Gene Brucker, Renaissance Florence (1969)

 

Florence: the dome of the Duomo viewed from the Uffizi [my photo]

I finally finished reading this book in 2025, approximately 45 years after I started it. In fact, I started it several times, but always got sidetracked. This itself is an indication of the strengths and weaknesses of Brucker’s book: a fascinating subject, but I didn’t find it a particularly easy read.  

Let’s face it, the history of Italian city-states is complex. Control of a city changes hands frequently, alliances change, the background of Papal forces, Empire forces, French and Spanish armies at various times make it difficult to study one city without knowing about the others. So I was disappointed that Brucker did not include a chronology.  

The thematic arrangement of the book

Brucker’s thematic arrangement means that it is very difficult to piece together a chronological understanding. Major events in Florentine history are grouped within a theme, so the Savonarola episode appears under the Religion chapter, but the Ciompi revolt appears rather unexpectedly in the chapter on the economy, and not the chapter on politics. While I’m at it, here is a comparison of the chapter titles of Bruckner and Burckhardt, both of them thematic, but arranged rather differently:

Brucker	Burckhardt
The Renaissance City	State as work of art
The economy	Development of the Individual
The patriciate	Revival of antiquity
Politics	Discovery of the world and of man
The church and the faith	Society and festivals
Culture	Morality and religion
Last years of the Republic	Monuments of art

 

Each has a very different emphasis. There is no mention of “Ciompi” in Burckhardt, for example – a pretty major omission. 

Trying to piece together what happened is challenging with Brucker (as with Burckhardt). For example, Brucker mentions that Walter of Brienne, Duke of Athens was invited by the Florentines to be signore for life, in 1342, yet in 1343 he was overthrown. In fact, in the two years 1342 to 1343, Brucker tells us the ruling power was overthrown no less than three times. You won’t find this in the index, because there is no entry for “Walter”, “Brienne”, or even for “Athens” – in other words, a human-compiled and deeply deficient index (there’s no entry for Raphael, either, although there is for Michelangelo and Leonardo). The only way to find where Walter is mentioned in Brucker is by going to the Internet Archive text and using the full-text search feature on their digital copy, even though I own a copy of the print edition. This alone is a justification for digitising every printed book: even if they have an index, it might be (and usually is) deficient in some regard. 

Republicanism

This is perhaps the thorniest problem of all. How much of Florence’s success was derived from being a republic? In fact, was Florence even a republic?  While reading the book, you come across such stunning revelations as “On three separate occasions in the fourteenth century, the citizens voluntarily surrendered a part of their liberty to a foreign prince”. That doesn’t sound very republican-minded! Yet Bruckner, in his epilogue, states confidently: 

The Florentine Renaissance has been defined in various ways [typical Brucker] … However it is described and interpreted, it was the creation of a free and independent community. Liberty and republicanism were two key elements of the city’s historical experience. [p274] 

Notice Brucker sitting on the fence here. He doesn’t say it was a republic, only that republicanism was an element of the city’s “historical experience” (why not just say history?). He disagrees with the Hans Baron thesis that Florentine republicanism is the way to interpret Renaissance Florence, and dates from a specific crisis in 1402 when Florence was threatened by invasion from Milan. Around that time, the humanists argued for republican values, praising civic participation and the “active life”. Bruckner disagrees with the specific date of 1402, suggesting there was a similar  crisis moment some ten years later, and so “Florence’s cultural revolution … was a gradual process”, and that the  cause was not  Florence “as a beleaguered  republican city, but in the particular character of this society and its political traditions, which facilitated communication between intellectuals, merchants and statesmen” [p237]. 

The problem with this kind of argument is what I call the dissociation of sensibility argument. Eliot’s thesis sounds wonderful when you read it, until you try to prove it. How can you prove that Florence had better communication between intellectuals and statesmen than, say, Milan or Naples? 

Humanism

If you state that humanism is the key idea behind the Renaissance, you find that you are leaving out what might be considered some of the key historical moments and key thinkers. Brucker points out that Machiavelli and Guicciardini, writing in the 1510s and 1530s respectively, with disastrous events happening around them, presented a very different message to the 14th-century humanists. “They saw men as selfish and egotistical creatures … in a world dominated by the irrational and the unpredictable, by the triumph of force and violence over reason and calculation”. Yet both of them are regarded as Renaissance figures. On looking again at Burckhardt, he manages to somehow include them both as chroniclers of catastrophe, yet at the same time he sees them as figures of reason: 

They were not humanists, but they had passed through the school of humanism, and have in them more of the spirit of the ancient historians than most of the imitators of Livy.” [The Revival of Antiquity] 

Honorary humanists, in other words, writing in Italian rather than Latin. But hardly republican: Machiavelli favoured a prince as a ruler, and Guicciardini seemed to be happy with a Medici in charge. Hardly a ringing endorsement for republicanism as the preferred form of government. 

Brucker’s quirks

After almost three hundred pages of Brucker, I’ve become used to his quirks, notably using two or three words when one would do, presumably because it sounds more measured:

• The scramble for privileges and immunities, for tax concessions and judicial dispensations [p151]
• Communal ideals of equity and impartiality, and individual quests for favors and privileges [p150]
• The problem of wealth … created the sharpest discord in the ethical and moral system of the Florentine patriciate. [p107]
• The profession of ironmongering would seem to be essentially local and domestic in character. [p60]
• The opportunities for disagreement and discord were infinite [p113]

[my italics]

More annoying is the refusal to pass judgement, which I have commented on elsewhere. Was Florence a religious city or not? Well, it depends.

