Travelogue 1200 – 8 August
Memling’s Shrine

She led 11,000 virgins. She was a British princess on pilgrimage. She was slaughtered, along with all her entourage, by the Huns in Cologne. Their bodies were buried there, in the centre of modern Cologne, and there they remained until their discovery in the twelfth century. The bones unearthed entered the relic market, and St Ursula became very popular as the patron saint of young women. (The bones were probably from a Roman graveyard.)

I love the stories of Catholic saints. They are thousands of saints, and they are the superheroes of the Middle Ages. But there is a key difference between Catholic saints and heroes of Greek or Roman or Marvel mythology: they were human, born to live or die like anyone else, but were saved, sometimes martyred, and they effected miracles only incidentally, as an consequence of their holiness.

One can follow the story of St Ursula on the fifteenth-century relic shrine left us in Bruges, a product of the famous Flemish primitive, Hans Memling. Memling was a favourite of the sisters of the Sint-Janshospitaal. A particular fan was Agnes Casembrood, who commissioned the shrine, and who is portrayed on one of the short facades praying behind the Virgin and Child. She also appears, by the way, in one of the back panels of the huge Triptych of Saint John the Baptist and Saint John the Evangelist, which is also housed at the Sint-Janshospitaal. She kneels there and prays under the tutelage of two tall women saints, one of which ohich is Catherine.

The relic shrine is a marvellous piece of work, carved in wood to be a miniature Gothic chapel to house the hospital church’s relics and then painted by Memling and his workshop. The shrine is wooden, but is gilded, and it features all the decoration common in Gothic architecture, pinnacles, finials, gablets, crockets, tracery, and statues in niches. Along both sides, you follow the story of St Ursula in Memling’s vivid colours, travelling to Rome, meeting the pope, and then besieged by the Huns in Cologne. The scenes are crowded with figures, and yet you have no trouble picking out Ursula and the pope and following the fundamental storyline. The shrine is not even a metre tall. The art of the miniature is in full glory in this period. The detail is wonderful.

Travelogue 1199 – 4 August
Our Lady

We spent a few days in Bruges (or Brugge, in the Flemish variation). I made a point of stopping by the Church of Our Lady straight away, to visit the Renaissance treasure hidden inside. Here is one of the very few Michelangelo sculptures to leave Italy during his lifetime.

During the years he was carving the David, 1501-1504, when he was young, Michelangelo also produced this lovely Madonna and Child. It may have been intended for an altar in Tuscany, but it was purchased by a pair of Flemish brothers in the cloth business, Jan and Alexander Mouscron, and shipped home to Bruges to embellish a funerary monument for their parents.

The sculpture is recognizable as Michelangelo’s, in the Carrara stone, in the polish applied, in the shape of the Virgin’s face, in the twisting pose of the Christ child. It breaks from medieval tradition in several ways, in its asymmetry, in the independence of the child, who seems to be ready to take a step, in the contemplative expression on Mary’s face. She is not looking at her baby, but down, presumably at the worshippers in the church where the sculpture was originally intended to be installed, on an altar above the congregation.

There is something of the great man’s character in the work, something of his complex character. Note his devotion to hard work in the fine detail and the high polish. Catch the tone of his religion in the way the pyramidal composition exalts the figures, in the cool detachment of the figures as they consider the boy’s fate. Note his pride in the illusion of simplicity in the challenging pose of the Christ child. His awe-inspiring competence is as much the subject and purpose of the piece as the religious subject matter. Michelangelo’s work is a kind of testament to and embodiment of Pico della Mirandola’s "Oration on the Dignity of Man".

It was a privilege to see this work. It is housed in the Church of Our Lady, the thirteenth-century church with the tallest tower in the city, and third tallest brickwork tower in the world, a lovely structure that also houses the elaborate fifteenth-century tombs of Mary of Burgundy and Charles the Bold.

Travelogue 1198 – 27 July
Mimesis and Perspective

Renaissance sonnets were precious trinkets, but they were not solitary productions. They were discursive and public. They were a fun way to trade comments, compliments and ideas. They were a kind of sport for the aristocracy, a friendly competition among those educated among the Renaissance humanists.

Lorenzo de’ Medici wrote sonnets, in the days when Michelangelo was a young man. He started a commentary on his sonnets; I’ve been reading excerpts. He says, “whoever diligently seeks the true definition of love, finds it to be nothing other than an appetite for beauty.” This captures something of the spirit of the age. It’s a taste of the Neo-Platonism popular at the time – Lorenzo next discusses Plato’s definition of love, – but the statement provides a simple enough declaration of priorities. Elegance in form, and even elegance of ideas: God’s universe should fit together like a fun, little puzzle.

