‘Vissi d’arte’: the song Patti Smith links to Robert Mapplethorpe’s final moments
No one is necessarily prepared to see their loved ones pass on. Even if they have lived a long, fulfilling life, there comes that one moment when everyone realises that they’re all mortal and that the person that they care about more than anyone in the world will one day not be there be their side ever again. But even when Patti Smith heard of one of her best friends passing on to the other side, she had the right tools for her to deal with everything.
Granted, a lot of Smith’s greatest work was about appreciating the time that she had on Earth. A lot of the message behind Horses revolved around someone who didn’t know how short her time on this Earth was, and since the rock and roll world had already lost icons like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix, Smith saw it as her mission to cover the ground they didn’t get a chance to when she walked into Electric Lady Studios.
When she eventually did work on her own music, though, she always had Robert Mapplethorpe by her side. Aside from being the photographer behind her infamous profile shot on her debut album, Mapplethorpe always had a kindred relationship with Smith, always platonic and beautifully captured when she wrote about him in her memoir, Just Kids.
Throughout her writing, it’s easy to forget that one of the founding godmothers of subversive rock had this alternate life. She may have worn her heart on her sleeve every time she screamed ‘Gloria,’ but this side of her is a good reminder to everyone listening to her music that she was still as vulnerable as anyone else whenever she got behind the microphone. Then again, no one could have predicted that Mapplethorpe was living with a terminal ailment at the time.
While the concept of HIV may have been taboo at the time, Smith remembered Mapplethorpe being almost cavalier about the whole ordeal, as if it was a sidenote to his life and that he wouldn’t let it beat him no matter what he did. Once his time did come in the 1990s, though, Smith couldn’t have asked for a better way for him to cross over to the other side.
She might not have been there at the end, but she had the best soundtrack she could have asked for to see him off, saying, “When Robert died, I was listening to Maria Callas singing ‘Vissi d’arte’ from the opera Tosca. It has the lines, ‘I have lived for art, I have lived for love.’” For anyone who was even slightly aware of the kind of scene that Smith came from, those two lines manage to wrap up everything that her artistic vision was about.
Even if she got labelled as a punk icon in the beginning, it was all about creating art in the same way that people like Lou Reed did when he started the Velvet Underground. And even when she turned towards a solo career without her band, she always looked at her songs as pieces of poetry rather than the firecrackers that started emerging once people like The Clash and Sex Pistols started making waves years later.
That was all spectacle, but Smith and Mapplethorpe always came from a place of love rather than destruction when it came to their works. Because even though it might seem fun to make something that sounds chaotic, both of them were concerned with the legacy they left behind, and all that Mapplethorpe left was nothing short of pure beauty.