 

How was Florence unique?

Brucker provides several reasons, although these are scattered throughout the text and difficult to compile. Here are a couple: 

Florence's exceptional size and wealth forced her [sic] to play a leading role in Italian affairs, and to become more deeply involved in European diplomacy than smaller cities [p128]

Particularly important was the commune's fundamental advantage over an ecclesiastical institution which was not the monolithic, hierarchical structure often described in textbooks, but rather a congeries of particular entities, frequently in bitter conflict with each other, and very imperfectly and ineffectively controlled by the papacy and the episcopate. [p181] 

Brucker illustrates this point by showing how Florence was able to tax the clergy, for example. This makes sense; but can we thereby deduce that Florence’s relative level of secularism was linked to its cultural output? Brucker makes no such claim. 

Link between society, politics and culture

Having read Brucker, I’m no closer to understanding if there is a link between the government of Florence and/or its mercantile success, and the astonishing culture. Brucker states confidently that “the most notable characteristic of Florentine history in the later Quattrocento is the spirit of conservativism which pervades every phase of human activity”, and yet this is exactly the period when the greatest art was  being produced. This is a problem I have encountered before: the city states’ most republican governments were often many years apart from their cultural achievements. 

Conclusion

The best impression I have gained by reading about Renaissance Italy has been autobiographies, such as Benvenuto Cellini, as well as some of the several excellent merchants’ accounts of their lives, for example that of Buonaccorso Pitti, edited by Gene Brucker (1967). In addition, Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories provides a vivid if complicated picture.

Christina Thompson, Sea People

 

Anaho Bay, Marquesas [photo: Semhur, Wikipedia]

A remarkable book, gripping in a way that few popular science narratives are. It is well written and well informed – a comparison with other popular science titles (such as Dava Sobel’s Longitude) maes it clear Christina Thompson can write. 

Nonetheless, Sea People represents an interesting case study of science communication. In this post I’ll explain a little more about how this book works, and how it doesn’t work, as a piece of science communication: it inspires, but it doesn’t really inform. Just to note, I include archaeology and anthropology as within the scope  of science communication.

Sea People tells the story of Pacific exploration and settlement. Polynesia is remarkable because the Polynesians are themselves immigrants, but for many years it was not known how they travelled to the many widely-spread islands of the Pacific. It tells the story of the European navigators, from Cook to Heyerdahl, but also describes the attempts to understand how the inhabitants travelled. So it is a story of origins, of navigation, from the 16th-century to the present day, and with inference back to the earliest arrival of people on these islands. What makes the book remarkable is that it describes something truly astounding: how early peoples were able to sail hundreds of miles to other islands without navigational aids. 

That’s the positive view. The telling of this tale, however skilful as a narrative (and this book is a real page-turner), is not matched by the presentation of the information, or by the communication of the science. The author is let down by the format, and by a lack of scientific understanding (no less). 

The science here, for example, is navigation. The author describes efforts over many years to understand how the early Polynesians navigated. For me, to understand that meant I needed to know how the Europeans navigated. It’s a mark of this book that on reading it, I was compelled to go to Wikipedia and other sources to try to find out just how early explorers navigated. There is no mention in this book, for example, of the measurement of longitude, about which whole books have been written. Instead, we get descriptions of traditional navigation. 

When we get to traditional navigation, we are told it was a combination of looking at the position of the sun and the stars, observing the swell of the ocean, noticing any birds – but, I imagine, this is what the early European explorers must have used. Apparently Drake had an astrolabe, which enabled him to measure latitude, but for longitude it was guesswork. 

Here is my criticism of Thompson’s book. Although she writes a fine narrative, I didn’t come away from the book with any great knowledge of navigation. It’s as if the technical details were skipped over as being less interesting. Sure, every character is described in rich detail, including, for some of the men, how handsome they were.

On a wider note, this book is yet another example of the dreadful divide between illustrated and non-illustrated books. The book contains sixteen pages of colour illustrations that are never referenced within the text. Why not? In addition, each of the unnumbered chapters has a small illustration, but these are not described in any detail in the text. There are two grossly inadequate maps. For a book about widely-dispersed islands and their discovery, this is woeful. It might be more of a challenge to link maps with text, or illustrations with text, but that is what we pay for when we buy a book, surely? 

My third objection is that the book retains an air of colonialism about it. Even though the author is married to a Maori, the impression I get is that the appeal of these islands is, ultimately, the great beaches and dreams of paradise. The book ends with a glowing description of the beach at Anaho Bay in the Marquesas (but don’t expect this book to show you exactly where), where Robert Louis Stevenson lived. The book is called “Sea People”, but is really about the people who tried to discover the islands and to find out how they got there. I bought this book in the bookshop of the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, having seen an exhibition of Pacific items in the collection, with comments from present-day  inhabitants of the region – and they aren’t always very complimentary. 

Should you read this book? Absolutely, but at the same time it will leave you wanting much, much more information. I want to know exactly what these traditional Polynesian canoes look like. I want to know how the ten or twenty people on the boat survived for three weeks or more without reaching land – what did they do for water, for example? How did those canoes sail against the prevailing wind, which determined the course of all the early European explorers? It’s a mark of the success of this book that you want to know more. 

Reading about Renaissance Florence

 

Cover of The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, English translation

It seems a straightforward question. You visit Florence, you would like to know why it is regarded as so special. There are plenty of books about the Renaissance, and many Renaissance cities, but Florence is regarded as the epicentre of the Renaissance – which may be because Florence had Vasari writing the story of art from a Florentine perspective. Whatever the case, Florence is worth reading more about.

