The holidays are approaching and stores in Rome are pulling out all the stops and decorating their windows in celebration. We don’t want you to miss a moment of the fabulous spectacle this provides!
While last week we showed you images from Rome’s Christmas Fair in Piazza Navona with its myriad of presepe figures, this week we’ve been strolling around in search of some of the more original presepe offerings adorning shop windows in the Eterna.
A stroll past Rome’s famous gelateria, Giolitti, is always worth the time as the pink grapefruit and rice flavors are as close as one can get to nectar and ambrosia. But, at Christmas, a visit to this celebrated ice-cream scooping locale holds extra delight, as the gelato wizards there often create scrumptious-looking presepe scenes such as that placed in a chocolate cave with a candy village scene towering above (left).
Yet not even a chocolate Christmas creche can trump the innovative idea of featuring a creche scene on a pile of parmigiano (right). Spotted on Via della Scrofa, the display provoked a round of the age-old carol, “O Christmas Cheese.”
Ron Hutt’s paintings (recently featured in a New York Times article) are hipped-up versions of Greek red figure vases, such as the painting above in which we see Aphrodite after her rendezvous with Ares calling her husband Hephaestus on her cell phone to say she will be late getting home.
So why feature these Greek-style paintings and their classical content on eCool, a blog about Rome? First, we at the eCool compound love modern takes on mythology, so we simply can’t resist these witty remakes. More legitimately, it’s a fact that painted Greek vases were a major Greek export to the Italian peninsula. In fact, more such vases have been found on the ancient Italian peninsula than in Greece itself.
Why is this artist so interested in modernizing an ancient art form, as in the painting above in which Heracles battles helicopters which are half human and half machine and is aided by two stem cell warriors, or that below in which the goddess Demeter is depicted as a protective earth mother and is encouraging a pair of endangered polar bears as they take apart a gas guzzling Hummer while Hummingbirds lend a beak to carry off a tire?
On his website, Ron Hutt explains:
The Greek narratives have a unique ability to contain and creatively express the conflicts inherent to life and offer to anyone who takes the time to read and contemplate them the rich reward of a humanized imagination.
We like the blending of the classical world with social critique meant for our 21st-century fast-paced world. If you like it too and would like to see more, Ron Hutt’s paintings are currently part of an exhibit titled, “Wit on Wry,” at the Islip Art Museum in New York.
