Posts Tagged ‘Michelangelo’

Six years ago we wrote about Berkeley publisher Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books and his suggestions for the Eros of Difficulty. Here is an addendum, in his own words:

When I ran the Los Angeles Times Book Review (1996-2005) I was temperamentally allergic to the notion, widespread in the newsroom, that the paper must reflect the alleged interests of its readers.

That notion, in the digital age, has now achieved a kind of hegemony. It’s the metric that rules. The underlying presumption is that the paper (or now website) must act as a “mirror” reflecting readers’ “interests,” otherwise the paper risked being “out of touch.” Only in this way, it was argued, could the bond between readers and the paper be strengthened. I thought then – and think now – this was exactly wrong. Rather, a better analogy would be the telescope, which when looked through one end makes near things appear distant, thus throwing them into sharp relief and providing a useful and unsuspected perspective. Or, alternatively, turned around and looked through at the other end makes faraway things appear closer, thus giving us an opportunity to see afresh things that otherwise might escape our attention. I felt it was important to spurn the faux populism of the marketplace. I sought to honor what Mary Lou Williams, the jazz pianist and composer, said about her obligation to her audience and her art: “I … keep a little ahead of them, like a mirror that shows what will happen next.”

I wanted to give readers the news that stays news. Of course, ideally I wanted what Otis Chandler in his heyday had wanted: mass and class. But if it came down to a choice between the two, I knew I’d go for class every time. In literary affairs, I was always a closet Leninist: Better fewer, but better. Today, my friend, the brilliant and resourceful Rochelle Gurstein, sent me a lovely quote from Ernst Gombrich (writing in his 1969 essay “Art and Self-Transcendence”), which had I known it, I would have emblazoned it on the door to my office: “This parrot cry of relevance seems to me total nonsense. … The egocentric provincialism of people who so lack the capacity for self-transcendence that they can only listen to what touches their own individual problems threatens us with such intellectual impoverishment that we must resist at all costs.”

Some weeks ago, Rochelle had plucked from Joshua Reynolds‘s farewell discourses on art, this gem. Reynolds, taking his leave from the Academy of Art he’d founded, surprised his audience (and later readers, as Rochelle wrote to me) by offering Michelangelo as the greatest artist and the one students ought to take as their exemplar over Raphael whose virtues he had been at pains to praise in the preceding fourteen lectures. Now, Reynolds tells his audience, “We are on no account to expect that fine things should descend to us; our taste, if possible, must be made to ascend to them.” Against those who believe they can trust their first impressions, Reynolds insists, “As [Michelangelo’s] great style itself is artificial in the highest degree, it presupposes in the spectator, a cultivated and prepared artificial state of mind. It is an absurdity therefore to suppose that we are born with this taste, though we are with the seeds of it, which, by the heat and kindly influence of his genius, may be ripened in us.”

There really wasn’t a winner … or rather, there were only winners. The annual “A Company of Authors,” which we previewed here, is like the Dodo’s Caucus Race: “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.” Alright, alright … there are no prizes, either, but everybody really does win.

That said, John L’Heureux‘s presentation of his latest, The Medici Boy, was clearly one of the highpoints of an afternoon that was full of them (some said it was the best “Company of Authors” year evah). So much so that I began taking notes against my better instincts – my home is cluttered with wads of papers filled with unused notes, whatever will I do with them? L’Heureux said that we know little about the origins of Donatello‘s bronze David, unlike most of his works that we can pin to an approximate date and a commission. Not so with this mysterious work, which L’Heureux called “a revelation.”

I was the last moderator on the final panel of the long afternoon. Hence, by the time I staggered out into the Stanford Humanities Center lobby where the Stanford Bookstore was selling copies of the featured books, much buying and selling had already taken place. However, one book had vanished entirely. You guessed it. L’Heureux’s The Medici Boy was suddenly a Stanford best-seller. No surprise, perhaps. The Washington Post said of the book and its author: “His luminous prose, swift narrative, love of art history and cool eye for human weakness make this one a pleasure to read.”