My choice of books was not exceptional. I started with Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published 1860 but still being read. Why? Because Burckhardt gives the reader an image of the Renaissance as something new, something radical, something fundamentally different from what came before. Reading Burckhardt, there is an excitement, something lacking in so many academic works. Even the chapter titles suggest this passion: “The State as a work of art”, “The discovery of the world and of man”. Of course, today we challenge Burckhardt’s thesis – he overstates his case, he deliberately understates what happened in the Middle Ages. But he tells a great story.  

It is a noticeable contrast to turn to another classic title, written almost a hundred years later. Gene Brucker’s Renaissance Florence (1969)  indicates how much more mature the subject has become, the work of an academic who has clearly spent a considerable time in the archives. You feel that Brucker sets out to provide evidence for every argument.

Reading Brucker makes me think about the nature of historical writing. What can a historian tell us? Brucker’s method is one of the accepted ways of writing history. He takes a theme, for example, religion, politics, and then draws on many years of studying Florentine archives and primary sources to provide examples for and against a point of view. This view, implied or stated, is usually Burckhardt’s, which, for religion, is that there was a new emphasis on secularism. Here is Brucker’s opening of his chapter on the Church:

Studies of Florentine religion tend to fall into two categories. One interpretation, particularly favored by clerical authors, emphasize the continuity of religious institutions and traditions … At the other extreme are those historians like Jakob Burckhardt, who minimize the importance of Christianity in Renaissance Italy. For Burckhardt, the most significant feature of Italian religious history in the Renaissance was the secularization of institutions and beliefs. [Brucker, ch 5]

 Brucker examines the records, and gives us fascinating extracts. One monk records everything in the monastery archive, even the expenditure on eggs in his monastery (S. Trinita). But there is also a record of the same convent providing large quantities of beef, eggs, salad and fruit for a local festival in the parish. Another monk states it’s not worth bothering with keeping a record. Elsewhere, Brucker notes a report of men climbing over nunnery walls to get to the women inside. They fail to find the woman they were seeking, and then ran away to escape the fine imposed on them.

What’s the problem with such meticulous reporting? After all, these are all from good primary sources. Using this technique as a historical  methodology raises, I think, two problems. First, it is difficult for the reader to get an overall interpretation. Was religion taken seriously in Renaissance Florence or was it not? Did it decrease in importance or not? Brucker provides examples for and against, so the answer so often is “sometimes”. That doesn’t give us a very clear picture of the Renaissance. It may be more accurate than Burckhardt, but it is less clear.

Secondly, although this is less of a limitation, Brucker is restricted to whatever records exist. He has no control over the archives. Not surprisingly, the biggest archives appear to be official records, so, for the example above, the record is most likely the record of a fine imposed, with little information about the story behind it. We don’t know how typical or frequent such episodes were.

Neither of these problems is insuperable, but other historians, such as Eamonn Duffy, in my opinion solve them much better. Duffy, in The Voices of Morebath, uses official records, but mainly just one, the parish archive, and manages to create a vivid and captivating account of a whole generation in rural 16th-century England. Of course, Duffy’s writing is polemical – he is a Catholic, and arguing that much of England was far less radically Protestant than contemporary nationwide events might appear – but we can live with that. Iin fact, we prefer it from a historian. The best historians argue a case; they don’t try to be neutral, because neutral leaves us none the wiser. We want a kind of periodization, if only so that we can later react against it. We want to hear someone arguing for the celebration of the independent city-state, and the art it produced, even if we know that it all ends with Medici dominance, and (if the decoration of the Pitti Palace is anything to go by) two hundred years of poor art. 

Visiting Florence

 

Visible from everywhere in and around the city: the Florence Duomo and Baptistery

“The single most compelling reason for coming here is to see Florentine Art” [Rupert Scott]. That’s certainly why I set out to visit Florence, although closely linked to the art is to think about the economic and social circumstances that enabled such art to be created.

Not all Florentine

This visit involved staying in Fiesole, and so it made sense to visit the archaeological site and museum. This wasn’t Florentine art, but Etruscan temples and, astonishingly, a 2,000- or 3,000-capacity amphitheatre (the figures depend on which guidebook you read). Nor was the Pitti all Florentine – it included a vast collection of ancient sculpture. Nonetheless, Florence is perhaps unique in the world for being able to have several collections, not to speak of churches, containing art created locally. 

Guide books

Any visitor to a major city will be aided, or hindered, by several guidebooks. I focused on two:

The Touring Club of Italy Guida d’Italia (known as the Guida Rossa), volume on Florence, all of 911 pages. This book provides the essential dates and attributions for pretty much everything you can view in Florence, up to around 1945 (the station is mentioned, as is the airport, from 1986, but the guide is not really intended for the modern buildings). It tells you who did what in exhaustive detail, very occasionally awards a star rating (the Pitti, overall, gets a star). Everything is there, if you can find it.

Florence, a walking guide to the architecture (Richard Goy, 2015) – Goy tells you openly this guide provides an English-language version of the best Italian guides, but nonetheless I was disappointed that he frequently repeats the Guida Rossa text without comment. He uses a lot of architectural terms without explaining them, although he provides a glossary of Italian terms, such as “duomo”. There are good reference photos, although not in situ with the text where they are mentioned. All in all, this is a lost opportunity: Florence should be the dream city for illustrated walks.

