18 March 2011

Roman Faces


After visiting the Sistine Chapel, I spent the rest of the afternoon drawing in the Museo Chiaramonti, the Greek and Roman antiquities wing of the Vatican Museum. It was a long vaulted corridor with hundreds of portrait busts and statues of emperors, gods, goddesses, philosophers and plebeians.

I am fascinated by their eternally blank stares.

(sidenote) Everything in the Vatican Museum is obsessively numbers and cataloged. All the portraits were labeled with both a cardinal number and a Roman numeral.

sketchbook pages copyright Kate Castelli 2011

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