Renaissance Slam? What’s that?

T.S. Eliot talked about modern literature reflecting the “presence of the past” upon the “pastness of the present.” These days, it seems, those forces slam against one another.  In some respects the Renaissance remains a work in progress.

In literature, as well as art, elements of the past and present clash in the cultural particle collider of our times, making it new. “Make it new,” is what Ezra Pound urged the writers and poets of his generation to work toward. So, Renaissance Slam is that poetry slam in New York, or Portland, or Firenze where one of Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz’s Crack Squirrels could be the guide through the Purgatorios of our age. Renaissance Slam is also artist Guiseppe Veneziano’s Ronald McDonald likeness posed as Michelangelo’s David. It is artist Vic Muniz’s recasting of Caravaggio’s Medusa shield in pasta and marinara sauce.

This is what this blog theme is all is all about. That, and the travel experience in getting there. Renaissance Slam. Please stay tuned. This is too is a work in progress from a guy who writes modernist fiction, some journalism, and travels to immerse himself in a past that coexists in a present where Vatican accountants seek corporate sponsorship for renovations on a 2,000-year-old stadium in Rome.

The Renaissance, still a work in progress

If there ever was a sign that the Renaissance remains a work in progress, it could be the current efforts to complete Michelangelo’s design work on  the facade of Florence’s San Lorenzo Basilica. Construction  delays are not so unusual, but  this one has been going on now for  nearly 500 years.

Florence’s mayor, Matteo Renzi, wants to change that. He’s advocating completion of the long-abandoned work on that plain Jane facade almost everyone is accustomed to.

While the interior of the church remains one of the most magnificent in Italy,  the exterior is  decidedly ordinary with crude  masonry.  That was not the intention back in 1515 when Pope Leo X commissioned Michelangelo to design a facade. Those Renaissance brick layers didn’t even bother to scrape away the excess mortar and smooth out the gaps between the blocks.

Michelangelo made some sketches and built wooden model, but the Pope halted the project before incurring the expense of hauling in the blocks of white marble from Carrara.

Instead of completing the facade, the Pope decided to use the money to build  a magnificent mausoleum for his own Medici family relatives’ remains. Today, you’ll the Medici Mausoleum attached to the rear of the church.

This would not be the first time a facade was added to one of Florence’s major churches hundreds of years after it was completed. The multi-hued pink and green marble face of the main cathedral, Santa Maria Fiore, otherwise known as “The Duomo”, was added to the structure in the 19th Century. This facade was in a gothic revival style what would have appalled Renaissance era Florentines.  To this day, the public reception of that  facade reception remains mixed, some saying it reminds them of a zebra in striped pajamas.

So,  it shouldn’t be too surprising. idea of restarting the facade project is  being beset with some controversy. Some people are not comfortable with the change. The design for San Lorenzo and  may be true to the Renaissance and may be 500 years old, there’s no denying that the church’s present appearance is its historical appearance.

No longer would the square in front of the church have quite thesame feel as it did in Michelangelo’s time.  Then again, it could be gratifying to see whatwould have been one of Michelangelo’s most significant works  brought to completion.  It could end up reminding us just how much the of Renaissance remains in play in our times.

Enough of those Penis Print Souvenirs

Authorities of several Tuscan cities are talking about putting a stop to the sale of naughty novelty souvenirs, including those boxer shorts and cooking aprons sporting a rendering of the penis from Michelangelo’s David statue.  It seems this is not how some folks want to see the Renaissance remain at play in contemporary culture.

Last month Florence’s Deputy Mayor, Dario Nardella, called for summit meeting with officials from five Tuscan towns: Florence, Pisa, San Gimignano, Pienza and Siena. They will meet sometime before the end of August.

Pisa has already begun to crack down on the sale of merchandise authorities think is too trashy, such as the boxer shorts decorated with an image of the leaning tower over the fly. The owners of five Pisan souvenir stalls have been fined 500 Euros ($705) for selling “merchandise offensive to public decorum.”

This is not the first time Michelangelo’s depiction of male anatomy became an issue.  In 1561 church ordered scores of penises painted over in the Sistine Chapel on the Last Judgement. Artist Daniele da Volterra received the commission and for that he has since been known as with the nickname “the Pants Maker”.

Vargas Llosa and the Florentine Literary Tradition

Like Dante in The Commedia, Mario Vargas Llosa casts himself in the dual role of both the author and the self-exiled narrator-character in the Storyteller We’ve seen this act before. In those few pages of the novel where Llosa speaks directly to the reader he speaks of his time in Florence, Italy. It’s here where Vargas Llosa plays with the Florentine literary tradition.

There’s a feeling that this Peruvian Mario is a man who to has lost his way. He is unhappy, sad, working his way through the circles of recollection, a kind of Purgatorio. He is remembering an old friendship, a faraway culture, and wanders the Florentine Streets whole world away from family and home.

Vargas Llosa’s account of his stay in Florence leaves the reader with the feeling that he means these months to be a period of self-exile. Throughout the account, Vargas Llosa experiences a longing for his homeland, together with sadness over the state of its political affairs back home. Meanwhile, he tells us, he spends hours in cafes and the libraries reading Dante and Machiavelli.

