Travelogue 1213 – 10 October
Colonna

Vittoria Colonna was born in the fateful year of 1492, the year Lorenzo the Magnificent died, the year Columbus sailed the ocean blue, the year young Michelangelo completed his marble relief sculpture, “Batte of the Centaurs”. She was born into the famous Roman noble family in a villa outside of Rome.

The Colonnas were an ancient family. They claimed their ancestry could be traced back to Julius Caesar’s own clan. They appeared in recorded history in the eleventh century, among the extended family of the Counts of Tuscany. This heritage, emerging from the Lombard era, is obscure, but they were already installed at the Castle called Columna outside Rome.

Medieval Rome – and the papacy - was a battleground for aristocratic families throughout the first centuries of the second millennium, and the Colonna family were nearly always in the mix. This required of them that they suffer exile from time to time. They suffered it in the fourteenth century, when a family squabble precipitated the Avignon papacy. For nearly a hundred years, the papacy was captive in France. Poetically, it was a Colonna pope, Martin V, who brought the papacy permanently home to Rome in 1420, during Brunelleschi’s time.

The family suffered exile again as the sixteenth century dawned, when Vittoria Colonna was only nine, because of a conflict with the Borgia pope, Alexander VI. Alexander used the French wars in Italy to consolidate his power over the city and the Papal States.

Noble families always had options. The Colonna family had married into so many noble families over the centuries that they had refuge ready. Fabrizio, Vittoria’s father was grand constable to the King of Naples. They moved to the island of Ischia. Already, at the age of three, Vittoria had been engaged to marry the son of a general in the king’s service, a boy who would become the Marquis of Pescara. The boy was Spanish by blood, and born in Naples, but he was heir to lands on the other side of Italy, a place I’m not sure he ever visited.

Travelogue 1212 – 2 October
Conscience

It’s sure that Brunelleschi’s dome was immediately famous. I imagine it took only a generation for the building to become an established symbol of the city. For Florentines, for Tuscans, and perhaps farther. Certainly, the popes cast a jealous eye on Florence’s architectural achievements.

By the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent’s waning years, when he wrote his essay on sonnets, when young Michelangelo was getting started, impressing patrons with his first productions, the Duomo was half a century old, still exciting, while also slipping into the background, an unchanging component of scenery on a stage set for great things.

By the time a century had passed since the Duomo was consecrated, Lorenzo’s great grandson, Cosimo, was ruling as the Duke of Florence. Duke was a title created by the Medici pope, Clement VII, for his illegitimate son, Alessandro. Alessandro did not last long; he was murdered by a jealous cousin. Duke Cosimo ruled then for more than thirty years. Perhaps the young lutenist, Vincenzo, played for Cosimo in his first years as duke. Cosimo was a great patron of the arts, after all.

The world was different than in Brunelleschi’s day. The republican past seemed a romance. But the Duomo still stood, one hundred years old, gathering soot from hearth fires, tall symbol of the city of art and influence, and still a source of pride. To give some perspective, the Empire State Building is just approaching the completion of its first century now. And the Eiffel Tower is approaching 140 years.

Michelangelo, son of Florence, was in Rome. He felt nervous in Medici Florence. A Medici was also in charge of Rome, but the second Medici pope, Clement VII, was a liberal-minded and a generous man, having less need than the Medici in Florence for continuous consolidation of power. The Florentine republican instinct died hard. One of Clement’s last acts of patronage before he passed away in 1534 was to commission the “Last Judgement” in the Sistine Chapel from Michelangelo. The artist carried on with the huge fresco, through the rest of the decade, under the reign of Paul III.

Paul III was a Farnese, a friend of the Medici. The sculptor and the pope may have known each other from Lorenzo’s days in Florence, when Farnese studied under the Florentine humanist, Giulio Pomponio Leto. The new pope was an old man, but he was alert, ambitious, and tireless. He was a reformer. The Protestant rebellion was in full swing in northern Europe. In the year of Paul’s accession, Luther completed his German translation of the Bible. In response to the rebellion, the pope launched a stern reform movement, the first sincere response to Protestant accusations of corruption. He called the Council of Trent. He oversaw sincere efforts to root out abuses among the Curia.

He also oversaw an aggressive reaffirmation of church doctrine along conservative lines. He approved the founding of the Jesuit order. And, in history, his pontificate became known as the starting point of the Counter-Reformation, a force of some magnitude over the next few centuries.

