Would Winckelmann like Eminem? – Story of Civilization X.xii.v

In his closing words on Italy, Will Durant tells the story of the scholar Winckelmann, one of the apostles of neoclassicism.  Winckelmann so loved the art of classical Greece that he converted to Roman Catholicism to gain access to the art treasures of the Vatican.   Before that, in Germany, he restricted himself to four hours of sleep a night, so that he could find eight hours in a day for classical studies, in addition to the time he had to devote to his poor living as a teacher.  Doubtless, he also had to walk uphill both ways to the school.

Winckelmann’s conversion to Catholicism was looked upon with some shock by his contemporaries, but Goethe defended him on the grounds that to someone as immersed in classical culture as Winckelmann, the distinctions between modern sects of Christianity were irrelevant.

As I read it, I found the whole anecdote quite amusing, and wondered if anyone today could so lose himself that he could not understand contemporary culture.  Unexpectedly, the answer came to me while listening to Eminem’s “Love the Way You Lie”.  Today’s Winckelmann is my favorite whipping boy, the modern, postmodernist liberal yuppy.

“Love the Way You Lie”, you see, is modern romantic or baroque art.  It is an apostrophe to feeling.  Its images and metaphors don’t necessarily stream together perfectly, and the story is told just in strokes, but the feeling that courses through the piece is obvious.  The excess in the closing sentiment of the song is clear: “[if] she ever tries to f—-n’ leave again, I’ma tie her to the bed and set this house on fire.”

Both Eminem and Rihanna, the artists, are victims of broken relationships.  In Rihanna’s case, domestic violence is an explicit element of the collapse, while in Eminem’s case we can only speculate.  We are thus secure in the knowledge that the song’s sentiment is deeply felt.  But so was Britney Spears’s “Lucky”, or Stefani Germanotta’s “The Fame”, and these were egocentric odes of garbage.  For feeling to matter, it must be feeling we could conceivably relate to, or at least appreciate.   Fortunately (or not), in a country with skyrocketing divorce rates, domestic violence and the breakdown of relationships are subjects a huge proportion of Americans can deeply appreciate.  The accuracy is Eminem’s description of a gasping relationship is brilliant:

“Now I know we said things, did things that we didn’t mean
And we fall back into the same patterns, the same routine
But your temper’s just as bad as mine is, you’re the same as me
But when it comes to love, you’re just as blinded.”

But there is a class that cannot even see the accuracy, cannot recognize the feeling.  It is the class of reason, the modern, upwardly mobile young liberals.  Their stable relationships start in college or right after, and are destined to last forever.  What disagreements, what conflicts, can there be between identical twins?  Besides, having a stable relationship is the responsible, the reasonable thing to do.  The yuppy deprecates Eminem’s baroque and Katy Perry’s rococo with equal sniffs: more Feist, please, or better yet, some NPR. Indeed, I have heard some yuppies assert that their entire lives, nay their every actions are driven by reason.  These are indeed Winckelmanns adrift in a world of Christians, and it is their devotion to reason that renders them unable to appreciate modern art.  Fortunately, the working class has more taste, and Eminem is currently at the top of the charts.

The first danger of reason is its ability to deceive.  One might insinuate that Winckelmann’s appreciation for classical art was sublimated erotic desire, for the male form that classical Greece so glorified was also the object of Winckelmann’s own predilections.  Perhaps no Winckelmann is so completely the servant of reason as he believes.

Edit: I can’t believe I had to think twice about the Eminem romantic vs. baroque issue.  Consider the first line of “Love the Way You Lie”: “I can’t tell you what it really is, I can only tell you what it feels like…” followed by three lines of simile and metaphor.  Romantic, duh.

Shakespeare – Story of Civilization VII.iii.i-VII.iv.vii

Durant sums up the case for Shakespeare as follows: “These are the three epochal gifts of the world’s drama, and we must, despite our limitations, welcome them all to our deepening, thanking our heritage for Greek wisdom, French beauty, and Elizabethan life.  (But, of course, Shakespeare is supreme.)”

