A Quick Trip to Italy, Part XIII

On Friday we went to Milan, about a three hour ride by high-speed rail.

Mediolanum is an old city, with a very long history. It was settled by Celts in the fifth century BC and conquered by Romans in the third century BC. For a period of time under Domitian it was the capital of the Western Roman Empire. It was a major site of conflict between the Guelphs and Ghibellines. It was one of the major cities of the Italian Renaissance. After Napoleon invaded Italy, it was the capital of the Cisalpine Republic, and later of his Kingdom of Italy. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, its opera houses and theaters were among the greatest in the world. Mozart and Verdi debuted works here. Milan has almost always been a thriving trade center and today is one of the economic powerhouses of Europe.

Very little of this is obvious, though. Rome always feels very big and overcrowded; Milan, the second most populous city of Italy, rarely feels so, with plenty of walkable areas and gardens all over the place. You can hardly move around in Rome's historic center without stumbling on something ancient; Milan's ancient Roman history only very rarely comes out. And in World War II, as the economic center of Italy, Milan was very heavily bombed throughout the war. Almost a third of its buildings were destroyed; very few of its great medieval and Baroque buildings and monuments escaped being at least damaged, and some vanished entirely. Milan, almost everywhere, seems very modern, because Milan, almost everywhere, is indeed very modern.

But despite the pulverization of so much of its history, Milan still has treasures. The most obvious is the Cathedral of Santa Maria Nascente -- most often known as the Duomo di Milano:

A photograph does not in any way do it justice. The Duomo, the heart of the Ambrosian Rite of the Latin Church, is the largest church in Italy. (St. Peter's is larger, but, of course, it is not technically in Italy.) It is usually said to be the fifth largest church in the world. It is over 10,000 square meters in area, over 440,000 cubic meters in volume, and it took nearly six centuries to build. The fortunes of the cathedral are closely connected with the history of Milan.

In 1385, Gian Galeazzo Visconti of Pavia seized Milan by overthrowing his uncle Bernabo by breaking a few promises. Bernabo was, however, very unpopular with the Milanese because of his very oppressive taxes. Using his new position as Signore of both Pavia and Milan, he went on to take Verona, Vicenza, and Padua (although he would later lose the last of these). One of the things he did as his fortunes were quickly rising was promise to the Milanese a grand new cathedral. The Milanese, happy to be out from the heel of the taxing taskmaster, were enthusiastic about the project -- so Gian Galeazzo, very cleverly, began to take donations for it, and the first stone was laid in 1386. Construction proceeded quite swiftly, and soon half the brick structure was built. But Gian Galeazzo died of fever in 1402, and very little was done afterward, although bits and pieces would be done here and there. The very Gothic cathedral got a few High Renaissance touches here and there.

In 1564, St. Carlo Borromeo became Archbishop of Milan, and one of his insights was to recognize that the guild controlling the construction of the cathedral was part of the problem; he used his influence to change the statutes and appoint Pellegrino di Tibaldo de Pellegrini as chief engineer. They planned on toning down the Gothic character of the cathedral (Gothic was increasingly seen as a Franco-German style) and giving it a more Italian Renaissance flair. But there was an immense of cathedral there, and an immense amount of cathedral yet to be done. Construction continued through the sixteenth century into the seventeenth, when the facade finally began to be developed. Construction continued through the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century, and in 1762, the Madonna's Spire was erected by Carlo Pellicani, with a gold-plated bronze statue of Mary placed on top of it, the Madonnina:

We were in Milan the day after Italian Unification Day, so that's why the Virgin Mary is waving the Italian flag. The Madonnina is one of the key touches of Milan. By tradition, no building in Milan is allowed to be higher than the Madonnina. But, tall as the Madonna's Spire is, Milan is a city of skyscrapers, and has been for decades! How can this be? When the Pirelli Tower was built in the 1950s in Milan, it was the tallest building in Italy. So they made a small replica of the Madonnina and put it at the top of the building. Skyscraper or now, it is still not higher than the Madonnina! When the Palazzo Lombardia rose even higher, they did the same. They did the same with the Allianz Tower of CityLife. One of the most famous folk songs in Milan, often regarded as the anthem of the city, refers to the Madonnina in its chorus:

Oh mia bela Madunina, che te brilet de luntan,
tüta d'ora e picinina, ti te dominet Milan,
sota a ti se viv la vita, se sta mai cui man in man.

It was written by Giovanni D'Anzi in the 1930s, and this bit means something like, "O my beautiful Madonnina, you shine brightly from afar; wholly golden and tiny, you rule over Milan. Life is lived beneath your feet without twiddling one's thumbs."

Life went on, and then came Napoleon. He wanted to be crowned King of Italy in the Duomo, so he promised the archbishop that if they finished the facade, he would reimburse the entire expense. That finally got things in full gear; the facade was finished and Napoleon was crowned King there in 1805. He then went off to fight in Russia and never got around to reimbursing anyone.

Arches and spires continued to be built through the nineteenth century. The last gate was put in on January 6, 1965, and this is usually the date given for the end of construction -- although there are still parts of the cathedral where you find blocks of stone that are supposed to be carved into statues at some point. There's so much going on with the cathedral, however, that you wouldn't notice it unless you were looking for it. It makes for an impressive whole.

Here is one of the doors, not the largest:

Inside, it is like a forest of columns. We were only allowed on the right-hand side (and thus actually missed a number of the most famous features of the cathedral).

St. Charles Borromeo, of course, is quite prominent here:

Now we will descend into the crypt, under the grand altar of Milan Cathedral, and receive an impressive sermon from lips that have been silent and hands that have been gestureless for three hundred years.

The priest stopped in a small dungeon and held up his candle. This was the last resting-place of a good man, a warm-hearted, unselfish man; a man whose whole life was given to succoring the poor, encouraging the faint-hearted, visiting the sick; in relieving distress, whenever and wherever he found it. His heart, his hand, and his purse were always open. With his story in one's mind he can almost see his benignant countenance moving calmly among the haggard faces of Milan in the days when the plague swept the city, brave where all others were cowards, full of compassion where pity had been crushed out of all other breasts by the instinct of self-preservation gone mad with terror, cheering all, praying with all, helping all, with hand and brain and purse, at a time when parents forsook their children, the friend deserted the friend, and the brother turned away from the sister while her pleadings were still wailing in his ears.

(Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Chapter XVIII)

Even just seeing the right side of the church, there was a lot of it. And we came out again; a truism, perhaps, but perhaps also a bit less of one than it would be with another building. People sometimes get lost in forests.

What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frost-work that might vanish with a breath! How sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon its snowy roof! It was a vision!—a miracle!—an anthem sung in stone, a poem wrought in marble!

to be continued

Full Many a Spiry Pinnacle

Milan Cathedral
by John Ruskin

The heat of summer day is sped ;
On far Mont Rose the sun is red ;
And mark you Milan's marble pile
Glow with the mellow rays awhile !
Lo, there relieved, his front so high
On the blue sky of Italy !
While higher still above him bear,
And slender in proportion fair,
Fretted with Gothic carving well,
Full many a spiry pinnacle ;
And dazzling bright as Rosa's crest,
Each with his sculptured statue prest,
They seem to stand in that thin air
As on a thread of gossamer.
You think the evening zephyr's play
Could sweep them from their post away,
And bear them on its sportful wing
As autumn leaves, wild scattering.

Ruskin was not a fan of the Milan Cathedral, however; he regarded it as a barbarous mish-mash, and the "spiry pinnacles" were practically the only thing he thought good in it.

Mark Twain on the Duomo of Milan

At last, a forest of graceful needles, shimmering in the amber sunlight, rose slowly above the pygmy housetops, as one sometimes sees, in the far horizon, a gilded and pinnacled mass of cloud lift itself above the waste of waves, at sea,—the Cathedral! We knew it in a moment.

Half of that night, and all of the next day, this architectural autocrat was our sole object of interest.

What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems in the soft moonlight only a fairy delusion of frost-work that might vanish with a breath! How sharply its pinnacled angles and its wilderness of spires were cut against the sky, and how richly their shadows fell upon its snowy roof! It was a vision!—a miracle!—an anthem sung in stone, a poem wrought in marble!

Howsoever you look at the great cathedral, it is noble, it is beautiful! Wherever you stand in Milan or within seven miles of Milan, it is visible and when it is visible, no other object can chain your whole attention. Leave your eyes unfettered by your will but a single instant and they will surely turn to seek it. It is the first thing you look for when you rise in the morning, and the last your lingering gaze rests upon at night. Surely it must be the princeliest creation that ever brain of man conceived.

Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, Chapter XVIII

Two New Poem Drafts and Some Poem Re-Drafts

(The second is based on a rare version of the apocryphal Psalm 151.)

Vale

Elusive is the vale,
an evening-colored petal
quivering in violet breezes.

The moon is full tonight
over fireflies in the air,
drunken stars in inky darkness,
iridescence on the petal.

A Song of David

Less was I than all my brothers,
youngest of my father's sons,
a simple shepherd of the flock,
a ruler of kids and goats.

I fashioned from the reed a pipe;
my fingers shaped a fair harp;
thus gave I glory to the Lord.
The mountains cannot tell Him.
The hills cannot proclaim His Name.

Take up my words, tall-topped trees,
sing my melodies, baaing sheep.
Who will else declare or speak?
The Lord our God has seen all things;
our God gives His attention.

He sent His anointing prophet:
Samuel came to grace me.
My brothers went out to meet him,
handsome-formed and handsome-faced.
They were tall and their hair was thick,
but God did not make them kings.

He fetched me from behind the flock,
anointed me with pure oil,
and made me prince of His people,
ruler in his covenant.

Birds Hunting Crickets

The sky is so blue you could dive right in and swim,
the sun so bright that it burns like hidden sin,
the breeze so cool upon harsh, sunburned skin;

I'd give a penny for your thoughts,
but you're probably thinking of him,

so instead I'll muse on truth and rule of law
and watch birds hunting crickets outside the coffee shop.

The Moon Sang Soprano

The moon sang soprano to the bass of the sea:
The fish danced in schools and pavaned ecstasy
As the waves crashed the shore with a drum-beaten bliss
That was voiced by a deep and unending abyss.
The tide measured time and the waves measured shore
As the song like a chorus resounded the more;
The moon sang its light, and that moonlight was borne
By the weight of the sea in the sound of its horn.

Astraea

The stars fell down; we felt
the light shift vivid red
and somewhere in Orion's belt
you fell down dead.
Your dreams whispered in ears
not made to hear your song,
beyond their sundry fears;
self-destroying, headlong,
they sullied face and name
with thoughts good sense would quell,
like moth to nova-flame,
like unfound souls to hell;
still you stood, stood still,
unchanged by the changing winds,
a quiet rill
opposing rushing tides of men.
All stars fail; in sharp light
they will forever fall
into eternal night,
that deepest night that conquers all;
and all too soon.
Your words ring in our heads.
Beneath some strange and weirding moon
your spirit fled.

Willow

The hollow-laden willow waves the leaflets of its limbs
in winds that whip around it through the shadowed evendim;
my heart is hale and singing with a hymn of hope and praise,
a hymn of hope and praise that I have learned from summer rain,
a healing psalm so soulful that it saves from fear and pain
and lengthens out like prayer all the wonders of my days.
With the waving of the willow I with spirit rise and sway
as the raindrops, kissed by moonlight, on my eyelids leap and play.

Birthtime of Beauty and of Poesy

April Sonnets
by Francis Bennoch

No. I: April Kind

April, though treacherous and changeling named,
Wanton and wayward in thy nature, still
Revealest thou those mysteries that fill
All hearts with love's deep sympathy, and famed
For blooms that odorous balm distil.
Birthtime of beauty and of poesy:
When birds betrothed melodious from the hill
Rain down their morning song of ecstasy.
When amorous bees toy fondly with the flower,
And drain its humid sweets deliriously,
Faint with excess, in love's delicious bower
Softly infolded, blossom-couched he lies:
Whilst draughts of fragrant dew oblivious sleep supplies.

April, 1855.