However, history is messier than the colourful maps that divide Europe into solid blocks of territory. People wrestled with their conscience in every country. Even in Rome. Even Michelangelo, artist for the popes, struggled with his conscience.

Travelogue 1211 – 30 September
One Sunset

The sky was a geometry. It was a blue field for play. There were lines crossing. The shapes formed were dreams of Euclid. There were white lines arcing in straight lines across the curving space of our sky. The lines were evaporating, erasing themselves. The sky was more than blue. There were shades darkening. There were gradients of colour. They were settling near the bottom, like syrup in a glass of tonic. There were wisps of the irrational, clouds that were not geometric. They soaked in the sweet colours, the red tones, the raspberry and the pomegranate. They glowed.

There are so many planes in Holland’s skies. They multiply, chasing each other like fuzzy white rabbits across the field. They play in their big, blue field where there are no fences, no furrows, no hills, and just space to run. And can draw there, abrasive scratches against their unearthly ground. They can bring impossible ideas to brief life, those straight lines, straight lines that curve, that might have inspired Newton and then Euclid, if the skies had existed back then, the skies in which the sun set, the skies in which metal rabbits played.

The fools who find contrails sinister, who read them like verses left by Nostradamus’s left hand, those poor minds, cheated out of adult thought, they might find the sight terrifying. Or offensive. Or worthy of righteous action. They find themselves incapable of aesthetics. They are made indignant by the proofs of geometry. They are confused by the purity of lines. They might become bewildered at the entrance of Newton, the peacemaker. May they find breath again.

For now, the night is gaining on the lines, and they are turning red with fright.

Travelogue 1210 – 25 September
Measuring Strings

A hundred years after Martin V returned to Rome, and after Brunelleschi had begun on the dome of the Duomo, in the year of Henry VIII’s Field of Cloth of Gold in Calais, a boy was born in a small town between outside Pisa and Florence. The boy was named Vincenzo, and he was destined to become one of the best lutenists of the century. He attracted attention early with his musical talent, and he studied under renowned masters. He played for great patrons, and he wrote many pieces for the lute, some of which have survived until today. Here is a nice example.

For most of his adult life, he lived in Florence. There, he became a regular member of the famous Florentine Camerata. This was a group of musicians and humanists who met to discuss the state of art, music and drama. It engendered a number of theoretical studies. It became something of an incubator for ideas that led to the reform of music and the birth of opera. Jacopo Peri, who wrote the first opera, was too young to have participated in the Camerata, but was inspired by their advocacy for Greek tragedy, and given tools by their theory; for example, the “recitative”, which allowed rhythms of natural speech in musical composition. This is often attributed to Vincenzo’s work on monody, or the single voice.

That was how far the Renaissance had come since the days of Brunelleschi and his mirror. There were learned debates about Greek music and tragedy. Modern music and drama were to emulate their Greek models. They read the Greeks, they documented their thoughts, and, more importantly, they applied it to what they saw and heard.

Vincenzo, for his part, wanted theory to sound like reality. Theories about music were still medieval, dominated by the speculations of ancient philosophers, who saw magic in nature. The intervals between musical notes were to be seen as divine ratios. They were messages from the gods, and the medieval were unlikely to tamper with things divine. But Renaissance artists like Brunelleschi and our lutenist Vincenzo were artisans who believed in the practical world. They were fine with the church, but they wanted to speak more accurately about their craft. It didn’t seem like an insult to God to do that, to make sense of what they saw and heard, what they experienced with their own fingers on the fretboard.

Vincenzo tested those medieval intervals, found they were not accurate. He conducted experiments. He laid strings across enlarged, table-like fretboards, and he hung weights off them to test tension. He tried different types of strings, of different sizes and materials. He kept records of his results, and he calculated new values for the intervals, more accurate ratios. His eldest son, Galileo, had a talent for mathematics.

These experiments were a trial run for the scientific method. They had results that ran quite beyond the interests of the lutenist. He did publish his results, and they did make waves among scholars of music. It did contribute to the birth of opera, and to the practice and theory of music afterward. But, more importantly, they were a brick in the foundation of empirical science. They were a template for research. They formed the mind of one formative thinker for the coming age of science, his son, who was born the day Michelangelo died.

