Travelogue 1192 – 2 July

Qua si fa

What was it like to be an artist in the Michelangelo’s time? It was obviously precarious. He served at the whim of tyrants. Popes threw temper tantrums. Projects fizzled. Funds came in fits and starts. Much of the time, the initial risk in a project was his. He received an advance, but then purchased a shipload of marble on his own account.

Was he a religious man? Much of his art had religious themes, following the tradition of the times. His patrons were often churchmen. What did he really think of Julius II, the conquering pope?

Interesting insight comes in his writings. Besides being the sculptor of the age, and having become the painter of the age, he was an accomplished poet. Some 300 poems of his survive, including a number of sonnets.

He wrote, in the first lines of a sonnet,

 

“Qua si fa elmi di calici e spade
e ’l sangue di Cristo si vend’a giumelle,
e croce e spine son lance e rotelle,
e pur da Cristo pazïenzia cade.”

 

Which means something like,

 

Here they make helms and swords from chalices,

They sell the blood of Christ,

And the cross and thorns become lances and shields,

So that even the patience of Christ fails.

 

No one has an exact date for the poem, but it’s probably during the reign of Julius II, the warrior pope. That was the pope who hired him for his mausoleum, then fought with him. That was the one who punished him by assigning him to the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Michelangelo was a devout man, which is given witness to in this sonnet and sonnets of a later time. An artist of his calibre was channelled as a matter of course right up the church hierarchy, and to the top. Was he disillusioned? What happened when Martin Luther challenged the papacy as corrupt? Some say even Michelangelo’s faith wavered.

Travelogue 1191 – 27 June
The Road to Carrara
Part Five: the Titbits

Aureae Petronillae Filiae Dulcissimae

Today, Michelangelo’s marvellous Pietà stands inside of Saint Peter’s Basilica, in the first chapel on the right as you enter. It has been there for several centuries. But the statue was not intended for the basilica. It was commissioned by the French Cardinal Bilheres to decorate his tomb, which would stand in the ancient Chapel of Santa Petronilla.

Saint Petronilla was an early martyr, probably of a noble Roman family in the second century. She was already venerated in the following century, when a basilica was built over her burial site. In the early Middle Ages, her identity became confused. People began praying to her as the daughter of St Peter. A story grew that she had been locked in a castle by the Apostle himself to protect her from King Flaccus. In a demonstration of how odd bits of reality survive in legend, Flaccus was the name of a noble Roman family that was indeed prominent in the second and third centuries.

In the middle of the eighth century, her remains were moved by Pope Stephen III to a mausoleum serving several late Roman emperors, which had been built in the late fourth century on the site of a circus (race track) built by the emperor Caligula. This building became the Chapel of Santa Petronilla. This was quite near the site of St Peter’s burial place, and near Constantine’s basilica.

The Chapel of Santa Petronilla became a favourite of French kings, from the time of Charlemagne. It was rumoured (falsely) that Charlemagne was buried there. When Charlemagne was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in 800, he was declared the adopted son of St Peter, and therefore brother to Petronilla.

That is the long backstory to the first location for the Pietà, carved for the tomb of the French cardinal who represented the French crown at the Vatican.

Poor Cardinal Bilheres was not remembered long. The Chapel of Santa Petronilla was demolished only a decade or so later to make way for the new basilica of St Peter. Some years later, Michelangelo himself would become the chief architect of the new basilica.

If it seems as though Renaissance and Baroque Rome was busy moving bodily remains from one place to another, well, yeah.

Travelogue 1190 – 24 June
The Road to Carrara
Part Four: the Titbits

The Carrara story begs some extras to tidy up. There are always interesting titbits to history, aren’t there? Being too strict in story-telling is to miss out on the fun of it, and, I believe, to violate the spirit of narrative history.

Michelangelo didn’t have to travel to Carrara for his next project after the Pietà. He returned to Florence to work on a huge block of marble that had been left aside, partially worked and abandoned. There was new leadership in Florence, and Michelangelo had a new reputation. The gifted young man was gifted the stone, a chunk of marble that a few artists had started on and stopped, noticing “imperfections” in the grain. Michelangelo took the challenge.

What he fashioned took three years. Everyone loved it so much, they changed the plan for its placement in the Duomo, and instead placed in the Piazza della Signoria for all to see. They called it “Il Gigante”, and it became a symbol of the city. The nickname makes me think of the 1956 film, “Giant”, which makes me think of James Dean. The sultry boy looks up from under his cowboy hat, taking the measure of the day’s Goliath. There is, after all, something Dean-like to the “Gigante”.

After that, Michelangelo was back in Carrara, this time for his longest stint, eight months, collecting a massive amount of marble for a monumental tomb he had designed for the new pope, Julius II. His relationship with this pope was a famously stormy one. Julius II was an ambitious man with a fiery temper, and he had big dreams for the city of Rome and the Papal States. He pursued wars like any contemporary warlord in Italy. And he took an interest in the up-and-coming young sculptor. The young man had risen into the highest ranks of artistic talent. And this did not go unnoticed among his competition. While Michelangelo was scouting marble in Carrara, a rival whispered in the pope’s ear that it might be bad luck to be building his tomb so early.