Philosophy and religion and the force of courtly tradition forced him to treat of love, but the far more interesting variable in his equation is beauty.

Aristotle analysed beauty, and therefore the Renaissance humanist must. Both Aristotle and Plato called art “mimesis”, and said that the keys to art were utility and beauty. Aristotle was more forgiving of art, finding it had its uses for the human mind, first as “catharsis” – what he meant by the term is still not clear – and then as a stimulus to higher intellectual function.

The great Renaissance theorist, Leon Battista Alberti, added mathematics. Harmony, symmetry, and proportion became properties of beauty. Beauty was measurable. And because art had become bound to philosophy and religion, it took on something of their gravity. Brunelleschi, Donatello and Masaccio were seers and saints in the new order.

Some seventy years separate Lorenzo’s essay from Brunelleschi’s experiments with perspective. Brunelleschi was a protégé of Lorenzo’s grandfather the great Cosimo de’ Medici.

Travelogue 1197 – 22 July
Il Mio Basso Ingegno

The sestet that rounds off Michelangelo’s sonnet races toward a conclusion, one we modern readers might easily anticipate, just as well as a Renaissance reader might, having been conditioned by the persistent memento mori in Renaissance art and discourse. Glancing ahead, we see the final word of the poem is “morte”, and we conclude that yes, the lover must die without the attentions of the beloved. That seems a safe conclusion for a poem that seems both courtly (about love and admiration) and philosophical (entangled with medieval religion). So, yes, this must end badly for the lover.

But it is Michelangelo. The concentrated language here offers threads of meaning that could reach almost as far as Freud. He sees in the mirror of his beloved contempt (“gran disdegno”), and he’s afraid – for the art, for himself. He doesn’t blame her; he blames himself. It’s not even his destiny that dooms him, he says, in a surprising concession, or even an assertion of will, but a failure of intelligence (“ingego”). In her heart, she carries two possibilities: her “pietate” or “morte”, pity for him or his demise. He has failed to inspire pity, and therefore it must be death.

These melodramatic terms are common in courtly poetry, going back centuries before Michelangelo’s time. Pity becomes a function of the beloved, and the effects of a withdrawal of love are dire. The differences here are Michelangelo’s analogy to sculpture, and the interesting device of unrequited love as a failure of “ingegno”, a failure of imagination, basically. That is not a light matter in the case of an artist, maybe as stark a picture as he can paint in words, an indication that he is reaching for the most impact possible. It doesn’t mean that he actually felt so desperately. It’s more likely a rhetorical exercise, a parlour game, a statement of affection, perhaps a hint of real longing, but not a twentieth-century cry for help from an obsessed ex.

Artistically the sestet is less interesting than the preceding stanzas. Much of the metre is eaten up with a list of the things not responsible for his failure: not love, not her “beltate o durezza o fortuna”, etc. No, he just lacks the wit. And, of course, confessing this in the sophisticated format of a sonnet is, intentionally or not, ironic, an act of self-indulgence among friends. It’s a beautiful little piece, though, and a pleasure in the way that, say, Renaissance intaglio was, or a gilded, sculpted salt cellar.

Travelogue 1196 – 17 July

Il Disïato Effetto

The second stanza of the Michelangelo sonnet is a knotted string of discourse, an artist lamenting his failures. It seems like a fairly typical sentiment in the courtly love poetry of the period: the beauty of the beloved escapes the meagre talents of the artist. But there’s something more.

 

Il mal ch’io fuggo, e ’l ben ch’io mi prometto,
in te, donna leggiadra, altera e diva,
tal si nasconde; e perch’io più non viva,
contraria ho l’arte al disïato effetto.

 

The language is so concentrated, it manifests the dilemma that the artist seems to bemoan. He can’t access her character. Or her character evades his art. I can’t tell which. Are we able to understand the beloved? Can we reproduce the beloved, create true images of them? “The bad that I flee from and the good that I pursue, they are hidden in you.” Can we know the author any better? The reader knows neither.

The author issues a cry of despair: “Perch’io più non viva, contraria ho l’arte al disïato effetto.” Because I may live no longer, even though I am not alive, inasmuch as I no longer live …” I can’t seem to find a translation that fits correctly over that precious frame. “While I live, I only have art that falls short.”

