Posts Tagged ‘Renaissance’
“What nourishes me, destroys me”*…
On the occasion of the publication of Stephen Greenblatt‘s new book, Dark Renaissance, Nina Pasquini profiles its subject, the remarkable Christopher Marlowe…
He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder. This was the English playwright Christopher Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of William Shakespeare—and perhaps the Bard’s key creative influence.
At 14, young Marlowe—the son of a poor Canterbury cobbler—won a scholarship to the prestigious King’s School, becoming the first in his family to receive a formal education. He excelled, went on to the University of Cambridge, and there studied the great works of antiquity, from Virgil’s Aeneid to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Where his classmates saw musty mandatory reading, Marlowe found something else: worlds of ecstatic violence and erotic excess, of vengeful outcasts and capricious gods, worlds that upended the Christian moral order in which he was raised.
After graduation, Marlowe faced an uncertain future—unlike his wealthy classmates, his education didn’t secure for him a place in society. So, he decided to take a risk, moving to London to try his hand at an unstable, disreputable profession: writing for the stage.
When Marlowe was born in 1564, says Stephen Greenblatt, the Cogan University Professor of the Humanities, England was still stuck in the Middle Ages, even as the Renaissance bloomed on the continent. Public entertainment revolved around bearbaiting and hangings; poetry was weighed down by moralizing and clumsy rhymes; brutal censorship stifled any art that challenged the crown’s authority.
By the time Marlowe died in 1593, at just 29 years old, England was in the midst of a cultural and intellectual flourishing. Greenblatt credits Marlowe with sparking this transformation. In a new book, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, Greenblatt—one of the world’s foremost Shakespeare scholars—argues that Marlowe didn’t merely precede Shakespeare, he made Shakespeare’s career possible.
“It was Marlowe who cracked something open,” Greenblatt says, “and enabled Shakespeare to walk through—how should we say?—over his dead body.”
Marlowe’s story, Greenblatt adds, is also relevant to many of academia’s current preoccupations. He was a “first-gen” student who glimpsed radical possibilities in the supposedly conservative texts of “great books courses.” He faced a “vocational crisis” familiar to many humanities students today—and pursued his passion despite the risk.
That career began with Marlowe’s debut play, Tamburlaine the Great, written in 1587 or 1588. “Virtually everything in the Elizabethan theater,” Greenblatt writes, “is pre- and post-Tamburlaine.”
Part of the play’s shock value lay in its plot. Loosely based on the rise of the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror Timur (also known as Tamerlane), Tamburlaine the Great tells the story of a Scythian shepherd who ascends from obscurity to become a dominating tyrant. The violence is unrelenting, and the ambition unchecked: Tamburlaine faces no moral comeuppance for his pride. This rags-to-riches arc may have mirrored Marlowe’s own desires, Greenblatt writes—and defined many of the other outsider characters Marlowe would go on to write.
But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says. Marlowe’s characters spoke in unrhymed iambic pentameter—“elegant, musical, and forward-thrusting,” Greenblatt writes—which gave English drama a new expressive register.
Before Tamburlaine, English playwrights were trapped in stiff structures such as Poulter’s measures—couplets in which 12-syllable iambic lines rhyme with 14-syllable iambic lines. Blank verse enabled Marlowe’s characters to sound like they were “actually speaking English,” Greenblatt says, dramatized by some structure, but still alive. Shakespeare would come to rely heavily on blank verse in his own work.
A few years later came Doctor Faustus, first performed in 1594. It was Marlowe’s most famous play and the first dramatization of the Faust legend, in which a scholar makes a deal with the devil, trading his soul for magical powers. This work, Greenblatt argues, marked the first time “a powerful, complex inner life” was represented on the stage.
Before Marlowe, English theater externalized psychology through allegory: morality plays populated by characters such as Pride and Shame. In Doctor Faustus, by contrast, Marlowe relies on soliloquy and dialogue about the characters’ internal states. “It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done,” Greenblatt writes.
Marlowe’s life ended as dramatically as one of his plays: he was stabbed to death in a tavern in Deptford. Officials claimed the death resulted from a quarrel over a dinner bill—but Greenblatt points to a more complicated story. While still a student at university, Greenblatt writes, Marlowe was likely recruited as a spy for Queen Elizabeth’s secret service, possibly to monitor Catholic dissidents or plots against the crown.
But over the years, Marlowe drew scrutiny for his radical ideas and was accused at times of atheism—a grave offense in Elizabethan England. Greenblatt believes that Marlowe was killed for his beliefs, possibly on orders carried out by an “overly zealous servant” of Queen Elizabeth herself.
