Robert:
What a gadfly! Countries should export their cultural
artifacts! I like it.
Whenever I think about country's treatment of their own
cultural "patrimony", I am reminded of the Siena museum of
paintings. It was one of the most memorable and hilarious
places I've ever visited. After a few weeks of absorption in
Tuscan trecento and quatrocento pictures, we were pretty
well fed to the gills with Madonnas and their child's (and
their child's playmates, granparents, putative and earthly
fathers, and the friends of his later years.)
But, we *needed* to see another Taddeo Taddi, one more
Gaddi, perhaps a few more Martini's (if you get my drift.)
So, off to the Pinakoteca (sp?!). Well, this place was a
disaster...Pictures that any regional museum in America
would have wrapped in UV protective plexi, behind a rope,
with extra guards. These same pictures were in an overheated
room, with the guard smoking and reading the paper, his
coffee on the windowsill next to his feet. I swear that
there were active, working, fully functional, living
wormholes, with similarly vital worms, in some of the panel
paintings, their dead brethren lying on the bottom of the
plastic frames.
I never really got to know these paintings, unfortunately,
because I could not visit with them over years. I wish that
they would have loaned a dozen or so to the Met, after the
plan that you suggest.
And remember, this is in Tuscany! where the tourist trade
depends on art, and we are constantly reminded of the fierce
loyalty modern Italians have to their cultural patrimony!
How much worse would it be I can only speculate, where a
modern country has to care for the artifacts of a culture
with which they feel no connection.
Eric Siegel
[log in to unmask]
and by the way, I disagree with what I can understand of the
francophone who quit us in high dudgeon. I enjoy this group,
think that the wheat/chaff ratio is surprisingly high. So,
au revoir mon ami, soyez sage.
ES
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