Even as Julius’s interest in the project flagged, Michelangelo worked on, always diligent, always dedicated to his vision. “He remained in those mountains for more than eight months,” Ascanio Condivi, his friend and his biographer, wrote, “with two helpers and a horse and no provision other than food.” He inspected marble; he supervised its excavation and the hewing of the blocks; he bargained with shipowners from Lavagna and Avenza. There were always politics, in every locale. Here, he had to balance Versilia with Liguria, Lucca with Florence, and with Rome. In the end, he accomplished his work; he had collected all the marble he needed, the raw material for a magnificent three-level monument, with more than forty statues, even as the will and the funds for it all were fading. Most of the marble would stand languishing in St Peters Square.

Michelangelo started the work in Rome, but clearly the pope’s mood had shifted. The sculptor was discouraged. After a quarrel with the pope over funding, he moved back to Florence to pick up his project carving St Matthew, as something more fulfilling. Julius II was not pleased. He harassed Florence’s gonfaloniere, Piero Soderini to such an extent that the city’s leader reluctantly asked Michelangelo to return to Rome. The court artist whispering in the pope’s ear, Donato Bramante, opined that the perfect assignment would be the vault of the Sistine Chapel. He thought it would be a way to set Michelangelo up for failure and finally dim the glow of this rising star.

So it was that Carrara and the marbles were set aside for a few years.

Travelogue 1189 – 20 June
The Road to Carrara
Part Three

The first time Michelangelo visited Carrara, the world was young. It was young, but not so innocent. In the same year, the Venetian John Cabot landed in Newfoundland, and the Florentine Vespucci embarked on his first voyage. Columbus was between voyages, perhaps fretting over the end of the world. The Genovese-Spaniard believed he was personally shepherding along Biblical prophecy with his exploration and conquest. The world must be laid open to evangelism. Gold must be collected in order to reconquer Jerusalem. Once again, it is good if we remind ourselves of the deep weirdness at the inception of the European project in America.

The poor, sad French monarch, Charles VIII, who had upset the apple cart in Italy a few years earlier, was planning a second campaign to recapture all he had quickly won and quickly lost in southern Italy. He had had two sons and heirs die as babies within the past two years. He was twenty-seven. In the spring of 1498, his wife would die in childbirth, and he himself would die a month afterward after banging his head against a door lintel in a rush to watch a tennis match. His successor would be his cousin, who would pursue his own ambitions in Italy, becoming the Duke of Milan and King of Naples, (only to lose it quickly to the Spaniards once again.)

Meanwhile, Michelangelo contentedly rode his grey horse across the mountains between Lucca and Pietrasanta, through Monte Magno and Camaiore. It was November; we can assume it was cloudy and cold. The road along the base of the mountains, from Camiore through Pietrasanta to Massa and Carrara was probably fairly rough. The region was going to be made more accessible after the Medicis claimed it, some sixteen years later. And as noted earlier, Michelangelo himself would be delegated to take a lead in the development.

For the moment, he is sure to have been content with his lot. He was 22 years old, and he had received a major commission. He was preceded by a letter from the Cardinal of Saint-Denis, asking the Elders of Lucca to support the young “maestro buonarrotto” in his task. The coast was Lucca’s for the moment. And so he travelled as someone important.

He arrived in beautiful Carrara, a town trailing down the hill, and arrived among the quarries above the town, where bone-white stone stood bare to the weather, squared and sheer from the blocks that were cut away. Here was the raw resource of his first genius, the element that held inside it his vision. He would write about the design inside the stone in his famous sonnet series when he was older and had done his reading in Renaissance Neo-Platonism.

The sculptor was put up in a house owned by the quarryman Francesco Pelliccia. Francesco worked in the Polvaccio quarry, and that is where Michelangelo found his blocks to carve. One can only imagine with what joy and what curiosity the young sculptor explored the quarries, led by stonemason Matteo Cuccarelli. One can imagine his agile mind at work, learning the techniques of quarrying, how he identified the stone, how he studied it, with what care and curiosity the young man ran his fingers over the raw marble in the mountainside.

Michelangelo paid for the stone, and he arranged for the horse and cart for the stones to be transported down the hill and to the port. And he left for Rome, probably to be there for Christmas. The marble was delayed; there was some problem with delivery. By spring, the marble had still not arrived. The cardinal was forced to write to friends to intervene.

As he became older, Michelangelo was reluctant to handle the business of the marble himself. It was no doubt an exhausting process haggling with the canny masons and workmen and cart owners, and then cajoling them to follow through with what they said, negotiating with the various customs agents of the day, the taxmen, the toll collectors, and the trolls under the bridges. By 1515, he was asking his brother to arrange for mediators.

Travelogue 1188 – 15 June
The Road to Carrara
Part Two

The stage had been set. Michelangelo had been a precocious boy. He had demonstrated unusual talent, enough to raise speculation and gossip, enough to be picked up by a cardinal in Rome. It was in Rome that his moment would come. It just took a little patience.