What confluence of forces produced Shakespeare?  We must first acknowledge that, like Michelangelo, Shakespeare was not produced by his environment, but only made possible by it.  The wealth and prosperity of England, the religious ebb that gave free rein to dramatic performances, and the scholarly tide that introduced nearly all of the classics into England in just a few decades, made Shakespeare possible.  But Shakespeare was unique.

But perhaps to understand Shakespeare fully, we must understand his background.  In reading about Elizabethan literature, I found a quite striking thesis in the figure of Sir Philip Sidney.  He argued, in brief, that the purpose of literature was to elucidate morality.  Philosophy, he acknowledged, could do this, but it tended to get lost in the general precept.  History also could touch on morality, but was relentlessly confined to the inane details of what actually happened (or worse, an ignorance thereof).  Literature, Sidney argued, provided the happy medium; in accessible examples, it could speak to men of concrete, specific things – thereby escaping philosophy’s shortcomings – while avoiding the problem of relying on the limited storehouse of examples that history provides.  Perhaps, in literature, there could even be a beauty that even the best philosophy struggles to attain.

Sidney’s argument was, in a way, an apology for the prevalence of extremely moralistic allegories as one of the chief literary forms of his time.  Shakespeare’s early drama, like other drama of the time, was to some degree an outgrowth of allegorical fiction.  In the early tragedies, like Richard II and Richard III, the principle characters are personifications of qualities, about which the story turns, and a moral is pointed.

Shakespeare’s genius lay (among many, many other qualities) in his eventual ability to overcome this overly symbolical way of writing and achieve complex characters; modern taste cites Hamlet as the best example of this achievement.  Without Shakespeare to lead the way, would the subtleties of Thackeray, or the moralistic novellas (Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, It’s a Wonderful Life, Casablanca) of our own era ever have come into existence?  Probably, but perhaps after much lost time.

For the time being, we will follow Durant in thinking Shakespeare the greatest of the great.  Many of his works have been added to the Recommended Reading.

Art Prospers When Religion Suffers – Story of Civilization VI.xxxii.i-VI.xxxvi.iii

If we are to make a bold thesis and a provocative one, such as “art prospers when religion suffers,” let us first define terms.  Art is the study of the human condition.  To prosper is to develop, not merely in quantity, but to make new inroads into previously unexplored areas.  In art, to prosper is to develop new forms and methods of art, as well as new ideas for that art to express.  Religion is the monotheistic monoliths of the west, Islam and Christianity.  Suffering is suppression by starvation or removal of resources; in religion, suffering is the distraction of the people from religious studies by worldly concerns.

Having safely defined the terms to our whim, our thesis is hardly disprovable.  Perhaps it’s all a big joke played on us by the ancient Hebrews: Moses could not have known what 3,000 years would do to the commandments he had invented.

In the 1500′s, both the Christians of the Reformation and the Muslims across the board took quite literally Moses’ commandment “You shall not make for yourself any graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in Heaven above, or  that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth…”

Both religions went so far as to interpret this commandment as prohibiting any artwork religious in nature, and in the Muslim case, nearly any portraiture or representative art at all.  So it was that while Renaissance Italy was enjoying a golden renascence, Persia, experiencing the good administration of the sons of Tamerlane, made no sculpture comparable to that of Michelangelo, and no paintings like those of Raphael or del Sarto.

