Merejkowski's Leonardo and other distractions

It is much harder than I thought to keep up a blog.  Especially when you are in the habit of saying yes to too many things.  This is the most exhausted I have ever been at the end of a semester.  There were six talks at conferences, symposia, colloquia, other people's classes, all within three and a half weeks, and in the middle of it I took a test in Mandarin.  And all the talks (I also ran a session at a conference) were on completely different topics.  I made it hard on myself by deciding to do the Chinese class. In spite of all that I am going to try to keep up with the second semester.  In the photo above, alongside the title page of the novel is a sheet of my attempts to practice characters with a brush pen.  The larger characters are my Chinese name, 史北思 (Shi Bei Si).  The Bei Si sort of sounds like Beth in Chinese (about as close as you can get) and means northern thinker (or scholar) , which is funny because I am from the north and a professor.  Shi also has an appropriate meaning ('tho I forget it at the moment) and is a common last name in China.  It was selected for its meaning and because my family name begins with S.

But in spite of all the work I did manage to read the Merejkowski.  Now I can cross off the to-do list the idea of writing a novel on Leonardo's life to parallel the Agony and the Ecstasy for Michelangelo.  That was a bit of a stretch anyway.  This book, written in 1899 in Russian (the translation was from 1928), does that.  It seems to start in the middle of his life but manages to go back to his childhood through cleverly inserted sections of Leonardo's reminiscences.  This works well because the evidence for his early years is much fainter in detail and a bit unclear, like memories.  For much of the book, nearly the first 2/3s of it, we don't get much of a view of Leonardo and certainly are not privy to his thoughts.  As a character, he is seen in the background.  Other people are the narrators and we see him glimpsed through their eyes and thoughts.  One whole chapter was supposedly pages from Beltraffio's diary, which reports things he has been told by Leonardo.  They are straight out of Leonardo's notebooks!  Alongside such nearly non-fictional chapters are people experiencing drug induced hallucinogenic parties with pagan deities.  I kept thinking how clever it all was, keeping Leonardo himself at a distance so that his character and story are as mysterious as the historical Leonardo.  Then, slowly, we see him closer and closer, through the door of his studio, then in conversations with his employers and others, then we are with him in the studio, and finally we hear his thoughts.  I don't think I'm giving anything away by this description.  It's such an old book, and anyone who would read it certainly is already aware of Leonardo's life and work.  It ends of course with his death, not the mythologized dying in the king's arms but a scene that is much more plausible and in its own way poetic.

The translation is beautifully written except for one thing.  The upper-class and educated characters and the artists all speak in a quasi-Elizabethan dialect with lots of thou's and doth's and such.  It bothered me at first, but then the stiffness and oddness of it began to fade.  Then I noticed tradespeople and peasants spoke in a country English dialect.  So I fully expected when Salai showed up he would speak Cockney or something.  But no, he spoke the gentlemanly Elizabethan too, and was not referred to as Salai but by his first name.  He did not play a significant part except at one point he saves the day… no, I won't give that surprise away.

Most odd was the realization as I read it that nearly everything that scholars of the 20th and 21st centuries have found to say about Leonardo is in this novel, at least implied in it, including the attempt to characterize Mona Lisa as Leonardo in drag.  This is refuted in the novel nearly 80 years before that idea was proposed and a believable explanation for the similarity of Leonardo's self portrait (if that is indeed his self portrait) and Mona Lisa is offered.  I can't believe my luck to have this copy of the book fall into my hands by chance.  Ands thanks, Carey, for recommending it.

Edinburgh at 5 am.

High Street and the castle and Prince's Street Gardens from Waverly Bridge at 5:30 am

A rare quiet moment in the very center of Edinburgh in early August, taken on the way to the airport bus to head home.  If I had known how wonderful the city is before people are out, I would have extended the nine or ten hour hikes endured every day by an occasional pre-breakfast stroll in the mist.  In this photo the old buildings below High Street fade and the even older castle almost disappears in the fog, like the way things seem to rapidly withdraw into the past.  The silhouette of the iron fence and nearby tree create a frame on three sides and its U shape is then repeated in the mauve-colored paths turned 90 degrees in both the picture plane and the perpendicular plane of depth.  You can see the National Gallery in the center just below the castle.  This was taken at the last moments of a trip mostly focused on the museums, galleries, and visual-art Fringe events.  I thought visiting before the Festival days would avoid the crowds, but Edinburgh in August is as crowded as Florence in July!  Maybe more.  There were times when I couldn't move, the streets were so full of people.

