Tag Archives: Italy

November 30, 2012 · 10:56 am

Venice in America

Today is the Feast of St. Andrew the Apostle, brother of St. Peter and patron saint of many things, including fishermen, Scotland, and Russia.  However he is also the patron saint of one of the greatest and most significant architects of the modern age, Andrea Palladio, who was born on St. Andrew’s Day in 1508.  If you are not hugely interested in architecture, you may not be familiar with his name, but if you live in the Western world there is a reasonably good chance that the home you live in, or the civic buildings that make up the town where you live, were shaped and influenced by the ideas of this 16th century Venetian master.

Just as Jacobo Sansovino, whom I wrote about earlier this week, had a profound influence on the artists of his day, in convincing them that they were equaling or even surpassing the achievements of their ancient Greek and Roman forbearers, so too Palladio was a driving force in convincing architects that they could do the same.  Sansovino was himself a highly accomplished architect, of course, producing many beautiful and monumental structures in Venice between the 1530′s and 1560′s.  Palladio, who was a generation younger, had to bide his time while Sansovino held sway over the public taste of the capital, but eventually he became the head architect of the Venetian Republic after Sansovino’s death.

One of Palladio’s most influential contributions to the development of modern architecture and indeed modern living was in taking advantage of open spaces, rather than being afraid of them.  Keep in mind that in much of Europe from the fall of the Roman Empire in the West until the time of the Renaissance, most people lived together for protection, either in closely-packed walled towns, or in castles or other fortified structures in the countryside.  Foreign invaders or marauding neighbors bent on pillaging and destruction could sweep in at any moment, and there was safety in numbers.

What our eyes need to be trained to see is how different the world which Palladio created was from the times that had come immediately before it.  There is nothing of the fortress about a Palladian house.  There are no dark, thick walls designed for defensive purposes, with only interior courtyards to allow light and air.  Instead, his houses sit gracefully inside beautiful parks and gardens, surrounded by trees and flowers, green lawns and splashing fountains.

Nor were these houses gigantic, bloated structures, like the Baroque behemoths that were built to house the egos of absolute monarchs.  Rather, they were comfortable places to enjoy oneself with one’s family and friends by engaging in outdoor activities, reading, entertaining, or the like.  They are of course much larger than the average person’s home, but they are not overwhelmingly so.  The confidence with which these villas were built testifies to a similar spirit of self-confidence of the day that times were getting better, and that the darker ages of constant warfare between rivaling factions were becoming less frequent, at least in the Venetian Republic.

This in itself is a key component to the architecture which Palladio created.  His houses are built for aristocrats, but they are they are the aristocrats of a republic.  There was no hereditary king of Venice: the Republic was ruled by a Doge, an elected official whose powers were limited further and further as the centuries wore on.  While the Venetian Republic was not truly a representative democracy, in the sense that we would understand the term, it had a series of checks and balances in place to ensure that no one single individual or family could come to dominate the entire system.

Palladio’s ideas and methods were not just limited to a bunch of gondola-riding aristocrats half a millenia ago.  For in fact, many of the American Founding Fathers were hugely enamored of the Palladian way of living.  President Thomas Jefferson, for example, built his beloved estate Monticello, as well as the Virginia State Capitol building, and the main building of the University of Virginia, using principles derived from his own study of Palladio’s work.  James Hoban, the Irish-American architect of the White House, took his plans for the Executive Mansion directly from two Palladian-style country houses which had been built a few years earlier in Ireland.

Even today, Palladio’s legacy is all around us, not only as part of our visible history, but in continuing to influence architects who build homes and businesses, offices and churches by taking Palladio’s ideas and applying or re-interpreting them.  As is so often the case in these pages, we have here yet another example of why it is important to understand the cultural history of the West, something which the past forty-odd years of academically entrenched relativism has done such a bang-up job of trying to eradicate.  Over many centuries the ideas of this single Venetian architect have had a positive impact on both the look and livability of our homes, our public buildings, and indeed our cities.