Strangely, it was the cardinal who had been fooled by Michelangelo’s faux-ancient sleeping Cupid that took him and acted as his patron, the Cardinal San Giorgio. But he never made use of him. Other small commissions came up here and there. This is when the sculptor carved his Bacchus for another cardinal, a piece now at the Bargello in Florence, the god of wine high on his own supply, leaning back unsteadily while a boyish satyr nibbles from the grapes he holds by his side.

After a year of small projects, Michelangelo was approached by the French cardinal of Saint-Denis, one Jean Bilhères de Lagraulas, who was acting as ambassador to Rome. He wanted nothing less than “la più bella opera di marmo che sia oge in Roma, e che maestro niuno la farìa megliore oge”, the most beautiful work in marble in Rome, something no master could do better. Those are words straight from the contract between Michelangelo and the cardinal, a contract negotiated, by the way, by Jacopo Galli, a banker and patron, the savvy man who eventually ended up with several works by Michelangelo in his garden, including the Bacchus.

And Michelangelo did deliver. He promised “la più bella opera di marmo” and that is what he accomplished. I was awestruck when I first saw the “Pietà” in Rome. Everyone was. “To this work let no sculptor, however rare a craftsman, ever think to be able to approach in design or in grace,” wrote Vasari. It was transcendent, the detail, the passion, the fine polish of its surface, the sublime expression on Mary’s face, the masterful composition. It is one of the many great privileges of my life to have seen this singularly beautiful piece of art, and sadly, a privilege never shared by the patron, the Cardinal of Saint-Denis, who died before the completion of the piece.

Galli had negotiated the deal for the Pietà. Michelangelo received an advance on the work, and, before he even signed the contract, he travelled to Carrara to scout for marble for the job.

Travelogue 1187 – 8 June
The Road to Carrara
Part One

The first time Michelangelo visited the marble quarries in Carrara, the fifteenth century hadn’t even reached its close, the High Renaissance was in full bloom, Mannerism and Baroque were waiting patiently in the wings – largely waiting for this young man to mature, – Raphael was a teenager, and Leonardo was working on his “Last Supper”, while designing weapons of war for the Sforza in Milan. Savonarola, the radical preacher, was running Florence – an episode I’ll be writing more about soon. Botticelli was in middle age, and was quite enthralled with Savonarola’s message, so much so, according to some, that he threw some of his own artwork into the great Bonfire of the Vanities earlier in the same year that Michelangelo visited Carrara.

Lorenzo de’ Medici had been Michelangelo’s first great patron. After Lorenzo had died, and after his son and successor, Piero, had been exiled from Florence, Michelangelo was forced to make other plans. His first stop was Bologna. But every ambitious artist of the day hoped to make their way to Rome. The Eternal City was resurgent, recovering from the rough years of the previous century and the early fifteenth century. The popes and Roman aristocracy were eager to rebuild the city in their image. The twenty-two-year-old Michelangelo already had achieved some renown as a sculptor. Next step: find his way to Rome.

How it came about was strange and fortuitous. On a visit back to Florence, Michelangelo fashioned a sleeping cupid from marble left over from another sculpture. The story goes that he contrived, upon the advice of a friend, to make the sculpture appear as though it were ancient and recently excavated. As Vasari puts it, “nor is there any reason to marvel at that, seeing that he had genius enough to do it, and even more.”

What followed was a bit of scandal, at least according to one version of the story. His friend sold it to a cardinal in Rome, and then shorted Michelangelo on the payment. The cardinal subsequently discovered it was modern and demanded his money back. This brought to light the friend’s deceit. There was outrage all around. The cupid did eventually find a home, and Michelangelo found his notoriety among the Roman aristocracy. That led in quick succession to his first extended stay in Rome and to the creation of the masterpiece that, among all his work, first stole my heart a long time ago.

Travelogue 1186 – 5 June
Versilia
Part Two

Forte dei Marmi was like a ghost town when we arrived in early May. The weather had been unreliable. It had rained the day before. We emerged onto the beach on a lovely day, and no one was there. It was like a dream.

The coast there is entirely privately owned. Forte dei Marmi and Pietrasanta each have one small public beach. All the rest, long kilometres of beach, is controlled by clubs, with each bagno, as they are called, running its strip of property between the road and the sea, its restaurant, its changing rooms and showers, its sands set with rows of gazebos, tents, chairs and umbrellas, all the way to within a few metres of the waves.

We stood on the narrow boardwalk, transfixed by the sight of the chairs arranged in rows as far as we could see, and all of them empty. The only people we saw were bagno staff, listlessly working here and there, arranging chairs, raking the sand, or effecting repairs. We walked up the boardwalk, peering into the empty restaurants. Bagno people looked at us curiously. There is no easy entry onto the private beaches. We had happened upon a path beside a club that was being rebuilt; otherwise, we would have been barred from seeing the beach by the long line of bagno fences. The nearest public beach was several kilometres away.

We got our time for fun in the sun. One club-owner kindly offered a day on the beach for twenty euros. It was off-season; the restaurant was closed, but we were free to occupy our chairs under the umbrella as long as we liked. It was a lovely, sunny day, and yet the beaches were still and quiet. The only signs of life were the occasional locals walking their dogs and the staff of the nearby bagni lazily inspecting their equipment.

