Mapplethorpe’s Photographs Show Us What Rome Already Knows: Beauty Is Beautiful Because It Fades
By Effie Quattrociocchi
Rome is full of muscle. Statues and paintings alike are full of meaty biceps, articulated calves, and sinuous forearms. Whatever the figures are doing, they are big with life. So too are the subjects of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs now on view at the Museo dell’Ara Pacis in Rome. It isn’t difficult to see the throughline from Classical Rome in Robert Mapplethorpe’s work and in the exhibit: body builders twist, flex, and arch, their musculature accentuated by shadows and light. The photos explode with vitality, yet another reading suggests that his work is more about deterioration than vitality and Rome allows us to see this. Before you think this is going to be a depressing argument about the futility and brevity of life, wait. It’s actually quite romantic.
First some background. Born in 1946, Mapplethorpe focused his artistic career photographing celebrities, himself, nudes, and flowers. In the 60s and 70s his work catapulted to notoriety through his BDSM-inspired photographs. Whether nudes or flowers, his photographs are statuesque, perfectly posed, perfectly lit, full of dynamism, exploding beyond the frame. Mapplethorpe preferred to photograph in his studio to control every element of the photo, thus capturing the perfection of the body, of the form.And here is where Rome comes in. Certainly, this city is full of well-preserved artworks, testimonies to absolute beauty, but this city has also been blown to bits over and over again and so have the sculptures. A knee here, a hand there, torsos missing heads and some or all appendages. A giant foot, just there, by itself. Noses once protruding, chiseled down to nothing. Marble skin is spongy and pockmarked from carbon dioxide, heat, rain. Rome may offer more body parts than it does full figures.
Mapplethorpe’s work features full figures in dynamic poses but also figures that are missing body parts, not because they are actually missing, but because they have been intentionally positioned and framed in ways that leave them out, a clear nod to the remnants of Greco-Roman sculpture. These poses heighten the shapely qualities of the bodies. A torso might resemble an urn because arms, legs and head are folded into the shadows or expand beyond the frame.
It is easy to get swept away by the perfection of Rome and the photos of Mapplethorpe, to preserve, like new love, a blindspot of perfection, but behind all that, perfection wilts, and the only thing we can be sure of is that it will deteriorate. Mapplethorpe didn’t like the ephemeral and we know this because of his approach to flowers: he didn’t like them. Too short-lived, too hard to keep alive, yet in photographing them, he captures their most perfect moment and ignores their inevitable wilting. Mapplethorpe fossilized vitality, both floral and human, into a frame, into a form, a desperate burying of heads in the sand against the wilting of all things living. Mapplethorpe’s work is a battle against deterioration. In burying our heads, we stay in love. What we can take away from seeing this exhibit in Rome is this eternal pursuit of perfection amidst its deterioration. Beauty won’t last forever, but in the meantime, it is perfect.