It can always be argued that theses like mine are correlative, but the rise of the Reformation provides an opportunity to see clearly the connection between the rise of religion and the fall of art.  In painting, the works of the masters in the churches of Germany and Switzerland were thrown out and destroyed out of religious fervor, and the statues were smashed.  The reason?  The commandment against idolatry.  Likewise, while Spain, France, Italy, and even Poland were enjoying burgeoning periods of growth in their universities, the enrollment in universities in Germany and Switzerland fell to – nearly literally – zero.  The reason?  The universities had taken as their mission the preservation and study of the Greek and Latin classics, and men who took part in such studies were suspected of heresy, apostasy, atheism, and worse.  In literature, Spain – despite the Inquisition – and Portugal developed a new drama, and in Spain, Portugal, France, and England, the sonnets of Petrarch were dusted off and this literary form was adapted to new vigor in new languages, while in Germany, there was only the bluff poetry of Hans Sachs.  The reason?  While the printing presses of France pumped out the classics, and the kings of France and England dowered artists and universities, the presses of Germany pumped out pamphlets on subjects such as whether the doctrine of transubstantiation or consubstantiation was true, or what the implications of God’s foreknowledge were on His omnipotence – my oblique way of referring to the doctrine of predestination.

Alas, all this has been said before, and religion has been the whipping boy of those who mourn progress oft enough.  But still there are rhetoricians who will insist that when we lament the losses that religion has inflicted on humanity, we are exaggerating.  They are ignorant of history.

The Travels of Genius – Story of Civilization VI.xxiv.i-VI.xxxii.v

One of the great frustrations that the student of history encounters is the difficulty of making general comparative statements.  General comparative statements are observations about the status or relationship of one item, event, individual, civilization, or achievement vis-à-vis all other recorded things of like kind.

The difficulty arises from the fact that the interesting general comparative statements are almost always of a negative form.  This is obvious for a statement like, “The civilization of X was the only civilization in history with characteristic Y.”  But it holds true for many other statements too.  If we wish to say, “X was the first philosopher to come up with idea Y,” what we really wish to say is, “There existed no philosopher before X who came up with idea Y.”  If we wish to say, “X was the greatest poet of his time,” what we really wish to say is, “No poet of his time surpassed X.”

Who shall be so bold to make one of these statements?  Whose grasp of history is so great that he can confidently state a negative?  There are few enough among us, and the amateur historian must resign himself to the delight, not of making bold negative statements, but of correcting those that others fling about with his own positive statements.

This function is useful, of course.  If historians did nothing but correct the arrogant negative statement that every age and every people makes – “Nothing like this has ever been before!” – they would provide humanity a service beyond measure.

Now that we have proven their impossibility, let us make a few negative statements.  The artistic and literary genius of Renaissance Italy were unsurpassed by any other civilization on Earth in their time.  Their wealth and influence were also unequaled, if not in absolute terms, then in proportion to their size.

Now, to prove the negative: having achieved to the final third of Durant’s The Reformation, and having completed its twin The Renaissance, we have observed in close succession the histories of Persia, Transoxiana, the Crimea, Asia Minor, Russia, eastern Europe, western Europe, Scandinavia, northern Africa, Egypt, and of course, Italy.  As always, we arrogantly dismiss the Far East and the New World.

Having observed all these civilizations, we can say with confidence that the art of Renaissance Italy is superior.  In sculpture, the Moslem world did nothing, and north of the Alps, there was little beyond cathedral sculpture.  Who then, shall compete with Michelangelo?  In literature, Chaucer was great, and Hafez and Jami wrote fine poetry, but neither England nor Persia approached the bounteous fount of Italy’s genius: Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Guicciardini, Macchiavelli…

In painting, Italy’s primacy seems obvious, though Durant provides obstinate resistance.  He does not dwell on Holbein, who is perhaps the only competition for Italy’s Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Caravaggio, del Sarto.  Instead, taking the Ottomans and the Persians, and beginning one of his rants on the arrogance of Western historians, Durant cites the miniatures and illuminations of the Bayasonghori Shahnameh as being of surpassing beauty.

We must be careful not only of Western arrogance, but of false humility, and an objectivity that makes us incapable of judging beauty.  We rebut any claims of Persian superiority in illumination with a single work of Tintoretto.  Compare this to the above best illuminations of the Shahnameh.  A difference merely in taste?  Really?

