The Color of White Statues #SundaySalon
Happy Sunday! Sunday Salon is hosted by Deb at ReaderBuzz. Check out her post and the links to see what other bloggers have been up to in the last week.
How’s the weather?
We’ve had some remarkably cool days with lots of clouds and some rain. We’ll have a warming trend but not that bad given that Monday is Memorial Day.
What are you reading?
I finished We Are Not Like Them by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza in time for our book club meeting. We had a generational divide. The older folks accepted the friendship as it was written. The younger folks weren’t convinced that the friendship was as strong as it was conveyed. If it had been, the hard topics would have been talked about long before the precipitating crisis of the novel. The disagreement led to a more exciting conversation than we sometimes have at our meetings!
I’m currently reading A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare ahead of the summer solstice.
For a quick overview, I got a graphic novel (Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Nel Yomtov, illustrated by Berenice Muñiz) from the library. I picked it, partly, because I liked the cover.
Since this is a graphic novel, I handed it to a 10-year-old in my life. He read it and, then, read it a second time. A few days later, I read it to his younger siblings. It went over well with that audience, too. So, that’s a lot of recommendations for this one if you’re looking for a bookish way to celebrate summer.
What are you watching?
We enjoyed the movie Wicked Little Letters with splendid performances by comic actors of multiple generations and from a variety of places in the British Isles.
What are you doing?
I went to the St. Louis Art Museum to see the special exhibit “Ancient Splendor: Roman Art in the Time of Trajan.” It’s an impressive gathering of sculptures, frescoes, and decorative household items from the second century. Many of them were borrowed from museums around Italy.
I learned that the statues were originally painted — the whiteness that we associate with ancient sculpture is an artifact of time not the intent. When these statues were in their original public spaces and private gardens, they sported flowers and perfume because they were meant to be a full sensory experience.
Here’s a glimpse of what I got to see in person:
For those of you in Texas, this exhibit’s next stop is the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.