"It is bound to happen. You have been wandering in the Academia all day, you have seen a solid mile of painted canvas, it is the fourth, the sixth, or the eigth day and you feel as though you are swimming against a powerful current of gods, kings, prophets, martyrs, monks, virgins and monsters; that Ovid, Hesiod, the Old and New Testaments have accompanied you the whole way, that you are being pursued by the Lives of the Saints and Christian and heathen iconography, that Catherine’s wheel, Sebastian’s arrows, Hermes’s wingèd sandals, Mars’s helmet, and all lions of stone, gold, porphyry and marble are out to get you. Frescoes, tapestries, gravestones, everything is charged with meaning, refers to real or imaginary events, armies of sea-gods, putti, popes, sultans, condottieri, admirals all clamour for your attention. They whoosh by along the ceilings, look down at you with their painted, woven, sketched and sculpted eyes. Sometimes you see the same saint more than once in a day, in a Gothic, Byzantine, baroque or classical disguise, for myths are mighty and the heroes are adaptable, Renaissance or rococo, it does not bother them, as long as you keep looking, as long as their essence remains intact. So there they stand, a nation of Stone Guests, waving from the façades of churches, leaning out of the tromple-l’oeils of the palazzi, the ragazzi of Tiepolo and Fumiani race around up there, and once again St. Julian is beheaded, once again the Madonna cradles her baby, once again Perseus battles with Medusa, Alexander converses with Diogenes. The traveler draws back from all the tumult, for the moment he wants no more, just to sit on a stone seat on the embankment, and watch how a Slavonian grebe searches for its prey in the brackish, greenish, water, watch the movement of the water itself, pinch himself in the arm to reassure himself that he is not sculpted or painted." - Cees Nooteboom
Graham Howe, Rock Form, Durras Lake, New South Wales, 2005 