Palladio understood that in order for contemporary society to succeed, it must be interconnected with the best aspects of the society which came before it.  He helped to radically change the way that his contemporaries lived by looking at how people had lived before, how they lived in his day, and figuring out he could bring together the best aspects of each.  In doing so, he succeeded in transforming not only a small Italian republic, but the lives of people in countless cities and towns large and small, all over the world.  His is but one example of why we should both study and try to understand our past, taking the lessons we learn there, and adapting them to the needs of the present.

Fratta

“La Badoera” Villa by Andrea Palladio (built 1556-1563)
Fratta Polesine, Italy

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November 27, 2012 · 10:42 am

Raise Your Glasses

Today is the anniversary of the death of Jacobo Sansovino, who was born in Florence in 1486 and died in Venice in 1570. You may not be familiar with his name, gentle reader, but because of one single piece of art he created, he helped spur on the development of the Renaissance in Western Art, which of course had a far greater impact on world history than simply serving as decoration.  In one sculpture, Sansovino helped convince his contemporaries that not only had they managed to rediscover the knowledge of the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but in fact they were reaching the point at which they would be able to surpass those who had come before them – and for this he certainly deserves a memorial toast.

In 1510 Sansovino was commissioned to sculpt a statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of wine, for the Florentine aristocrat Giovanni Bartolini.  It was to be placed in a niche in the classically designed gardens of the latter’s home, the Palazzo di Valfonda, alongside statues of other gods and heroes from Greek and Roman mythology.  Fortunately for us, ever since the sculpture was later acquired by the Medici family, it has been housed in a museum for many centuries.  If the statue had been left outside, what makes this particular sculpture so special might very well have been lost, as a result of exposure to the elements.

When the work was completed in 1512, it astonished viewers because of a single factor, which may not be apparent unless you think about what you are looking at.  We see the figure of a nude young man, crowned with a wreath made out of grapevines.  He is striding forward, while at his lower right a small faun is trying to snatch a cluster of grapes from his hand.  All of this seems very ordinary at first, if we have seen Greek and Roman sculptures before.  Yet what is truly remarkable about this particular piece is that the figure of the young god holds his left arm aloft, bearing a drinking vessel, and that left arm has no visible means of support.

Up until this time, sculptors were extremely reluctant to attempt this type of carving in stone, since they had little or no remaining evidence from the past that such a thing could be done successfully.  Typically, when they were carving limbs that would be held away from the body, ancient sculptors would carve the arms of their statue separately and attach them later, since the weight of the heavy marble arms and the lack of support would tend to cause this part of the sculpture to crack and fall off, were it carved from a single block.  For example, in the famous example of the now-armless “Venus de Milo” in The Louvre, on the right side of the torso one can see a hole, which originally held a metal strut to support the now-vanished right arm of the statue, carved separately and attached later in situ.

Moreover, not many patrons would be willing to pay for such a feat, which would likely end in failure.  In a lightweight material such as wood, where things could be hollowed out or pinned together, gravity was not such a significant issue, but when it comes to stone, its heavy weight can be its undoing.  Thus it was considered so difficult and risky to attempt to carve a statue with an arm held aloft in a single piece of carved stone, that until Sansovino made this bold attempt most sculptors – including Michelangelo – simply avoided the challenge altogether.

The arm alone is not the only innovation however,  for here Sansovino is not simply copying his artistic forebears.  He is portraying a classical subject in stone, of course, which would have been familiar to the ancients, but there is a more natural sense of motion and fluidity in the body than one would often find in classical sculpture.  Admittedly this is not a universal observation, and there are notable exceptions, particularly from the Hellenic period.  Yet here we have a sense of movement in the pose of the figure, and indeed of boldness on the part of its sculptor, to create a sense of liveliness caught in a split second, rather than portraying someone standing still or at rest, which is what Classical sculptors tended to do.

In his later career Sansovino moved to Venice, where he became an engineer and a brilliant architect, helping to spread the aesthetic ideals of High Renaissance Florence and Rome to that city.  In fact, this native Florentine became so beloved by the Venetians, that when he died he was buried in the great Basilica of San Marco.  Yet this single work from when Sansovino was only an up-and-coming artist in his mid-20′s, competing with dozens of other young sculptors in the artistic hotbed of Renaissance Florence, can be admired not only on its own merits, but more importantly as part of a whole.

