Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History by Robert Hughes
463 pages
Published 2011
Read from January 10 to January 19
Rating: ★★★★ out of 5
I
became infatuated with Robert Hughes' writing last year when I read his
biography of Goya. That book presented a richly detailed tapestry of
Spain and its court figures in the waning decades of the Inquisition,
and of their resistance to "francesas" Enlightenment ideas; Goya's life and work were merely the compositional lines of that depiction. Goya
was Hughes' magnum opus, the book he had always wanted to write but
shirked until a near-fatal car accident and years of grueling physical
therapy made him determined to undertake it once and for all. That
passion made for compelling reading. The fact that the book had color
reproductions of Goya's works on practically every other page was pretty
cool too. That one book was enough to make me gravitate toward any
other Hughes titles I come across -- enough to make me a fan of his, as
it were.
Rome is the first Hughes book I've tackled since my Goya infatuation. (I owned The Fatal Shore
at one point, years ago, but I never read it, and now I can't find it.)
It's a bit of a disappointment, I have to confess. Dabbling through
three millennia of art and history, without a central figure like Goya
to focus on, Rome is often rambly and disconnected, retreading
the same subject in separate chapters. Hughes' heart doesn't seem to be
in this book, especially in the early going -- his enthusiasm clearly
perks up in the Renaissance and peaks during the Settecento, but by then
it's too late. Worse, his editor didn't seem to be invested in it so
much, either; a paragraph from Tacitus regarding Nero's persecution of
the Christians is quoted at length on page 108, and then the same
paragraph (albeit worded differently, so possibly a different
translation of the same paragraph?) is quoted at length on page 140.
This isn't done to highlight a different aspect of the subject or to
emphasize a point. It reads as if Hughes simply forgot he'd already
talked about the persecution in his section on Nero, so he went into it
again in his chapter on early Christians in Rome, and his editor didn't
bother to fix it.
Without anything comparable to the narrative urgency of Goya's biography, Rome
is often a rather dry recital of names and works. (Again, I can't
emphasize how much of a difference it makes to have full-color
reproductions of pretty much every work named in the Goya book; Hughes
will rhapsodize in detail about a Caravaggio or a Velázquez, which
hardly seems fair when you're left to imagine it. I suppose I could look
up the works individually on the internet, but I'm reading mostly for
pleasure, not for homework.) At one point I literally fell asleep
reading Rome, something I don't recall doing with any previous
book. As I slept, my brain kept on nattering away in imitation of
Hughes' blunt and summary style. No wonder it took me ten days to read
the damn thing.
Lest you wonder why I gave this four stars when
all I've done is criticize it, I should mention that Hughes' prose is
always a treat. One reviewer calls it "muscular yet elegant," which is
pithy enough, ignoring its masculist implications. Despite the rambling,
despite the lack of passion for anything before Brunellischi and
obvious contempt for everything after Canova, Hughes' way with words
made this a worthwhile read. Just not the classic I found Goya to be.
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