A Word on the Current Pop Situation

I have often argued that songs are the new poetry; with modern technology, we can carry a melody around with us as easily as the youths of yesteryear could carry couplets.  The old and sick at heart will inveigh against Taylor Swift’s love poetry, but the old men probably hated Sappho in exact proportion to the popularity of her poetry, too.

It is in this spirit that I must protest mightily against “Tik Tok”, the current number one single by Kesha.  Why is it not enough any more to have a good beat, some good lyrics, and a classy performance?  Why does the music industry have to be going the way of “high” fashion and modern painting, so obsessed with itself that it can find nothing else to comment on?

Stefani Germanotta started this with her deliberately puerile stage name, but at least she banged out a couple of good songs before turning to such self-obsessed trash as “Paparazzi”.  It’s a shame she’s still at the height of her arc… by the time Britney Spears got to crap like “Lucky”, she was already in the process of fading out to the boozed-up baby/lipo-machine that she became.

And so we come to Kesha, who, with “Tik Tok”, has managed to parody herself in her very debut to the musical world.  How can you parody yourself if you don’t even have an image to parody?  Sorry dunces like me, thinking the question a paradox, should study Kesha.  One of the keys appears to be to follow assiduously the saying of P. T. Barnum.  Despite including the “$” sign in her own stage name, and the not-so-subtle references to money sprinkled throughout her music video, the fact that Kesha’s single is just an ATM run seems lost on the critics.

I suppose it’s not just an ATM run, since she’s also having an awesome joke at our/their expense.  My guess is that the entire song is copied from bits and pieces of other stuff, with the interstitial space jammed with obscure references.  The vamping is Germanotta’s, with a little bit of electronica mixed in, the lyrics an acid-flashed version of the Stones, the beat… what, P. Diddy’s?  Probably, since Kesha’s main goal seems to make her unoriginality as obvious as possible.

It was a mistake to watch the music video, because the gimmicks are so mind-bogglingly lame.  A boy sucking on a popsicle.  Wow, you’ve completely turned that gender role on its head.  Did you go to Harvard or something?  I don’t know whether I’m listening to pop or reading philosophy!  Oh, look at that, a pimped-up bike… a guy with a drawn-on goatee… not only did you not have to pay for that garbage, but it’s such a hip commentary on the music world!  What does it mean?  Oh, if only I could wrap my head around it!

The really sad thing is that the song does, in fact, have a good beat, and Kesha treads rap ground that hasn’t been touched much since Nelly Furtado.  It’s painful like going into a five star restaurant wearing jeans.  You know as the waiter is pouring the wine that he’s laughing at you, but you also know that that wine is going to be way better than the swill you drink at home.

God is in the Mind – Story of Civilization V.xi.v.2-V.xviii.ii

“We have left to the last Julius’ favorite painter and sculptor, a man rivaling him in temper and terribilità, in power and depth of spirit – the greatest and saddest artist in the records of mankind.”  So begins Durant’s discussion of Michelangelo Buonarroti, and with such a beginning, who wouldn’t want to know more about this artist?

Again, Durant, on Michelangelo’s most famous work, the ceiling paintings of the Sistine Chapel.  “…taken together, they constitute the greatest achievement of any man in the history of painting.  The total effect of repeated and careful contemplation is far greater than in the case of [Raphael's] Stanze.  There we feel a happy perfection of artistry, and an urbane union of pagan and Christian thought.  Here we do not merely perceive technical accomplishment – in the perspective, the foreshortenings, the unrivaled variety of attitudes; we feel the sweep and breath of genius, almost as creative as in the wind-swept figure of the Almighty raising Adam out of the earth.”

This last refers to one of the panel’s of Michelangelo’s work in the Chapel, The Creation of Adam.  This painting is remarkable not just because it is often considered to be the finest painting in the Sistine Chapel, but also because it contains a remarkable allusion within it.  Specifically, as first noted by Dr. Frank Meshberger, the cloud that envelopes the figure of God, combined with the figure itself and the accompanying figures of angels, resembles a human brain, the shape of which Michelangelo, having dissected many human corpses, would have been one of the first men of his era to understand.

