Art history Sunday: let's get Roman (again)

Marcus Vispanius Agrippa, the M. Agrippa inscribed on the facade of the Pantheon.

To be a Roman of any standing was to spend your life making good impressions on your peers and your betters. Wealthy Romans were obsessed with appearances and being perceived as a hospitable and welcoming host. These dual obsessions reached their zenith in the dining rooms (triclinia) of the Empire.

My pals over at Eternally Cool dug up this menu from a Roman banquet from the year 63 BCE. Macius Lentulus Niger was made a Roman priest and the celebratory feast commemorating his elevation was attended by the creme de la creme of Roman society. The menu and hospitality demonstrated by Macius Lentulus set the standard of his day and was recorded by the historian and gastronomer Macrobius:

Before the dinner proper came sea hedgehogs; fresh oysters, as many as the guests wished; large mussels; sphondyli; field fares with asparagus; fattened fowls; oyster and mussel pasties; black and white sea acorns; sphondyli again; glycimarides; sea nettles; becaficoes; roe ribs; boar’s ribs; fowls dressed with flour; becaficoes; purple shellfish of two sorts. The dinner itself consisted of sows’ udder; boar’s head; fish-pasties; boar-pasties; ducks; boiled teals; hares; roasted fowls; starch pastry; Pontic pastry.

That my friends is what you serve when you have Julius Caesar and the Vestal Virgins over for dinner. Wow.

Roman hospitality was serious business and a big part of impressing your guests was keeping them entertained. Musicians played and sang, actors performed skits, jesters joked and the art displayed in the triclinium was intended to get a laugh while it impressed the viewer with its rarity and expense.

Romans reclined on sofas when they ate and threw bones, shells and seeds to the floor. A slave would sweep up periodically, but a good feast left a messy floor. The messy, post banquet floor was the sign of a good host. So much so that The Unswept Floor was a recurring theme in the mosaic floors a lot of wealthy Romans used in their triclinia.

This is a detail of second century triclinium floor from the Emporer Hadrian's villa in Tivoli. This floor is now in the Vatican Museum in Rome. The mouse in the bottom center of this image gets all of the attention, but what amazes me is the perspective and chiaroscuro on the borders. Incredible stuff.

Roman hospitality and banquet throwing skills fell into a body of knowledge the Romans called Ars Convivialis, the Art of Hospitality. There is a restaurant in Rome called Ars Convivialis that recreates the atmosphere and the menu of a Roman banquet. I've never eaten there but I'd love to hear from someone who has. Anyone? Anyone?

Anyhow, what prompted all of this meandering was something my friends at Mosaic Art Now posted on their site this week. My love of Roman art and life is shared by everybody over there and another friend of Mosaic Art now is an artist named Maureen O'Keene. O'Keene is a contemporary mosaicist, a master. Like all great mosaicists, she has a great love for the history of her art form.

In 2003, Maureen O'Keene and co-director Jane Hubbard based this short, stop-motion animated film on The Unswept Floor from Hadrian's villa.




Unswept floor from maureen o'kane on Vimeo.

Talk about putting art in historical context. Bravi!

If you'd like to experiment with some Roman cookery, resources abound. Here's a directory of ingredients and recipes, Antique Roman Dishes. Hint, Liquamen is Garum, the Roman fish sauce condiment that was as common then as ketchup is today. In fact, modern ketchup evolved from garum. You can still buy Garum Colatura from Zingerman's in Ann Arbor, MI. If you like anchovies, you will love garum. If you don't like anchovies, learn to like them. You'll thank me. Di vos incolumes custodiant!

A dispatch from the International Builder's Show

The International Builders' Show is big Kahuna of builder and renovation trade shows. It rivals in scope and size the trade show of the kitchen and bath industry, KBIS. KBIS and the IBS are large on a scale that's hard to describe accurately. These shows are so big that there are only four convention centers in the US large enough to handle them. So they rotate between Orlando, Atlanta, Chicago and Las Vegas. This year, KBIS is in Chicago and the IBS took place in Las Vegas last week. I love going to these shows. They are closed to the public and they provide a forum where manufacturers can meet with specifiers face to face. Becasue nothing's for sale, it's a chance too for some great product previews and product training.

I couldn't go to the IBS this year but I'm fortunate in that I had a pair of eyes on the showroom floor. Jamie Goldberg is a friend of mine and she was gracious enough to share with me some of the highlights of what she saw. Jamie writes the terrific blog Gold Notes as well as writing for a whole host of industry publications and websites. She's one of the more savvy designers I know and if she noticed it, that's all I need to know. So without further ado, here's Jamie.

Kohler

Kohler always has innovative and stylish products. On the innovative end is the Conceal Mirrored Cabinet and Lock Box. What a terrific way to keep prescription medicines secured from curious children, prying guests or open house shoppers.

On the stylish end, Kohler has introduced the Vault 18-gauge stainless sink that works as a drop-in or undermount. While good-looking contemporary sinks are easily found in the undermount class, they’re much harder to find for drop-in applications. This one has a very sleek edge that separates it from its clunky cousins! It's also available in a single bowl style.