The sands were so soft, and the water so refreshing. The girls ran tirelessly in and out of the water, pausing only to spend time on their sandcastles. I was happy just soaking in the warmth of the sun and sands, soaking in the long view out over the sea, and glancing back incredulously at the beautiful mountains, which were close enough to offer a dramatic backdrop, and close enough that one could see the white scarring on their sides where the marble was quarried.

Had the great man stood here? Michelangelo would have examined the shore, inspecting inlets, harbours and piers, no doubt, but he didn’t seem like a meditate-on-the-beach kind of guy. You don’t see much love of landscape among his works. He seems rather the type to choose mountains over seas, to me, the type to relish rocks and earth and the feel of solid land under his feet.

Travelogue 1185 – 2 June 
Versilia
Part One

Northwest of Florence, but still in Tuscany, there is a small mountain range called the Apuan Alps. They stretch only 55 kilometres, running more or less parallel to the coast, from southeast to northwest. They are jagged and beautiful, and they contain a precious stone that has attracted artists and architects since Roman times. It has come to be known as Carrara marble, after the Tuscan town Carrara.

Southwest of the range, the strip of coastal land is called the Versilia. It was a lovely discovery for us, a beautiful, green land squeezed up against the scenic mountains and set with small communities in the foothills and on the seashore. I recognise the signs of rain in the lush greenery. The area was once a marshy one, somewhat forbidding for the Etruscans and Romans.

Funnily enough, Michelangelo himself might be considered a founder of sorts of the modern Versilia, having been entrusted by the Medici in Florence to supply enough marble to build a façade for the church of San Lorenzo, the church that the Medici considered their own. That required the building of a road to carry all the marble to the sea.

A Medici had been elected pope, a childhood friend of Michelangelo’s, Giovanni, who became Leo X. That became an opportunity for the Medici, of course, and one quickly seized. An old territorial dispute between Genova, Lucca, and Florence was settled with a papal “lodo”, which granted the Versilia to Florence. And so it stayed until Napoleon’s day.

The sculptor oversaw the road’s construction for two years, and, though the church façade was abandoned – the church to this day has no façade, – and though Michelangelo was called called to other projects, the road survived and became the basis for development of the Versilia.

Travelogue 1184 – 28 May
The Day’s Battle

Most days are some sort of battle. Who you fight, how desperate the struggle, these things may change. On the rare day, there is no adversary at all, and you drift through the day like a prelude to Paradise. Yesterday was not that day. The adversary was obvious, and a common one for us gentle fools in the Netherlands: the weather.

I want to say we were lashed by the weather. It’s such a wonderfully dramatic, Victorian phrase, and in this case it’s entirely apt. It was a day that the girls and I were obliged to be on the bicycles for hours. The girls had after-school activities at all ends of the city. And the winds and the rain were relentless.

We were as ready as we could have been. Rain suits were on, and warm clothes underneath. But there is an undeniable power in Nature that demands your submission. The day was a record of the weather, more than of our achievements. Most of the time, the rain was a gentle one, but it would not let up. And the wind had its own rules, rising and falling in its own unpredictable rhythm, driving the rain into our faces, and pushing against us as we pedalled. Occasionally, the two forces combined, rain intensifying just as the wind blew. Occasionally, the wind played with our wheels, making us wind along our paths unsteadily.

I feared for our safety on the roads. I feared we would catch cold. I feared that the girls would be miserable.

And all this trouble we undergo during the modern age, with the wonderful technology at our disposal, the light and effective rain suits, the strong bicycles with treads on the tires designed for weather, the smooth and quick roads, and the warm and dry interiors.

No wonder the ancients perceived angry gods behind the weather and tried to propitiate them. No wonder Renaissance engineers prayed for success. Even in Italy, the wind and the rain would have made imperious demands on the people. I think of the labours of the Renaissance’s Hercules, one Michelangelo Buonarotti.

Travelogue 1183 – 24 May
The Neighbourhood Church
Part Two

Domenico Ghirlandaio, the painter of the Saint Jerome set opposite Botticelli’s Saint Augustine in the Church of Ognissanti in Florence, was a favourite of the Vespucci family, who were prominent in the neighbourhood. The Vespucci family funded Ghirlandaio’s projects in the church, including the Last Supper in the Refectory, the Saint Jerome, and the frescos he completed with his brother in the small chapel built by the Vespucci, the Madonna of Mercy and the Pietà. The Madonna of Mercy is an early piece, dating to 1474 or so. Mother Mary stands on a small pedestal with her arms extended in a gesture of protection, while members of the Vespucci family kneel below her praying. Closest to her is a boy or young man who would eventually become the most famous member of the Vespucci clan, although his fame lay a quarter of a century in the future. At the moment, the prestige of the family was upheld by his grandfather, who served as chancellor for the republic. He probably died just before this fresco was painted, and the boy’s branch of the family languished a bit under the tutelage of his wayward father, Nastagio, who was a notary and probably a drunk. Nastagio’s brother, Giorgio Antonio, was put together a bit better. Giorgio Antonio became a Dominican friar and a well-known humanist scholar, who was a friend of Marsilio Ficino’s, and he took responsibility for young Amerigo’s education. When another uncle was sent on a diplomatic mission to Paris, to the court of Louis X1, he invited young Amerigo along, and thus began Amerigo’s travels.