Michelangelo's "The Creation of Adam"

What is the message?  When I first saw the painting, I thought it a sublime joke.  God is in the mind. Imagine, the greatest and saddest genius of mankind painting the most atheistic of mantras atop the very citadel of Christendom, and funded by a pope!

Sadly, Michelangelo appears to have been a better Christian than the pope funding him.  In his youth, Michelangelo was an admirer of the savage Savonarola, a Florentine priest preaching the end of days.  As Dr. Meshberger (above) notes, Michelangelo’s intention seems to be to express, without irony, the importance of God’s gift of intellect to man, a subject that deeply concerned Michelangelo in some of his writing.  The pope who funded the work, Julius II, by contrast, was a man of immense worldly ambition.  Having purchased his way to the papacy over the voices of those who objected to the idea of a pope with three biological daughters, Julius spent more time waging war than in worship.

All this is not to malign Julius’ character – though it does by the standards of our time – for his behavior was typical of the popes of his time, and more typical of the temporal monarchs, among which the popes numbered, since they ruled in a secular capacity large regions of Italy.  It is merely to illustrate that the placement of God in the human mind was not meant to be so ironic as it now, to some, appears.  Michelangelo did not know the extent of his own genius.

Freedom, Violence, and Art – Story of Civilization V.vii.i-V.xi.v.1

Often, discussions of freedom are quickly hijacked by the argument over precisely what type of freedom is being discussed.  For instance, in America today, you may love freedom, but is it the freedom to not have to worry about healthcare, or the freedom to not pay excessive taxes to the government?  Similar questions have occurred throughout recent history: in apposition to free enterprise, freedom of property, and freedom from oppressive regulation are freedom to work, freedom from poverty, and freedom to unionize.

These questions are not unique to our time.  Historians often say of Renaissance Italy that it was the freedom of the city-states that stimulated the great flowering of the arts that then occurred.  But which freedom, precisely, do they mean?

In the most trivial answer, the freedom that mattered was the freedom of the city-states themselves from outside rule.  Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Siena were all independent fiefs, practically free, if not technically so, from the encroaching kings, emperors, and popes of their time.  Economically, this meant that each city acted as the capital of its associated lands, receiving their taxes and their goods, and passing them on to no higher authority.

This map of Italy, actually from 1796, hints at the divided nature of the country during the Renaissance. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was actually the Republic of Florence, the Duchy of Parma occupies approximately what would have been Milanese territory, and numerous smaller principalities, such as Ferrara and Siena, would at times have been independent.

Consider, by contrast, Rome during the Empire: prosperous cities and territories grew up repeatedly, but in the end, all were ransacked for the beautification of the capital.  When the method was not taxation or tribute, it was graft; the imperial appointees -native to Rome – would travel to a province, govern it for a few years, gather great wealth, and then leave with it for Rome.

In Renaissance Italy, with no imperial monster to feed, local concentrations of wealth were broken up but little, and the governors of each city-state, having collected the wealth that seems to be the eternal appanage of power, had nowhere to go with it but home.  This is reflected in the art patronage of the time. During the 1400s and 1500s, the greatest patrons of art were almost exclusively the government and the Church.  The Medicis in Florence, the Estensi in Ferrara, the Gonzagas in Mantua, and even Lodovico Sforza in Milan were all both premier patrons of the arts in their cities, and the dictators of said cities.

One is inclined to wonder whence came the great wealth of these dictators.  Other questions also arise.  Might the proletariat have done better under the oppression of a papal legate than under the freedom of the independent dictators?  Perhaps not; in addition to being artistically fertile, one of the signature characteristics of the Renaissance city-states was their patriotism.  Nonetheless, it seems clear that freedom from outside rule meant, in practice, the freedom of local rulers to cull for themselves whatever wealth they could extract from their territories.

