Trying to make sense of Montaigne

Where to start with Montaigne? The sheer bulk of Montaigne’s essays, in the monster single-volume translation by Michael Screech, is forbidding enough - some 1280 pages. But let’s be a little more realistic: the essays are certainly readable, which is a good start. This post is about first impressions of reading Montaigne – although I’ve looked at the essays before, I can’t say I’ve ever really engaged with them. How do they appear on an initial read?

·       First of all, they are the writings of a thinker, someone willing to attempt to examine just what they think, unlike the complacency of, say, James Woodforde (I don't get the impression he ever examined his own ideas critically). You couldn’t imagine a greater contrast.

·       But Montaigne’s essays are a hotchpotch. They vary widely in length, from just over a thousand words (‘On Idleness’) to book-length (‘An Apologie for Raymond Sebonde’, which is nearly 200 pages in the Penguin edition. The title and the length of each essay don’t appear to be related.

·       The title of each essay often seems to be bear little relationship to what is discussed within. Moreover, some of the titles look to have little relevance to a man trying to determine his own views (‘Ceremonial at the meeting of kings’).

·       On first reading, it seems the essays represent many years of rethinking. But the three editions of the essays, which editors by convention label A, B, and C, were written in 1580, 1588, and after his death in 1592 – a period of only twelve years. Nonetheless, it is fascinating to see evidence of a writer changing his mind, or at least his approach. Many writings contain multitudes, as Whitman said, but not always as visibly as here.

·       Most importantly, I can’t help seeing the vast number of quotations, mainly from classical authors. It’s as if Montaigne couldn’t look at the weather without quoting a classical writer on the subject. Now I know the Renaissance was fixated on ancient Greece and Rome, but it’s still a shock to see how frequent Montaigne’s quotes are. Did he never disagree with classical authors? What if their opinions were so cryptic that they offered no guidance, a bit like Vitruvius describing the classical method of architecture, which has remained unintelligible from his time to the present day? Nonetheless, it is certainly true today that an accepted style for non-fiction writing is to state an opinion and to follow it up by an authority who states in writing a confirmation of that opinion. So the pattern still exists today; we just don’t use classical authors so often as our exemplars.

·       Of course, Montaigne uses the classical authors for his own ends. The selection of a quote from a classical author is to an extent the construction of your own ideas. We can’t say that Montaigne had classical attitudes. But we can look in the classics to see if there is a correspondence between Montaigne’s ideas and those of the Classical writers he read most frequently.

·       A fundamental problem of the Essays, a problem shared with all writings of the time, is that they combine formulaic views, which were the accepted opinions of the day, with unconventional and perhaps radical ideas. I’m no expert in Renaissance thought, so I inevitably depend on authorities to point these opinions out. At least initially, then, the commentators are looking at the text with rather different criteria to my own. For a modern reader like me, many of the commonplace views are surprising; I am fascinated (at least initially) by what was probably unexceptional to Montaigne’s contemporaries. I can’t (initially) get excited by Montaigne’s scepticism, as I am so fascinated by his everyday opinions and how different they are to those of the present day.

·       Thus, for example, in ‘To Philosophize is to learn how to die’, Montaigne talks about the importance of being ready for death at any moment: “As far as we possibly can we must always have our boots on, ready to go; above all we should take care to have no outstanding business with anyone else.” What a strange attitude! How different to the present-day, where death is largely suppressed from our thinking. Of course people die, but for the most part we can ensure that death is painless and predictable. Usually, in the modern world, we can ignore death and pretend that it will never happen.

·       What about a present-day Montaigne? What if someone were to read Montaigne and to try to assemble the modern assumptions and expectations, and then to analyse themselves to show which of those assumptions he or she didn’t agree with? That would be a project indeed!

James Woodforde: the complacent cleric

James Woodforde was a parson of a Norfolk country church for 27 years. In principle, his diary could be a unique insight into rural life in the 18th century, but I found it an excruciating read.  In a word, Woodforde is complacent. For example, pretty much every entry in the diary begins as follows:

I breakfasted, supped and slept again at home.

The reader might think, because the author has not moved house, that such a detail is not worth recording – at least not repeating the same sentence thousands of times. For Woodforde, it seems a significant guide to his character. Habit, repetition, the daily round, is good. He records:

·       How much money he gave away in charitable donations - but he doesn’t mention the much larger sums he received in tithes from his parishioners. According to Wikipedia, the living of his parish was worth £400 per year.

·       How much money he won or lost playing at cards

·       How much he spent on travel.

·       What he cooked or ate.

Does anything else motivate Woodforde? Not religion. Woodforde’s faith is of the “minimal folk superstition” variety. Religion is only mentioned when someone dies, is born, gets married, of if something exceptional happens. There is no questioning or investigation of faith. Typical references to religion are:

I got to Ansford, I thank God safe and well this evening about 6 o’clock [Feb 1st 1764]
I … married my Sister Jane and Mr Pouncett by license. Pray God send Thy Blessing upon them both, and may they be happy in each other. [May 24 1774]
Thank God Almighty, for preserving us all safe from so violent a Tempest. [Aug 10 1787]

As for positive aspects of the diary, they seem to be an excellent depiction of the unthinking life at Oxford in the 18th-century: Woodforde records drinking, competing for livings, and disciplining undergraduates who drink too much, but no mention of any learning. These are the words of a complacent fellow.

The Buildings are grand at Cambridge but few of them [May 22 1776]

Quite a Summer’s day and exceeding fair.

Had a letter this evening from my Sister Pounsett.

Had another from Dr. Oglander, Warden of New

Coll: Oxford, in answer to mine, and very satis-

factory it was. Five poor unhappy young men were

hanged this day at Norwich, for divers misdemeanours,

at the last Assizes they were condemned — Bell, Boddy,

Bridges, Partridge and Gryfin, none of them but

what were quite young, but Villains … [April 3 1778]

The effect of the diary is smug and soporific. Worse, it brings into question the whole nature of diary writing. Must writing a journal be as egocentric and complacent as this? What makes a good personal diary or journal? Montaigne’s writings are a fierce self-examination, carried out over many years. Sartre describes his childhood with merciless condemnation of the people about him. Boswell’s journals are a masterpiece of self-assurance accompanied by the less comfortable reality he encounters. He is enthusiastic. Where is Woodforde’s excitement?

