I stayed downtown today. Some of us from CIRCLE
had an interesting lunch in Union Station, discussing research ideas with
some potential applicants. I was also on my cell phone a fair amount,
mostly talking to fellow NACE members
about opportunities to mobilize the organization. In between things, I
ranliterally raninto the National Gallery. I headed for an
area that I hadn’t been in for a long time, and found myself looking at
a couple of striking portraits of Guiliano de’ Medici, who was murdered
at mass in the Pazzi conspiracy. The Gallery has Botticelli’s amazing
(which looks almost like a fine modern cartoon, with its bold blocks of
color and exeggerated features) and also Verocchio’s large bust
of the same young man. Guiliano is ugly but charismatic; confident or
perhaps arrogant; and very much an individual. I can’t think of anything
else to write about these portraits except art-historical cliches ("Renaissance
individualism," "unsentimental realism" …), but it was
a 25-minute break that will stay with me for a long time.