May 9, 2024 • 78 mins
"Greetings, fellow citizens! Welcome to Cassilly Chronicles, where we peel back the layers of the iconic City Museum, the masterful creation of my parents, Robert and Gail Cassilly. I'm Max Robert Cassilly, and while I've dipped my toes in the waters of art and social activism, and tried my hand at a myriad of trades without mastering any (yet), today I invite you to join me in a journey through the hallways of memories and stories that form the core of the City Museum."-Max
If you've enjoyed this episode of the Cassilly Chronicles and want to hear more about the untold stories, creativity, and legacy of the Cassilly family, consider supporting us on Patreon. Your contribution helps us create more episodes, uncover fascinating insights, and share exclusive content. Join our community to dive deeper into the journey and help us keep the stories coming. Head over to our Patreon page and become a part of the Chronicles. Every bit of support makes a difference! Right now we will have a special Video going up this month and you can get the second episode when it drops a week early. https://patreon.com/CapturedPlanet
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:04):
Welcome to our space, fellow citizens.
Now let's set the stage.
While I'd love to shoot from the hip, to riff and to share a laugh, there are times when reality slips in and the curtain behind the entertainment is pulled away.
This isn't just another edutainment podcast.
Here you'll dive into an authentic experience.
My life has been a tapestry of artistic people, and let me tell you, they can be quite the characters.
(00:26):
We've tried our best to keep this family friendly by bleeping out some colorful language, but just as a heads up, content warnings are a thing here.
And just to be clear, while the City Museum has its charm for kids, this podcast explores the deeper, sometimes darker sides of life, death, and everything in between.
(00:47):
And as Mr.
Charles would say, explore with your own discretion.
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the cast of The Chronicles.
Think of This is our Rosetta, the initial sketch from a much grander creation.
It's the first brushstroke on a vast canvas of stories we're going to explore together.
We start with a narrative rimming with potential and promise.
(01:09):
Growing up in downtown St.
Louis, MO, in a house that was once a religious mission, I was enveloped in an atmosphere rich with creativity and history.
My father and his first wife snagged this property, including the two adjoining houses, for around $7000, all connected through a shared base, a quirk effect.
My childhood bed was placed where the missions altar once stood, a detail my parents often recounted with the twinkle in their eyes.
(01:35):
Driving past our Lafayette Square home in the mid 1990s, you'd have glimpsed through a living piece of history, imaginatively reinvented.
Our home, deeply rooted in its past as a mission, was set back from the street.
Unlike its neighbors, the courtyard was a beautiful fusion of historical and contemporary elements.
The walkway, paved with hydraulic bricks reclaimed from the local St.
(01:57):
renovation, was a nod to the blend of Saint Louis heritage and progress.
The Ivy clad sculptures in our landscape each held a story to tell stories of transformation and renewal.
This place was a more than a home, it was a reflection of my parents artistic souls where the past and present were seamlessly intertwined.
Our home was graced with Spolio architectural pieces rich with history in the basement.
(02:22):
Once the heart of my parents architectural sculptural business transformed into a jungle gym, the front space rather than a typical lawn displaying sculptures from various forgotten projects showcasing my parents gift for uncovering Eden beauty.
Prominent among the pieces was a giant iguana and a frog statue, the later inscribed with Max Cassie.
(02:44):
That's me, the iguana, seemingly ready to take on Avw Bug and the Watchful frog silent sentence were icons from my child, the courtyard.
Once the iguanas domain evolved again when it was relocated downtown.
Then came a pivotal day in our store.
My father introduced a 13 foot Burmese Python encased in what was said to be bulletproof glass.
(03:10):
This Python was more than an exotic pet.
It was the living Bosetta, A preliminary model for a larger artistic endeavor.
Its presence sparked a mix of wonder and apprehension, particularly that last one in my mother and my sister days.
As creators of the City Museum, my parents left an indelible mark on our city's artistic landscape.
(03:31):
The Python marked a crucial juncture in their artistic odyssey, a living blueprint for the monumental works to come.
Today I'm chatting with Chris Nasiger, A historian specializing in Saint Louis's art and architecture, to delve deeper into the these tales.
Welcome to the Cassley Chronicles, where every artwork has its story, every lie, its own fabrication.
(03:55):
This episode is our buzzetto join us as we unfold the full picture.
How are you doing today?
Doing great.
How are you doing, Max?
I'm sweating.
Why are you sweating?
It's kind of warm in here.
Yeah, I've got a sweater on, maybe a little warm.
(04:17):
You've been drinking coffee, though.
That might be another reason why you're hot.
I do love cup.
I love coffee too.
I already drank as much as I should.
Well, anyway, so there was a couple of words that I was using there that when telling my life and my family story to you, that you talked to me.
(04:44):
And as we were talking about, I guess the first word that I kind of like to talk about is Bozzetto.
Yeah.
So Bozzetto is a an Italian term which has been used for centuries.
It's basically like a prep preparatory sketch and I don't want people to to limit it to just the idea of like maybe a pencil and a piece of paper.
(05:09):
It could.
It definitely can be that, but it often times.
Was charcoal or you know, lead white, you know all sorts of different different media can be used for it.
It's when the artist is really kind of worked past, you know, maybe just sort of gesture drawings, you know, with the head of live model.
(05:29):
But Seto is really kind of a worked up, you know, preparatory drawing where they've kind of started to really get the composition down and where they're working towards the point where they're going to be.
Doing the actual finished work of art.
Pretty much no professional artist in Western culture just simply started working on the finished work of art right off the bat.
(05:54):
You know Michelangelo, Raphael, You know Bernini.
None of them just started hammering away at a block of marble right off winged it.
Right.
They did not do that.
I mean, I think that's what people.
don't realize.
One time I was watching a news article and they were talking about, you know, how Renaissance artists cheated by using, you know, what we call pouncing?
(06:20):
You know, they'd actually make a giant, what we actually call a cartoon, which was the step right after a potsetto where they actually called the cartoon.
Yeah, that's actually the the correct term.
It's not, you know, like what you see.
Like in the funnies.
It's actually where they would take the the potsetto and they had actually transferred into a 1 to 1 sized drawing.
That would actually have little holes poked in it.
(06:42):
And they would actually, you know, take a bag of chalk or I should say charcoal, and they'd actually pounce.
They bagged a little, banged a little bag of chalk based off of the potsetto image up on the actual canvas or onto the panel or onto the ceiling and transfer the image that way from the potsetto.
And, you know, I had this article said that was cheating.
(07:02):
That's not cheating.
And Michelangelo did it for the Sistine Ceiling.
For example, I never think that using technology is cheating for art, and you can hopefully I don't ever have to eat those words.
So what I think what people also need to realize that a Pozzetto can also be a sculpture.
Sculptors like, you know, I think the the artist that jumps out to me first and foremost is an artist like Jean Lorenzo Bernini, who was sort of the Michelangelo of the 17th century in Rome.
(07:34):
He worked extensively on works in the most important building of 17th century Rome, which was Saint Peter's Basilica.
And he actually, but we're really fortunate to have, are surviving bozzetti, which is the plural in Italian of bozetti.
Exactly.
(07:55):
Many of those survive and they're extremely valuable because, quite frankly, marble works, which of course was the material that he would work in.
For the finished work of art are pretty hard to come by.
They don't really come up for sale very often, and his most famous works are owned by the Roman Catholic Church, and they're not selling them.
They're in churches throughout Rome and a couple of other places around Italy.
(08:18):
But these Bosetti are often times made out of clay, and some of them are damaged, but they're still incredibly interesting.
You can see some in the Vatican Museums as well.
What's really interesting about them is often times these botsetti are different than the final composition, so we can actually get a window into the mind of a sculptor such as Bernini and what I really find interesting about your dad's work because he actually did these preparatory sketches every time.
(08:52):
And sometimes he actually did drawings now.
Well, at the end with City Museum he was doing almost a free form jazz sculpture, but that was only the last, probably 10.
Years.
So and that's actually you know that that that evolved.
That's interesting because you know some very highly skilled sculptors, we actually believe that even maybe Donatello and Michelangelo maybe maybe got to the point where they could have just simply you know, but if you looked at the at the models of say of a Cementland model or something else, stuff will be very different.
(09:31):
Well, you're also living in an actual the actual reality of the space and the material that you're working with and that you have to so.
That's really interesting.
Is that model of the Matland survive or has it been?
There's a couple of them.
Well, I'll, well, I'll put a lookout for it it there was one at the museum so oh wow.
(09:51):
Try to get a.
Stand so you do know for a fact that.
Stuff different differs in it did, yes.
So it's very typical of of, you know, I think what's interesting about your dad is he fits in very comfortably and very normally with a lot of other great artists.
Well, he he did study actually as an actual apprentice under a guy named Rudy Turini who was an art teacher at the end at Fontban, but I believe he was at a different place originally.
(10:26):
And I think when he was like young, like.
It sounds like his teacher sounds like he might have been Italian.
Yeah, Rudy Torini.
Yeah, that sounds like a very Italian.
So his stuff can be actually seen in City Museum back behind.
Like if you're looking at old circus area, that's like the circus moved.
(10:47):
That's what ended up.
There's like a piano back there.
There's a whole bunch of classically posed figurines or figures.
They're life-size.
They're pretty good.
It's cool.
Yeah.
I, I, I, I see that.
I see in your dad's work that evidence of earlier Italian artists 100%.
(11:08):
Very clearly.
And so it's not surprising to see that he had some of the same methodology of work, you know, going through this preparatory sketches, whether it's in clay.
Terracotta or even you know other materials and then having the final work in a more durable permanent material such as concrete or marble.
(11:29):
I unlike my father which I don't think my father liked getting yelled at by people.
He just didn't care that much.
I have a very strong guilt response to things and never like to get yelled at or have attention on me negatively.
And so when I was a little kid, I'd go down to my dad's shop, down at at the the Cassley shop we would call it on.
(11:59):
Lafayette just West of Jefferson?
Yeah.
And yeah, he would have all these library books there, and they'd be getting dusty and scratched and lo, lo and behold, walk in one day and they're cut to pieces.
And find out one day that he's making art for the library to pay off his library fines, because he would just keep the books.
(12:27):
And those there, they weren't art books.
They were, they were all animal books, 'cause he was doing stuff like the sea lions at the Living World or at the zoo, and then he was doing The Shark in the Living World.
And so he was, he was cutting up these, these books, and then I'd be going to school and they'd talk about, you know, returning your library books and Oh no, Dad's going to get in so much trouble.
(12:54):
And and that was the least amount of trouble he probably got in, but if you actually go to the bar.
Branch the bar Branch.
Yes, you can go see Bob Castley's library.
Finds still are permanently on display.
Now his one of his favorite folklore tails was the rabbit in the hare or the turtle tortoise in the hare.
(13:15):
Rabbit in the hare, the tortoise is really easy to see if you don't walk around it.
As you're walking towards the door, you'll you'll trip over it.
The the tortoise is not that interesting of an art piece that is.
Now when we talk about different levels of castley art, there's the frog, which I mentioned in the cold open.
(13:36):
The frog was one of the first animals that was mass produced that was huge.
And he would actually, he he always told me that he never really sold that many of them, but they were good for giving away to like a school and the school would give him a like auction them off and they'd auction off for about $800 I think, he said.
(13:57):
So he they were He'd never really made any money on the Frogs.
They're good stocking stuffers, yes, and the hugest stocking stuffers.
And let's do a frog call out, because I mean they ended up everywhere.
Let's, let's, let's try to find the furthest away frog castly frog.
And you can know it's a castly frog if it has the base.
(14:19):
It says Max castly, which, yes, confused me to high heaven.
That and the movie Mad Max did not appreciate that.
I do like it now.
It took a while for me to grow into the like I was definitely old by the time.
Well, it was confusing and scary.
(14:41):
So besides those, what now are incredibly priceless models of cement land do you have?
Any other examples of the of Bossetti left from your dad like earlier?
There are some stuff that's on display at the museum right now.
Yeah, there's a history exhibit.
(15:02):
They also have Kurtz on Exhibit 2 so.
Kurt But yeah, like I said, the stuff at the museum was free.
Jazz expressionism.
It was legitimately you'd make a steel structure that was in the shape of a head of something, right?
(15:23):
And as you put stuff, you slopped some concrete or gypsum over it.
You would, Yeah.
So it's really interesting.
There's one part, it's probably my least favorite thing at City Museum, which I think we should only be negative about City Museum and the show, obviously.
(15:46):
But it was just, it was a bad time in my life when we did this part.
But they built the front stairway and they made it all out of like, plaster.
It's a there's a it's a serpent.
But there's the this wing that comes off of it for no reason I just don't like.
(16:13):
It you really hate that?
I don't know why I hate it.
Just sometimes it's a it.
The whole place is a sketch and.
Well, it's interesting you should say that because, you know, I mean moving into the 19th century as art became much more experimental, I might just, well, I don't know if I necessarily say art was an experimental before that.
(16:37):
There was less of a an interest in having, you know, it being so regimented as it had been before.
It's interesting is to hear that as your dad advanced as an artist, he became much more free form is the term you use it, but much more sort of working away from that preparatory, you know, laying it out very carefully beforehand, but instead just sort of going with his instincts as he'd be matured as an artist.
(17:06):
I think that's really interesting.
Well, the iguana statue looks like an iguana.