Did you know Rigoletto was Charlie Chaplin?

Glyndebourne Touring Opera production of Rigoletto: Rigoletto (R) and Gilda (L)

No, I didn’t know either, until I saw the Glyndebourne Touring production of Verdi’s Rigoletto (Norwich, December 2019). The opera was now set in a film studio, with Rigoletto himself dressed in the distinctive guise of the little tramp. Except that the singer playing Rigoletto happened to be about 20 stone and as unlike Charlie Chaplin in physique as you could imagine. The director, Christiane Lutz, appears to be responsible for this interpretation. She states, in the programme:

“We then thought about Charlie Chaplin, an iconic comedian, someone with enough charisma to fill the huge figure of Rigoletto, who worked within the studio system at this time, as the starting point for our staging… When you say ‘Charlie Chaplin’, everyone has an image, an idea in mind, and that richness of association was what we wanted.”

But the more you think about it, the more unlikely the analogy becomes. Chaplin was famous in films as the victim, the little man who suffers from an impersonal and cruel society, and at others’ hands. Rigoletto, in contrast, is someone who is clearly very successful, surrounded and protected by rich people, many of whom resent him for his success. There is nothing the two characters have in common.  Lines such as this would sound very strange coming from Charlie Chaplin:

Rigoletto

Who could harm me? I’m not afraid of them.
No one dare touch someone protected by the Duke.

Gratuitous videos are a commonplace of modern opera productions, and this production has a good example. Glyndebourne shows the three-act opera in two parts, with an interval between. Before the start of each part, there is a short video in which someone (I assume an elderly Chaplin, although uncredited) talks about the importance of moving forward, not looking back. These videos, together with the amateurish mime of an actor writing the word “forwards” in a circle, do not help us understand or appreciate the plot. In what way does Rigoletto look forward? It seems to me he spends most of his time worrying about the curse put on him - not very forward-looking.

There were other aspects of this production that left me guessing. For example, whose daughter is Gilda? The Count of Monterone, according to the synopsis, “confronts the Duke for seducing his daughter”. In this production, the daughter is seen on stage with a baby – and Rigoletto is seen to take the baby. So who exactly seduced the Count’s daughter? Or is Rigoletto acting honourably in taking responsibility for the Duke’s transgressions?

One problem with this production was that I didn’t get much of an idea of Rigoletto as evil. Perhaps Nikoloz Lagvilava, the baritone playing Rigoletto, simply doesn’t do nasty very well. In this production, he appeared as the wounded bear: a big, ungainly animal ridiculed by his peers. Theatre is supposed to deal with archetypes. I was lost by the archetypes depicted here.

Complexities of the story

To be fair to the production team, Rigoletto is a rather confused opera. Some of the story makes perfect sense, and can be readily grasped by the audience. The coup de theatre when Rigoletto discovers he has had his own daughter murdered is stunning; the moment he hears the tune of La donna e mobile in the background, he realises the dead body in the blanket in front of him is clearly not his intended victim, the duke. But other key points are not at all clear. Is the Duke a good or a bad man? At the start of the opera, he is the archetypal seducer:

Duke

If today one woman pleases me

Perhaps it’ll be another one tomorrow.

Constancy, tyrant of the heart,

We detest like a disease.

Yet later in the opera, the Duke appears in all sincerity as a man converted to constancy for love of Gilda:

Duke

She who first kindled in my heart

The flame of a constant love

She so pure, whose modest expression

Almost convinced me to a virtuous life!

The opera, and this production, would suggest the Duke is entirely sincere in his affections towards Gilda. Later in the opera, he is seen trying to seduce Sparafucile’s sister Maddalena. Perhaps it was just me, but I interpreted this not as the actions of a serial seducer, but as the ravings of a man who has just lost his true love. However, it's something of a condemnation of the plot that it's still not clear after I have seen Rigoletto performed several times. Of course, Verdi’s operas are melodramas, which means there is little room for complexity of character; it is perhaps trying to fit an over-complex plot into the opera format. I would see this as a limitation of the opera itself, not of this production.

Unnecessary action in this production

There are two actors in this production whose job it is to swan around and ‘interpret’ the music in some way (apart from singing - they are silent roles). Only one actor is credited in the programme, so perhaps the second actor appeared, like the extras in Noises Off, just in case the first one didn’t manage to appear on stage at the right time. Helpfully, the two of them killed each other off just before the final curtain. Otherwise, we could have been there all night.

Those barren leaves: barren indeed

Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) is his third novel. I chose it because, having enjoyed Crome Yellow, I thought, mistakenly, that the later novel would also be a light-hearted social satire. Light-hearted it is not; the last incident with any humorous interpretation takes place at least 50 pages before the end, and the tone could be described as unremittingly sombre. I can accept Jeeves and Wooster as figures of fun because I am never invited to take them seriously. Mrs Aldwinkle, in contrast, is at the start of the novel a satirical fabulously wealthy but insensitive villa owner, but by the end of the novel her heavy-handed behaviour towards would-be lovers makes us feel distinctly uncomfortable about her.

Those Barren Leaves could be called, a novel of ideas, but while  that term is not usually intended as a negative comment, in this case, the ideas weigh down the action and left this reader yawning. Huxley’s novel is overladen with ideas. What little action there is pauses repeatedly, interminably, with lengthy meditations on such unlikely topics as the human hand (about which more below). From David Bradshaw’s introduction to the Viking edition of the novel, Huxley described his aim as a novelist was ‘to arrive, technically, at a perfect fusion of the novel and the essay’. For that approach, you have to be convinced that Huxley’s ideas are interesting. In this novel, at least, the ideas give the impression of someone who (as Huxley admitted) takes pleasure in reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica: disconnected chunks of learning, seen as an end in its own right, disconnected from any kind of social vision.

In this post I will reveal details of the plot, because I really can’t imagine anyone wanting to read this novel for themselves. I hope I might be able to dissuade others from struggling through it.

This novel of ideas could be described, perhaps uncharitably, as the idle writings of an Etonian, who has studied excessively and can’t stop himself churning out great slabs of erudition, for nobody’s benefit, and with little political vision outside his own rather complacent class . All the characters have the vice of talking to themselves. Not only that, but the only characters it seems that the novelist considers truly worth are the males with the right kind of philosophical pondering. Most of the characters are from the leisured classes, and even if they are not rich (and Chellifer is not), they comply with the unstated house rules that money is not mentioned and practical action scorned.

