Recently I spent a day in Rome with my two teenage kids and was faced with the challenge of making the Renaissance interesting for a pair who would rather defecate in front of their partners than look at a painting or enter a church.
So we tried Bernini, one of the greatest sculptors of the Renaissance, and his sculpture of 'the Ecstasy of St Theresa' which is essentially a marble orgasm in a church.
This peaked their interest. They not only went into the church, but they were happy to go to another one and look at a Caravaggio too. Holy cow.
Even though my 19 yo son said 'this painting sucks ass', the fact that he even looked at it for 15 minutes, and now remembers who Caravaggio is, well, that's some kind of miracle.
This is essentially all I told them, and now they get Bernini . . .
This might be the beginning of something. A collection of historical figures reduced to ten panels for the attention span of idiots, as represented by my teenage offspring.
Only trouble being, I also don't have the attention span to read about people and reduce their lives to ten panels.
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