No. II: April Cruel

April, ah me! how swiftly changes come,
How soon the month we love we learn to hate,
When boughs deflowered hang down disconsolate,
And clouds of grief make dark our garden home,
Where genial sunshine lingering loved to wait;
With joy we grafted in thy wounded rind
The fairest branch that ever blossom bore;
Clasped close, incorporate as one combined,
A newborn rapture trembled in thy core
As budding life expanded, more and more
We longed to reap the fruit; but woke to find
Hope in a morning blighted ; from the shore
A ruthless wind stole with untimely frost,
And all thy cherished bloom was shrivelled, loosed, and lost.

April, 1855.

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part XII

Heading back from St. Peter's Square we passed, of course, Castel Sant'Angelo:

Castel Sant'Angelo is the Mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian, built in the second century; it was used to store the ashes of the Roman emperors for the next several decades. The ashes seem to have been scattered in one of the sacks of Rome, and most of the original decorations of the building have been lost. According to a legend, the Archangel Michael appeared at the top of the building to signal the end of a plague in the sixth century, which is the reason for the current name. In the late Middle Ages, the building became a fortified castle for the popes; it later became a prison and, beginning in 1901, a museum. A statue of an angel was first put on top of the building in the sixteenth century; that original marble statue was replaced by a bronze statue made by Peter Anton von Verschaffelt in 1753, which is still there.

Hadrian also built the Pons Aelius across the River Tiber, part of which makes up the current Ponte Sant'Angelo:

In the sixteenth century Raffaello da Montelupo, who had sculpted the original stone angel for the top of Castel Sant'Angelo was commissioned to decorate the bridge with fourteen statues of angels. By the late seventeenth century they weren't aging well, so Clement IX commissioned Bernini, near the end of his life, to design replacements. Bernini had the idea of ten angels holding the Instruments of the Passion of Christ. He managed to do two of them with his son Paolo, the Angel of the Crown of Thorns and the Angel of the Superscription. Neither, however, is on the bridge: the pope liked them so much that he kept them, so the current versions of those angels are copies of Bernini's statues by other artists. The Angels are:

(1) The Angel of the Column
(2) The Angel of the Whips
(3) The Angel of the Crown of Thorns
(4) The Angel of the Sudarium
(5) The Angel of the Garment and Dice
(6) The Angel of the Nails
(7) The Angel of the Cross
(8) The Angel of the Superscription
(9) The Angel of the Sponge
(10) The Angel of the Lance

We lunched in the Piazza Navona, which is built on the site of the ancient Stadium of Domitian:

The church is Sant'Agnese in Agone. The 'in Agone' is actually just the earlier name of the plaza, which was corrupted over time to 'navona'. The church marks the spot where St. Agnes of Rome was supposed to have died in the early fourth century (the other major church devoted to her, St. Agnes Outside the Walls, marks her burial spot). The current church was built in the seventeenth century; Pope Innocent X had his family residence in the recently built Palazzo Pamphili immediately to the left of the current church, and he wanted to make the church that was previously there a chapel appropriate to his new family home. He commissioned Girolamo and Carlo Rainaldi to design it. The Rainaldi plan was extremely controversial, though, and they were replaced by Francesco Borromini, who had to use the Rainaldi floor plan but made liberal changes in other respects. Borromini became frustrated with his employers and resigned the commission; Carlo Rainaldi took over again. Carlo was replaced by Gian Lorenzo Bernini. And shortly afterward, Bernini was replaced by Carlo again. (Different members of the Pamphili family seem to have had different tastes in architects.)

In front of the church is one of the most famous fountains of Rome, Bernini's Fontana dei Quattro Fiumi:

Each of the Four Rivers is from a different continent, symbolizing the spread of papal authority: the Danube, the Nile, the Ganges, and the Rio de Plata.

After lunch, we headed to our next destination: the church of Saint Mary and the Martyrs, or, as it is better known, the Pantheon:

While the Pantheon was (as the inscription suggests) commissioned by Marcus Agrippa in the reign of Augustus, that version seems to have been destroyed, and the one that currently exists appears to be a restoration that wasn't actually completed until the second century in the reign of Hadrian. Its dome is, after two thousand years, still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome, and it is one of the best preserved of all ancient Roman buildings. In the seventh century, the Emperor Phocas gave it as a gift to Pope Boniface IV and it became a Christian church. A number of notable people are buried there, including King Vittorio Emanuele II, but the most notable is the the artist Raphael Sanzio. Alas, I did not get a good photograph of his tomb; here is one from Wikimedia:


And that was Thursday, and the end of Rome. One of the things that is very clear is how little we actually saw: even for places we visited, like the Forum or St. Peter's, we only saw small slices. Everywhere there were too many things to see, not enough time, and too many things to work around to see what we could. It would have been nice to see some other things -- St. Mary Major, for instance -- but it was not to be. The Raphael Rooms in the Vatican Museums were what I most wanted to see -- but they were undergoing restoration, so, just like Florence, I didn't have any opportunity to see my only must-see thing. But it is better that the Raphael Rooms be preserved than that I should see them, and with such an abundance of things to see it would be foolish to complain.

We then returned to the original city into which we had flown, Milan.

to be continued

The Goddess of the White Man

Rudyard Kipling's "The White Man's Burden" was written on the occasion of the American invasion of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War. Shortly after it came out, an American author wrote a scathing satirical response to it, noting a point of some significance: it was never the white man who actually had to carry the white man's burden.

The Black Man’s Burden
by Edgar Rice Burroughs

Take up the white man’s burden,
The yoke ye sought to spurn;
And spurn your father’s customs;
Your father’s temples burn.
O learn to love and honor
The white God’s favored sons.
Forget the white-haired fathers
Fast lashed to mouths of guns.

Take up the white man’s burden,
Your own was not enough;
He’ll burden you with taxes;
But though the road be rough,
“To him who waits,” remember,
“All things in time shall come;”
The white man’s culture brings you
The white man’s God, and rum.

Take up the white man’s burden;
‘Tis called “protectorate,”
And lift your voice in thanks to
The God ye well might hate.
Forget your exiled brothers;
Forget your boundless lands;
In acres that they gave for
The blood upon their hands.