One chapter of the book (Part Five, Chapter One)  is devoted to the human hand. The lovers Calamy and Mary Thriplow appear to be in some kind of post-coital reverie. Calamy is thinking about his hand.

‘About your hand? Said Mary incredulously. ‘That seems a queer thing to think about.’

‘But interesting if you think about it hard enough.’

That is, Calamy implies, a hand is interesting if he, Calamy thinks about it – not Mary. Now the sex is over, it is time for some real thought.

Calamy allowed his hand to be kissed, and as soon as it was decently possible gently withdrew it … He was no longer interested in kisses, at the moment …  ‘I believe that if one could stand the strain of thinking really hard about one thing – this hand, for example … one might… really get at something – some kind of truth.” … But it would be a slow laborious process; one would need time, one would need freedom. Above everything, freedom.

Implied here is freedom from the woman he is with. In this novel, women tempt, women love, they may even be novelists, but they don’t think, at least, not the way that men think. In fact they get in the way for much of the time. Calamy has no problem thinking about multiple meanings of a hand, but only when not interrupted.

Later, Mary Thriplow makes a note of this extended meditation on the human hand, clearly intending it for her next novel. No original thinking, then; the ideas in her novels are derivative. This is heavy-handed, misogynistic satire.

Not only does Huxley depict a world where women don’t think, he posits a universe where we, the readers, are fascinated by his thought. Reading this novel is a bit like attending every lecture in a University Extension course for a whole term. The novel concludes with a lengthy chapter where the three male characters – Cardan, Chelifer and Calamy discuss ideas openly.  Remarkably, they all seem to agree – the novelist’s usual trick of interrupting a lengthy digression with some disagreement is here abandoned. This is lazy writing, with characters not easily differentiated - there is no plot; the novel ends in chat. Nothing happens.

But the most horrific aspect to the novel is a subplot that is completely at odds with a satirical novel. Cardan accidentally spends the night with a brother and sister, who put him up for the night, and hatches a plan to marry the sister, who has some kind of disability, for her money. Accordingly he in effect abducts her for the remainder of the novel, where she is tolerated (but not accepted) by the main characters, until conveniently she dies horribly of food poisoning after failing to take the men’s advice on eating local fish. Is his action condemned? Nobody in the group questions what Cardan is doing. The satirical tone of the novel has been well and truly lost. How Huxley could mix up his genres in such a way is disturbing

So there we are: leaden satire, vague worries by the leisured classes about the effect of democracy on the masses, women as objects of temptation but who are not capable of systematic thinking like the men: here is a novel of the dying upper classes. When the bomb drops, this lot will still be considering the human hand and its many simultaneous meanings.

An Orientalist Painting

Antinous in the form of Osiris, c1790-c1820

At the Fitzwilliam Museum there is a small exhibition entitled The Great Belzoni, occasioned by the donation of a portrait of Belzoni to the Fitzwilliam. The authorities have marked the occasion by setting up a small exhibition of items from the permanent collection that are linked in some way to Belzoni. “In some way” is a rather broad term, since the single room devoted to the exhibition includes a miscellany of paintings, drawings and objects loosely linked to Egypt in the 19th century – a rather broad area. However much (or little) Belzoni knew about ancient Egypt, and it seems unlikely he knew very much, given his career history as a circus strongman among other activities, he certainly participated in, and was perhaps partly responsible for, a mania for all things Egyptian and Oriental during the period. One example is the ludicrous small statue of Hadrian’s lover Antinous, depicted as the god Osiris. Although this porcelain statue is from Belzoni's time, it is derived from a Roman original. Clearly, the fashion for Orientalism - dressing up the everyday in the costumes of another civilization to make it more exotic - started well before the eighteenth-century in Europe.

I’m not complaining that the exhibition was a hotch-potch, because its loose nature has enabled some things from the permanent collection to be shown that would otherwise be left gathering dust. Most wonderfully, it reveals at least one magical work, John Frederick Lewis’s The Siesta. The Fitzwilliam has Lewis's first version, in watercolour.

Lewis, The Siesta (Fitzwilliam, c1876)

Lewis (1804-1876) was an English painter who lived in Cairo for ten years (as well as spells in Constantinople and elsewhere in the Middle East). On his return to England, he used items collected from his stay abroad to suggest an Oriental theme in many of his paintings.  According to Wikipedia, he would often use his (British) wife as a model for the many ‘oriental’ works he painted for the rest of his career. His works often have exotic titles such as “The Harem”, but the figures depicted in many of them have faces more characteristic of Victorian drawing rooms.

In other words, what is “oriental” about his paintings (by "oriental" I mean exotic and sensuous for a Western viewer) above is largely anecdotal and imaginary: a state of mind rather than an accurate record. It could have been a room in Walton-on-Thames (where Lewis lived after his return to England). But in this painting, what is displayed is less about the figures and more about patterns and colours. In any case, the representations of objects and figures are less than detailed: the woman is wearing some kind of long green gown, but beyond that it would be difficult to be specific. The impression left in the viewer is of areas of varied and contrasting colours: the colours of the woman’s clothes and the fabrics on which she is reclining; the flowers on the table; the light shining through the translucent green gauze across the window; the light shining through the grille that seems to make up the outer wall of the space viewed; the patterned carpet. The rich juxtapositions of patterns, the grill that seems to make up the wall of the room, and the low kind of divan in one corner of the room, make up the exotic feel to the picture space. The woman asleep makes this a slightly voyeuristic act on the part of the viewer: we are accessing a private world. In a few words, this is exotic, reclining, relaxed, inviting, sensuous; a space we would like to inhabit. The painting is all the more successful because the human forms only a small part of the background of the painting; other works by Lewis have an exotic location but a main figure with an all-too obvious and everyday face. I prefer my fantasies more suggested than intrusive.

Lewis painted the same work again in oil (now in the Tate Britain).

Lewis, The Siesta (Oil version, Tate Britain)

However, I think the oil version is slightly more composed, and loses some of the exquisite freshness of the watercolour version. It also lacks some of the lovely pinks and blues of the watercolour.

Orientalist or not, The Siesta (in either version) is a magnificently evocative picture, and a match for (say) Tennyson in using a remote civilization as a vague suggestive backdrop to turn a mundane subject into a kind of dream: The Siesta is a wonderful example of the art of suggestion.

