Drawing, Memory, and the City: William Kentridge's Rome by Salvatore Settis

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drawing, memory, and the city: william kentridge's rome

by Salvatore Settis

There is something strange about paintings, similar to written words: they stand before us like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence.

Plato, Phaedrus, 275d1

The Eternity of the Ephemeral

( fig. 1 ) Trajan’s Column, Rome, 113 CE, detail

Rome, the “eternal city” by repute and by destiny, has always been a place of ephemerality. “I found Rome a city of bricks and I left it a city of marble,” said Augustus (63 BCE–14 CE). As his biographer Suetonius wrote, “The city was not worthy of the dignity of empire and was vulnerable to floods and fires, yet Augustus secured it against future disasters, as much as human foresight could allow.”2 The durability and splendor of marble, the dignity of the empire, and protection from Tiber floods were thus brought together in a unified strategy. It was also in the age of Augustus that Horace wrote his famous Ode to proudly trumpet the eternity of his poetry: “I have built a monument more lasting than bronze, loftier than the royal pyramids, which neither devouring rain nor raging winds, nor even the countless succession of years and the flight of time will destroy. Thus I will die, but not fully.”3 Political power and urban design, dominion over the river, the literature and art of bronze and marble—these were key elements in what we might call the Horatian image of limitless time, of Rome eternally triumphant: the Rome of the Caesars and the Rome of the popes.

Such an image begins to break down, however, when we consider how the Romans celebrated their triumphs. The carefully staged ceremony of the triumphus was held at the end of every war to celebrate the victorious general’s return to Rome. He received the title imperator, which in Republican times was given to victorious military leaders (even, for example, to Cicero after the campaign of 50 BCE in Cilicia), yet starting with Augustus was used to refer to the de facto ruler of the Roman state. The word triumphus derives from the Greek word thriambos, used in the cult of Dionysus and brought to Rome through the Etruscan triumpe. This layering of language and of rituals associated with the triumph, though we may not fully understand or have documentation of them, conferred a certain historical gravity on the Roman

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ceremony. The procession entered the city via the “triumphal” gate, slowly winding its way through the flanks of the curious, cheering crowd, until it reached the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill (fig. 2). The triumphator paraded on a chariot pulled by four horses, preceded by lictors and joined by senators and magistrates. Standing next to him in his quadriga was a slave holding a laurel crown above his head, whispering from time to time, “Look behind you! Remember, you are only a man!”4 Thus the Roman triumph, though a moment of supreme glory, was permeated from the outset with a self-conscious lament on human mortality and the brevity of life.

A prominent feature of the procession was the men bearing military standards and spoils captured from the enemy, often heaped on overloaded litters.

Another was the prisoners (in particular, kings and captured leaders), paraded in chains, on foot, or in chariots before the eyes of the people. There were wagons loaded with all manner of booty (weapons, precious vases, statues, or liturgical furnishings), animals prepared for sacrifice at the altar in front of the temple, torchbearers, musicians, and groups of soldiers in picturesque succession. Colorful triumphal paintings, also carried in procession, brought images of the recent war before the eyes of the Roman people, as if to render it more vivid and more real.

These complex and costly rituals vanished the moment they took place, leaving no trace except in the memories of those who witnessed them and in historical accounts (and also in certain images—for example, on the Arch of Trajan at Benevento, fig. 27). But what about triumphal paintings? As part of the celebratory rhetoric of Roman power, we might imagine that they were meant to last, but they were not. Even these were conceived as a quintessentially ephemeral type of decoration made for the imperator ’s train.

They were exhibited after the fact in public places—the Capitoline Hill, or on the walls of the buildings in the Forum—but quickly wasted away. No one minded, since the arrival of new tabulae triumphales was never far off, as one part of a never-ending stream of information and imagery reflecting Rome’s uninterrupted military pursuits. Since at least the third century BCE, triumphal painting emerged as a specific genre of Roman art with an eminently political and, as we would say, “communicative” purpose: to bring before the eyes of the Romans a series of bloody, fearsome events that had just taken place somewhere very far away. To this end, maps, plans, and models of conquered cities with explicatory texts were paraded together with precious metals, enemy weapons, and high-ranking prisoners.

Even the famous words Veni, vidi, vici (I came, I saw, I conquered) were carried in procession during a triumph: that of Julius Caesar over Pharnaces II of Pontus, decreed by the Senate in 46 BCE.5 Somewhat longer inscriptions listed conquered cities, sunken or captured ships, or kings reduced to servitude. The triumph of Pompey over Mithridates VI of Pontus (61 BCE) included not only “two chariots loaded with gold, 75 million drachmas of gold and an image of the conquered king in gold, but also 324 generals and

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( fig. 2 ) Proposed reconstruction of the route of the via triumphalis in Rome during the early Imperial era

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nobles with their sons, and inscriptions reading ‘Rostra of 800 ships captured, new cities founded during the war: 28; captured kings: 6 [followed by their names].’”6 In the triumph, words and images told the same story, as if to jointly represent an official form of “truth” which was incontestable because it was tangible, documented, and paraded before the eyes of all. And still, it was ephemeral.

So too were triumphal paintings, of which none survive. We can get a sense of what they looked like from the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’s vivid description of Vespasian and Titus’s triumph over his fellow countrymen (71 CE):

of motifs. The examples noted above (in particular Flavius Josephus), offer a good sample of the sorts of verbal descriptions of triumphs and paintings that preserved their memory. And on the basis of texts such as these, a long list of books—from Flavio Biondo’s Roma Triumphans (1459) to contemporary studies such as Mary Beard’s The Roman Triumph (2007)—have tried to evoke the pathos and vibrancy of these events, which were laced with violence. Imagining their unrepeatable mixture of sounds and colors, of triumphs and laments, has long been a powerfully emotive mental exercise, if we consider that those who have expressed their burning desire to witness a Roman triumph in person include Saint Augustine (354–430 CE) and Saint Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444).8 Among visual reimaginings of the triumph, none is more elaborate than The Triumphs of Caesar, which Andrea Mantegna painted for the Gonzagas of Mantua, starting in 1485. In the first of nine large canvases, now at England’s Hampton Court, the procession is introduced by trumpeters and the bearers of triumphal paintings—a detail inspired by the passage by Flavius Josephus cited above (fig. 26).

The frequent display of triumphal painting also had the effect of establishing, consolidating, and continually renewing a stock repertory of Pathosformeln and expressive motifs reused not only in the columns of Trajan (fig. 1) and Marcus Aurelius (fig. 3), but also in an impressive array of battle sarcophagi (fig. 4) and any number of other works of art now lost to us, representing other battles against other enemies, using the same repertory that Flavius Josephus had before his eyes. On the one hand, triumphal paintings, which were ostensibly ephemeral and made to disintegrate, left behind a potent residuum of memories, words, and visual impressions. On the other was the illusory eternity of marble, perpetually threatened by time, which in the case of Trajan’s Column has wiped away its color ( fig. 3 ) Column of and stripped away the bronze swords once Marcus Aurelius, Rome, held by the soldiers on it. The endless, meancirca 180–92 CE, detail ingful circuit between what is fleeting, yet

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The most wondrous thing in the entire procession was the series of portable panels borne along in procession through the city. They were so large that it was feared their bearers would not be able to support them: each was divided into three or even four stories, one above another, with compositions which were so complex and varied as to bring great delight and surprise . . . The war was illustrated in a series of scenes, each brought before the eyes most vividly. You could see here a prosperous country laid to waste, there entire squadrons of enemy troops vanquished, others put to flight or imprisoned.

You could see enormous walls battered down by great war machines, the strongest fortifications overthrown, the walls of heavily armed cities seized by the Romans. You could see the Roman army flooding into the walls, leaving rivers of blood in their tracks. You could see the enemy reduced to powerlessness, raising its arms and begging for mercy; you could see temples set afire, houses collapsing in on themselves and trapping their inhabitants, and after all this ruination and devastation you could see rivers flowing not to irrigate the fields, nor to quench the thirst of man and beast, but through a burning landscape. The Jews had to face these tragedies because they had dared to face the Romans in war. And the whole story was depicted with imaginative scenes, and executed with such a high level of art and ability so that even those who were not there on the battlefield felt they were in the middle of the action, as if they had been present in person.7

While these impressive paintings are forever lost, the Arch of Titus still in situ in the Roman Forum preserves two “snapshots” of the triumphal procession of 71 CE: one relief of the emperor riding in a chariot, and another of the spoils carried in procession (fig. 28). These spoils were the most prized treasures of the Temple of Jerusalem, including a menorah, borne together with tablets that would have carried inscriptions (which, since they were merely painted on, have long since vanished).

Purposefully ephemeral and by their very nature evanescent, triumphs and triumphal paintings have left behind three different sorts of traces: the words of contemporaries which preserve some memory of them, posterity’s attempts to reconstruct them, and lastly the formation and reuse of a repertory

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There was a Roman emperor in this city on the Bosporus until 1453, and even afterward: after conquering what would become Istanbul, Mehmed II assumed the title of Kayser-i-Rûm (Caesar of the Romans), which was passed down by the Ottoman sultans until 1922 (when Mehmed VI, the last sultan, was deposed).

Meanwhile, in Rome on the Tiber in the fifth century, the immense imperial palace was already left without a real ruler, while the city became an empty shell, losing its population day by day as the power (including political power) of the papacy grew stronger and more overt (fig. 30). Despite whatever glory could still be found in the remains of the imperial city, as Rome became ever more deserted, her triumphs were increasingly overwhelmed by the incessant lament of the ruins. Verses written around 1100 by a French bishop, Hildebert of Lavardin, capture something of this sentiment:

in search of durability, and an “eternity” fatally undermined by time, is a drama played out in an age-old artistic tradition.

While the materials of artistic representation can be either ephemeral or “eternal,” their subject matter is constantly nourished by one and the same lexicon of images (or repertory) that animates it and makes it visible to the eye. ( fig. 4 ) Great Ludovisi sarcophagus, mid third century CE, detail

Triumph Amid the Ruins It was not columns, but triumphal arches which imprinted the memory of triumphal processions in Rome. Their architectural form is a contradiction in terms (fig. 29): every arch resembles a city gate, yet is placed at the very heart of the city’s urban fabric, not at its walls. The arch presupposes, implies, and imposes passage through its central portal, but with its elaborate decorative scheme suggests that each passage beneath it, surrounded by its imagery, has a distinctly ceremonial or ritual character. The Arch of Constantine (the first Christian emperor), with its monumental inscription recording his victory by “divine inspiration” (instinctu divinitatis) over his rival emperor Maxentius, would later ease the transition to the new Christian religion, transforming a military conflict like any other into a providential event deemed to be unique and unrepeatable.

The destruction of the Roman state after turbulent centuries of anarchy, factional conflict, and violent raids by Germanic tribes swept through Rome, but did not touch Constantinople, the “New Rome” founded by Constantine.

You are entirely in ruin, O Rome, yet still beyond compare. You are broken in pieces, yet still you teach how great you once were when you were whole. . . .

The city has fallen, about which, try as I might, I can only say, “Rome was once here.” Neither time nor fire nor sword could utterly defeat its glory. What remains is so great, and what falls into ruin is so grand, that it will never be possible to equal the monuments which survive, nor ever to restore to full glory those which fall into ruin.9

Nevertheless, among the enormous ruins, arches, and columns, the memory of the ancient triumphs lived on, while Christian liturgical rituals and processions kept alive the memory and specter of past triumphal parades. Coursing through the veins of these fleeting memories was an ancient political authority, that of the Caesars—which by an unexpected metamorphosis now disguised itself as a religious authority, that of the popes.

The imperial insignia recently dis( fig. 5 ) Reconstruction covered on the Palatine Hill (fig. 5) of the imperial insignia, early fourth century CE probably date to the era of Constantine and

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Maxentius, but inspire us to reflect upon two crucial moments in European history. The first occurred circa 476 CE, when the Germanic king Odoacer took Rome, but did not assume the title of emperor as he could have done.

Instead, he preferred to pay homage to the only legitimate Caesar, that of Constantinople, by sending him the imperial insignia that still lay on the Palatine Hill. The second took place on Christmas night, 800 CE, in the Basilica of Saint Peter, where Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne, king of the Franks, as Roman emperor. In both cases, the triumphal insignia of imperial power—those sent to Byzantium by a “barbarian” king, or those claimed by another sovereign who was equally “barbarian”—were set against the backdrop of the rapidly deteriorating ruins.