Travelogue 1209 – 15 September
The Eccentrics and Science

The Medici family collected artists and philosophers, and their fields of study flourished. The individuals fared as they fared, most living hand to mouth, lucky if they received some small stipend for their work, no artist so grotesquely rich as some artists have become in our time.

They had passion, and they had flair. Florence in its glory years was full of eccentrics. One of our fonder moments of eccentricity features Filippo Brunelleschi standing before the ancient Battistero with a painting and a hand mirror before his face. It was an experiment in perspective. And a public one, at that, a just tribute to the republican origins of art. “Come look,” he may have said, as people gathered. In the mirror was a tiny peephole, and also in the panel. The panel was likely a mirror itself, painted on one side with a likeness of the Battistero. “No, hold the back of the painting to your face,” he said, helping a citizen line up the panel, the mirror, and the background. “What do you see?” They answered with wonder, “San Giovanni!” The Battistero, the painting of the building lining up perfectly with the reality. Brunelleschi had already something of the reputation as a wonder-worker; the mirror stunt was only confirmation.

The likeness of the Battistero was crafted, of course, according to his new method of perspective, using a vanishing point, horizon and orthogonal lines. The trick was a psychological one, adopting one point of view, the human eye of one individual viewer. This was the art made by humanists. This contrasted with God’s viewpoint, in which all points in time and space were equal and accessible. The human viewpoint was individual and anchored to one privileged location.

The trick was a scientific one. Apply geometrical principles. Test and replicate. Does it look accurate? Can the bystanders in the Piazza del Duomo confirm the success of the technique. Then the principles were sound. Twenty years after his public experiment, the young Leon Battista Alberti codified Brunelleschi’s principles in his book, “De Pictura”, and the Renaissance project, as a broad-based phenomenon among artists, was born.

It makes sense that the artists of the day would be among the first scientists. They had to understand the chemistry and physical properties of their paints, boards, metals, plaster, and stone. Being more architect than artist in his later years, Brunelleschi concerned himself with space and dimension. There was no other recourse than mathematics. In Rome, he had assigned himself the task of documenting in sketches all the ancient buildings he could find, and tradition tells us that this is when he began thinking about perspective. How would he capture the essence of what he was seeing? Accuracy became important for the purposes of reconstruction and imitation. Replication was essential to the scientific project.

Travelogue 1208 – 8 September
The Busy Hive

Why can we never sit still? While we discuss history, while some people make history, the ceaseless activity of humanity, like the frenetic motion in a populous hive, carries on with its customary intensity. While Petrarch heralds a new age, standing on the Capitoline Hill as a representative of the renatae litterae (a Renaissance), the hive is abuzz with activity. It is only six years later that Cola di Rienzo rises to seize power in Rome. One of his acts during the roughly six months of his self-declared tribunate is to call for a united Italy – five hundred years before Garibaldi. He succeeds in calling representatives from electors and head of the Holy Roman Emperor to sit beside representatives from all principalities in Italy in an assembly as he announced a new Italian federation. Petrarch is surprised and delighted.

But Cola di Rienzo didn’t last. He was erratic, and he couldn’t stand against the forces of reaction arrayed against him. He was run out of town. Some years later, he was turned into a tool for the Avignon popes, smuggled back into Rome to sow chaos, and was turned on by his own mob.

Neither could King Robert of Naples last, the enlightened monarch who acted as patron to Petrarch being only mortal. His death in 1343, only two years after Petrarch’s laureate ceremony, was a blow to the poet, and one that may have led him to a humbler assessment of the state of cultural renewal. He thereafter spoke about the “Renaissance” project (his idea, but not his term) as one delayed, one destined for the future.

I think of Trump’s big project, written in sand by a petulant and greedy child. It seems unstoppable, and probably is, for the moment. But even in triumph, it is already being undermined. Locally, regionally, nationally, thousands of people are innovating in small ways that chew into the same tapestry that the Trumpistas are weaving, like the myriad, miniature forces of nature working on the greedy, little boy’s sandcastle. In a generation, the Trump “legacy” will be unrecognizable.

