Emulation: VII.1 The Palio in Action

Lucca’s Feast of San Paolino

Some of the events leading up to the crossbow competition on the feast of San Paolino in Lucca, for which I painted the Palio (banner):

Saturday, 6 July 10:30am, via del Moro, Loggiato Palazzo Santini, exhibition of the bozzetti (models) submitted for the competition to paint the Palio

Thursday, 11 July 21:15, Piazza S. Martino, drawing for the shooting order of the crossbow competitors

21:30 S. Michele, vigil prayer service

22:00 from Piazza S. Michele to Basilica of S. Paolino, torch lit procession of S. Paolino, religious communities and historic groups

22:30 Basilica of S. Paolino, blessing of the city, prayers of the crossbowmen and solemn motet for S. Paolino (Polifonica Lucchese)

Friday, 12 July 11am mass at S. Paolino

12:00 artillery firing at the S. Donato bastion and gate, recalling the miracle of S. Paolino

17:00 Sagrato, basilica of S. Paolino, award ceremony for shop window displays

18:30 Basilica di S. Paolino, solemn pontifical mass, presiding Msgr. Italo Castellani, Archbishop of Lucca

the mayor of Lucca offers a votive candle in the name of the city and

the mayor of Bagni di Lucca offers oil for the lamp in S. Paolino in the name of the municipalities of the archdiocese

21:00 Piazza S. Martino, 39th Crossbow Palio in honor of S. Paolino, competitors from the three Terzieri (districts) of Lucca

Saturday, 13 July 18:00 Piazza S. Martino, 1st tourney of San Paolino, antique archery competition

21:00 Piazza S. Martino, flag throwing show

Emulation: VI.3 America and Europe

ARTS ABROAD

the bozzetto or model
submitted for the competition

I’m winding up my last stab at edits of my book The Challenge of Emulation in Art and Architecture (due out from Ashgate in November). And I am happy to say I won the competition to paint this year’s Palio for Lucca’s feast of San Paolino (to be celebrated with a crossbow competition on 12 July). Having a foot in both the US and in Italy is a privilege, and being able to contribute in some way to the culture that sponsored the Renaissance is at once daunting and invigorating. Lucca’s Compagnia Balestrieri may have recreated the palio competition only 39 years ago, but the commitment and pride they bring to their reconstituted tradition speaks of a connection to their past that is centuries old. Sometimes traditions have to be recreated from scratch. It is just so for classical artists.

I came across an article in the recent Vanity Fair by A. A. Gill on some Europeans’ penchant for bashing Americans. While I agree with the author that the bashing is blunt and ill informed, I might disagree with the assumptions that underlie his defense of Americans. Although he rightly makes a case for America’s European roots, like many on both sides of the Atlantic he sees the US’ great cultural accomplishment as extending the Enlightenment project to greater liberation from the Old World’s supposedly worn-out classical culture; and while we contributed much that was new to the visual arts and music, he also naturally makes the case for America’s preeminence in the sciences. Radical arts and progressive science are, in defense of America against European disdain, powerful arguments.

America has also produced great scholars of European culture, like architectural historians Henry Millon and James Ackerman; has valorized and helped sustain European culinary traditions in the persons of Julia Child and Burton Anderson; has been a major contributor in both sweat equity and money for the restoration of Europe’s cultural heritage; has built classical buildings that merit consideration as part of the Western canon; and has produced art in the context of the great figurative traditions of European painting in the persons of Benjamin West and John Singer Sargent.

Yet if those traditions that many still endorse are European in origin, so too is the radical Modernism that has so relentlessly worked at (and mostly succeeded in) obliterating them. America’s native architectural modernism was of a Sullivan and Wright kind, pragmatic in terms of technologies but still rooted in traditional forms, until European exiles brought something much more abstract to those shores. Our modern painting was ashcan realism until we became seduced by cubism and abstraction. If we embraced the imported architecture wholly—because it satisfied our pragmatism at least as much as our preferences for simplicity—and applied it on an unforeseen scale, it is no less European for that.

