This one's in Rome (thanks to Phil for being a rugby fan and heading down to Italy to photograph odd stuff for me during the Six Nations Championship) and appears to depict a half-naked man with an oversized hand startled by a small horse emerging from a cave. Unless my eyes deceive me some inexplicable cacti and a laughing snake also come into the equation.
Obviously a huge amount of time and effort has gone in to depicting this tableau for our fuddled bemusement. One wonders why …
I've searched Ovid's Metamorphoses in vain for the story.
Any suggestions gratefully received.
11 comments:
And you, dear Dive, have just made me laugh hard enough to snort, "Neigh, neigh!"
WV = pitance. an amount so niggardly as to not even warrant the second "t."
Yay for Saturday morning giggles (or middle of the night giggles in your case, Speedway).
Love your definition of "pitance". Perfect!
I can tell you it's on one end of the Piazza Navona, a couple of streets west of the Pantheon.
Dive, there is another great statue at the other end of this piazza which I'll remind you about this morning over coffee.
There is also a wonderful stolen Egyptian obelisk surrounded by more horses and beardy men falling over between these two.
It seems that everything Egyptian or Greek is either in English museums or The Vatican and Rome.
You're going to have a list of photo subjects longer than your arm when you go back in February, Phil.
That obelisk used to lie in pieces. I was re-reading Goethe's "Italian Journey" the other day and recall that he took rubbings of the heiroglyphs at the top as "nobody will be able to see them when the thing is re-erected."
Best description of weird statuary ever. Loved it.
There's plenty more where that came from, Kate. I've been rummaging trough my photos of statuary and there doesn't seem to be a sane piece of sculpture among them.
OH, how funny. But how do you know he's not yelling "OHMYGODALAUGHINGSNAKE"?
Or even, "OHMYGODI'VESTOODONACACTUSINBAREFEET!"
I think this one's open to all manner of interpretation, Robyn.
Yet another interpretation:
Writhing man: "Arggghhh! When I said 'my kingdom for a horse' I meant a LARGE horse!"
Snake: "Hahaha! Too bad you weren't more specific."
Yes, I thought it was "OHMYGODI'VEPRICKEDMYFINGERONACACTUS" but I see I'm wrong. I didn't study art history in school, so sometimes I miss details others are aware of.
I was momentarily shocked to find out this is actually in Rome and not in some British basement. But then Phil says it's the Egyptians and Greeks who are so fortunate as to have their heritage filed this way, and of course I remembered it's the Romans who've kept their things in the States.
Hee hee, Ms.M. An excellent interpretation!
Petrea, those cacti confuse me; I've never seen anything like them on any classical sculpture. This, of course, is from the Renaissance and so would not have been looted by the English. The Romans looted Greece and Egypt, both in Classical times and during the Renaissance, and then Napoleon, the English and the Germans looted all three of them in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We do love a good museum filled with everybody else's stuff.
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