As often happens, while there I discovered two much more interesting tours:

Rupert Scott, Florence Explored (1987) – this was a real find. A short, opinionated book looking only at a few major works. But this is its strength, because in Italian cities it is so easy to get bogged down in trying to identify everything you are looking at. There is simply too much to see. Scott includes some good quotes from Ruskin, below:

Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (1875– 77) - this was such a contrast to the boring guidebooks. You may intensely dislike what he says, but his text is compelling, and it is clear he has looked at what he describes! Confronted by the amazing Ghirlandaio frescoes in Sta Maria Novella, he is dismissive: “it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”.

Does it make any difference if you see something or not?

As usual, many of the things I came to see were not visible. The Masaccio Trinity was being restored, but for an additional €1.50 you could see parts of it through the scaffolding. In truth, however, for many of the works, you recognise they are there, but you learn about them at home, when you can see them in reproduction much more clearly. Ruskin, of course, would fume at reading this.

Highs and Lows

The low point was visiting the Pitti Palace. It contains an art collection of the top rank, yet it was almost impossible to see any of it. First, all the art was displayed in 19th-century style, with pictures piled on top of each other. Result: you couldn’t see the ones at the top. Secondly, and much worse, the pictures remain in situ from how they must have looked when the Medici last inhabited the Palace. Captioning information is out of date or simply missing. Third, and most important, the lighting came from large windows that meant there was a lot of glare on the pictures, making them either too dark to view, or with too much reflection to be intelligible. The impression I came away with from the Pitti was overwhelmingly one of grotesque tastelessness – room after room of 17th, 18th- and 19th-century ostentation, displaying wealth but little taste. In these surroundings, no painting could survive.

The Pitti collection should be entirely rehung in a better, and separate, environment for conservation and for viewing. The state rooms could I imagine be filled up with plenty of art from the store – paintings by the yard, as it were.

Tips for visitors

“The single most compelling reason for coming here is to see Florentine Art” [Rupert Scott]. That’s certainly why I set out to visit Florence, although closely linked to the art is to think about the economic and social circumstances that enabled such art to be created.

Not all Florentine

This visit involved staying in Fiesole, and so it made sense to visit the archaeological site and museum. This wasn’t Florentine art, but Etruscan temples and, astonishingly, a 2,000- or 3,000-capacity amphitheatre (the figures depend on which guidebook you read). Nor was the Pitti all Florentine – it included a vast collection of ancient sculpture. Nonetheless, Florence is perhaps unique in the world for being able to have several collections, not to speak of churches, containing art created locally. 

Guide books

Any visitor to a major city will be aided, or hindered, by several guidebooks. I focused on two:

The Touring Club of Italy Guida d’Italia (known as the Guida Rossa), volume on Florence, all of 911 pages. This book provides the essential dates and attributions for pretty much everything you can view in Florence, up to around 1945 (the station is mentioned, as is the airport, from 1986, but the guide is not really intended for the modern buildings). It tells you who did what in exhaustive detail, very occasionally awards a star rating (the Pitti, overall, gets a star). Everything is there, if you can find it.

Florence, a walking guide to the architecture (Richard Goy, 2015) – Goy tells you openly this guide provides an English-language version of the best Italian guides, but nonetheless I was disappointed that he frequently repeats the Guida Rossa text without comment. He uses a lot of architectural terms without explaining them, although he provides a glossary of Italian terms, such as “duomo”. There are good reference photos, although not in situ with the text where they are mentioned. All in all, this is a lost opportunity: Florence should be the dream city for illustrated walks.

As often happens, while there I discovered two much more interesting tours:

Rupert Scott, Florence Explored (1987) – this was a real find. A short, opinionated book looking only at a few major works. But this is its strength, because in Italian cities it is so easy to get bogged down in trying to identify everything you are looking at. There is simply too much to see. Scott includes some good quotes from Ruskin, below:

Ruskin, Mornings in Florence (1875– 77) - this was such a contrast to the boring guidebooks. You may intensely dislike what he says, but his text is compelling, and it is clear he has looked at what he describes! Confronted by the amazing Ghirlandaio frescoes in Sta Maria Novella, he is dismissive: “it is all simply – good for nothing … Ghirlandaio was to the end of his life a mere goldsmith”.

Does it make any difference if you see something or not?

As usual, many of the things I came to see were not visible. The Masaccio Trinity was being restored, but for an additional €1.50 you could see parts of it through the scaffolding. In truth, however, for many of the works, you recognise they are there, but you learn about them at home, when you can see them in reproduction much more clearly. Ruskin, of course, would fume at reading this.

Highs and Lows

The low point was visiting the Pitti Palace. It contains an art collection of the top rank, yet it was almost impossible to see any of it. First, all the art was displayed in 19th-century style, with pictures piled on top of each other. Result: you couldn’t see the ones at the top. Secondly, and much worse, the pictures remain in situ from how they must have looked when the Medici last inhabited the Palace. Captioning information is out of date or simply missing. Third, and most important, the lighting came from large windows that meant there was a lot of glare on the pictures, making them either too dark to view, or with too much reflection to be intelligible. The impression I came away with from the Pitti was overwhelmingly one of grotesque tastelessness – room after room of 17th, 18th- and 19th-century ostentation, displaying wealth but little taste. In these surroundings, no painting could survive.

The Pitti collection should be entirely rehung in a better, and separate, environment for conservation and for viewing. The state rooms could I imagine be filled up with plenty of art from the store – paintings by the yard, as it were.

Tips for visitors

• Fiesole is a good place to stay when visiting Florence. It is much quieter than the centre, and has its own (rather contrasting) appeal.
• The Uffizi becomes quieter during the afternoons, unexpectedly.
• Allow twenty minutes to find the entrance to the Uffizi, quite apart from buying the tickets.
• The archaeological museum is a well-kept secret, full of Etruscan remains from across Tuscany.
• Trying to cross the historic central area is a slow and exhausting process. There are tiny electric buses, which defy credibility in squeezing through impossibly small alleyways alongside tourists and parked cars – and they take almost as long as walking as they have to follow a circuitous route.  The tram, where available , is a great bonus.
• Booking for restaurants is usually necessary. 