And the frog statue, actually, I think it was based on some toad ironically.
And then the turtle is a box turtle and the turtle one was made well before turtle park.
So I want to say that that was like an idea in its head for a pretty long time.
(17:30):
Right.
Well, I think, you know, after you look at so many different animals and stuff and you've sculpted them, perhaps you start to be able to try and develop the ability to, you know, sculpt it in your head.
It does remind me of, OK, so my dad had this huge snake that he shows up with and we love the far side growing up.
(17:52):
I mean, who doesn't You.
Know it's been popping up on my Facebook feed quite a lot.
Yeah, like last couple weeks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's God makes the snake.
Yeah.
Show him rolling up the.
That's a famous one.
This is a singe, yeah.
So that's what was annoying about the snake is that it's not that hard to look at a a picture of a snake.
And also they're scalable too.
(18:16):
The tiny ones look like the big ones.
If anything, the tinier ones can look a little bit cooler and crazier, like the really ornate faced crazy one, you know?
But doesn't that kind of show your dad's?
Sort of.
I think he wanted to put it in the museum.
So you think it was kind of like a ploy that, oh, I need to, oh, I think he wanted to annoy everybody and like, so he would use these pranks and and I say pranks with, you know, quotes.
(18:48):
So he showed it up to the neighbor's house with a couple of the guys.
I guess they had a few drinks and thought it was funny.
And they showed up next door with the snake.
And I have a photo of this and you can see they, they're a little, little too relaxed to be, to be honest, because 13 feet is huge.
(19:10):
And yeah, he's just, I would say if we were doing a captioning contest like the Internet likes to do, it'd be like this.
My snake, you know?
Right.
And I'll post that it's definitely weird.
And I am.
So they threw the snake in cuz everybody got bored with it or whatever, and they put it in the bathroom to scare people.
(19:36):
And the snake was like, I don't really wanna be in this bathroom and they can sense where heat and stuff is.
So it proceeded to move the toilet over and crawl down through into the basement.
So when somebody opened up the door, the snake wasn't there and they were like, where's the snake?
I'll.
Wait, so.
(19:56):
No, no, no.
It just escaped a bunch of times.
This is just one of the times I thought.
It went down through the water holding its breath.
No, but no.
It actually physically pushed the toilet.
It was big enough, yeah, because toilets don't.
They're not cemented in place necessary.
I've watched a lot of wax.
Well, I've watched a lot of This Old House episodes where they installed toilets and there's that big giant beeswax ring.
(20:22):
Yeah.
And.
They can sense heat and up.
That will not heat, but a temperature flex, right?
Because they're cold blooded.
Yeah, so they're like, oh, I'm going through this obvious hole that you guys can't see for whatever reason.
And so there's there's pictures somewhere and I'm putting the call out now of the the, the snake halfway up and the snake halfway down and like, you know, and yeah, I never liked so.
(20:48):
The cavalier nature with animals that.
Like, leave them outside.
So the so he got the snake.
Ostensibly because he needed to study it carefully for a pozzetto of the snake for Turtle Park.
But in reality it was just probably for a little bit of hell raising.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then, so once he brought it back, this thing would escape from its actual cage.
(21:12):
And I called my sister and you know, I was like, hey, I'm going to trigger my sister.
But hey, Daisy, what do you remember about the snake?
And she said.
Well, I remember coming home from your piano lesson, which is a Wednesday.
They always were.
And she was about 8 years old probably and walked into the courtyard and right in front of her face was the snake and it was 13 feet long.
(21:36):
So it was like eye level to a nine year old or 12 year old.
I have no idea how old.
I'm terrible with the time, not a younger than a teenager.
Yes, a child I couldn't have picked up the snake at.
That age and I was probably like 11, but yeah, she said that me and my dad jumped on the snake and threw it in the in the in the snake cage and then they were going to move it to someplace else, but it escaped again and they just, they didn't know where it went and it got really cold out because winter, winter be happening as it does in Saint Louis.
(22:12):
And it was, I guess it was a more mild winter because it survived.
It found a place underneath.
Some part of the neighbor's house, I guess.
Oh my.
God.
And there's a little warm spot.
And they found it and it moved.
They moved.
(22:32):
The snake never had a name.
You never named the snake?
No.
That's actually really interesting.
No, I never liked the snake.
Well, I mean, I I felt bad for the snake, you know?
Yeah.
But yeah, yeah, we would feed.
The snake.
Cute animals, you know.
Not, not me, I say.
(22:53):
We but your dad.
The snake would eat the cute animals in my opinion.
You know, so like rabbits and.
Yeah, Guinea.
Pigs.
Guinea pigs, They scream.
Yeah.
And so I I fell out a This was one of the first, you know, familial riffs.
(23:14):
And what did your mom say about this snake?
I mean, she.
She.
Doesn't have very much memory about the snake, actually.
I called her and she's like, I don't really remember.
Let me look for the photos.
She found the photos, but she's like, I don't really kind of blocked it out.
I'm pretty sure there's other stuff that was just as annoying too.
But yeah, so my parents were doing the these really big animals, so the next thing that that was on the list was a huge giraffe.
(23:43):
So we come home from school one day.
No, I'm just kidding.
There was no giraffe.
Thankfully, no, your dad did not illegally import a giraffe.
But he would go to the zoo and hang out in the giraffe area behind the scenes and he got permission to go, Yeah.
OK, because he was.
He had contracts with the zoo to do have different animals at different times.
(24:07):
He did a a hippo.
Yeah.
Anyway, that was one of the first big things was he made a hippo for me?
Climb through So it's a big giant fiberglass hippo.
And that actually ended up at the zoo and all of you climbed on it when you were a kid.
Didn't eventually fall apart or something like, did it?
(24:28):
I don't know.
Is it still there?
I don't know.
I don't remember that.
We're gonna have to go.
Look, I don't remember that they're being a hippo.
To make a list of all the stuff that we need to go look for today.
That used to be your play quote event.
Correct.
But we do have a video of them talking about it being made untrusting.
Yeah, so duh.
(24:52):
Yeah.
So when another word that I used in my fancy intro was spolia, yeah.
So Spolia, as you can probably tell again, is another Italian word, one that's actually very important to sort of the history of Western civilization, particularly in Italy, because let's just be frank, there's a lot more Roman ruins and ancient Greek ruins in Italy than in say, perhaps Germany, though of course I've seen plenty of Roman ruins in Germany as well.
(25:24):
But let's just kind of start from the beginning.
So obviously just huge amount of Roman ruins particularly in the city of Rome, but also like you know in cities like that later on became major Renaissance centers like Florence.
And despite kind of like the popular, you know Hollywood image of it, Rome was not burned to the ground by a bunch of Barbarians.
(25:49):
In reality what happened is most of those huge buildings like the Colosseum or the Roman Forum, those buildings actually survived for centuries after the so-called fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century.
And what happened is, is that they collapsed due to earthquakes or just simply lack of maintenance.
(26:11):
Some were turned into churches, like the Pantheon is a church actually still to the present day.
And Rome fell into just desperate poverty.
In fact, Rome probably, in my opinion, would have actually been abandoned if it hadn't become the center of the Roman Catholic Church.
And there were certainly a lot of churches being built because it was this major, you know, center of Christianity.
(26:38):
And building materials are expensive.
Marble is expensive.
Likewise, there were a lot of building materials in Rome that came from other parts of the Mediterranean.
The most famous example I would say is porphyry.
Porphyry is this very hard purple granite like I'm not a geologist granite like stone that comes from Mount Porphyrus in Egypt and I late one night out of curiosity I was like, I wonder if you can still import that.
(27:10):
And I found this really sketchy website that claimed you can actually buy I I I have this feeling that your money would just disappear if you sent money to them for some modern day porphyry.
But anyway, I digress.
Starting almost immediately, Roman Catholic churches began to actually, how do we put this borrow permanently pieces of Roman temples, Roman buildings.
(27:38):
And certainly on one level it was because it was free.
There would be a temple down the street and it was dedicated to a Pagan Roman God.
It collapsed or it, you know, just fell down due to lack of maintenance or hadn't been converted into a church.
And they were a little short on money that century, and they would just help themselves all that beautiful marble and worked out.
(28:07):
Great.
By the way, that dog you hear is Louie.
Oh, we have Archer here.
And then the neighbor's dog is Louie.
So those are very Saint Louis dogs, yeah.
It is also particularly, very early on there was this idea of destroying ancient Roman monuments for the purpose of building churches.
(28:31):
There's a very famous church up on top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome where basically every single column is different.
It's this real kind of museum.
This church is Santa Maria and Aracoli.
It also implies that if there's twenty different columns, it means that they probably tore down or salvage from 20 different ancient Roman buildings.
(28:54):
So it's sort of like this trophy room for the destruction of Pagan religion by Christianity in the late Roman Empire.
Now Fast forward.
So we're out of the Middle Ages now.
We're getting to the Renaissance, where the Renaissance, of course, is this reevaluation and reconciliation of the ancient Roman world and the and the Greek world with Christianity and, you know, with people such as Petriarch, etcetera.
(29:24):
And still seen as sort of trophies, but now they're seen with more of a reverence that had been seen in the past that you know, but now they're very much being seen as, you know, works of art and important relics of this era when Italy was the center of the Western world and during the Renaissance, Italy was fragmented.
(29:49):
It was constantly being attacked and, you know, constantly being the pawn of France, Austria, Spain.
And now these stones were becoming a symbol of when Italy was powerful and a great, powerful empire in the Roman Empire.
(30:09):
So now you're seeing the use of these spolia, these pieces of stone in particular.
Now the sculpture was becoming of extremely high value.
While in the past a lot of times what they would do with ancient Roman sculpture or Greek sculpture is they would put it in a furnace and you know burn it down into lime to be used as cement or concrete for concrete.
(30:34):
Now sculpture was valued as a precious work of ancient Greek and Roman art.
And you know, famous Italian families, royal houses around Europe are now collecting these sculptures and these blocks of marble, these pieces of stone, the porphyry, that purple Egyptian stone.
Nobody in the Ottoman Empire which ruled Egypt at this point was allowing anybody from Christian Europe to sail and you know, buy, you know, porphyry from Egypt at the time.
(31:05):
So in particular, those purple porphyry columns were extremely valuable.
And I always enjoy when I go on vacation to places like, you know, France or, you know, Italy.
It's always fun to look out and see if he's spotting at that stone.
When I was at Versailles, which of course was the palace that was enlarged to its current huge form by Leah the 14th, I spotted some of that porphyry.
(31:30):
And a highly educated, you know, nobleman or someone else visiting Versailles would have known when he or she spotted that porphyry, that oh, wow, you know, Leah the 14th, that person's, you know, he's very well educated.
He's very wealthy.
He has that expensive stone from Egypt in his collection and you see that all over, for example, New Saint Peter's Basilica.
(31:55):
The last time I visited, I was actually kind of laughing because pretty much none of the columns in Saint Peter's Basilica are from the 15th or 16th century.
They actually were all these giant, huge columns taken from the Baths of Caracalla, which Michelangelo had explored.
He actually advised the Pope on which of the best sculptures to buy.
(32:17):
That's why the Vatican has such a great core sculpture collections, because the great Michelangelo told them what to buy.
And so I was actually looking at all these columns.
I'm like, man, these columns are really beaten up.
There's chips out of them.
I'm like, oh, wait a minute, These are ancient Roman columns, so there's smolia even in like the most important church in the Roman Catholic Church, Saint Peter's this ancient Roman and Greek.
(32:45):
In some instances in the Western world, these pieces of marble take on almost this sort of mystical quality because they were made by the civilization that's long gone.
And when you incorporate this mystical marble and stone, your new building using that old material has this credibility, this certain mystique, that it inherits by having the workmanship of past civilizations added into it.
(33:35):
Yeah, Speaking of past things, buildings to federal, I mentioned also the hydraulic bricks, which was a form of Spolio that my parents had fashioned A walkway out of.
Yeah, I mean the city of Saint Louis, which was only founded what back, you know, of just over 250 years ago, it even now has its own spolia.
(34:01):
It has its own materials that people value with greater reverence than its own equivalent modern, you know, produced material.
And that is probably most famously it's brick and terracotta.
I mean, Saint Louis once produced millions of bricks a year.
If not, you know, in its whole history of brick making billions of bricks and hydraulic press.
(34:27):
Brick Company is probably one of the most famous.
And they always stamp their name on it, as far as I can tell, in a place, not necessarily always where you could see it because it was incorporated into a wall.
And now, as far as I know, not a single brick is produced in the city of Saint Louis, at least not on a commercial scale.
(34:47):
Maybe there might be some people, an artisan who makes his or her own bricks, as you know, for artistic purposes.
But it's just like.
Rome.
Stay tuned.
Yeah, right.
It's just like Rome, you know?
There's no ancient Romans producing Roman art in Rome anymore, so it just makes their art just the more valuable.
Likewise, because no one's making commercial grade bricks in Saint Louis anymore, it makes those bricks just the more valuable now.
(35:15):
They go for a dollar to $2.00 nowadays.
No, even more than that and and even more than that.
And as you say, while when they were originally made, I'm sure they're only a couple pennies.
I mean, if you were to tell somebody in the streets of Saint Louis then you're 1900, that you'd sell them a brick for a dollar, they would laugh at you and maybe think that, like, you know, they definitely think you were a huckster.
