Aesthetic Chastity

From my long association with classical antiquity I have formed an ardent attachment to symmetry, restraint, order, tradition and its revision.  Thus I am thrilled to be able to go back to the source, the city of Athens, even if most of the monuments have vanished or remain as hardly recognizable fragments.  Nonetheless, the Parthenon temple is whole enough to force the viewer to surrender while at the same time sufficiently damaged and partial to excite the most extreme passion at the loss that time inevitably exacts, the Parthenon simply standing as part for the whole of that difficult life experience.  The archaic sculpture of the Acropolis is another aesthetic of restraint to which I immediately surrendered once I had seen it.  And at the time of my discovery of antiquity my wife in those years was teaching me about the aesthetic of the Bauhaus, and I read antiquity into the Seagrams Building and other testimonies to that style being thrown up at that time.  A few years after my Athenian adventure, I went to live in Rome, and discovered that, although I found so much of the painting in that city hard to take, I was intoxicated with the Baroque in architecture and in city planning, and of course I had to realize that despite my mother's constantly shouting out: "Charles, you're not Italian, you're not Jewish, stop waving your hands around like that when you speak," I was born to flamboyance as surely as I was born gay.  Walking through Rome demands that you stand up and act the part, you are definitely on stage, just as the sinuous curves, carved everywhere demand a sensual response.  I knew that I was not in Iowa anymore, not in Boston for that matter.   Still,  what I most of all love in our own time are the glass boxes, Philip Johnson's Glass House, or the Beinecke Library at Yale, not to mention a million perfectly decent houses, libraries, music halls, what have you, erected in stern understated while overstated--the essence of the Parthenon--style.  But of course the very, very funny thing about the marbles of ancient Athens, which delight us for their fragmentary nature just as their their cold stone whiteness chastens us and demands that we grow up, is the fact that the ancients painted the marble surfaces.  The Parthenon was a melange of maroon, gilt, and green. You even get a suggestion of this on the archaic sculpture of the Acropolis because it was buried early on and not brought into the destructive force of weather until very recently and immediately rushed into the protection of museums.  It's like learning that Plato invented rock-n'-roll.