Museos

Other than my first day in Santiago, I have been unlucky with the weather.  Everyday it reminds me of one of those spring days in Iowa when the tennis, track, and golf meets are canceled because it's 45 degrees and rainy.  This has limited our ability to do some touristy things because we've been rained out of a walking tour in Santiago and Valparaiso.  So we've had to do indoor things like go to museums, which of course I'm perfectly happy with.

So far, LG and I have been to four museums in Chile and their themes are dramatically different.

Museum of Colonial Art

The Museum of Colonial Art is in the former convent of the adjacent Iglesia San Francisco.  Its primary feature is fifty-four 5x10 foot (approximated using the height of LG) paintings that depict the life of St. Francis of Assissi.  The paintings are remarkable in size and scope. (Here is a link to them.)  They were painted by an unknown Franciscan monk or monks in Peru in the 1600s.  The question that I wondered about this is "why paint these?"  One answer is that monks have a lot of time, even after their prayers and chores.  But then that leads to why paint these? The answer is that it is a long ways from Spain.  And pictures like this reinforce the mission that Franciscans had in the Americas for spreading Christianity.  So as Francis spread Christianity throughout Europe, so too, would Franciscan monks spread.

I should have taken some pictures of the paintings (illegally, of course, like most museums), but LG did take a picture of St. Francis's prayer despite the photography prohibition

On a lighter note, the paintings were displayed in galleries that ringed a central courtyard.  And the courtyard had roosters, hens, and peacocks crowing and strutting about.

Museum of Memory and Human Rights

The Museum of Memory and Human Rights is dedicated to accounting the violations of human rights during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973-1990 (which I visited and wrote about last year).  During the dictatorship, there were executions, assassinations, torture, disappearance, and the suspension of civil rights.  Seeing a museum a second time allowed me the opportunity to notice things I may have missed the first time.  One of the items that struck me was the brevity of Pinochet's statement on the day of the coup, September 11, 1973: "The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all."  This statement struck me because I sometimes wonder how dictators can perpetrate such acts of violence.  This quotation demonstrates how Pinochet, in his mind, could justify the coup and his subsequent dictatorship out of patriotism, an avoidance of chaos, and an opposition to Marxism.

Pablo Neruda's Homes: La Chascona and La Sebastiana

Had he lived longer, Pablo Neruda would have been one of staunchest, and certainly the most famous, opponents of Pinochet's dictatorship.  Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet who won the 1971 Nobel Prize for Literature.  He was also a socialist and diplomat.  Neruda died September 23, 1973, just twelve days after the coup.  Neruda's politics were very interesting, but his personal life is even more interesting...

La Chascona

LG and I visited La Chascona, Pablo Neruda's Santiago home, immediately after the Museum of Colonial art.  After going to a museum dedicated to St. Francis, devotion to god, and an ascetic lifestyle, it was quite a contrast to go to a house a Chilean poet had built for his mistress.  While St. Francis endured the stigmata, Pablo Neruda wrote poems that contained lines such as "I want to do with you what spring does to cherry trees."

As old houses go(though this one's not really old), I would rank La Chascona behind only Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and George Washington's Mount Vernon.  It was awesome for several reasons.

1. It had a name.  A house is more awesome if it has a name.

2. The name itself: La Chascona is a word of Quechua Indian origin that means wild mane of hair.  His mistress, Matilde Urrutia, had a wild mane of red hair.

This is a picture of Matilde, that represents her public face and their private relationship.  It hang in La Chascona.

3. He built the house to hide the relationship with  his mistress.  This clearly shows evidence that he spent time in France.

4. It's not a house so much as a bunch of rooms at different elevations built around a central courtyard.  I think I want a house with a central courtyard....

5. He built the exterior and interior so that it would give him and guests the sensation that he was on a boat.

The dining room.  The secret entrance is straight ahead.

6. He built everything was built with a particular purpose.  Most of the time, the purpose was for his amusement...For example, the main dining room had a secret door so that he could make surprise entrances.

La Sebastiana
Neruda also had a home he named La Sebastiana in Valparaiso, which is on the coast.  (He also had a third home on Isla Negra.)   Though this house was full of his eccentricities (such a bathroom door in his bar with holes in it), he originally acquired it to work.

And it was quite a work and living environment.  The first level was an entrance, the second level was his living room, the third level was his bedroom, and the fourth level was his study.  The pictures below are from the internet.  I couldn't take pictures and besides, it was raining heavily and our view wasn't as great.

View from the living room

View from the bedroom

For some reason, I'm now very intrigued by Neruda.  I don't even like poetry, but I'm going to go back to La Chascona and I might even buy one of his books of poetry....