(35:42):
And nowadays, you know it's normal.
Yeah, it's, you know, Bricks of Saint Louis Brick has become, have become spolia.
Oh yeah, no.
So yeah, in my parents courtyard is what we called it.
It's the front yard.
The house is set back and.
(36:06):
There was a fountain for one of the projects that he did, which he didn't sell the Fountain Park to the project, but it's the townhouses that are over by IKEA.
Yeah, it's back in the Central West End kind of on Ron McPherson.
That was one of his first, like, big projects that he was really proud of.
(36:29):
But yeah, they didn't use any of, and the same.
The same patterns that they use there are actually around the Cassley building.
The one on Lafayette.
Oh yeah.
And it's the same pattern too.
So that was all made around the same time.
(36:52):
So your Did your parents design the front of the building on Lafayette together?
Or was that Oh yeah, they they they were, it was Cassie Cassley.
So what I understand is that he they started that or my dad started that company.
With his original with with the number one wife and then my mom and him got married soon after and they ran the business out of the house and I think my mom had she's a good finisher of projects.
(37:26):
My dad's a really good starter, but he doesn't want to finish any of the perfect combination.
Well, Michelangelo liked to start stuff too, and never finish.
It, yeah.
And oh, he would say that all the time.
And yeah, so when my mom came in to Polish everything, I believe that's when they really started to be able to accumulate a lot of the spolia that they were accumulating from other projects.
(37:55):
So you'd go to the the, the shop on Lafayette and there would be storage upon storage of molds for past projects.
And I remember they would have days where they, you know, have to get everybody together to move stuff, to go pick it, because everything was organized in such a bit close together that you'd have to, you know.
(38:18):
But it's kind of funny you mentioned that they had, you know, examples of past projects.
There's even a fancy Italian word for that.
It's called the recordo and that's when a an artist would actually sometimes paint or create a a sketch of a work of art that they sold, because it very well might, they might never see it again.
So they would actually make a a record, a record of a project after they had completed it.
(38:43):
So they actually did that as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a lot of times me and friends, we'll see if we if they want to go on to podcast later.
We would go and run the forklift, get up on top of it with a pallet.
I would be like six or seven years old at this and you guys would ride on top of.
(39:05):
That, oh, 100%, yeah, it was, yeah, in hindsight, whoops.
But nobody got hurt.
It was the 19.
It's probably, Yeah, nobody got hurt then.
It was the 20th.
Century, yeah.
(39:27):
But yeah, my father always had a crew of people that would help him with his projects.
He was very good at getting you to believe in his, his vision.
And I would argue that that's what made him a good artist.
(39:49):
And I think a lot of it really was.
He was good at like.
Programming your mind with certain words and then kind of mumbling through the rest so you would fill in the blanks while you're helping him.
Even.
Because people constantly say that when you were on crew, you know he'd come over and you need to go do this over here and you people go, what did he say?
(40:16):
And if you ask him to get mad, you know.
The Devil Wears Prada type situation.
So he wasn't a micromanager, is what you're saying?
Or he was a bit of both.
But no, he wasn't a micromanager.
You you kind of never knew why something would be bad though, so if it was bad it would might just because he was in a bad mood.
(40:42):
Everything was very guttural.
Is a gut instinct.
Uh huh.
Do you feel like his his crew would start to kind of get an instinctual idea of what he wanted from them though A 100% and then they'd, you know, that have their own language to describe his mood, you know?
(41:02):
Like, what are some of the different moods they came up with for?
Oh, just he would be in a bad mood, or in a good mood he was.
He was kind of a man of polarity in that regard, and I think you would use that energy to not to get to woo woo, but to make him concentrate.
(41:27):
Well, what do you mean by that?
It explains that well, I guess when you ruminate on stuff, is that is that a negative term?
Ruminate.
Not necessarily, yeah.
Well, when you get into that headspace, you actually get very good at turning off your like the connection between what you're physically doing and what you're what you're like inner animal is doing.
(41:56):
So I think that he would, you know, when you're not thinking in English, an artist will tell you that they know what I'm talking about.
A musician will definitely.
You know, you're thinking in music, you're in a different realm, even it's quantum quantum computing in your brain, stuff like that.
You know you can't throw baseball in the in the pitch, in the strike zone every time on purpose and less if you don't think about it, you know?
(42:28):
And he was very into knowing how to focus on his projects, but very bad at focusing on his life.
(43:08):
So we were talking about that sculptor, Bernini.
I think he's someone who's really interesting.
Like I said, you know, he was kind of seen as a.
Successor to Michelangelo and I I think one thing that's very important to point out is that obviously Michelangelo was a painter and he also, very importantly, on top of all of the other influences he he did, he was also a very influential architect.
(43:34):
I don't think a lot of people realize that.
In fact, just driving around the city like Saint Louis, there's actually huge amounts of influence even on Saint Louis architecture.
So, Jean Lorenzo Bernini, he was actually a Florentine who was born in Naples, because that's where his dad, who was a pretty competent sculptor, nowhere near as talented as his son Jean Lorenzo would eventually be.
(43:58):
But I have a question for you.
What?
What?
What type of pizza did he like?
I assume it would be Neapolitan.
Now I'm blanking on whether or not Neapolitan pizza had even been invented.
Right.
Yeah.
Boy, that's another whole story about which is the oldest pizza place in Naples.
There's this one place that might have gone out of business for a little while.
(44:19):
Anyway, if you go to Naples, it's an amazing city.
I call it the Saint Louis of Italy.
Don't stand in line at those places that claim to be the oldest one.
There's a place right outside of this one Church of Saint Paul that has perfectly great pizza.
It's in the oven for just 4 minutes.
You never have to wait long for pizza anyway.
(44:41):
It turns out they didn't want to stay in Naples for the pizza for very long.
In fact actually Roman style pizza is really good as well.
It's thin crust as well.
And he started his career with the Borghese family, which I'm sure you probably have never heard of, but they were a very important family.
The the one guy was Pope Pope Paul the 5th and his.
(45:04):
Nephew Chipeone was also a very important patron of the arts as well.
So we actually get the term nepotism from is because Nepote is Italian for nephew.
Cause theoretically a member of the Roman Catholic Church would not theoretically have any sons, right?
No, theoretically, theoretically.
(45:26):
And also then of course, maybe the other most famous patrons were the.
Garberini family.
Anyway, the reason why we bring up Bernini is that he helps to push forward a new sort of way of looking at art.
And that is the combination of painting, sculpture and architecture together.
(45:48):
And that's very much what we would call sort of anti classical because when you look back to the Greeks and the Romans, when you look at their architecture, every single component whether it's the column.
The steps, you know, and also then the attic as we call it, they're all very delineated and separate from each other.
(46:08):
They don't blend together.
The sculpture is very cool, calm, collected composition.
Well, Bernini does something much different, and we see it as well in Hellenistic art back in the ancient world as well, becomes much more dramatic.
We call it Baroque.
Art And of course there still was classical art and architecture in the 17th century when Bernini was active.
(46:33):
But we also then in the work of Bernini, work in Saint Peter's Basilica, but also very famously in a church, Santa Maria Dellavatoria.
We see in the work of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, we see the combination of painting, sculpture and architecture.
(46:53):
They begin to fuse together.
And because some of the most important early scholars in the modern day field of of art history were German, the term is actually German.
And we always joke that there is in fact a word for everything in German, but they cheat by making a compound noun, and the term is ghazamt kunstvek, which basically means we'll translate it as sort of total work of art.
(47:23):
And that is where the lines, the borders between art, art forms, paintings, sculpture, the decorative arts and architecture all blend together where you can't really say where one begins and the other ends.
And Bernini really pioneers that.
(47:44):
He also does that with his advising of the decoration of the home Church of the Jesuits, which is the Church of Iljazu.
It actually has a much longer name, which I'm not going to bore us all with that, and I actually probably don't remember its full name.
Anyway, how the heck did you remember Ghaziah?
Well, it takes years of therapy after taking years of Germany, German language, let's just put it that way.
(48:08):
Six years of German anyway.
So this Ghazamt Kunzwark we see that.
With the There's actually one thing, and I always pretty much hate every photograph that's ever taken of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, because it only takes a picture of the sculpture.
And then occasionally they'll show you the architecture around it, which is very architectonic, is the fancy word we use.
(48:36):
It's very it pushes and pulls.
It's actually sort of a.
It's what we call an Ida Cule.
It's the architecture around the altar, but it actually is curved.
It's and it's a broken pediment.
We call it because it doesn't go all the way across.
But what no one ever does is that they don't show you the painting on the vault of the church up above that was painted by one of his acolytes of Bernini.
(48:59):
And together it works as this total work of art.
And they don't.
They're not possible for all three of these elements to work separately.
Yeah, you can't show all that, right?
I mean the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, it's actually spot lit by a not a skylight, but there's a window that you can actually see on the outside of the church that lights the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, this famous baroque sculpture.
(49:28):
Naturally, Bernini was a master of stage effects.
In fact, he actually did operas.
He actually had stage effects.
Special effects.
I can only imagine if Bernini was alive today how much fun he would have with all the technology we have.
But what technology he did have in the 17th century, he used to the greatest effect and, you know, natural lighting, etcetera.
(49:54):
The actual sculpture is made out of, I think, travertine and marble.
It looks like it's floating.
It's actually affixed to the back wall of the Chapel with iron rods.
It's it's amazing.
And so consequently, moving forward, we see this moving up to France, up to the German states.
(50:16):
There was no Germany back then yet.
And we see how art now is becoming, you know, indivisible.
We don't just simply have paintings hanging on the wall, we have paintings that are incorporated into the architecture as particularly ceiling paintings had become very highly evolved.
You know, we see.
(50:37):
What we nowadays call found art, I think of this room at the new palace in Potsdam, part of the larger palace complex of Sansui, where they actually incorporated real seashells into this room, which is just out of this world.
And that actually we see the development of what we call the Rococo style, which is just basically Baroque architecture and style.
(51:06):
That's developed in France, Just taken to this whole new level of ornateness and asymmetricality is how you might just differentiate between Baroque and rococo.
If in fact as some architectural, you know, historians argue there's not even actually a difference, but just going into this room and it's just glistening with seashells everywhere.
(51:29):
I actually even think when I go to a lot of the parts of the City Museum, there is this very rococo.
Quality.
Oh yeah.
So I, I and So what we're getting at here is that I argue that the City Museum is a Ghazamth Kunzverk.
I I think it very much fits into the the history of art history and architectural history.
(51:50):
It it it, you can't separate the parts out by themselves.
You couldn't put it in a special exhibit, otherwise it loses its its power.
So yeah, so my parents were making these exhibits out in the world, like Turtle Park and the stuff at the zoo, and a lot of them would have an environment like that they would create around each exhibit, IE the outside of the living world, there's a giant rock, which I don't think it's a real rock, I think it's concrete, but it's got a whole bunch of little tiny models or of actual animals, and they are made out of bronze.
(52:52):
And I actually have the, I have the possum over there somewhere.
We'll take a photo of it and throw it up, throw it up.
We'll take a photo of it and put it on our socials.
And yeah, so all of that stuff that they were built, they know just different tests that they would do.
(53:20):
All they they would say my father was very much a hoarder and he would save all that stuff.
So if they made something that didn't, it was the wrong color, they would save it if it was still in good shape.
And all of that stuff ended up being the building blocks to the caves or and when you go go in there, they'll be like a fake rock.
(53:42):
If you look at it, it's a fake rock.
But I actually think that they do a better job of making it look like a rock than other places.
And you don't even, you forget that it's fake there, even though you know and it's not trying to be real.
Like it's definitely a sculpture of a rock.
(54:06):
And in the beginning they would go around and they would look for trees that were really big, that were coming down, especially in Forest Park in Tower Grove Park.
And they built them into the museum.
They brought in some whole like some fancy wood from someplace and it got some sort of African boar beetle thing and it took out a whole bunch of the original part of the Enchanted Forest actually, so.
(54:39):
Oh my yeah, you're kidding me.
No, no, that that was about five years into it.
Oh, so this was like over 20 years ago now?
Yeah.
But yeah, it was fun.
And it really just liked that type of wood, whatever.
Beetle and that.
That beetle probably came in off of some other truck.
(55:00):
Yeah, it was too bad.
But yeah, my father always was talking about the forts and stuff, tree forts that they would build as kids and immediately would start doing that for us when I was a kid.
And yeah, that we had in the basement, it, it started off as a production facility for their architectural facade company.
(55:36):
And as they had kids, as they had kids that slowly, yeah, moved it out into the Lafayette shop.
But we have a couple clips of people playing in the basement.
(56:01):
There's a ramp in the basement where I have some pretty cool video actually, of us sitting in a big giant barrel rolling down the ramp and.
What did you guys kind of sliding down the ramp like you're not rolling head over, like you're not bouncing around banging yourself up?
(56:23):
No, we definitely did that, but.
You did that too, you You would do that once each time?
Because yeah, but that was City Museum before City Museum 100%.
So is that stuff down in the basement still there?
No, we've redone the basement as over the years it's slowly became more livable.
(56:54):
And now it just has a guest bed in it.
So my dad and his first wife go on their honeymoon and they decide to go all around the world, I'm pretty sure.
(57:15):
And while they are going to Rome, they happen to be going through the theater.
What is it that basilica?
Yeah.
