JASMINE NATIONALISM, HONEYBEE RULE, JASMINE MEMENTO MORI

Notwithstanding the cityscape's foundations in the razing/building campaigns of the Romans, so rapaciously dependent on the blank human slate, so antithetical to Greek carving with the landscape, so akin to our own, a day of finding oi-kos, ecos, in the self-puffing of the polis, whether national, papal or aristocratic: signifiers of femininity and the natural, nonhuman (animal, landscape, woman being yoked in some dubious wise), wending their ways into and out of representation.

Megalith to Victor Emmanuel II, laden even in protosummer smog with the scent of jasmine,

Barberini worship space shaped by Borromini into the angles and curves of the honeybee,

Lorenzo Lotto's gentleman courtier (borrowed for this Quirinale show from the Borghese Gallery) resting his hand on a heap of rose petals and jasmine softening a tiny skull: memory of a child lost at birth.

The exceptions fundamental part of sprezzatura, which we note in competitive cupolas on the roof of the Forum: a menefregismo which allows the ruler his strategic softness (so as to be mastered?), too.