New in 2023

The Ludovisi Gaul (c. AD 100, copy of a Hellenistic sculpture c. 200 BC), Palazzo Altemps. This was originally part of a grand commemoration of Attalus I’s victory over the Gauls, as was the famous Dying Gaul statue in the Capitoline Museums. In the Aeneid, when the hero enters Carthage, he sees a mural depicting the Trojan War and focuses not on the victors but on his own defeated people. Taking a bittersweet comfort in how humanely their pain is portrayed, Aeneas cries out, “These are the tears of things, and mortality touches the mind.”

Arch of Septimius Severus (AD 203), Roman Forum. Great military victories were sometimes commemorated with a triumphal arch. Septimius Severus earned one because, as Edward Gibbon says in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “his daring ambition was never diverted from its steady course by the allurements of pleasure, the apprehension of danger, or the feelings of humanity.”

Bust of Epicurus (c. 300-200 BC), Capitoline Museums. There’s evidence to suggest that in the ancient world different styles of beards reflected different philosophies. For both moral and aesthetic reasons, I subscribe to the old dictum, “Barba non facit philosophum” (A beard does not a philosopher make).

Toni Servillo as Jep Gambardella, The Great Beauty (La grande bellezza, 2013). Periodically asked why he never wrote another novel, Jep demurs with half-truths: “Rome makes you waste time,” “I went out too much at night,” “I was lazy,” “My life is nothing, and even Flaubert couldn’t write a novel about nothing.” Right before he reconnects with the roots of his imagination at the movie’s end, he replies with something closer to the full truth, “I was looking for the great beauty.”