The best of Delacroix

An earlier post looked at why critics condemn Delacroix. Here, I am not begging forgiveness for any real or imaginary failures of Delacroix, but I am seeking to identify the quintessence of Delacroix, the part I can unreservedly celebrate. Which are the great Delacroix paintings, for me? And what do they tell us about Delacroix? I have chosen five works. All of them have in common Delacroix’s romanticism, by which I mean delight in action. Whether humans or animals, Delacroix picks moments of striving. Delacroix was capable of reflection and poise, but not here. These are not comfortable paintings.

The Barque of Dante (1822)

The grouping is very similar to the later Liberty leading the people: a small number of heroic figures in a standing or moving position, with various horizontal bodies below them. But what makes the painting remarkable is, in the words of Petra Char, « passion bursting forth from the scene ».

The Death of Sardanapalus (1827)

The remarkable contrast between the stillness of Sardanapalus and the frenzied, mortal action all around him. This is not the suicide of a neurotic in lonely isolation; here is a man who, like Don Giovanni in Mozart’s opera, accepts unflinchingly the invitation of death, choosing to have all his possessions destroyed around him. Never has such a major painting attracted such criticism. Together with the wild action, the exotic details pull the viewer into the scene. This is not a painting to be observed in peace and tranquillity. As has been pointed out, this painting represents a moment of evil rather than good, but is all the more powerful for it.

Liberty leading the People (1831)

If any painting represented French 19th-century history, this is it. A glorious, memorable combination of allegorical female between two very realistic-looking human males. What a collection of hats! The males are believable portraits of different ranges of contemporary society, joined for this one cause.

The painting is so iconic that it has probably become more famous than the event it represents. By all accounts, the revolution of 1830 was not particularly revolutionary.

Self-portrait (1837)

I have included this painting as, in contrast to all the others above, nothing is ostensibly happening in it. And yet the human depicted is full of energy, from the hair to the tense pose, ready to spring into action, ready to depict a thousand Sardanapalus figures.

Jacob wrestling with the Angel (1861)

Here, figures are integrated with the landscape, more successfully than Claude or Turner ever managed. Yes, the painting shows the human body in action – that is how I define Delacroix’s Romanticism, but alongside the struggling bodies, the trees and natural surroundings are all alive with the same motion as the figures. Next time you visit a church, try to find another scene with figures and landscape so sinuously linked. The figure on horseback on the right, for example, seems in some incredible way to be following the same dramatic curve as the root of the tree. 

Five great paintings to enliven any art-going visit. 

Nina Stibbe - "England's greatest living comic novelist"?

I wonder if anyone ever went to a creative writing class proposing to write a comic novel. I didn’t think that creative writing and comic novels could be so opposed, until I read Nina Stibbe’s Reasons to be Cheerful (2019), which tries to be both at the same time. Behind a mask of comic fiction, I sense a sensitive soul trying to escape, dreaming of self-expression, as you would from a creative writing class in which you want to state significant things.

What made me think it was a comic novel? The TLS, no less. In a review by Ian Sansom, entitled “Bantz vs. humour: Differing approaches to the comic novel”, he compares her to other recent comic writers and states “she is in a different league”. In this novel, “Stibbe establishes herself as England’s greatest living comic novelist.” That’s good enough for me! I sat down to split my sides with laughter at Stibbe, twice shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. After all, David Lodge would be a good candidate for the role of greatest living comic novelist, and I found his novels hilarious.

I didn’t laugh. The novel, very unexpectedly, moved steadily away from the comic, to domestic tragedy. I haven’t read all of Wodehouse, but I don’t remember any of the major characters dying by accident three quarters of the way through the book. It kind of takes away the laughter, somehow – call me a curmudgeon if you like. Not only is a major character killed, but the rest of the novel describes the narrator coming to terms with it. I’ve never seen a comic novel moving to emotional self-examination.

The comic aspect is quite formulaic. The narrator, Lizzie Vogel, aged 18, gets a job as a dental nurse. She recites very convincingly all the dental characteristics of people she meets. At the same time, she claims to base her ideas on popular women’s magazines such as Woman’s Own. So, throughout the novel, we see trade names liberally used and mindless advertising slogans as part of the narrative. It’s not very funny. In fact the narrator – or Stibbe’s – approach to characterization is simply accretion, piling up personal idiosyncrasies, phobias, product preferences, and odd eating tastes, until we have some image for each character, based on their tics and consumption habits. Advertising slogans are used throughout in seeming belief:

I … stayed for dinner and watched a hard-hitting TV documentary.

If this is satire, then the character is a cipher. But if we are to believe the character, does she believe these publicity slogans? I suspect Stibbe is attempting to use cliché to arouse our sympathy and empathy with the character - which is ambitious, but not very comic. How else could you read this passage, near the end of the book, that is, in the 'emotional' part:

It struck me that I’d started to prefer the top half of a slice of bread to the bottom half. This hadn’t been a whim; I’d always eaten the crusted top half of a slice of toast, to get it out of the way before enjoying the softer underneath half. And now it was the other way round. It was a shocking realization. What had made me change? I don’t know – perhaps I was eager to change as many things as possible. I’d known sadness before, I’d seen it, but I’d not experienced the sort of pain that makes a person switch sandwich preference.

I’m prepared to read the first sentence as funny, but the paragraph moves towards the confessional. It’s as if Michael Frayn in the last act of Noises Off started to reveal his inner emotions when he wrote the play. But we, the viewers, aren’t interested, and mercifully the farce simply becomes more farcical than ever. Nor, I suspect, does P G Wodehouse go in much for genuine self-examination. I’m quite happy for Jeeves and Wooster to remain ciphers. It’s funnier that way.

Delacroix's failings

Self-portrait, 1837

In a recent post, I wrote about T J Clark’s very odd interpretation of Delacroix. This started me thinking: just what is the essence of Delacroix? What are his strengths and weaknesses? In this post I concentrate on the perceived weaknesses.

It’s always fascinating to see what people don’t like about a famous artist. While for the most part, works such as The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix (2001) do their best to see positives in Delacroix’s art, a few critics and reviewers are more condemning.