Wagner, The Flying Dutchman

From an 1876 production - this is how I imagined the opera would end [image: Wikimedia]

The story and how it ends

It might seem churlish after being overwhelmed by this opera full of damnation and redemption, but you have to ask the essential question: is the Dutchman saved or not? And is Senta saved? It’s not entirely clear in the libretto, let alone this production.

The story is an amalgam of various sources. The Dutchman, who is actually “fleeing” rather than “flying”, has a pact with the Devil, by which he is allowed to return once every seven years to see if he can find a woman to redeem him from his endless wandering. Everything seems to be going well, in this opera: the Dutchman finds a man (Daland) with a daughter, Senta, and Daland is happy to exchange his daughter for some treasure that the Dutchman offers. She is happy to marry the Dutchman; in fact, she knows all about his plight before even meeting him. She even has his picture in her home.

Nonetheless, the Dutchman expects the worst, even after she has agreed to marry him. This is where things get slightly complicated, and, for me uncertain. According to the script, even if Senta does not sail off with the Dutchman, she is saved from eternal damnation, because she didn’t plight her troth to the Dutchman in church: 

You plighted your troth to me, but not

Before Almighty God: this saves you!

Just to clarify, the Dutchman then states that those women who break their vow after making it are subject to eternal damnation. But in the same speech (Act 3 Finale) he states:                                                           

Learn the fate from which I save you!

I am doomed to the most hideous of lots …

From the curse, a woman alone can free me,

A woman who would be true to me till death.

So that’s clear, then. Her being true to him till death will result in his redemption. So does she have to die for him to be saved, or simply declare her love for him? In the end, according to the libretto, she “flings herself into the sea” and the two of them “rise transfigured”. I was waiting with anticipation to see how the director of this production handled that moment, but the actual ending was something of an anticlimax. It was quite inconsequential – and separate. The Dutchman crawls away by himself, ignoring Senta, while Senta puts her arms up seeming to implore heaven for some kind of conclusion, and by a simple coup de theatre, she disappears  -she is surrounded by the chorus and slips out without anyone seeing, so when the chorus members separate, she is gone – not, in this production, with him. This doesn’t make much sense to me – if there is any redemption, it’s not conveyed  

 

Is Senta too passive?

Many productions have worried about this aspect, according to the Overture Opera Guide (2012), Yet it is quite clear this is not simply one human submitting to another. Senta understands the story, and stares repeatedly at the image of the Dutchman hanging on the wall in her home. This is not, then, a response to human behaviour; she seems to have identified herself as the agent by which her sacrifice can bring about redemption. In other words, it’s not about him; it’s what he represents. This appears to be confirmed by the script, and certainly by this production.  The Dutchman is marked by his passivity. He makes no effort to seduce or even to appear welcoming. His attitude throughout seems barely concealed weariness and exhaustion. Senta’s willingness to sacrifice herself for his redemption is perfectly self-aware, and part of the world of myth rather than the world of the present-day. In a way, this devotion could be closer to what people do for immigrants. You don’t know them, but you can be compassionate.

This production

As usual, this was a mixed bag. I greatly enjoyed the set, which make little attempt to show a ship or even anything remotely resembling it,  the first two acts. Act three was set in a kind of surreal nightclub, which was a surprise.  

For the most part, the costumes were great. The Dutchman looked suitably crazed, as if he had just arrived from another world. He was dressed in a floor-length grey greatcoat and matching coloured hat that made him resemble a hippie who has been without sleep for six weeks. However, that excellence was dissipated somewhat. Senta, when she sings her big ballad, puts on an equivalent coat and hat, so stressing that she belonged in the Dutchman’s world, but when they come to sing an aria together, they looked like his and hers versions of the same outfit, which was cute, almost cosy, but not, I suspect, quite the intended effect.

I enjoyed the movement of the chorus. They grouped to resemble the movement of a ship, then, in Act 3, in the nightclub, they danced with a crazed stylized set of gestures, that collectively looked manic but which communicated the party-like atmosphere that the story intended, and from which Senta and the Dutchman were clearly excluded. 

The world of myth and the bourgeois world

It seems rather strange to have Wagner depicting present-day reality, but that is what seems to be the case with Daland and the sailors around him. There is a terrific contrast between the comfortable bourgeois world of Daland, Erik, and the chorus, compared with the wild, other-wordly (but threatening rather than pleasant) world of the Dutchman. The music switches powerfully from one to the other, most notably when Senta sings her ballad, in Act 1, and when the chorus taunt the newly wed couple in Act 3, until the couple themselves arrive, and the atmosphere changes utterly.

 

Disastrously, this production once or twice mixes up the two incorrectly. Daland is seduced by the prospect of a payment by the Dutchman in return for marrying his daughter. In this production, he takes a necklace that the Dutchman has given him, and places it on Senta, who then puts it in her pocket! It’s as if she accepts payment for the marriage, which is completely at odds with the opera and with her action, unconnected with money.

 

Sexual vs fairytale love

This opera straddles the world of myth and bourgeois reality quite effectively. However, the production makes some egregious errors. Senta’s love for the Dutchman is not sexual, at least, not in the way shown here. Senta wears hot pants (admittedly, she has the figure for it) but writhes on the table in front of him orgiastically, as if she is offering herself for one night, rather than for a lifetime.