Basilica.
New Saint Peter's Basilica.
Yeah, yeah.
And there my dad always described it to me as could hear the sound of steel and marble, which to us probably doesn't trigger the same response, meaning you only really hear that when somebody is trying to change the marvel in some fashion with with a lot of force.
(58:10):
So he went and he looked for the the source of the noise and he said that there was kind of a commotion, It's more of a stir.
And he noticed that there was a guy who was screaming I am Jesus.
In English, yeah, I'm pretty sure he was saying it in all of the languages.
(58:32):
Oh, OK And he was chipping off the face of Man on the Pieda, the famous sculpture by Michelangelo.
And yeah, my dad was in shock for a split second, but then noticed that nobody else was really doing anything and was kind of the catalyst guy himself a lot of times anyway, and reached up and grabbed the guy by his beard.
(59:13):
Was the was this guy facing towards the audience?
No, I think he was an.
Audience, It seems like since everyone was just staring at him, right?
Correct.
From what I understand, he had done a pretty wicked damn amount of damage to the face, yeah?
He he it's from Understand.
He chipped the He chipped the Virgin Mary's eyelid and knocked off one of her arms and some fingers.
(59:40):
Yeah, irreparable damage.
Technically, they repaired it.
But yeah, we'll talk about that in just a second.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, he, I remember he, he was like, I threw him into the crowd and then he regretted it, 'cause they were pretty, pretty rough on him.
He could tell.
He could tell that it he was a guy going through a time, Yeah, that's not something that a normal human being does.
(01:00:08):
Even though this guy was an artist, he was having a psychotic break and it's a very famous.
Separate story, in fact, the character, and I'm not going to name him because there is some debate to why somebody would do something like that.
(01:00:32):
And that's for the notoriety, right.
So I'm not going to name him, but it became a a Saturday Night Live character.
Really.
Yeah, yeah.
They had like papers from Blank, Blank, yeah.
And it was just basically his paranoid rants as that guy.
And it was the 80s, so.
(01:00:54):
So it so it has happened in 1972.
Yeah.
And so there was a character on Saturday Night Live that actually.
Yeah, Wow, I forget.
Yeah.
So it made its cultural impact.
And I would argue that in a lot of ways, my father would say that that he impacted Art Mower by accident that day.
(01:01:18):
Really.
How so?
Just by no.
That whole statue would have gotten destroyed if nobody stopped.
And in those type of situations a lot of times a a crowd might get paralyzed to doing anything is.
It called the bystander effect or something like that.
So some like you're lucky if somebody steps in at all.
Yeah, I've read about that, definitely.
(01:01:39):
And I would say that that is a strong point on my father's character is that he would have, he was down to take the beating for the Pieta.
He was 100% he was going to take the geologist hammer to the face for the Pieta.
Wow.
Your dad grabbed them by the beard, right?
He was a man of means.
When he was fighting, it was.
(01:02:00):
You're not going to retaliate, right?
Yeah.
Your face will be in the ground.
So I've seen there's a famous photograph out there floating around where I I can actually spot your dad.
He's still standing up next to to the, I think, yeah.
And you could tell it's him, yeah.
A very young dad.
He's like 2120.
Yeah, 'cause, yeah, he would have been pretty in his 20s back in early 70s, correct?
(01:02:26):
And it looks like there was some other people near him, but yeah, I think because he he said that when he reached up and grabbed the guy by the beard, everybody kind of followed suit.
So people started actually doing something once he, and that also is something you know, that he commented on like, you know, like maybe he should have just like beat him up a little bit instead of throw him into the crowd.
(01:02:53):
So your dad actually felt a little guilty.
So did the basically the Italian crowd just start pummeling the guy once he got?
From what I understand, yeah, yeah, of course they.
Did I have a funny story about my dad?
I'll tell at the end of this but we'll talk about the Pieta story and then I'll tell you my dad's story at the very end.
So yeah I mean it was it was a big deal and the stat this I I use the word sculpture.
(01:03:16):
It's one of the most famous works by Michelangelo very early in his career, will generally kind of say 14981499 coming off the success of his very famous David, which was for the.
The Cathedral of Florence, in fact that very famous David, which is now inside of the Academia Museum in Florence, was actually most people don't realize this.
(01:03:40):
That very famous David was actually originally sculpted with the intention and Michelangelo, while he was sculpting it, was underneath the impression it was actually going up on top of the roof line of the cathedral.
So they thought it was such an amazing sculpture that they actually kept it down on the ground, which has remained to this day.
(01:04:01):
So coming off of that success, he then gets this Commission for the Pieta from actually a French cardinal, if you can believe that, for old Saint Peter's Basilica.
That's what a lot of people don't realize.
Also, many things that people don't realize about the career of Michelangelo that actually originally was on display in the former.
The silica constructed by the Roman Emperor Constantine that was actually demolished then in the the 15th century, it actually had it was.
(01:04:28):
It was actually controversial at the time.
I mean, this was a building that was over 1000 years old, but it was kind of dilapidated and actually tore it down to build the building that's there today.
Did they use the pieces from that building to make the new one?
Well you know that's a great question.
So there are.
It's actually this is a.
If you since you asked, I'll tell you.
I think it's a.
(01:04:49):
They did save these 11 twisted columns that came from the old basilica.
The the legend was is that these 11 twisting columns.
Supposedly came from King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
(01:05:10):
Now, not to offend anybody, but they did not I've heard about.
This yet ten of those columns were reincorporated into New Saint Peter's Basilica, and one is in a museum close by.
Eight of the columns are incorporated into the crossing of New St.
Basilica and then two more are in a an altar nearby.
(01:05:32):
And like as I just mentioned, the 11th is nearby as well.
I I think there's other aspects, for example, the cathedra, the chair of Saint Peter is in New Saint Peter's Basilica as well, obviously.
Anyway, Michelangelo's Pieta made it into New Saint Peter's Basilica, as well as a sculpture of Saint Peter by Arnoffel Dicambio.
(01:05:58):
And there's probably other things as well, but don't quote me on that.
Anyway, it's an incredibly important sculpture, besides the fact that it's a huge tourist attraction, because it does show Michelangelo at his youthful prime, and he actually completed it as well, I might add.
It shows the Virgin Mary with Christ on her lap after he had been crucified.
(01:06:21):
And it's it's a great sculpture because there's a lot of different aspects to it which are very beautiful.
It has that really nice high renaissance pyramidal composition, the pyramid, which is very much a hallmark from Leonardo's art.
Raphael shows as well and his art this idea that a triangle or a pyramid is a sort of nice, perfect composition.
(01:06:43):
And if you can, you know, look it up online, you can see how the body, you know Mary's lap is huge in that sculpture.
If you look at it very closely, it forms a pyramid and.
Likewise, there was this theological debate about how Christ came back to life.
Was it like with a snap of a finger, or did he slowly come back to life?
(01:07:07):
And some pulmonologists, you know, doctors in the medical field, like to sometimes play amateur art historians.
One of them has argued, and I'm not saying that I necessarily 100% agree with this.
They have argued that.
Christ's veins show signs of having blood pressure, like he's coming back to life slowly.
(01:07:29):
In fact, if you look at his draped left hand, you can see he's two fingers might, maybe, might look like they're caressing his mother's robes.
Also, what was actually controversial at the time but was defended very vigorously is that the Virgin Mary is shown very young.
(01:07:50):
Oh yeah, and people were like, what the heck's up with that?
Because later, Michelangelo's Pietas, which I know of two off the top of my head, which I I've seen myself in Florence and Milan, which are very beautiful and incomplete, I might add.
From later on in his career, he shows the Virgin Mary looking much older.
(01:08:11):
The argument was is that there was this philosophical belief that if a woman remained a virgin, she kept her beautiful youthful looks.
Also, I would argue that this concept in Platonic thought that there was the idea that there was this perfect version of you and the idea is that this was this perfect beautiful platonic image of the Virgin Mary.
(01:08:35):
And so anyway, it made the transition over to New Saint Peter's Basilica obviously and you go there today and unfortunately due to.
That guy whose name I won't mention either because I don't want to give him the notoriety.
It's behind bulletproof glass now, and there's so many people taking pictures with flashes, and it's really, honestly, I've seen it from about 40 feet away.
(01:09:03):
Put your phones down, people.
But you really can't enjoy it, to be honest, if you actually, if you're listening to this and you want to see how beautiful this sculpture really is.
I encourage you to go to the new cathedral in the central West End.
There's actually a bronze replica.
Back during World War 2, I was told there was actually a real fear that a lot of the great works of Western art were going to be destroyed.
(01:09:28):
Oh, imagine that.
So they made a lot of copies and Saint Louis being obviously, you know, very high up ranking in Roman Catholicism around the world, they received a bronze replica and it's actually really quite beautiful.
Obviously the original is.
Carrara marble and But the bronze 1 still gives you a great idea and you can actually enjoy it in peace and quiet.
(01:09:52):
And you can actually see it up close, as opposed from behind bulletproof glass with everybody's flashes bouncing off of the glass as you see it in real life, yeah.
But yeah, it was heavily damaged and I think everybody understands like, I don't know if you ever have had trouble with your carpet, you know, like if you get.
(01:10:12):
If you need to patch your carpet, you actually pretty much have to replace the entire piece of carpet, because that run of carpet, the carpet is going to have a particular color that can't be replicated perfectly well.
It's the same way with marble, that block of marble from Carrara, that very famous quarry you know, north of Rome that had been used since the ancient world.
(01:10:37):
It's still highly valuable.
You can see it.
The stuff at Home Depot that's labeled Carrara marble, and it's like $2.00 for a square foot.
That is not real.
Just to let you guys know that's false advertising.
The Carrara marble for that sculpture, we wouldn't be able to find the exact place anymore.
So they actually performed what we might call the graft from the back of the sculpture where nobody sees it.
(01:11:07):
And that's how they used, they found actual matching marble to repair the eyelid and the broken off fingers and they did reattach the arm and actually had been restored before in the 18th century.
So I think it's just a wonderful story.
I mean, you know, on top of all of the just fascinating, you know, interesting stories that you're of the life that your dad lived, he also, you know, he was a sculptor himself and he saves one of the greatest sculptors ever.
(01:11:35):
You know, one of his greatest works of art.
I think that's just AI think it's just such a great story, lightning striking in fascinating ways.
Yeah, and you said you had a story about your dad.
Oh, so this is a great story.
It's not.
My dad did not save a great work of Western art, but my parents years ago, they were flying in between.
(01:12:02):
I think it was London and Madrid.
They're on a business trip and my mom had gone along, you know, to keep my dad company and also to get a chance to see Spain.
And I think they're pretty much the only Americans on this flight in between London and Madrid.
And there are all these obnoxious, like, I don't know if they were like soccer hooligans or just like annoying students on like a class trip.
(01:12:26):
And they were just making everybody so annoyed.
And my dad just stood up and yelled at all of them to shut up.
Yeah.
And the entire plane erupted in applause.
(01:12:46):
And it gets even funnier because then the flight attendants came up and offered my parents champagne.
Yeah.
Oh, those are the days.
And my dad was like, no, I don't like champagne.
I just got to enjoy my peace of quiet on the flight.
(01:13:08):
That's pretty awesome.
Yeah.
Anyway, here's the flying around the world.
So, fellow citizens, this is where our journey through the cast of the Chronicles bring us this week.
But remember, the story never truly ends.
And if you've enjoyed our expedition, delve a little deeper.
(01:13:29):
Hit that like button, subscribe.
And if you're feeling generous, A5 Star Review would be fantastic.
Your support is our lifeline, keeping these stories vibrant and alive.
For those who would like to contribute in any other way, our Patreon awaits your Patreon.
Every bit of support helps us weave these narratives into being.
Don't forget that to visit the cast of the chronicles.com for some unique finds.
(01:13:53):
We've got everything from underwear pins to other intriguing merch.
Got a story that you think belongs on the podcast?
We'd love to hear it.
A heartfelt thank you to Tim Kammer, Kurt Nickmeyer, Ricky Fortner, Bruce and Laura.
Rick Irwin, Stephanie von Drasek, Gene Webb.
Your unwavering support and encouragement are the cornerstones of this project.
(01:14:14):
Special thanks to Nicole, Ramona, and Ryan.
Immense gratitude goes to my mother, GAIL Cassidy, and her partner.
My world is richer because of you, too.
To Daisy, my sister.
I love you.
This one's for you and Jared, JJ, Julian and Jayden.
You inspire this journey.
And a dedicated shout out to Christine Marshall.
(01:14:36):
10 years of dedication, yet the elephant on the roof still eluded you.
I'm Max.
Robert Cassidy, your guide on this adventure alongside with Maria Cassidy and Chris Nasiger.
A big thank you for tuning in.
Our theme song, A Day Like Today by The Acid Set is Maria's dad's band.
Remember, the views and opinions on this podcast are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the stance of city, museum or other affiliated entities.
(01:15:03):
We bring this podcast to you for entertainment and and information only.
Until we meet again, citizens keep delving into the unknown, questioning the world around you, and seek the story behind the story.
Farewell and Stay tuned for the next episode of the cast of The Chronicles.
(01:15:37):
A day like today, it's in my eye.
The way the sun shines on the windy skies.
Thoughts of you?
Traveling through my head.
(01:15:58):
The look on your face although that I rain a delicate day is in my eye.
