January 24th, 2008 11:19 AM
By CHANDLER BURR
One of the problems with classical beauty is, quite simply, that we know it too well. The eye can pass over a Caravaggio painting and not really see it, finding the image too familiar. It is much easier to attract with novelty and flash, but that burns off quickly and leaves a void. The real trick is to combine the two. If an artist can create new beauty with a classic form, he has done something marvelous because his creation is doubly fueled, by the exhilarating thrill of the new and by the visceral power of the old.
By CHANDLER BURR
One of the problems with classical beauty is, quite simply, that we know it too well. The eye can pass over a Caravaggio painting and not really see it, finding the image too familiar. It is much easier to attract with novelty and flash, but that burns off quickly and leaves a void. The real trick is to combine the two. If an artist can create new beauty with a classic form, he has done something marvelous because his creation is doubly fueled, by the exhilarating thrill of the new and by the visceral power of the old.
For classical beauty in perfume there is ultimately only one scent: rose. Yet the perfume industry (and its marketers) know that rose, like a slightly faded movie star, is a problematic sell to the public. We can smell rose yet, registering it as a known commodity, not really smell it.
The niche Italian house of Eau d’Italie has taken rose and made of it a revelation. Paestum Rose was creative directed by Marina Sersale and Sebastien Alvarez Murena, Eau d’Italie’s founders, and built by perfumer Bertrand Duchaufour. Duchaufour is an expert in shadows (see his Dzongka, done for l’Artisan Parfumeur). He paints olfactory charcoals and grays and deep purples with the smells of smoke and worn wood, a living Old Master of scent, and Paestum Rose is not just perfectly calibrated on a technical level. It is better than that. It is a work of art.
The perfume unfolds with a scented crepuscular darkness, a twilight that is an exact balance of disappearing sunlight and incipient evening. Its rose aspect is ancient, blended with the smell of old stone — Paestum was a classical Roman city known for its roses — yet it also somehow (here’s the trick) smells utterly contemporary. There is no “green stem scent” detail here for a facile thrill, no smell of fresh flower — Duchaufour eschews such easy clichés. Nor is this a “floral” perfume in any obvious way, though it smells, in a sense, like the flower. One October in her apartment in Rome, Sersale showed me a large photograph of a Caravaggio she particularly loves, and I understood. Paestum Rose is a perfume that’s rich and filled with meaning like the intimate opalescent blacks Caravaggio painted, instantly known and strangely unfamiliar. In this perfume we smell ancient beauty made thrillingly new.
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