Although I had arrived too late to purchase a copy, there had been a small bonus book added to each purchase, and one or two left over. So in the spirit of the Caucus Race (“all shall have prizes”), I got a free copy of Dikran Karaguezian‘s Conversations with John L’Heureux, published by Stanford’s CSLI Publications in 2010 – and with an excellent introduction by Tobias Wolff, too. Here’s what L’Heureux said about The Medici Boy five years ago:

“Way back in 1999 on my first trip to Florence I had the good fortune to visit the Accademia and the Bargello on the same day, which meant I got to see Michelangelo‘s David in the morning and Donatello’s David in the afternoon. They provided me with a good close-up contrast. I was astonished at the Michelangelo – it’s vast and overwhelming – and I was embarrassed by the Donatello. I didn’t know where to look. The statue is so unashamedly naked. And erotic, with an eroticism that is quite calculated, I think. It asks to be looked at. It asks to be touched. I knew absolutely nothing about Donatello at that time, but one look at the David convinced me that Donatello knew exactly what he was doing and went ahead and did it anyway. …

“I concluded first that there’s a story here. That whoever modeled for this David meant more to Donatello personally than the models for Saint George or Saint Louis. Donatello gives the statue an audacity, a sexual defiance, that I’m sure he captured from the model. It’s not superimposed. It’s there in the boy posing for him. And their relationship, I concluded, was by its nature designed to break his heart. …

Q: It sounds as if you must have done a lot of research for this book.

“Actually research for this thing is an endless process. I never really intended to write the book even though I began keeping notes for it as early as 1999. I thought of it as a project for my old age, something I could keep noodling away at right up to the moment of my death … or my being sent doddering and drooling to Casa Sayanara … and when people would ask, ‘Are you working on a new book?’ I would reply, ‘Oh yes, a long term project on Donatello.’ And then I’d leave a pile of notes and nothing more at my death, but I’d have been able to kid myself that I was still at work.

Truth be told, I have the same misgivings, that at my death my survivors will find only piles and piles of confused and disorganized papers and notes. So I was relieved that the bookstore also carried a few books by some of the panel moderators at “A Company of Authors” – and Humble Moi was among them. So at least one series of efforts will not be entirely lost to time. The featured book was one of my earlier efforts, Czeslaw Milosz: Conversations. While I can’t say that the small stack of my book flew off the shelves, the pile was slightly shorter when I left, which was gratifying.

One of my favorite quotes from the book: “I feel that the greatest asset that my part of Europe received in the history of the twentieth century, the privilege of our being the avant-garde of inhumanity, is that the question of true and false, good and evil, became operative again. Namely, good and evil, true and false have not been discovered through philosophical discourse, but empirically, like the taste of bread.”

"A resemblance of the divine mind"?

During my recent London sojourn, I passed the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square.  I hadn’t visited in years, and didn’t this time. Yet I remembered an old friend there: the Leonardo da Vinci charcoal cartoon of the Madonna, Child, St. Anne and John the Baptist.  I remember sitting contemplatively in the darkened alcove that housed it after I first moved to London years ago.

I should have stopped in last month.  Little did I know that a megawatt exhibition of Leonardo’s paintings had just kicked off.  On the other hand, a friend reminded me, do I want to fight my way to spy Leonardo intermittently through large mobs of chattering people?

My desire was piqued more than assuaged when I saw a magazine on a friend’s coffeetable, with another old friend on the cover.  No wonder the Lady with an Ermine was not available for viewing when I went to Kraków last spring (I’d introduced myself in 2008).  She was being gussied up for London.

“Yet what is even more impressive is the way that these spectacular loans have been devised, not simply to draw crowds – although they will, of course, do that – but to encourage us to think more deeply about Leonardo as an artist. Far more even than Michelangelo, he has come to stand as the archetype of universal genius – an anatomist, inventor and theorist pursuing his pioneering studies alone – to such a degree that the fact that he was primarily a painter operating in the commercial and courtly world of Renaissance Italy has been in danger of being forgotten.  The exhibition focuses on the 18 years he spent in Milan at the court of Ludovico Sforza.”

The article, by Michael Hall, was the cover story on a magazine I hadn’t thought about for years, ye olde Country Life, which I had always thought a stuffy, snooty sort of affair, filled with the names of people I’d never heard of.  It’s been revamped, and now it’s rather fun. There’s still a lot of pricey estates in the English countryside (though now it looks a bargain when compared to the Bay Area housing markets), but it also discusses a William Golding centenary exhibition, “Lord of the Flies and Beyond,” at the Bodleian, and a small tidbit on how the proceeds of the sale of two sketch-leaves of Edward Elgar‘s unfinished 3d Symphony are going to the great-great-granddaughter of the woman he he loved madly (she’ll be using the money to study at the Royal College of Music).

Meanwhile, the Leonardo exhibition continues till February 5, though I’m unlikely to catch it. It brings together more than half of his known paintings.  It also includes the first painting in over a century to be accepted as a hitherto unknown Leonardo:

“…an emphasis on perfect beauty that is strongly evident also in the newly discovered Christ as Salvator Mundi, begun in about 1499. … Leonardo strives to go beyond reality to embody an approach to art that he described thus: ‘The divinity which is the science of painting transmutes the painter’s mind into a resemblance of the divine mind.'”