Swooning Over the Super-Small
If models and miniatures make you ooh and ahh, have I got a castle for you.
When I was a kid, I collected little animal families made of bone china that I loved with an intensity I can still feel decades later. Too cute not to touch, most of them ended up sporting blobs of glue on their delicate, spindly legs. Then there were my trolls (my favorite was, of course, the smallest one), for which I made cardboard houses complete with curtained windows and painted shutters like the ones on most houses in Italy. And for me, no visit to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History was complete without a 20-minute inspection of the 5-story, 23-room Doll’s House. It’s home to 19 people and 20 pets and 1,354 things—tiny dishes and sponges and brooms, paintings and vases, bedside tables and clawfoot tubs. The best part? The attic, jammed with relics and memories.
So you can imagine my delight when I went to Castel Sant’Angelo recently and discovered there’s a new permanent exhibit that features models of the mausoleum/fortress/prison/castle/pope’s residence in its various configurations over the centuries. The actual building crouches, menacing and somehow triumphant, at the north end of the Sant’Angelo Bridge, where rows of stunning angel sculptures designed by Bernini in 1688 guard the approach.
It’s a fascinating place, oozing with atmosphere—dungeons, despair, death—and it comes with a bonus: the hands-down best view of Rome, which you can enjoy along with a cocktail at an upper-level bar.
After wandering up a long incline on which the remains of Emperor Hadrian once traveled, we arrived at the new exhibition space and discovered six models, each painstakingly done, each worthy of admiration and awe.
Why, I wondered as I studied these masterpieces, are miniatures so appealing? Why does my voice rise an octave on the word adorable, and why do I stare at models in a sort of glassy-eyed stupor, as if I’d consumed too many mind- and body-altering substances? Well, as it turns out, drugs are involved. Okay, not drugs, exactly, but chemicals. Hormones, to be specific. We are biologically programmed to like small things because doing so creates the desire to nurture, which in turn helps us survive.
And here I thought cute was just cute. But no.
In an article in Real Simple, journalist/professor Elizabeth Yuko explains the “psychology of cuteness.” Simply put, small + cute = desire to nurture. That applies to babies and puppies, and yes, tiny things. Yuko writes: “Part of the whole helpless-but-irresistible, big-eyed baby narrative is that seeing these adorable tiny humans or animals releases oxytocin—aka the ‘love hormone’—which is involved with forming emotional bonds.” (This according to Varun Choudhary, MD, a board-certified forensic psychiatrist.) Yes, it’s that oxytocin, the same one that stimulates uterine contractions during childbirth. In this case, though, it makes us feel us all warm and fuzzy and reduces blood pressure and cortisol levels (which rise during times of stress).
But oxytocin can’t do the whole job on its own. It partners with dopamine, a feel-good hormone. In the same article, Yuko quotes clinical counselor and mental health practitioner Pareen Sehat: “Dopamine is one of the most important hormones that triggers happiness and any positive emotional response. Whenever we see tiny things we find cute and attractive, our brain releases dopamine and makes us feel happy.”
Other factors are at play according to this article in The Guardian, specifically the return to the childhood satisfaction of feeling powerful (as children, we are giants to our tiny toys) and the pleasure of visualizing the whole of something that’s too big to grasp in real life. Author Simon Garfield writes: “The ability to enhance a life by bringing scaled-down order and illumination to an otherwise chaotic world—a world over which we may otherwise feel we have little control—cannot be overvalued. [. . .] At its simplest, the miniature shows us how to see, learn and appreciate more with less.”
Maybe. Probably. But I wasn’t thinking any such thing at the Castel Sant’Angelo exhibit. I was marveling at the walk through time these models offered. It’s one thing to know a castle was once a fortress was once a tomb of mind-boggling scale, but to see what it looked like, to understand the transformation of a building in concrete terms, is another kettle of fish.
Castel Sant’Angelo’s history spans more than 1800 years—quite seductive to those of us who like the super-old as much as the super-small. The Roman emperor Hadrian, who reigned from 117 to 138 AD, designed the mausoleum, which was built in 135–139 AD. A few hundred years later, in the fifth century, the mausoleum became a fortress, gaining the name Castel Sant’Angelo in 590 when Pope Gregory I saw a vision of a sword-bearing archangel Michael atop the building—come to protect the people from the plague then devastating Rome, said the pope. Nearly a thousand years later, in the 1500s, the fortress became a castle, and for decades it served as courtroom, prison, and papal residence.
On a side note, Castel Sant’Angelo is a prime example of the kind of recycling of sites and materials so often found in Italy. Catholic churches built on the ruins of ancient temples (like the churches of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome and Assisi); columns and cornices and slabs of marble carted off to become part of something “new” (like the salvaged columns in Perugia’s Chiesa di San Michele Archangelo and marble veneers on the gallery walls at Rome’s Galleria Borghese).
In Italy, history is everywhere, layers of it, revealing egos and grandiosity, sophisticated design skills and innovative construction methods, emotions and sentimentality and the drive for power. Fortunately, in many museums here in Italy, some of history’s residue takes the form of models and miniatures. Sure, they’re imitations, but they’re also pint-sized and utterly adorable.
Books of the week:
· The Miniaturist by Jessie Burton
· Fleeting Rome: In Search of La Dolce Vita by Carlo Levi
Poem of the week:
“Go Thou to Rome” by Percy Bysshe Shelley (part of “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats”)
Comments? Thoughts? I’m all ears.
For me, these miniatures are not cute and do not excite the hormone that makes me wish to care for them and nurture them. But, the mind is stirred by the history of the building over a long period arouses curiousity. Why the changes? What architectural innovations enabled the changes? How did the purposes of the building change? How did the building and its occupants relate to the city around them? The detail amazes too but all the moreso because one goes from seeing the buildings in total to some little thing the eye catches and then back again to the "whole" while at the same time, standing in the interior of the very building depicted while at the same time one tries to fix the place where one is standing while bearing in mind the immensity of the structure one encountered on the way to the exhibit and its place in Rome in the here and now. A pleasant discombobulation.
I feel the same way when visiting the room-sized models of Rome in the museum in EUR!