 

Supporting displaced people

I am all in favour of trying to link art to contemporary issues. It is wholly commendable that Opera North makes a stand on behalf of displaced people, and you can see the link between the wild sea of the story and the terrible tales of people trying to cross the Channel by boat. So in principle I was happy that each act was introduced by a presumably autobiographical quote from a would-be immigrant to the UK. Unfortunately, the character on stage, who appears to be the personification of the person whose voice we hear, is clearly white, while the voice sounds African. This gesture doesn’t work.

At the start of the opera, someone from Opera North describes the displaced people as “our collaborators” in the programme “who have shared their life experiences”. I can see the link between crossing the sea and the Dutchman; but it should have been possible to have involved some of the displaced people to participate in the production in some way, rather than being recorded and then mimed by one of the cast. Art exhibitions are doing this kind of community engagement all the time, e.g. getting local people to participate in an collective project such as a tapestry.

I didn’t grasp, and I suspect that many people in the audience had similar problems, understanding why the opera opens with what appears to be a group of financial traders. According to the programme, they officials in the UK Home Office dealing with displaced people. According to this reading, therefore, the Dutchman is an immigrant seeking refuge  - but I don’t think the Dutchman strikes me as a displaced would-be immigrant .

Conclusion

 Fascinating opera, production with some good elements, but ultimately not helping to elucidate what is going on. It was such a shame to see the theatre only half-full for this unique night of Wagner in Hull, perhaps the most appropriate opera venue in Britain to perform a tale of wild sea journeys and endless wandering.   

Did the city-state create great art?

 

Raphael's The School of Athens: the triumph of philosophy. But was it partly the result of Athens being a city-state?

City-states continue to fascinate world history commentators. Two of the most famous cultural cities in history, Athens and Florence, were city-states, and it is tempting to try to ascertain if, and to what extent, their status as independent entities was an influence on their cultural production. Like many tourists, I visit these cities with their stunning artefacts and marvel that a city could produce such art, architecture,  literature – and that’s just the start of it.

Of course, to answer this question turns out to be far more complicated that envisaged. One immediate problem is that of timing. The peak period for the political influence of the city state does not appear to correspond to the peak periods of artistic output. A widespread (although perhaps less fashionable today) view, for example by art historian Sydney Freedberg, is that the peak of the Italian Renaissance, at least for visual art, was the period 1490 – 1510, in Florence, when Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael, and others were producing art in Florence. Then Leonardo moved to Milan and thence to Paris, Michelangelo and Raphael to Rome, and Florence fell under the control of the Medici (not for the first time) in 1512 – it’s tempting to associate the end of any kind of collective decision-making with a decline in art. But reading about the Italian city-states more widely suggests that their peak for collective decision-making was well before 1500. According to Daniel Waley (The Italian City-Republics, 1969), the city-states achieved political independence as early as the eleventh century, and were largely taken over by individual tyrants from the 14th century onwards.

Similarly, the “golden age” of Athens, the fifth century BCE, the age of Pericles, the Parthenon, and Socrates, was thought to have coincided with the peak of the Polis, the Greek city-state. But, it turns out, from a recent book by John Ma, Polis (2024) that the fifth century was a low-point in terms of government; the most successful period for the Greek city-state was the Hellenistic period, when Athens had lost all its political power and was under the control of the Roman Empire, yet retained its stability, prosperity, and collective government.

So what is the relationship between art and political systems? Is it simply facile to think that great art was created in periods of some kind of representative government, or should we recognize that the relationship is more subtle, that there might be hundreds of years between the two peaks, yet in some undefinable way, the effect of collective government lingered on and bore fruit in the creative output? I’m not the first to ask these questions, but I will certainly be thinking again about them when I next visit Florence. 

Examining slavery at the Fitzwilliam

 

A "trade token", used on a British ship to vouch for the "integrity" of the slave trader (1788)

Hot on the heels of the last slavery exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, here is another show on a similar theme (Rise Up: Resistance Revolution Abolition), co-curated by Victoria Avery, who was also responsible for the Black Atlantic exhibition at the Fitzwilliam in 2023. This exhibition is the result of a study commissioned by the University to identify its links with Atlantic slavery “and other forms of forced labour”. This explains why there are so many references to Cambridge alumni in the exhibits and catalogue.  

The themes of the exhibition appear to be:

• Anti-slavery campaigners with links in and around Cambridge, notably Olaudah Equiano.
• The anti-slavery campaigning movement in Britain.
• Resistance and rebellion in early Black states, primarily, Haiti. The curators state the exhibition focuses on “acts of resistance” rather than “narratives of white abolitionism”.
• Resettlement, comprising a fascinating section about the 3,000 British Black loyalists who fought in the American War of Independence and were offered resettlement in Nova Scotia, and some coverage of an attempt to “repatriate” African slaves in Sierra Leone.
• Some early Black students at the University of Cambridge, specifically, a composer and an actor.  

This is a lot for one exhibition. Is it an art exhibition, a history presentation, or an act of expiation by the University? It sits uneasily somewhere between all three, with some muddled messages as you proceed around the exhibition.

What unites the exhibition, if anything, is a strident tone of injustice, with many heavily pedagogical captions. You will be told the correct interpretation of these exhibits, just in case you missed it; for example, a medal celebrating William Wilberforce is sternly labelled:

Medals like this one  - adopting the individualist conventions of the medium – ensured that abolitionist success was associated for decades to follow with a single white man. This has contributed to the neglect of countless other stories of resistance.

