I love Venice. My family and I just returned from an idyllic week there and are mourning our departure. However, we noticed that a lot of the other visitors didn’t look very happy. Maybe they were having a better time than it seemed as we watched them trudge across the Piazza San Marco. I’m sure that some of them enjoy activities that I don’t happen to like (such as shopping), and that’s great. But I also know from overhearing their conversations that at least some of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit this small city every day are quite unhappy.
Category Archives: fine arts
Judas, priest
I don’t know much about gnosticism, but it’s interesting to compare the newly translated gnostic “Gospel of Judas” with the four canonical gospels as works of literature. The contrast that jumps out at everyone concerns plot and characterization: Judas is the hero, rather than the villain, in the document named after him. But I was interested that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have literary merits far in excess of “Judas.” Perhaps this was one reason they prevailed in the early centuries of Christianity.
Shakespeare in retirement
I recently finished Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World, a chronological series of essays about Shakespeare’s life and its influence on his work. It leaves me thinking about the reasons for Shakespeare’s early retirement around 1611. That year he turned 47 and was probably not in bad health, for he had bought an expensive annuity that would only pay off if he faced decades of retirement (Greenblatt, p. 364). Why then did he quit London and write nothing more on his own? Greenblatt explores three explanations, and I will add a fourth of my own that’s completely speculative:
Orhan Pamuk, My Name is Red
I’ve been wanting to write something insightful about this novel, which I read recently. To state that is is a masterpiece is not nearly as convincing or useful as to interpret it or elucidate one of its many themes. Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to collect my thoughts about My Name is Red. Rather than leave it unmentioned, I’d at least like to express my admiration for this remarkable book. It contains intricate, completely original puzzles and stories on metaphysical subjects–worthy of Borges. However, Borges was uninterested in human beings and couldn’t sustain a plot or create appealing characters. My Name is Red revolves around two people who are richly imagined and likeable. They interact with numerous other people, at least two of whom have unforgettable personalities. Pamuk’s puzzles and Borgesian short stories are integral parts of an overall plot which is very suspenseful, compelling, and naturalistic. Whereas Borges is cold and cerebral, Pamuk is deeply humane.
The novel plays with philosophical themes–the purpose of representational art, the relationship between painting and memory, the idea of an artistic style and of originality, blindness and insight, the influence of the West (and cultural influence, in general). With excellent “negative capability,” Pamuk avoids taking a position on these issues but instead shows them from many angles. If all these virtues weren’t sufficient, My Name is Red vividly represents the unfamiliar world of Istanbul, ca. 1591. And Pamuk makes great use of the modernist device of giving each chapter to a different narrator–all highly unreliable. At the very end, we learn something surprising about the narration of the whole book.
Pamuk has been persecuted by the contemporary Turkish state; he just won a tactical legal victory. The following two claims are both true but are completely separate and independent:
(1) Orhan Pamuk is a hero of free speech whose legal case is important for human rights. (And I say that having spent some six total weeks in Turkey, a country for which I feel a lot of sympathy and fondness.)
(2) Orhan Pamuk is one of the greatest contemporary novelists in the world.
three-dimensional?
In the National Gallery this morning, I was looking at a Madonna and Child by Antonio Rossellino (I show a detail here). It’s a low-relief sculpture carved about 1475. Look at the pillow at the bottom right, on which the toddler Jesus stands. This is a representation of a squarish object, depicted in linear perspective. To work correctly as a representation, it must be viewed from straight ahead. The marble pillow is also a three-dimensional object. You can look at it from several angles. If you were allowed to take it down off the wall, you could hold it, feel it, slide your finger behind it. It would not be a square but kind of a fat trapezoid. There is something quite strange about a three-dimensional object whose purpose is to look like an object of a different shape if viewed from a particular angle. What shape is it really?