Freedom from outside rule, in a way, also meant freedom from supervision, freedom from law.  This resulted in another notorious characteristic of the Renaissance city-states: their violence.  The Medicis and the Sforzas had to fear violent insurrections from time to time, but they were by no means the worst.  In cities like Verona under the Scaligeri, Perugia under the Baglioni, and others, rule was by families or factions whose sole claim to power appears to have been violence; so numerous are the stories of murder and midnight coups in these states, that, through the clouded vision of history, one could almost characterize the form of government as gang rule.

And so freedom can mean many things.  We must especially beware of those who would use freedom as a banner under which to usher in any number or variety of changes that in actuality have little to do with freedom.  When, in an effort to oust Lorenzo de’ Medici his opponents attempted to assassinate him, while running through the streets proclaiming freedom, the only reasonable interpretation of the freedom they offered was freedom from Lorenzo, and freedom for themselves to oppress the people in his stead.  The people responded accordingly, and killed them.

An Art Reinvented – Story of Civilization V.iv.vi-V.vi.vii

The most interesting way to write about history is as a revisionist.  The historian picks a period, examines common suppositions and conclusions, and then, through detailed analysis, shows that it was not so.

For the Renaissance, I suspect that such a treatment would be most unjust.  The Renaissance is supposed to have been a flowering of all of the arts and graces of civilization, and so it was.  No field better shows the contrast between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance than painting.

There may have been painting in The Age of Faith; if so, I don’t remember.  But in the Renaissance, it is as if man discovered canvas, and then through raw genius, invented de novo the art of covering it.  If some future revisionist wishes to annul this impression, let the sheer volume of Renaissance painting and painters overwhelm him, as it does the student of art.

The high state of painting during the 1400s is almost a curse; if we ever hope to make it to the 1500s, we must pass by whole careers of genius with a line, or even a word.  One or two who stood above the rest come to symbolize their age; so in the Renaissance, when we think of painting, we think of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

Let this note, then, stand as a monument to forgotten genius: among these thousand Renaissance painters, Andrea del Sarto is also worthy of remembrance.  Michelangelo said of him to Raphael, “There is a little fellow in Florence who will bring sweat to your brow if ever he is engaged in great works.”  Indeed, Andrea’s especial focus on a narrow circle of subjects, particularly Madonnas, is apparently what has kept him from greater critical acclaim, in both his own day and ours.  Nonetheless, Durant prefers many aspects of his painting to that of the remembered greats, citing composition, anatomy, and color among others as elements in which Andrea surpassed all.

Botticelli's Madonna of the Magnificat

This humble critic also found Andrea’s work to be exceptional, particularly in the field of anatomy (nearly the only field in which he is a qualified judge).  Compare the Madonna of the Harpies, for example, to anything from Botticelli.  I found Andrea’s Last Supper preferable in some ways to Leonardo’s (though perhaps this is only a consequence of time’s caprice).  As Wikipedia says, each figure in Andrea’s rendition is like a portrait, exceptionally individualized, and excelling Leonardo’s in picturing the varied tones and shades of human skins and faces.  What a progression from Fra Angelico to this, in less than a hundred years!

Andrea del Sarto's Madonna of the Harpies

We can only hope that, in our own characteristic arts, our age may baffle future critics as the Renaissance baffles us.

Story of Civilization – V.ii.iii – V.iv.v

This reading has forced me to reconsider a couple of points.  Firstly, not too long ago, I wrote a post suggesting that the scarcity of books in the Middle Ages was in part a result of the decline of slavery.  I can only shake my head at my own stupidity.

Books were created by copying previous books; the shortage of books was explained by the shortage of templates; I argued that if indeed this was the case, the supply of books should increase exponentially over time; this is, in fact, exactly what happened.  Moreover, my suggestion that slavery had anything to do with the proliferation of books was predicated on the incorrect idea that the cost of using a literate slave to copy a book was the cost of the manual labor the slave could otherwise have been doing.