Achievements such as this in the arts, sciences, literature, and so on, had a profound impact on the thinkers and writers of the Renaissance.  These people became convinced that they were on the right track to achieve an even greater civilization than the ancients, to whom they had previously felt so inferior.  As we are all aware, in the end this change of attitude had a profound impact on the entire history of humanity.

“Bacchus” (detail) by Jacobo Sansovino (c. 1510-1512)
The Bargello, Florence

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April 19, 2012 · 11:42 am

A New Bonfire of the Vanities

My friend Margaret Perry over at Ten Thousand Places sent me an article last evening about a rather bizarre form of protest taking place in Italy at the moment.  The director of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum in Naples has begun burning works of art from that collection, to complain about government funding cuts due to financial austerity measures. This is being done with the support of the artists involved, and took place again today.

This kind of excessive, histrionic behavior is not the exclusive purview of the left, as students of art history are well aware. The reader may have heard the term “bonfire of the vanities”, which refers to a practice that was particularly popular during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Preachers would invite their listeners to bring sinful objects, or objects which might lead one into sin, to a public place. These objects would be burned, as a sign of contrition and repentance.

The most infamous exponent of this practice, though he himself did not invent it, was the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola (1452-1498). For a brief period at the end of the 15th century, Savonarola established what was effectively a right-wing theocracy in Florence, at the very height of the Italian Renaissance. It was perfect timing for him, given that the ruling Medici had been banished for their excesses and heavy-handedness in ruling the Florentine people. Of course, what replaced them arguably turned out to be even worse, in what came to be almost a trial run of the Reign of Terror in France three centuries later.

Savonarola sponsored numerous bonfires of the vanities during his period of influence over Florence, but perhaps the most famous was the one which took place on Mardi Gras in 1497, when hundreds of works of art, books, and other objects were burned in the Piazza della Signoria, the large square in front of the city hall. During this conflagration, and in the ones which preceded it, we can assume that many bad things were destroyed, which were indeed occasions of sin for some people: objects associated with gambling, pornography, drunkenness, and so on. Yet many beautiful things which were not evil in themselves were also destroyed, including secular works by some of the greatest artists of the Renaissance, as well as Greek and Roman antiquities, musical instruments and compositions, and works of poetry, drama, and literature.

True, not everything was destroyed that could have been; some objects remained out of the hands of the contrite artists who created them, or the mobs which Savonarola sent about the city finding this sort of kindling were not able to locate as many of these things as they might have liked. Imagine the loss to Western Civilization for example, if Botticelli’s iconic “Birth of Venus”, or his glorious procession of Greek gods in “La Primavera” had been destroyed, as they surely would have been if Savonarola had gotten his hands on them. Yet we do know that the great painter Fra Bartolomeo burned just about everything he had painted that was not of a sacred subject, and the loss to our culture of secular work from the hand of this brilliant draftsman is an incalculable one.

I have always loathed Savonarola, not because he was actually wrong about many of the excesses of the church and society in his day, but because of his arrogance and his methods, particularly with regard to encouraging the destruction of art.  It strikes me that something similar is going on in Naples at the present time.  The thinking behind Savonarola’s actions, and that behind the actions of the Casoria gallery, appear to be quite different, superficially. The former is ostensibly about conversion from sin, while the latter is about government funding of the arts. Yet ironically enough, both are expressions of personal vanity on the part of those advocating these extreme measures.

Rather than being what he ought to have been, an inspiring, fiery preacher, with a sense of his own personal humility as a created being and remembering his vow of religious obedience made before God, Savonarola set himself up as the ultimate arbiter of Christian orthodoxy, which he must emphatically was not. In the process of consolidating his temporal power and encouraging his followers to adhere more closely to his personal cult, he fostered a kind of reverse iconoclasm, where the only acceptable art was Christian in nature. And as devout a Christian as I am, I cannot imagine a world without portraits by Sargent, landscapes by Corot, still lifes by Zurbarán, and so on. The result was a cultural disaster, more designed to show the personal power of Savonarola over his subjects – who later rebelled and executed him – than to encourage a universal good.

