Thinking

Wed - May 4, 2005

Make me a God

By Malcolm Bull

Something strange happened in the Renaissance. The deities of Greece and Rome had been proper gods with temples, rituals, priests and worshippers to go with them. They had disappeared only when Christianity took their place. Yet in the Renaissance, when the gods and goddesses of the ancient world re-emerged, they were no longer part of a religion, they were something else. What exactly?

It is tempting to suppose that the revival of classical mythology was the result of humanist scholarship and the rediscovery of ancient texts. Yet this is not really true, because the most important literary sources for artists were not classical works but vernacular romances and reprints of medieval paraphrases of Ovid that often have little relation to the original text. Even in the mid-16th century when mythographical handbooks of various kinds start to appear, they are often written for, and sometimes by, artists themselves.

Although the revival of interest in antiquity took many forms, the reanimation of pagan mythology is something that took place within the sphere of the arts. And there mythologies emerge first in minor decorative forms - wedding chests and jewellery boxes, the painted plates used in country villas - in the statues for fountains and gardens, and in the decoration of bathrooms and bedrooms. In literature, mythological themes are more common in occasional verse than longer poems; in the theatre, they initially appear as intermezzi, musical diversions staged between the acts of the play, rather than in the drama itself. Mythology did not demand sustained attention and it was not considered suitable for serious public contexts; if it served as more than a filler, it belonged in the private, often female sphere, where people sought undemanding relaxation.

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Tue - April 5, 2005

Bard of the boulevards

By Jonathan Bate

The French have always cared more for the authority of tradition than have the empirical English. That is one reason why they undergo revolutions – political and cultural – while we muddle happily through with evolution, surprising ourselves with our social mobility and cultural fluidity.

There is no better case in point than the drama. It may be argued with perfect seriousness that one of the reasons France had revolutions in 1789 and 1848 and Britain did not, is that they had Racine and we had Shakespeare. In London popular theatre provided a safety valve for popular opinion, whereas in Paris the drama of class confrontation was acted out on the streets with real blood.

Racine wrote for the court of the Sun King according to the prescriptions of neo-classical dramatic theory. The authority of tradition was as absolute as that of the monarch. The ancient Greeks had kept comedy out of their tragedies, restricting tragic matter to elevated characters and themes, so the French did the same. Their poetic drama used a limited vocabulary, bounded by decorum, and was aimed at a limited audience, bounded by the court. The wider populace was excluded from the realm of high art.

From the French point of view, nothing could be more vulgar than the counter-example of Shakespeare: he wrote for a public theatre, mingled verse and prose, high emotion and rude puns, kings and clowns, funerals and drunkenness. Most shockingly of all, he allowed trivial domestic objects – things that a classical French author would never dream of mentioning – to play a significant role in his plots. Othello turns on a misplaced handkerchief. A humble mouchoir: quelle horreur!

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Mon - February 14, 2005

Renaissance art, culture lacks link to extraterrestials

By Aaron Sakulich

Beauty is, or so I'm told, more often than not in the eye of the beholder. That's usually a pretty good policy, in my opinion. When people try to claim, however, that they behold not beauty, but rather UFOs in art from the Renaissance and middle ages, I have to draw the line. Last week I spoke about how there is nothing in ancient art that depicts ancient aliens speaking to our ancestors; I'd like to make the same argument here despite the fact that 'aliens' in ancient art and those in art of the renaissance are wildly different.

In ancient art it's mostly reoccurring shapes, such as spirals, and strange looking people, such as the Aborigine 'Brothers of the Lightning' that UFO enthusiasts peg as representing alien influence over human affairs. In Renaissance art, there's a lot of crazy-ass things depicted in paintings. They're harder to explain and, at first glance, appear to show UFOs. I hate to make things simplistic, but my answer to those who have asked what I think about this weird art is that it's all in the eye of the beholder, and I sure as hell don't behold any spaceships.