Is it frustration with himself, is it a courtly raising of the beloved to an unreachable height, or is it something of a standard Christian statement about the corruptibility of the flesh? Is it all of the above? Was he a great poet or a clumsy one? That is the legacy left us by one of the true geniuses of our history, grandeur and riddles.

Travelogue 1195 – 14 July 

His Double Negatives 

Three of Michelangelo’s sonnets were published in his lifetime, and they were published anonymously. This one might have been one of those three. I can’t seem to confirm that yet.

It begins beautifully:

“Non ha l’ottimo artista alcun concetto
  c’un marmo solo in sé non circonscriva
  col suo superchio, e solo a quello arriva
  la man che ubbidisce all’intelletto.”

 

The poem is famous because it forms a sort of artist’s statement, a philosophy of how art is made, while also being a poem of love or devotion. It was written to Vittoria Colonna, a woman that Michelangelo became quite attached to in the 1540s or so. He was already an elderly man, and it is debatable what form his devotion took. In all likelihood, a deep and friendly affection. Colonna was intensely religious. She was nearly as famous as Michelangelo, a noblewoman and an acclaimed poet. She had been widowed, and she lived in a convent at least part of the time that she spent in Rome. The two of them shared a lively faith in the church during a turbulent time. They entertained the company of reformers and people who confessed some sympathy with the Lutheran movement, but neither left the Catholic church.

I don’t like any of the translations of this poem I have seen so far. Not that I think I could do any better. There is something difficult to capture from Michelangelo’s style, his concentrated, even clenched, syntax and structure, elements that led Benedetto Croce to rather rudely label his poems “contorted and obscure”. This concentrated quality reminded me of Dante, even before I discovered that Michelangelo was a dedicated reader of the great poet.

Not atypically, he begins the poem with a double negative: there is no concept a great artist can conceive that is not already buried inside a block of marble underneath its excess stone; it just requires a hand properly guided by the intellect to find it.

The poem then becomes a poem of devotion to his dear friend Colonna, “donna leggiadra, altera e diva”. He is afraid that his art is no match for her beauty.

Much has been read into that first stanza as a statement of the sculpture’s method, because it sounds an awful lot like the Neo-Platonist thought of the day, of his youth, of Lorenzo’s day, in which the concept exists whole in the material, or in the ethers, waiting for the artist to capture it.

Travelogue 1194 – 10 July

Difficulties, Impediments and Labours

In Michelangelo’s day, and perhaps because of his extraordinary career, there was a lively debate among humanists, philosophers, and artists about which art was nobler, painting or sculpture. The great man had probably fuelled the debate with his performance at the Sistine Chapel, by the scorn with which he was assigned it, by his reluctance to do it, by his astonishing achievement there.

Later in life, he was asked to contribute something to the discussion by Benedetto Varchi, who was a historian and poet, and who was a friend of Michelangelo’s. (He would deliver the oration at Michelangelo’s funeral.) Varchi wanted his friend’s final word on the subject of which art was the nobler one.

“I admit that it seems to me that painting may be held to be good in the degree in which it approximates to relief, and relief to be bad in the degree in which it approximates to painting. I used therefore to think that painting derived its light from sculpture and that between the two the difference was as that between the sun and the moon.

“Now, since I have read the passage in your paper where you say that, philosophically speaking, things which have the same end are one and the same, I have altered my opinion and maintain that, if in face of greater difficulties, impediments and labours, greater judgement does not make for greater nobility, then painting and sculpture are one and the same, and being held so, no painter ought to think less of sculpture than of painting, and similarly no sculptor less of painting than of sculpture. By sculpture, I mean that which is fashioned by the effort of cutting away, that which is fashioned by the method of building up being like unto painting. It suffices that as both, that is to say sculpture and painting, proceed from one and the same faculty of understanding, we may bring them to amicable terms and desist from such disputes, because they take up more time than the execution of the figures themselves. If he who wrote that painting is nobler than sculpture understood as little about the other things of which he writes – my maidservant could have expressed them better.”

If translated correctly, there is a subtlety to this answer that I find compelling. It turns rather heavily on a negative if-clause that makes for an admission that is not an admission. It’s like saying that if the sun didn’t shine so strongly in Italy it might just be the Netherlands. And inside the if-clause we glimpse a core value for Michelangelo, which is the labour, the challenge that a job offers. It suggests to me that his achievement on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel came about not in spite of the challenge but because of it.

We can see here that he was contrary and stubborn. And yet, we can also see he was a thinker and a writer. The prose is pleasant. It isn’t simple grammatically. It has an edge; it has some humour. It isn’t a slave to bland abstraction like many of the rhetoricians of the day.