For Jason Rosenfeld, reviewing the vast Delacroix exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in 2018-19, the essence of Delacroix is cats:

It is perhaps time to reconsider Delacroix’s achievement, to acknowledge his limitations. He was imaginative. He talked a good game in his journals. He was novel in his use of color and in accessing contemporary literature. He did not shy away from the large-scale canvases of the French tradition. But his project was a failure. His pictures are replete with tumult but lack human spirit. His women are ciphers for male violence and desire, and nothing more. Stick with the cats.

But are his paintings “ciphers for male violence and desire, and nothing more”? This is a rather glib judgement based on references in his Journals that he used to have sex with his models. Unfortunately, if we write off a male artist because of their failure to develop believable depictions of women, we will have to abandon Charles Dickens. And if we condemn artists who sleep with their models, we will have to cast off Picasso, Lucian Freud, and many others. There are plenty of depictions of women by Delacroix that are not “ciphers for male violence and desire”, for example his Jewish Bride of Tangier.

Jewish Bride of Tangiers, 1832

To summarise some of the complaints about Delacroix:

He is phallocentric (among many other faults). An essay by Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby in the Cambridge Companion condemns Delacroix for many things, including: “[Delacroix] continually conflated (hetero)sexual intercourse and the act of painting”, since he describes a new canvas as a “virgin” space. But her judgements on the paintings are more, I think, a dialogue with herself and her arguments than a genuine engagement with the picture. 

Massacre at Chios

Thus, in the Massacre at Chios, she seems to complain that the women, about to be taken into slavery, are not erotic, as in similar paintings by Delacroix’s contemporaries: “Delacroix … compromised the fiction of the viewer’s altruistic empathy with violated Greek women by offering a conflicting identification with the male aggressor.” As a modern viewer, I don’t feel any identification with any of the characters in this picture, Greek (victims) or Ottoman (oppressors).

Death of Sardanapalus

Grigsby’s view of Sardanapalus is wilder still. For her, the picture, from its subject matter, should be a wild male fantasy, set in “an Orient identified with his [Delacroix’s] own (hetero)sexual prowess”. This, however, does not tally with the figure of Sardanapalus, rather lacking in the aggression she seeks: “The circling dance of interchangeable nude women fails to secure the unimaginable phallic authority of an oriental despot whose diminutive head retreats from a swaddled body, which despite, or rather because of its preposterously enormous limbs, collapses into a uterine concavity”. This seems to mean he is curled up on the bed. If only poor Sardanapalus had been lucky enough to have a larger head.

He couldn’t draw (Rosenfeld: “There is hardly a “picture without a curious passage or two—an arm akimbo, a horse’s head that is laughably small, glances that miss intended targets by a wide margin.”). Art historians gleefully report any deviation from a photographic realism as if it were a fault. Ingres was another poor painter who couldn't draw the human figure. 

Delacroix wasn’t sufficiently left-wing. Clark, in The Absolute Bourgeois, 1973, writes: “D’s art in 1849-51 was bad because becoming a reactionary … was an experience [that] interfered too palpably with his strange amalgam—of reaction and revolution in art practice.”

His paintings “lack human spirit” (Rosenfeld). This is so much at odds with Delacroix’s major works that it is not worth refuting. His 1837 Self-Portrait is a work full of the passion of the man himself.

So was Delacroix good for anything? Well, he could draw and paint cats, and other animals in movement. Rosenfeld again:

The Lion Hunt of 1855 … is the usual mish-mosh of bodies with misaligned heads and appendages, relieved by deftly distributed color. But oh, the cats. Bristling musculature and rippling tawny fur, deployed claws and gnashing teeth. It is not new in concept—as ever with Delacroix, Rubens got there first—but few artists of the period could match this level of physical presence in their work.

So, yes to cats, and no to women, no to historical painting.  Not much remains from the legacy of one of the most famous 19th-century European artists. Perhaps it is time to look again at Delacroix, and to see if there is anything worth saving, as it were. That can be another post; but we do agree he can paint cats. 

Sex and violence in Delacroix

I have the greatest regard for T J Clark. His The Absolute Bourgeois (1973) and Image of the People (also 1973), and, most of all, The Painting of Modern Life (1987), were for me a model of how to write committed art criticism, aware of the context in which a painter was operating. This view was for me a revelation, to discover another way of seeing late 19th-century art without as a result feeling I should be buying myself an Impressionist calendar every Christmas.

So to see the Clark, now retired and in his eighties, writing about Delacroix (in the London Review of Books, 10 October 2019) was very welcome. Clark strikes a personal note in this article, remembering a poster of Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855) that he bought in 1966, and how the painting was for him a “talisman” that he compared with Jacob wrestling with the Angel, in the church of Saint Sulpice, Paris. But the conclusions Clark draws are not the way I see Delacroix.

For Clark, in these two paintings, “I was being shown what violence was, the full range of its beauty and monstrosity, and how deeply human beings can be in love with both”.

Certainly Delacroix, like Gericault, is a painter attracted in some of his paintings (but by no means all) to violence, or more specifically, to moments of animals and humans in distorted and non-classical movement, in dramatic conflict of the highest intensity. The lion hunt shows a lion that, despite the title, looks to be triumphant, having just landed on top of a horse and man, perhaps its rider. On the right of the scene, another lion is digging its claws into a horse. The scene is depicted with astonishing intensity, partly from the way the figures are piled on top of and alongside each other, partly from the way the canvas is filled with contrasting movement, with no space for any background or landscape. Clark gives more reasons for the intensity (he has seen the original, which I have not): the sheer scale of the painting, around 3.5 metres in width, and finally from the unfortunate fire damage that removed much of the top of the painting in the 19th century. As Clark, states, the result is ‘congested’; it is a magnificent painting.

Clark then refers to an article he wrote in 1969 about Delacroix, and how he concluded Delacroix was a “desolate reactionary, shipwrecked in the 19th century by the failure of Napoleon”, which means that Clark views Delacroix with an “unresolved mixture of admiration and distaste”.

 Although Clark’s article is several thousand words long, he doesn’t explain how he reaches this conclusion. I haven’t (yet) read what he wrote in 1969 (and he doesn’t give a citation), but I dislike people referring to other content that they don’t summarise or explain. He states (but does not explain why) the Lion Hunt was meant by its maker as an “antidote to Liberty Guiding the People”. Perhaps it was; please tell me why.

Finally, Clark concludes, the Lion Hunt and the Death of Sardanapalus (1827) are both about Delacroix’s view of sex.