In the case of the Casoria gallery, a museum director who genuinely cared about the art under his care would not be setting that work on fire, were he in fact acting selflessly in this matter. I suspect that this sort of stunt does nothing to tug on either the heart- or purse strings of the average, rational Italian citizen. The man in the street probably finds most of the type of art shown at the Casoria rubbish anyway, and is more concerned about not being able to pay his rising utility bills, or that his children cannot find a job, given the poor state of the economy at present.

These actions on the part of the Casoria are a perfect embodiment of the maxim against cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Chances are a pencil-pushing, number-crunching government bureaucrat in Rome, who has to make decisions about budgetary matters for a living, is not someone who is going to care very much if some ugly works of art are burned in the street by a publicity hound in Naples. If the goal is somehow to hold the Italian government hostage until it finds more money which it does not have, then I suspect a great deal more art will be burned at the Casoria before something is done.

At the end of the day, this bizarre publicity stunt is a new, fully secular incarnation of the age-old bonfire of the vanities as practiced by Savonarola and his regime. The stated intent of the old practice was to encourage the sinner to reform his life; the stated intent of the new is to encourage funding of the arts: both are good ends in and of themselves. Yet the means by which these ends are being sought say more about the egos and desire for personal fame of those coordinating these efforts, than about the causes which they claim to be advocating.


“The Execution of Savonarola” by Unknown Artist (1498)
Museum of San Marco, Florence.

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March 29, 2012 · 10:42 am

Behold, The Power of Blue

This morning I have been reading with great interest reports about the unveiling of the recently-restored Leonardo da Vinci painting “The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” at The Louvre in Paris. Leonardo has been in the news a great deal lately; indeed, I cannot recall a time when there was so much fascinating, legitimate (i.e., non-Dan-Brown-related) news about the Renaissance master in the headlines. And I am beginning, if only slightly, to rethink some of my views on him, in part because of his surprising use of the color blue.

In addition to today’s reporting on the “St. Anne” from Paris, recently there have been multiple stories about other Leonardo works. Much of these seem fortuitously tied to the fact that there have been two major exhibitions of late: the first in London from November to February, and the second which opens in Paris today, and continues until summer. There have been stories about Leonardo’s “Lady with an Ermine”, which traveled to the London show; the astonishing restoration of the Madrid version of “La Gioconda” aka the “Mona Lisa” ahead of its trip to the Paris show, which I blogged about; and the very exciting possibility I shared with you that the remnants of Leonardo’s lost fresco “The Battle of Anghiari” may have been rediscovered in Florence, hidden behind a wall.

As reported in many of the articles on the “St. Anne” painting, one of the first visitors to the Leonardo exhibition at The Louvre is quoted as being shocked by the brightness of the blues used by Leonardo. This is presumably as a result of having become accustomed, as indeed most of us have been, to thinking of his work as dark and muddled. “Now you have that same feeling as when you enter Michelangelo’s restored Sistine Chapel. Look at the blue!”, this visitor reportedly exclaimed. A similar reaction occurred when the contemporary copy of the Mona Lisa in Madrid, which experts believe was painted by one of Leonardo’s assistants side-by-side with the master in order to study his technique, was cleaned of layers of black overpaint and darkened varnish, to reveal the bright colors beloved by Italians of the Renaissance and beyond.

It is interesting to consider the possibility that Leonardo loved color as much as he loved light and shade, though perhaps not in the way that most of his fellow Italians did at the time he was working. On a common-sense level, we have to recognize that Renaissance Italians loved bright, often gaudy colors. We see this in how they decorated everything from their public and private buildings, to their everyday household items such as tin-glazed dinnerware, to how they dressed themselves in patterned silks and flashy velvets with plenty of gold jewelry. In fact one could argue that we can still see this today, in the way that some Italian fashion houses such as Missoni, Pucci, and Versace, among others, carry on this historic tradition of the Italian love for bold color.

