In the flesh

Time to add some words.

My fiftieth birthday treat. A lunch at Le Train Bleu, followed by the sleeper to Rome. An interesting journey. Rome was still full of celebrants from the Easter festival. Why? Ah. The old dead Pope was about to be beatified and they'd all stayed on. Damn them.

The Romans were in a tetchy, resentful mood. All that overcrowding on pavements and no-one buying anything must really get you down after a while. We didn't care. We had a super serviced apartment and timed entry tickets to all the main attractions. Canovas, Berninis and Caravaggios passed under our excited gaze whilst outside the hordes waited...

A vegetarian meal, best forgotten and a good night's rest before the main event. The Vatican Museum. We walked alongside the sullen queue for a good fifteen minutes before we found the entrance and the express lane. Once in, where to go? The guides all wanted us to follow the signs. The Sistine Chapel appears to be the only exhibit the curators and administrators care about, so every sign points there. But we weren't here for a painted ceiling. Finding Room XIX proved to be really rather easy. Just turn away from the trudging masses following raised umbrellas and duck into a side room. Then count down the rooms. XXIII, XXII, XXI, XX.... Here it is.

In the most special of any room in any museum in the world we find it. Just me, The Cat and a sleepy guard (who still managed to make me feel vaguely guilty. How do they do that?). I confess, I was nervous. What if it didn't live up to my expectations? What if, in real life it was just a...... You know, just another old pot?

The first thing that struck me was the colour. Not at all a dull orangey-brown but a luminous red-orange which seemed to reach out from its glass cage and pull the eye towards it. And then the size. I knew its dimensions but I hadn't really taken in how imposing it would look by comparison with other pots of the age. Even others by Exekias don't have this sort of scale, do they? And then the detail....

I've gone on about this depiction of Exekias' masterwork, Aias and Achilles playing dice before so you know what I think of it but just to recap: Its execution is unparalleled, the detail reminds me of Blake's

"To see a world in a grain of sand, And a heaven in a wild flower, Hold infinity in the palm of your hand, And eternity in an hour"

and the story it tells still seems to resonate even across the centuries and vastly changed culture. It's as if Exekias has pulled off the holy trinity of concept, form and execution and created something even greater than merely the sum of the (very good) parts. Anyway, enough. Here it is in its rather clinical and highly unnatural habitat....










What's great about these pictures is that none of them, or any of the other 50-odd I took do it the least bit of justice. They really are not "just like being there"; and you know what that means? If you really want to see one of the greatest artistic achievements in the whole of human history, you have to go there yourself. And after you've stayed with it for an hour or so, you can take a stroll round to the room with the ceiling which everyone else is there for. It's quite nice. And before you leave, fight your way back against the crowds and guards to go and have one last look in Room XIX.

If you really can't achieve immortality by not dying, then Exekias has achieved the next best thing, immortality through his work.

So, that was how I spent my 50th birthday. Achieving a lifetime ambition. Niche.