“Sex and violence, Sardanapalus says, are completely and necessarily entangled.  Sex is antagonism … dominance and submission are indelibly part of it.”

I’m not sure about this; and I’m certainly not sure about Clark’s next statement:

Dominance and submission … in the years following Sardanapalus he [Delacroix] decided not to state the case so openly … but the metaphor he then fell back on, of combat between men and animals, was sufficiently easy to decode. The lions and tigers and shrieking horses in his pictures are to be understood as women. Men are truly endangered by them, and regularly lose their hard and fast identities in the struggle. The loss is unnerving, but delectable, for eventually the men will win … this is the story we call patriarchy.”

This is more about Clark than about Delacroix. In the Lion Hunt, the lion is winning. If Delacroix wanted to show the triumph of patriarchy, in Clark’s terms, he would have depicted a dead (or defeated) lion. Where is the evidence that Delacroix saw violence on animals as a metaphor for human sexual relations? In Clark’s terms, I could retitle this work “The Triumph of Woman”, and leave my audience mystified. 

I won’t go into Clark’s interpretation of Sardanapalus here (it does not seem very relevant to this discussion). But I will challenge Clark’s final comparison, between Jacob wrestling the Angel and Lion Hunt. He describes the Jacob painting as a moment “when violence transmutes to balance and mutuality … the great oaks looking down on the wrestlers, their branches mimicking but also dwarfing – ironising – the ways of man.” Well, there are no oaks in Lion Hunt, by which I mean no background to provide a context. And I don’t see much sign of balance in the Lion Hunt either; it is a moment of raw intensity. Perhaps, over 40,000 words, and with sufficient explanation, Clark’s argument would make some sense. But here, it does not.

David Lodge’s Campus Trilogy: a hilarious epitaph for the seventies

There have been some comments that this blog is too negative. I haven’t counted the number of approving or disapproving posts, but it’s probably true that the negative outranks the positive quite substantially.

So it is refreshing indeed to report not one but three novels that are entertaining, informative, and full of narrative energy. They are the three novels comprising David Lodge’s sequence, The Campus Trilogy. The first, Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), dsescribes the exchange of two academics, Morris Zapp from the US and Philip Swallow from the UK, at each other’s institutions, with plenty of opportunities to contrast the UK and US academic systems. Small World: An Academic Romance (1984), introduces the character of Persse McGarrigle, a rather innocent young Irish researcher, and his search for the woman he thinks he loves, with rather obvious (but funny) echoes of Percival searching for the Holy Grail.

Finally, Nice Work (1988) expands the series well beyond higher education to include the world of a small industrial company in Rummidge, and the interaction of Vic Wilcox, the industry boss, and Robyn Penrose, junior lecturer at Rummidge, as part of a government initiative for academia and industry to get closer together. They do indeed get closer together, an episode that is a tour de force, given that it is highly unlikely an academic and industrialist would ever have any time for each other in the real world. 

One character, Philip Swallow, appears in all three novels, and much of the action (pretty much the whole of the action of Nice Work) is set in Rummidge, a loosely fictionalized Birmingham. Having enjoyed the novels so much, I am slightly reluctant to investigate too closely how and why they are successful, but as a former student of literature, I feel it is my duty to, ahem, show off my skills and discover how they work.

One achievement is that Lodge writes from the inside. As a former professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, he had an intimate knowledge of a redbrick university in a large industrial city. Fascinatingly, however, he doesn’t attempt to make the city or the university any more appealing than it is. He is a remarkably objective and often unsympathetic describer of the industrial midlands, particularly in the third novel.

Remarkably, Lodge is very aware, as an academic might be in Birmingham, but not in Oxford or Cambridge, that academic life is not the only way to live. Nice Work contains lengthy arguments between the industrialist and the academic, each defining their own existence, and the academic is by no means wholly successful. The academic career structure is shown to be elitist, unfair, underpaid, and often irrelevant to the local community, yet Robyn Penrose, dreaming of obtaining a tenured position, defends it passionately – even though she is likely to be a victim of the very system she defends.

Wilcox said, ‘Who were you trying to hurt?’

‘Hurt?’

‘A strike has to hurt someone. The employers, the public. Otherwise it has no effect.’

Robyn was about to say, ‘The Government,’ when she saw the trap.

It becomes clear to Robyn that the strike has little effect on the government, the students, or the general public. The exchange is revealing for Lodge’s remarkable balance. Few professors would have such a dispassionate and even jaundiced idea of their own profession; you feel that these novels could not have emerged from the far more precious world of Oxford or Cambridge, where there is no countervailing force to the academy.

Still more remarkable, the novels make a solid attempt to communicate some idea of literary theory. I came away from the novels with a refreshed idea of what terms such as metaphor, metonymy, and less common, aporia, meant, even though I had dutifully learned them years ago. In any case, my university education largely predated structuralism and literary theory.

Not only can Lodge balance academia and industry, he also succeeds impressively, to my mind, in balancing male and female attitudes. Admittedly, some of the female characters, notably Hilary Swallow and Mrs Wilcox, appear to be mere ciphers, but some of the other younger women in the novels are very believable, notably Robyn Penrose. She is believable partly because she is so centred in a place and time. Her slightly hippy clothes, her possessions, even the way her partner Charles massages her, are so typical of the 1970s and 80s. And yet she is more than just a cipher. Despite her innocence, she tries to make sense of the world around her and to respond to it towards some kind of success; it’s almost tragic, that both Wilcox and Penrose are almost doomed in their respective home and work environments, oppressed by forces they have almost no control over, and yet they continue to struggle and to fight a very unequal battle. Lodge does not write about industry as an insider, and yet his depiction of a small-scale British manufacturing company trying to survive in a declining industrial environment is moving and almost tragic. Wilcox’s company has few options other than cost-saving – something it has in common with Rummidge University, faced with endless cuts in funding and hence staffing.

So, a set of incisive novels that seem unerring in their depiction of fashions and styles of the 70s and 80s, set against a brutal realistic background that offers little hope for the main characters. Similarly, family life, notably the life of the Swallows and the Wilcoxes, seems to have just one direction: down. By the end of the trilogy, Swallow is reduced to a hard-of-hearing, rather ineffectual head of department, unable to do anything to respond to external events. And yet the trilogy was compelling to read. A remarkable achievement.

What's with the word 'radical'?

