A Bit of Raphael

Today was another successful day in the library! I managed to read (nearly) all of Lisa Pon's Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print, which offered a lot of intriguing context and analysis of the ways prints functioned in the early 16th century. The book centers around the relationship between Raphael, the greatest painter of the High Renaissance, and the printer Marcantonio Raimondi, with whom he had an active collaboration in Rome. Raphael embraced the rise of mechanical reproduction, not only because it offered a wider audience for his work, but, as Pon argues, because his own technical interests were closely allied to the art of engraving. Pon challenges several traditional ways of thinking about prints, like the tendency to automatically regard a print made after a painting as a faithful reproduction of the original-- something that is especially fraught if the original painting has been lost or damaged, and the print is all we have left.

In contrast to the Italian duo, Durer represents an artist who tried to maintain absolute control over the reproduction of his images in an age before copyright. He became enraged when he found out that Raimondi had only copied his Life of the Virgin engravings and was selling them in Venice--complete with Durer's AD monogram. He petitioned the Venetian Senate for damages, making this the first case brought by an artist over intellectual property rights. He ultimately won, but the judgment only decreed that Raimondi could no longer include the monogram in his images, not that he couldn't make copies at all. Now, this is a oft-told story, and one that usually makes Raimondi sound little better than the guys selling the knock-off Gucci bags in New York City. According to Pon's recreation of the context of early 16th-century printing, however, not only were such borrowings traditional and generally accepted, but the secondhand engravers and printers viewed themselves not as counterfeiters, but as working in collaboration with the original makers--hence their inclusion of authenticating insignia like Durer's monogram. She also points out that even though the verb used to denote the process, contrafare, is a cognate for "counterfeit," it had a much more neutral connotation during the 16th century.

Durer and Raphael worked in very different ways; the former by himself, the latter as the head of a large and very busy workshop of apprentices, associates, and specialists--the entire production of which, however, was recognized as being "by the hand of Raphael." (Long before Don Draper, Raphael had some serious brand recognition). Pon also reproduced a drawing that I'd never seen before today, a study for Pythagoras in the School of Athens.

At left, a group of young men cluster eagerly around a bald-headed artist who's sketching a nude male model in the center. The same model appears at the right, robed and slightly larger in scale. Although the uniform use of highlights make the left and center appear unified, this is actually a composite image. The turbaned man and the bald man each appear twice as separate characters; the bald sketcher is elbow-to-elbow with himself as an onlooker, and the turbaned man is both model and student. Pon also points out that the scale of the seated figure relative to the model makes it clear that the latter must be further back in space.

What interested me in this image is the way it represents workshop practice. Sketching from life was a major component of artistic education and practice in the Renaissance, and Raphael clearly made use of his own employees as models, posing them in different roles and then combining those drawings into the group shown here. More unique, though, is what the drawing reveals about how artists' models managed to contort themselves into appropriately sinuous positions long enough to be drawn--they used a prop! Raphael's drawing demonstrates two phases of preparatory drawing: the nude model with the crutch visible, and the more finished figure at the right, the crutch hidden beneath the fall of drapery.

In the actual fresco (I'm skipping over the stage of the cartoon, which is basically one giant preparatory drawing that is used to transfer the design to the wall), the artist and his pupils are transformed into Pythagoras and his students, while the model becomes another ancient philosopher. The grace and harmony of the finished fresco thus conceals two of the realities of artistic practice: the use of the same models (by altering their facial characteristics and hair) and the use of the crutch to achieve the perfect contrapposto pose.


I like this comparison so much that I'm going to work it into the AWW section that covers School of Athens. We try to put a lot of focus on materials and techniques, as opposed to style, because students tend to like the concrete stuff more. I think this demonstrates very clearly how an artist could move from idea to playing with a composition to a finished work, while also revealing the "special effects" that helped make the final illusion possible.

Slow Reading

I'm actually not using that title to refer to the movement, which has recently received attention on NPR and elsewhere, that lauds the pleasures and benefits of reading slowly. Those stories made me feel a little guilty, because I'm not a slow reader most of the time; my ability to read quickly with a high level of comprehension has been something that I've been proud of since I was in elementary school (except for in 5th grade, when Mrs. Barber in her infinite wisdom decided to pair the fastest reader in the class with Larry, the very slowest; torment ensued), and it's continued to be useful in graduate school, where you're often faced with parsing huge amounts of text in a short amount of time. I recognize the downsides to this method. If you read quickly, you're bound to miss things, and you don't experience the flavor and texture of language as fully as you would if you read very slowly. Or, as some of the people involved in the movement suggested, read out loud. I don't really like the sound of my voice when reading, so that's not going to happen.