Why Machiavelli? Why Dante?

The simple answer is that modernist writers like Vargas Llosa tend to reference literary figures in their works. Beyond that, it’s a little risky to guess what is in the mind of a living writer. You never know. Vargas Llosa may one day Google himself and see this blog. Not likely, but you never know. The comment box is below. So, lets continue with this thought experiment in conjecture.

While Machiavelli is best known as the author of The Prince, a little how-to manual for despots on the art of political manipulation and deception, the bulk of Machiavelli’s writings are more benign than that. There’s plays, poems, history, and one work that praises the virtues of republics. Yes, bad old Machiavelli was an advocate of representative democracies that govern with the good will of the people. Machiavelli was also pragmatic. When he was out of a job after the Florentine Republic fell, he wrote The Prince and offered it as a gift to the city’s ruler. It would be the French who would later tag Machiavelli with Machiavellianism.

Dante and Machiavelli lived in much different times. Machiavelli lived during the high Renaissance, as opposed to Dante’s middle ages. And yet the thing they have in common is that both held high public office in Florence, and both the became exiles from Florence when the political tides changed. Here’s the risky part, Vargas Llosa appears to be identifying with their experience. Vargas Llosa was politically active in his country. He even ran for President. He fell out of favor with his country’s ruling party after he fought Peru’s nationalization of banks, and again when he protested against his governments human rights violations.

It’s less risky to say that writers and poets generally enjoy toying with the literary canon.  Dante and Machiavelli are clearly part of the canon, and there’s no reason to think that Vargas Llosa would not be deliberately putting the Dante and Machiavelli at play in his work. One can hardly be in Florence without sensing something of the  presence of  Dante. You can walk right up the Alighieri home, then cross the Ponte Vecchio and stand in the doorway of Machiavelli’s digs.

If one is a writer or a poet. one is going to be especially mindful of the likelihood down this or that old street,  or these stairs Dante or Machiavelli walked. If you write, and know something of your literary history, and have spent any time in places like Florence, or Paris,  or Stratford, you know this feeling.

Mario Vargas Llosa on Florence’s Mosquitos and Art

Mario Vargas Llosa once traveled to Florence with a plan to forget about his native Peru in “absolute solitude”. The 2010 Nobel Prize winning novelist tells us about this trip in the opening and closing chapters of The Storyteller. Florence’s Renaissance art was supposed to help with the forgetting. The mosquitos didn’t help at all.

The Storyteller is a postmodern novel in which Vargas Llosa is not just the author, but also a character and narrator in those chapters. It turns out that Mario’s time of solitude were mobbed by summer crowds and menaced by mosquitos he remembers attacking the tourists on behalf of displaced Florentine natives.

Even while viewing Florence’s Renaissance art, the mosquitos bite Mario. He can’t forget Peru. The mosquitos won’t allow it. The swarms continue to remind him of Peru and the Peruvian mosquitos that bit him on the arms, legs and neck years earlier when he visited the jungle’s Machiguenga people

While Florence’s art is clearly at play in the opening and closing chapters, specific works receive scant mention. The narrator mentions Botticelli’s Primavera and Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. That’s it, and he mentions these only to praise a contemporary photograph taken in the Peruvian jungle, a photograph displayed as part of a temporary exhibit in a little gallery near Dante’s house.

In the jungle picture, a storyteller performs among a gathering of Indians. Mario is so captivated by the image that he says the photo is as much a masterpiece as those two paintings hanging in Florence’s famed Uffizi Gallery. The story is, after all, a novel primarily about the immense cultural value of storytelling, and a Jewish man who disappears from modern Lima to live among the indigenous Machiguenga people as their storyteller. And as a postmodern Latin American novelist, author Vargas Llosa means to undermine the old Eurocentric grand narrative.

The Mario in this story rents a room in a pensione and spends his days either in galleries viewing paintings and photographs, or in cafes reading Dante and Machiavelli. He tells us that the stream of tourists inundate the streets like a flooding “Amazonian River.” So, instead of a comfortable and reflective solitude, he experiences a sense of isolation among the crowds, and a sense of loss and sadness in seeing foreign invaders occupy Florence. He says, “…there are virtually no natives left in Firenze.”

That part is an exaggeration, although it is true that some of the city’s streets become choked with foreign tourists in the summer. It’s true that many Florentines schedule long vacations from the city in the peak tourist season. Vargas Llosa is too good of a storyteller to let the facts spoil his story.

With his exaggerated crowds and mosquitos, Vargas Llosa raises those big questions of cultural hegemony and threatened native populations, and applies those questions to both the Machiguenga and the Florentines. While the Machiguenga are displaced by the corporate exploitation of their jungle homeland, Florentines see their lives altered by the tourists and the travel industry. And so, he asks, “Are the mosquitos the zanzare of the Firenze totem animals, the guardian angels of Leonardos, Cellinis, Botticellis, Filippo Lipis, Fra Angelicos?” He wants to know if the mosquitos are that, “or are they the weapon that the absent Florentines try to put their detested invaders to flight?”
–rs

Next time: What Vargas Llosa lifts from Florentine literary traditions.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Florence

Who would expect the city of Florence to figure prominently in a novel about a man who lives among a threatened Indian tribe in the middle of the Peruvian jungle? The question came to mind last week with the news that writer Mario Vargas Llosa was being awarded the Nobel prize for literature.

