Doomed to a Life of Early Evenings

News bulletin: graduate school is hard. Quite hard, in fact. I knew it would be, I expected it, but the view from underneath is certainly daunting. For today's seminar, which was Making of a Renaissance painting, we read two hundred pages of text on techniques of 15th and 16th century painting, which was interesting, if rather dense. With that much material you usually wind up with the over-arching themes fairly well-imprinted in your mind, but a lot of the specifics inevitably slip through. Not so with my professor, who responded to a question about the precise definition of a glaze with "It should be on page 237." It was. She didn't have a copy of the book in front of her; she hadn't even re-read these chapters recently, having put her copy in our grad lounge last week. That's just the kind of memory Dr. Hall has. Needless to say, that is not the kind of memory I have (far from it). Intimidating. She personally is not, though; in fact, all of my professors are great.

I think Dr. Cooper's class may be my favorite--that's a seminar on Palladio, this being the 500th anniversary of his birth. We chose research topics this week (which can be a rather tense jostling for the most popular choices, often with Dr. Cooper deciding which topic would be best suited, based on everyone's interests) and I managed to get the one that I wanted, which was Palladio and the East. Venice is a great laboratory for the co-mingling of Western and Eastern influences, having always had strong trading ties with first the Byzantine and then the Muslim worlds. There was actually a really interesting article in the Art Bulletin a few issues ago about a glass vessel in the treasury of San Marco that juxtaposed classicizing reliefs and Islamicizing script in its decoration.

Anyway, this topic is of course different because it's architecture, which is obviously not as easily diffused as doing faux-Arab writing on a dish to make it look exotic. The article assigned to the topic as its "jumping-off point" was on possible Ottoman influences in the church of the Redentore (redeemer) on the Guidecca in Venice:



Basically it argued that Marc'Antonio Barbaro, a friend of Palladio's who at the time of the commissioning of the Redentore had just returned from five years as a consul in Constantinople, might have been the means for transmitting some aspects of Ottoman-style architecture to Venice. I didn't find the article entirely convincing (a couple of minaret-like structures do not an Ottoman influence make, especially when they've been done elsewhere in Italy beforehand) but, as with all things in grad school, you can't form an opinion until you've done about five thousand pages of reading. However, my lack of familiarity with architecture beyond the basics made itself known when I sat down with a book on the Redentore and had to spend fifteen minutes staring at the ground plans before they started to make sense in terms of what the book was describing. When it got into a really theoretical discussions of spatial relationships within the structure, though, my eyes simply started to close.

Reading Italian is also going to come quite in handy, if I ever doubted it--this book was the kind that quotes directly from period documents with no translation, either in the text or in the footnotes. Of course, it's a lot easier for me to figure out modern Italian than 16th century Italian (think of how people wrote in English in the sixteenth century, ie, in needlessly complex sentences that went on for freakin' ever) so I'm lucky right how that I can get a general idea of what's going on.

The result of getting up early and spending many hours each day in a library is that I'm tired at a very early hour in the evening. I could totally go to sleep now, and it's 9:30. I am OLD!