The execution of Charles I, 1649

Raymond Williams, in his book Keywords (1976), emphasises the importance of word and phrase meanings in scholarly discussions. His book deals with “vocabulary: a shared body of words and meanings in our most general discussions.” He describes how he was struck by a word being used in a discussion, and how “the problem of its meanings seemed to me inextricably bound up with the problem it was being used to discuss”. The problems that arise when people do not define their terms were described in a recent blog about the term “neoliberalism”, where the term was being used at times with opposing meanings without explanation.

Blair Worden, a highly regarded expert on the English Civil War, highlights the term ‘radical’ in an interesting review (in the London Review of Books, September 2019) of two books about English Radicalism during the seventeenth century. Worden notes that the term ‘radical’ was used by Christopher Hill in his pioneering books of the 1970s, notably his 1972 book The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution, which was a highly fashionable study of radicalism.

Worden points out that term ‘radical’ was not used in the seventeenth century in the sense in which Hill uses it, meaning a view dissenting from the political order of things. He also points out that Thomas Hobbes was as radical as anyone in the period, but is not included in Hill’s collection of radicals. Hill concentrated on small groups such as The Levellers.

So far, I agree. But Worden is a man of rather fixed opinions. The review becomes a rant against Hill, something Worden has done several times before, even though Hill was writing more than 45 years ago. There are many more mentions of Hill in this review than of the two books ostensibly being reviewed.

What is Worden’s complaint about Hill? For Worden, Hill is in thrall to a doctrine that doesn’t fit the facts: 

“The language of ‘radicalism’ enabled Hill to play down differences among his groups and to situate them with an essentially unified ‘culture’ of protest.
“Hill, who saw events as the mere superstructure of history”
“This perplexity did not detain Hill. Taking political and religious dissent to be articulations of a single set of class relations, he [Hill] thought them natural allies.”

Yet one of the books under review is entitled “Radical Parliamentarians”. Clearly Hill can’t have been entirely wrong, then.

 You wonder why the London Review of Books follows this strange practice of giving reviewer X the opportunity to review a book by Y, when in fact we all know that X will write about Z. It might be more helpful to commission a review article, along the lines of “Is Hill still worth reading today”, by someone more balanced.

The close of the review, if I understand it correctly, is about how the American libertarian right has championed John Lilburne as one of their heroes, and praised “Leveller attacks on trading monopolies … as pleas for a free market”.

At this point I noticed how Worden places in inverted commas terms he is not happy about – every mention of the word radicalism appears in this way, as if its meaning were not to be trusted. However, if any term should be distrusted, it is ‘free market’ -there has probably never been a free market anywhere (see, for example, Ha-Joon Chang’s 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism).

Worden suggests, I think, that ‘the British radical pantheon’ [his inverted commas] cannot monopolize radical ideas for the left.  Yet the phrase ‘radical right’ was captured by Raymond Williams in his Keywords way back in 1976. On the one hand, the term “radical” continues in use to the present day (as the book being reviewed demonstrates). On the other hand, the fact that the right-wing has made use of the term “radical” hardly invalidates the term itself. In Justin Champion’s view, in a Guardian interview in 2009, “Blair [Worden] is correct, that the political experiments of the 1650s were defeated … but … once 1649 [the execution of Charles I] had happened there was no turning back.” Worden is unrepentant; he can’t see “what good it did” to behead King Charles I. All this talk about radicalism really comes down to your opinion whether it was right or not to execute the king. 

However, despite Professor Worden's reservations, the word ‘radical’ is clearly still being used in book titles, and no doubt will continue to be used meaningfully by ‘the British radical pantheon’ for a few years yet.

On reading Burckhardt

It’s a long time since I opened a book by Jacob Burckhardt (1818-97), Swiss professor, and son of a priest. On turning to his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) I was expecting a stimulating, well-informed overview by a world expert in Italian culture and history (after all, Burckhardt was the author of the famous Cicerone, 1855, subtitled Art-guide to painting in Italy. For the use of travellers).

But what I read in the first few pages shocked me. Burckhardt is to history as the News of the World is to culture – only of interest if it is scandalous and, hopefully, immoral. Burckhardt is not interested in what happened when, who was in power and who came next. For Burckhardt, finding a spectacular crime or an appropriate anecdote is all – and I don’t think he particularly cares if it is not true, as long as it fits his case. Burckhardt’s Renaissance Italy is a creation of pure fantasy, a Sunday scandal newspaper approach to history. This is history as an impassioned statement of wild forces, characterised rather than summarised by melodramatic and lurid illustrations:

And what can be thought of Frederick III? His journeys to Italy have the air of holiday-trips or pleasure-tours made at the expense of those who wanted him to confirm their prerogatives, or whose vanity is flattered to entertain an emperor… At Ferrara, on his second return from Rome (1469), Frederick spent a whole day without leaving his chamber, distributing no less than eighty titles.

We aren’t told who Frederick III was, where he as emperor, what his background it; only that he was fabulously, thrillingly corrupt. Only a truly immoral man, he implies, would not leave his chamber when distributing titles.

Burckhardt is fascinated as well as repelled by immorality. The term “bastard” seems to raise his writing to fever pitch:

Closely connected with the political illegitimacy of the dynasties of the fifteenth century was the public indifference to legitimate birth, which to foreigners—for example, to Commines— appeared so remarkable. … In Italy, there no longer existed a princely house where even in the direct line of descent, bastards were not patiently tolerated.

You recognise the shocked Swiss bourgeois visiting Italy and becoming aroused and appalled by the sense of vice and immorality. No bastards in Switzerland, clearly. 

From henceforth that thoroughly immoral relation between the governments and their Condottieri, which is characteristic of the fifteenth century, became more and more common.

Quite what is a “thoroughly immoral” relation? Was the rest of Europe particularly moral, at the time?

Burckhardt revels in lurid descriptions:

When in 1494 Charles VIII approached, the Baglioni from Perugia and the exiles encamped in and near Assisi conducted the war with such ferocity that every house in the valley was levelled to the ground. The fields lay untilled. the peasants were turned into plundering and murdering savages, the fresh-grown bushes were filled with stags and wolves, and the beasts grew fat on the bodies of the slain, on so-called “Christian flesh.”

Alongside the prurient fascination with evil, there is casual racism:

taxes … were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals.