It was in this setting of ruins and memories, triumphs and laments, that the first precarious revival of the ancient triumph began in the fourteenth century. We can see it in a drawing in the Louvre made after lost frescoes illustrating the Jewish Wars—inspired by the histories of Flavius Josephus—in the sala grande of the Palazzo degli Scaligeri in Verona (circa 1364), which Mantegna saw before painting his Triumphs of Caesar (fig. 31). Or in the Triumph of Alfonso of Aragon on the arch of Castel Nuovo in Naples (fig. 32) attributed to Francesco Laurana and others (circa 1460). Allusion to ancient triumphs and the staging of modern triumphs by princes and rulers was a constant theme in the Renaissance and beyond, but reached its peak in the double triumph of Charles V in Bologna in 1529 (fig. 6) and Rome in 1536 (fig. 33). A few years earlier, in 1527, his imperial troops had taken Rome, sacking it mercilessly and putting Pope Clement VII de’ Medici to flight: “All the sacred objects, the sacraments and saints’ relics of which all the churches were full, were stripped of their ornaments, thrown to the ground, adding to the innumerable insults of the German barbarians . . . and rumor has it that the value of the money, gold, silver, and jewels taken in the sack amounts to over one million ducats.”10 After this brutal conflict, which came at a time when Europe was already torn apart by the Reformation and internal strife, the relationship between the pope and the emperor (who had been archenemies until quite recently) struck a new balance. Lament over the Sack of Rome, which had halved Rome’s population and caused immeasurable damage to the city’s monuments and artistic patrimony, set the stage for a negotiated, artificial triumph.

Entering into Bologna, where the pope awaited him, Charles V was preceded by hundreds of Spanish, Burgundian, and Flemish soldiers on horseback, and long processions of Landsknechts (the same mercenaries who only two years earlier had sacked and pillaged Rome), cannons, musicians, and standard-bearers. Dressed in magnificent armor and with scepter in hand, accompanied by cardinals, pages, and men on horseback, Charles entered the city through a gate decorated with portraits of ancient emperors and processed under ephemeral triumphal arches adorned with images of his more recent predecessors, beginning with Charlemagne. “The triumphal procession in Bologna, with its rigid hierarchical order, with the solemn gait of pope and emperor side by side, kindled hope in a return of order and stability guaranteed by renewed concord between the two universal powers.”11 Yet the triumphal entry Charles V really wanted could only have been in Rome. After a successful military expedition in Tunisia, the emperor sailed to Sicily, and the cities he passed as he traveled up the Italian coast (from Messina, to Cosenza, to Naples) vied to stage lavish ceremonial entrances for him, with ephemeral arches set up in the absence of real ones. Finally, on April 5, 1535, the emperor made his ceremonial entry into Rome. Together with the new pope, Paul III, he had devised a carefully planned itinerary (fig. 33). It would include—after an entry at Porta San Sebastiano—the three surviving, antique triumphal arches of the Imperial era: those of Constantine, Titus, and Septimius Severus. It would also include a fourth, temporary arch, made of wood and richly decorated and gilded, which Antonio da Sangallo set up for the occasion in Piazza Venezia. It was important that the sovereign pass through imperial Rome’s most celebrated sites, and to this end churches and homes were torn down to make the new via triumphalis more credible and more dignified. (Rabelais, who was in Rome at the time, complained in a letter from January 28 of that year about the brazen demolition of medieval churches.)12 The slow procession wound its way through the city on streets widened for the occasion, ending at Saint Peter’s, where the pope received Charles. Another four ephemeral arches meant to adorn the streets were

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( fig. 6 ) Nicolaus Hogenberg, Triumphal Procession of Emperor Charles V and Pope Clement VII to Bologna, circa 1535–39, detail

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Defeated Emperors

not finished in time. Yet the combination of temporary structures, masonry gates (of the city and of St Peter’s), and ancient, marble arches, which were also given new decorations in wood and stucco, demonstrates the functional equivalence of the ephemeral and the eternal. Indeed, it was this momentary event—the ceremonial entry of a sovereign who had sacked the city nine years earlier—which “revived” the eternity of the ancient monuments, restoring to the arches and ruins their function as ceremonial backdrops for a neo-triumphal procession.

From the ancient triumphs to the entries of rulers and popes, Rome boasts a record which is probably unique, for festive celebrations obsessively focused on the person of a particular sovereign (or pope-king) and his successes—while keeping silent about the sufferings and deaths that accompanied every triumph. In the illuminating volumes of Festa a Roma,13 one can easily get a sense of the enduring lexicon of such celebrations: triumphal arches, temporary decorations on bridges, gazebos and pavilions, columns, obelisks, and guglie (spires), castles and trophies, fountains, carts and chariots, stages and theaters, facades, and so forth. The list of triumphators could have been even longer if one considers all the sovereigns who planned entries into Rome, but never succeeded. The most famous example is Napoleon, who wanted to make Rome the second capital of his empire and stage a ceremonial entry there, together with his wife and son (to whom he gave the title of king of Rome). He planned to take up residence in the Quirinal Palace, transforming it into an imperial palace through radical alterations to its decor and furnishings. But military and political setbacks kept Napoleon from ever setting foot in Rome. Nothing remains of what would have been another triumph except lament for an unfulfilled dream, a few surviving traces such as Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Alexander the Great frieze in the Quirinal Palace (fig. 7), and the memories and regrets of Madame Mère, Letizia Buonaparte. After her son’s exile on the island of Saint Helena, she moved to Rome, where she lived for fifteen years after Napoleon’s death in 1821, cloistered in the Palazzo Buonaparte near Piazza Venezia. ( fig. 7 ) Bertel Thorvaldsen, Triumphal Entry of Alexander the Great into Babylon, 1812, detail

The Latin word imperator, as we have seen, originally meant “victorious general.” Only gradually, starting in the time of Augustus, did it begin to take on a different meaning in Latin and other languages (from the English emperor, to the Portuguese imperador). In many other cultures, the same concept—that of a sovereign more powerful than all others—is expressed by words derived from the name “Caesar”: the German Kaiser, the Russian czar (also used in other Slavic languages, from Bulgarian to Serbian), or the Turkish kayser.14 The Roman emperor presented himself, even in his title, as perpetual victor. Yet many emperors, though they celebrated triumphs they more or less deserved, were soundly defeated, killed, or forced to commit suicide, beginning with Caligula (41 CE) and Nero (68 CE). From then until the end of the fifth century, nearly fifty emperors (more than half their total number) were killed in war or in palace plots, sometimes reigning only a matter of months until one of their rivals managed to eliminate them. Yet all maintained the triumphal (and misleading) title of “perpetual victor,” and none explicitly represented the downfall of their defeated rival. By tacit agreement, ( fig. 8 ) Triumph of King the triumphs of the Roman princeps Shahpur I, detail of the second Sassanian relief at Bishahpur, (first amongst the citizens) might be Iran, second half of third shown publicly, but not the laments century CE of his defeat, even when his tragic

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end was known to all. Similarly, the enormous (200-meter-long) frieze of Trajan’s Column, narrating the story of Trajan’s campaigns against the Dacians, repeatedly represents the death of Dacian soldiers, but never that of the Romans.

Only by means of the so-called damnatio memoriae—that is, the deliberate destruction of an emperor’s image and name—could his person come under attack. One notable example is the tondo (fig. 34) in Berlin, made for the occasion of a visit to Egypt (199–200 CE) by Septimius Severus, his wife Giulia Domna, and their two sons, Caracalla and Geta, whom the emperor had named as co-regents. Soon after the death of Septimius Severus in 211 CE, Caracalla had his hated brother assassinated and ordered his damnatio memoriae. Nevertheless, while the portrait of Geta is erased, its visible traces were left behind, so no one (not even us, so many centuries later) would fail to see that this monstrous, headless figure preserves the shame of a prince who lost a ruthless battle with his brother and was driven into the fog of history.

The residual image of Geta on the tondo does not conceal, but rather flaunts, this personal and political tragedy.

In order to represent the defeat of a Roman emperor explicitly, two very specific conditions had to be met: namely, a figural tradition that included scenes of war and triumph, as well as considerable distance not only from Rome, but also from the borders of the empire. And this is what one finds in certain Sassanian rock reliefs in Iran—for example, that of Naqsh-e-Rostam, in which the Sassanian king Shahpur I, on horseback, celebrates his victory over Rome in the Battle of Edessa (260 CE). In a gesture of dominance, he grips the arm of the Roman emperor Valerian, who died as his prisoner.

Another Roman, probably Philip the Arab (emperor from 244 to 249 CE) kneels and begs for mercy (fig. 35), an allusion to an event that had occurred about twenty years earlier. A similar representation is found in a relief in Bishahpur, where a type of Winged Victory brings a diadem to the victorious Persian king (fig. 8), while the Roman emperor Gordian III, who died in battle in ( fig. 9 ) Arch of 244 CE, is represented under the hooves of Constantine, Rome, early Shahpur I’s horse. These Sassanian works fourth century CE, detail

of art clearly demonstrate knowledge of a Greco-Roman artistic vocabulary and representational conventions—as is shown by another relief from Bishahpur, in which lengthy battle scenes are divided into five superimposed registers that look back to the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius (fig. 36).

Dozens of Roman emperors, both before and after Valerian, came to power by killing their predecessors or having them killed. Yet none would have been represented, like this Sassanian king, in the act of defeating their rival, trampling him under the hooves of his horse, grabbing him by the arm as if he was a servant, or forcing him to kneel and beg for mercy. A battle between rival emperors, the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (313 CE), is represented in Rome on the Arch of Constantine (fig. 9). The relief (carved two years after the fact) illustrates the climactic moment when Maxentius’s soldiers (cataphractarii), in scale armor, are overwhelmed by Constantine’s cavalry and drown in the Tiber. At the extreme left may be a representation of Constantine accompanied by Victoria and Virtus, as well as a personification of the Tiber; at right, two trumpeters summon the victorious troops for their triumphal entry into the city. There is no sign of Maxentius. Roman art never developed a means of representing an emperor’s defeat, and even when Maxentius, the last emperor to reside primarily in Rome, was immediately erased from memory after he was vanquished and killed, his portrait statues were taken down, his name expunged from inscriptions—but he was never shamed by a depiction of his defeat, forever fixed in marble.

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Reasons for a Repertory Three thousand years of history, thousands of events recounted in verse and prose, in single images or imposing monuments: war and victory, looting and death, triumph and lament—Rome’s history is played out a thousand times, in the same scenes reappearing over and over again. In the Vatican Stanze, for example, Raphael revived the scene of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (fig. 37), and hundreds of other episodes were replayed throughout Europe and beyond in tapestries, drawings, paintings, and book illustrations.

Even scenes that no one in Rome had ever witnessed, such as Valerian’s humiliating defeat, were recreated using ancient sources (fig. 10). In a drawing by Hans Holbein the Younger (circa 1521), the characters wear sixteenth-century dress, but the way that Valerian serves as Shahpur I’s footstool closely recalls the image of Gordian III under the king’s horse’s hooves in the Bishahpur reliefs—whose existence Holbein could never even have

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imagined. Patterns, gestures, poses, figurative topoi, and Pathosformeln used to represent the history of ancient Rome become established and fixed, migrating from one century to the next, constantly putting their efficacy to the test. This repertory, conserved and transformed over the centuries, became a necessary filter through which scenes—even those from the more recent past—were imagined, represented, and relived.

In their workshops, European artists kept drawings after the antique which preserved this ( fig. 10 ) Hans Holbein the Younger, vocabulary of triumph and Humiliation of Valerian, circa 1521 lament—for example, copies in single sheets or long rolls of the spectacular narrative of Trajan’s Column (fig. 38). Its account of the Dacian Wars drew motifs and representational conventions from the repertory of ephemeral triumphal painting, translating them into marble; these, in turn, are then transferred onto paper to become a source for paintings, sculpture, tapestry, or fresco. In Rome, as elsewhere, art has always been nourished by this continuous overspill of imagery from temporary to permanent, and back again.