The title refers more to the pace at which I am accomplishing the reading that I wanted to get through during these weeks Sean's away. I've kind of given up on prepping my Eakins paper for a journal submission after recognizing that there's just not enough original content there to merit it. Even though my professor encouraged me to do so, he hasn't looked directly at my sources, and I don't think they need the synthesis that my paper offered. So that was one thing I was planning to accomplish that is now out of the way.

I've been making very slow progress through Marilyn Lavin's The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431-1600. It's one of those books that holds an important place in the canon of literature because Lavin did a very important thing--she looked at all (literally, all) the extant narrative cycles in churches, determined in what order the episodes of each cycle were presented, and then formulated theories as to why certain patterns were more suited to a location, context, patron, or theological argument. It had never been done before; no one had bothered to ask why the episodes of, say, the life of St. Francis appear in a triple wrap-around pattern in one place and in a weird zig-zag pattern in another, sometimes even in chapels painted by the same artist, or two chapels in the same church. She also used a computer database to compile the data, something that was new in the early 1980s, especially in art history. Again, an important accomplishment, but unfortunately one that makes for pretty boring reading. Especially since she describes, in detail, the organization of each pattern, even though there's also an accompanying diagram.

Today, I finally betook myself to the library to prevent myself from becoming permanently affixed to Sean's computer chair. What's been preventing me from doing that daily is that I have to walk there, about a mile, and in Charlottesville it's usually 90 degrees and humid by 10am (with a high of 100 or more daily). Today was different, though; no humidity, and only 83 when I left at 9am. I was dreading the walk home, but it hit just 91 today, which is pretty awesome. I started with a couple of hours reading Patricia Brown's Venetian Narrative Painting in the Age of Carpaccio, which turned out to be a lot like Lavin's in terms of interest, and then I moved to Griselda Pollock's Old Mistresses: Women, Art, Ideology, which was much more interesting.

It's thirty years old now, so some of the complaints that were raised by the first feminist art historians have been addressed (for example, in the 1960s there were no women in art history survey texts at all, which is no longer the case), along with some of the secondary complaints addressed toward over-zealous feminist art historians, like the tendency to place every woman artist that could be dug up as on par with great men artists of their times, even when their skill level was clearly inferior. Pollock wrote her book after the first flush of feminist art history was over, so she was able to zero in on these and other ways in which feminist scholarship, for all its good intentions, succeeded in nothing more than either the continued marginalization of women artists, or the tacit acceptance of male-dominated standards for artistic merit. An example of the former might be a book titled something like "Women's Art History"--something that sets women apart, as though they existed separate and distinct from the social and cultural forces that shaped men. At the other end of the spectrum is scholarship that tries to prove that women painters were just as good as men, which, as Pollock points out, just implicitly accepts that men are the gold standard. She argues that there shouldn't be a competition, but rather an examination of why and how women created the art they did, considering their particular positions within societies and cultures, and even their limitations (lack of access to education and materials, etc). I think most art historians, feminist and otherwise, have tried to follow this more balanced option since the turbulence of the 1970s. Like Lavin and Brown, then, Pollock's is a Very Important Book, but one that was much more engaging to read for a few hours.

The Book of the Courtier

Part of my reading this week is The Book of the Courtier, the famous 16th-century book of manners written by Baldassare Castiglione (shown above in his equally famous portrait by Raphael, a great friend of his). I picked it up at a used bookstore in town, together with Stendhal's The Red and the Black, for $1.50, which is a pretty awesome deal.

Like Vasari's Lives, the Book of the Courtier is one of those texts with which you can be pretty familiar without ever having read, so thorough has been their osmosis into the cultural ideals of the Renaissance and beyond. Presented as a conversation among the courtiers of the Duke of Urbino, the prescription is pretty simple: the ideal courtier should be able to do just about everything, do it well, and yet be able to make it look like he wasn't trying at all. That last requirement is the quality of sprezzatura, which is usually translated as "nonchalance."

As you would expect in books of this kind, there's lot of advice on what type of musical instruments the courtier should be able to play (strings are fine, but not flutes, because they make you contort your face unattractively), and how it's acceptable to mimic the vocal patterns and gestures of a famous person for laughs, but not their physical deformities (because that's just mean). The part I was just reading admonished gentlemen against the use of "enchantments, charms, sometimes force, sometimes sleeping potions and other such things" in order to, er, "enjoy a lady to the full." Roofies are nothing new, it seems, and neither are creeps.