There is a medallion on the floor in the Vespucci chapel, a memorial for Amerigo. I cannot find conclusive testimony that he is actually buried there. In fact, it seems more likely that he was buried in Seville. In his will, he requested to be buried in Spain, in his wife’s family’s plot. The sense of mystery that attends Amerigo in death seems to gently match the mystery in his life. There is a surprising amount we don’t know about the Navigator. We can’t even be sure he took all the four trips to America that tradition has credited him with. The letter that sparked German mapmakers, Ringmann and Waldseemüller, to lend Amerigo’s name to the New World has proven to be a fake, probably put together by an unscrupulous Florentine publisher to boost sales. It’s quite possible that Uncle Giorgio Antonio took an active role in promoting Amerigo’s reputation. He was a dabbler in cartography himself, and could have been in touch with Waldseemüller. It might just be the right time to remind ourselves that America was from the start a story of family pride and fake news.

Travelogue 1182 – 17 May
The Neighbourhood Church
Part One

On our second day in Florence, we visited Botticelli at the Ognissanti church. The Renaissance painter is buried there, in the church of the neighbourhood where he was born. The church looked different then. What we see now is a Baroque, sixteenth-century renovation. But something of the original layout remains, and Botticelli himself contributed to its décor during his day. A fresco of Saint Augustine was commissioned by the Vespucci family, which Vasari tells us was intended for the entry to the choir but was moved to its current position in 1564. It hangs in the nave, opposite a commission executed at the same time by competitor Domenico Ghirlandaio, a depiction of Saint Jerome. The two saints were contemporaries, as were their portraitists, and in fact Botticelli seems to have wanted to reference Jerome in his portrait of Augustine. The clock behind Augustine points to the hour of compline, and he holds a hand to his breast and looks up with a rapt expression. He has heard the voice of his friend Jerome, who at that moment, faraway from Augustine, had just died. Jerome visited him before moving on, whispering to him, “You might as soon enclose the ocean in a bottle as comprehend the blessed nature of the saints.”

By contrast, Ghirlandaio’s Jerome, set now across the nave, is captured in a more prosaic moment. He is doing his work, writing in his study, stealing a look at us as we watch him translate the Bible into Latin. The two portraits clearly belong together, their divergences minor in comparison to their kinship. The time is written all over them, even, I feel, to the year, given the fast pace of Renaissance development. The two artists would work together again some five years later in another church, this time in Rome, in the Sistine Chapel.

The church is also Botticelli’s burial place. He never lived anywhere but Florence, and never even left the neighbourhood, moving only around the corner from his birthplace near the Ognissanto. It is only fitting that he lies there, a simple medallion in the floor of one of the church chapels memorialising him and his family. Since he did not use the name “Botticelli”, his family name of Filipepi being the name on the plaque, a small portrait of him has been placed on a small easel beside the marker, an image based on a self-portrait in one of his works, an addition to the scene that seems both touching and trivializing. Based on the very little I know, I believe he would have taken it in the best spirit.

There isn’t much to know about Botticelli. He quickly fell into obscurity after his death. Even in his old age, he had been left behind. Painting had moved on quickly from the techniques and styles of his youth. He persisted in his art, but his mood shifted. He was more serious; he was more devout. He turned his eye from mythological themes to Gospel themes. He turned to more sombre colours, and his compositions became more Gothic, in perspective and in figure.

When the demagogic friar Savonarola took over the city, Botticelli became an enthusiastic follower. He believed in the prophecies, and he believed in the calls to purge. Some say he threw his own paintings into the Bonfire of the Vanities in 1497. Vasari, a Medici courtier through and through, never forgave Botticelli for his betrayal of the great family, writing about him years later as though he were a bit of a clown. The biography is brief and dismissive. Writing half a century later, Vasari says the great painter died in penury.

Travelogue 1181 – 11 May
Up With the Birds

It is a hot one. Not a cloud in the sky. I keep going, despite the sweat and the glare. It is hotter here in Rotterdam than it was in Tuscany. But I need the run. I have a 5K coming up, and I must keep up the routine. I ran almost every day I was in Italy.

The first Italian run was some time before six in the morning. Light was just dawning over the hills in the east; the first light of the day was just striking the waters of the Arno. I felt like the sun was about to rise on a secluded little valley, which, I suppose is not a completely false impression. That the valley hosts one of the world’s great heritage sites is circumstantial. It is history.

It was May Day weekend in Florence, and there was something special about being out on the streets. Everything was so quiet. I ran a loop between two of the bridges. At that hour, I was one of only two people on the Ponte Vecchio. The famous views up and down the river were unimpeded and glorious.