Florence is the setting of the first and last chapters of The Storyteller. The rest of the book is set in Lima and the jungle, as the narrator tells the story about a friend who had become a traditional storyteller, traveling from one jungle village to another.

Stay tuned. Will follow-up.

Pope Boniface’s Dog

Dante made a place for Pope Boniface in Hell, meanwhile this despised pontiff of the late middle ages was commissioning manuscripts with artfully decorative images and designs in the margins. So, here’s a pre-Renaissance dog chasing a hare. It’s purely decorative and has no connection with the Latin text in this book, Liber Sextus, which is a collection of Papal letters clarifying points of Canon Law.

Still, one can ponder with some amusement the historical juxtaposition of this rabbit-chasing dog and the degree that the pope pursued his enemies. Dante fell out of graces for being on the wrong side of the debate over whether the Florentine Republic should assist the pope with its soldiers in one of those pursuits. For that, Dante was convicted and condemned to death on trumped of corruption charges, forcing the poet into exile for the rest of his life. It’s a sad story, but then without that we would probably not have quite so divine of a Comedy to enjoy.

(This manuscript is from the University of California, Berkeley, Robbins Collection.)

The dog and the beast

The dog in this 15th Century German text appears worried as he looks up plaintively to the man holding his leash. He is among some people who are worshiping the beast. The image is part of one of 36 painted miniatures contained in this book illustrating the apocalypse. The dog seems to know something is not quite right here. Unfortunately for him, being on the leash prevents him from doing much about it.

The book is part of the manuscript collection of the New York Public Library. More information here

Dogs of the Passeggiata

The passeggiata is the traditional evening walk in Italian communities. It’s a fun time with the local folks stepping out of the doorways and into the streets. In the most Renaissance of Italian of cities, Florence, dogs seem to have become part of the street scene. For best viewing, go during the off-season.

(photo by Roy Scarbrough/ponte commedia)

That’s the Basilica of Santa Maria Fiore and its polychrome marble siding in the background.

More on the historical portrayal of Renaissance dogs in art and literature to come.

Another Renaissance Dog

This happy dog is about to enjoy some slices of ham. This image comes from one of the pages of an early 16th century French book of Christmas carols.

One of the interesting things about this image is the relationship of the man and the dog. The man is shoeless, and yet he carries a beautiful ham, from which he feeds the dog. Does this man love the dog in the way contemporary pet owners love their animals and tend to spoil them with food? That has to be one expensive piece of meat.

Yes, meat was precious. The typical Florentine ate meat once a week with the Saturday meal. Workmen to labored on Brunelleschi’s dumo made a sport of catching the pigeons that nested on the ledges of the incomplete basilica.

The aboce image is from the rare book department of the Free Library of Philadelphia.

More Renaissance Dogs

From the looks of a manuscript from the 1480s, it appears that the Medici household in Florence could have used the services of the Dog Whisperer. TV dog obedience trainer Cesar Millan just might have an idea on how to better socialize this dog pack had he lived in the late quattrocento.

In this illustration, a man standing in an upstairs room holds one of the dogs in his arms. Meanwhile, in the dining area below, a servant is setting a table for a feast while another dog appears to have become airborne. Four more dogs frolic about the scene.

This beautiful rendering of a domestic dog pack is one of 135 illustrations from what is known as the Medici Aesop Manuscript.

The volume is in the Spenser Collection from the New York Public Library. It’s an illustrated edition of Aesop’s Fables with the text in Greek. The art is usually attributed to Mariano del Buono, a prolific illustrator of lavish sacred texts. Although, in this case the text appears to be something a boy would be reading while studying Greek. Learning classical Greek would at that time be in vogue among the Renaissance elite with their obsession with classical times. (There’s more on the manuscript here.)

Appearing in the background behind the head and shoulders of the dog to left is the Medici coat of arms. This makes it easy to imagine the scene as part of one of the Medici villas or palaces. The head of that household, and head of Florence and its Tuscan territories would be Lorenzo the Magnificent, that father and consummate patron of Renaissance art.

The boy who might have been one tutored in Greek with the book would be his son, Piero di Medici, later known as the exiled Piero the Unfortunate. The family’s records do show a volume of a Greek Aesop in still in private library in 1495.

The fable here is “The Dog that Came to Dinner.” In that story, a dog belonging to a rich man invites another dog to a feast the man is planning. The guest dog then brags to other street dogs, but later gets tossed out of the home by the cook. Perhaps the airborne dog is he one that got himself toss out.

The image is rich in material to deconstruct toward one interpretation or another about Renaissance folks related to their dogs. We might start with seems to be the personal connection the rich man seems to have with the little dog he holds in his arms.