Take up the white man’s burden;
Poor simple folk and free;
Abandon nature’s freedom,
Embrace his “Liberty,”
The goddess of the white man
Who makes you free in name;
But in her heart your color
Will brand you “slave” the same.

Take up the white man’s burden;
And learn by what you’ve lost
That white men called as counsel
Means black men pay the cost.
Your right to fertile acres
Their priests will teach you well
Have gained your fathers only
A desert claim in hell.

Take up the white man’s burden;
Take it because you must;
Burden of making money;
Burden of greed and lust;
Burden of points strategic,
Burden of harbors deep,
Burden of greatest burdens;
Burden, these burdens to keep.

Take up the white man’s burden;
His papers take, and read;
‘Tis all for your salvation;
The white man knows not greed.
For you he’s spending millions —
To him, more than his God —
To make you learned, and happy,
Enlightened, cultured, broad.

Take up the white man’s burden
While he makes laws for you,
That show your fathers taught you
The things you should not do.
Cast off your foolish feathers,
Your necklace, beads, and paint;
Buy raiment for your mother,
Lest fairer sisters faint.

Take up the white man’s burden;
Go learn to wear his clothes;
You may look like the devil;
But nobody cares who knows.
Peruse a work of Darwin —
Thank gods that you’re alive —
And learn the reason clearly: —
The fittest alone survive.

The Perfection of the Mind

True knowledge, and not science falsely so called, is a 'divine thing,' as an excellent pen has proved it. For to know is to perceive truth, and the perception of truth is a participation of God Himself who is the truth, and the participation of God is the perfection of the mind.

[Mary Astell, in The Christian Religion, section 262, as quoted in Jacqueline Broad, The Philosophy of Mary Astell, Oxford UP (New York: 2015), p. 40.]

Broad comments:

Norris is the 'excellent pen' to whom Astell refers, and the passage in question appears in the second part of his Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (1704), where he says that since 'truth is of a divine extraction, and has a real divinity in its nature, what a divine thing must all true science be'. Astell's subsequent point likewise echoes Norris's observation that 'the Truth which we see is Divine, and...the knowledge which we have of Truth, is, in some degree a participation of the Divine Nature, and a kind of possession of God himself.'

Broad is referring to Part II of An Essay Toward a Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World; she could also have noted the role played by truth as perfective of the mind in Part I (e.g., p. 334):

But besides, how comes Truth to be Perfective of our Minds? That it is so, may well be supposed our Understanding being then confessedly most perfect, when in the fullest Possession of Truth, when it has the clearest and largest View of it. But does not the whole Perfection of the Mind consist in its Union with God? Is not he our only perfective and beatifying Object, and can any thing else but his Divine Substance be the Good of our Souls?

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part XI

There was quite a bit of preparation going on everywhere around St. Peter's for a number of upcoming events, so it took some work to get around them. Rather than the usual way, our guide took us indirectly through the Treasury. No photography was allowed, but we saw several of the tombs of the popes. (I thought Paul VI's was interesting; it's just a plain slab, but it draws attention to itself for that very reason, as if you had been walking by a decorated wall and suddenly came to a completely blank section; all the others blend into the architecture, but that one sticks out in an obvious way.)

We also saw the tomb of Queen Christina of Sweden, which I was happy to see. Queen Christina is an interesting historical character. She was the polymathic queen who invited Rene Descartes to her court to organize a scientific academy. They did not get along well at all, and quarreled, it is said, over whether it was more important for her to study physics or Ancient Greek, so she mostly stopped seeing him, and he died of pneumonia not long afterward. In 1652, Christina began to study the Catholic faith, and she abdicated her throne in 1654, setting out for the Catholic countries of Europe; she then officially converted in Brussels. She soon came to Rome, which she would visit several times, and would die in Rome in 1689 at the age of 62. She asked to be buried in the Pantheon, but Pope Clement X decided to bury her in St. Peter's. You can see a picture of her sarcophagus here. I didn't even think to look for her monument in the church, but here's a nice picture of it from Wikimedia:


So we finally came up inside St. Peter's; almost the first thing we could see was this:

You can see, of course, part of the inscription around the base of the dome, Christ's words to St. Peter, in Latin: Tu es Petrus et super hanc petram aedificabo ecclesiam meam. Tibi dabo claves regni caelorum -- You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church; I give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven.

A very old tradition says that St. Peter was executed at the Circus of Nero on October 13, in the Year of Our Lord 64. His remains were rumored to have been buried somewhere on the Vatican hill near the Circus. The Emperor Constantine ordered that the shrine that had come to be built to commemorate St. Peter's death and burial should be upgraded to a basilica, and St. Peter's Basilica -- now called Old St. Peter's Basilica -- began somewhere around 320 and took about three decades to build. The church grew in importance over the next few centuries, but also suffered the ravages of time; for instance, it was sacked and heavily damaged when in 846 a Muslim raiding party sacked it and a few other important buildings outside of Rome itself. Its fortunes the next few centuries were not all that much better, since the decampment of the Popes to Avignon led all the churches of Rome to be neglected for decades, so the church was in very poor condition by the fifteenth century. Some efforts were made to restore it, Leon Battista Alberti being one of the architects to try his hand at it.

Then Pope Julius II decided to tear the whole thing down. It was a shocking and controversial proposal: the church represented the continuity of the papacy, it was a symbol of the claims of the See of Rome to be in right authoritative succession from Peter himself and to be sanctified, so to speak, with the blood of Peter's martyrdom. And it was also a massive project. Julius seems to have decided to tear it down and rebuild around 1505. He would start the project, and it would continue through the papal reigns of Leo X, Adrian VI, Clement VII, Paul III, Julius III, Marcellus II, Paul IV, Pius IV, St. Pius V, Gregory XIII, Sixtus V, Urban VII, Gregory XIV, Innocent IX, Clement VIII, Leo XI, Paul V, Gregory XV, Urban VIII, to be finished up in 1626 in the reign of Innocent X.

A great design contest was held, and Donato Bramante's design won. He had the idea of a Greek Cross:



It was to be topped with a dome inspired in part by the Pantheon and in part by Brunelleschi's dome in Florence. Over time, however, the design changed as different architects were put in charge of it. There was an increasing tendency to change the design from a Greek Cross to a Latin Cross, however.

