The Perspective Gallery

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Mr & Mrs Casaubon went to Rome for their honeymoon.

Edward Casaubon was unimpressed. Dorothea, however, experienced ‘a city of visible history where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.’

They’re such a mis-matched couple, the Casaubons, and I love the way George Eliot uses perspective to show the extent of the Casaubons’ distance from each other.

Perspective is one of Rome’s gifts. It’s something the city deliberately plays with, sometimes as entertainment, other times as instruction.

Exhibit A: Francesco Borromini’s Colonnade at Gallery Spada.

Known as the Perspective Gallery, it was built for Cardinal Spada in 1653. It looks like a grand Renaissance corridor but in fact its length is not much more than you’d need to park a few Fiat bambini, end-to-end.

The point of the Perspective Gallery, of course, is that in the same way illusion may cause small shapes to appear great, worldly matters we hold to be great may prove to be illusory.

That’s not the takeaway I wanted, necessarily, but it speaks, nevertheless.

For the past year or two I’ve been writing a memoir about being a gay donor dad. It’s a history, of sorts, not of a whole hemisphere but a few molecules thereof, a set of stories I hope my distant son will one day want to read.

Ancestral images, lost love, mis-matched dreams …. those are things we all see and feel. Perhaps a bit of perspective won’t go astray after all.