Wanted in Rome DEC 2021

two world wars, death and disfiguration, the
extermination of the concentration camps, the
Holocaust, madness, terrorism. The canvases
crowded with desperate bodies are back, pushing
up against each other, either in death or trying
to avoid it. The painting by Gaetano Previati, Gli
orrori della guerra: l’esodo (1917) shows civilians
fleeing death in a scene that is all too familiar
today, whether of Afghanis pushing in desperation
to climb on to get-away planes at Kabul airport or
of cold, starving refugees on the Belarus border
forced up against the barbed wire across the
Polish frontier.
One painting stands out among the others, La
Matta by Giacomo Balla (1905) from the National
Gallery in Rome. The woman illustrates another
form of hell, of the inability to control one's body,
of loneliness and isolation. The lone woman
stands at an open door, alone but not alone, as she
desperately attempts to control her movements and
to communicate with someone inside the room.
From one agony to another, to that of disfigured
faces, plaster casts of faces disfigured by the
wounds of war, the living dead. Here is the
double tragedy not just of the physical pain of
the disfigured faces but also of the annihilation of
their previous identity.
Moving into the next room the original typescript
of Primo Levi's If this is a Man, the testimony to
his time in Auschwitz, seems shockingly down
to earth. Here are pages familiar to anyone who
grew up with typewriters; the crossings out,
the additions, the re-writings, the painstaking
afterthoughts before a work is finally sent to
the publisher. The onlooker cannot help feeling
guilty to be looking so dispassionately at this
sanitised version of the Holocaust, of what is left
of that desperate suffering and subsequent pain.
The Twin Towers in Flames (2003) by British
sculptor Raymond Mason doesn't manage to
convey the shock of that out-of-the-blue event
but it takes the exhibition right up to date and
conveys once again the crowding, the lack of
space, of bodies pushing up against each other in
terror and horror.
Then finally, in the last section, we are out to the
stars, almost as though we were clambering out
of that hell-hole ourselves in those wonderful last
lines of Dante's L'inferno.
La Matta by Giacomo Balla (1905).
E senza cura aver d'alcun riposo
salimmo su, el primo e io secondo,
tanto ch'i' vidi delle cose belle
che porta 'l ciel, per un pertugio tondo --
e quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle.
"And with no rest from the fatigue of it,
We clambered up, he first, till finally I saw the
heavenly spheres
Through a round hole, the aperture whence we
Emerged to look once more upon the stars".
Two works by Anselm Keifer end the exhibition but
we aren't quite out of hell yet. There is something
challenging about Stelle Cadente (1995). Here is a
man on his back under the stars, motionless with
his eyes shut, as though there were something
troubling and challenging him as he lies in a deathlike
position. Is it wonder or fear? as he lies in a
death-like position. Is it wonder or fear?
It is only as we walk down the magnificent final
staircase of Le Scuderie, with its view over the
roof tops of Rome, off to the dome of St Peter's in
the distance, that we are finally able to leave those
images of hell behind.
8 | December 2021 • Wanted in Rome