One photo I would have like to get but couldn't because it went by too quickly was of a street sign seen on the bus ride into town.  Large rectangle, white letters on red, it said "Changing Priorities Ahead."  !  You know you're in another world seeing something like that.  I'm sure it means something about the arrangement of the roads, but it seems to be some kind of prophesy and sets me to thinking of all sorts of messages one could put on such signs.

There are a few things I didn't get to do.  I didn't get out to Little Sparta, the studio estate of Ian Hamilton Finlay (he called it a poem).  That was actually the first thing that had motivated me to visit, and I wasn't there the right time, didn't plan carefully enough.  A few hours earlier arrival or two days longer stay, and I could have taken a minibus trip that was only offered on Fridays in August.  It's virtually impossible to get there any other way, since the nearest bus stop is over four miles away.  Traveling lesson learned: plan carefully before reserving hotel room or purchasing air tickets.  I walked down Candlemaker's Row from Greyfriars, but couldn't find the sculpture of the little dog.  And I couldn't see much of the National Museum of Scotland because the Mary Queen of Scot's special exhibit ate up most of the afternoon. Half the National Gallery was closed for renovations.  But I'm not disappointed; I've excuses to return some day.

Getting there and getting around is very easy.  The Scots are very friendly and eager to be helpful.  The airport is tiny and easy to find your way through, and the bus takes you right to the center of town in just half an hour.  They run every 10 minutes in the first week of August.  You don't need exact change.  You can walk to anywhere in Old Town, New Town, or several neighborhoods surrounding them in a reasonable amount of time. I felt safe everywhere.  For weeks before going I was anxious and wondering if I was foolish to travel alone. It's been many years since I've traveled till I began again last summer.  I got a pin number for my Visa card and thought I was ready to get a good exchange rate, but then it turned out there had to be something in the card and the atm's wouldn't work. So I had to go to an exchange.  Surprise, the fees were much lower than getting Euro's with traveller's checks last year.  So I did ok anyway.  Rick Steve's advice was right.  Just go and trust that things will work out.  I will add more to this from my travel journal in days to come, including an experience of a possible haunting, thoughts on the art seen, sketches and photos. . . .

The Ponte Vecchio (Florence) Mirrored in the Rippling Arno

The Ponte Vecchio Mirrored in the Rippling Arno

The colors in this photo are a little off, so when or if I get a better shot (Photoshopping didn't seem to help) I will replace it.  This is a 24 color reduction woodcut, a process invented by Pablo Picasso.  The wood is a 24" length of  of 18" wide clear pine which came from a plank purchased many years ago when I was a sophomore at college.  The professor of my relief print class, J. Terry Downs, and 2 other students and I chipped in to buy the 8' board and split it between us.  It was relatively expensive even then because as Terry Downs pointed out such lumber was no longer available.  I have carried it around for all these years a bit afraid to use it.  But this summer I figured it should get used and had an image in mind, so here tis. I was emboldened by the thought that I can use the other side for another image later, and maybe even plane it down and reuse the surface several times.  Might as well, since in making a reduction print you destroy the image as you go.  

I aimed to create a balance between three things: the material (wood and ink), the facture (marks of the tool kept visible), and the image.  The close up below reveals some of this better than the full view.  Of course, it is much more visible in person.

For me the balance works, probably because I think of all three things when working on a print or painting.  Some viewers will notice the wood grain carrying through all the layers of ink and the slightly motley texture of the ink (which nonetheless manages to stay flat and matt through all those colors).  Others will note how the image is constructed of marks of the tool which look like gouge cuts rather than trying to follow a more precise rendering of contours and textures, rather like the brushstrokes of a Chinese ink painting.  I often think about Xie He's 6 Principles which recommend first and foremost to render not the outward appearance but the spirit of the thing, and secondly how the brushstroke is the 'bone' of an image.  But others will see most clearly the represented image.  Whatever you find interesting (or not), isn't it amazing that something that doesn't resemble the thing portrayed (the colors are all quite off, the cuts and shapes abstracted and quite different from the 'real' image, whatever that means, the texture, light, all far different from even a photo of the place) nonetheless is readily understood as a representation of a place.  See how the water of the Arno breaks up the image in two ways - the relatively clear striated image where the ripples are large and smooth, created by the downhill movement of the water over the subtle terrain beneath the river, and the choppy blurred image nearly dissolved where wind makes the surface flutter.  Both are just horizontal cuts of the gouge rolled up with many layers of colors, yet something of the reflected buildings are visible like the dream of a memory.  