I think of a fresco by Bicci di Lorenzo that survives from 1420, the year that Pope Martin V departs Florence to begin his Rome project, and in that fresco the pope is consecrating a new church in Florence. The style of the painting is still medieval, the clergy and the nobility in attendance standing in tidy rows, and the perspective so flat and simplified that the scene is like pages in a book. The faces are serene and nearly indistinguishable. The protagonist of the fresco is the church itself, the old Sant’Egidio. And while the church is small and yellow, with red tile above, it signals some Gothic intention, with high arched windows beneath two high-peaked roofs. There is no symmetry; each door bears a different shape, and sparse, small windows are set by no plan. Small gargoyles guard the main door. The only hint of new aesthetics might be the round window above the doorway and what appears to be the terracotta piece in the tympanum. Old and new are simultaneous; people are busy with both, all the time.

Occasionally, I stop by the central train station for a coffee. I travel west to east across the city every day; the station convenient. There is a café next to the roltrap for Spoor 3, where I can perch at a counter by the window and watch the people rush. I watch the hive. I listen to its buzz. Why does a writer with a strong misanthropic streak volunteer to stop the midst of it? There is a sort of wisdom that resides in the centre of the hive, a calm within the storm. I don’t walk away with much of it, meaning I am no wiser when I find it, but I do sense it, and find a kind of rest inside of it.

Travelogue 1207 – 5 September
Wild Rome

Rome had already provided the inspiration for the poets and philosophers. For them, the Renaissance was well under way. Since Petrarch had discovered the letters of Cicero, Roman language, literature, style and ideas had formed a guiding light for the writers. But not many had actually travelled to Rome.

Petrarch himself had gone to Rome in 1337. Inspired by the wild and magnificent ruins of the forum, he had started on his epic Latin poem, “Africa”. He returned in 1341 to be crowned on the Capitoline Hill with laurel wreath and proclaimed Poet Laureate, with the blessing of the Roman Colonna family and King Robert of Naples. It was an unorthodox choice of location. The papacy was in France, and Paris was the centre of academic culture in Christendom.

Rome was a bit untamed. A new pope was elected in 1417, and he lodged in Florence. Martin V may have been a familiar figure to Brunelleschi and his cohort. The architect was forty that year. He was completing his first commission, the drawings for the Ospedale degli Innocenti. He and his friend Donatello had taken their place as leading voices among the artists in Florence.

There is a story that Donatello and Brunelleschi travelled to Rome to study the buildings left by the empire. Perhaps they accompanied Martin V on his return to the city in 1420, when he brought home the papacy after its years of division and exile. It was his task to build the foundations of the Renaissance papacy. He brought to it the same intensity of purpose as the artists set on laying the foundations of a new classicism in art.

Did the sight of those ancient ruins provide the kind of inspiration to Brunelleschi that they did to Petrarch?

Travelogue 1206 – 2 September
A Dream in the Centre Square

Like Christopher Wren in London or Bernini in Rome, Filippo Brunelleschi left an indelible mark on Florence, a legacy you saw in every quarter of the old city, whether in the Medici’s Basilica of San Lorenzo, or the Ospedale degli Innocenti nearby, or Santa Felicita across the river, or in Santa Croce, in Santo Spirito, or, of course, in the great dome of Santa Maria del Fiore, his most remarkable achievement and the enduring symbol of Florence. The Duomo stood above the city old and new, and it became instantly and for centuries an element of Florentine identity, even human identity, something permanent and sublime, an object huge and intricate and yet immediately recognisable.

I have written about this before: years ago, while travelling to Perugia by train, I had a transfer in Florence at 4:00 in the morning. I had enough time to walk into the town centre. I stood before the Duomo all alone that morning, in silence, marvelling at the bulk and the beauty. It was like a dream. A six-hundred-year-old dream.

Imagine the labour involved in the manifestation of Brunelleschi’s design! It might be said that architecture, like theatre, is an art of collaboration, and that writers and architects are only the first in a chain of contributors to the final piece of art. His buildings took decades to finish, and the work incorporated the ingenuity and elaboration of other architects and artists, many of them happy to be a part of the legacy, as the master’s reputation grew. And then there were the hundreds of masons and labourers. I wonder how they all related.

Brunelleschi started humbly enough. He may have been the first of the architectural superstars in Europe, but he started in the way that most did, apprenticing as a goldsmith and sculptor, as Michelangelo did, and many others. His first job as architect was the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and he immediately set himself apart, drawing something we call classically Renaissance, something that was new then. What he drew was elegant, symmetrical and sparse in adornment, thin columns and arches and simple white. I can’t imagine how it struck the minds of those so accustomed to the Gothic. It might have provoked some objections: “Is this the drawing of a child? We are paying for grandeur.” But clearly he was the right mind for the time. Change swept through the Italy and then Europe. It was centuries before anyone looked back to rediscover the charms of the Gothic.