It is this extensive history, crowded with personalities and events, which William Kentridge measures himself against in his frieze on the Tiber. His own artistic history stretches very far back, and through profound rethinking of the Western tradition of drawing, he meditates on the function of the visual arts in our time—as is demonstrated eloquently in his book Six Drawing Lessons.15 The solids and voids of Kentridge’s figures follow centuries-old techniques of shading, yet they absorb them effortlessly, in a language that tends toward the sculptural and which finds its ideal setting in the monumental walls of the Tiber embankment. His very technique, carried out in sequential steps—from drawings made on paper (first in charcoal, then in ink) to their translation into monumental form on the travertine walls that contain the river today— straddles the knife-edge between its own monumentality, which now (in our time) is surprising and unexpected, and a muted awareness of its status as painting (or drawing) that subtracts the dark layer left on the stone blocks by pollution, vegetation, and microorganisms. The figures’ monumental size (their triumph) is therefore inseparable from their precarious state (their lament),

since the frieze will inevitably fade away, turning its powerful evocation of people and events into a quiet lament for its own fate. In the fulfillment of this fatal destiny, the frieze repeats and reverses the artistic gesture that gave rise to it—that is, preparatory sketches on reused sheets of paper (old books or ledgers; see plates 1–37): Kentridge’s drawings simultaneously obliterate and subsume the preexisting handwritten and printed words on these pages, as other artists have, too (for instance, Alberto Giacometti.)

Drawing is Kentridge’s preferred medium. His manner of drawing is versatile and inventive, subject to continuous revision and change depending on its intended use, size, or layout. His animated films are based on drawing—for example, Felix in Exile (1994), a moving reflection on the history of South Africa and its core of violence. Here, drawings overlap as if emerging from an internal agitation: human bodies merge with landscapes; the interior of a room and the vastness of the outside world alternate and intersect. Each drawing, originally conceived as a static form, is constantly altered through deletions, additions, and modifications, with each step photographed in order to be put into sequence. This technique, typical of Kentridge, engages not only the artist’s skill or artifice, but also a self-conscious reflection on the layering of human memory. Subsequent alterations of the base image become not only mnemonic devices that help establish form and narrative, but also (and often at the same time) mental traces of forgotten details, facts, or scenes.

The artist’s gestures reflect, indeed mimic the processes of memory, leaving at every stage of the image (and with each movement) clear, performative traces of the creative process.

This layering of memory is the central theme of Kentridge’s work, which can also translate into the attempt to decompose and rearticulate the human figure through music, dance, and/or imaginative processions, conceived halfway between theater and ritual.16 With More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015), Kentridge created a true danse macabre for our time. Without archaeologisms, the installation (which extends 40 meters, across several screens) engages visitors by surrounding them with figures, dancing skeletons, or musicians, who are shown carrying signs, objects, and faces, or dragging loads against a variegated background of prints, drawings, or Chinese characters. The oldest conundrum of drawing (and painting) in the Western tradition—movement—is resolved here in a controlled shadow-puppet theater, where human figures are reduced to dancing silhouettes, an “emptiness, that substance seem’d.” 17 The danse macabre of the late Middle Ages is not directly cited or evoked, but instead internalized, and historical references are, if anything, to more recent events, such as the Paris Commune.

Kentridge’s work for the opera (for example, Lulu at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2015) is a considered rethinking of the potentialities of drawing, enormously enlarged and projected on the stage. In that “perpetual re-beginning” that Kentridge has called a cornerstone of his work, projection, animation, and dance give every image a sense of internal

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movement; emphasizing instability and impermanence, they deconstruct and realign, diverge and come together again, in constant counterpoint to Alban Berg’s music, but also within a “vortex of images that come from the past” (as Geoffrey O’Brien wrote),18 injecting history into scenography. But Kentridge’s history owes nothing to the museum. Rather, it is linked to social memory, and its unstable equilibrium between flashes of recollection and the abyss of oblivion.

Extending the wealth and resources of his refined drawings to the genres of theater, dance, cinema, and animation, Kentridge deposits selected historical events into the scenery of memory (and its gaps). Passing through the mind and the hand of the artist, human figures seem like characters in a puppet theater, ready to assume poses which are more or less meaningful, since they are ultimately taken from life, yet are at the same time conventional. If only for an instant, the living bodies of men and women, reduced to shadows, assume patterns and poses that echo the iconographic tradition and follow a vocabulary of forms that moves freely between life, theater, dance, and the visual arts. One is reminded of Heinrich von Kleist’s On the Marionette Theater (1810), in which a sixteen-year-old boy, coming out of the bath, is surprised to see his reflection in the mirror in the pose of the Spinario—but then fails, try as he might, to ever repeat again that magical moment, as his own beauty is ruined by the obsessive, futile effort to reproduce the supreme elegance of classical art. We witness thereby a passage from life to the puppet theater, to the drawn or painted figure, and vice versa, in a process that involves a progressive “crystallization” of gestural language (in one direction), and a progressive “liberation” of figurative patterns from historical significance (in the other). Yet the artist’s experimental inquiry into this bilateral movement requires a repertory, and Kentridge needed a mental repertory to draw from in order to compose, in Rome and for Rome, his monumental frieze.

I do not know how many images Lila Yawn, with a group of art historians based at John Cabot University in Rome, gathered together to bring Kentridge an arbitrary, yet very rich, anthology of scenes from Roman history. I do, however, know that in focusing his attention on those figures, the artist has rehearsed and confronted the age-old workshop tradition of conceiving new compositions by compiling sketchbooks that bring together designs, figures, and gestures—in short, a basic vocabulary to be absorbed and reworked in new scenes. Kentridge has assimilated, selected, and transformed what he found in the vast repertory put together for his perusal. He staged the successive steps of this project in his studio; moving from charcoal to ink, he changed background and format for each figure, occasionally putting them in reverse like ancient and medieval painters did using patrones—drawings made on sheets of paper rubbed with oil (to make them transparent), which could then be transferred to the wall or panel and reused to repeat a figure in a series, either identically or with slight variations. This ancient technique, passing through intermediate steps such as the Renaissance cartoon, ultimately gave

rise to the widespread use of stencils, which Kentridge adopted to enlarge drawings on paper to the monumental proportions of the Tiber frieze. At the beginning of the creative process, the artist gradually composed his own album of models, creatively borrowing from a very large repertory to make his own neo-vocabulary, filtered through his particular working methods and interests as an artist and a citizen of the world. Moving from drawings to the monumental Tiber embankments, the images are not only enlarged, but also assume new forms, in a bricolage of metamorphoses, symmetries, correspondences, dissonances, irony, and deference. But the guiding principle seems to be (as is always the case with Kentridge) a clear ambition: to extract from representation—from art—a medicine or remedy against the fragility of memory.

Thus in Kentridge’s frieze we find, borrowed from the Arch of Titus, soldiers bearing spoils from the Temple of Jerusalem in the triumph of 71 CE (no. 31, fig. 28); but we find them juxtaposed with a scene from the nineteenth-century Roman carnival, where the Jews of the ghetto used to be mocked (no. 32), two figures of deportees (no. 33), and three members of the Italian resistance, captured by the Nazis (no. 35). On the other side, in a chariot, there are two images (one a fragment of the “Rastafarian” hand gesture) of the emperor of Ethiopia, Hailé Selassié, evoking the Italian colonialism of the Fascist era (no. 30). In this segment, Kentridge borrows from Roman art (no. 31) and from an illustrated book (circa 1823) by Antoine Jean-Baptiste Thomas (no. 32), but above all from photographs (nos. 30, 33, 35). And it is precisely in this segment of the frieze that we find a large square section that was “spared” and left completely black, and where we find one of the few instances of writing in Triumphs and Laments: the words, “quello che non ricordo” (“That which I do not remember,” no. 34).

A declaration of a gap in memory, this “black hole” commands a weight equal to the figures surrounding it—indeed, even a greater one. Recalling the power and enormity of forgetting, it is a mise en abyme for everything that is, by contrast, remembered and represented in the frieze, reducing it to a pale reflection of what might have been remembered, but has not been: of other triumphs and laments which might have been much more exuberant, or more painful.

The fact that Hailé Selassié is carried on a cart is an important detail: this is (and can be nothing but) a direct reference to the classical Roman triumph, when defeated kings were borne in procession through Rome. Other chariots appear in the train of Triumphs and Laments, and all reference or evoke the ancient Roman triumphal procession. Drawn in chariots, in close succession, are Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne (no. 7), a portrait of Cicero (no. 8), and Arnold of Brescia (no. 9). A little further, we find Pope Gregory VII on his deathbed (no. 13), a scene from the Column of Marcus Aurelius (no. 15, fig. 3), Cola di Rienzo (no. 29), and, finally, after Hailé Selassié (no.

30), Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni lifted from La Dolce Vita and

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transferred, playfully, from the Trevi Fountain to a bathtub (no. 49). Only one image comes not from Roman or Italian history, but from Greek myth: that of Apollo and Daphne, which is referenced here not for its own sake, but as a tribute to Bernini, or more generally to Rome as a celebrated setting of the history of art (no. 7).

Our idea of the ancient triumph is (by necessity) filtered through its various reconstructions in the Renaissance. This is why three standard-bearers inspired by Andrea Mantegna’s Triumphs of Caesar are given prominence in Kentridge’s ghostly procession (no. 5, fig. 26). Yet to remove any hint of erudition from the reference, Kentridge substitutes the armor carried by one of them with a sewing machine, presumably a Necchi—an allusion (and not the only one) to Italian design. Nevertheless, the density and significance of allusion to the triumph is heightened by the two wolves flanking the image: one of them (no. 4) is the Capitoline Wolf. However, the twins underneath her teats are replaced by two glass or ceramic milk jars, as if the wolves of Rome produced bottled milk. The other (no. 6) is a skeleton of a wolf, gnawed and ghostly, which reappears in reverse at the nearly opposite end (no. 38). It irresistibly evokes the memory of Dante’s description of:

However one interprets Dante’s verses, in the context of Triumphs and Laments the wolf reduced to a skeleton scaffolding (in contrast with the wolf producing milk) perhaps alludes to the greed that comes with power (which has made so many subjected people “live in misery”). Yet it also finds an echo in the triumph of Death, shown as a skeleton riding a horse (no. 11), a direct citation of a fresco in the Sacro Speco of Subiaco (fig. 11), and in two skeletal horses which resemble puppets made of cardboard or straw (nos. 3, 51).

Clustered around Death, personified and ( fig. 12 ) Odoardo Tabacchi, triumphing on horseback—in Kentridge’s Arnold of Brescia, 1882, analogical, associative, and functional detail thought, as well as in his artistic practice— are the laments of tragic deaths like that of Arnold of Brescia, who was condemned to the stake in 1155 after challenging papal power. He is shown here twice, reusing imagery from the portrait statue in his hometown and its base (no. 9, figs. 12, 39). Close by, a painting by Titian provides the model for Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia, the first act of a personal and political drama that led to her death and Tarquinii expulsion from Rome (no. 10). The story of Gregory VII’s bitter conflict with Emperor Henry IV—who deposed the pope and forced him into exile in Salerno, where he died in 1085—is evoked with an image drawn from a manuscript of the Chronicle of Otto of Freising (nos. 12–13, fig. 40). There is an abrupt chronological (though not conceptual) leap to the firefighter next to it (no. 14), borrowed from a photo of the Allied bombing of the San Lorenzo neighborhood on July 19, 1943 (fig. 19); this segment closes with a scene from the Column of Marcus Aurelius (no. 15, fig. 3) showing Romans decapitating the enemy Germanic warriors they have just defeated.

Ancient monuments, medieval manuscripts, Renaissance and Baroque painting and sculpture, statues in nineteenth-century Italian piazzas, photographs, film stills: Kentridge freely selects from the endless repository he has made his own, renewing and reimagining content and function. He returns these images to Rome, where so many of them were born. He makes them monumental yet ghostly figures, attracting attention by forcing those passing by to question their significance—in keeping with what Kentridge, in Six Drawing Lessons, calls a “pressure for meaning.” This mixture of sources and themes, bricolage, and artistic expression articulates thoughts, and does not ask viewers to believe in a particular theory or philosophy of history, but to engage emotionally with these images, and to attach to them their own capacity to remember. And to think.