A delicate day is going by.
(01:16:20):
I'll see you right now like I never.
Felt before all those wrong and I can't help anymore.
It was so much a day like today when you were here and I knew you would stay.
(01:16:47):
A day like today, the.
(01:17:26):
A day like.
Today is in my dream thinking of you so it isn't a day like today is in my life.
(01:18:08):
Awesome.
Cut it.
Print it.
Welcome to our space, fellow citizens.
Now let's set the stage.
While I'd love to shoot from the hip, to riff and to share a laugh, there are times when reality slips in and the curtain behind the entertainment is pulled away.
This isn't just another edutainment podcast.
Here you'll dive into an authentic experience.
My life has been a tapestry of artistic people, and let me tell you, they can be quite the characters.
(00:26):
We've tried our best to keep this family friendly by bleeping out some colorful language, but just as a heads up, content warnings are a thing here.
And just to be clear, while the City Museum has its charm for kids, this podcast explores the deeper, sometimes darker sides of life, death, and everything in between.
(00:47):
And as Mr.
Charles would say, explore with your own discretion.
Welcome to the inaugural episode of the cast of The Chronicles.
Think of This is our Rosetta, the initial sketch from a much grander creation.
It's the first brushstroke on a vast canvas of stories we're going to explore together.
We start with a narrative rimming with potential and promise.
(01:09):
Growing up in downtown St.
Louis, MO, in a house that was once a religious mission, I was enveloped in an atmosphere rich with creativity and history.
My father and his first wife snagged this property, including the two adjoining houses, for around $7000, all connected through a shared base, a quirk effect.
My childhood bed was placed where the missions altar once stood, a detail my parents often recounted with the twinkle in their eyes.
(01:35):
Driving past our Lafayette Square home in the mid 1990s, you'd have glimpsed through a living piece of history, imaginatively reinvented.
Our home, deeply rooted in its past as a mission, was set back from the street.
Unlike its neighbors, the courtyard was a beautiful fusion of historical and contemporary elements.
The walkway, paved with hydraulic bricks reclaimed from the local St.
(01:57):
renovation, was a nod to the blend of Saint Louis heritage and progress.
The Ivy clad sculptures in our landscape each held a story to tell stories of transformation and renewal.
This place was a more than a home, it was a reflection of my parents artistic souls where the past and present were seamlessly intertwined.
Our home was graced with Spolio architectural pieces rich with history in the basement.
(02:22):
Once the heart of my parents architectural sculptural business transformed into a jungle gym, the front space rather than a typical lawn displaying sculptures from various forgotten projects showcasing my parents gift for uncovering Eden beauty.
Prominent among the pieces was a giant iguana and a frog statue, the later inscribed with Max Cassie.
(02:44):
That's me, the iguana, seemingly ready to take on Avw Bug and the Watchful frog silent sentence were icons from my child, the courtyard.
Once the iguanas domain evolved again when it was relocated downtown.
Then came a pivotal day in our store.
My father introduced a 13 foot Burmese Python encased in what was said to be bulletproof glass.
(03:10):
This Python was more than an exotic pet.
It was the living Bosetta, A preliminary model for a larger artistic endeavor.
Its presence sparked a mix of wonder and apprehension, particularly that last one in my mother and my sister days.
As creators of the City Museum, my parents left an indelible mark on our city's artistic landscape.
(03:31):
The Python marked a crucial juncture in their artistic odyssey, a living blueprint for the monumental works to come.
Today I'm chatting with Chris Nasiger, A historian specializing in Saint Louis's art and architecture, to delve deeper into the these tales.
Welcome to the Cassley Chronicles, where every artwork has its story, every lie, its own fabrication.
(03:55):
This episode is our buzzetto join us as we unfold the full picture.
How are you doing today?
Doing great.
How are you doing, Max?
I'm sweating.
Why are you sweating?
It's kind of warm in here.
Yeah, I've got a sweater on, maybe a little warm.
(04:17):
You've been drinking coffee, though.
That might be another reason why you're hot.
I do love cup.
I love coffee too.
I already drank as much as I should.
Well, anyway, so there was a couple of words that I was using there that when telling my life and my family story to you, that you talked to me.
(04:44):
And as we were talking about, I guess the first word that I kind of like to talk about is Bozzetto.
Yeah.
So Bozzetto is a an Italian term which has been used for centuries.
It's basically like a prep preparatory sketch and I don't want people to to limit it to just the idea of like maybe a pencil and a piece of paper.
(05:09):
It could.
It definitely can be that, but it often times.
Was charcoal or you know, lead white, you know all sorts of different different media can be used for it.
It's when the artist is really kind of worked past, you know, maybe just sort of gesture drawings, you know, with the head of live model.
(05:29):
But Seto is really kind of a worked up, you know, preparatory drawing where they've kind of started to really get the composition down and where they're working towards the point where they're going to be.
Doing the actual finished work of art.
Pretty much no professional artist in Western culture just simply started working on the finished work of art right off the bat.
(05:54):
You know Michelangelo, Raphael, You know Bernini.
None of them just started hammering away at a block of marble right off winged it.
Right.
They did not do that.
I mean, I think that's what people.
don't realize.
One time I was watching a news article and they were talking about, you know, how Renaissance artists cheated by using, you know, what we call pouncing?
(06:20):
You know, they'd actually make a giant, what we actually call a cartoon, which was the step right after a potsetto where they actually called the cartoon.
Yeah, that's actually the the correct term.
It's not, you know, like what you see.
Like in the funnies.
It's actually where they would take the the potsetto and they had actually transferred into a 1 to 1 sized drawing.
That would actually have little holes poked in it.
(06:42):
And they would actually, you know, take a bag of chalk or I should say charcoal, and they'd actually pounce.
They bagged a little, banged a little bag of chalk based off of the potsetto image up on the actual canvas or onto the panel or onto the ceiling and transfer the image that way from the potsetto.
And, you know, I had this article said that was cheating.
(07:02):
That's not cheating.
And Michelangelo did it for the Sistine Ceiling.
For example, I never think that using technology is cheating for art, and you can hopefully I don't ever have to eat those words.
So what I think what people also need to realize that a Pozzetto can also be a sculpture.
Sculptors like, you know, I think the the artist that jumps out to me first and foremost is an artist like Jean Lorenzo Bernini, who was sort of the Michelangelo of the 17th century in Rome.
(07:34):
He worked extensively on works in the most important building of 17th century Rome, which was Saint Peter's Basilica.
And he actually, but we're really fortunate to have, are surviving bozzetti, which is the plural in Italian of bozetti.
Exactly.
(07:55):
Many of those survive and they're extremely valuable because, quite frankly, marble works, which of course was the material that he would work in.
For the finished work of art are pretty hard to come by.
They don't really come up for sale very often, and his most famous works are owned by the Roman Catholic Church, and they're not selling them.
They're in churches throughout Rome and a couple of other places around Italy.
(08:18):
But these Bosetti are often times made out of clay, and some of them are damaged, but they're still incredibly interesting.
You can see some in the Vatican Museums as well.
What's really interesting about them is often times these botsetti are different than the final composition, so we can actually get a window into the mind of a sculptor such as Bernini and what I really find interesting about your dad's work because he actually did these preparatory sketches every time.
(08:52):
And sometimes he actually did drawings now.
Well, at the end with City Museum he was doing almost a free form jazz sculpture, but that was only the last, probably 10.
Years.
So and that's actually you know that that that evolved.
That's interesting because you know some very highly skilled sculptors, we actually believe that even maybe Donatello and Michelangelo maybe maybe got to the point where they could have just simply you know, but if you looked at the at the models of say of a Cementland model or something else, stuff will be very different.
(09:31):
Well, you're also living in an actual the actual reality of the space and the material that you're working with and that you have to so.
That's really interesting.
Is that model of the Matland survive or has it been?
There's a couple of them.
Well, I'll, well, I'll put a lookout for it it there was one at the museum so oh wow.
(09:51):
Try to get a.
Stand so you do know for a fact that.
Stuff different differs in it did, yes.
So it's very typical of of, you know, I think what's interesting about your dad is he fits in very comfortably and very normally with a lot of other great artists.
Well, he he did study actually as an actual apprentice under a guy named Rudy Turini who was an art teacher at the end at Fontban, but I believe he was at a different place originally.
(10:26):
And I think when he was like young, like.
It sounds like his teacher sounds like he might have been Italian.
Yeah, Rudy Torini.
Yeah, that sounds like a very Italian.
So his stuff can be actually seen in City Museum back behind.
Like if you're looking at old circus area, that's like the circus moved.
(10:47):
That's what ended up.
There's like a piano back there.
There's a whole bunch of classically posed figurines or figures.
They're life-size.
They're pretty good.
It's cool.
Yeah.
I, I, I, I see that.
I see in your dad's work that evidence of earlier Italian artists 100%.
(11:08):
Very clearly.
And so it's not surprising to see that he had some of the same methodology of work, you know, going through this preparatory sketches, whether it's in clay.
Terracotta or even you know other materials and then having the final work in a more durable permanent material such as concrete or marble.
(11:29):
I unlike my father which I don't think my father liked getting yelled at by people.
He just didn't care that much.
I have a very strong guilt response to things and never like to get yelled at or have attention on me negatively.
And so when I was a little kid, I'd go down to my dad's shop, down at at the the Cassley shop we would call it on.
(11:59):
Lafayette just West of Jefferson?
Yeah.
And yeah, he would have all these library books there, and they'd be getting dusty and scratched and lo, lo and behold, walk in one day and they're cut to pieces.
And find out one day that he's making art for the library to pay off his library fines, because he would just keep the books.
(12:27):
And those there, they weren't art books.
They were, they were all animal books, 'cause he was doing stuff like the sea lions at the Living World or at the zoo, and then he was doing The Shark in the Living World.
And so he was, he was cutting up these, these books, and then I'd be going to school and they'd talk about, you know, returning your library books and Oh no, Dad's going to get in so much trouble.
(12:54):
And and that was the least amount of trouble he probably got in, but if you actually go to the bar.
Branch the bar Branch.
Yes, you can go see Bob Castley's library.
Finds still are permanently on display.
Now his one of his favorite folklore tails was the rabbit in the hare or the turtle tortoise in the hare.
(13:15):
Rabbit in the hare, the tortoise is really easy to see if you don't walk around it.
As you're walking towards the door, you'll you'll trip over it.
The the tortoise is not that interesting of an art piece that is.
Now when we talk about different levels of castley art, there's the frog, which I mentioned in the cold open.
(13:36):
The frog was one of the first animals that was mass produced that was huge.
And he would actually, he he always told me that he never really sold that many of them, but they were good for giving away to like a school and the school would give him a like auction them off and they'd auction off for about $800 I think, he said.
(13:57):
So he they were He'd never really made any money on the Frogs.
They're good stocking stuffers, yes, and the hugest stocking stuffers.
And let's do a frog call out, because I mean they ended up everywhere.
Let's, let's, let's try to find the furthest away frog castly frog.
And you can know it's a castly frog if it has the base.
(14:19):
It says Max castly, which, yes, confused me to high heaven.
That and the movie Mad Max did not appreciate that.
I do like it now.
It took a while for me to grow into the like I was definitely old by the time.
Well, it was confusing and scary.
(14:41):
So besides those, what now are incredibly priceless models of cement land do you have?
Any other examples of the of Bossetti left from your dad like earlier?
There are some stuff that's on display at the museum right now.
Yeah, there's a history exhibit.
(15:02):
They also have Kurtz on Exhibit 2 so.
Kurt But yeah, like I said, the stuff at the museum was free.
Jazz expressionism.
It was legitimately you'd make a steel structure that was in the shape of a head of something, right?
(15:23):
And as you put stuff, you slopped some concrete or gypsum over it.
You would, Yeah.
So it's really interesting.
There's one part, it's probably my least favorite thing at City Museum, which I think we should only be negative about City Museum and the show, obviously.
(15:46):
But it was just, it was a bad time in my life when we did this part.
But they built the front stairway and they made it all out of like, plaster.
It's a there's a it's a serpent.
But there's the this wing that comes off of it for no reason I just don't like.
(16:13):
It you really hate that?
I don't know why I hate it.
Just sometimes it's a it.
The whole place is a sketch and.
Well, it's interesting you should say that because, you know, I mean moving into the 19th century as art became much more experimental, I might just, well, I don't know if I necessarily say art was an experimental before that.
(16:37):
There was less of a an interest in having, you know, it being so regimented as it had been before.
It's interesting is to hear that as your dad advanced as an artist, he became much more free form is the term you use it, but much more sort of working away from that preparatory, you know, laying it out very carefully beforehand, but instead just sort of going with his instincts as he'd be matured as an artist.
(17:06):
I think that's really interesting.
Well, the iguana statue looks like an iguana.
And the frog statue, actually, I think it was based on some toad ironically.
And then the turtle is a box turtle and the turtle one was made well before turtle park.
So I want to say that that was like an idea in its head for a pretty long time.
(17:30):
Right.
Well, I think, you know, after you look at so many different animals and stuff and you've sculpted them, perhaps you start to be able to try and develop the ability to, you know, sculpt it in your head.
It does remind me of, OK, so my dad had this huge snake that he shows up with and we love the far side growing up.
(17:52):
I mean, who doesn't You.
Know it's been popping up on my Facebook feed quite a lot.