Such a thing is never true.  Imagine that you live in classical Greece, and have a literate slave.  You can either hire him out as a scribe in the local bank for $20 a year, or keep him in your house and have him copy a book from your library, one book a year.  What is the cost of the book?  It’s the opportunity cost of the other labor the slave could have been doing, namely $20 a year for clerical work at the bank.

In any case, to return to another previous post, I recently observed the dramatic shift in philosophy from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.  The shift is from religion to humanism, from concern with the next world to concern with this one.  As the term renaissance suggests, this is not the first such shift.  Between classical times and the Middle Ages, the shift was from paganism to Christianity, and from a religion relatively lacking in ethical strictures to one loaded with them.  In classical times, the question of right conduct was almost independent of religion – consider Plato and Aristotle – whereas in the Middle Ages, religion was the final arbiter of right conduct.

I write all of this to suggest that there are three – perhaps four – great phases in human history.  First (This is the one I’m not sure I count…) there was the long, slow rise from animal to civilization, littered with superstition and all the bizarreries of religion imaginable.  Second, there was classical Greece and Rome, in which man for a time sought to understand nature, and sought a natural ethic for conduct, ignoring the occult and traditional answers to these problems.  Third, there was the Middle Ages; a return to superstition, a time in which the art of the individual, and the exploration of nature and ethics declined.  Fourth, there was the Renaissance and all that follows: the rebirth of the art of the individual, the free exploration once again of all questions, scientific and ethical.  The release from the chains of religion is an ongoing process, not complete even now.

All of this is merely a circuitous way of saying that I view the Renaissance as the beginning of the modern era.  Here, forward progress began again, and has not ceased even until now.

And so I come to another retraction.  I once suggested that patronage was a time-honored method of producing superior artwork.  In the first great patrons of the modern age, the House of Medici, I have found a compelling argument against patronage.  The House of Medici seems to have supported nearly every great artist of the early Renaissance, from Politian to Michelangelo.  The Medicis did not do this with the earnings of tired but brilliant lives, but rather by means of inherited wealth and a near-total control over the political machinery of Florence.  The first great Medicis, Cosimo and Lorenzo, found their own finances so inextricably linked with Florence’s as a result of their long rule that they could not abandon politics for fear of ruin.  Although this was a new paradigm at the time, it recalls nothing more than the fear of the departing incumbents, and the witch-hunts for graft that inevitably follow changes of power, in the modern era.

Therefore, it seems that we shall have to await future eras in history for examples of patronage that we may find morally acceptable.

Edit: for lamentably, humiliatingly bad spelling.

Story of Civilization – IV.xxxix.i – IV.Epilogue

We come at last to The Divine Comedy, with which Durant closes the “age of faith”.  It is a fitting way to end the age of faith because The Divine Comedy in many ways embodies the follies and absurdities of that age.  It is obsessed with the mystic and occult, accepts astrology uncritically, and needless to say, takes as its premise that very greatest of absurd mystic occultisms, the Catholic faith, with all of the “mysteries of faith” that it carries along with it.

Still, The Divine Comedy is a great work of art, marked by a unity and perfection of execution very rare in any age and from the hand of any artist.  The reader, with Dante, is lifted from the bowels of hell to the highest circle of Heaven, and experiences, through the force and vividness of Dante’s writing, the same elevation that the soul itself out to experience from such an ascent.

Typical of Dante’s masterful integration of allegory into his work is his use of Virgil and Beatrice as guides.  Durant summarizes “Virgil, who guides Dante through hell and purgatory, stands for knowledge, reason, wisdom, which can lead us to the portals of happiness; only faith and love (Beatrice) can lead us in.”  The Divine Comedy, then, will be a depressing read for those of us who prefer Virgil to God.

Dante’s aim is the worthiest, perhaps the only worthy purpose of art: he wishes to teach man to be happy.  In his aspiration as well as in form, his work is perfect.  Let us be thankful that in the choice of matter for his work, the use of faith to achieve happiness, he was so very wrong.  He has left the greatest art to be discovered by future generations.