Moreover, Burckhardt succumbs to the same prejudice that affected many 19th-century German academics: a facile stereotypical view by northern Europeans of Italians as wildly passionate, and hopelessly incapable of living in organised societies, for example, the Renaissance princely states … “displaying the worst features of an unbridled egotism, outraging every right, and killing every germ of a healthier culture”. He uses throughout metaphors of health and disease (and it is pretty clear that Burckhardt and his home of Basel are the healthy ones).

When I look again at descriptions of Burckhardt, these characteristics for me invalidate him a serious thinker. What is all the more astonishing is how relatively recent figures praise him to the skies. Jonathan Jones in the Guardian (10 July 2010) states “His book drips with love of Italy and the Italians. It is … one of the most passionate homages ever paid by a northern European to southern Europe … its greatness as a book lies in its imaginative intoxication”. Intoxicated and wrong?

For Professor James Davidson, in the London Review of Books (20 August 1998), comparing Burckhardt’s treatment of ancient Greece with the Italian Renaissance, “Burckhardt’s account of the currents of energy within and between those epochs still depends on the clichés of dissipation, dilution and adulteration”.  That’s exactly what it is, and yet Burckhardt is not condemned for it. Davidson, incidentally, mistakenly describes Burckhardt as an “intellectual voluptuary”, when the phrase was actually used by Peter Gay to describe Macaulay. Davidson quotes, apparently admiringly, a typical anecdote from Burckhardt, on the subject of suicide:

An epidemic of this kind once afflicted the girls of Miletus, and was attributed to a morbid influence in the air; all of a sudden they longed for death, and many strangled themselves. The pleas and tears of their parents and friends had no effect, and they evaded the closest surveillance, until a clever man suggested a public edict stating that those who died in this way must be carried naked through the agora; this put an end to the problem.

Burckhardt’s sense of cultural (and sexual) superiority, of condemning the worlds he depicts, make him highly suspect as a cultural critic - those foolish, easily-led young girls. It’s as if Pevsner were to rewrite The Buildings of England based around the scandalous vicars who inhabited the parishes of which the church buildings are the only remaining evidence. Fun to read, but not history.

What does the Italian Renaissance mean?

You can’t say this blog does not tackle the big questions. No, it’s not the next winner of Celebrity Come Dancing, but the meaning of the Italian Renaissance.

For most people, including myself, the Italian Renaissance means, more than anything else, paintings and sculpture. Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the Mona Lisa – images as familiar to us as Beatles songs and national anthems. But, of course, devoid of any context, who knows what they represent to the modern eye. Part of it is the way museums hoick paintings out of any background and display them in a neutral gallery, against a blank wall, with nothing above or below.

Like many people, I enjoy looking at paintings in my spare time. I’d like to think it is more than simply train-spotting, just identifying the recognisable pictures in various galleries, but it becomes challenging to explain exactly what I have learned, or imbibed, after a quick tour around a fine art collection. And of all the mysteries, I am more often drawn to the Italian Renaissance pictures than any other (not quite true – to be precise, it’s the period 1500 – 1575, for me, but that’s another story). What is the fascination of the Italian Renaissance?

Well, for a start, the Italian Renaissance is immediately recognisable. There is no doubt in most art galleries which are the Italian Renaissance paintings. They have mastered perspective, which earlier generations did imperfectly, if at all, and while still being largely religious in subject matter, tend to depict their subjects in a more naturalistic way.

But beyond these rather simplistic and trivial details, there is a feeling, which you sense powerfully in Florence, but also in most major western art galleries, that the Italian Renaissance seems to have been something of a whirlwind. Everyone in the Renaissance seems to have been painting like there was no tomorrow. Of course, this might simply reflect the buying practices of the museums: are there more Italian renaissance paintings in Western galleries because more were produced, or is it simply that they are today valued more highly than other schools of art? Whatever the case, the Italian Renaissance is highly esteemed, and often given pride of place in museum collections.

The ubiquity of the Italian Renaissance! As soon as you start looking, you see references to the Italian Renaissance in so many places. Aldous Huxley’s Those Barren Leaves (1925) depicts mercilessly the communities of British and American wealthy individuals believing they could somehow imbibe the spirit of the Renaissance by living in the Tuscan hills overlooking Florence. The most famous of these individuals was of course Bernard Berenson, who made a highly effective combination of interests and income living at the villa I Tatti and advising wealthy clients which paintings to buy.

Donald Olsen’s 1986 book, The City as a Work of Art, is clearly a reference to Jacob Burckhardt. After a visit to Florence earlier this year, I recalled reading Burckhardt’s astonishing book for the first time, many years ago. The Florence he describes is not, of course, the real Florence of the Renaissance, but his vision was so compelling, and even the words he used have become fixed in the language: “The State as a Work of Art” is the title of his first chapter. In terms of influencing generations of visitors to Italy and students of Italian history, its importance cannot be overstated. Burckhardt’s vision of artists and thinkers probably led to the proliferation of Renaissance artefacts in Washington, New York and elsewhere as wealthy collectors in their enthusiasm collected objects in the belief that by ownership they could acquire something of this magical Renaissance spirit.

Of course, it’s another matter to decide if Burckhardt’s vision was correct, and if it still deserves its place as an introduction to Renaissance Italy. There is a topic! How far is Burckhardt relevant today, if at all, and does he misrepresent the Renaissance? Quite a theme, and quite a challenge. To be precise, the task would be to identify why Burckhardt appealed so much to his twentieth-century readers, and whether the more recent overviews of the same territory appeal and why.

For a start, Burckhardt’s subdivisions of the book make clear what he is omitting:

Part One: The State as a Work of Art

Part Two: The Development of the Individual

Part Three: The Revival of Antiquity

Part Four: The Discovery of the World and of Man

Part Five: Society and Festivals

Part Six: Morality and Religion

This does not appear include the private enterprise that was clearly flourishing at the time in Florence. But to look at that in detail would require something of a study of Burckhardt, as well as a comparison with more recent titles. For example,

Peter Burke’s single volume on the Renaissance, Culture and Society in Italy, was consciously modelled on Burckhardt and attempted to update it for the second half of the twentieth century. Some 25 years after reading these books, I again looked at the Renaissance in the shape of a more recent overview, Art in Renaissance Italy, by Evelyn Welch (2000). It would be fascinating to compare the differences in their perceptions of what the Italian Renaissance meant at various points in modern history: 1860, 1972, 2000. Watch this space!