Yeah, like last couple weeks.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So there's God makes the snake.
Yeah.
Show him rolling up the.
That's a famous one.
This is a singe, yeah.
So that's what was annoying about the snake is that it's not that hard to look at a a picture of a snake.
And also they're scalable too.
(18:16):
The tiny ones look like the big ones.
If anything, the tinier ones can look a little bit cooler and crazier, like the really ornate faced crazy one, you know?
But doesn't that kind of show your dad's?
Sort of.
I think he wanted to put it in the museum.
So you think it was kind of like a ploy that, oh, I need to, oh, I think he wanted to annoy everybody and like, so he would use these pranks and and I say pranks with, you know, quotes.
(18:48):
So he showed it up to the neighbor's house with a couple of the guys.
I guess they had a few drinks and thought it was funny.
And they showed up next door with the snake.
And I have a photo of this and you can see they, they're a little, little too relaxed to be, to be honest, because 13 feet is huge.
(19:10):
And yeah, he's just, I would say if we were doing a captioning contest like the Internet likes to do, it'd be like this.
My snake, you know?
Right.
And I'll post that it's definitely weird.
And I am.
So they threw the snake in cuz everybody got bored with it or whatever, and they put it in the bathroom to scare people.
(19:36):
And the snake was like, I don't really wanna be in this bathroom and they can sense where heat and stuff is.
So it proceeded to move the toilet over and crawl down through into the basement.
So when somebody opened up the door, the snake wasn't there and they were like, where's the snake?
I'll.
Wait, so.
(19:56):
No, no, no.
It just escaped a bunch of times.
This is just one of the times I thought.
It went down through the water holding its breath.
No, but no.
It actually physically pushed the toilet.
It was big enough, yeah, because toilets don't.
They're not cemented in place necessary.
I've watched a lot of wax.
Well, I've watched a lot of This Old House episodes where they installed toilets and there's that big giant beeswax ring.
(20:22):
Yeah.
And.
They can sense heat and up.
That will not heat, but a temperature flex, right?
Because they're cold blooded.
Yeah, so they're like, oh, I'm going through this obvious hole that you guys can't see for whatever reason.
And so there's there's pictures somewhere and I'm putting the call out now of the the, the snake halfway up and the snake halfway down and like, you know, and yeah, I never liked so.
(20:48):
The cavalier nature with animals that.
Like, leave them outside.
So the so he got the snake.
Ostensibly because he needed to study it carefully for a pozzetto of the snake for Turtle Park.
But in reality it was just probably for a little bit of hell raising.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then, so once he brought it back, this thing would escape from its actual cage.
(21:12):
And I called my sister and you know, I was like, hey, I'm going to trigger my sister.
But hey, Daisy, what do you remember about the snake?
And she said.
Well, I remember coming home from your piano lesson, which is a Wednesday.
They always were.
And she was about 8 years old probably and walked into the courtyard and right in front of her face was the snake and it was 13 feet long.
(21:36):
So it was like eye level to a nine year old or 12 year old.
I have no idea how old.
I'm terrible with the time, not a younger than a teenager.
Yes, a child I couldn't have picked up the snake at.
That age and I was probably like 11, but yeah, she said that me and my dad jumped on the snake and threw it in the in the in the snake cage and then they were going to move it to someplace else, but it escaped again and they just, they didn't know where it went and it got really cold out because winter, winter be happening as it does in Saint Louis.
(22:12):
And it was, I guess it was a more mild winter because it survived.
It found a place underneath.
Some part of the neighbor's house, I guess.
Oh my.
God.
And there's a little warm spot.
And they found it and it moved.
They moved.
(22:32):
The snake never had a name.
You never named the snake?
No.
That's actually really interesting.
No, I never liked the snake.
Well, I mean, I I felt bad for the snake, you know?
Yeah.
But yeah, yeah, we would feed.
The snake.
Cute animals, you know.
Not, not me, I say.
(22:53):
We but your dad.
The snake would eat the cute animals in my opinion.
You know, so like rabbits and.
Yeah, Guinea.
Pigs.
Guinea pigs, They scream.
Yeah.
And so I I fell out a This was one of the first, you know, familial riffs.
(23:14):
And what did your mom say about this snake?
I mean, she.
She.
Doesn't have very much memory about the snake, actually.
I called her and she's like, I don't really remember.
Let me look for the photos.
She found the photos, but she's like, I don't really kind of blocked it out.
I'm pretty sure there's other stuff that was just as annoying too.
But yeah, so my parents were doing the these really big animals, so the next thing that that was on the list was a huge giraffe.
(23:43):
So we come home from school one day.
No, I'm just kidding.
There was no giraffe.
Thankfully, no, your dad did not illegally import a giraffe.
But he would go to the zoo and hang out in the giraffe area behind the scenes and he got permission to go, Yeah.
OK, because he was.
He had contracts with the zoo to do have different animals at different times.
(24:07):
He did a a hippo.
Yeah.
Anyway, that was one of the first big things was he made a hippo for me?
Climb through So it's a big giant fiberglass hippo.
And that actually ended up at the zoo and all of you climbed on it when you were a kid.
Didn't eventually fall apart or something like, did it?
(24:28):
I don't know.
Is it still there?
I don't know.
I don't remember that.
We're gonna have to go.
Look, I don't remember that they're being a hippo.
To make a list of all the stuff that we need to go look for today.
That used to be your play quote event.
Correct.
But we do have a video of them talking about it being made untrusting.
Yeah, so duh.
(24:52):
Yeah.
So when another word that I used in my fancy intro was spolia, yeah.
So Spolia, as you can probably tell again, is another Italian word, one that's actually very important to sort of the history of Western civilization, particularly in Italy, because let's just be frank, there's a lot more Roman ruins and ancient Greek ruins in Italy than in say, perhaps Germany, though of course I've seen plenty of Roman ruins in Germany as well.
(25:24):
But let's just kind of start from the beginning.
So obviously just huge amount of Roman ruins particularly in the city of Rome, but also like you know in cities like that later on became major Renaissance centers like Florence.
And despite kind of like the popular, you know Hollywood image of it, Rome was not burned to the ground by a bunch of Barbarians.
(25:49):
In reality what happened is most of those huge buildings like the Colosseum or the Roman Forum, those buildings actually survived for centuries after the so-called fall of the Western Roman Empire in the late 5th century.
And what happened is, is that they collapsed due to earthquakes or just simply lack of maintenance.
(26:11):
Some were turned into churches, like the Pantheon is a church actually still to the present day.
And Rome fell into just desperate poverty.
In fact, Rome probably, in my opinion, would have actually been abandoned if it hadn't become the center of the Roman Catholic Church.
And there were certainly a lot of churches being built because it was this major, you know, center of Christianity.
(26:38):
And building materials are expensive.
Marble is expensive.
Likewise, there were a lot of building materials in Rome that came from other parts of the Mediterranean.
The most famous example I would say is porphyry.
Porphyry is this very hard purple granite like I'm not a geologist granite like stone that comes from Mount Porphyrus in Egypt and I late one night out of curiosity I was like, I wonder if you can still import that.
(27:10):
And I found this really sketchy website that claimed you can actually buy I I I have this feeling that your money would just disappear if you sent money to them for some modern day porphyry.
But anyway, I digress.
Starting almost immediately, Roman Catholic churches began to actually, how do we put this borrow permanently pieces of Roman temples, Roman buildings.
(27:38):
And certainly on one level it was because it was free.
There would be a temple down the street and it was dedicated to a Pagan Roman God.
It collapsed or it, you know, just fell down due to lack of maintenance or hadn't been converted into a church.
And they were a little short on money that century, and they would just help themselves all that beautiful marble and worked out.
(28:07):
Great.
By the way, that dog you hear is Louie.
Oh, we have Archer here.
And then the neighbor's dog is Louie.
So those are very Saint Louis dogs, yeah.
It is also particularly, very early on there was this idea of destroying ancient Roman monuments for the purpose of building churches.
(28:31):
There's a very famous church up on top of the Capitoline Hill in Rome where basically every single column is different.
It's this real kind of museum.
This church is Santa Maria and Aracoli.
It also implies that if there's twenty different columns, it means that they probably tore down or salvage from 20 different ancient Roman buildings.
(28:54):
So it's sort of like this trophy room for the destruction of Pagan religion by Christianity in the late Roman Empire.
Now Fast forward.
So we're out of the Middle Ages now.
We're getting to the Renaissance, where the Renaissance, of course, is this reevaluation and reconciliation of the ancient Roman world and the and the Greek world with Christianity and, you know, with people such as Petriarch, etcetera.
(29:24):
And still seen as sort of trophies, but now they're seen with more of a reverence that had been seen in the past that you know, but now they're very much being seen as, you know, works of art and important relics of this era when Italy was the center of the Western world and during the Renaissance, Italy was fragmented.
(29:49):
It was constantly being attacked and, you know, constantly being the pawn of France, Austria, Spain.
And now these stones were becoming a symbol of when Italy was powerful and a great, powerful empire in the Roman Empire.
(30:09):
So now you're seeing the use of these spolia, these pieces of stone in particular.
Now the sculpture was becoming of extremely high value.
While in the past a lot of times what they would do with ancient Roman sculpture or Greek sculpture is they would put it in a furnace and you know burn it down into lime to be used as cement or concrete for concrete.
(30:34):
Now sculpture was valued as a precious work of ancient Greek and Roman art.
And you know, famous Italian families, royal houses around Europe are now collecting these sculptures and these blocks of marble, these pieces of stone, the porphyry, that purple Egyptian stone.
Nobody in the Ottoman Empire which ruled Egypt at this point was allowing anybody from Christian Europe to sail and you know, buy, you know, porphyry from Egypt at the time.
(31:05):
So in particular, those purple porphyry columns were extremely valuable.
And I always enjoy when I go on vacation to places like, you know, France or, you know, Italy.
It's always fun to look out and see if he's spotting at that stone.
When I was at Versailles, which of course was the palace that was enlarged to its current huge form by Leah the 14th, I spotted some of that porphyry.
(31:30):
And a highly educated, you know, nobleman or someone else visiting Versailles would have known when he or she spotted that porphyry, that oh, wow, you know, Leah the 14th, that person's, you know, he's very well educated.
He's very wealthy.
He has that expensive stone from Egypt in his collection and you see that all over, for example, New Saint Peter's Basilica.
(31:55):
The last time I visited, I was actually kind of laughing because pretty much none of the columns in Saint Peter's Basilica are from the 15th or 16th century.
They actually were all these giant, huge columns taken from the Baths of Caracalla, which Michelangelo had explored.
He actually advised the Pope on which of the best sculptures to buy.
(32:17):
That's why the Vatican has such a great core sculpture collections, because the great Michelangelo told them what to buy.
And so I was actually looking at all these columns.
I'm like, man, these columns are really beaten up.
There's chips out of them.
I'm like, oh, wait a minute, These are ancient Roman columns, so there's smolia even in like the most important church in the Roman Catholic Church, Saint Peter's this ancient Roman and Greek.
(32:45):
In some instances in the Western world, these pieces of marble take on almost this sort of mystical quality because they were made by the civilization that's long gone.
And when you incorporate this mystical marble and stone, your new building using that old material has this credibility, this certain mystique, that it inherits by having the workmanship of past civilizations added into it.
(33:35):
Yeah, Speaking of past things, buildings to federal, I mentioned also the hydraulic bricks, which was a form of Spolio that my parents had fashioned A walkway out of.
Yeah, I mean the city of Saint Louis, which was only founded what back, you know, of just over 250 years ago, it even now has its own spolia.
(34:01):
It has its own materials that people value with greater reverence than its own equivalent modern, you know, produced material.
And that is probably most famously it's brick and terracotta.
I mean, Saint Louis once produced millions of bricks a year.
If not, you know, in its whole history of brick making billions of bricks and hydraulic press.
(34:27):
Brick Company is probably one of the most famous.
And they always stamp their name on it, as far as I can tell, in a place, not necessarily always where you could see it because it was incorporated into a wall.
And now, as far as I know, not a single brick is produced in the city of Saint Louis, at least not on a commercial scale.
(34:47):
Maybe there might be some people, an artisan who makes his or her own bricks, as you know, for artistic purposes.
But it's just like.
Rome.
Stay tuned.
Yeah, right.
It's just like Rome, you know?
There's no ancient Romans producing Roman art in Rome anymore, so it just makes their art just the more valuable.
Likewise, because no one's making commercial grade bricks in Saint Louis anymore, it makes those bricks just the more valuable now.
(35:15):
They go for a dollar to $2.00 nowadays.
No, even more than that and and even more than that.
And as you say, while when they were originally made, I'm sure they're only a couple pennies.
I mean, if you were to tell somebody in the streets of Saint Louis then you're 1900, that you'd sell them a brick for a dollar, they would laugh at you and maybe think that, like, you know, they definitely think you were a huckster.
(35:42):
And nowadays, you know it's normal.
Yeah, it's, you know, Bricks of Saint Louis Brick has become, have become spolia.
Oh yeah, no.
So yeah, in my parents courtyard is what we called it.
It's the front yard.
The house is set back and.
(36:06):
There was a fountain for one of the projects that he did, which he didn't sell the Fountain Park to the project, but it's the townhouses that are over by IKEA.
Yeah, it's back in the Central West End kind of on Ron McPherson.
