Mary Beth Looney

The source of inspiration for this series is Rome and her spoils. Spend enough time walking the historic center and looking very carefully, and it becomes evident that the ancient as well as medieval eras are still very present. They assert themselves via stone fragments that are affixed to building exteriors and interior courtyard walls, as well as incorporated into more modern structures as architectural supports and decorations.  These fragments are often identifiable as sculpted human, animal and hybrid forms, or stylized plant and floral shapes. They may be components of ancient sarcophagi (coffins) or temples. They range in quality from extraordinarily high – with beautifully crafted forms and skillful depictions – to rather crude and awkward, suggesting that not all artisans were trained to the same level.

I have titled this series ‘Lost and Found.’ These objects are certainly lost and found, liberated from the accumulated soil and detritus of history, disassociated from their place and purpose of origin. In my wanderings, I find them in unexpected places. They are sometimes a familiar part of the fabric of my environment, or the source of the name of a given street. I am often surprised to discover them in places I have traversed dozens of times yet never before noticed, because the city was emptied of tourist crowds for well over a year. Reimagined in print form, these carved stone bits and pieces are recontextualized, merged with the myriad textures, peeling layers, vertiginous angles, improbable assemblages and strangely curving city blocks still conforming to now vanished structures. Like them, as a displaced American in the Eternal City, I too am both lost and found, deprived of original context, adapting, waiting, straying, alien and fixed in place.

All of the prints on this page were made in the last two years, but this is the one that deals directly with the coronavirus pandemic as it was experienced in Italy. My print directly refers to Raphael’s Il Morbetto (The Plague) (1515) print, shown here. Il Morbetto is Raphael’s commentary on the third book of Virgil’s Aeneid, in which Aeneus establishes the city of Pergamum (on current day Crete). To his horror, its classical beauty and promise is wiped out by a plague. He is then visited by Apollo’s oracle in a dream, and is told that he and the Trojans belong in Italy, where he becomes a founding father of Rome.

 It is presumed that Raphael created the drawing for Il Morbetto and other images inspired by the Aeneid while living and working in Rome.

 Il Virus: 200 Metri adopts and reverses the Raphael image. It includes the things I saw and experienced – largely within the 200 meters we were allowed to move - during the lockdown of Spring 2020.  The empty streets, the lonely monuments, my masked butchers, people waiting in line to enter the neighborhood pharmacy, my favorite fig tree and the cats I adopted a few months before this began…they all populate the quiet city. They function as small testimonies of consistency and hope, unlike Raphael’s figures in the throes of anguish and death. Il Morbetto’s central figure is interpreted as the ‘god terminus’ – the barrier between living and dying. In Il Virus, the central figure is Il Mascherino – the fountain on Via Giulia – a literal and symbolic emblem of the pandemic, a barrier between health and sickness.

Even though this time was difficult, I am grateful to have experienced it, and to have witnessed this global event in a unique and beautiful place.