Cambridge man, and Renaissance man, Jonathan Miller, who emerged from “Beyond the Fringe” (the satire that he, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore and Alan Bennett, brought to the London stage, while Miller was still a trainee neurologist). Satirist, scientist, opera director, associate director (appointed by Laurence Olivier) at the National Theatre, and BBC Television producer, Miller is seen in front of his scheduling board which includes such program titles as mind+matter, human hosp, and fountains italy. Miller once explained his refusal to work with Italian tenor, Luciano Pavarotti, “There’s no point in trying to build a production around someone who’s so massively inert.” Although it serves as seated portrait for the sedate National Portrait Gallery, it is easy to see from this photograph why Jonathan Miller has no regard for inertia; see it in his eyes, which in the grouping of PERSONS LIVING|PERSONS STONE seem to look askance at the massive (eight and a half feet high) bust of Constantine I from the Museo del Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, sporting a similar upturned expression.
Stone faces and live faces arranged for coincidence and comedy — a bust of Caracalla from the Hall of Emperors, Palazzo Nuovo, Museo Capitolino in Rome, a conserved head, hung beside the portrait of Keith Simpson holding the preserved skull; and then copyist-artist John McKay leaning over his seated unimpressed mother with his imitations of master-works lining the room, exhibited alongside a photograph of a photographer capturing another work of art, Constantine once more, this time a colossal bronze in the Appartamento dei Conservatori, Hall of the Horatii and Curiatii, Museo Capitolino; J. Antony Redmile photographed in his London shop seated on a bronze dodo bird, a species tragically extinct, vies with busts photographed in the Hall of Frescoes, Appartamento dei Conservatori, for grandiosity; and outside the museum a bridegroom stands aside for his bride while she is caught in the Piazza del Campidoglio.