The key early architect was certainly Michelangelo, in his seventies, who did not want the job but took it under pressure from Paul III. Up to him, the work had progressed very slowly, and there were many competing ideas playing off of Bramante's original conception. It was Michelangelo who unified all the previous ideas into one conception; he reverted to Bramante's Greek Cross plan, however. And it was Michelangelo, allowed a free hand, who really got the building going.

The most important contribution of Michelangelo, however, was to redesign the dome, taking ideas from all the previous suggestions and blending them together as only Michelangelo could do. He died before finishing it, however, and it has been a matter of controversy since whether the ovoid, rather than hemispherical, shape of the dome was actually Michelangelo's final intent or not.

The next major architect to be involved was Carlo Maderno, who was appointed in 1606 by Paul V. At this point, opinions were reverting back to a Latin Cross design, and there was also a general feeling that the new St. Peter's should be on the same ground as the old St. Peter's. So Maderno proposed the extension of the nave to meet both these requirements, which was built very quickly. It works beautifully, from the inside; it greatly amplifies the already significant space. The facade, which Maderno also did, is usually considered not to work quite so well.

One of the most visible things inside is the Papal Altar with its famous baldacchino:

Urban VIII appointed Gian Lorenzo Bernini papal architect after Maderno, and one of his first tasks was to design the baldachin or canopy over the Papal Altar, which only the Pope can use. Urban VIII trusted him completely: he was given a blank check, no budget restrictions at all. Bernini's design is essentially a freestanding bronze sculpture that fits neatly into the immense space beneath the dome while still allowing free view of the Cathedra Petri behind it. It took nine years to make and an immense amount of bronze that could only be obtained by raiding bronze from various sources, including the Pantheon.

It was Bernini who also created the bronze throne housing the Chair of Peter, which symbolizes the apostolic authority of Peter himself:

There are better pictures easily found online; as I mentioned before, there was a great deal of preparation going on, meaning that walking around the church was somewhat restricted and more crowded than usual, so it was difficult to take good pictures inside.

It was also Bernini who designed the striking tomb for Pope Alexander VII:

The tomb was in an odd place, right above a door, but Bernini made use of that very fact in a brilliant fashion. Notice Death itself in front, partly covered by the shroud, the skeleton with the hourglass. There are two women on each side, Charity and Truth; the one you can see from this angle is Charity.

Here is a mosaic, based on a painting by Raphael:

Vatican City, of course, has the most advanced mosaic workshop in the world, and one reason is that the major churches, like St. Peter's, have few paintings -- they use mosaics instead. But the mosaic-work is so well done that you can hardly tell that it is mosaic rather than painting if you just glance at it.

The most famous work of art in the basilica, however, is again by Michelangelo, and is so popular that they have to put it behind glass to preserve it:

And then we went out. Here is the view of St. Peter's Square from St. Peter's itself, followed by a series of pictures as we walked down and around the Square, which was itself cordoned off:

The masterstroke of Bernini's contribution to the basilica is certainly the two-part piazza, starting with a trapezoidal section near the entrance and then suddenly swinging open to a wide circular section that contextualizes the gigantic facade so that it is more easily taken in, and yet also somehow makes the whole thing seem even larger. Bramante, Raphael, Michelangelo, Maderno, Bernini, over a hundred and twenty years: this is what goes into building the world's basilica.

to be continued

Maronite Year XLI

After New Sunday, the Maronites return to the liturgy of Easter for most of the Sundays of the Resurrection Season.

Third Sunday of the Resurrection
2 Timothy 2:8-13; Luke 24:13-35

On this day the Lord arose from the tomb;
death and the devil He conquered with life,
thus giving life to Adam's progeny.

This is our gospel: Christ rose from the dead;
because of Him we fear not chain nor bond,
but bear all for the salvation of all,
dying in Him that we may live in Him,
by passion preparing to reign with Him.
Was it not thus that Christ suffered for us?

Your servants praise You, for You conquered death.
Your saints glory; You sealed them with Your Name,
thus giving life to Adam's progeny.

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part X

No cameras are allowed in the Sistine Chapel, and the people who try to get around it are hunted down by the attendants and the tour guides! So we will have to rely on something other than my own pictures to talk about the Chapel.

The Sacellum Sixtina was originally just called the Larger Chapel, Capella Maggiore; it received its current name because it was rebuilt by Pope Sixtus IV in the fifteenth century. Its importance lies in the fact that it is the official chapel of the Capella Pontificia, which is one of the two bodies making up what is called the Papal Household -- the body of people whose responsibility is to assist the Pope in his day-to-day ceremonial duties. The Pontifical Chapel in particular is concerned with the Pope's liturgical duties.

The ceiling of the chapel was originally a blue sky with stars -- very expensive, actually, since pure heavenly blue required the use of lapis lazuli in the paint; this expensive work would be undone to make way for Michelangelo about two to three decades later. The side walls had paintings by Domenico Ghirlandaio, Sandro Botticelli, and others, some of which still exist. They are in a band containing two cycles, the Life of Moses (to the south) and the Life of Christ (to the north); above these were painted a Gallery of Popes.

The most famous part of the Chapel, of course, is Michelangelo's painting, made between 1508 and 1512. He topped the Gallery of Popes with the Ancestors of Christ, put prophets and sibyls in the large pendentives, and painted panels on the ceiling itself of the Creation, the Fall, and the Deluge.

Much of the basic scheme would, however, be partially disrupted by the painting of the Last Judgment above the altar (by Michelangelo toward the end of his life), which ended up eliminating the Nativity of Jesus and the Finding of Moses, as well as several of the Popes and Ancestors.

Much of the work is excellent in its own right, but everyone comes for the ceiling:


(You can click to see more detail, and you can see a labeled version here.)