Even when his work is cleaned and restored, Leonardo is a painter clearly more interested in subtle tonalities, than in creating a kind of bold, almost plastic quality in his work. His “St. Anne” of 1508, even if brighter and more colorful than it was before, is still nowhere near as colorful as the type of work done by many of his contemporaries. For example, take a look at this “Madonna and Child with Saints” by Lorenzo Lotto, or the young Raphael’s “Deposition from The Cross”, both of which were also painted in 1508.  Of course, Leonardo continued working on the “St. Anne” until his death, so the comparison is slightly unfair, but we do have to recognize that  the dreamy quality of the colors, bright though some of them may be, was somewhat atypical of the tastes of his day.

Given all of this media attention, expert opinion, and public scrutiny, I wonder whether future art historians will look back at this time period and consider it an important moment in both the study and critical appreciation of Leonardo’s work. This would not be the first time that such a thing took place. While Leonardo has always been treasured by those fortunate enough to own something by him, other artists have benefited from later exhibitions re-opening the assessments made on their work by their contemporaries or those who later supplanted them in popularity.

In the case of Leonardo, truth be told, I am not a fan of much of his work – nor of much of Michelangelo’s work for that matter. I recognize the contributions of these men to the development of Western art as being monumental in importance, but that does not mean that I necessarily warm to them as others do. It is a little bit like recognizing that a musician or an actor has a great deal of talent and ability, but turns you off in some other way, which would make you eschew the chance of having them over to the manse for cocktails. Intellectual honesty demands that I recognize achievement, but that does not mean I actually have to like it.

And yet now there is, as The Louvre visitor points out, that truly engaging, misty, captivating use of blue. It simply washes through the entire picture, bringing the piece a more intensely spiritual quality, almost like the effect when incense is used at mass, and the sanctuary becomes temporarily clouded in smoke. It is really something to see this, after so many years of thinking that Leonardo was interested almost exclusively in weird and colorless things.

Does this mean that I am about to become a convert to the cult of Leonardo? Not quite: there are many things about his work that I do not like, which will not change based on a re-assessment of his use of color. However one does have to recognize that sometimes, a creative individual can indeed surprise you with their talent, just when you thought you had figured them out.

I will certainly be thinking and reading more about Leonardo’s work, as a result not only of the many news stories about him, but also by the emergence of this surprising application of the color blue in his work – work which, in my ignorance of his palette, I had for such a long time dismissed as being unappealing, dirty, and dark.

A visitor at The Louvre admiring the newly-restored
“The Virgin and Child with St. Anne” by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1508-1519)

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March 15, 2012 · 10:58 am

On Art, Architecture, and Snazzy Suits

I have stated on this blog many times that one of the great merits of both social and new media is the ability to connect people in the hope of some good thing coming out of it.  While it is true that many of us may not be in a position to put what we like to do ahead of what we need to do, by making an effort to reach out to others we may be able to make use of our talents, abilities, and interests in ways which our day-to-day lives do not always permit.  I do not work in the fields of art and architecture, for example, and yet I have been able to build upon my knowledge of and enthusiasm for these fields as a result of the possibilities afforded by the increasingly connected world in which we live.  I want to take this opportunity to encourage you to do the same, gentle reader, by giving you some examples from some of my own experiences of how you might go about doing so as well.

Yesterday in the mail I received copies of a catalogue from a new exhibition at the venerable Fortnum & Mason, on Piccadilly in London, who as you may know have been the grocers to the British Royal Family for many years.  They were sent by my friend Rupert Alexander, a hugely talented English artist whose work appears in the exhibition, because in the section on his work the catalogue  quotes from an essay he commissioned me to write about his painting for his website.  It was an odd thing, realizing that the Queen may very well have read some of my writing – or perhaps Kate or Camilla – when they visited the exhibition recently.

