states of the mid to late 19th century, though the power such images convey today is perhaps somewhat diminished by the photographic documentation of their creation.


    Laura Foster
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    Collapsing Horse

    Gratus et optatus

    (Pleasing and desired)


    Kentridge’s “Collapsing Horse” was inspired by a traditional type-scene on Roman Dionysiac sarcophagi: representations of the blissful, ecstatic Bacchic victory over purportedly normative identity and behavior. The falling animal, a humble beast of burden, is nevertheless a full participant in a triumphal procession celebrating Bacchus’s conquest of the world. On a sarcophagus in the Capitoline Museums, two donkeys pull a chariot occupied by two seated and embracing women and are led by the only Greco-Roman hybrid divinity: Pan, part goat, part anthropomorphic male. The donkey nearest the viewer is shown drunk, possessed by Dionysos: it folds, curls into and onto itself: its rear end and legs are steady, but its back slopes downward. Its neck curves forward and inward, while its muzzle curls to the ground. The foreground leg bends at a sharp angle, with the hoof pointing diagonally upwards to its belly; the second leg is splayed out in front striving for balance. The second donkey leading the biga is also struggling with intoxication, but its head is held up by a satyr who holds up the head of yet another satyr who carries a dead boar over his shoulders: the resolution of a revolution through sacrifice?


    Sharon Salvadori
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    Rome, Open City

    Francesco!


    On August 14, 1943, after the second Allied bombing of Rome in less than a month, Marshal Pietro Badoglio declared Rome an “open city,” effectively demilitarizing the capital. (Badoglio had become prime minister on July 25th, following Mussolini’s dismissal and arrest.) On September 8th, the armistice between the Kingdom of Italy and the Allied powers was made public, and early on the morning of September 9th, King Victor Emmanuel III and the royal family left Rome in a motorcade, destined for Pescara and accompanied by Badoglio. Orders were given to the Italian military not to defend the city. By September 10th, the Germans controlled Rome, having swept aside the resistance mounted by Italian civilians, students, and soldiers. The Nazi Supreme Commander in Italy, Albert Kesselring, reaffirmed Rome’s status as an open (i.e. demilitarized, undefended) city while nevertheless occupying it with German troops and overseeing the most repressive, violent nine months of the last several centuries of Rome’s history. In Roma Città Aperta (1945), Roberto Rossellini portrayed the tragic events of the Nazi occupation with the strength typical of Neorealist cinema. The main characters are members of the Resistance persecuted by the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo. In this intense scene, Pina, played by the Roman actress Anna Magnani, has been shot down by the Nazis, and her son, Marcello, is crying over her dead body.


    Giorgia Tamburi and Lila Yawn
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    La dolce vita

    Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not


    My parents took me and my sister on a summer holiday to Rome in 1961. I was six and mesmerized by a city and world so utterly different to the suburban Johannesburg I had lived in. I think it was the terror of the Bocca della Verità as much as the Trevi Fountain and fettuccine Alfredo that transfixed me. At any rate since that first exposure to Italy I have felt a closeness to the country that is more than mere historical or art historical interest. When I saw La Dolce Vita (made in 1961, but I saw it only in 1979) the connection was both to the filmmaking and to the memory of a child in Rome. So when in 2012 I started thinking about images of Triumphs and Laments, one of the glories of Rome that I wanted to celebrate was that image of The Trevi Fountain with Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg, in a moment of wished for exuberance and freedom. When all seems possible—as it did to that six year old. To put it into the procession (and it is the penultimate image), the Trevi fountain had to be shrunk into a bathtub.


    William Kentridge
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    Bersagliere

    Le piume al vento

    (Feathers in the wind)


    This monument commemorates the Italian infantry corps of the Bersaglieri, who crossed through an artillery-made breach in the Aurelian Wall on September 20, 1870. The entry of the Bersaglieri into Rome marked the end of papal control of the city and the addition of Rome to the young Kingdom of Italy. Morbiducci’s colossal bronze statue stands just outside of Porta Pia, on the north side of the city. Its design, one of many submitted in a public competition of 1930, was personally approved by Mussolini.


