Ars Artis Ceccarelli

Tra la pittura e la scultura non trovo altra differenza, senonché lo scultore conduce le sue opere con maggior fatica di corpo che il pittore, ed il pittore conduce le opere sue con maggior fatica di mente. (Leonardo da Vinci)

separator

The great labia of Rome

separator

 

cm.56x55 - 14 deep - 1983

 

This bronze-cast-high-relief sculpture has a unique history. 

In spite of first sight appearances it’s a very sensual work. Had no idea of anything like this could I do till the day came when across the renderings of some archaeological diggings undertaken in Rome, inside the Foro Romano by the Palatine, fell into my hands.

Struck by the strength of the image before me, and in spite of the apparent barrenness of the discovered artefact, the association with something intimate and warm came soon to mind. 

The newly found relic of the past was identified as the remnants of the original ‘Ara’ (the pagan alter, as in the ‘Ara Pacis’) where the Virgin Vestals would have attended to the forever burning sacred fire of Rome, the ‘Caput Mundi’.

That image spoke of a world of its own, self-contained and encircled like a womb, deeply compelling, with promise of luring and obscure but tantalizing depths. A holy place to be revered. A feminine form immediately associated to the very essence of the Virgin Vestals, the Ara patrons, when the hearth of ancient Rome was theirs to nurture and protect for ever. 

A symbol of eternity, of great psychological import for all Romans.

Female duty was theirs, as tending to the home hearth, then and now, always has been. 

But that holy hearth, the mental home for all Romans, had a different spiritual dimension. 

It meant linking the strength of the city to the will of all powerful gods, for their protection, assistance and enticement to proceed with conquest, with the imposition of roman rule and civic order, and the quest towards the perpetuation of the always cavorted, but never quite achieved, almighty, ephemeral ‘Pax Romana’.      

Historians suggested the one reason for that duty to be assigned to female care was because , even in the throws of inebriation, or madness or defiance, could they not be tempted by any perverse, sacrilegious wish to take their own revenge by urinating onto the fire. 

That fire that made them enslaved.  

But surely there was more to it than that.

The very existence of the holy fire was the source of roman man faith in themselves, their strength and resolve. Their male prowess depending then from the very centre of the vestals more intimate being, their vulva, even in metaphysic terms.

The vestigial form of the Ara as we now know it today, evoking an abstract image for the vulva great labia, conjures up a resonance of meanings whereby the idea of vulva, as protectres, finds now  its deferential symbolic and even loving homage within its reification into the physical shape of the very artefact the vestals were meant to tend to. 

Their Ara. Live by the magic of what’s left of it by the ware and tare of time.

Historians tell us that roman women never had any public role or overt political power, but within the domestic realm their power instead was obsolete and unquestioned, and in that milieu much political play, or even intrigue, took place over the ages and fortunes made and destroyed.  

Furthermore home is the natural cradle where mother tongue is taught, where values are formed, where creeds are sustained, and where the basics of self confidence and respect of rule and order are built. 

Those were all the very attributes needed for the ascending power of the greatest empire ancient history has ever known.

So, never in the public arena, nonetheless no doubt, women were the backbone of roman society, and the power of the vestal’s Ara was symbolically theirs, in the domestic realm. 

What at first might have appeared, to some, as a cavalier proposition concerning the feminine treasures, eventually after so much free association, it could then be conceded that my interpretation of the vestal Ara remnants as some metaphoric “Great Labia of Rome”, is meant in fact as a poetic transfiguration intended as a tribute to womanhood, of all times, for their resolve to endurance, to staying by the domestic hearth and, with its governance, forge man and women strong in body and character, able to tend to their future, compelling duties.

 

Giorgio Attilio Ceccarelli

 

 

More in this category: « Hybris Echo 1 »