Brizo

Always in style, Delta’s upscale Brizo brand, introduced an elegant new faucet series called Virage. It’s available in numerous finishes and a non-aerated water stream that accentuates its clean, classic lines. I personally loved the polish nickel. Not a game changer, just a lovely looker worth writing home about.

KitchenAid

KitchenAid has come up with a new French Door refrigerator that answers the prayers of moms everywhere who want to show off their kids’ photos and art. Rather than magnets and paper, parents scan juniors' artwork onto a memory stick and upload it to the fridge's USB port, where it will "hang" for as long as you want to display it. The LCD panel has other functions, as well, like displaying recipe substitutions and measurement conversions, but to my mind, the ability to personalize it with kid pics and vacation shots tops them all! (FYI, I mentioned to KitchenAid's brand manager that a future version with food preservation guidelines would be another great feature to include. She agreed.)

Amana

Also in the Whirlpool family is a fun new fridge called the Amana Quick Tap. The dispenser can be filled with any beverage of your choice, and would be ideal for game rooms. It’s adorable and affordable.

Whirlpool

Whirlpool also introduced a super-convenient feature to its newest refrigerator called MicroEtch. What it does is prevent spills from escaping from a shelf and leaking down the sides and bottom of the fridge. I wish I would have had that last month when a Coke glass tipped over on the top shelf just before a house showing! This fridge also has good lines, LED lighting and excellent capacity, too. The anti-spill feature, though, is what makes it a must-have.

You can read more of Jamie's findings on her post Live from the International Builders' Show on her blog Gold Notes

© 2010, Jamie Goldberg, AKBD, CAPS.

Living and loving in 450 square feet

Katie and her husband Martin live in a 450 square foot apartment in Berlin. Katie's and American ex-pat and she writes a blog called Making This Home. Her blog's about renovating all of those 450 square feet, one task at a time. She takes plenty of time along the way to tell stories about sustainability, life, love and being a stranger in a strange land. As much as I love a good ex-pat blog I have to say that what's has me so taken with Katie is the feat she and Martin performed on their 36 square foot kitchen.

That's right a 36 square foot kitchen.

But look what they've done. It's beautiful and I don't doubt for a second that it does everything they need a kitchen to do. Living big is easy, living small on the other hand takes some real skill. Skill that these two have in spades. Schöne arbeit! Glückwünsche!

Check out the rest of Katie's blog, Making it Home, here.

Ramón Coronado's art speaks quietly

Ramón Coronado is a Los Angeles-based Cross-Media Visual Designer and one of my new favorite visionaries. He calls this project Mercado Negro.

Mercado negro means "black market" in English and it consisted of a 12-week process to reclaim an artifact of urban blight and to find a new use for it. Along the way, he wanted to make a statement about the lack of parks and recreational facilities in LA.

From the Artist's Statement:

Mercado Negro is a Spanish word for Black Market. This 12 week project deals with reclaiming an ordinary, everyday object and transforming it into something with a completely different purpose. I also wanted to create a project that commented on the shortage of parks and recreational functions in Los Angeles.

Moving to Los Angeles four years ago from the small population of Cathedral City was a major eye opener. Los Angeles felt like an entirely new world separate from everything that I had known or experienced before. With little knowledge of LA and it's neighborhoods, I ended up living across the street from MacArthur Park, a dangerous lower income area, overpopulated with homeless, and trash, but with a heavy Hispanic influence.

Spending a year in this area exposed me to the lack of recreational areas for kids in Los Angeles. The irony being that I lived across from MacArthur park, but because of it’s dangerous reputation, no children would ever go there to play and often resorted to playing on the streets running in and out of traffic.

This area is filled with trash on the sidewalks, people sleeping everywhere, and an abundance of shopping carts. Shopping carts exist everywhere and anywhere throughout the city of LA and include themselves as part of LA's landscape. A shopping cart says a lot about a city. Seeing one on every block adds attention to the poverty and that there is no control of private property.

I took it upon myself to take a shopping cart and make a statement with it. I reclaimed LA's iconic shopping cart and created furniture for kids to enjoy in these urban Los Angeles areas. The project is a criticism of the scarcity of recreational functions for kids growing up in a dense city like Los Angeles.

Who thinks to take an abandoned shopping cart and actually do something with it? Over the last 30 years or so, it's become acceptable to blame the marginalized for being marginalized. Ramón Coronado's work is a clever remonstration of that entire way of thinking. Blame solves nothing and makes finding solutions more difficult. Thanks for giving me something to think about Ramón Coronado.

It's a New Ravenna give away

The great Sara Baldwin writes a blog about her art and her company, New Ravenna Mosaics. Sara has a deep love and respect for classically Roman-inspired stone mosaics and she's been writing a series called Rome if You Want to for the last couple of weeks.

In her latest installment, she tells the story of the Roman mosaics left in Tunisia and how they influence the work of New Ravenna. To make that point, Sara's giving away a copy of a rare art book, Mosaics of Roman Africa. Click on this Amazon link to see how much it's worth. Wow.

But there's hope, pop over to Sara's blog and leave a comment. She'll be drawing a lucky winner from the comments left after Rome if You Want to Part II. So enter her contest and stick around long enough to soak in some inspiration.