Rome Travel Guide

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Saturday, May 19, 2012

Sculpture at EUR: but leave the kids at home!



RST discovered this curious piece of public sculpture while on our way to the Fungo, a space-needle-like tower in EUR.  We don't pretend to have figured it out.  The woman in the center is lacking an arm--or, more precisely, she has two arms but the left one is wedged under the right one, the work of the sculptor (if so, more than odd) or vandals. 

At her feet, on its back, is something out of Rosemary's Baby:  it appears to have little devil ears and the lower half of its body trails off, placenta-like.  Maybe the one-armed maid had just given birth to this little monster.






But maybe not.  The man is front of her is all blustery violence, ax-like weapon in hand. He might have just killed the child--and cut off its mother's arm--making her scene one of personal trauma and maternal tragedy. 

At the other end (left), images of horrific confinement for both genders; everyone's boxed up or dominated.  Looks like a woman, with a fetus in her womb, is being ridden by George Washington. 

There's no plaque to identify the work, and the sculptor's name doesn't appear on it, that we could find.  It was probably made and installed around the time when the nearby Fungo was built: the late 1950s.  (See an earlier post on the Fungo itself - worth a glance.)

Zealots of artistic interpretation can find this piece across from Pier Luigi Nervi's Palazzo dello Sport in EUR (right, the Palazzo in the background).  It's on the west fork of Via Cristoforo Colombo, about halfway betweeen the lake and il Fungo. 

Let us know your morbid thoughts.
Bill

1 comment:

Luke Tycoon said...

This sculptural complex is called "Il vascello della rivoluzione" (The vessel of the Revolution). It was made in 1989 by artist Ugo Attardi on the occasion of the bicentenary of the French Revolution.