Travelogue 1218 – 11 November
Troubles

The gaiety of youth passes. Life has changes in store. It is hard to estimate, when one is young, how much change a decade can effect. One full decade has not passed, even yet, since Trump was elected for the first time. It was 2016, and we had an idea that history was a huge ship that was nearly imperturbable. No storm could rock it. Momentum would carry it on. Changing course on the high seas would require more effort than a small group of zealots had the stamina for. We could afford to wait out one errant administration, this one storm.

In 1516, one of Vittoria’s brothers died. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the church in Wittenberg. In context, these were tragedies on a scale that seemed manageable. But these were first links in a chain. Challenges of a different order were awaiting in the next decade, as Vittoria entered her thirties.

In 1520 and 1522, she lost her parents. In 1522, Fernando took on the Emperor’s commission, and it was the last time she saw him. In 1525, after the battle with the French, in which the French king was captured, Fernando was something of a hero. The forces looking to unite Italians against the emperor momentarily saw in him an opportunity. They approached him to change allegiance. Vittoria, when she caught wind of the conspiracy, urged her husband in letters to be loyal. Ultimately, he did, capturing the messenger of the conspirators, torturing him and prosecuting him.

I have read that Vittoria fell ill that summer. The cause is not known, but she was bedridden. Maladies drifted back then, lifted by breezes, touching down here and then, nameless and dry, robbing people of vitality. It appears in biographies without cause. No one is quite sure what took Fernando away at the moment it did, almost a year after the battle that left wounds on him. They say Vittoria battled illness the rest of her life.

It was December when Fernando died. She was on her way to his bedside; she had made it as far as Viterbo, just north of Rome. There she received news of his passing. She returned to Rome, and she retreated into the convent of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. She entered only days after Fernando passed, and she stayed until the autumn of the next year. Friends high in the church appealed to the Pope to forbid the nuns of the convent to allow Vittoria to join them by taking orders. This gives us an idea how esteemed she was, both as a dazzling member of the nobility and of the litterati, but also as a marriageable commodity.

Travelogue 1217 – 4 November

Sposata 

 

Vittoria and Fernando were married in 1509, when she was 17, and they lived together in Ischia together for two years before Fernando went off to war. In 1512, he joined the Spanish armies in the north of Italy, and almost immediately he was captured by the French, which provides the first of a neat set of bookends in his career. He wasn’t detained in Milan long by the French, thanks in large part to connections with the Colonna family, and he was kept comfortably.

Imprisoned by the French in Milan, Fernando wrote a ‘Dialogo d’Amore’ to his wife. It hasn’t survived. Vittoria responded with 112 lines in terza rima, which did survive, the oldest sample of her poetry that we have. She wrote:

 

“Se Vittoria volevi, io t’era appresso;

Ma tu, lasciando me, lasciasti lei.”

 

If you wanted Victory, I was right next to you. But, in leaving me, you left her. Her letter was a piece too pretty, full of classical allegory and puns, as was the custom.

 

Fernando was returned to the family, but he stayed only briefly. He was off to war again the next year, and he fought for the Spanish with honour, almost without respite, for nine years.

 

Life carried on at Ischia. Vittoria and her aunt, Costanza, gathered their literary luminaries, writers with names like Musefilo, Filocalo, Giovio, Minturno, Cariteo, Rota, Sanazzaro, and Tasso, and the island enjoyed something of a reputation for culture. “Superbo scoglio,” Bernardo Tasso wrote in a later sonnet about Ischia, “altero e bel ricetto / Di tanti chiari eroi, d’imperadori!” Proud rock, high and beautiful retreat, for such heroes, such conquerors!

 

Naples was the nearest major court, where the aggressive Spanish kingdom was based. Here, the d’Avalos family from Ischia could consort with the nobility of the realm. According to contemporary accounts, Vittoria and her aunt were dazzling.

 

The year was spent in celebrations and ceremony, pageants, parties, and religious observations. Gaiety and extravagance were the order of the day, gold and silk, sumptuous dress and sumptuous food. I just read about a wedding banquet in Naples that ran to 27 courses and only finished at five in the morning.

Travelogue 1216 – 27 October
Fernando

Vittoria Colonna was engaged when she was three. The boy was also from a noble family, of course, a family originally of Spanish descent. Fernando’s grandfather, Íñigo, came to Italy with Alfonso V, King of Aragon, who was also King of Sicily. Alfonso had a claim to the throne of the Kingdom of Naples, and he spent much of his reign pursuing that claim. His rivals included the Sforzas and the Anjous, and, during the early years of the wars, his rivals enjoyed the favour of the Colonna pope Martin V, whom we have met in Florence during the days of Brunelleschi.

In an interesting side-note, this same Íñigo, Vittoria Colonna’s grandfather by marriage, is a candidate to be author of “Curial and Güelfa”, a chivalric romance written in Castilian, which survives in only one manuscript. It’s written in Spanish, but is Italian and French in its sentiment and devices.