That was one of his first, like, big projects that he was really proud of.
(36:29):
But yeah, they didn't use any of, and the same.
The same patterns that they use there are actually around the Cassley building.
The one on Lafayette.
Oh yeah.
And it's the same pattern too.
So that was all made around the same time.
(36:52):
So your Did your parents design the front of the building on Lafayette together?
Or was that Oh yeah, they they they were, it was Cassie Cassley.
So what I understand is that he they started that or my dad started that company.
With his original with with the number one wife and then my mom and him got married soon after and they ran the business out of the house and I think my mom had she's a good finisher of projects.
(37:26):
My dad's a really good starter, but he doesn't want to finish any of the perfect combination.
Well, Michelangelo liked to start stuff too, and never finish.
It, yeah.
And oh, he would say that all the time.
And yeah, so when my mom came in to Polish everything, I believe that's when they really started to be able to accumulate a lot of the spolia that they were accumulating from other projects.
(37:55):
So you'd go to the the, the shop on Lafayette and there would be storage upon storage of molds for past projects.
And I remember they would have days where they, you know, have to get everybody together to move stuff, to go pick it, because everything was organized in such a bit close together that you'd have to, you know.
(38:18):
But it's kind of funny you mentioned that they had, you know, examples of past projects.
There's even a fancy Italian word for that.
It's called the recordo and that's when a an artist would actually sometimes paint or create a a sketch of a work of art that they sold, because it very well might, they might never see it again.
So they would actually make a a record, a record of a project after they had completed it.
(38:43):
So they actually did that as well.
Yeah, absolutely.
And a lot of times me and friends, we'll see if we if they want to go on to podcast later.
We would go and run the forklift, get up on top of it with a pallet.
I would be like six or seven years old at this and you guys would ride on top of.
(39:05):
That, oh, 100%, yeah, it was, yeah, in hindsight, whoops.
But nobody got hurt.
It was the 19.
It's probably, Yeah, nobody got hurt then.
It was the 20th.
Century, yeah.
(39:27):
But yeah, my father always had a crew of people that would help him with his projects.
He was very good at getting you to believe in his, his vision.
And I would argue that that's what made him a good artist.
(39:49):
And I think a lot of it really was.
He was good at like.
Programming your mind with certain words and then kind of mumbling through the rest so you would fill in the blanks while you're helping him.
Even.
Because people constantly say that when you were on crew, you know he'd come over and you need to go do this over here and you people go, what did he say?
(40:16):
And if you ask him to get mad, you know.
The Devil Wears Prada type situation.
So he wasn't a micromanager, is what you're saying?
Or he was a bit of both.
But no, he wasn't a micromanager.
You you kind of never knew why something would be bad though, so if it was bad it would might just because he was in a bad mood.
(40:42):
Everything was very guttural.
Is a gut instinct.
Uh huh.
Do you feel like his his crew would start to kind of get an instinctual idea of what he wanted from them though A 100% and then they'd, you know, that have their own language to describe his mood, you know?
(41:02):
Like, what are some of the different moods they came up with for?
Oh, just he would be in a bad mood, or in a good mood he was.
He was kind of a man of polarity in that regard, and I think you would use that energy to not to get to woo woo, but to make him concentrate.
(41:27):
Well, what do you mean by that?
It explains that well, I guess when you ruminate on stuff, is that is that a negative term?
Ruminate.
Not necessarily, yeah.
Well, when you get into that headspace, you actually get very good at turning off your like the connection between what you're physically doing and what you're what you're like inner animal is doing.
(41:56):
So I think that he would, you know, when you're not thinking in English, an artist will tell you that they know what I'm talking about.
A musician will definitely.
You know, you're thinking in music, you're in a different realm, even it's quantum quantum computing in your brain, stuff like that.
You know you can't throw baseball in the in the pitch, in the strike zone every time on purpose and less if you don't think about it, you know?
(42:28):
And he was very into knowing how to focus on his projects, but very bad at focusing on his life.
(43:08):
So we were talking about that sculptor, Bernini.
I think he's someone who's really interesting.
Like I said, you know, he was kind of seen as a.
Successor to Michelangelo and I I think one thing that's very important to point out is that obviously Michelangelo was a painter and he also, very importantly, on top of all of the other influences he he did, he was also a very influential architect.
(43:34):
I don't think a lot of people realize that.
In fact, just driving around the city like Saint Louis, there's actually huge amounts of influence even on Saint Louis architecture.
So, Jean Lorenzo Bernini, he was actually a Florentine who was born in Naples, because that's where his dad, who was a pretty competent sculptor, nowhere near as talented as his son Jean Lorenzo would eventually be.
(43:58):
But I have a question for you.
What?
What?
What type of pizza did he like?
I assume it would be Neapolitan.
Now I'm blanking on whether or not Neapolitan pizza had even been invented.
Right.
Yeah.
Boy, that's another whole story about which is the oldest pizza place in Naples.
There's this one place that might have gone out of business for a little while.
(44:19):
Anyway, if you go to Naples, it's an amazing city.
I call it the Saint Louis of Italy.
Don't stand in line at those places that claim to be the oldest one.
There's a place right outside of this one Church of Saint Paul that has perfectly great pizza.
It's in the oven for just 4 minutes.
You never have to wait long for pizza anyway.
(44:41):
It turns out they didn't want to stay in Naples for the pizza for very long.
In fact actually Roman style pizza is really good as well.
It's thin crust as well.
And he started his career with the Borghese family, which I'm sure you probably have never heard of, but they were a very important family.
The the one guy was Pope Pope Paul the 5th and his.
(45:04):
Nephew Chipeone was also a very important patron of the arts as well.
So we actually get the term nepotism from is because Nepote is Italian for nephew.
Cause theoretically a member of the Roman Catholic Church would not theoretically have any sons, right?
No, theoretically, theoretically.
(45:26):
And also then of course, maybe the other most famous patrons were the.
Garberini family.
Anyway, the reason why we bring up Bernini is that he helps to push forward a new sort of way of looking at art.
And that is the combination of painting, sculpture and architecture together.
(45:48):
And that's very much what we would call sort of anti classical because when you look back to the Greeks and the Romans, when you look at their architecture, every single component whether it's the column.
The steps, you know, and also then the attic as we call it, they're all very delineated and separate from each other.
(46:08):
They don't blend together.
The sculpture is very cool, calm, collected composition.
Well, Bernini does something much different, and we see it as well in Hellenistic art back in the ancient world as well, becomes much more dramatic.
We call it Baroque.
Art And of course there still was classical art and architecture in the 17th century when Bernini was active.
(46:33):
But we also then in the work of Bernini, work in Saint Peter's Basilica, but also very famously in a church, Santa Maria Dellavatoria.
We see in the work of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, we see the combination of painting, sculpture and architecture.
(46:53):
They begin to fuse together.
And because some of the most important early scholars in the modern day field of of art history were German, the term is actually German.
And we always joke that there is in fact a word for everything in German, but they cheat by making a compound noun, and the term is ghazamt kunstvek, which basically means we'll translate it as sort of total work of art.
(47:23):
And that is where the lines, the borders between art, art forms, paintings, sculpture, the decorative arts and architecture all blend together where you can't really say where one begins and the other ends.
And Bernini really pioneers that.
(47:44):
He also does that with his advising of the decoration of the home Church of the Jesuits, which is the Church of Iljazu.
It actually has a much longer name, which I'm not going to bore us all with that, and I actually probably don't remember its full name.
Anyway, how the heck did you remember Ghaziah?
Well, it takes years of therapy after taking years of Germany, German language, let's just put it that way.
(48:08):
Six years of German anyway.
So this Ghazamt Kunzwark we see that.
With the There's actually one thing, and I always pretty much hate every photograph that's ever taken of the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, because it only takes a picture of the sculpture.
And then occasionally they'll show you the architecture around it, which is very architectonic, is the fancy word we use.
(48:36):
It's very it pushes and pulls.
It's actually sort of a.
It's what we call an Ida Cule.
It's the architecture around the altar, but it actually is curved.
It's and it's a broken pediment.
We call it because it doesn't go all the way across.
But what no one ever does is that they don't show you the painting on the vault of the church up above that was painted by one of his acolytes of Bernini.
(48:59):
And together it works as this total work of art.
And they don't.
They're not possible for all three of these elements to work separately.
Yeah, you can't show all that, right?
I mean the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, it's actually spot lit by a not a skylight, but there's a window that you can actually see on the outside of the church that lights the ecstasy of Saint Teresa, this famous baroque sculpture.
(49:28):
Naturally, Bernini was a master of stage effects.
In fact, he actually did operas.
He actually had stage effects.
Special effects.
I can only imagine if Bernini was alive today how much fun he would have with all the technology we have.
But what technology he did have in the 17th century, he used to the greatest effect and, you know, natural lighting, etcetera.
(49:54):
The actual sculpture is made out of, I think, travertine and marble.
It looks like it's floating.
It's actually affixed to the back wall of the Chapel with iron rods.
It's it's amazing.
And so consequently, moving forward, we see this moving up to France, up to the German states.
(50:16):
There was no Germany back then yet.
And we see how art now is becoming, you know, indivisible.
We don't just simply have paintings hanging on the wall, we have paintings that are incorporated into the architecture as particularly ceiling paintings had become very highly evolved.
You know, we see.
(50:37):
What we nowadays call found art, I think of this room at the new palace in Potsdam, part of the larger palace complex of Sansui, where they actually incorporated real seashells into this room, which is just out of this world.
And that actually we see the development of what we call the Rococo style, which is just basically Baroque architecture and style.
(51:06):
That's developed in France, Just taken to this whole new level of ornateness and asymmetricality is how you might just differentiate between Baroque and rococo.
If in fact as some architectural, you know, historians argue there's not even actually a difference, but just going into this room and it's just glistening with seashells everywhere.
(51:29):
I actually even think when I go to a lot of the parts of the City Museum, there is this very rococo.
Quality.
Oh yeah.
So I, I and So what we're getting at here is that I argue that the City Museum is a Ghazamth Kunzverk.
I I think it very much fits into the the history of art history and architectural history.
(51:50):
It it it, you can't separate the parts out by themselves.
You couldn't put it in a special exhibit, otherwise it loses its its power.
So yeah, so my parents were making these exhibits out in the world, like Turtle Park and the stuff at the zoo, and a lot of them would have an environment like that they would create around each exhibit, IE the outside of the living world, there's a giant rock, which I don't think it's a real rock, I think it's concrete, but it's got a whole bunch of little tiny models or of actual animals, and they are made out of bronze.
(52:52):
And I actually have the, I have the possum over there somewhere.
We'll take a photo of it and throw it up, throw it up.
We'll take a photo of it and put it on our socials.
And yeah, so all of that stuff that they were built, they know just different tests that they would do.
(53:20):
All they they would say my father was very much a hoarder and he would save all that stuff.
So if they made something that didn't, it was the wrong color, they would save it if it was still in good shape.
And all of that stuff ended up being the building blocks to the caves or and when you go go in there, they'll be like a fake rock.
(53:42):
If you look at it, it's a fake rock.
But I actually think that they do a better job of making it look like a rock than other places.
And you don't even, you forget that it's fake there, even though you know and it's not trying to be real.
Like it's definitely a sculpture of a rock.
(54:06):
And in the beginning they would go around and they would look for trees that were really big, that were coming down, especially in Forest Park in Tower Grove Park.
And they built them into the museum.
They brought in some whole like some fancy wood from someplace and it got some sort of African boar beetle thing and it took out a whole bunch of the original part of the Enchanted Forest actually, so.
(54:39):
Oh my yeah, you're kidding me.
No, no, that that was about five years into it.
Oh, so this was like over 20 years ago now?
Yeah.
But yeah, it was fun.
And it really just liked that type of wood, whatever.
Beetle and that.
That beetle probably came in off of some other truck.
(55:00):
Yeah, it was too bad.
But yeah, my father always was talking about the forts and stuff, tree forts that they would build as kids and immediately would start doing that for us when I was a kid.
And yeah, that we had in the basement, it, it started off as a production facility for their architectural facade company.
(55:36):
And as they had kids, as they had kids that slowly, yeah, moved it out into the Lafayette shop.
But we have a couple clips of people playing in the basement.
(56:01):
There's a ramp in the basement where I have some pretty cool video actually, of us sitting in a big giant barrel rolling down the ramp and.
What did you guys kind of sliding down the ramp like you're not rolling head over, like you're not bouncing around banging yourself up?
(56:23):
No, we definitely did that, but.
You did that too, you You would do that once each time?
Because yeah, but that was City Museum before City Museum 100%.
So is that stuff down in the basement still there?
No, we've redone the basement as over the years it's slowly became more livable.
(56:54):
And now it just has a guest bed in it.
So my dad and his first wife go on their honeymoon and they decide to go all around the world, I'm pretty sure.
(57:15):
And while they are going to Rome, they happen to be going through the theater.
What is it that basilica?
Yeah.
Basilica.
New Saint Peter's Basilica.
Yeah, yeah.
And there my dad always described it to me as could hear the sound of steel and marble, which to us probably doesn't trigger the same response, meaning you only really hear that when somebody is trying to change the marvel in some fashion with with a lot of force.
(58:10):
So he went and he looked for the the source of the noise and he said that there was kind of a commotion, It's more of a stir.
And he noticed that there was a guy who was screaming I am Jesus.