Travelogue 1205 – 27 August
Civil Acts

We have a poster on our wall from the last trip to Florence. It’s a sketch of Brunelleschi’s dome. It’s a reminder of the place. It’s a reminder of the spirit of the time. And it’s a reminder of the invigorating pace of civilization, once it’s been inspired.

I was listening to Heather Cox Richardson reading from Illinois Governor Pritzger’s statement after Trump threatened to send National Guard units into Chicago. It’s a momentous time, and a time of change. It’s not too unlike some of the periods in Florentine history, when the republic fought monarchs, when the republic fought itself. Perhaps America is not so exceptional after all.

Somehow men and women find the energy to stand against the chaos. I admire them. I might have had the reserves of energy once, or if I were young now. Perhaps I made one or two stands against chaos when I was younger, a few instances among the millions of unsung defences against chaos. Many people do it, you know.

At the moment, I’m just trying to recover from our trip to the beach. It requires a certain fortitude to travel with your family to the beach by public transit. It’s a trade of stress and strain for a couple hours peace, and clearly the kind of peace one can’t find amid the mundane, or we wouldn’t exert such efforts. It might just be the persuasion of an eight-year-old. Little Ren is a beach-lover. Her enthusiasm is infectious.

I tend to linger somewhere between boredom and sincere appreciation when I am at the beach. I am restless, and then I am resting. I am happiest staring up at the clouds, and then out to the reaches of the sea, as far as the wind farm out there, as far as the big ships that seem to drift asleep, as far as the curve of the Earth and what I cannot see.

I watch the people. The crowds are exhausting. But they are there, and undeniably a part of the beach experience, the boisterous boys, the families ceaselessly moving, the old couples calm, the children squealing. The dogs. The motion swirls around us, rising and subsiding like the sea’s waves, and yet it has its codes and its lines, its prescribed limits, and people commit to the roughly drawn circles of their agitation, and their commotion becomes channelled. Centuries of repetition have encoded their manners. It’s a wonderful thing, and it’s no less foundational than a vote in Parliament. Every civil act, conscious and sub, is in fact a stand against the chaos, every normalcy a sort of kindness to the neighbour, in the face of the malignancy of the raiders running through the halls of our public buildings, shouting orders in our capitals’ streets, performing for each other like pirates who had forgotten how to behave, smug in their coarseness, donning fancy hats for each other.

Travelogue 1204 – 22 August
Travelling the Rivers

Little Ren needs a piano. Rotterdam has surprisingly few music stores with pianos in stock. It’s summer; we are free to travel and search. We decide on a music store in Sliedrecht, a small town upriver from Rotterdam.

I love water; I love being on water. I chose a watery place to live, and yet I find so few opportunities in the day-today to be on the water. We have to travel today, so I decide we’ll travel by water. It’s a direct way to travel in this case, from the west of Rotterdam to the eastern suburb, and yet not the most efficient. In a car, we would be there in half an hour. By train, it might take an hour. On the water bus, it takes an hour and a half. But it’s a beautiful summer day, and it’s an adventure of sorts, standing on the deck of a boat that is chugging against the river currents, watching the choppy water created in our wake. The girls are delighted.

On our journey of some 25-30 kilometres, we travelled on three rivers: the Nieuwe Maas, the Noord, and the Beneden Merwede. And each time, entering a new river meant literally entering a new river. In other words, the river ran no further. The waters changed their names. This is the magic of the delta.

There is a spot in Dordrecht, right where three rivers meet, the Noord, the Beneden Merwede, and the Oude Maas. There is a fifteenth-century brick gateway into the city, at the Groothoofdspoort, with a small, domed tower and seventeenth-century adornments, including a lovely relief of the Dordtse Stadsmaagd, the Maiden of Dordrecht, sitting in the “Garden of Holland, a palm of peace in one hand and the shield of the city in another, so delicate as to appear terracotta. It’s a cute little building. More importantly, there are a few modest eetcafes there by the water, where you can absorb the rare sun and feel like a witness of the convergence of waters.

Travelogue 1203 – 20 August
The Rivers They Come and They Go

It’s been a watery summer. We have celebrated August with many visits to the canals, rivers, lakes and sea that define this little country.