To Greenblatt, Marlowe’s life serves as a reminder of how repressive Elizabethan England was: “It was basically wise to keep your head down, unless you wanted your head to be chopped off.” Marlowe didn’t and paid the price. Shakespeare was watching, Greenblatt argues, and learned he had to be more careful. But Shakespeare’s blend of conservatism and radicalism was only possible because Marlowe had first ventured too far. Shakespeare relied, Greenblatt writes, on Marlowe’s legacy of “reckless courage and genius.”
And Greenblatt believes Shakespeare was aware of his debt. Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance ends with a line from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, a reference to Marlowe’s mysterious death in that small tavern room in Deptford: “When a man’s verses cannot be understood…it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.”…
Without Christopher Marlowe, there might not have been a Bard: “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival,” from @harvardmagazine.bsky.social.
See also: “Why One of Shakespeare’s Rivals Is Still Making Trouble.”
* translation of the phrase– “Quod me alit, me extinguit”– found on the portrait of Marlowe above (at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
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As we ponder profundity, we might spare a thought for a more modern playwright, August Wilson; he died on this date in 2005. Often referred to as “theater’s poet of Black America,” Wilson is best known for a series of 10 plays, collectively called The Pittsburgh Cycle (or The Century Cycle), which chronicle the experiences and heritage of the African-American community in the 20th century. (Plays in the series include Fences and The Piano Lesson, each of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, as well as Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom and Joe Turner’s Come and Gone.) In 2006, Wilson was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”*…
… But that most valuable of gifts is being hijacked, subverted/converted into a commodity, and used to mold not just consumer behavior, but society-as-a-whole. We live in an attention economy, and its media/tech ownership landscape is becoming ever more consoldiated.
Kyla Scanlon unpacks the way in which concentrated ownership of media and tech and their automated manipulation reshape democracy…
It’s nearly impossible not to get lost in the news right now. I was at a wedding last week, and every conversation eventually drifted back to the same subject: the World We Are in and All That is Happening. The ground feels like it’s moving faster than anyone can feasibly keep up with.
Some people think the shift is progress. Others see collapse. Either way, the line between digital and physical life is increasingly blurry. What happens online is real life. What we consume is what we become.
Plenty of thinkers have circled this before – Postman, Debord, Huxley, Orwell on media; Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Thucydides, Gibbon on human corruptibility during times of uncertainty. The convergence of endless information and a ragebait economy creates the perfect environment for splintering how we understand the world and how we understand each other.
The deeper problem is this: we no longer trust institutions to provide truth, fairness, or mobility. Once, they were scaffolding that helped us climb from raw data to wisdom. And when that scaffolding gives out, people adapt: some over-perform in the status race (because you have to) and others defect from obligations altogether (why would I work for institutions if they don’t work for me).
There are a few ways to picture our distorted information ecosystem.
- The DIKW Pyramid (Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom): raw posts and clicks at the bottom, trending content in the middle, shared truths above that, and finally wisdom, the rare ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
- Or the Ladder of Inference: we start with data, add meaning, make assumptions – and our beliefs tend to affect what data we select. Bots and algorithms hijack that ladder, nudging us toward polarized beliefs before we realize what’s happening.
Taken together, we can combine them into what we might call a hierarchy of information:
- Raw data: the endless stream of posts, likes, bot spam
- Information: headlines, hashtags, trending things
- Knowledge: the narratives we share and fight over.
- Understanding: recognizing what might not be real (or is hyperreal)
- Wisdom: systemic analysis, the ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
Right now, we’re stuck sloshing around in the middle layers of the hierarchy: drowning in outrage, fighting over partisan hot takes, rarely reaching understanding, almost never wisdom.
Chaos always has an architect. And if we want to make sense of American democracy today, we need to understand who those architects are, and how they profit from confusion.
This polarization rests on media concentration.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was sold as a way to increase competition in media and telecommunications, but in reality, it did quite the opposite. Within five years, four firms controlled ~85% of US telephone infrastructure. That deregulated spine carried today’s consolidation of the entire media environment – not just telephones. Newspapers. Social media. TV stations.
We have the increasing concentration of media ownership, the financialization of attention, and the transformation of information from a public good into a private commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated…
[Scanlon characterizes and explains the concentration, examines its impacts, and unpacks the roles of bots…]
When manufacturing consensus is both cheap to produce and valuable to those who benefit from confusion, you get industrial-scale manipulation.