And about that there are not a few regrets. Artists in particular over the last couple of decades have striven to recover what we once knew about representation, and while England has a number of very able figurative artists, the US is home to a miraculous, burgeoning realist movement. Ateliers are everywhere, and publications like American Artist magazine disseminate a broad body of knowledge that has been recovered when it had not been sustained.

But if that recovery is colored by a decisively American penchant for pragmatism and mechanics—how to paint water, tricks for painting at night, five common mistakes in drawing the human form—there are some of us who want to recover the whole of the figurative tradition, whose pinnacle is the classical. One major impediment to that recovery is that there are precious few opportunities, clients, or markets for that kind of work.

the modified design

Which is why it is so exciting for me to be able to paint the palio for Lucca this year. Here is not only a subject—the patron saint, the fourth centenary of the city walls’ completion, crossbowmen in costume—but a public purpose to art that we mostly lack in America. The banner will be carried around town all day leading up to the nighttime competition, a display that challenges any artist to give her or his best. And many artists once did: Raphael’s first major independent commission was for a processional banner for Città di Castello, and Guido Reni painted an important one for Bologna, the Pala del Voto.

When the Palio is presented to the pubic sometime before the actual event I will share the final painting here. In the meantime, I am sharing the bozzetto, or model, submitted for the competition, along with some progress photos of the final work which I'll publish periodically. Some changes to the model were requested, not the least of which was the image of a crossbow (balestra)…

Emulation: VI.2 Sights and Sounds

Concert in the Cathedral of Lucca Marking the Restoration of a Painting

Last evening, in the cathedral of Lucca, an incredibly beautiful concert was given by the relatively newly-formed group VoxAlia. What I found especially notable was the integration of the visual and aural, first by the presentation of the newly restored painting and altar of The Visitation (the painting by Jacopo Ligozzi, 1596), the altar surround a revised version of a design by Giorgio Vasari. Standing by the altar, adjacent to the chapel of the Volto Santo, the new cathedral rector Don Mauro Lucchesi first introduced Archbishop Benvenuto Italo Castellani with some apposite words on the arts and culture in the church; after the bishop spoke, the scholar in charge of the restoration, Dott.ssa Antonia D'Aniello presented a bit of its history; she was followed by a spokesman for the restoration team. Then we moved on to the pews for the concert, under the direction of Livio Picotti. 

The singers entered from the sacristy singing a solemn chant (not in the program), after which they assembled at the altar in a circle to sing Hildegard von Bingen’s O Viridissima Virga, the musical quality highlighted as much aurally as visually by their formation. The program was organized around readings from Rainer Maria Rilke’s Life of Mary, and while the music was mostly Monteverdi and before a discordant note was introduced with Poulenc’s Litanies a la Vierge Noire (why must modern sacred music be so anguished and harsh, even ugly?). Each section of the program was introduced by the readings, which were accompanied by the presentation of a relevant icon painting to the assembled, processed from the altar down the central aisle. Finally, with the inevitable encore (they are de rigueur in Italy) the group moved again, singing as they went, to the altar to conclude the evening.

Maestro Picotti’s credits list him as architect-musician, and his dual background showed in his attention to the spatial and visual dimensions of the music. With Early Music the recovery of something like the original effect of the music is usually confined to the musical, but the spatial and visual accompaniment are no less essential to revivifying music that deserves to be heard as often, and as well-performed, as possible. To imitate the lost original sense of the music one almost must, perforce, emulate—attempt to rival by working to integrate as much information and sense experience as possible.

http://quilucca.corrierenazionale.it/eventi/2013/06/04/news/40282-Restaurato-l-altare-della-Visitazione-nel-Duomo-di-Lucca

Emulation: VI.1 Humanism, Humanities, and the Utilitarian

Let Others Rail...