Curial is a poor knight, and Güelfa is a noblewoman and widow. She takes him under her wing and tutors him, until rumour drives him away from her. He travels and engages in great tournaments and deeds of knight errantry all over Europe, always coming back to Güelfa, who more or less spurns him. He ranges farther afield, captured as a slave in Africa, finding his fortune, raising an army against the Turks. But eventually, he comes home, a fully realised warrior and gentleman, and he and Güelfa wed.

So Íñigo d’Avalos fought for Naples. So did his son. So did his grandson. It was this ongoing dispute over Naples that eventually drew the French into Italy in 1494. This was the invasion that toppled the Medici (temporarily) and brought Savonarola into power in Florence. This was the beginning of the destructive Italian Wars that kept the peninsula in turmoil for the next sixty years or so. In this context, King Alfonso and his successors needed warriors.

Fernando Francesco d'Ávalos d'Aquino was nobility, and so he was trained to fight. Fight he did, all his short adult life. He was good at it. For ten years, he led troops for the Spanish interests in the Italian Wars. By 1522, he had attracted the attention of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. Fernando agreed, rather reluctantly, to lead Catholic imperial troops in Italy, though they were chronically underpaid and discontented. And he helped lead them to victory in Pavia, where, in a battle to break a siege of the city, imperial soldiers took the French king, Francis I, captive.

Unfortunately, Fernando didn’t live long to advance any further. He died in the same year, aged 36, his body, if not his spirit, broken by the years of tough military life. He left Vittoria Colonna widowed at the young age of 33.

Travelogue 1215 – 19 October
Finger On the Page

The most familiar portrait of Vittoria Colonna is by Sebastiano del Piombo. It was executed in the year 1520, (the year Vincenzo, the great lutenist was born; the year Pope Leo X had Michelangelo start on the Medici funerary chapel in the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence,) and it portrayed the 28 year-old with the finger of one hand on the page of an open book and the other hand to her heart. (Interestingly, this portrait of the very Roman Colonna by the Venetian painter Sebastiano del Piombo is housed in Spain, the homeland of her husband’s family.) If Vittoria’s gesture seems familiar, it is because it echoes the pose of Mary in many Renaissance versions of the Annunciation. Mary’s piety is notated by her studiousness.

Vittoria was raised by her fiancé’s family on the island of Ischia off the coast of Naples. She was educated by her fiancé’s aunt, Costanza, Duchess of Francavilla and defender of Ischia against the French. Costanza was a serious patron of the literary arts. She gathered a circle of poets and philosophers around her, several who were famous at the time, though Vittoria’s would become the most enduring name. Aside, perhaps, for Costanza herself, who some have theorized was the real “Gioconda”!

Travelogue 1214 – 14 October

Weird Cultures

Maybe there’s something virtuous about weirdness. I mean “virtuous” in a sense inherent in the word’s Latin roots, something robust, something strong.

I think that two things can safely be said about Florence in the 1400s. The society, the culture, the polity were robust and they were weird. I was reminded of the latter in reading a sample of Pico della Mirandola’s “900 Conclusions”.

In 1486 (the new Sistine Chapel was consecrated in 1483, complete with wall frescoes by Botticelli and Perugino,) the young philosopher proposed to defend his 900 Conclusions against “any philosopher or theologian, even from the ends of Italy”. He proposed to do this in Rome, but on his way there, he could not help but get himself in trouble. He tried to run off with the wife of a Medici in Arezzo and ended up (albeit briefly) in prison. He was 23 years old.

 

A few samples from the “900 Conclusions”:

·       The world’s craftsman is a hypercosmic soul.

·       No angel that has six wings ever changes.

·       Every soul sharing in Vulcan’s intellect is sown in the moon.

 

It should be remembered that Pico and Ficino (one of Florence’s premier humanist scholars) both were enthusiastic about magic and esoteric studies. Pico revived a study of the Kabbalah. And both were sincerely pious Christians, too. Pico was largely responsible for the rise of Savonarola, a fundamentalist monk who took over the city for four years during the crisis of the French invasion of Italy. Pico was committed to becoming a monk himself, when suddenly he died, age 31, the same year that the city drove out Piero de’ Medici.

 

All this to say, it’s easy to forget, as we lionize our Renaissance heroes, how idiosyncratic they could be, and how idiosyncratic also the culture that they nurtured and that nurtured them.

 

This I report as the American culture enthusiastically explores its own weirdest corners under the stewardship of the Grand Wizard of Weird, the (alleged) star of the Epstein files and the creepy don of the deal. Is all this, in the unsettling way of this world, a sign of a healthy culture reasserting itself, doubling down on its weirdness? It could be argued, I suppose, that the more lopsided the belief system, the more its people will fight to protect it: a perversion of Keirkegaard’s “leap of faith”. Reasonable people, by this logic, are inherently weaker in their social structures because there is just less passion aroused in the defence of transparently rational systems.

 

It should be held in mind, though, that Late Renaissance culture, robust and fertile as it was, developed before a backdrop of crisis and turmoil. Italy was becoming a battleground for the superpowers of the age, and there were plenty of relatively sober people who were convinced that the end was coming, that the year 1500 would bring the Last Judgement.

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.