My Baroque Rome professor took my class on a field trip to admire Caravaggio’s works in three churches in Rome. It was 9:30 am, so many of us leaned against marble pillars and sat in wooden pews to alleviate our lack of sleep from Wednesday’s festivities (who doesn’t love 1 Euro shots named after the characters in Harry Potter?) We listened to our professoressa, groggy yet intrigued. Some of us took out our fancy DLR cameras, obvious gifts from parents. Others jotted down furiously typed notes onto our iPhones. We listened as best as anyone from our generation knows how to listen: with our gadgets always within fingers’ reach.
In each church, it was immediately clear which piece was done by the famous Carravaggio: the darkest one with subtle hints of light, admired by a group of Italian preteens and Asian tourists who were all doing the same self-guided tour as our class. As we shuffled from Carravaggio to Carravaggio, church to church, I began to notice a pattern. After we snapped our photos which we would later upload to Instagram (because, God forbid, 3G doesn’t exist everywhere and “I want to check my Facebook in this restaurant!”), our professor would lead us to some other piece of noteworthy art in the church. None of us would recognize it, yet as soon as she said it was “important” or “famous,” everyone got out their cameras/iPhones and snapped away. A sculpture/statue/altarpiece that we would have otherwise hurriedly passed on the way out the door suddenly became worthy of our pixilated lenses.
I started to wonder: Are we unable to appreciate beauty in things that aren’t considered “famous” or on our list of “must-sees” in Rome? Where do people put the thousands of photos they take on a vacation or during a semester abroad? I don’t have the answer to these questions, but as I watched my peers snap photos of these works of art they would have otherwise ignored, I found myself frustrated at the lost art (pun is always intended) of appreciating beauty.
I am slowly starting to tick places off my own list of “must-sees” in Rome, and as I visit each monument and museum I try to contemplate why it has made it into the books. I try to find the beauty in the work for myself, in addition to reading what the guidebook has to say about it. Otherwise, I would find myself moving like a zombie from destination to destination, just for the sake of checking a box, without any real care for why whatever I am looking at is important. It is very possible that my peers were truly moved by each piece they saw, but I struggled with the automatic attention they gave to each piece as soon as they heard it was somehow significant. Of course, understanding background is important to appreciating any work of art. But once we read about the reason behind a certain painting’s fame, let’s put down the guide book and truly consider the unrivaled beauty in what we are experiencing. Let’s acknowledge the beauty we are “supposed” to see, and then find it for ourselves. The things we discover on our own may be a lot more rewarding than the number of “likes” we get on a photo of a famous tourist spot.