Truth becomes whatever can capture the most attention in the shortest amount of time. Traditional journalism, with its slow fact-checking and institutional processes, can’t compete with bot-amplified outrage. Democratic deliberation, which requires shared facts and good faith dialogue, becomes nearly impossible when the information environment is designed to maximize conflict.
We’re living in a speculation economy where perception drives value more than fundamentals. Look at the stock market: Nvidia gained $150 billion in value based the back of a $100 billion OpenAI investment (which OpenAI will use to buy more Nvidia chips). Ten companies pass hundreds of billions back and forth, and the S&P jumps like it’s measuring something real.
It’s all memes wearing suits. Meme stocks and Dogecoin at least looked like jokes; now the same speculative energy runs through the corporate core. Attention, perception, and narrative drive valuation more than production or profit.
We’ve built a world where the hierarchy of information has flipped upside down.
At the bottom, bots flood us with raw noise. In the middle, outrage and team narratives harden into “knowledge.” At the top, the ladders to wisdom like journalism, schools, civic discourse, shared institutions are weakened. The scaffolding that once helped us climb no longer holds.
The traditional solutions – fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation – assume we’re dealing with a content problem when we’re actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable.
Recognizing this as a market structure problem rather than an information problem changes everything. Instead of focusing on individual bad actors or specific false claims, you start thinking about the underlying systems that make manipulation both profitable and scalable.
The information wars are economic policy, determining how we allocate attention, structure incentives, and organize the flow of information that shapes every other market and political decision we make. I don’t think it’s useful to get on a Substack soapbox about this – but we need to take (1) the power of media seriously and (2) those trying to influence it extremely seriously. There is a way to get to the top of the information hierarchy! We don’t have to be stuck in these middle layers…
Follow the money: “Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention?” from @kyla.bsky.social
For more on how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped set all of this in motion, see: “On Jimmy Kimmel: It’s Time to Destroy the Censorship Machine and Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996” from @matthewstoller.bsky.social.
For more on thoughts on why companies are behaving in the ways they are: “Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump” and “Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next.”
And lest we think that this came out of nowhere: “David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About these Eight Things.”
[Image above: source]
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As we reclaim recognition, we might recall that on this date in 1452 an earlier information revolution began: Johannes Gutenberg started work on his Bible (which was completed and published in 1455). An inventor and craftsman, Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press, enabling a much faster (and cheaper) printing process. (Movable type was already in use in East Asia, but was slower and used for smaller jobs.) His Bible was his first major work, and his most impactful.
The printing press later spread across the world, leading to an information revolution– the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Humanist movements.
“Firmness, utility, and beauty”*…
In a review of Indra Kagis McEwen‘s book All the King’s Horses- Vitruvius in an Age of Princes, Ingrid Rowland examines the ways in which Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture [AKA De Architectura] was not only a manual of the building arts but a treatise on how to extend and consolidate the Roman Empire, and lent itself all too well to the autocratic ambitions of Renaissance princes…
As perennial best sellers go, the treatise known as Ten Books on Architecture by the Roman writer Vitruvius is not, perhaps, the most predictable. It includes some gripping stories, certainly, many of them military, like the the Carian queen Artemisia’s surprise naval attack on Rhodes aboard the Rhodians’ own ships or the thwarted siege of the same city by the Macedonian general Demetrius Poliorcetes, the proverbial “Sacker of Cities,” whose gigantic war machine, the “City-seizer” (Helepolis), churns to an ignominious halt in a pool of muck created overnight by the mass emptying of Rhodian chamber pots.
These vignettes, however, are little gems inserted to brighten long passages about what kind of wood to use for different parts of a building, the proportions of temples, and the marvels of waterproof concrete, as well as instructions on how to build, among many other wonders and amenities, sundials, aqueducts, water clocks, and catapults. Its storehouse of practical information helped to ensure that Vitruvius’s handbook, written around 25 BCE, was one of the few ancient Greek and Latin works to survive what the fifteenth-century pundit Leon Battista Alberti called the “shipwreck” of the Middle Ages, along with the poetry of Vergil and Ovid, the prose of Cicero, a Latin translation of Plato’s Timaeus, the Bible, and some other surprisingly durable texts. Ever since the papal printer Eucharius Silber brought out his edition in Rome in 1486, Ten Books on Architecture has never gone out of print.