On Living in a Library

When I finished expanding the shelves on one wall of my study a short while ago, the shelf space more than tripled and books immediately began colonizing the new spaces.  They came from all over the house where they had sat in piles on top of shelves, tables, and wherever.  For the time being there is a little bit of room for more.  Notebooks, sketchbooks, and some art materials and unfinished projects have handy-to-reach places that are now somewhat neat.  Perhaps I will be more productive.

There are more bookcases on the other side of the room not seen here, in all the other rooms, and in the wide front hall, so the little c. 1900 house is well on its way to being the proverbial book-lined cottage, though not nearly so much as the charming one inhabited by the character C.S. Lewis as played by Anthony Hopkins years ago in the film Shadowlands.  I recall being a bit envious of that setting.  

On the turning bookcase side table is a guide to Edinburgh, and a children's book titled Scotland's Story vies for attention with the tv remote and a sketchbook on the ottoman.  I'll be off to 'Auld Reekie' in a short while and will no doubt post some thoughts on the experience upon return.  Meanwhile I travel through a universe of places and ideas in the library.  The books are in disarray, but whole shelves could be filled if I organized them with collections that would reveal obsessions: time, space, perspective, science (esp. physics) and math, history, music history & theory, luthiery, chess, foreign languages, cryptography, ancient scripts, philosophy, Leonardo, and of course art from all times and places.  There is fiction also, but mostly in other rooms.  Historical fiction and science fiction probably outnumber other categories in that.  But from the age of two I have preferred to read non-fiction.  

My favorite poet for 40 years has been Yeats; favorite non-fiction writer for 18 years Martin Kemp, favorite fiction author changes much more rapidly.  For some time Colleen McCullough's Masters of Rome series held my fascination, then the books of Neil Stephenson, especially Cryptonomicon and the immense three volume Baroque Cycle.  That latter has as one of the main characters Sir Isaac Newton.  Leibniz and King Louis the XIV make their appearances.  It leaves you wondering for over 4500 pages why it is categorized as science fiction, why not historical fiction, but then . . . . I won't give it away.  Iain Pear's Dream of Scipio left me pondering for quite some time, and so for a while I read others of his books, all quite good reads.  Enjoyed Robert Harris's Pompeii so much years ago that I tracked down copies of his Cicero books Imperium and Conspirata this summer.  I once wrote a book review of his Pompeii, comparing it with Bulwer-Litton's Last Days of Pompeii.  They are very similar stories with often parallel characters: a hero from out of town, a maiden in distress, an evil priest of Isis. . . , but the comparison reveals the difference of world-views between the 19th century and the late 20th.  One can compare the treatment of his Cicero with that of McCullough's saga.  In her books he is a background character who seems to have sided with the bad guys, while Julius Caesar comes across as heroic and sympathetic.  I got to suspecting as I read the 7-book series that the author was in love with Julius Caesar.  But in Harris's books, Caesar seems the bad guy and Cicero is a very complex and reasonably good character who does the best he can in difficult circumstances.  The more you know of someone, the more you spend time in his house and his mind, the less I think you are likely to judge and dismiss him.  

So many books, so little time.  Now I must get back to work.   

Charlotte Visits the Site of Piero della Francesca's Annunciation, Sant' Antonio polyptych

Charlotte Visits the Site of Piero della Francesca's Annunciation on the Sant' Antonio Polyptych

It is almost to the day 20 years since my friend Charlotte and I visited Perugia while spending a month in Italy.  Perugia is on a rocky steep hill, and at the top you can go down inside the rock.  There underground is a museum dedicated to one painting by Piero della Francesca.  My first thought heading in the door was, we've hiked up and down steep hills and into a cave-like space and paid an entry fee even to see one painting?  It is worth it.