I can recall the first time I heard the theory that space aliens appeared in renaissance art: someone showed me a picture of the Virgin Mary with a "UFO" in the background. I can distinctly recall looking at it and thinking that it was no UFO, but rather that the Virgin Mary was wearing a beret that looked like a slice of brown baloney. Proof that aliens were visiting Italy in the 1700s? I feel I can make a stronger argument that medieval Italians had some wierd headgear. Sadly, I've never been able to find that painting again.

Obviously, I'm not going to base my entire argument on the fact that these crazy things in artwork don't look like UFOs to me. One other painting I have been able to find is called the Glorification of the Eucharist, painted by Bonaventura Salimbeni in1600. At first glance it appears to be god and Jesus sitting on thrones, each with a hand on the 'antenna' of a device that looks a lot like Sputnik. It's round, black, and has two long poles sticking out of the top of it.

When I first saw this painting, I was stumped. I had no idea how such a perfect drawing of Sputnik existed in the 1600s. But something seemed a bit odd to me: the two figures have their hands positioned on the 'antenna' not as if they are grasping it, but as if they're holding a pencil. I looked up a clearer, better version of the painting, and was immediately relieved. They're not holding onto a satellite; they're holding onto giant pencils with which they're drawing on the world. On the internet the orb appears grainy and black, making it looks as though the pencils and the earth are connected into a huge satellite-like shape. In better images, it's clear that the orb is the earth and the 'antennae' are pencils are styluses. It's also helpful to recall that during the middle ages Jesus and god were sometimes considered the "divine engineers," the architects who created the universe. This was during the age of building the great cathedrals of Europe; any historian would easily be able to identify this painting as non-UFO related.

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Tue - February 8, 2005

"Merchant" film rekindles debate over Shylock

By Misha Berson

The first big-budget, star-enhanced feature film of one of Shakespeare's best-known plays is cause for general celebration — isn't it?

Yes and no. When the play is "The Merchant of Venice," it lumbers to the screen laden with mounds of centuries-old baggage. And the heaviest burden is its most memorable character: a Jewish money lender in Renaissance Venice named Shylock.

Arguably the best-known Jewish figure in all of secular dramatic literature, Shylock is still a lightning rod — long after he made his first recorded appearance onstage, in 1605.

Michael Radford's attractive new film adaptation, starring Al Pacino as Shylock, rekindles the vehement modern debate over the character, and the play he dominates.

Roughly, it boils down to: Is Shylock, a Jew who demands a "pound of flesh" as his bond for a defaulted loan to the merchant Antonio, essentially a racist caricature? Or is he a more complex individual, who can't be neatly categorized as victim or villain, stereotype or singular?

Do Shylock's hoarding and usury (loaning money at high interest), his eagerness to exact bloody revenge from a gentile, and, ultimately, his forced conversion to Christianity make "Merchant" an intrinsically anti-Semitic drama? And prove that Will Shakespeare was a bigot?

Such unsettling, unsettled questions are not erased by the thoughtful but overly timid tenor of Radford's new film. Handsomely staged and shot mainly in Venice, this "Merchant" drums up even-handed sympathy for all the flawed major characters.

But such important recent books as Stephen Greenblatt's "Will in the World" and James Shapiro's "Shakespeare and the Jews" urge us to consider "Merchant of Venice" in a broader historical context. That way, we can move beyond a one-track debate about authorial anti-Semitism, to better examine the play's worldview in relation to our own.

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Wed - December 8, 2004

The Renaissance revival

The Renaissance probably went much deeper and lasted much longer than previously thought. Chris Arnot reports.

We tend to think of the Renaissance as a movement confined to a European intellectual elite during the 15th and 16th centuries. Wrong on all counts, according to Professor Steve Hindle, who is to be a leading figure in a research project linking Warwick University with the Newberry Library in Chicago. Over three years, British and American historians, classicists and linguists will seek to re-examine the social depth, the geographical breadth and the historical length of a period that saw the rebirth of classicism in art, philosophy and literature.