This hectoring style of captioning reminds me of recent exhibitions at the Tate Modern.  

Undoubtedly there are some fine exhibits, but overall the effect is weakened because of the very disparate themes and their wildly differing importance. To remember the first Black actor to play Othello is undoubtedly worth celebrating, as is one of the earliest Black composers as a student at a Cambridge college, but where does that fit in this exhibition of resistance and revolution?

Haiti

Haiti is justified for inclusion as the first successful rebellion by a slave population. Yet the focus here is rather strange. While the story of Toussaint L’Ouverture and the initial rebellion is well known, Haiti after the revolt is not a very edifying tale – as is shown by images in this exhibition. It looked to me there were more objects in the exhibition relating to reaction in Haiti than to revolution.

Dessalines, leader from 1804, introduced “serfdom” (as opposed to slavery, now banned), with all labourers bound to a plantation. The use of a whip was now forbidden, so estate owners used thick vines instead. Before this exhibition, I had no idea that Haiti had ever had a king. Now I know that Henri Christophe, one of the leaders of the rebellion, created a kingdom for himself, with a vast palace, using forced (not slave) labour, “using the corvée system, where people worked without pay instead of paying taxes”. Is this the rebellion we want to celebrate? Do we want to see details of the heraldic arms of the newly created (and short-lived) Haitian nobility?

Links to Cambridge

This is a mixture of significant and trivial. Certainly it is interesting that “the contradictory intertwinement of abolitionism and slavery existed at multiple levels from individuals to institutions to the country at large” [p134]. But does that justify mentioning all possible references to Cambridge alumni, for example that “Cambridge University educated … the heirs of British planters from Barbados, Jamaica and other British colonies long after slavery had ended”? Several references have an unintended effect: “Around 13,000 enslaved people rose up on sixty plantations, including some with connections to the University of Cambridge.” [catalogue, p144]

Contemporary art

One of the common practices with recent exhibitions that take place in an art gallery, but on a historical theme, is to invite contemporary artists to present their interpretation. This is the principle behind, for example, the recent Hew Locke show at the British Museum. However, some of the art seems to be chosen for its compliance with the exhibition theme, but to be in harmony with the message does not always produce an effective piece of propaganda – or art. A collection of hessian sacks by Karen McLean, for example, depicts enslaved women “via their reproductive organs rather than their faces to highlight enslaved women’s resistance and defiance through the control they took over their wombs.”  Sadly, I think that’s just how the slave owners saw the women: as reproductive agents to create more slaves. It doesn’t appear very defiant to me.

Some of the most effective recent art in the exhibition appears to have  little connection with the themes. There is a great picture by Rosmarie Marke (Which One, No Choice – Fleeing) of the Sierra Leone Civil War of 1997, but what is its connection with the rest of the exhibition?

Conclusion

It seems clear that the British Act of 1807 did not end the UK’s involvement with slavery, and I would have welcomed a more nuanced approach. Instead, there is a mixture of central and peripheral topics. The Atlantic slave trade is a fundamental and justified theme; it’s just a shame this Fitzwilliam show dilutes the message.

The Great Mughals: was it really paradise?

 

The carpet described in this exhibition as “The Ilchester carpet” ... but what has Ilchester got to do with it? It is Mughal in origin. 

The slogan (by a famous Persian poet) “If there is paradise on Earth, this is it”, is used to describe The Great Mughals exhibition (V&A, London): we are invited to see the period as an earthly paradise of tranquillity and beauty. We hear recorded sound of fountains and birds singing. We see object after object of spectacular wealth – jewellery, carpets, ironware, decorative weapons (not intended to be used in anger), as well as illuminated manuscripts, clothes, and paintings. But it turns out, not that you would learn this from the exhibition, that the three Mughals (Akbar, Shah Jahan, and Jahangir) who form the focus of this exhibition were perhaps not so great after all.

Clearly the V&A thought they were great, and that was sufficient. But everything was presented as an example of conspicuous consumption, and (at least walking round the exhibition) it was never clear where all this money came from, and whether the rulers spent it wisely. It looks like they had huge amounts of it, and spent it lavishly. As far as I could see, the paintings  (including the illustrated manuscripts) and the architecture were magnificent, and the textiles (hangings, clothes, and carpets) had wonderful detailed designs, but I wasn’t in a position to judge the many other objects on display (jewellery, ironware, glassware). It looked, well, expensive. Our criteria today are rather different to that of the 17th century.

What the exhibition didn’t tell me was:

• How none of the items I could see in the exhibition are actually held today in India? Does India have any collection of its own history?
• Where did the money come from to pay for all this stuff at the time of its creation?
• Were the Mughals (in 1066 and all that parlance) good kings or bad kings?
• More about the artistic quality of the items exhibited. What makes Mughal art distinctive?
• More about the various styles that the Mughals incorporated – not just the occasional (and easily identified) links to European art, but art of other Asian regions, plus more about what was being produced before the Mughals conquered the north of India.
• More about the Taj Mahal, rather than just a running video with dramatic shots of the building at sunrise and sunset

The catalogue, although lavishly illustrated, like the exhibition itself, answered few if any of these questions. The historical presentation is minimal – for example, the story of how Akbar reconquered much of North India is reduced to two sentences:

In 1556 the control of Hindustan by Babur’s descendants was precarious. Yet by 1571 Akbar’s territory could reasonably be described as an empire.  [Catalogue, p35]