    Lila Yawn
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    Horse

    Così l’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva, si volse a retro

    (So did my still-fleeing spirit turn back)


    Invention of William Kentridge


Triumphs and Laments – Guide

EDITOR'S PREFACE

Each episode in William Kentridge’s Triumphs & Laments refers to the past in at least two ways. On the one hand, it depicts a triumph or lament from Roman history, legend, or myth (or, better, a triumph-lament, the two being different sides of the same coin). On the other, it represents a specific historical image of a triumph-lament: a sculpture, painting, drawing, print, photograph, film still, or some detail thereof, transposed into Kentridge’s graphic idiom and modified in ways that await discovery by the viewer.

This section of the website is intended to help you interpret these distinct but intertwined elements. It consists of fifty-four entries, one for each of the fifty-four scenes of triumph and lament depicted on the river wall. All entries are furnished with subtitles, in languages that range from Gothic to Ge’ez. The arrangement of entries follows the order of images on the Tiber embankment starting at the foot of Ponte Sisto and moving north toward Ponte Mazzini.

Each entry includes: 

  • a thumbnail image of Kentridge’s drawing; 
  • a descriptive title; 
  • an identification of the inspiring historical image, hyperlinked to a photo available on the internet; 
  • a short description of the triumph-lament and model image, written by a professor or advanced student; 
  • a subtitle that I invented or excerpted from ancient, medieval, or modern literature as an enigmatic interpretive key or informative riddle (the artist called these subtitles “a frieze alongside the frieze”);
  • a short, select bibliography for further reading, with a hint for decoding the subtitle.

The authors 

These texts represent a labor of love and countless hours of volunteer work on the part of university professors, students, and recent graduates who gave generously of their time and expertise to write and translate the descriptive texts. As general editor, I formulated the poetic subtitles and short bibliographies with occasional advice from the contributing authors. Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri kindly edited the Italian translations provided by my students for a planned but no longer available stand-alone app. The short titles are those that I composed in consultation with William Kentridge for publication by Teveretereno in an ‘instant book’ at the inauguration of the frieze on April 21, 2016.

Lila Yawn

Triumphs and Laments – Guide

FAQ

Are the figures arranged in historical order on the river wall? Triumphs & Laments is playfully non-chronological. It is not a timeline of Roman history. Characters from different eras stand side by side, interacting and merging across the centuries like the physical stuff of Rome itself.

Is there some other principle behind their arrangement? The frieze is continuous, a grand procession. Along the way, however, it changes in subtle ways.

  • Most of the episodes downriver (nos. 1-21), starting with the Winged Victory near Ponte Sisto (no. 1), come from the distant past, legend, or myth, and they process toward the sea in parallel with the currents of the Tiber.
  • Toward the center of the frieze, a startling ancient-modern hybrid introduces a change of key (nos. 22-24), which is sealed by a two-part cadence (nos. 25-31): the fallen figures of Remus (no. 25) and Pasolini (no. 28) framing two other men who met violent ends (nos. 26-27); and the return of Winged Victory (no. 29), who this time directs her triumphant gaze upriver before crumbling into the quay (nos. 30-31).
  • After Victory’s fall, new principles hold sway. Ancient, medieval, and modern alternate more freely than before, but modernity increasingly dominates. For a while, the procession resumes its progress toward the Tyrrhenian Sea (nos. 32-39); but with the great ship of Eritrean migrants pulling into Lampedusa (no. 40) it does an about-face, turning against the flow of the Tiber and toward the river’s source. Initially somber (nos. 32-46), this segment of the parade eventually gives way to light-heartedness and romance (nos. 48-50, 52-53), interrupted by one last, especially poignant tragedy (no. 51).

Where do the figures come from? William Kentridge selected and drew freely from a timeline of nearly five hundred images from the history of art, cinema, and journalism compiled for the purpose by by volunteers from Tevereterno and by our Triumphs & Laments research group at John Cabot University.

Although these model images represent episodes from Roman history, legend, and myth, the images themselves come from many different places: Italy, France, Germany, England, Ethiopia. Some were made close in time to the events they represent, while others were created centuries or even millennia later. In a few cases, Kentridge drew his inspirations from other sources or freely invented the iconography, for example the skeletal wolf drawn from an x-ray (nos. 6 and 41) and the inscribed wagon commemorating triumphs and laments that have gone forgotten (no. 37). 

