Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Corsini Artifacts


I loved every one of these Papal family palace museums in Rome. They all had riches beyond measure hidden inside, but each with its own time-honored eccentricities to make it memorable.



Palazzo Corsini was surrounded by botanical gardens. I took the picture above through a large high window with afternoon light streaming in sideways onto rows of antique busts on plinths.



No photography was allowed inside the galleries, but there were no such restrictions on this passageway. Maybe the marbles were regarded as decoration rather than art.





All were Roman, either portraits or copies from Greek sources. In the 17th and 18th centuries they had been restored more than modern standards approve. Perhaps that diminished their importance to those who know more about these things than I do. To me they seemed more than sufficiently important.






At the two stair heads (below) matching niches held matching statues with matching sarcophaguses underneath. This part of the palace was built in the 18th century and looked more like something you would expect to find in London than in Rome. It demonstrated to me the strength of the reaction that set in about this time against all those former Baroque flourishes.