There were a couple of passages that I marked. First, this one made me feel better about not being able to play chess well:

Signore Gaspare replied: "And what do you say about the game of chess?"

"That is certainly a refined and ingenious recreation," said Federico, "but it seems to me to possess one defect; namely, that it is possible for it to demand too much knowledge, so that anyone who wishes to become an outstanding player must, I think, give it as much time and study as he would to learning some noble science or performing well something or other of importance; and yet for all his pains when all is said and done all he knows is a game. Therefore as far as chess is concerned we reach what is a very rare conclusion: that mediocrity is more to be praised than excellence."

This one just amused me because of the author's obvious contempt for fops and dandies:

"...I don't want him to appear soft and feminine as so many try to do, when they not only curl their hair and pluck their eyebrows but also preen themselves like the most wanton and dissolute creatures imaginable. Indeed, they appear so effeminate and languid in the way they walk, or stand, or do anything at all, that their limbs look as if they are about to fall apart...since Nature has not in fact made them the ladies they want to seem and be, they should be treated not as honest women but as common whores and be driven out from all gentlemanly society, let alone the Courts of great lords."

Methinks Baldassare would not have been over-fond of the metrosexual look!

More Travels

A lot has happened since my last post! Anna and TJ's wedding went off beautifully, despite a little bit of rain, and the reception was a blast. It was great to see the Fairfield crowd again! Two of our friends, Mike Talmadge and Michelle Holmberg, recently got engaged themselves, so we were able to give them our congratulations in person. Sara, Zac, and Heather were also in attendance, plus special guest star Melissa, who was DJing, that is, when she wasn't dancing with a blazer-wearing Heather (who also shouted at one point in the evening, "That's my jam! Imma take off mah jewelry!" and then actually did so at the DJ's table). Basically, the only person missing from this wedding was Rae, so I'll just give her a shout-out here: we love you, Rae!!

I mustn't forget to mention the wedding favors, a box of delicious, delicious fudge in both chocolate and coconut that tasted like frosting that died and went to heaven. Tragedy occurred when Sean and I forgot ours while we were scrambling to join Sara and Zac in the shuttle back to the hotel, but! Zac was kind enough to give us his. Speaking of the hotel, that was not the best Courtyard I have ever stayed in. Bitches made you pay $12 for breakfast! Not cool! Making it more worthwhile, however, was that we ate with Meredith, Pimp Juice, and his lovely girlfriend, Becky, with whom he's now living in Stratford (his parents moved out to...Texas, maybe? with his younger sister, and sold him their house, making him the first of my college friends to be a homeowner). Then we hit the road once again, this time headed for Connecticut, where we (or more specifically, I) spent a week being slowly driven mad by Hubbard's...eccentricities.

While we were there, we journeyed to northern Connecticut for a swing through my old haunts. We went by the house first. Nothing had changed from the last time I visited, but it was still sad driving down all the streets I spent the first twenty years of my life looking at, and knowing that they're just not mine anymore; it's not my neighborhood, and not my house. Even though I absolutely hated that house, it was still my home, and I don't have one anymore. Philadelphia feels like home to me, of course, but I don't have an ancestral home, for lack of a better term, a place where my family is rooted, where I have lifelong memories. That sucks.

From the house we went by the cemetery, even though neither Sean nor I feel any connection to gravesites whatsoever. We never even get out of the car; you don't have to, since my parents' stone is at the very corner where the road turns left at the rear of the cemetery. We usually just laugh at whatever crappy memento someone (read: Jen) has left there (the stupid angel she put there years ago is still there, but she added a pair of praying hands cupping another angel. There is also an angel carved on the stone, at her behest. My poor parents are literally beset with angels.) From there we went to Northwest Park, but the barn was closed, so we couldn't feed treats to our old friends: the Cotswald ram, the two pygmy goats, and the cow with the disturbingly long tongue that only Sean will feed. Our pal the lonely donkey was gone from the paddock outside, too, replaced by a pair of horses.