One of the chief reasons for the enduring interest in On Architecture, aside from its treasury of practical instructions, is the ambitious educational program that Vitruvius puts forth in the first of his ten books (each of which originated as a single papyrus scroll, closer to the length of a modern chapter than an entire book, just as his chapters are approximately the size of a paragraph). Architects, he argues, can only complete their work properly (in his words, “perfect” it) if they are well informed about every one of the subjects that the art of building brings into play—if not as well informed as a specialist, then at least well enough to make the right decisions. A competent practitioner, therefore, must not only master drawing but also have a good grasp of literature, music, mathematics, and law…
… It seems likely that the connection between education, architecture, and empire inspired the creation of the earliest known manuscript of Vitruvius, copied on parchment in the ninth century, perhaps for Charlemagne, perhaps by the hand of his learned adviser Alcuin of York, almost certainly as part of the Frankish king’s project of resurrecting the glories of ancient Rome in a Christian spirit. It is through this same clever wedge, education, that Vitruvius has driven himself and his treatise into the very heart of the way the contemporary world still thinks about any number of things, from human scale to beauty to liberal education to the best methods of town planning. Whether you have read Vitruvius or not, his influence is still palpable in the fabric of modern urban life, and that is why he has been translated as recently as 2017 into Chinese…
… In All the King’s Horses: Vitruvius in an Age of Princes, Indra Kagis McEwen, a Canadian architect and historian, brings out a more chilling aspect of Vitruvius and his millennial tradition: his fatal attractiveness to despots. The “princes” of her title are the princes of whom Machiavelli wrote: strongmen who seized and maintained one-man rule over medieval and early modern Italian city-states by force of arms and charisma. Augustus served these princes as an inspiring model because his trajectory so closely resembled their own—except, of course, for its colossal scale. Like the Italian lords who revered him, the future Imperator rose to his august heights by doing whatever would ensure his own survival, eventually completing a process that Machiavelli attributes to Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar: supplanting the ancient Roman Republic with one-man rule…
Fascinating… and too timely: “Vitruvius & the Warlords” from @nybooks.com.
* “Firmitas, utilitas, venustas”– the three principles of good architecture, as described by Vitruvius in De Architectura
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As we analyze the architecture of authoritarianism, we might recall that it was on thsi date in 1527, during the War of the League of Cognac (a dispute between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy), that Rome was captured and sacked by the mutinous troops of Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor. Charles V had intended only to threaten military action to make Pope Clement VII come to his terms. But most of Charles’ Imperial army (14,000 Germans, including Lutherans, 6,000 Spaniards, and some Italians) were unpaid, and took matters into their own hands. Despite being ordered not to storm Rome, they broke into the scarcely defended city and began looting, killing, and holding citizens for ransom. Clement VII took refuge in Castel Sant’Angelo after the Swiss Guard were annihilated in a delaying rear guard action; he remained there until a ransom was paid to the pillagers. Benvenuto Cellini witnessed the Sack and described the it in his works.
The Sack of Rome impacted the histories of Europe, Italy, and Christianity, creating lasting ripple effects throughout European culture and politics. Before the sack, Rome had been a center of Italian High Renaissance culture and patronage, and the main destination for any European artist eager for fame and wealth, thanks to the prestigious commissions of the papal court. In the sack, Rome suffered depopulation and economic collapse, sending artists and writers elsewhere.
The Sack of Rome also permanently shifted the balance of power between Church and State. Before the sack, Pope Clement VII opposed the ambitions of Emperor Charles V. Afterward, he no longer had the military or financial resources to do so. To avert more warfare, Clement adopted a conciliatory policy toward Charles. The power shift – away from the Pope, toward the Emperor – also produced lasting consequences for Catholicism.
And the Sack of Rome also contributed to making permanent the split between Catholics and Protestants. (After the sack, Clement acceded to Charles’ wishes, agreeing to call a Church Council to decide how to address the Protestant Reformation and naming the city of Trent, Italy as its site. In 1545, eleven years after Clement’s death, his successor Pope Paul III convened the Council of Trent. As Charles predicted, it reformed the corruption present in certain orders of the Catholic Church. But by 1545, the moment for reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants – arguably a possibility during the 1520s, given cooperation between the Pope and Emperor – had passed.)
The Sack of Rome is widely identified by historians as the the end of the Italian High Renaissance.