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. . . the she-wolf who, only skin and bones, seemed charged with the hunger that makes so many live in misery: She weighted my spirits with fear, which swelled at the sight of her, so that I lost hope of making the ascent.19

( fig. 11 ) Master of the Sacro Speco and assistants, The Triumph of Death, fourteenth century

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Anachronisms Is it really necessary to track down and identify the sources of Triumphs and Laments, figure by figure? No. As a work of public art, following a tradition that stretches back thousands of years (in Rome, for example), Kentridge’s frieze was not conceived for an elite audience or for the critical gaze of intellectuals and specialists, but for a synoptic and synthetic point of view. It aims to make a powerful emotional impact that can capture a broad audience.

Yet at the same time, this book is meant to preserve the memory of the frieze even after it slowly blackens and self-destructs, recovering—at least in part—its conceptual pro( fig. 13 ) Silvestre D. Mirys, The Death of Remus cesses. It has the particular and the Foundation of Rome, 1800 aim of bringing together the multiple perspectives that inform Triumphs and Laments, without which the work’s emotional impact would be less authentic, less intense.

Considering the narrative sequence, one is struck by the superimposition, figure by figure, of three chronological levels: (1) that of the events represented (for example, the dead body of Remus (no.

22, fig. 13), who was killed by Romulus, according to tradition, in 753 BCE; (2) that of the image chosen as an archival source (in this case, an illustration from Figures de l’histoire de la République romaine, accompagnées d’un précis historique, circa 1800); and (3) the third and last level defined by the juxtaposition of figures in the frieze.

For example, the corpse of Remus is flanked by the most intense imagery in the composition (no. 21), which includes the body of Aldo Moro (see below) and, somewhat further, another cadaver: that of Pasolini (no. 25).

Looking only at this short segment, we can order these three chronological levels according to a basic framework, within which the bottom level (3)— which also gives a “title” to individual figures—corresponds to Kentridge’s

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frieze as it exists today in Rome; the intermediate level (2) corresponds to the imagery Kentridge used as his “source,” drawn from his repertory; and, finally, the top level (1) is the date, actual or presumed, of the event that each figure represents. The sequence is therefore: ( 1 )

( 2 )

590 CE

452 CE

1562 + 1978

1752

3rd cent. CE +

1513–14

( 3 )

c. 250 CE +

19.

20.

angel

horseman

753 BCE

c. 1940

c. 1800

c. 1940

c. 50 BC

1975

c. 50 BCE

1975

c. 1650 + 1978 21.

Barbarians +

22.

23.

24.

25.

Remus

Mussolini

Cicero

Pasolini

S. Teresa + Moro

on horseback

Images that alternate or follow one other in this sequence include some that have long been iconic (the angel on top of Castel Sant’Angelo); new icons that many will recognize (the image of Pasolini’s body, as it appeared when it was discovered on the beach of the Idroscalo di Ostia); figures which seem generic, even if they are drawn from specific sources (the rider, no. 20, may have been taken from The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila in Raphael’s Stanze, fig. 41), and citations internal to the frieze (the Fractured Cicero, no. 24, repeats a portrait, on wheels, which appears earlier, no. 8). Lastly, there are surprising images which we hesitate to recognize: such as Mussolini on Horseback, no. 23, taken from a fresco by Giovanni Brancaccio at the Mostra d’Oltremare, first shown in Naples in 1940. Mussolini’s arm, in the fascist salute, is removed and depicted separately, as if it were a fragment of a broken statue (such as, to take one recent example, that of Saddam Hussein).

Kentridge gives prominence here not only to the figures of Mussolini and the horse, but also to bullet holes, in reference to the bullets repeatedly fired at that image after the fall of the regime; the adjacent portrait of Cicero (no. 24), crossed out by thick lines, may allude to the imperial Roman rhetoric of fascism and/or its final defeat.

While few of these sources will be recognizable to most viewers, no one can mistake the sequence of three bodies (Aldo Moro, Remus, although he is not easily identifiable, and Pasolini), the symmetry of the two riders, or the disturbing image of Mussolini’s amputated fascist salute. It will be clear to everyone that this segment of the frieze falls under the category of Laments, rather than Triumphs. But the core of its composition, indeed the most complex image in the entire frieze, is the powerful collage found in image no. 21.

Many will recognize at first glance one of the famous photos of the red Renault in which Aldo Moro’s body was found, crumpled pitifully in the trunk, on May 9, 1978 (fig. 14). But in Kentridge’s bold composition, this image—a photograph from the not-so-distant past—merges with two others: a detail of the battle sarcophagus known as the Great Ludovisi sarcophagus, showing

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barbarians about to die, or be killed ( fig. 14 ) Discovery of the body (fig. 4); and Bernini’s Ecstasy of Saint of Aldo Moro, 1978 Teresa (fig. 42). In this disturbing and compelling composition, the mystical ecstasy of the saint becomes an intense mourning. An ancient Roman sculpture, a Baroque masterpiece, and the tragic death of a modern-day politician all come together in a single lament.

What sense can be made of the convergence, in a single graphic composition, of three scenes which took place centuries apart? How is it possible that Moro’s tragic death, which occurred less than forty years ago, merges with that of anonymous, dying Germans (a snapshot from Roman history circa 250 CE), and the ecstasy of Saint Teresa—a very private moment which, according to the saint’s autobiography, occurred in 1562, and which Bernini represented a century later with unsurpassed mastery? Here, we are helped by a term used extensively in art theory, especially between the sixteenth and seventeenth century: “anachronism.” Today, we use the word to refer to something “out of place”: the emperor Augustus dressed as a medieval king in many representations of The Meeting of Augustus and the Tiburtine Sibyl, but also the wristwatch worn by an ancient Roman soldier in a movie. In the seventeenth century, however, for the great art expert Giovan Pietro Bellori, “anachronism” could mean the coexistence of asynchronous moments or historical figures in a single pictorial space. Bellori wrote of a “compression

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of actions or moments in time into a single narrative moment, or glimpse into the past,”20 as in Raphael’s Saint Cecilia (painted circa 1514), in which the protagonist is a saint thought to have died in 230 CE, but is shown surrounded by three saints of the first century CE (Paul, John, and Mary Magdalene) and one of the fourth-to-fifth centuries CE (Augustine)—to say nothing of musical instruments (the viola da gamba, flute, tambourine, and triangle) which date to the time of the painting, not that of the saint.

Anachronism (in the sense described above) and collage are essential ingredients of Kentridge’s work on the Tiber. And these techniques have long precedents in Rome. The composition of the Arch of Constantine (fig. 29) is itself an “anachronistic” collage, because it includes not only reliefs made at the moment of its creation, circa 315 CE (fig. 9), but also many others carved for earlier emperors (Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius—fig. 43)— even going so far as to replace their heads with that of Constantine (fig. 15).

Even the first beginnings of a new, reverential attitude toward antiquity— which from the fifteenth century onward inspired Romans to collect sculptures and reliefs from the ruins, where they had lain neglected for many centuries—took the form of anachronistic collage. Circa 1475, Lorenzo Manlio, a pharmacist at Piazza Giudea, brought together several ancient reliefs and mounted them on the outside walls of his house (fig. 44), dressing them up with an inscription in large letters celebrating Rome’s “rebirth” in his own time.21 This ( fig. 15 ) Great Trajanic uninterrupted bricolage of fragments relief from the Arch of (memories) of the past is also characConstantine, Rome, early fourth century CE, detail teristic of the “anachronistic” institution

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par excellence—the museum—which ( fig. 16 ) Statuario juxtaposes works from different eras, Pubblico, Venice, removing them from different contexts reconstruction and re-presenting them under a new guise (invariably an arbitrary one), inspired by art history, taste, aesthetic pleasure, or antiquarian erudition. And the museum as an institution has very much to do with Rome. It was born, in fact, only a few centuries ago, starting with collections of antique sculptures22 built up—as a rule—around a nucleus of Roman objects. This was the case not only in Rome, but also in the Statuario Pubblico of Venice (1587), even if it was later added to with marbles from the Greek East (fig. 16).

Combining high and low art (popular prints and Bernini, a sewing machine and Trajan’s Column), adding at times a touch of irony (a Bialetti coffeemaker in no. 17, the king of Italy’s toy horse in no. 46), Kentridge grapples with and manipulates his own repertory as if it were synchronous, while knowing full well it is not. Absorbing history into memory, and embodying it with imagery unknown to most, he creates a narrative out of iconic images which are immersed in the past but speak to the present. Astutely placed visual signals suggest that, despite its apparent disorder, the frieze reads as if it were a unified narrative proceeding by fits and starts (like memory), yet consolidating around certain themes that are implicitly inscribed into the frieze itself. The best example of this is the Victoria Dacica (Victory over the Dacians) inspired by Trajan’s Column (no. 1), an allusion to triumph which opens the frieze, following the principal direction of the narrative (from Ponte Sisto to Ponte Mazzini). The same figure reappears, in mirror image, at the exact center of the frieze (no. 26), but is immediately broken up and toppled

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in two successive images that are like frames in an animated short (nos. 27, 28). This effectively encapsulates the central leitmotif of the frieze: the coexistence of triumphs and laments, or rather the tendency of triumphs to turn painfully into laments. Right at the point when it begins to take on a sense of structure, the frieze becomes broken and fragmented, inviting the viewer to start a new reading, reassembling the frieze in the eye and the mind around new possibilities. Even the arm holding the laurel wreath above the empty triumphal chariot (no. 3) returns above a scene from Rome, Open City (1945), in which a child cries for his mother (Anna Magnani), who has just fallen in the street (no. 48). Thus the same gesture crowns a sketched-out ancient triumph, and a fully intact lament from the recent past.

Other leitmotifs serve, at the same time, to join up one or the other of the images, which the monumental dimensions of the frieze might otherwise condemn to isolation—for example, the wolves, as we have seen. Another example is the horses, with or without riders, which number about a dozen and are often, like the wolves, represented as skeletons. Or the recurring appearance of the Church and the popes, from the crucifixion of Saint Peter (no. 40), with reference to Masaccio; to Gregory VII (nos. 12–13); to Celestine V (no. 16, fig. 17), who is shown—on the model of a Venetian woodcut from 1514— ( fig. 17 ) with a fox taking away his tiara to give it to The abdication of Boniface VIII; to an inscription by Paul IV, Celestine V, 1514 copied from the facade of Santa Maria sopra

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Minerva, that records the Tiber flood of 1557 (no. 44). Other popes appear, so to speak, in the background: Adrian IV, who condemned Arnold of Brescia (no. 9), or Clement VIII, who reigned when Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake (no. 43).

If we were to hazard a simplified reading, we might say that—just like the two processions of the opening event, with music by Philip Miller, on April 21, 2016—the start of the frieze, at Ponte Sisto, is made up mostly of triumphs; the end, at Ponte Mazzini, of laments. But even if on the whole we consider nos. 1–8 under the heading of “triumphs,” the skeleton ( fig. 18 ) Peter Anton von of a wolf (no. 6) strictly limits this interVerschaffelt, Archangel pretation. Should the angel announcing Michael, Castel Sant’Angelo, the end of plague in the year 590 CE Rome, 1753 (no. 19) be read as a triumph, because the disease has been conquered, or a lament for the grief and pain it had caused? The statue at the top of Castel Sant’Angelo (1752) puts his sword back in its sheath (fig. 18); so was it this angel, or was it heaven, who brought the scourge of the plague on Rome?

Gathered around the figure of Death personified (no. 11, fig. 11), in the segment from nos. 9–18, are the laments of particular individuals. Here we find Arnold of Brescia’s condemnation (no. 9), the rape of Lucretia that would lead to her suicide (no. 10), the death of a pope in exile (nos. 12–13), and the terrors of war (nos. 14–15). One might imagine that the firefighter (no. 14), taken from a photograph of the bombing of the San Lorenzo neighborhood in July 1943, evokes the best-known image of that event: that of Pius XII rushing into the crowd, with his arms outstretched in a highly dramatic gesture (fig. 45). This was indeed one of the images in the repertory from which Kentridge made his selection. But he did not choose it. Instead, the image of a firefighter, although taken from a particular source, is not recognizable to viewers, and therefore fulfills a compositional and narrative function independent from its original context—serving as a visual link to other, adjacent images (fig. 19). It is as if the fireman, running from a brutal beheading (no. 15), were rushing to the aid of the dying Gregory VII, or to mourn his exile and his death. This is a “light” form of interaction between the figures, which uses a pronounced “anachronism” to suggest some form of interaction between them, but without making them into a narrative story. A second mode involves a merging (a “crasis,” if we were to use the appropriate grammatical

term) of disparate images, as we saw in ( fig. 19 ) Firemen at work after the bombing of the the case of Moro, Saint Teresa, and the San Lorenzo neighborhood defeated barbarians (no. 21). But there in Rome, July 19, 1943 is also a third mode, involving not only the sequential ordering of the figures, but also a sense of mutual dependency, which brings figures together in close narrative relationship.