What you see above is a parody of the uppermost portion.  In the interesting architecture were giant figures, Gabriel in the open space where Charlotte is standing and Mary in the covered loggia in front of the dark brown wall.  They filled the space almost to the ceiling of the loggia.  I stretched a canvas in the odd shape that you see here and painted the scene.  The sacred figures have left and Charlotte walks into the fictional space, camera in hand.  It's part of that series that includes the cats visiting sites from Duccio's Maesta (a few entries below).  This was done around 1994?  It's about 3 feet wide.

We spent a couple hours in front of that one painting (the Piero, not mine).  I was fortunate to have a traveling companion who approached things in much the same way as I liked to, slowly.  We would be in line before a place opened and the last to leave.  You could say we have been kicked out of the finest museums in Europe.  By dawdling we even managed to see the Sistine Chapel ceiling with the electric lights turned off and the room empty except for us.  The natural light was fine for viewing, perhaps more like it was meant to be seen.

St. Jerome in His Study After Durer (1995)

  

I made this spoof of Durer's St. Jerome in his Study around 20 years ago.  At the time I was using a MacPlus with a dot matrix printer, which this Jerome has borrowed.  It was the latest thing at the time, or close to it, and now it looks quite antiquated.  Ha.  The print is a simple line etching, 9 x 12 inches.

Good Reads: novels about Leonardo

detail from the ceiling of the Palazzo Zuccaro, Florence

Historical novels are among my favorite indulgences.  Recently, I've read Lucille Turner's Gioconda.  A recommendation from Martin Kemp in one of his books (or was it a talk) set me to looking for this.  The treatment is poetic.  She weaves bits from the notebooks, descriptions of the Italian countryside, imaginary thoughts and conversations, into a narrative that rolls along like felt time.  I was a bit annoyed at the anachronisms, but laughed heartily at the ending, relieved to not have to read yet another account of his possible despair at his death at not finishing much.  But since they were about twenty odd years apart in age, surely it is unlikely Leonardo played with Lisa of the famous portrait when they were children.  I'm not giving anything away here for those who haven't read it; the book begins with that.  Another sort of disruption in the otherwise enjoyable story is exemplified in the misunderstanding of how one would go about making the clay sculpture from which a giant bronze horse would be cast.  A huge block of clay cut into?  No way.  You need an armature, and you need to build it up over that, not carve it down.  And since she has them wetting the clay it obviously isn't plastilina.  Terra cotta would need to be fired. Here the need for it to be hollow becomes obvious.  Solid clay would explode in the firing, if you could even get an adequate temperature around such a thing.  And if not fired it would melt in the rain long before anyone got to shoot it to bits.  And it would slump in the firing and shrink 10% when drying.  If not fired, drying would cause it to crack to pieces if solid. But even if hollow it couldn't hold up under its own weight.  But these are minor complaints.

So this is why I have trouble reading some historical novels.  I want to make adjustments.  I want technical exactness in the art making.  I want someone to do for Leonardo what Irving Stone did for Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy.  Nearly a thousand pages, tiny type, and thoroughly researched, that novel filled my mind for 1 1/2 years as I read it one or two tiny chapters at a time every other night.  That was back in High School and the first year that I was a college student.  I felt like I was living in Renaissance Florence.  Why didn't Irving Stone do Leonardo?  Surely he is just as interesting as Michelangelo or van Gogh (Lust for Life).  If I find myself unemployed, without anything to do (ha) perhaps I will tackle it some day.

Other novels of Leonardo include Leonardo's Swans, which is more about the d'Este sisters than Leonardo, and The Memory Cathedral, a sci-fi story about the lost years (years in Leonardo's life that are missing in the documentary evidence of the time.)  It has some disgusting and some gruesome parts.  I won't spoil it with details, but I suspect there is some realism in those, alas.  The bad behaviour is not on Leonardo's part, unless you fault his lack of response.

I've also recently read Ken Follett's Fall of Giants.  This is not something I would have purchased but a friend sent it as a gift.  Before she sent it I'd debated in my mind whether to get it because I had greatly enjoyed his saga of the coming of the Gothic age to England in the series that began with Pillars of the Earth.  But this new one took place during WWI.  I was surprised that I found it absorbing.  You want the people to survive, to return to each other, to reconcile their differences.  It weaves personal stories and historical action more believably than the medieval novels, but both series have that strength.