So few people were out, the sounds of spring rose above the river, into the air of the city, the rush of the river itself with the songs of the birds, and I ran on, starting and finishing on the east side of the centre, where two ancient towers are left to stand watch, the Torre della Zecca and the Torre di San Niccolò. The Zecca used to be a mint in the Middle Ages, producing the famous florins that ruled medieval trade. Now it stands anonymously in a traffic circle, no public sign to name it or acknowledge its age. It is an artefact of history, something both obvious and mysterious.

The stillness in the city is modern. It is an anomaly. I doubt that Mariano Filipepi’s son, in 65 years in Florence, experienced a quiet morning. I imagine the medieval Florence a cacophony, once the slightest light had dawned. And Alessandro was a worker; I imagine him up with the birds and into the workshop.

Travelogue 1180 – 30 April
Workers

A couple of artists have been on my mind, a couple of hard-working artists. I’ve been reading the famous letters of one. One passage stood out. He’s about twenty-seven, and he has gone on a trip to see the country of a favourite artist. “I did go to Courrières last winter,” he writes, “I went on a walking tour in the Pas-de-Calais …. I had just ten francs in my pocket and because I had started out by taking the train, that was soon gone, and as I was on the road for a week, it was rather a gruelling trip. Anyway, I saw Courrières and the outside of M. Jules Breton’s studio.” He was too shy to knock on the door.

He continues on his trip. “I earned a few crusts here and there en route in exchange for a picture or a drawing or two I had in my bag. But when my ten francs ran out I tried to bivouac in the open the last three nights….” My body aches just reading it.

This artist repeats quite often his commitment to working hard. “Work” must be the most repeated verb in the collection. “So you see that I am working away hard ….”

“I saw something else during the trip,” he writes, “the weavers’ villages. The miners and the weavers still form a race somehow apart from other workers and artisans and I have much fellow-feeling for them …. And increasingly I find something touching and even pathetic in these poor humble workers ….” He wants to paint them.

Another artist was born centuries earlier in a humble section of his town, a neighbourhood called “Ognissanti”, after a thirteenth-century church there. At that time, the neighbourhood was inhabited by weavers and workers. His father had been a tanner but had become a gold-beater, which put him in contact with the artists and goldsmiths of the city.

The artist was a restless boy. Vasari says of him, “He was the son of Mariano Filipepi … who raised him very conscientiously and had him instructed in all those things usually taught to young boys during the years before they were placed in the shops. And although the boy learned everything he wanted to quite easily, he was nevertheless restless; he was never satisfied in school with reading, writing, and arithmetic. Disturbed by the boy’s whimsical mind, his father in desperation placed him with a goldsmith.” This was a fateful step. In those days, goldsmiths were close with painters, workers all, and the boy was taken by painting. Later he would add his art to the décor of the Ognissanti church itself. He never left that neighbourhood his entire life.

I hope to see the Ognissanti church myself in a few days. I will take a trip to the artist’s city.

Perspective 

History has been a study and an avocation all my life. It’s a passion. Some of my earliest thoughts were about history. Where did we come from? What were the first cities like? Ancient Egypt was especially tantalising to me. I asked my mother soon after I started the first grade, “When are we getting to world history?” I was frustrated: the school was getting a rather late start in academics, in my opinion.

When a history professor pitched his programme to me in my first year at university, I proved an easy sell. My original avocation still held me in thrall, even though adolescence had been a distraction. In the intervening years, I had moved on from Egypt: through the classical ancient histories and into the Middle Ages. In my subsequent studies, I settled on Renaissance and Reformation history, and I went on to write a forgettable honour’s thesis on Petrarch’s concept of history.

What have I gained from it all? This is a mercenary world, and the question is unavoidable. What is the dollar value of that degree, the study, those hours spent reading history? Believe me, I understand. I understand where history stands in the hierarchy of values in our society. My father was an engineer who used to mock the humanities. Now I teach in a business programme. What is the payoff, the ROI?

I will answer in one way that will not satisfy none of the needs of a capitalist’s soul. And then I will answer in another way that might just give the capitalist a moment’s pause.

First, I’ll say that, here, nearer the end of all my reading than the beginning, I feel like it takes a lifetime of reading and re-reading to begin to have perspective on the immensity of the human project. I won’t make any claims of mastery over the subject. In a sense, that keeps my ardour alive. I have never ceased to enjoy thinking about it, discussing it, and writing about it, always a beginner and always an enthusiast.

I use the word “perspective” with intention. Perspective is a result of reading history. It can also be said to be a value in reading history, meaning a reason to read history. Moreover, it can also be a way to read history. Summing up what I mean in teacher’s language, the way is to read actively. I tell my language students to read with a dictionary handy and to use it. Similarly, one needn’t read history passively; follow every branching detail or thought. For convenience, we conceive of stories as lines, but in fact they are webs, networks, or branching structures. History is no different; history is a story.

We are uniquely positioned, in the age of the internet, to understand this latter point. When we browse, we follow links. Think of every history text as hypertext, every name, date, place, and event a link. A productive session of study is a series of digressions. Some of us resist the urge to digress because we’re indoctrinated to think it demonstrates a lack of concentration. In fact, it is real engagement. Some of us resist digressions because we’re lazy. But the product of that is lazy history. Do you get irritated when your children interrupt you? Take a minute to consider their curiosity, and then consider the state of your own curiosity.