"I would argue that it was a much longer period than previously thought," says Hindle, who is based at Warwick's Centre for the Study of the Renaissance. "Yes, its origins were in late 14th-century Italy, with the rediscovery of classical texts, especially Plato's. But its influence was still evident in New England from the 1620s onwards. By the 18th century, the shape that institutions and architecture start to take on is fundamentally influenced by classical antiquity.

"In fact, the very idea of American democracy is influenced by classical modes of thought, revived in 15th- and 16th-century Italy and refined by 17th-century English republicanism. By 1776, all kinds of other influences were making their presence felt in American culture, but the fundamental idea for America as a republic harks back to Plato and Aristotle."

The project, linking scholars in the West Midlands with American counterparts in the Midwest, has been made possible by a grant of £190,000 from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, which finances educational projects with transatlantic links. Warwick academics will have access to manuscripts in one of the three leading research libraries in the US. And American scholars will be able to come to the Coventry-based campus for seminars and workshops and a few sight-seeing trips.

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Fri - September 24, 2004

The joy of art

By Richard Cork

I will never forget the momentous encounter that made me capitulate to the full power of art. At the age of 13, I travelled to London from Bath with my mother. Although both the National Gallery and the Tate were in my sights, nothing could have prepared me for the discovery of the Wallace Collection. Hushed, mysterious and filled with an eccentric assortment of unpredictable objects, it made me feel curiously at ease. It lacked the oppressive uniformity of systematic institutional display, and the virtual absence of other visitors nurtured the sense of exploration.

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Wed - September 22, 2004

Turning Pages

By Jane Sullivan

Researching a historical novel is a bit like asking someone to go to bed with you for the first time, says Richard Zimler. You want to get everything right. You take care choosing your clothes, the food you will eat. Afterwards, you realise you did all this just so you would have the confidence to pop the question.

Zimler, an American writer living in Lisbon who was a guest at the recent Melbourne Writers' Festival, says he has done up to a year of research for his novels about 16th century Sephardic Jews - and then has to leave out about 99 per cent of his material.

But nothing is wasted: "Through a magical process, you believe you are back there. You feel yourself walking in the cobblestone streets, you smell the oils in the market, and then you feel, 'Now I can begin to write'."

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Tue - September 21, 2004

Yawning in the Uffizi

By ALICE DuBOIS

WHEN I was 9 years old, my family took a trip to Italy. My mother suggested I keep a journal during the trip, and apparently I agreed to do so because I still have it: a hardback book, bound with paper and cloth, and stuffed with postcards, stickers, drawings, snapshots and page after page of my preadolescent pensées, written in the kind of earnest, labored cursive that only a mother could love.

The journal sat on my parents' bookshelf, ignored, until I rediscovered it a few years ago and instantly realized that my mother deserved an award for her foresight. The book is now at the top of my most treasured possessions list. As a window into the thoughts of a young traveler, it's an invaluable primary document, and I indulge myself by looking through it periodically, marveling and cringing at the peculiar ways my 9-year-old mind worked.

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Fri - September 17, 2004

The barbarian invasion

Pankaj Mishra

In 1492, Christopher Columbus "discovered" America. Six years later, a petty Portuguese nobleman called Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and reached India. These were, as Adam Smith called them, "the two greatest events recorded in the history of mankind". They marked the beginning of a great age of exploration and maritime trade, which resulted by the 19th century in complete western domination of the world.

Or so the old story goes, still found in books that describe how the modern world was created by the west, Europe, Britain, even Scotland; how from 1490 onwards, brave and resourceful Europeans ventured out into the great unknown, and showed isolated and backward natives everywhere the benefits of free trade, science, technology, and democracy.

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Fri - September 3, 2004

BEYOND THE IVORY TOWER:
A World of Glass

Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin

There is much debate about what caused the remarkable changes that swept through Europe between 1200 and 1850 in the form of the Renaissance and the industrial and scientific revolutions. In this month's Science and Society Essay, Macfarlane and Martin, discuss how glass contributed to these changes by improving everyday life and altering scientific thinking, ultimately helping to usher in our modern world.

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