Geoff Dyer

On photography, shrines and Maradona: Geoff Dyer’s Neapolitan pilgrimage

The author wanders around Naples seeking transcendence – and finds it

At the Villa Pignatelli in Naples there is an exhibition by Elisa Sighicelli: photographs of bits and pieces of antiquity from, among other places, the city’s Archaeological Museum. Put like that it doesn’t sound so interesting but the results are stunning.

Walking through the Archaeological Museum after seeing the exhibition it was difficult to discover the original objects from which Sighicelli’s samples were taken. One instance, a tight crop of fingers pressing into a calf, is from a highly elaborate, much restored and augmented sculpture with so much going on — a naked swirl of bodies, a rearing horse, a sympathetic doggy — it’s hard to imagine how she found it in the first place. From the midst of this limby extravaganza the resulting image is as tactile as a close-up of a physio massaging the muscled calf of an injured footballer.

Even when you have located the original it is tricky, sometimes, to work out how the picture might have been coaxed from it. Taking the photograph must have involved a kind of archaeological excavation in its own right: a kind of visual dig. The original works are not just photographed but transformed. Tightly framed, the goddess Aphrodite’s midriff and hip have a slinky stillness — a form of naked display enhanced by concealing folds of stone drapery — that embodies the erotic force of millennia.

These images are printed on the same materials from which the original objects are made — marble, travertine — so that there is a symbiosis between what is depicted and the way it is shown. We associate photography with the moment but the main feeling induced by these entirely flat images is of temporal and sculptural depth, of deep permanence. The photographs simultaneously remove the object from and return it to its source.

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