This is the case with nos. 17–18 (figs. 46–47), which many historians or art historians will easily recognize. The monstrous figure with a scaly body, donkey’s head, and dragon’s tail has a history of its own, most significantly through association with a famous pamphlet by Luther and Melanchthon (1523). According to a legend circulating at the time, this monster emerged from the Tiber in 1496 after a flood. The reformers took the opportunity to read it as an omen, interpreting it as a divine confirmation of the corruption of the Roman popes—indeed, even a monstrous metamorphosis of the pope as Antichrist.23 Next to this figure, the woman huddled pitifully on the ground is none other than Roma vidua— that is, the widow of the pope: a propagandistic image invented during the long period when the popes resided in Avignon, away from Rome (circa 1309–1377). Rome personified is left without a pope, begging on the ground, at the center of a schematic map of the city in illustrated manuscripts of Fazio degli Uberti’s Dittamondo (composed circa 1350–60). But in Kentridge’s frieze, the two figures—the “Protestant” one of the pope-Antichrist who defiles Rome, and that of Rome who, instead, feels she is a widow and begs for the pope’s return—are juxtaposed and made interdependent. It seems the donkey-pope wants to comfort the desolate city by offering her a coffee

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made with a Bialetti coffeemaker. A gratuitous joke? Perhaps. Or perhaps (like the sewing machine carried by one of the standard-bearers, no. 5) it is an attempt to lessen the density and gravitas of this part of the frieze, which would otherwise be overburdened with historical citation. In the first instance, there are the multiple allusions to the ancient triumph (as it was experienced and/or reconstructed) with which the frieze opens; in the second, there is the close proximity of the death of Gregory VII with the abdication of Celestine V (no. 16), which immediately precedes the “coffee-pot” group; yet there is also a clear allusion to Rome, the widow of the pope, in the figure of Cola di Rienzo (no. 29), who, when the popes were absent from Rome, tried to revive the power and splendor of the Roman Commune, only to be killed in 1354.

Beginning from the Ponte Mazzini end and walking past the frieze, laments outweigh triumphs, which is certainly why this section includes an image so iconic it is recognizable even in reverse: the figure of Jeremiah (no. 42) that Michelangelo painted in the Sistine Chapel in 1512 (plate 11).

The unheeded prophet of doom and the collective lament of an entire people, Jeremiah is evoked in a spirit not unlike that seen in literary works about him, such as Jeremias by Stefan Zweig (1917) or Höret die Stimme (“Listen to the voice,” 1937) by Franz Werfel—texts that evoke the tragedy of the two world wars. In Kentridge’s frieze, Jeremiah appears between a small procession of three veiled women (no. 41—the source is a stock photo from October 12, 2013) who mourn the victims of a shipwreck in Lampedusa, and Giordano Bruno (no. 43)—evoking the statue by Ettore Ferrari in Campo de’ Fiori,

showing the friar about to be burned ( fig. 21 ) Ulpiano Checa, at the stake and looking with a scowl Naumachia, 1894 (as was possible in 1889) at the dome of Saint Peter’s. But it is in the present that Kentridge’s Jeremiah raises his lament: in this section of the frieze, the weight of the present builds up until it becomes almost overwhelming, as the artist’s own extraordinary interventions increase (as seen in his manipulation of historical sequence) and as thousands of years merge together, forcing us to remember.

Let us turn to the sequence of nos. 36–44. At one end is an image of Romans seeking refuge on a boat during the Tiber flood of December 17, 1937 (no. 36, from a photo of the time), and at the other is a transcription of the sign marking the water level reached during another Tiber flood, that of September 15, 1557 (no. 44). In the middle is a migrants’ boat (no.

37), the skeleton of the Roman wolf (no. 38), a procession of migrants who carry their belongings on their heads (no. 39), the crucifixion of Saint Peter (no. 40), mourners on Lampedusa (no. 41), Jeremiah (no. 42), and Giordano Bruno (no. 43). The emphasis placed on current events does not ease the weight of history, but rather augments it. The migrants’ boat (no. 37) is the sum, the mergence, or crasis of two contrasting images: a stock photo taken on December 14, 2013, of a boat off the coast of Lampedusa (fig. 20) is laid on top of and merges with the oars and outlines of an ancient Roman ship, as it was imagined circa 1894 by the Spanish painter Ulpiano Checa in his portrayal of the first naumachia ordered by Caesar for his triumph of 46 BCE (fig. 21). A huge moat was dug in the Campus Martius and filled with water, and thousands of sailors and prisoners of war fought on real triremes. The

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( fig. 20 ) A migrants’ boat off Lampedusa, December 14, 2013

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artificial lake in ancient Rome, created for the spectacle of a mock sea battle, is juxtaposed with the disastrous natural flooding of the Tiber; the memory of Julius Caesar’s triumph is swallowed up by the lament of a boat overloaded with migrants.

Skeletal She-wolf II (no. 38) is the most obvious sign that it is this entire segment that asks to be seen through the lens of lament. It shows, with unrelenting force, a procession of refugees (no. 39), which Kentridge has composed by drawing upon, surprisingly, not the vast photographic documentation of such scenes, but a monument from imperial Rome. This is one of the socalled “Plutei of Trajan” (fig. 48), showing figures carrying heavy account registers to be burned after a generous act of debt forgiveness by Emperor Hadrian (119 CE). It has the same rhythm of marching, forced steps, and the weight of heavy burdens that Kentridge has transported from ancient Rome to Rome 1,900 years later, on the Tiber embankment. With masterful sprezzatura, the artist reveals the vast extent of the repertory that allows him—if only through the reuse of one particular type of representation—to collapse chronological distance: to match up the burden of the debts of ancient Romans with the sufferings of those who, today, laboriously transport all their belongings with them, seeking refuge from country to country, or indeed from continent to continent (an indirect evocation of, among other things, photographs of migration within South Africa).24

We can reread this sequence, characterized by the self-conscious use of “anachronism,” or rather of temporal short-circuits, following the model of the three chronological tiers discussed earlier:

that of Pasolini (no. 25). In this light, the powerful crasis that passes from the lifeless barbarians on the Ludovisi sarcophagus, to a saint in ecstasy, to the assassination of Aldo Moro, takes on a new poignancy (plates 7, 22, 25).

It is not by chance that this is the apex of a new “grammar” that Kentridge has devised and then applied (for us) to his Roman frieze.

Nothing is more Roman in ancient Roman art (despite some precedents in other cultures) than what has been called “continuous narrative”—that is, the representation of a uninterrupted sequence of events which follows the convention of how, as when writing in Latin on a page, narrative is read from left to right, following a sequence of events chronologically as it unfolds in time. The columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius are the best examples, but the same is true of even shorter narrative scenes, such as those shown on Roman sarcophagi, which use identical methods to narrate, scene by scene, the biography of a particular general, or the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus. Reversing this method of storytelling, which is fully present in his (and our) memory, Kentridge has invented a markedly discontinuous narrative—where feelings swallow up events, and dates and facts are left shipwrecked in a gray zone between memory and oblivion. He exercises to the fullest extent the “sovereignty of the artist” which Ernst Kantorowicz wrote about in a famous essay.25

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of St. Peter

Moving with such freedom and awareness, Kentridge invents new “rules of the game,” where an equivalence between the Jews defeated by Titus and Vespasian and the migrants of today is made prominently (and seemingly naturally), and where the short-circuit between the abdications of Celestine V (1294) and Benedict XVI (2013) suggests others, perhaps less obvious: for example, that between the equestrian figures of Marcus Aurelius (no. 2), Death (no. 11), and the mutilated one of Mussolini; or by contrast, the image of Saint Peter crucified upside-down (no. 40), which might evoke the terrible memory of Mussolini’s body being hung upside-down in Piazzale Loreto; or perhaps the nexus between the desolate corpse of Remus (no. 22) and

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The World in the Studio On the one hand, therefore, we find a self-evident sequence laid out in Triumphs and Laments, underscored by the figures’ monumentality and by the possibility of multiple angles of viewing (from this or the other side of the river, from above or below, from Ponte Mazzini or Ponte Sisto). On the other, there is a pronounced discontinuity in the abrupt transition from famous “icons” of art (for instance, Jeremiah, no. 42; Marcus Aurelius, no. 2) to figures which are evocative, but unrecognizable (such as the body of Remus, no. 22; a soldier on horseback, no. 20; a firefighter, no. 14; or a pope in flight, no. 12), whose very presence in this covertly narrative series of images gives them a temporary iconic status. Mixing high and low, Kentridge brings together not only figures borrowed from a triumphal column or the Vatican palace, but little-known manuscripts, popular prints, photographs, provincial fresco cycles, nineteenth-century monuments, and film stills. Their very juxtaposition saves them from their inevitable obsolescence, and even rather reactivates their expressive potential, their inner core of pathos—their ability to narrate, to clash in harmony with each other, to come together in a new story.

Thus in Kentridge’s frieze, themes and narrative motifs reoccur in a calculated way (Titus’s triumph over the Jews, no. 31; the Jews captured by the Nazis, no. 33). So too do ironic counterpoints. (The equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, no. 2, contrasts with the image of the first king of Italy

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on a toy wooden horse, no. 46.) ( fig. 22 ) William Kentridge Or the sudden appearance of a drawing the Skeletal She-wolf, 2015 surprising iconographic crasis (the migrant boat, no. 37, is equipped with the oars of a trireme, while Saint Teresa deeply mourns the fate of enemies of the Romans, and at the same time that of Aldo Moro, no. 21).

Shuttling between metaphor and narrative, Kentridge’s frieze can be read as a mnemonic device, a sort of “memory theater” that proceeds by flashes of recollection—the symbolic meaning of which corrodes, even incinerates, the potential for precise quotation.

“The Art of Memory consists of places and images,” 26 according to a passage in the Rhetorica ad Herennium (first century BCE), where “a locus is a place easily conjured up in the memory, while the imagines are forms, simulacra, symbols of that which is to be remembered.” 27 As with ancient memory systems (for example, that of L’idea del theatro, by Giulio Camillo, published in 1550, fig. 49),28 the space—the massive Tiber walls—is a metaphor for time, and the symbiosis of events close to one other in the frieze but distant in history—in a way which is deliberately “anachronistic”—subverts the temporal sequence and spatial dimension of the frieze. Arranged in order, and almost always isolated from one another or in small groups, the images undergo a metamorphosis, one by one and all together. In one famous frieze

by M. C. Escher (Metamorphosis II, 1939–40), the squares of a chessboard turn into lizards, then hexagons, then a beehive, which bees which fly out of before gradually becoming butterflies, fish, birds, and then cubes—which transform into a cityscape, and then, finally, a chessboard. Kentridge, by

contrast, subjects his figures to a wholly metaphoric metamorphosis, which only marginally alters his source—images, reversing them as with patrones (as in nos. 7, 10, 12–13, 16, 22), fragmenting them and putting them into ruin (as in nos. 20, 23, 24, and especially 26–28), combining them as if in a “continuous narrative” (as in nos. 7–8, 17–18, 21, 37). Their meaning, however, is profoundly transformed by confrontation and contagion, their very arrangement in a sequence, and the poignant title, Triumphs and Laments, which has been impressed upon them.

This emotional metamorphosis takes place by “inviting the world into the studio,” as Kentridge himself has said (figs. 22–23). Setting up a vast repertory of potential sources, selecting motifs for reuse, devising a monumental narrative, and bringing together Pathosformeln in a morphological and/or narrative sense: through this creative process, mediated by assiduous drawing, the artist’s own skill and his (and our) cognitive thinking come together.

The more that Triumphs and Laments articulates and transmits clear traces of this performative process, the more it lends itself to a kind of “reverse engineering”—urging us to reconstruct in our minds, working backward, the artistic process which took place in the studio.