I’m still learning about the complexity of the river system here. In most European cities, one river runs through town. It was often the original raison d'être of the town. The river has a name; the name has roots deep in the past, some fun etymology, something comforting. There might be another river, a tributary.

In this part of the world, rivers come and go. Near Brugge, for example, the Zwin River was created by a storm in 1134. At one time, Bruges was close enough to the sea to be a port city. Then it wasn’t. Then the Zwin appeared, leading the sea almost to the walls of the city. It started silting up almost immediately. Canals were built, and the Zwin itself became unusable. Et cetera. But the Zwin played its part in history, enabling Bruges to become the medieval treasure that it was.

In this area, you can peacefully motor your way upstream on one waterway, never deviating, only to find several kilometres later that you are on a different waterway. Past the confluence with that smaller river, the larger river changed names. The Nieuwe Maas, for example, which runs through Rotterdam and connects it to the sea, actually only flows for 24 kilometres, and never makes it to the sea. Further, it has only existed since the thirteenth century, when, yes, a storm flooded the region, and river courses were changed.

It's a bit like the experience of an American trying to figure London out for the first time. The same street changes names every mile or so. “Why?” the innocent tourist asks. “It’s the same street!” Well, yes and no. It has everything to do with history, and with communities. Each village or borough had its own story about that thoroughfare, and the connection with other throughfares is a separate story.

Here, the rivers and canals are so many, and some are so recent. They form one huge network, like a web, and each strand much be identified for the purpose of navigation and planning. Some names are organic, some are quite dry, like the “New Waterway” that does finally connect the Nieuwe Maas – by way of the Scheur, mixing waters with the Oude Maas – connect it to the sea.

Travelogue 1202 – 16 August
The Holy Blood

The Burg Square in Bruges is the site of the original fort (“burg”) that was the seed from which the town grew. That fort was built in the mid-ninth century by Margrave Baldwin I. Baldwin the Iron Arm, as he was called, was made first margrave because he was the son-in-law of Charles the Bald, grandson of Charlemagne and Emperor. Flanders became the first hereditary autonomous county in the splintering Carolingian Empire.

There were a lot of Baldwins in Flemish history. Later Baldwins would include: the True Beard; the Leper King; Baldwin IX of Flanders, who was also Baldwin VI of Hainaut, who was also leader of the Fourth Crusade and afterward Baldwin I as Byzantine Emperor (and, sadly, the last of the Flemish Baldwins).

There was another Baldwin, one not descended from the family of Flemish counts but from French nobility, Baldwin III of Jerusalem, king of that Crusader state. According to legend, he presented to Thierry of Alsace, Theoderic, the actual Count of Flanders, a vial of the Christ’s holy blood in reward for his service in the Second Crusade. That was in the 1140s.

In 1150 or so, the Sint-Janshospitaal was founded. In the same decade, the Chapel of the Holy Blood was built. It was built next to the “Oud Steen”, the residence of the counts, which stood on the site of the old “burg” and would become the City Hall. The building we see on that site today was built in the fourteenth century. The Basilica of the Holy Blood that we see today is a combination of the first chapel and a fifteenth-century addition, with significant nineteenth-century renovation.

The weekly veneration of the Holy Blood happens upstairs, in the fifteenth- and nineteenth-century chapel. You walk up a lovely sixteenth-century staircase, designed by William Aerts, before entering the upper chapel, which is small and ornate, tinted by the nineteenth-century stained glass and the nineteenth-century frescoes behind the high altar. The Holy Blood is presented in a side chapel, at a marble altar designed in the eighteenth century.

Two priests enter with the relic. You have been bid to sit before the altar by an impatient deacon, but you stand when they enter. One priest is old, one is young. The old man handles the relic while the young man recites a blessing in four languages. Then we are allowed to line up before the stairs up to the altar. One by one, we are allowed a moment before the relic.

The relic is a piece of cloth holding the blood of Jesus, contained in a vial that tests have determined is made of Byzantine rock crystal dating back to the 11th or 12th century. There is golden thread wound around the vial’s neck which is visible through the encasing cylinder. That cylinder dates to the fourteenth century. It is glass with golden coronets on each end. Altogether, it is a mesmerising object.