I do get it: to the impatient capitalist, wisdom and understanding fall under the rubric of “nice qualities”, which has a subheading, “so what?” I’ll turn to my example of the benefits of history, which might just inch us up the ladder of capitalist values from “so what?” to “hmm, interesting”.

First, a digression: is history fact? Much is made these days of the anti-factual climate we increasingly inhabit. Fact-checkers are working overtime, and in the face of increasing apathy. History is definitely one of the favoured categories of the fact-checkers, especially when dealing with the likes of Donald Trump. The implication is that history is a privileged discipline in that tarnished, old, fact-based reality that millions of citizens of the twenty-first century have found such a disappointment. But is history really fact?

If a politician is motivated for some reason to say that Hannibal crossed the Alps in 118 BC (rather than 218 BC,) he can be easily fact-checked, because dates clearly fall in the column of facts. But imagine he says that the Carthaginians were the Russians of their day. It’s a crass, emotion-based assertion, and obvious to most of us as empty rhetoric. But how is it we know that, and how do we check it? We cannot counter with fact. It’s an interpretation, and it must be countered with interpretation.

Context and depth of knowledge are required for interpretation. The politician in my example brings context, but a mismatching context; e.g., Cold War context vs ancient Roman. To successfully counter his conscious and intentional misinterpretation requires bringing the correct context to bear and then explaining it. It also requires the audience to have context. The propagandist counts on that being a difficult combination, and frankly being just too much work.

How do we rebuild context in the general milieu? It takes readers, and it takes writers. Remember that perspective is a method. A reader shouldn’t approach a biography, for example, as a train ride. On a train, there is one track, and one would prefer that the train stays on that one track all the way to the destination. That doesn’t work in reading. The destination encompasses all the territory in between. The journey is context, and is essential to comprehension. On ought to ride a few divergent routes, window-side, eyes wide open. Biographies are often academics talking to other academics. Lay readers will space out and remember little. There’s too much detail There’s little to link new knowledge to old.

Thus we come to the delivery systems. It could well be that proper histories are a civic enterprise. Perspective must also be a method for the writer. Modern readers know titbits about many things, few things deeply. Their attention spans are short. Assuming books still have a future, they should be written in such a way that they reflect the vagaries of enthusiasm, digging among details and then roaming the hills around the topic in order to scout the terrain. Excitement leads one far and wide in search of significance. And well it should be so.

The reader fascinated by Hannibal probably needs to also be exposed to Caesar and Scipio, Roman military tactics, and the roles of Sicily and Spain in Rome’s growing empire. The links should be natural. They ought to carry the reader forward simply on the power of their interest. Closing the book, the reader ought to feel comfortable that a new level of understanding has been reached, a kind of primitive navigation system, if you will, for a whole region in time, an environment that wasn’t familiar before. It’s not enough to know the milestones in Hannibal’s life; significance is derived from the geography and the stakes and the trajectories of empire before and after.

“Follow your bliss,” old Joseph Campbell used to say in championing the everyday hero, and I think it’s a fair bit of advice for the everyday, amateur scholar. We ought to every one of us have our humble ambitions as scholars, whatever the market value. And we ought to pursue them with whimsy, with liberty, and as though we had all the time in the world to follow every branching path.

We shouldn’t be rattled by the noise of our time; we should trust in the sturdiness of facts. We should simply cultivate the habit of sharing truth, and with something of joy we felt in discovering it.

Travelogue 1179 – 22 April
Never Sleep

I cannot sleep. My head is full of responsibilities and fear. My heart is racing. There are ideas chasing each other around the empty and resounding transit hall that is my head. Ideas about books, but also ideas about mundane challenges. The Metro is down this week between my station and the next two stations, and the day will involve at least half a dozen interchanges that would have led me through that home Metro Station. I must orchestrate the comings and goings of myself and the girls, sometimes together, sometimes separate. Even this is a puzzle beyond my powers.

In contrast to the charged atmosphere inside my mind stands the still air of the early morning. The spring dawn has not arrived. The songbirds are silent. They must be sleeping. The still air is beautiful. It is silky as ambrosia, but it is rare and dispersed as a moment without thought. I dearly love this hour before dawn, before I really wake, before I become the person who must wake. The stillness is profound; it teaches me about meditation.

As I record this, I am being stared at. There is a pink Styrofoam skull on my desk, a legacy of a play I wrote, and the eyes are turned toward me, its red irises set upon mine. The skull is pink and set with spangles because it is decorated in the style of the Day of the Dead. The play required a real skull, but I made this one suffice. It lies on its side now, among the chaotic jumble of items that have collected on my desk, lies within the tight circle of light described by my desk lamp. Its red eyes never sleep.

Travelogue 1178 – 13 April
Gracious

“Goed bezig,” they said as I passed. 

The sun had returned, and in a gracious manner: not brusquely or suddenly; not wanly, as though winter were still lurking, but just as a spring sun should, gently applying heat to the clouds, thinning them and shining through.