The world in Kentridge’s studio (transported to the Tiber River from his home in Johannesburg) is a fragmentary one, arranged in more or less arbitrary repertories of themes and figures to be explored and drawn using a “subtractive process”: the removal of that which seems least relevant to the project, from a large archive of motifs and themes—or the removal of the black patina on the travertine walls, allowing the figures to emerge from it. The result is a ghostly, black-and-white world of shadows. It is made perpetually temporary by an intellectual process that, through the sovereign gesture of the artist, both de-iconifies what might appear to us to be canonical and gives little-known or marginal imagery an unexpected (and temporary) iconic status. It compels the viewer toward a constant fluctuation between the opposite poles of familiarity and estrangement.

The potential simultaneity of perception, which is intrinsic to the “figural genre” of the frieze, invites us not only to read by segments, but also to mentally reassemble them as an expressive whole. “Rome cries, ( fig. 23 ) William Kentridge Lucca whispers,” as American director working on Triumphs and LaWilliam Friedkin has said, comparing ments in his studio, 2015 Rome to a quieter city in Tuscany; but

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in Kentridge’s frieze, even Rome, a city naturally inclined toward declamation, has managed to whisper. Striking a dreamlike balance between memory and oblivion, the artist has purged the work of any bombastic temptation.

He has reduced the history of Rome—from the very distant She-wolf to the refugees who land on Lampedusa every day—to an insistent whisper, or a silent chorus. Here, a continuous short-circuit of events, images, characters, and emotions is never a banal version of “history repeating itself.” On the contrary, for Kentridge, events of the past, shattered and flattened by the weight of the present, continue to plague us—just as current events in Rome risk appearing insignificant when measured against the vast expanse of history. But human memory does not (unlike a computer) store or retrieve sequences of events intact; on the contrary, it breaks up memories, grasps them in fragments, and processes, interprets, and reuses them. It discards them, forgets them, or finds them again, just as an artist (this artist) would do with his repertory, “taking strength from the past.” 29 This is achieved without flattening out thousands of years of history into an indeterminate present, but rather by retrieving events and figures, triumphs and laments, and reactivating them before our eyes: reinvigorating in one motion their radical diversity (from us), their familiar essence, and their pathos, which we can still attempt to find reflected in ourselves.

Kentridge does not propose a diagnosis or treatment for the pathology (or physiology) of memory, but he does trace its horizons and gorges with a cartographer’s sense of intuition. His use of drawing, by its particular qualities and figural intensity, prolongs indefinitely the transience of both memory and oblivion. Impermanent by its very nature, Kentridge’s art offers itself as a homeopathic remedy for the inevitable disintegration of events and memories. His response is not aesthetic, but ethical and cognitive: by bringing a thematic and morphological bricolage into the laboratory (the studio), the artist succeeds in producing a cognitive tool for understanding the world and himself. But also for understanding ourselves.

on a collective aspect, as if “speaking from the walls” and entering into dialogue with the city as it becomes part of it. It is an unexpected presence that surprises and demands attention. It is powerful but discreet in its play of shadows on stone and its short and transitory life, which is itself an integral part of the artist’s intention.

In an initial phase of the project, the artist considered creating the frieze as a projection on the wall, where figures—as if emitted from a sort of enormous magic lantern—would come together, then quickly disperse, as can be done on the opera stage. The walls of the Tiber were built after the city became the capital of Italy (1870), but the travertine, and the texture of the blocks, make a self-conscious allusion to ancient imperial architecture (for example, the Colosseum), and in particular to the masonry technique known as opus quadratum. Although the idea of using the walls as a screen against which images of the frieze would be projected was quickly abandoned, it evokes a visionary passage from Gabriele D’Annunzio’s “On the Cinematograph as an Instrument of Liberation and an Art of Transfiguration,” which compares a cinema screen to the walls of the Acropolis of Athens: a “bare wall, of sublime nudity, which seems made for the apparitions of tomorrow . . . dominating the theater of Dionysus.” Written around the same time as the film Cabiria (1914), these words embody a twentieth-century aesthetic of movement (and cinema) focused on the marvelous and metamorphic, as well as on the tension between the sublime and the ephemeral. The cinema screen, where the human figure can take on monumental proportions, recalls the grandeur of an ancient wall, but at the same time describes a type of spectacle that is perpetually present and repeatable, an audience that swells ever larger, and an “art for the masses” (Benjamin).30

A few years later, the artist and filmmaker Pier Antonio Gariazzo imagined the cinema (which he called the “silent theater” or “cinematic theater”) as a sort of Dionysian procession. “From the bottom of the blue valley of time,” he wrote, “an immense crowd of passions and dreams from the past come to us. Dionysus, the God, leads the phantasmagorical parade, shadows and shadows amid gray billowing mists . . .”31 These are words that could be read as a watermark on the “shadows and shadows” of Kentridge’s frieze, where the cinema is explicitly referenced in two images inspired by film (nos. 48, 49), which are placed (not by accident) next to each other. The cinema is implicit in the rhythmic succession of figures, as silhouettes caught in arrested motion, which sometimes—as in the Victoria Romana who collapses into ruin, nos.

26–28—actually seem to move. It seems remarkable that, among these carts carrying sculpture (no. 7), historical figures (nos. 8, 9, 13, 29, 30), and scenes from an ancient Roman relief (no. 15) or from the cinema (no. 49), there is no camera dolly.

Positioned, with this arrière-pensée, at a highly conspicuous spot in the center of Rome, Kentridge’s frieze inevitably enters into dialogue with the great tradition of mural painting—not just the Mexican tradition, but also

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Public Art and the Future of the City

Alas for human fate! Fortune is only sketched in like a shadow: if misfortune strikes, the touch of a damp sponge wipes away the drawing.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon, vv. 1327–29

Thanks to the collegial effort of Tevereterno and Kristin Jones, who in her work She Wolves on the Tiber (2005) experimented with the “reverse graffiti” method, and thanks to the frieze’s location in the center of Rome and its imposing size, Kentridge’s work—though created by the hand of one master—takes

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its more recent and more controversial forms. “Street art” has been much discussed in the news as of late. The original Mexican murales, created to speak to the masses, were conceived of and perceived as public art, and linked to institutions such as the Mexican government or to industry. Since the time of their creation, the Detroit Industry murals by Diego Rivera (1932–33) have occupied dedicated spaces in a large museum, although it was only in 2014 that they were declared a U.S. National Historic Landmark. In stark contrast to avant-garde art that—following elite taste—developed abstract forms and motifs, this form of “popular” art, using a language that was necessarily figural, could present itself as another, alternative avant-garde. It was the source of artistic developments that occupied the whole of the twentieth century, and continue into the present. In Italy, there was also a “Manifesto of Mural Painting” (1933),32 signed by Mario Sironi and Carlo Carrà, among others; this was the era of the decorative program commissioned for the University of Padua by Carlo Anti, archaeologist and university rector, including paintings by Massimo Campigli (1939–40) and sculptures by Arturo Martini. This was also the era of the Mussolini on Horseback in Naples (1940), which shows up in Kentridge’s frieze (no. 23).

Large mural cycles were refined works of art ordered by patrons, and which were highly political in their subjects and aims. So too were (in a more disguised manner) their choice of pictorial genre, setting, and visual language.

Set in contrast to the systems of private patronage and the art market, mural painting positioned itself as an art “for all,” to be encountered in the street or the workplace, and therefore supposedly attuned not to elite taste, but to the expectations, interests, and concerns of “the people.” It was, by its very nature, an art form that sought to express collective values, to speak to the masses, despite the fact that works were often “signed” by well-known masters. This political sentiment gradually strengthened as murals appeared in more diverse settings, and as a shift took place toward the anonymity of the collective or the amateur—as is seen in the many murals of Northern Ireland, which give monumental form to statements of conflict with the British government.33 Murals have also become a type of public art sponsored (and controlled) by local governments as expressions of identity, which can communicate ideas or (mild) protests, while at the same time offering an antidote to the dullness of inner cities or suburbs. This is the case, for example, in Johannesburg, where civic leaders have written an official document that defines public art: Public art provides a means of celebrating Johannesburg’s unique culture, different communities and rich history. It offers shared symbols which build social cohesion, contribute to civic pride and help forge a positive identity for the city. Through this art, the City projects its collective identity and vision, while individuals and community groups in neighborhoods are also empowered to express their unique identities. Public art supports the creative industries, creating opportunities for artists, designers and fabricators. Further, public

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art acts as a catalyst for development and economic growth through raising confidence, attracting visitors and stimulating investment.34

But the décalage from public art made on commission by master artists, to the collective production of imagery, and finally to the generic sponsorship by city governments of murals—by anyone with the talent to paint a wall, so to speak, “on behalf of all”—is not a neutral process. It involves, indeed, a new type of muralism which would describe itself as spontaneous, anti( fig. 24 ) Francesco Del Casino, Laocoön and financial institutional, and not only outside the speculation, Orgosolo, 1993, market, but set in opposition to it— mural as well as to other, related practices, such as art criticism. In 1970s Italy, the town of Orgosolo’s murals, which were often political, formed part of this debate; they were the work of amateur artists such as Francesco Del Casino (who painted “collectively,” together with middle-school students). Although it is still lacks (as far as I am aware) a thorough analysis, it seems the more “public art” becomes anonymous—outside the patronage of institutions and, indeed, anti-institutional—the more it seeks or presumes the consent of the crowd, and the more it seems a collective form of expression, and, for this reason, more readily uses quotations from the art of the past. In Orgosolo, we find, for example, explicit quotations of Guernica or the Laocoön sculpture (fig. 24), to be understood as something in-between learned references and icons of pop culture.

This is the background that informs the wave of what we would now call street art, which has exploded in recent years, including in Italy. It inherits its political identity from its predecessors, but adds to it a provocative, subversive character. As a type of artistic performance which institutions do not permit, and which indeed is clandestine by nature, it has no choice but to be temporary and volatile. It is sometimes deliberately destroyed, or left to decay, because it is classified as vandalism. This inherently “underground” quality, which draws upon a real or faux cult of anonymity and improvisation, plays a significant part in street art’s recent success—which indeed increases every time murals are removed or otherwise repressed. At the same time, street art, with all its poetics of ephemerality, ends up (inevitably?) drawn in by the broader forces that it apparently rejects: permanence and the market. Such is the case with Banksy, probably the most famous living street artist, who continues to maintain his anonymity despite attempts to identity him. In his

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film Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010), the British guerrilla artist states that his show Barely Legal, which he organized in Los Angeles in 2006, was a turning point in the relationship between street art and the market, and that street art, precisely because it is short-lived, must be properly documented (with photography, films, websites, etc.). In other words, there would be no street art without its reproduction, diffusion, and distribution on the Internet.

The problematic relationship between street art and the museum also crosses these precarious boundaries. In early 2016 (coincidentally, the same time Kentridge was working on his Roman frieze in his studio in Johannesburg), two exhibitions on street art opened in Italy. The first, in Bologna, (Street Art – Banksy & Co. L’arte allo stato urbano, from March 18 to June 26) brought together works by various artists, while the second, in Rome (War, Capitalism & Liberty, from May 24 to September 4) put 150 works by Banksy, from private collections, on display, seemingly without the artist’s consent.35 Yet what happens to street art once it is removed from its urban context and moved to the rarified space of the museum? Sometimes it is exhibited on a reduced scale (in the form of photographs, drawings, sketches, or stencils); other times, it is detached from walls using techniques similar to those used to rescue Florentine frescoes after the great flood of 1966.36 In this way, street art—meant to confront passersby when they least expect it—is decontextualized, framed, and set aside for the eyes of a public that pays to attend an art exhibition. One notable work on display in the show in Bologna, by an Italian mural artist who goes by the name of Blu, had been removed (without his consent) from the wall of an abandoned factory. The artist, however, vehemently objected to this. In protest, with the help of the occupants of two community centers, he even destroyed fifteen of his own murals in and around Bologna. As Wu Ming, a collective of five Italian writers, wrote,

triggers mechanisms that are commercial, rather than thoughtful or evaluative, helps to explain the success of street art—which “anyone” can do and can be displayed anywhere, seen by anyone, and has the advantage of being short-lived and therefore does not need storage in warehouses or archives. (Although the truth is that, like it or not, it ends up generating both kinds of storage spaces.)