There are nine Central Stories, in three groups. I add the commentary of Giorgio Vasari from his Lives

1. The Separation of Light and Darkness
2. The Creation of the Sun, Moon and Earth
3. The Separation of Land and Water

...in order to display the perfection of art and also the greatness of God, he painted in a scene God dividing Light from Darkness, wherein may be seen His Majesty as He rests self-sustained with the arms outstretched, and reveals both love and power. In the second scene he depicted with most beautiful judgment and genius God creating the Sun and Moon, in which He is supported by many little Angels, in an attitude sublime and terrible by reason of the foreshortenings in the arms and legs. In the same scene Michelangelo depicted Him after the Blessing of the Earth and the Creation of the Animals, when He is seen on that vaulting as a figure flying in foreshortening; and wherever you go throughout the chapel, it turns constantly and faces in every direction. So, also, in the next scene, where He is dividing the Water from the Earth; and both these are very beautiful figures and refinements of genius such as could be produced only by the divine hands of Michelangelo.

4. The Creation of Adam
5. The Creation of Eve
6. The Temptation and Expulsion

He then went on, beyond that scene, to the Creation of Adam, wherein he figured God as borne by a group of nude Angels of tender age, which appear to be supporting not one figure only, but the whole weight of the world; this effect being produced by the venerable majesty of His form and by the manner of the movement with which He embraces some of the little Angels with one arm, as if to support Himself, and with the other extends the right hand towards Adam, a figure of such a kind in its beauty, in the attitude, and in the outlines, that it appears as if newly fashioned by the first and supreme Creator rather than by the brush and design of a mortal man. Beyond this, in another scene, he made God taking our mother Eve from Adam's side, in which may be seen those two nude figures, one as it were dead from his being the thrall of sleep, and the other become alive and filled with animation by the blessing of God. Very clearly do we see from the brush of this most gifted craftsman the difference that there is between sleep and wakefulness, and how firm and stable, speaking humanly, the Divine Majesty may appear.

Next to this there follows the scene when Adam, at the persuasion of a figure half woman and half serpent, brings death upon himself and upon us by the Forbidden Fruit; and there, also, are seen Adam and Eve driven from Paradise. In the figure of the Angel is shown with nobility and grandeur the execution of the mandate of a wrathful Lord, and in the attitude of Adam the sorrow for his sin together with the fear of death, as likewise in the woman may be seen shame, abasement, and the desire to implore pardon, as she presses the arms to the breast, clasps the hands palm to palm, and sinks the neck into the bosom, and also turns the head towards the Angel, having more fear of the justice of God than hope in His mercy.

7. The Sacrifice of Noah
8. The Great Flood
9. The Drunkenness of Noah

[Vasari assumes, not surprisingly, that (7) is the Sacrifice of Cain and Abel, but it is usually thought today to be the sacrifice of Noah after the Flood, the sequence of stories being displaced in order to allow a greater amount of room for the Flood itself.]

Nor is there less beauty in the story of the sacrifice of Cain and Abel; wherein are some who are bringing up the wood, some who are bent down and blowing at the fire, and others who are cutting the throat of the victim; which certainly is all executed with not less consideration and attention than the others. He showed the same art and the same judgment in the story of the Deluge, wherein are seen various deaths of men, who, terrified by the horror of those days, are striving their [Pg 35] utmost in different ways to save their lives. For in the faces of those figures may be seen life a prey to death, not less than fear, terror, and disregard of everything; and compassion is visible in many that are assisting one another to climb to the summit of a rock in search of safety, among them one who, having embraced one half dead, is striving his utmost to save him, than which Nature herself could show nothing better. Nor can I tell how well expressed is the story of Noah, who, drunk with wine, is sleeping naked, and has before him one son who is laughing at him and two who are covering him up—a scene incomparable in the beauty of the artistry, and not to be surpassed save by himself alone.

Above the altar is the famous Last Judgment, in which all are stripped naked, having nothing but their souls, some falling to hell and others rising to heaven:



Michelangelo's extensive use of nudes throughout his work stirred up quite a bit of controversy, and at least once almost led the ceiling being stripped entirely and redone.

After the Sistine Chapel we headed toward St. Peter's. Along the way there are statues in high niches. This one was particularly noticeable because it was right where we cam out:

The inscription on the base is in Latin and Armenian and identifies the statue as St. Gregory the Illuminator of Armenia. St. Gregory preached the gospel in Armenia, and in 301 he baptized the king and all his court, thus making Armenia the first officially Christian nation in the world. In 2001, Pope John Paul II was visiting Armenia for the 1700th anniversary, and agreed to a request by the Armenian Catholic patriarch to put up a statue of St. Gregory in the Vatican somewhere. A design contest was launched, and the winner was the Parisian Khachik Kazandjian, himself of Armenian background. The statue was put in the last niche that had not yet been filled, and that is where we saw it.

And so on to St. Peter's.

to be continued

Links of Note, Noted

I think I'll extend the Fortnightly Book another week so I can have time to get through all of The Return of Tarzan; last week was much, much busier than I was expecting.

* Thony Christie criticizes the tendency to inflate Galileo's achievements.

* Karl Ameriks on Kant and the historical turn

* Samuel Gregg on Benedict XVI's account of law

* How the ancient Greeks learned Latin

* An article at Aeon talks about the role of repetition in music, including the speech-to-song illusion, in which repetition of words begins to sound like singing. I'm inclined to think the phenomenon is entirely misnamed; there is no illusion at all. What is singing? Singing just is speaking with additional features like repetition, prolonging of vowels, and projection of voice, in various combinations. If you listen to Leonard Cohen, he's obviously singing, but it's also quite clear that what he is doing is not anything radically different from speaking.

* Peter Kwasniewski discusses an interesting instance of manuscript variation in the manuscript tradition for Thomas Aquinas.

And speaking of which, autograph manuscripts of Aquinas are now available at the Vatican Library website. Aquinas's handwriting is notoriously bad, so good luck to trying to read it without specializing in it.

* Elizabeth Lopatto discusses the many puzzles of lichen.

* Some half-joke philosophy articles:

David A. Horner, Whether Augustine’s Name Should Be Pronounced AW-gus-teen or aw-GUS-tin?, done in the spirit of a medieval disputation.

Garry DeWeese, Quid ergo Hipponium et Floridensis? Or, Does Horner Succeed in Referring? A Rejoinder, responding to the previous one in the style of Quine

I particularly like DeWeese's final footnote:

I want to thank David Horner, whose loyal friendship more than makes up for his locutionary failure; colleagues who tried but failed to teach me what is important to argue about; and the many students over the years whose well-intended “corrections” of my pronunciation filled much-needed voids.

