Editor's Note: This is the second installment of a biweekly column on the art and culture of Rome by Hilary Becker, who is spending Spring term on the art history Foreign Study Program.
Last week in Rome our professor reminded us of art's essential ability to say and mean two things at once. Art, she said, is a way of exposing life's contradictions, of revealing the duality that seems to reside in everything. Doubles, as it turns out, are everywhere, and art serves as an expression of this reality.
During my freshmen fall at Dartmouth, two enlightened '08s shared with me the existence of a fabled College phenomenon: the Dartmouth doppelganger. Everyone on campus, they said, is in possession of a twin -- or two or three.
This is true. Once you start looking, you can't stop seeing -- your roommate's double, the exact replica of your drill instructor across a basement, a familiar gait across the green. I once sustained a fifteen minute conversation with a confused fraternity member about how great it was to finally meet me, his friend's girlfriend that he had heard so much about. I never found the girlfriend -- apparently my twin -- but I did receive several lunch invitations from a boy who had heard I "look just like [his] girlfriend."
Even in our Roman classrooms, which aren't rooms at all but instead an entire city, full not of slides or textbooks but sites and sculptures, we are talking about "the other." We are talking about twins.
The ancient Romans had a particular affinity for twins, be it Romulus and Remus, the founders of their city, or Castor and Pollux, the brothers who, according to legend, helped the Romans secure a crucial victory.
As a permanent reminder of this double fascination, the "unequal twins" Castor and Pollux stand atop the steps of the Campidoglio, the Michelangelo-designed piazza that occupies the Capitoline -- the highest of Rome's seven hills. The sculptures are Roman copies of Greek originals, removed in the 16th century from their temple setting. In their current context they are the dual guardians, staring permanently at the expanse of city beneath the monumental staircase. They mark the entrance to Rome's apex, their backs forever turned on the Roman forum that contains the remnants of an ancient temple dedicated in their honor.
The twin sons of Zeus (in the guise of a swan) and the mortal Leda, the brothers were called the Diskouroi by the Greeks and the Gemini by the Romans. On their heads they wear distinctive caps reminiscent of the egg from which they hatched. Two-faced faced, double natured -- one a horsemen, one a boxer -- the Gemini brothers are said to share immortality between themselves: according to mythology they occupy alternately Mount Olympus and the underworld, each claiming divinity every other day.
These particular statues are strange in a way that befits their bizarre backstory. Seemingly proportional from below, their disfiguration becomes visible at closer range. With outsize heads, stumpy legs and horses much too short, their grace from the ground proves grotesque -- an illusory appearance easily shattered.
Like the colossal statues that lose their proportion up close, the thrill of an exotic city wears off. Life becomes routine again. Often the illusion, or the "other," can be much more exciting than reality.
"We are never where we are, but somewhere else, even in Italy," writes the poet Derek Walcott. It seems strange, but here in romantic Rome, we sometimes long to be our Dartmouth doppelgangers instead. We wish to be the other twin: Castor in the heavens, perhaps, and not Pollux down here.
Sometimes we long to drink Diet Coke instead of Coca-Light, to run along the Connecticut and not the Tiber. Craning our necks at the Sistine chapel ceiling for the fifth hour of class, we aren't purely enraptured, we're also sore. Life is still life, even in Italy, and it seems we could always be better, happier, somewhere else.
Duality, though, can be erased and art can help. It's why we like and study it, why we cram ourselves through crowded corridors and walk through miles of the Vatican -- not only because art is beautiful, or a vehicle for conveying complexity, but because art helps us to escape and be present, at the same time.
Whether we are the horsemen or the boxer, under the world or above it, with art we can occupy the space we are in and be, at once, somewhere else. We massage our necks and look upward at Michelangelo's revolution of figures and musculature sparkling through the sheen of recent restoration, and we are amazed. We remember the hour of discomfort, but also the broad blue-sky fresco of the Last Judgment, the calculated tilt of the wall.
There are quiet moments when we're elsewhere, wishing to be our doppelgangers. But then there are the moments we're here, and these are the ones we talk about: standing in wonder under the Sistine ceiling, or perched in awe atop the Capitoline, looking out over the city.