There is thus a stark contrast between the sort of public art condoned, or actively supported, by institutions, and the sort made in protest against them, but they also have a certain affinity. In truth, public art aimed at forging a shared identity “cannot in itself function as an effective instrument of rupture and contestation” (Filippomaria Pontani). This art is meant to construct collective identities (that of the person who creates it, or that of its viewers), but seems more credible when it is not domesticated by institutions—indeed, when it repudiates and challenges them. Yet even when street artists present themselves, or are perceived, as the voice of the masses, seeking their approval, they often end up becoming individual artistic personalities, calling attention not only to their work but also to themselves.

I do not want to dwell upon these and other contradictions inherent to street art. Yet it is worth noting how often an artist who is suddenly put forward (and understood) as the authentic voice of collective consciousness makes more or less direct use of a repertory of works of art from the past. We see it every day with the itinerant artists who draw Madonnas of Raphael or portraits of Leonardo on the sidewalk, ask passersby for tips, and then move on to do the same thing somewhere else. It happens in a more complex form when the street artist Andrea Ravo Mattoni spray-paints a giant copy of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ on an underpass in Varese (April 2016) with the caption, “We will all be forgotten”—an allusion to the fact that the picture was forgotten for so long, and only rediscovered in 1990, in Dublin.37 Or it is seen even with the “dirty car art” of Scott Wade, a Texas artist who draws famous paintings such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in the dirty rear windshields of cars (fig. 50) by taking away dirt.38

This painting by Botticelli, given its supremely iconic status,39 recurs often in popular culture, in various forms. I will note only two examples here, one American and one Italian. Venice Kinesis is just one of many titles given to a vast mural by Rip Cronk in Venice, California, which the artist has painted and repainted periodically since the 1980s (fig. 51). The work, which faces the sea, is painted on the facade of a “Palazzo Ducale” that mimics the one in Venice, and draws evocatively upon various elements of the painting, from the large shell to the personifications of the winds. Venus, a California girl on roller skates, tells us in a speech bubble that “History is Myth.” Freed of this burden, she is ready to skate along the beach with the tourists. The Venus of Lampedusa—painted in April 2016 on the wall of an abandoned explosives factory in Colleferro, near Rome, by local students of the Istituto Tecnico “Cannizzaro” (fig. 52)—seems convinced of exactly

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We are faced with arrogant landlords who act as colonial governors and think they’re free to take murals off our walls. The only thing that’s left to do is make these paintings disappear, to snatch them from those claws, to make hoarding impossible. . . . The people who take this action don’t accept that yet another shared asset is appropriated, they don’t want yet another enclosure and a ticket to buy.

Since it is public or urban art, street art defies the art market (art for those who can afford it), as well as the museum (where art is imprisoned, in a made-to-measure space). Museums of contemporary art acquire too many works and store them in enormous warehouses where they are doubly confined, without in any way undermining the museum’s function as a legitimizing construct: if an artist’s work is shown in museums, it is worth more on the market—even when many of his or her works are in fact invisible, in storage or hidden away in the homes of elite collectors.

The widespread sentiment that the process of consecration by the museum

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the opposite. She is a refugee on the bow of a boat, wearing a life jacket and gazing dejectedly out at the sea foam, which does not evoke (as in Botticelli) her birth from Uranus’s semen cast into the sea, but instead shipwrecks, and other tragedies. She has supposedly arrived from North Africa; she still has her long, blond hair, but in this small city, devastated by industrial, economic, and environmental crises,40 she tells us that history is not a mythic sublimation of a generic past. On the contrary, it is a painful experience lived every day. In both examples, the repertory image is the same, but its reuse moves between the opposite poles of entertainment and political calls-toarms: the “decorative” and the serious.

Triumphs and Laments inevitably enters into these discussions, but arrives at them via a very different route, owing much more to the magic lantern and the shadow-puppet theater. Its essential tool is drawing, Kentridge’s unambiguous stylistic cipher (figs. 25, 53). The artist absorbs and assimilates a vast repertory drawn from the art of the past—never winking at the audience or drawing them into a superficial complicity, but instead reactivating that repertory’s expressive potential by giving each figure a new narrative function achieved not simply by evoking its iconic status (from Trajan’s Column to Bernini), but through a sense of continuity with the new context in which it appears. As if by contagion, the juxtaposition and sequence that binds these figures together gives them (the repertory) a new life. A fleeting life, it is true, like the water of the Tiber that flows next to them. But wasn’t this always the case? As Quevedo put it in his famous sonnet, “To Rome Buried in Its Own Ruin” (1617):41 ¡Oh Roma en tu grandeza, O Rome, in your grandeur, en tu hermosura, in your beauty huyó lo que era firme all that is eternal has taken flight; y solamente only that which is fleeting lo fugitivo permanece y dura! lasts and remains!

According to Robert Musil, “What strikes one most about monuments is that one doesn’t notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as monuments. There is no doubt they are erected in order to be seen, indeed to arouse attention, but at the same time they are somehow impregnated against attention: it runs down them like water on oilcloth, without stopping for an instant. . . . Everything permanent loses its ability to impress. . . . Pictures we hang on the wall are sucked up by the wall within a few days,” and we do not look at them anymore. To get noticed, he writes, “monuments today should do what we all have to do, make more of an effort!”42 Even a city as rich in monuments and museums as Rome needs to “make an effort.” In Rome, as elsewhere, public art is a possible answer to Musil’s prophetic call, since it enlivens urban space and rescues it from monotony. It captures the gaze of viewers outside the rituals of the gallery or museum. And in Rome there has,

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for a long time, been nothing com( fig. 25 ) parable to Triumphs and Laments, in Skeletal Horse, from its ability to reactivate mechanisms Triumphs and Laments, 2016, detail of visual memory—projecting into a city overloaded with monumentality and history a staunch admonition not only to look, but to remember.

Tainted by the market, censured by the social barriers that make it the privilege of the few, legitimized by the museum but often sent into exile in storage, art needs, now more than ever, aesthetic redemption. The birth of aesthetics as an organized discipline in the mid-eighteenth century was intertwined with the institutionalization of the museum. It entailed, on one hand, the retrospective codification of Beauty, and on the other the emergence of new methods of classification to be applied to “works of art,” labeled as such as soon as they crossed the threshold of the museum. With this came, by contrast, an eagerness for liberation from the constraints of a predetermined canon. The urban crowd, the museum’s public, played a determining role in this sociocultural process, which Georges Bataille memorably described: The museum’s rooms and art works only form a container. The real content of the museum is its visitors. . . . The museum is like the lungs of a city: crowds flow through it like blood and come out purified and fresh. The paintings are dead surfaces, and the sense of play, the shouts and streams of light which the authorized critics labor to describe in their technical language, all originate in the crowd.43

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Much has changed since then, and the museum of today struggles to maintain its former function as the “regenerating lung” of the city. In this new environment, the real or presumed democratic universality of urban art is necessarily tied to the city’s fate, in particular to the increasing vulnerability of historic cities, our propensity to tear them apart while forgetting their substance and spirit.44 For this reason, all urban art in today’s world shuns the museum, orienting itself instead toward ineluctable transience.

Ideas about the city of the future seem to be determined today by three interrelated factors: the unstoppable growth of megacities, the verticalization of architecture (the rhetoric of skyscrapers), and, lastly, the dissipation of boundaries separating city and countryside, with the simultaneous rise of boundaries within cities—between gentrified and abandoned neighborhoods, and elite, gated communities and suburbs teeming with the old and new poor. Perhaps it is not the glittering displays of galleries and exhibitions, but street art—created by subtraction (from Scott Wade’s windshields; to the peeling plaster of the Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, also known as Vhils; to that of the Spanish street artist Pejac, in the Al-Hussein refugee camp in Palestine) and set up in public spaces, where it can be seen by all and slowly degrade—that is the true mirror of our time. It is around this art that the city itself steadily passes away, as its forma urbis, intact until recently, dies every day. By scalpeling off and subtracting from the city’s skin the residue of plaster deposits, sand, and “dirt,” are we caring for the city’s sick body? Or are we dressing her up, as if for her own funeral?

With Triumphs and Laments, Kentridge has brought to Rome, and to urban art more generally, an unrivalled artistic vision. He has given this work a collective dimension, especially at the start of the creative process (through the formation, with the help of art historians, of a vast repertory from which he could distill motifs) and at its end (with a team of collaborators who transferred designs from sketches in small dimensions, to monumental figures on the wall—moving from computer mock-ups to large stencils to the images’ transcription, made by simply cleaning the darkened travertine). In a city meant to be “eternal” but still subject to the fears and pressures of the future, the frieze is meant to vanish and dissolve within a few years. But, thanks to this book, something will remain. To adapt a phrase from Horace, non omnis morietur: it will die, but not fully.

203 notes 1.

All translations of original sources, unless noted, are by the author and translator of this essay.

2.

Suetonius, Life of Augustus, 28.

3.

Horace, Odes III, 30, 1–6.

4.

Tertullian, Apologeticus XXXIII, 4.

5.

Suetonius, Life of Julius Caesar, 37.

6.

Appian, Roman History XII, 116–17.

7.

Flavius Josephus, The Jewish War VII, 5, 139–47.

8.

Antonio Pinelli, “Feste e trionfi: continuità e metamorfosi di un tema,” in S. Settis, ed., Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, Turin: Einaudi, 1985, vol. 2, pp. 279–350, esp. pp. 281–2.

9.

Hildeberti Cenomannensis Episcopi Carmina minora, ed. A. B. Scott, Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1969, n. 36.

10.

Francesco Guicciardini, Storia d’Italia, Milan: Mondadori, 1975, p. 901.

11.

Pinelli, pp. 339–40. See André Chastel, The Sack of Rome, 1527, trans. Beth Archer, Bollingen Series 35:26, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983.

12.

François Rabelais, Lettres écrites d’Italie, ed. V.-L. Bourrilly, Paris: H. Champion, 1910, p. 56.

13.

La festa a Roma dal Rinascimento al 1870, ed. Marcello Fagiolo, catalog from the exhibition (Palazzo Venezia, Rome, May 23–September 15, 1997), Turin: Allemandi, 1997, 2 vols.

14.

Federica Rossi, “Caesar, As Political Title,” eds. A. Grafton, G. Most, and S. Settis, The Classical Tradition, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 159–61.

15.

William Kentridge, Six Drawings Lessons, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2014. Published on the occasion of Kentridge’s Norton Lecture at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University.

16.

For Kentridge’s shadow processions, see, for example, William Kentridge, catalog from the exhibition curated by Carolyn ChristovBakargiev (Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin, January 10–February 29, 2004), Milan: Skira, 2004, pp. 141–62.

17.

Dante, Inferno VI, 36.

18.

Geoffrey O’Brien, “A Very New ‘Lulu,’” New York Review of Books, January 14, 2016.

19.

Dante, Inferno I, 49–54.

20.

Silvia Tomasi Velli, Le immagini e il tempo.

Narrazione visiva, storia e allegoria tra Cinque e Seicento, Pisa: Edizioni della Normale, 2007.

21.

Pier Luigi Tucci, Laurentius Manlius. La riscoperta dell’antica Roma. La nuova Roma di Sisto IV, Rome: Edizioni Quasar, 2001.

22.

Kathleen W. Christian, Empire Without

End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527, New Haven, Connecticut, and London: Yale University Press, 2010.

23.

I will mention only the famous study

by Aby Warburg, “Pagan-Antique Prophecy in Words and Images in the Age of Luther” (1920), trans. David Britt, in Kurt W. Forster, ed., Aby Warburg: The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999, pp. 597–697. See also L. P. Buck, The Roman Monster: An Icon of the Papal Antichrist in Reformation Polemics, Kirksville, Missouri: Truman State University Press, 2014.

24.

Published in William Kentridge, catalog from the exhibition curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev (Société des Expositions des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, May 15–August 23, 1998), Brussels: Société des Expositions des BeauxArts, 1998, p. 142.

25.

Ernst H. Kantorowicz, “The Sovereignty of the Artist: A Note on Legal Maxims and Renaissance Theories of Art,” in M. Meiss, ed., De Artibus Opuscula XL: Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, New York: New York University Press, 1961, vol. 1, pp. 267–79.

26.

Rhetorica ad Herennium III, 16.

27.

Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966.

28.