Rupert and I initially connected because I saw a piece about him in The Telegraph online, and I wanted to convey my appreciation for his work. I found him online via an internet search, I emailed him, and he replied: simple as that.  We slowly started talking back and forth about his work, our respective points of view on art, sending each other links, and so on.  Eventually, we got to meet in person when he and his wife spent their honeymoon in the United States, and both proved to be as lovely in person as they were online.  Today our connection continues, and in the note which accompanied the catalogues he sent, he let me know that he had enjoyed listening to my recent appearances on SQPN’s “Catholic Weekend” podcast – which he listened to, by the way, even though he himself is not a Catholic.  The point is, both of us made an effort to connect using new media and social media, and the end result is, I daresay, a positive one.

You cannot always guarantee, of course, that the result will be positive, for just because you reach out to someone on Twitter or Facebook, or via e-mail and the like, they may not necessarily respond, or they may do little more than give you a cursory acknowledgement.  I have met a number of people both in real life and via online media who seem unable to figure out how to go about reaching out to people, how to follow up once they have done so, and what to do if their efforts are not successful.  Allow me to give you an example of how I usually go about starting this process of investigation.

Thanks to my friend Eric Wind over at the National Civic Art Society, I learnt this week of an art project taking shape in the Tuscan city of Pisa.  Luca Battini, a young Italian artist, is undertaking the interior decoration of the monastic church of St. Vito, which he will cover with an enormous, 1,700 square-foot Renaissance-style fresco depicting the life of the city’s patron saint, St. Ranierus.  It is estimated that the painting will take at least three years to complete.

As you can imagine, if you are a regular reader of these pages, I found this an intriguing bit of news.  I did an internet search and found Maestro Battini’s blog which, while not updated frequently, he or his assistants clearly do maintain as they are able.   In scrolling through the archived posts, I noticed that last year he completed a portrait of Pope Benedict XVI, which he personally presented to His Holiness.  The technical skill employed is accomplished and slick, without however being a “look at me” sort of production, and the end result is a very pleasant, but unsentimental image of the Pontiff.

I have written to Signore Battini using the email addresses I found on his blog, briefly telling him about how much I enjoyed learning about his work, that I would be doing a blog post in which I mentioned him, and that I would follow up and send him a link to the post.  Now the ball is in his court.  He may write me back, as Rupert did, or he may not, as was the case with George Shaw, who was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in contemporary art last year and whom I attempted to contact via the gallery that represents him.  And even if Sr. Battini does write me back, there is no guarantee that we will have anything further to say to one another.

The point is, one must make an attempt, or one will never know.  Most human beings experience some degree of shyness or awkwardness at times, which is only natural.  And no doubt many find the idea of sending a message to a total stranger to be somewhat off-putting, particularly if that stranger is someone better-known than we are.  However whether famous or ordinary, the method should be the same.

In my experience, the best thing to do is be brief, and to the point.  Explain why you are contacting them, open the door to the possibility of a reply, such as by asking a question or indicating that you will be sending some follow-up information that may prove to be of use to them, and then thank them for their time.  If they do respond, do not use email or tweet #2 to spill out everything about who you are and why you are worth getting to know.  The vast majority of productive relationships are formed through a slow build of revelation of shared views and experiences, rather than a sudden explosion of information on either side.

However, even as we keep in mind that using new and social media to reach out to others does not mean the recipient of your communication must befriend you, by the same token nor do you have to befriend everyone you want to contact, if there is no real basis for further communication.  For example, recently I caught a bit of a 50′s-60′s style musical group performing on television, and rather liked the (admittedly flashy) suits they were wearing.  I found their website and e-mail address, wrote a brief email complimenting them on their talents and asking who made their suits.  One of the members e-mailed me back with the information, for which I thanked him, and that was that.  I do not anticipate any further contact, since I do not enjoy that style of music, even if it requires good vocal skills and a finely-tuned ear.

These few examples will hopefully encourage you to try to do the same thing, when you feel compelled to reach out to someone else online.  Taking advantage of the opportunities provided by the internet, through a combination of using both new and social media, can prove rewarding on many levels.  However the first step is perhaps the most difficult: recognizing your own humility, while simultaneously overcoming the fear of rejection.   You may not always make a new friend or contact, or obtain the answer to a question you have, but you will never know unless you try.

Italian artist Luca Battini at work

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