It sounds like magic, and presented in this way, it is. You feel that there is probably more that could be said. In stark contrast, standard historical accounts of the period describe many years of warfare often with the family fighting among themselves. From the history books, Akbar doesn’t appear to be the nicest of rulers. He came to power aged only 13, and the de facto regent, Maham Anga,

overplayed her hand by promoting her own son, the ambitious Adham Khan, who in 1562 recklessly assassinated the kingdom’s leading minister of state. This so enraged the nineteen-year-old Akbar that, although the youth was his own foster-brother, he threw him over a palace balcony to his death. [Eaton, p180]

The contest to win control after Akbar’s death is described as “a bloody, fratricidal contest” [Eaton, p235]

As for Jahangir, after his son Khusrau fomented a rebellion, Khusrau’s supporters “were impaled along both sides of a road, while their miserable leader was placed on an elephant and mockingly made to receive his supporters’ ‘homage’ as they writhed in agony.” When Khusrau rebelled again, Jahangir partially blinded him. [Eaton, p204]. Jahangir’s end was not so illustrious, either:

in the last five years of his life, from 1622 to his death in 1627, the emperor became so incapacitated by drink and opium that Nur Jahan [his wife] took many administrative matters into her own hands. [Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 2019]

That is not the image depicted by this exhibition.  

Catalogue

I had hoped that the catalogue would give me some more answers, but I was disappointed in this respect. The catalogue comprises three parts, one for each reign: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan. Each part has a very short general introduction by Susan Stronge, followed by much shorter and more detailed essays on individual works or genres (coins, Chinese porcelain). That leaves the catalogue, and the exhibition, short on historical background; perhaps 5% of the text is historical background. The curator, Susan Stronge, recently edited a publication on jewellery from India, so it is to be expected that she would have an interest in this aspect.

Like the exhibition, the catalogue seems to exist in an art-historical bubble, seemingly independent of politics, economics, and the wider social context. This show could have been a much more educational experience; we no longer look at artefacts and just admire the beauty, however stunning they may look. We ask questions.

Rajeev Kinra, in the introduction, stresses the non-sectarian nature of Mughal rule in India (he uses the term Hindustan to mean the northern part of India ruled by the Mughals). All religions were tolerated as long as they promoted the Mughal empire. I’m not so sure; Guru Arjun, one of the early Sikh leaders, was put death by Jahangir, and Guru Hargobind, his successor, was imprisoned for seven years. I don’t think I will be looking to the “great” Moghuls for guidance on how to run an empire any time soon. 

Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

 

Edith Wharton at The Mount, the country house she designed and had built in 1902

This was a very disappointing read. I read two or three books by Wharton when I was much younger, but perhaps I am more discerning today. What was wrong with this book? I can think of several reasons.

Lack of characterisation

I couldn’t believe that the main characters, May Welland, Newland Archer, and Ellen Olenska, could carry the weight of thought that Wharton tried to invest in them. In fact, of these three, only Newland Archer’s thinking is revealed. The novel could have been written in the first person by him.

Perhaps this lack of characterisation is a problem with a genre where if you decide to write about boring characters trapped in their environment, the book risks being boring itself.

The book attempts to present a Jamesian moment of decision: will Newland Archer desert his wife for an adulterous affair with Countess Olenska? But we feel he is too slight for us to bother much either way.

I was fascinated by the minutiae of New York life for the super-rich around 1890. At that time, it appears that if it didn’t happen in New York society, it wasn’t worth thinking about – at least, for the lucky participants. A social whirl of balls, opera, summer houses in Newport (where Wharton also had a house) but a life of complete philistinism, a cultural desert. Plus the way the men were able, if they wished, to run a double life with the tacit acceptance of their behaviour, clearly known about by the women, but not mentioned.

I was not impressed by Wharton’s feeble attempt to depict a bohemian artist, the tutor M. Riviere. Clearly she has a fondness for things cultural and presents this as a foil to the empty lives of the rich – but  Riviere’s character is as shallow as the main three roles.

The love scenes descend into romantic fiction, and resemble romantic fiction in that these characters are no better drawn or believable than the heroes of Mills & Boon.

How is Countess Olenska so notable, so individual? Newland is struck that she calls one of the wealthy relatives’ houses “gloomy” (“the words gave him an electric shock, for few were the rebellious spirits who would have dared to call the stately home of the van der Luydens gloomy”). In contrast, he states, of her rented house “It’s delicious – what you’ve done here”. But we never hear quite what she has done; she remains shallow, as are the other characters, since we have no evidence otherwise.

Nor was I impressed by the plot. It is very unlikely that as a lawyer, Newland Archer would be given a case involving his own family. But his legal work seems so undemanding of his time that perhaps it doesn’t really matter. There is no problem in him having time off for his emotional life,

Perhaps the lovingly detailed description of East Coast life  is to be expected. Wharton was born into a rich New York family; she privately published a collection of poems, and “came out” as a debutante. For much of her life she lived financially secure, from a legacy and her husband’s income. I would have imagined her experience in the First World War would have hardened her, yet this novel was only published in 1920.

Nostalgia?

Perhaps the book is, as some have claimed, an exercise in nostalgia, for a world that would never return. However, if this was New York in the 1890s, I want nothing of it. This is an existence totally dependent on slavery; Olenska’s visit to Boston is noted because she did not have a servant with her. She states it wasn’t worth it for only two day: “For two days it was not worth while to bring her”. Newland sees this as “unconventional”. Olenska is unusual in having a named servant, but one maid in the novel has no name except the description “mulatto”: we first hear of a “a mulatto maid-servant in a bright turban”. There is no description of the ethnic background of any of the other slaves, except for Olenska’s Nastasia, so why the repeated mention of “mulatto”? It must have some significance that escapes me (and escapes the World’s Classics edition editor).