Giulio Camillo, L'idea del theatro. Con “l'idea dell'eloquenza”, “il De Transmutatione” e altri testi inediti, ed. Lina Bolzoni, Milan: Adelphi, 2015.

29.

As Kentridge states in Easing the Passing (of the Hours), 1992, in Christov-Bakargiev, William Kentridge, 1998, p. 167.

30.

On this point, see my text “Supremely Original. Classical Art as Serial, Iterative, Portable,” eds. S. Settis, A. Anguissola, and D. Gasparotto, Serial/Portable Classic, Milan: Fondazione Prada, 2015, pp. 51–72.

31.

Pier Antonio Gariazzo, Il teatro muto, Turin: Lattes, 1907, p. 328. On this point (and on the quote from D'Annunzio), see my book Futuro del “classico”, Turin: Einaudi, 2006 (translated into English as The Future of the Classical, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006).

32.

Mario Sironi, Scritti e pensieri, ed. E. Pontiggia, Milan: Abscondita, 2002, pp. 43–46.

33.

Maximilian Rapp, Murals in Nordirland: Symbol der ethno-kulturellen Identität und Spiegel des politischen Wandels, Baden-Baden, Germany: Nomos, 2014.

34.

City of Johannesburg, “Public Art Policy” document, 2003, http://www.newtown.co.za/ heritage/art.

35.

On this theme, see Filippomaria Pontani,

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“Le contraddizioni della Street Art,” Il Post, May 31, 2016, http://www.ilpost.it/2016/05/31/contraddizioni-street-art-banksy. See also Banksy & Co. L’arte allo stato urbano, catalog from the exhibition (Palazzo Pepoli, Bologna, March 18–June 26, 2016), eds. Luca Ciancabilla, Christian Omodeo, and Sean Corcoran, Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2016; and Luca Ciancabilla, The Sight Gallery: Salvaguardia e conservazione della pittura murale urbana contemporanea a Bologna, Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2016.

36.

Frescoes from Florence: An Exhibition, Hayward Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, London, April 3–June 15, 1969.

37.

“Varese, un Caravaggio nel sottopasso: il murale è un'opera d'arte,” La Repubblica Milano, April 15, 2016, http://milano.repubblica. it/cronaca/2016/04/15/foto/varese_un_caravaggio_nel_sottopasso_il_murales_e_un_ opera_d_arte-137676196/1/#1.

38.

See http://www.dirtycarart.com/tell-memore. See also Google search results for “Scott Wade.”

39.

For a first look at this history of reception, see The Botticelli Renaissance, catalog from the exhibition (Gemäldegalerie, Berlin, September 24, 2015–January 24, 2016), eds. Stefan Weppelmann and Mark Evans, Munich: Hirmer, 2015.

(On p. 14 is a reference to Rip Cronk in Venice, California.)

40.

On this topic, see, once again, Filippomaria Pontani, “Buon anno da Colleferro,” Il Post, December 31, 2012, http://www.ilpost. it/2012/12/31/buon-anno-da-colleferro.

41.

Francisco de Quevedo, Obras completas, I: Poesía original, ed. J. M. Blecua, Barcelona: Planeta, 1963, pp. 258–59; see also Quevedo, Sonetti amorosi e morali, ed. V. Bodini, Turin: Einaudi, 1965, pp. 66–67.

42.

Robert Musil, "Monuments," in Selected Writings, trans. Burton Pike, New York: Continuum, 1995, pp. 320–3.

43.

Georges Bataille, “Musée,” Documents 5, 1930, p. 300.

44.

I will permit myself a reference to my book, If Venice Dies, New York: New Vessel Press, 2016 (original Italian edition: Se Venezia muore, Turin: Einaudi, 2015).

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complete figure captions 1. Trajan’s Column, Rome, 113 CE. Detail of the spiral frieze from the northwest, with Winged Victory writing on a shield, recording the victorious end of the first Dacian War 2. Proposed reconstruction of the route of the via triumphalis in Rome during the early Imperial era 3. Column of Marcus Aurelius, Rome, circa 180–92 CE. Detail of the spiral frieze from the southeast, showing the decapitation of prisoners 4. Great Ludovisi sarcophagus, mid-third century CE, marble. Detail of a battle scene showing Romans fighting barbarians (Palazzo Altemps, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome) 5. Reconstruction of the imperial insignia (insignia imperii), early fourth century CE, found in 2005 near the southeast slope of the Palatine Hill (Palazzo Massimo, Museo Nazionale Romano, Rome) 6. Nicolaus Hogenberg, Triumphal Procession of Emperor Charles V and Pope Clement VII to Bologna, circa 1535–39, colored etching, detail (Collection of festival prints, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles) 7. Bertel Thorvaldsen, Triumphal Entry of Alexander the Great into Babylon, 1812, detail.

The frieze, 1 meter high and 35 meters long, was executed for the Quirinal Palace in anticipation of the arrival of Emperor Napoleon in Rome 8. Detail of second Sassanian relief at Bishahpur with the Triumph of King Shahpur I, near the Tang-e Chowgan Gorge, Iran, second half of the third century CE. The Roman Emperor Valerian is taken prisoner, while Gordian III lies dead under the king's horse and Philip the Arab kneels before him 9. Arch of Constantine, Rome, early fourth century CE, detail with relief of the Battle of the Milvian Bridge 10. Hans Holbein the Younger, Humiliation of Valerian, circa 1521, drawing with pen and ink wash (Kupferstichkabinett, Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland) 11. Master of the Sacro Speco and assistants, The Triumph of Death, fourteenth century, fresco (Scala Santa, Santuario del Sacro Speco, Subiaco)

12. Odoardo Tabacchi, Arnold of Brescia, 1882, bronze, detail of statue (Piazzale Arnaldo da Brescia, Brescia) 13. Silvestre D. Mirys, The Death of Remus and the Foundation of Rome, lithograph, in Figures de l'histoire de la République romaine, accompagnées d'un précis historique, published in Paris by Mirys, 1800 14. Discovery of the body of Aldo Moro in the trunk of a red Renault 4, Via Caetani, Rome, May 9, 1978 15. Arch of Constantine, Rome, early fourth century CE, detail of great Trajanic relief.

Emperor Trajan fights Dacian soldiers; Trajan's features have been changed to those of Emperor Constantine 16. Vestibule with reconstruction of the Statuario Pubblico (Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice) 17. The abdication of Celestine V, woodcut from Sextus decretalium liber a Bonifacio VIII in concilio Lugdunensi editus, published in Venice by Luca Antonio Giunta, 1514 18. Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, Archangel Michael, bronze statue, Castel Sant’Angelo, Rome, 1753 19. Roman firemen after the bombing of the San Lorenzo neighborhood, July 19, 1943 20. A migrants’ boat off Lampedusa, sighted by the ship the Cassiopea, December 14, 2013 21. Ulpiano Checa, Naumachia, 1894, oil on canvas (Museo Ulpiano Checa, Colmenar de Oreja, Madrid) 22. William Kentridge drawing the Skeletal She-wolf, Johannesburg, 2015 23. William Kentridge working on Triumphs and Laments in his studio, Johannesburg, 2015 24. Francesco Del Casino, Laocoön and financial speculation, Orgosolo, August 1993, mural 25. Skeletal Horse, detail from Triumphs and Laments as it appears in the frieze, Piazza Tevere, Rome, April 2016

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26. Andrea Mantegna, The Picture-Bearers, from The Triumphs of Caesar, circa 1485–92, tempera on canvas (Royal Collection, Hampton Court Palace, Richmond, UK)

35. Detail of Sassanian reliefs of Naqsh-e-Rostam, Iran, with the Triumph of King Shahpur I over the Roman Emperor Valerian, second half of third century CE

27. Arch of Trajan, Benevento, 114–17 CE. Detail of trabeation, southwest side, with triumphal procession

36. Detail of third Sassanian relief at Bishahpur, near the Tang-e Chowgan Gorge, Iran, second half of third century CE. It celebrates the victories of King Shahpur I in five registers

28. Arch of Titus, Rome, circa 81–90 CE. Detail of relief from the southwest, inner side, showing the entry of the procession through the porta triumphalis, with the bearers of spolia, who carry treasures sacked from the Temple of Jerusalem 29. Arch of Constantine, Rome, dedicated by the Senate on July 25, 315 CE, in celebration of Constantine's victory over Maxentius in the Battle of the Milvian Bridge (October 28, 312 CE) 30. The ruins of the imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill, seen from the Circus Maximus, Rome 31. Lombard School, Triumph of Vespasian and Titus, sixteenth century, drawing in pen and brown ink. Drawn from the fresco cycle of Altichiero and Jacopo Avanzi (circa 1364) in the Sala Grande of the Palazzo Scaligero, Verona (Département des arts graphiques, Louvre Museum, Paris) 32. Francesco Laurana and assistants, Triumph of Alfonso of Aragon, circa 1460, marble (Castel Nuovo, Naples) 33. Route of the triumphal procession of Emperor Charles V into Rome, on April 5, 1536, from La festa a Roma: dal Rinascimento al 1870, ed.

Marcello Fagiolo, Turin: U. Allemandi, 1997, p.

52: 0. Departure from the monastery of San Paolo Fuori le Mura; 1. Porta San Sebastiano; 2. Circus Maximus/Palatine; 3. Stradone di San Gregorio; 4.

Arch of Constantine/Colosseum; 5. Arch of Titus; 6. Roman Forum; 7. Arch of Septimius Severus; 8.

Piazza San Marco, now Piazza Venezia; 9. Campo de’ Fiori; 10. Castel Sant’Angelo; 11–12. Triumphal arches at entry and exit of the Borgo Alessandrino; 13. Triumphal portal granting access to Basilica di San Pietro; 14. Triumphal portal granting access to the Vatican palace 34. Severan Tondo, circa 200 CE, painting on panel. The panel showed the family of Emperor Septimius Severus, but Geta's face was canceled out after his damnatio memoriae (Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Staatliche Museen, Berlin)

37. Raphael and assistants, The Battle of the Milvian Bridge, 1520–24, fresco (Sala di Costantino, Musei Vaticani, Vatican City) 38. Circle of Jacopo Ripanda, Drawings after the reliefs from Trajan’s Column, scenes 251–56, second half of the sixteenth century, pen drawing on parchment (Fondo Lanciani, Biblioteca dell’ Istituto Nazionale di Archeologia e Storia dell’Arte, Rome) 39. Odoardo Tabacchi, Death of Arnold of Brescia, detail of bronze relief with the death of Arnold, 1882, bronze (Piazzale Arnaldo da Brescia, Brescia) 40. The flight of Pope Gregory VII from Rome (1084), and his exile and death in Salerno (1085), in the Chronicle of Otto of Freising, second half of the twelfth century (Thüringer Universitäts-und Landesbibliothek, Jena, Germany) 41. Raphael and assistants, The Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila, 1514, fresco (Stanza di Eliodoro, Musei Vaticani, Vatican City) 42. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, 1647–52 (Cornaro Chapel, Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome) 43. Diagram of reused reliefs on the Arch of Constantine, Rome, 315 CE. This shows the reliefs that were reused from buildings of previous emperors, in addition to those from the Constantine era 44. House of Lorenzo Manlio, Rome, 1475, detail of the inscription and ancient sculptures immured on the exterior wall of the house 45. Pope Pius XII in Rome, amid the crowds after the bombing of the San Lorenzo neighborhood, July 19, 1943 46. Wenzel von Olmütz, Roma Caput Mundi, before 1523, engraving. Also known as The PopeAss (Papstesel), an antipapal satire (Department of Prints and Drawings British Museum, London)

salvatore settis

47. Rome As a Widow, miniature from Dittamondo

by Fazio degli Uberti, 1447 (Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris) 48. Plutei of Trajan showing the cancellation of debts, Curia Julia, Rome, second century CE 49. Memory theater, from Giulio Camillo, L’idea del theatro, published in Florence by Lorenzo Torrentino, 1550 50. Scott Wade, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, 2012, dirty car art 51. Rip Cronk, Venice Kinesis, Venice, California, circa 1988. The mural has been repeatedly repainted 52. Venus of Lampedusa, mural by students of the Istituto Tecnico "Cannizzaro," Colleferro, Rome, April 2016 53. William Kentridge in front of Triumphs and Laments, Piazza Tevere, Rome, April 2016

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