I don’t believe or disbelieve that the relic is authentic. I am not a practicing Christian. And yet, I was moved by the experience of the ceremony and by seeing the relic. I would classify my response as a religious feeling. Religious feelings are public and ritual, aesthetic and moral. They are shared, and they are significant only as communal and moral emotion. I was moved by a consciousness of the suffering in history, as acknowledged by the church in the story of the Passion.

There is an awful lot of ‘protesteth-too-much” atheism in the world these days, particularly in Northern Europe, and it faces off with a smaller, but perhaps more obdurate, “protesteth-too-much” religion. The standoff feels inauthentic; both camps have feet firmly planted in another era. If either group had actually arrived at their station, they would have little to be so anxious about, so strident over.

The awkward artificiality on both sides makes it hard to speak about religion. But I can say I caught a bit of it on my trip to Brugge. It is a healthy feeling, when left alone, not pressed into service of one agenda or another. I felt like I learned something important about the church, something hard yet to verbalise.

Travelogue 1201 – 12 August
Sint-Jans

Het Sint-Janshospitaal, the Hospital of Saint John, in Bruges was founded in the twelfth century. For almost eight hundred years, the hospital was open to all who needed help, the poor, the sick, travellers and pilgrims. Those inside were bound by their charter never to turn anyone away. It’s an impressive complex, brick buildings enclosing quiet cloisters and gardens. Even today, when tourists are free to explore – the hospital moved across town to a modern facility in 1977 and the complex became a museum, – the place has a quiet dignity.

Honestly, I was very moved by the remains of this place and its charitable mission. Inside were many exhibits oriented to the work carried on there for more than 800 years, showcasing the medical work, explaining the medieval notions of hospitality and religion, making it real with recreations of the sounds that would have resounded in those halls, with images from centuries ago. One little video exhibit analyses the detail in one historical painting of the great hall that formed the heart of the hospital. Everything was in the open in that space, admission and diagnosis, beds and food, prayers and cleaning and even surgery. It is overwhelming to consider the work, the humanity, the suffering, the hope and despair housed in that great hall, day after day.

Also humbling was a little video of interviews with modern nuns from the order. Their words were very affecting. They were plain, simple words from women who loved their work. “No regrets” they said about their vows and their vocations. Regrets! I feel a sense of shame that anyone acting out such a vision of selflessness would feel a need to apologize. Their lives were given to the care of others. Religion moved them, and if many of us find religion suspect, the point is moot in the face of their commitment.

There is no denying that the monastics enjoyed a certain privilege and status in medieval society. It’s no accident that the hospital houses a collection of priceless works of art. I know nothing of the character of Hans Memling, but it’s sure he didn’t work for free. I forgive Sister Agnes her vanity, placing herself in paintings beside Mother Mary and Saint Catherine. She was the prioress of a great house doing God’s work. Her self-regard is not conclusive evidence against her competence, or can, with any seriousness, be held against her if she saved even one life.

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.

Travelogue 1193 – 7 July
No Priest

I enjoy primary sources. There’s always something revelatory in hearing the voices of people in their time. You never know so much about another era that the words from a primary source won’t add some shading, some perspective, some pathos to the subject.

The great Renaissance statesman and historian, Francesco Guicciardini, wrote about his youth that

 

his father "thought the affairs of the Church were decadent. He preferred to lose great present profits and the chance of making one of his sons a great man rather than have it on his conscience that he had made one of his sons a priest out of greed for wealth or great position."

 

So the young Francesco studied law, becoming a teacher of law at the Florentine Studium at age 23. He was from a noble family, so he would not remain unnoticed if he had any talent, and, indeed, he did go on to become an ambassador and administrator for the Medici and for three popes. All without the compromise that his father found distasteful!

He wrote in his “Ricordi” later in life: “Tutti gli stati, chi bene considera la loro origine, sono violenti ….” All states, he says, if you consider well their origin, are violent. Whether republican or imperial in nature, governments are founded in violence. And priests are no exception to the rule, he says. If anything, “la violenzia de' quali è doppia”: their violence is doubled. To keep us down, he says, (“tenerci sotto”,) they use arms that are both spiritual and earthly.

And this from someone with years of political service among the variety of city-states and nation states in play in the field of Renaissance Northern Italy. None of them, including the popes, were innocent. This isn’t shocking to the cynical modern mind, but it is surprising to see it written so plainly by someone writing at the time. He sounds like his friend, Machiavelli.

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.