Does the frieze include more laments than triumphs, or vice versa? A central principle of the work is that triumphs and laments are inseparable; the one is always implicit in the other. When one party wins and exults, the opposing side loses and mourns. It follows that each composition on the wall represents both a triumph and a lament. For example…

  • The men carrying war booty in Caesar’s quadruple triumph (no. 5) march along unaware of what will happen two years later: Caesar’s assassination, precipitating civil war and the fall of the Roman Republic.
  • Farther along, Mussolini (no. 26) rides triumphant like a modern-day Marcus Aurelius. Yet the image is full of bullet holes shot by dissenters during or after the Second World War. In Kentridge’s drawing, Mussolini’s saluting arm has also been lopped off and suspended in the air like a trophy. (The arm may also belong to Cicero. For the reasons, see entry no. 27.)

What does it all mean? No great work of art can be explained fully in a few words or even in a thousand. To enjoy Triumphs & Laments I suggest treating it as a playground for the eyes and mind. The images are fascinating simply to look at, whether from the far side of the Tiber, the bridges, or Piazza Tevere. From afar they look like people, animals, and objects in silhouette. Seen up close, they break up into abstractions evocative of the ripples and currents of the river.

Kentridge’s drawings also radiate an infinity of possible meanings, thanks to the events and images they evoke and to the artist’s subtle manipulation of his models. Note, for example, the distended and slightly ridiculous bellies of the triumphators’ horses (nos. 2 and 26); the oars added to a modern power boat (no. 40); the sewing machine and shower head among ancient war spoils (no. 5); and the carnivalesque carts that bear grim laments along on tiny wheels (nos. 16, 37). 

Triumphs and Laments – Guide

CREDITS

Editor in chief
Lila Yawn, John Cabot University

Co-editor for Italian texts
Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, Università degli studi di Urbino Carlo Bo

Associate Curator 
Diane Roehm, Tevereterno 
    
Editorial assistance
Giulia Carletti, John Cabot University (alumna)
Giulia Carpignoli, Tevereterno 
Kirila Cvetkovska, John Cabot University (alumna)
Rosa Palermo, John Cabot University (alumna)

Subtitles and bibliography
Lila Yawn, John Cabot University

 

Historical entries
Carrie Beneš, New College of Florida
Nicola Brandt, University of Oxford
Martina Caruso, John Cabot University
Flavia Catarinelli, John Cabot University (alumna)
Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, Università degli studi di Urbino Carlo Bo
Laura Foster, John Cabot University
Massimo Gatto, University of Notre Dame Global Gateway
Inge Lyse Hansen, John Cabot University 
Mari Yoko Hara, Columbia University
Samantha Kelly, Rutgers University
T. J. H. McCarthy, New College of Florida
Linda Nolan, John Cabot University
Katherine Wentworth Rinne, California College of the Arts and Aquae Urbis Romae – The Waters of the City of Rome
Sharon Salvadori, John Cabot University
Giorgia Tamburi, John Cabot University (alumna)
Lila Yawn, John Cabot University

Translations (Italian edition)
Giulia Carletti, John Cabot University (alumna)
Flavia Catarinelli, John Cabot University (alumna)
Tommaso di Carpegna Falconieri, Università degli studi di Urbino Carlo Bo
Andrea Foschi, John Cabot University (student)
Valeria Frezza, John Cabot University (alumna)
Alice Marinelli, John Cabot University (alumna)
Giosuè Prezioso, John Cabot University (alumnus)
Giorgia Tamburi, John Cabot University (alumna)
Lila Yawn, John Cabot University

 

Research for the image ‘Timeline’ provided to William Kentridge

Andrea Biagioni

Sara Spizzichino

Giulia Carletti

Flavia Catarinelli

Kirila Cvetkovska

Valeria Frezza

Giacinta Gandolfo

Rosa Palermo

Giosuè Prezioso

Kirsten Rogerson

Giorgia Tamburi

Lila Yawn (curator)