History
I'm turning more often to writing history, something I have always done in my blog. History is a lifetime passion. Writing about it is a new level of learning about it. It requires something different of me. Please read my essay about "Perspective".
Savonarola
The Friar Who Ruled Florence
A book in progress ...
“For my part, I am not sure; my mind is not made up one way or the other … but to conclude, I say this: if he was good we have seen in our day a great prophet; if bad, a very great man ….”
Francesco Guicciardini
"The people of Florence do not esteem themselves rude or ignorant, and yet were persuaded by the Friar Girolamo Savonarola that he spoke with God. Whether in this he said truth or no, I take not on me to pronounce, since of so great a man we must speak with reverence; but this I do say, that very many believed him without having witnessed anything extraordinary to warrant their belief; his life, his doctrines, the matter whereof he treated, being sufficient to enlist their faith."
Machiavelli, The Discourses, 1, XI
SAMPLES
Excerpts from the blog:
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.
from #1180
SAMPLES
Excerpts from the blog:
The Road to Carrara
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.
from #1187
ergens anders