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.