Posthumous lives in Rome

The area around the Spanish Steps in Rome is still sometimes quaintly referred to as the English quarter. At the bottom in Piazza di Spagna on one side of the steps is Babington's Tea Room, where a small fortune will buy you an English cup of tea. On the other side of the steps is the Keats Shelley Museum. This is the apartment where the English poet Keats died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. His days of writing poetry were at an end, only 18 months long, but nevertheless producing some of the most famous and beautiful poetry in English literature. My favourite line from Keats is ‘alone and palely loitering' (from the poem, La Belle Dam Sans Mercy), which, when I was a student, is how I imagined myself; the dark romantic typeon the North York moors, never without a volume of poetry, a jazz record and a packet of Gauloises.

Keats came to Rome having been an apothecary and a physician in London, both rather lower class professions. As a result his poetry went unregarded and more famous poets like Byron looked snobbishly down on him. For a short while his health did improve and he saw some of the famous Roman sights. In the Villa Borghese he was shocked by Canova's sculpture, which would then only have been a few decades old and daringly modern, of Paolina Borghese with her breasts bared and holding an apple, a Christian symbol of her temptress nature. But the revival in his health was short-lived and he soon took to his bed to live out what he called in a beautiful, tragic phrase ‘his posthumous life'. Looked after, and occasionally movingly painted by his artist friend, John Severn, his health diminished and his death mask, which is in the museum, shows that he died a gaunt, shrunken man. He had no posthumous reputation, no fortune, no good name - but he left a beautiful oeuvre of romantic poetry which was eventually revived by the Pre-Raphaelites decades after his death.

Another famous English artist is also currently making a more transitory but nevertheless remarkable impact on Rome: FrancisBacon. In the gorgeous Villa Borghese(where Keats was shocked by the bare-breasted Paolina) there is an exhibition of Bacon paintings alongside the paintings of Caravaggio, that most realistic and down-to-earth of Rennaissance painters. The contorted and unrecognisable features of Bacon's subjects sit alongside the peasants and urchins that Caravaggio had transmogrified into hyper-realistic images of saints and classical heroes with his remarkable control of light and shadow, chiaroscuro, and his bold painting techniques. My favourite Caravaggio painting is not famous and rarely shown in exhibitions, though it is on display in this exhibition. Its normal home is a dark, dusty corner of the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, just outside the Borghese gardens. The painting appears
to be a man injured by being thrown from a horse. Most of the painting is taken up with the rear end of the horse and the man lies swooning and unconscious in the bottom right hand corner of the painting by the horse's side. In fact, the subject of the painting is the conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus. So what seems an earthy, realistic painting is in fact depicting a moment of transfiguration; a miraculous moment of enlightenment. The conversion of the real to the transfigured is Caravaggio's gift, as it is that of many other Rennaissance painters.

But by inserting Bacon paintings seemingly randomly amongt the Rennaissance masters, not just Caravaggio, but also Raphael, Cranach, Titian, Dossi, Lippi and the spectacular Bernini statues (amongst the greatest sculptures in the world), the curator is posing a big question about realism. Francis Bacon believed, as do many of those who look at his paintings, that his distortions of physical reality in the depiction of his subject brings out thier truer selves. In other words, the apparently distorted was more real, in the sense of true, than the realistic image. In thinking that he was influenced by Freudian notions of the unconscious. So here was the point of the show. The ‘realism' in painting to which Rennaissance art gave birth, with its unprecedented understanding of perspective and landscape as well as its humanistic portrayal of religious figures, was in fact depicting the spiritual, the miraculous, the transfigured: realism in painting to connect our human experiences to the divine. Francis Bacon also seemed to be arguing that realism did not serve reality. All the painters seemed to be using the voices of different times to say the real is rarely the true; look harder if you want to find the truer meaning.