“The historian of science may be tempted to exclaim that when paradigms change, the world itself changes with them”*…
What we now call AI has gone through a series of paradigm shifts, and there appears to be no end in sight. Ashlee Vance shares an anecdote that suggests that AI might itself be an agent (perhaps the agent) of a broader paradigm shift (or shifts)…
AI madness is upon many of us, and it can take different forms. In August 2024, for example, I stumbled upon a post from a 20-year-old who had built a nuclear fusor [see here] in his home with a bunch of mail-ordered parts. More to the point, he’d done this while under the tutelage of Anthropic’s Claude AI service…
… The guy who built the fusor in question, Hudhayfa Nazoordeen, better known as HudZah on the internet, was a math student on his summer break from the University of Waterloo. I reached out and asked to see his experiment in person partly because it seemed weird and interesting and partly because it seemed to say something about AI technology and how some people are going to be in for a very uncomfortable time in short order.
A couple days after the fusor posts hit X, I showed up at Nazoordeen’s front door, a typical Victorian in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood. Nazoordeen, a tall, skinny dude with lots of energy and the gesticulations to match, had been crashing there for the summer with a bunch of his university friends as they tried to soak in the start-up and AI lifestyle. Decades ago, these same kids might have yearned to catch Jerry Garcia and The Dead playing their first gigs or to happen upon an Acid Test. This Waterloo set, though, had a different agenda. They were turned on and LLMed up.
Like many of the Victorian-style homes in the city, this one had a long hallway that stretched from the front door to the kitchen with bedrooms jutting off on both sides. The wooden flooring had been blackened in the center from years of foot traffic, but that was not the first thing anyone would notice. Instead, they’d see the mass of electrical cables that were 10-, 25- and sometimes 50-feet long and coming out of each room and leading to somewhere else in the house.
One of the cables powered a series of mind-reading experiments. Someone in the house, Nazoordeen said, had built his own electroencephalogram (EEG) device for measuring brain activity and had been testing it out on houseguests for weeks. Most of the cables, though, were there to feed GPU clusters, the computing systems filled with graphics chips (often designed by Nvidia) that have powered the recent AI boom. You’d follow a cable from one room to another and end up in front of a black box on the floor. All across San Francisco, I imagined, twenty-somethings were gathered around similar GPU altars to try out their ideas…
Vance tells HudZah’s story, recounts the building of his fusor, explains Claude’s (sometimes reluctant) role, and raises the all-too-legitimate safety questions the experiment raises… though in fairness, one might note that the web is rife with instuctions for building a fusor, e.g., here, here, and here, some of which encuraged HudZah.
But in the end, the takeaway for Vance was not the product, but the process…
I must admit, though, that the thing that scared me most about HudZah was that he seemed to be living in a different technological universe than I was. If the previous generation were digital natives, HudZah was an AI native.
HudZah enjoys reading the old-fashioned way, but he now finds that he gets more out of the experience by reading alongside an AI. He puts PDFs of books into Claude or ChatGPT and then queries the books as he moves through the text. He uses Granola to listen in on meetings so that he can query an AI after the chats as well. His friend built Globe Explorer, which can instantly break down, say, the history of rockets, as if you had a professional researcher at your disposal. And, of course, HudZah has all manner of AI tools for coding and interacting with his computer via voice.
It’s not that I don’t use these things. I do. It’s more that I was watching HudZah navigate his laptop with an AI fluency that felt alarming to me. He was using his computer in a much, much different way than I’d seen someone use their computer before, and it made me feel old and alarmed by the number of new tools at our disposal and how HudZah intuitively knew how to tame them.
It also excited me. Just spending a couple of hours with HudZah left me convinced that we’re on the verge of someone, somewhere creating a new type of computer with AI built into its core. I believe that laptops and PCs will give way to a more novel device rather soon.
I’m not sure that people know what’s coming for them. You’re either with the AIs now and really learning how to use them or you’re getting left behind in a profound way. Obviously, these situations follow every major technology transition, but I’m a very tech-forward person, and there were things HudZah could accomplish on his machine that gave off alien vibes to me. So, er, like, good luck if you’re not paying attention to this stuff.
After doing his AI and fusor show for me, HudZah gave me a tour of the house. Most of his roommates had already bailed out and returned to Canada. He was left to clean up the mess, which included piles of beer cans and bottles of booze in the backyard from a last hurrah.
The AI housemates had also left some gold panning equipment in a bathtub. At some point during the summer, they had decided to grab “a shit ton of sand from a nearby creek” and work it over in their communal bathroom for fun.
