It is said that Stendal, the French romantic author of the
early 19th century, noted that Rome was an extraordinary city
because 1/3 of its population were women, 1/3 priests and the rest antique
statuary. Percentages may have changed,
but one thing is certain, the Eternal City still possesses an infinite amount
of antiquities and one of the problems the city faces is not having a large enough
museum to hold them all.
But where to see the best examples of the silent population
of athletes, gods, amazons, nymphs, warriors, maidens and emperors? It is a question that led me to find the
Centrale Elettrica Montemartini, the first electric power plant to serve Rome now
reconditioned as a permanent exhibition space for treasures from the Capitoline
Museum. To this day, it is almost a secret in the city’s museum circuit.
Decommissioned in the mid 1960s the power plant, much like
the Bankside Power Station that later became the Tate Modern in London, inspired
Italian officials into transforming it for usable space with the long-term idea
of converting the oldest industrial area of Rome into an Arts Center to include
the old gas plant, markets, slaughter house and docks.
I must say, I find the Museum to be a brilliant way of
displaying the aesthetic contrast between antiquities and the immense machines
of the industrial age - both wonderfully beautiful in their own ways. If you
then consider that these machines are our modern archeological artifacts, their
proximity to the statuary is simply perfect!
And in a way, this pairing of technology and art perfectly paints the
duality of life today – religious but skeptical, eternal and ephemeral.
image credits: Musei Capitolini - Centrale Montemartini,
Rome
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