Such half-joke articles, I think, serve an important function, since they pull back a bit from questions of material content to look at form, function, and method, which is something that needs to be done anyway, but is sometimes difficult to do properly in serious matters precisely because we take them seriously. That, I think, is one strand of the need for a sense of humor in intellectual life.

People have been talking about these things recently in part because of Tyron Goldschmidt's recent article, "A Demonstration of the Causal Power of Absences", which is one of the few Dialectica articles you can get complete and for free.

* Speaking of which, Goldschmidt has an interesting paper on "The Argument from Numbers"; Plantinga had suggested you could argue for God's existence from the nature of numbers, and Goldschmidt explores the strengths and weaknesses of one possible way someone might go about doing that. He doesn't really get very far, but he does rightly note the modal parallels between mathematical truths and moral truths, and the relevance of the Euthyphro problem to both.

* Andrew Ayers argues that Atticus Finch was never the sterling hero some readers made him out to be. (PDF)

* Janice Nadler, Expressive Law, Social Norms, and Social Groups (PDF)

* Cases in which King Arthur shows up in various medieval Lives of Saints.

* Nicholas Stan, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, at the SEP

* A brief debate between Bertrand Russell and G. K. Chesterton.

* MrsD on human restlessness

* An article on Henry Clay Brockmeyer, America's Hands-On Hegelian.

* Samuel Gregg on Benedict XVI's Regensburg Address

* A relatively recent blog: Medieval Logic and Semantics. It has already entirely justified its existence with a discovery of this musical version of the famous syllogistic mnemonic:



Disamis, Datisi, Disamis, Datisi, Bocardo, Bocardo, Ferison, Ferison, Ferison...

* A handy site on the Dead Sea Scrolls.

* Why Medieval Torture Devices are Not Medieval. Like a very large number of bad things pinned on the Middle Ages, they were usually invented in the modern period, although occasionally they were ancient devices of which we have no record of being used in the medieval period. Medievals did have torture -- they did not, as we have a weird tendency to do, think of it as a method of investigation, but they did regard it as sometimes justified as a punishment when the evidence against someone was considered conclusive and the person was refusing to confess in a situation in which it was important to get a confession. As the article notes, medieval torture generally consisted of unimaginative things like binding you tightly with ropes or making you stand out in the sun all day; really imaginative torture is almost always very ancient or very modern.

* And a brief article on medieval eyeglass technology.

* Researchers have discovered evidence that stories told in hagiography about how St. Eric of Sweden died have at least some truth to them.

* S. Adam Seagrave, The National Parks: 'America's Best Idea'

* Christopher Kaczor, Is Speciesism like Racism and Sexism?

* Eugene Marshall, How — and why — should we teach modern philosophy surveys to undergrads?

* An online course for learning basic Classical Chinese.

* An interesting article on recent work discovering otherwise unknown species in natural history museum collections.

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part IX

After the Hall of Muses, we passed into the Round Hall. It was quite crowded, so I didn't get a good picture of the whole hall, but you can see a picture here. The most famous sculpture in the room is the Braschi Antinous, of which I didn't get a picture. The room itself is indeed round; it's actually an homage to the Pantheon and was finished in 1779 by Michelangelo Simonetti. There is a striking basin, made of red porphyry, in the center of the room. The most remarkable thing is the floor, however. While the floor as it exists is entirely eighteenth century, it is pieced together out of 3rd century mosaics that were discovered in various parts of Italy.

Here is a detail of one of the horse's heads:

From the Round Hall we moved to the Greek Cross Hall, also designed in the 18th century by the architect Michelangelo Simonetti; it happened at the time to be the entrance to the Pio-Clementine Museum. It was also quite crowded. On each side of the hall is a massive red porphyry sarcophagus. Here is the one that is thought to have been the sarcophagus for St. Helena:

The other sarcophagus is that of one of the Emperor Constantine's daughters, probably Constantia.

Through all of this we were heading slowly to the Sistine Chapel; but as you get closer and closer to the Sistine Chapel, the crowds get thicker. Outside, it's quite noisy, while inside you're not allowed to talk more than a bare minimum. So our guide had us duck briefly into the Gregorian Etruscan Museum to talk about the Sistine Chapel. The Etruscan Museum was largely empty. Poor Etruscans! The archeological museum in Florence, which was, like the Gregorian, mostly focused on Egyptian and Etruscan exhibits, was also sparsely visited. Nobody goes sightseeing for Etruscan artifacts, apparently.

The Gregorian Etruscan Museum was founded by Pope Gregory XVI in 1837; there had begun to be a bit of a resurgence in excavation for ancient remains, and a large number of Etruscan artifacts had come into the Vatican and Lateran collections, largely from ancient Etruria (modern-day Latium), which was part of the Papal States. With the destruction of the Papal States in 1870 that flow more or less stopped, except for occasional donations and purchases. We never went further than Room I, which is concerned with the remnants of early Etruscan history (6th century BC and before). But there was a very nice piece that showed that even at that period the Etruscans could do serious artwork:

The little knobs on the bottom part are actually rows of tiny birds; they are so finely done that I could not get a good picture of them, because the camera had a difficult time focusing on them. But I did get some detail of the top part:

Having had some prior discussion of the Chapel, we then headed down that way. But as this was the Vatican, even walking in the direction of the Sistine Chapel was quite scenic. We saw some interesting ceiling paintings; there were two that were Thomas Aquinas-themed. Here is St. Thomas presenting his theological works to the Virgin Mary:

And here (my favorite) is a painting of St. Thomas's Summa Contra Gentiles, Summa Theologiae, and commentaries on Scripture defeating the philosophers of the world:

The physical representation of philosophical refutation is priceless; it almost looks at first glance like the angels have been hitting the philosophers upside the head with the books. The theme of the Triumph of St. Thomas over philosophers and heretics is a fairly common theme in paintings of the Common Doctor, but this one is interesting because it doesn't actually depict St. Thomas; it is the books themselves that are subjugating the philosophers.