In English, yeah, I'm pretty sure he was saying it in all of the languages.
(58:32):
Oh, OK And he was chipping off the face of Man on the Pieda, the famous sculpture by Michelangelo.
And yeah, my dad was in shock for a split second, but then noticed that nobody else was really doing anything and was kind of the catalyst guy himself a lot of times anyway, and reached up and grabbed the guy by his beard.
(59:13):
Was the was this guy facing towards the audience?
No, I think he was an.
Audience, It seems like since everyone was just staring at him, right?
Correct.
From what I understand, he had done a pretty wicked damn amount of damage to the face, yeah?
He he it's from Understand.
He chipped the He chipped the Virgin Mary's eyelid and knocked off one of her arms and some fingers.
(59:40):
Yeah, irreparable damage.
Technically, they repaired it.
But yeah, we'll talk about that in just a second.
Yeah, yeah.
So yeah, he, I remember he, he was like, I threw him into the crowd and then he regretted it, 'cause they were pretty, pretty rough on him.
He could tell.
He could tell that it he was a guy going through a time, Yeah, that's not something that a normal human being does.
(01:00:08):
Even though this guy was an artist, he was having a psychotic break and it's a very famous.
Separate story, in fact, the character, and I'm not going to name him because there is some debate to why somebody would do something like that.
(01:00:32):
And that's for the notoriety, right.
So I'm not going to name him, but it became a a Saturday Night Live character.
Really.
Yeah, yeah.
They had like papers from Blank, Blank, yeah.
And it was just basically his paranoid rants as that guy.
And it was the 80s, so.
(01:00:54):
So it so it has happened in 1972.
Yeah.
And so there was a character on Saturday Night Live that actually.
Yeah, Wow, I forget.
Yeah.
So it made its cultural impact.
And I would argue that in a lot of ways, my father would say that that he impacted Art Mower by accident that day.
(01:01:18):
Really.
How so?
Just by no.
That whole statue would have gotten destroyed if nobody stopped.
And in those type of situations a lot of times a a crowd might get paralyzed to doing anything is.
It called the bystander effect or something like that.
So some like you're lucky if somebody steps in at all.
Yeah, I've read about that, definitely.
(01:01:39):
And I would say that that is a strong point on my father's character is that he would have, he was down to take the beating for the Pieta.
He was 100% he was going to take the geologist hammer to the face for the Pieta.
Wow.
Your dad grabbed them by the beard, right?
He was a man of means.
When he was fighting, it was.
(01:02:00):
You're not going to retaliate, right?
Yeah.
Your face will be in the ground.
So I've seen there's a famous photograph out there floating around where I I can actually spot your dad.
He's still standing up next to to the, I think, yeah.
And you could tell it's him, yeah.
A very young dad.
He's like 2120.
Yeah, 'cause, yeah, he would have been pretty in his 20s back in early 70s, correct?
(01:02:26):
And it looks like there was some other people near him, but yeah, I think because he he said that when he reached up and grabbed the guy by the beard, everybody kind of followed suit.
So people started actually doing something once he, and that also is something you know, that he commented on like, you know, like maybe he should have just like beat him up a little bit instead of throw him into the crowd.
(01:02:53):
So your dad actually felt a little guilty.
So did the basically the Italian crowd just start pummeling the guy once he got?
From what I understand, yeah, yeah, of course they.
Did I have a funny story about my dad?
I'll tell at the end of this but we'll talk about the Pieta story and then I'll tell you my dad's story at the very end.
So yeah I mean it was it was a big deal and the stat this I I use the word sculpture.
(01:03:16):
It's one of the most famous works by Michelangelo very early in his career, will generally kind of say 14981499 coming off the success of his very famous David, which was for the.
The Cathedral of Florence, in fact that very famous David, which is now inside of the Academia Museum in Florence, was actually most people don't realize this.
(01:03:40):
That very famous David was actually originally sculpted with the intention and Michelangelo, while he was sculpting it, was underneath the impression it was actually going up on top of the roof line of the cathedral.
So they thought it was such an amazing sculpture that they actually kept it down on the ground, which has remained to this day.
(01:04:01):
So coming off of that success, he then gets this Commission for the Pieta from actually a French cardinal, if you can believe that, for old Saint Peter's Basilica.
That's what a lot of people don't realize.
Also, many things that people don't realize about the career of Michelangelo that actually originally was on display in the former.
The silica constructed by the Roman Emperor Constantine that was actually demolished then in the the 15th century, it actually had it was.
(01:04:28):
It was actually controversial at the time.
I mean, this was a building that was over 1000 years old, but it was kind of dilapidated and actually tore it down to build the building that's there today.
Did they use the pieces from that building to make the new one?
Well you know that's a great question.
So there are.
It's actually this is a.
If you since you asked, I'll tell you.
I think it's a.
(01:04:49):
They did save these 11 twisted columns that came from the old basilica.
The the legend was is that these 11 twisting columns.
Supposedly came from King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem.
(01:05:10):
Now, not to offend anybody, but they did not I've heard about.
This yet ten of those columns were reincorporated into New Saint Peter's Basilica, and one is in a museum close by.
Eight of the columns are incorporated into the crossing of New St.
Basilica and then two more are in a an altar nearby.
(01:05:32):
And like as I just mentioned, the 11th is nearby as well.
I I think there's other aspects, for example, the cathedra, the chair of Saint Peter is in New Saint Peter's Basilica as well, obviously.
Anyway, Michelangelo's Pieta made it into New Saint Peter's Basilica, as well as a sculpture of Saint Peter by Arnoffel Dicambio.
(01:05:58):
And there's probably other things as well, but don't quote me on that.
Anyway, it's an incredibly important sculpture, besides the fact that it's a huge tourist attraction, because it does show Michelangelo at his youthful prime, and he actually completed it as well, I might add.
It shows the Virgin Mary with Christ on her lap after he had been crucified.
(01:06:21):
And it's it's a great sculpture because there's a lot of different aspects to it which are very beautiful.
It has that really nice high renaissance pyramidal composition, the pyramid, which is very much a hallmark from Leonardo's art.
Raphael shows as well and his art this idea that a triangle or a pyramid is a sort of nice, perfect composition.
(01:06:43):
And if you can, you know, look it up online, you can see how the body, you know Mary's lap is huge in that sculpture.
If you look at it very closely, it forms a pyramid and.
Likewise, there was this theological debate about how Christ came back to life.
Was it like with a snap of a finger, or did he slowly come back to life?
(01:07:07):
And some pulmonologists, you know, doctors in the medical field, like to sometimes play amateur art historians.
One of them has argued, and I'm not saying that I necessarily 100% agree with this.
They have argued that.
Christ's veins show signs of having blood pressure, like he's coming back to life slowly.
(01:07:29):
In fact, if you look at his draped left hand, you can see he's two fingers might, maybe, might look like they're caressing his mother's robes.
Also, what was actually controversial at the time but was defended very vigorously is that the Virgin Mary is shown very young.
(01:07:50):
Oh yeah, and people were like, what the heck's up with that?
Because later, Michelangelo's Pietas, which I know of two off the top of my head, which I I've seen myself in Florence and Milan, which are very beautiful and incomplete, I might add.
From later on in his career, he shows the Virgin Mary looking much older.
(01:08:11):
The argument was is that there was this philosophical belief that if a woman remained a virgin, she kept her beautiful youthful looks.
Also, I would argue that this concept in Platonic thought that there was the idea that there was this perfect version of you and the idea is that this was this perfect beautiful platonic image of the Virgin Mary.
(01:08:35):
And so anyway, it made the transition over to New Saint Peter's Basilica obviously and you go there today and unfortunately due to.
That guy whose name I won't mention either because I don't want to give him the notoriety.
It's behind bulletproof glass now, and there's so many people taking pictures with flashes, and it's really, honestly, I've seen it from about 40 feet away.
(01:09:03):
Put your phones down, people.
But you really can't enjoy it, to be honest, if you actually, if you're listening to this and you want to see how beautiful this sculpture really is.
I encourage you to go to the new cathedral in the central West End.
There's actually a bronze replica.
Back during World War 2, I was told there was actually a real fear that a lot of the great works of Western art were going to be destroyed.
(01:09:28):
Oh, imagine that.
So they made a lot of copies and Saint Louis being obviously, you know, very high up ranking in Roman Catholicism around the world, they received a bronze replica and it's actually really quite beautiful.
Obviously the original is.
Carrara marble and But the bronze 1 still gives you a great idea and you can actually enjoy it in peace and quiet.
(01:09:52):
And you can actually see it up close, as opposed from behind bulletproof glass with everybody's flashes bouncing off of the glass as you see it in real life, yeah.
But yeah, it was heavily damaged and I think everybody understands like, I don't know if you ever have had trouble with your carpet, you know, like if you get.
(01:10:12):
If you need to patch your carpet, you actually pretty much have to replace the entire piece of carpet, because that run of carpet, the carpet is going to have a particular color that can't be replicated perfectly well.
It's the same way with marble, that block of marble from Carrara, that very famous quarry you know, north of Rome that had been used since the ancient world.
(01:10:37):
It's still highly valuable.
You can see it.
The stuff at Home Depot that's labeled Carrara marble, and it's like $2.00 for a square foot.
That is not real.
Just to let you guys know that's false advertising.
The Carrara marble for that sculpture, we wouldn't be able to find the exact place anymore.
So they actually performed what we might call the graft from the back of the sculpture where nobody sees it.
(01:11:07):
And that's how they used, they found actual matching marble to repair the eyelid and the broken off fingers and they did reattach the arm and actually had been restored before in the 18th century.
So I think it's just a wonderful story.
I mean, you know, on top of all of the just fascinating, you know, interesting stories that you're of the life that your dad lived, he also, you know, he was a sculptor himself and he saves one of the greatest sculptors ever.
(01:11:35):
You know, one of his greatest works of art.
I think that's just AI think it's just such a great story, lightning striking in fascinating ways.
Yeah, and you said you had a story about your dad.
Oh, so this is a great story.
It's not.
My dad did not save a great work of Western art, but my parents years ago, they were flying in between.
(01:12:02):
I think it was London and Madrid.
They're on a business trip and my mom had gone along, you know, to keep my dad company and also to get a chance to see Spain.
And I think they're pretty much the only Americans on this flight in between London and Madrid.
And there are all these obnoxious, like, I don't know if they were like soccer hooligans or just like annoying students on like a class trip.
(01:12:26):
And they were just making everybody so annoyed.
And my dad just stood up and yelled at all of them to shut up.
Yeah.
And the entire plane erupted in applause.
(01:12:46):
And it gets even funnier because then the flight attendants came up and offered my parents champagne.
Yeah.
Oh, those are the days.
And my dad was like, no, I don't like champagne.
I just got to enjoy my peace of quiet on the flight.
(01:13:08):
That's pretty awesome.
Yeah.
Anyway, here's the flying around the world.
So, fellow citizens, this is where our journey through the cast of the Chronicles bring us this week.
But remember, the story never truly ends.
And if you've enjoyed our expedition, delve a little deeper.
(01:13:29):
Hit that like button, subscribe.
And if you're feeling generous, A5 Star Review would be fantastic.
Your support is our lifeline, keeping these stories vibrant and alive.
For those who would like to contribute in any other way, our Patreon awaits your Patreon.
Every bit of support helps us weave these narratives into being.
Don't forget that to visit the cast of the chronicles.com for some unique finds.
(01:13:53):
We've got everything from underwear pins to other intriguing merch.
Got a story that you think belongs on the podcast?
We'd love to hear it.
A heartfelt thank you to Tim Kammer, Kurt Nickmeyer, Ricky Fortner, Bruce and Laura.
Rick Irwin, Stephanie von Drasek, Gene Webb.
Your unwavering support and encouragement are the cornerstones of this project.
(01:14:14):
Special thanks to Nicole, Ramona, and Ryan.
Immense gratitude goes to my mother, GAIL Cassidy, and her partner.
My world is richer because of you, too.
To Daisy, my sister.
I love you.
This one's for you and Jared, JJ, Julian and Jayden.
You inspire this journey.
And a dedicated shout out to Christine Marshall.
(01:14:36):
10 years of dedication, yet the elephant on the roof still eluded you.
I'm Max.
Robert Cassidy, your guide on this adventure alongside with Maria Cassidy and Chris Nasiger.
A big thank you for tuning in.
Our theme song, A Day Like Today by The Acid Set is Maria's dad's band.
Remember, the views and opinions on this podcast are those of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the stance of city, museum or other affiliated entities.
(01:15:03):
We bring this podcast to you for entertainment and and information only.
Until we meet again, citizens keep delving into the unknown, questioning the world around you, and seek the story behind the story.
Farewell and Stay tuned for the next episode of the cast of The Chronicles.
(01:15:37):
A day like today, it's in my eye.
The way the sun shines on the windy skies.
Thoughts of you?
Traveling through my head.
(01:15:58):
The look on your face although that I rain a delicate day is in my eye.
A delicate day is going by.
(01:16:20):
I'll see you right now like I never.
Felt before all those wrong and I can't help anymore.
It was so much a day like today when you were here and I knew you would stay.
(01:16:47):
A day like today, the.
(01:17:26):
A day like.
Today is in my dream thinking of you so it isn't a day like today is in my life.
(01:18:08):
Awesome.
Cut it.
Print it.
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