I’m honestly not sure what the takeaway there was exactly other than that something profound happened to the Bay Area brain in 1849, and it’s still doing its thing…
Goodbye, Digital Natives; hello, AI Natives: “A Young Man Used AI to Build A Nuclear Fusor and Now I Must Weep,” from @ashleevance. Eminently worth reading in full.
And for a look at one attempt to understand what may be the emerging new pardigm(s) of which AI may be a motive part, see Benjamin Bratton‘s explantion of the work he and his collegues are doing at a new institute at UCSD: “Antikythera.” See his recent Long Now Foundation talk on this same subject here.
On the other hand: “The Future Is Too Easy” (gift article) by David Roth in the always-illuminating Defector.
(Image above: source)
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As we ponder progress, we might spare a thought for Johannes Gutenberg; he died on this date in 1416. A craftsman and inventor, he invented the movable-type printing press. (Though movable type was already in use in East Asia, Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press enabled a much faster rate of printing.)
The printing press spread across the world and led to an information revolution and the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It was a profound enabler of the arts and the sciences of the Renaissance, of the Reformation (and Counter-Reformation), and of humanist movements… which is to say that it contributed to a series of pardigm shifts.
“As well as I can”*…
A reminder that your correspondent is traveling– to wit, more occasional posts. Regular service should resume on or about September 20…
Jan van Eyck (/væn ˈaɪk/ van EYEK; Dutch: [ˈjɑɱ vɑn ˈɛik]; c. before 1390 – 9 July 1441) was a Flemish painter active in Bruges who was one of the early innovators of what became known as Early Netherlandish painting, and one of the most significant representatives of Early Northern Renaissance art. According to Vasari and other art historians including Ernst Gombrich, he invented oil painting…
Gregory T. Clark with an appreciation of van Eyck and of the recent Louvre exhibition of his work…
Over the course of the thirty years that I taught art history to college undergraduates, introducing my students to the manuscript illuminations and panel paintings of the fifteenth-century Flemish painter Jan van Eyck always gave me an especial pleasure. I wanted my students to share in my wonderment at Jan’s seemingly effortless ability to present nature rather than represent it, right down to the most infinitesimal details, without compromising the integrity of the whole, his powers of observation complemented by an uncanny ability to capture light, texture, and atmosphere.
The earliest surviving works of Jan—who is thought to have been born around 1390 in Maaseyck, modern-day Belgium—date to the first lustrum of the 1420s. In 1425, he was appointed court painter to Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, whose empire then comprised almost the entirety of the Low Countries and a large wedge of northeastern France together with his home duchy of Burgundy and the contiguous Franche-Comté (Free County) to the east. Moving to Bruges in 1430, Jan produced paintings for the Burgundian court, nobility, and haute bourgeoisie right up until his death there in 1441…
… A like visual mastery characterizes the much larger Rolin Madonna itself. Measuring some twenty-six by twenty-five inches, the work shows the kneeling chancellor in prayer immediately before the enthroned Virgin and Child in a loggia that gives onto a sprawling landscape divided by a meandering river.
On Nicolas’s sinister side is a small town and beyond it a hillside with vineyards; the Rolin family drew much of its wealth from viticulture. On the holy figures’ dexter side rises a city composed almost entirely of churches, the two agglomerations linked by a single bridge across the river. Perhaps Jan is subtly warning the chancellor and all of us not to succumb to the blandishments of this mortal world, but rather to hew to the Christian faith and thereby cross the figurative River Jordan to the eternal City of God on the river’s other side.
The removal of centuries of grime and darkened varnish means that we can truly see Jan’s handiwork as he would have wished it. But what to marvel at first: Nicolas’ fur-edged brocade woven of chocolate-brown wool and silk and threads of gold? The gemstones that stud the hem of the Madonna’s red robe, the gold crown held by an angel over her head, and the cross of gold that surmounts the crystal orb in the baby Jesus’s left hand? The sprawling landscape beyond the three arches behind the chancellor and holy figures? Everywhere one looks there are details that astonish and enchant the eye but never compromise the unity of Jan’s vision.
Reproductions can only do partial justice to the paintings of Jan van Eyck; they beg to be seen face to face, and the Louvre exhibition offers the opportunity to see five of them together with fifty-nine objects that complement and widen our understanding of both his extraordinary art and his milieu…
An early master: “I like Eyck,” from @newcriterion.
* van Eyck’s motto, inscribed on the frame of the painting atop this post
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As we look closely, we might spare a thought for Andrea Mantegna; he died on this date in 1506. An artist and printmaker, he was a key figure in Italian Renaissance painting (and the son-in-law of Jacopo Bellini).
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