Two recent essays, in the very different sources of The New Republic and The New Criterion, say many of the same things about the state of the humanities and humanism in contemporary, dare I call it, culture. I recommend them, and in some ways wish I had written them myself. But I would only offer, vis-à-vis the arts, that the same utilitarian mentality that seems to be driving our universities, public policy, and even philosophy (how often is an intellectual position justified on the basis of its utility?) is just as prevalent in the arts, where the mechanics of realism and the coding of urbanism substitute for the richer culture of art and building we once had (albeit centuries ago).

"Perhaps Culture is Now the Counterculture"

A Defense of the Humanities

by Leon Wieseltier | May 28, 2013

For decades now in America we have been witnessing a steady and sickening denigration of humanistic understanding and humanistic method. We live in a society inebriated by technology, and happily, even giddily governed by the values of utility, speed, efficiency, and convenience. The technological mentality that has become the American worldview instructs us to prefer practical questions to questions of meaning – to ask of things not if they are true or false, or good or evil, but how they work. Our reason has become an instrumental reason, and is no longer the reason of the philosophers, with its ancient magnitude of intellectual ambition, its belief that the proper subjects of human thought are the largest subjects, and that the mind, in one way or another, can penetrate to the very principles of natural life and human life….

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/113299/leon-wieseltier-commencement-speech-brandeis-university-2013#

JUNE 2013

Ave atque vale

by Donald Kagan

I find a kind of cultural void, an ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but also the world was born yesterday, a feeling that they are attached to the society in which they live only incidentally and accidentally. Having little or no sense of the human experience through the ages, of what has been tried, of what has succeeded and what has failed, of what is the price of cherishing some values as opposed to others, or of how values relate to one another, they leap from acting as though anything is possible, without cost, to despairing that nothing is possible. They are inclined to see other people’s values as mere prejudices, one no better than another, while viewing their own as entirely valid, for they see themselves as autonomous entities entitled to be free from interference by society and from obligation to it….

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Ave-atque-vale-7653

Emulation: V.1 The Golden City

IN MEMORIAM: Henry Hope Reed, Jr. September 25, 1915 – May 1, 2013

Henry Hope Reed passed away on the first of May, and I wanted to add my voice to the list of those like my colleague Steve Semes, and David Brussat at the Providence Journal, in honoring Henry and what he stood for. Not that I always saw eye to eye with him. When I won my (rare for a classicist) fellowship to the American Academy in Rome (the Steedman Prize, no longer an Academy fellowship, yet won in the old fashioned way, by design competition—but that’s another story), Henry visited me in Philadelphia and encouraged me to do what Rome Prize winners had once done, measured drawings. While I did draw much on site in Rome, I have always believed we best process the lessons of the past when we try to design in the same manner (thus Emulatio…). But I would like to make a case for what Henry represented that I strongly endorse, something slowly withering on the vine of domestic "good taste."

A proposed chapel for the Notre Dame campus, by the author

Henry Hope Reed and Classical America co-founder John Barrington Bayley (who published Letarouilly on Renaissance Rome) advocated the Grand Manner. While this was partly a matter of taste—and a taste for European architecture in particular—it was also civic, and heroic. Henry’s book The Golden City (out of print—it deserves to be republished, and with a courageous foreword!) was not only an argument against Modernism, it was an argument for great architecture—not the merely pleasing, or “traditional”—and for heroic, civic architecture. An architecture of cities more than towns, and certainly more than the private and suburban. An architecture that lifts the spirits out of our value-engineered world, "embellished" in the old sense of making something more beautiful by enriching it. I have long maintained that, for those of us who aspire to doing great architecture, the opportunities are few if any today; but we must at least draw what we want to do, to show the world that it is, in fact, possible. It is only possible if we are capable, and we are only capable if we can prove that we are. Henry was himself highly capable—as advocate, polemicist, and connoisseur—but he was also heroic, urban, and grand in so many ways. He was not risk-averse, but he was prudent in his valuing of the past as a model for the future. Will we see his like again?