It had been a cool and breezy morning, perfect for marathoners. It was almost as though the sun had lent its blessing to the proud city’s event. Or maybe it was chance. I certainly gave the runners my blessing. One loop of the marathon’s course passed by the girls’ ballet school, and we stood at the side of the road and cheered for the athletes.

Spring was kind to the runners. The streets were strewn with pink petals from the cherry trees. The songbirds serenaded them in the parks. The clouds cooled them off, bestowing light, passing mists for their refreshment. The air was clement, and the sun made its entrance on the stage just as most of the runners were clearing their final kilometres.

“Is 41 kilometres a marathon? Is 39 kilometres a marathon?” Baby Jos asked. No, only 42. “Why?” Well, a competition needs to be standard, all around the world. There was no need to tell them the Pheidippides story again.

Later, I took a run myself. I ran along the road toward Schiedam, the one built along the back of the old dike. On one side were the old harbours of the River Maas. On right side was the little community of Witte Dorp, the little workers’ development, named for its white houses, built at same time as my own complex of flats.

From the dike, one must descend into the Witte Dorp. I took to one of the side streets, passing as I did a small playground. A boy was climbing on some bars. A couple who might have been the boy’s parents were sitting in their car, half in, half out, with the doors open. They were looking at their phones.

The mama saw me coming. “Goed bezig,” she said. I was past before I had processed her words. Good job, she had said. She had thought I was one of the marathoners. I probably looked like I had already run a marathon, the shape I was in, limping along, tired well before I should have been. I should have thanked her, but I was past.

I turned the corner and ran into the sun. This was spring. I felt renewed. “Goed bezig,” I said.

Travelogue 1177 – 5 April
A Fable for Rich Men

The powerful man has a thought. It’s not a very original thought, but he can deliver it with a wink. It’s only important that the man seem smart.

 

Our twitchy CEO, co-Majesty of the Untied States, Elonng Muisk, took to *their* (shall we try nonbinary pronouns for the father who has renounced a trans daughter) took to *their* inhouse chatbox to type a message to … no one? *They* wrote, “As I mentioned several years ago, it increasingly appears that humanity is a biological bootloader for digital superintelligence”

 

It's the appearance of smart, with the wink of a thief, cheap tech bro wisdom delivered with a shrug. Insouciance is the signature. The aphorism must be self-consciously disingenuous, a patently false sentiment from the hybrid engineer.

 

The rich man is scornful. Humanity has been found wanting. Our tale is found to be one full of sound of fury, and the rich man just might be the idiot telling it. “It appears that humanity is a biological bootloader.”

 

Notice, by the way, the rich man’s punctuation, comma in its proper spot, but leaving off the full stop – just the hint of rebellion, –leaving us always breathless in suspense. The comma is a sign he knows how to do it correctly, and the dropped point is a hint of his delicious roguishness.

 

The appearance of smart, with the wink of a thief. Here’s the pose of a thinker, our premier waxing dystopian between mainstage appearances at political rallies, where he jumps around in short Ts and whoop for the crowd, waxing dystopian in a kind of weak-tea homage to Rutger Hauer in “Blade Runner”, while lowering himself wistfully to the toilet seat backstage to issue off-handed disdain for the rally crowd, disdain for being mere … humanity.

One might wonder then, who is the audience for *their* aphorisms? Mme Muskoinette has already said that the world is inhabited largely by NPCs (nonplayer characters). “If you don’t think there’s at least a tiny chance you’re an NPC … you’re an NPC,” the Countess does “tweet”. One might just ask, “Who the fX is the “you” in *their* sage utterances?” – if one were to question a … genius.

At a Code Conference, some nine or ten years ago, the Countess Musk proclaimed that the likelihood that we are living in “base reality” was just “one in billions”. Meaning, all this is a computer simulation. (Run by a Muskovite teen in an alternate sphere?) It’s a terrible thought that might move a humble NPC to tears, but the Countess is fortified by nothingness. *They* survey all and see glorious Nothing, worlds emptied of soul. (The psychoanalyst of X punctuation might diagnose that void as the experience of pure ego.)

Among the poor suckers (NPCs every one of them) cheering on the Dark-MAGA hero are thousands of evangelical Christians who sit piously among their embroidered pillows reading devotional books like the one penned by the pious Jack Posobiec, entitled “Unhumans”, a book endorsed by Steve Bannon and JD Vance.

“For the last couple centuries,” those Christians read, “we’ve known them as communists. Socialists, with extra steps. And of course, leftists. Radicals and revolutionaries as well. A hundred years ago, Marxist Leninists, then more recently, Cultural Marxists. Even as, without irony and not as a joke, ‘progressives.’ For the purposes of this book, we will call them the unhumans.”

We the obedient are losing track of the ways in which we don’t count. We may require a Venn diagram now, explaining the overlap between NPCs and unhumans. If we have to ask, are we unhuman? Or is that only when we speak openly about “the people”, which, the Countess and Posobiec inform us, doesn’t exist? We must resign ourselves to having become a fable for rich men.