We didn't just go there for a maudlin memory tour, though; we were headed to East Windsor to have dinner with Jen and her boyfriend Vinny. Sean hadn't met him before, but they got on really well. That's kind of surprising in a way, if you think that they're involved with sisters who have spent so much of their lives being diametrically opposite in personality, but it's a good thing all the same. I think Vinny is a keeper, and I really do like him. We had dinner at Ad's, the pizza dive that's a favorite of Jen and Monica's, and then we played Scrabble. Now, a word about Scrabble. Sean and I play pretty frequently, and it's a known fact that he plays strategically while I fail at that, bigtime. The result is that in five and a half years, I've won Scrabble once. Once! This time, I had such a chance to win, I was in the lead for the whole game, until Sean whips out a 66-point word ("jive" on both a double-letter and triple-word score) to zoom by me for the win. Balls!!

We also had dinner with Ron and Kathy while we were in CT, which is always a good time. It always happens that Ron will monopolize Sean's conversation (though he insists that women, in fact, are the ones who dominate) and I'll always be catching scraps of whatever scandalous story he's telling while Kathy and I are having a more grown-up conversation on the other side of the table. I'm always envious, because hey, I love Kathy, but I want to hear about how Ron dropped LSD before a chemistry test and scored higher than anyone else in his class when he was at Berkeley in the 60s! Anything that involves Berkeley in the 60s is going to be more interesting than a new exhibition at the Acropolis museum; I'm sorry, it's just a fact. This time, we actually spent more time conversing as a group than we ever have before, so I got to hear some of the tales direct from the horse's mouth, as it were. Those two really are a riot, especially in tandem, and as per usual, we left their house some six hours and four bottles of wine later. I cannot wait to be like them when we're older.

We left Connecticut Friday morning and headed back to Philadelphia just in time for the worst of rush hour traffic. We hit everything, including an accident on the Tappan Zee that closed all four lanes, so it wound up taking us five hours to get there. We used the time wisely, though, to set up dinner with Richardson and Kim, who braved the traffic from New Jersey. We were going to take them to Baci's, but time constraints led us to the Trolley Car Diner instead, and leaving the mega-bottle of Chianti that Sean had picked up for dinner for my personal enjoyment back in Charlottesville (and yes, I'm drinking it now). Then we went to see Twilight, which I had somehow convinced Sean to agree to see when it came out, but we never ended up going. It was perhaps not as bad as I had expected, but it was plenty bad enough, so I was thoroughly amused. Sean's expressions alone were pretty priceless. Kim turned out to be an actual hardcore fan of the books, though, so there was no out-and-out mockery.

Finally, yesterday was the day I sent Sean off to the Netherlands. As I told Rae, I really wasn't on top of my game for the pre-trip planning; I nearly forgot about calling Bank of America for his debit cards, he didn't get a phrasebook, and I forgot to give him extra batteries for my camera. Oh, and his umbrella, which was in the backseat of my car. Minor errors aside, I know he arrived safely, since he emailed me this morning from Leiden. After dropping him off at the airport, I hit the road back down to C-ville, and made awesome time--just under 4 hours, when it's supposed to take 5. Go me!

The apartment is lonely without him. I'm getting a taste of how difficult it will be to go back to living apart in September after spending the summer together. At least in September I can pick up the phone and call him whenever I want to. My phone rang a little while ago (the best mother-in-law ever, checking on me) and my first thought was "Sean! Oh, wait..." I know he's going to have a great time, but I miss him already.

On the Road

We packed up this morning and left Charlottesville for Philadelphia, with a brief stop in Cherry Hill to pick up Sean's tux for the wedding this weekend. It was in the 90s in VA when we bid a mournful goodbye to the central air in Sean's apartment, anticipating how hot it would be in Philadelphia. And damn, is it hot. Unfortunately, while our house has the ability to stay pretty cool for a long time in the heat, once it heats up it also tends to hold it in. It must be 90 degrees on the third floor, because it's 85 on the ground floor. Phyllis was nice enough to turn on the air conditioner in my room this morning, so it's nice enough for the two of us in here, but leaving the room is like walking into a wall of heat.

This has required some tinkering with our travel schedule. First, off, we're going to go straight home to CT from Anna's wedding, instead of coming back to Philly to wait out the weekend traffic. We'll come back next Friday, so we just have to spend the one night there before Sean goes to Amsterdam on the 17th. After I drop him off at the airport, I'm going back down to his apartment! I just can't stay here and roast for two weeks, I'll kill myself! Also, it would be ridiculously inefficient to keep my air conditioner running for that long, when I can have an entirely cool apartment to myself in Virginia. Hopefully, by the time I get back to Philly for good at the end of August, things will have cooled down a bit.