Word: cestius
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...sexually loaded images. The New York Times, rarely in doubt about Salle's virtues, hailed the new works as "Rococo," presumably because they are all pale, some have harlequins, and one of them recycles a bit of 18th century decor -- figures in a Roman landscape beside the Pyramid of Cestius. Such is the history of style...
...even such as those of the immortal Palladio, could never have succeeded in conveying . . ." So in his renderings, the modest stones of Hadrian's Tomb were translated into a crushing, megalithic rock pile that dwarfed the tatterdemalion beggars at its foot; such Roman monuments as the Pyramid of Cestius, which in real life is as inconspicuous as any pyramid can reasonably be, rivaled the Pyramid of Cheops in height and spread. This kind of heroic misinformation provoked some murmuring from English dilettanti who, arriving in Rome armed with nothing but their recollections of Piranesi's engravings, were disappointed...
Artillery fire had damaged several gravestones between Keats's and the pyramid of Caius Cestius, a stone's throw away. Other greats in the same cemetery: Shelley, Trelawny, John Addington Symonds. Keats's name goes unmentioned on his own gravestone ("Here lies one whose name was writ in water"), but is inscribed on that of his painter-friend Severn, buried by his side...
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