We then passed by a long series of beautiful tapestries. The detail work on some of these tapestries was truly incredible, and confirms my view that tapestry should be considered one of the great fine arts:

The second of the two is almost indistinguishable from a painting if you are just glancing at it. And a very good painting, for that matter. You walk by it, and Christ's eyes follow you. What is more, wherever you are standing, no matter the angle from which you view the tapestry, Christ seems to be coming directly toward you.

After the tapestries, we came to the Gallery of Maps:

The maps along the hall show by parts the entire peninsula of Italy, with special focus on the Papal States as they existed in the sixteenth century. They should seem somewhat familiar; they were painted by Ignazio Danti, O.P., and we've come across his work before -- it was he who painted the maps in the Stanza delle Mappe geografiche in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence. The Palazzo Vecchio maps were painted in the very early 1570s, while the Vatican maps were painted in the early 1580s. Danti had left Florence to become a professor of mathematics at the University of Bologna; Pope Gregory XIII invited him to Rome to serve on the commission for calendar reform and making him the pontifical mathematician, and while he was serving in that capacity, he painted the maps.

And so we came to the Sistine Chapel itself.

to be continued

Travel Through the Land

The disposition which is fond of learning is inquisitive and exceedingly curious by nature, going everywhere without fear or hesitation and prying into every place, and not choosing to leave anything in existence, whether person or thing, not thoroughly investigated; for it is by nature extraordinarily greedy of everything that can be seen or heard, so as not only not to be satisfied with the things of its own country, but even to desire foreign things which are established at a great distance. At all events, they say that it is an absurd thing for merchants and dealers to cross the seas for the sake of gain, and to travel all round the habitable world, not allowing any considerations of summer, or winter, or violent gales, or contrary winds, or old age, or bodily sickness, or the society of friends, or the unspeakable pleasures arising from wife, or children, or one's other relations, or love of one's country, or the enjoyment of political connections, or the safe fruition of one's money and other possessions, or, in fact, anything whatever, whether great or small, to be any hindrance to them; and yet for men, for the sake of that most beautiful and desirable of all possessions, the only one which is peculiar to the human race, namely, wisdom, to be unwilling to cross over every sea and to penetrate every recess of the earth, inquiring whenever they can find anything beautiful either to see or to hear, and tracing out such things with all imaginable zeal and earnestness, until they arrive at the enjoyment of the things which are thus sought for and desired. Do thou then, O my soul, travel through the land....

Philo of Alexandria, On the Migration of Abraham, XXXIX.216-219.

A Quick Trip to Italy, Part VIII

On Thursday we headed off to meet our guide at another major attraction, one that is both in the city of Rome and in another country.

The Vatican Museums owe their existence to the fact that Pope Julius II, mostly famous for being a very arrogant leader and a very bellicose ruler, nonetheless also had excellent artistic taste. As Cardinal della Rovere, Julius had begun developing a collection of sculptures; when he became Pope, he moved his collection to the courtyard of the Villa Belvedere, a small papal summer house that had been built by Antonio del Pollaiuolo for Innocent VIII. As Pope, Julius recognized the genius of a number of the major artists whose works practically define Renaissance art at its height -- Michelangelo, Raphael, Bramante.

We can see the dome of St. Peter's rising above it all. When Julius became pope, he brought with him the best architect he had discovered when he had been cardinal, Donato Bramante, and commissioned him to design a new St. Peter's, which had fallen into some decay.

Soon we came to the Cortile della Pigna. Here we are looking across the courtyard toward the dome of St. Peter's and can see a bit of modern sculpture, as well, one of the versions of Arnaldo Pomodoro's Sfera con sfera:

The Cortile della Pigna is, of course, most famous for the Fontana della Pigna:

The Pigna was originally a sculpture set near the Pantheon as part of a fountain (it was designed so that water would come out of the top). It was at some point moved in front of the old St. Peter's Basilica, and was moved to its current location in 1608. It stands in an immense niche, the nicchione, designed by Pirro Ligorio, which was the largest niche that had ever been built. The peacocks on each side of the pinecone were copied from examples found at Hadrian's tomb the Castel Sant'Angelo). The pinecone, famous in its own right, was granted immortality in Dante's Inferno, Canto XXXI, in which Dante, who had seen it while it was in front of the old St. Peter's, refers to it in order to explain how large the giant Nimrod is:

La faccia sua mi parea lunga e grossa
come la pina di San Pietro a Roma,
e a sua proporzione eran l'altre ossa....

The Courtyard of the Pinecone is a part of what once was a much larger courtyard. While the new St. Peter's was being built, Julius also asked Bramante to design a way of connecting the Villa Belvedere with the Vatican Palace, and the Cortile del Belvedere was born. It was not a minor project, since the sides of the Vatican Palace and the Villa Belvedere were out of parallel and were separated by a steep slope; and thus the relatively regular appearance was quite an achievement. Bramante himself did not live to see the completion of it; that was done by Pirro Ligorio. Pope Sixtus V, however, would break up the unity of the courtyard and the general integrity of the design by running a wing of the Vatican Library across the middle of the courtyard. (It is widely said that he did so deliberately in order to shield the pagan statues from view.) The upper terrace is the current Cortile della Pigna, and the lower terrace retains the name of the Cortile del Belvedere. The main Vatican Museums are along the wings of the original courtyard.

We only saw part of the Vatican Museums, but we did get a good look at parts of the Museo Pio-Clementino, which is focused on sculpture. Here, for instance, are a great many classical busts:

The primary attraction of the Pio-Clementine, however, is the Octagonal Court, formerly known as the Cortile delle Statue. In this one space we have some of the purest typical expressions of classical and neo-classical sculpture. Two of these are especially important. The first is the Apollo Belvedere:

The history of this statue is a bit murky. We know that it was already in Julius II's possession when he became pope, but we don't know how he got it. It is usually thought to be an AD second-century Roman copy of a fourth-century BC Greek statue by the great Greek sculptor Leochares (whose patron was Alexander the Great). The left hand and part of the right arm had been lost through the centuries, and the ones currently in place were added by a student of Michelangelo. Once Julius II put it on display in the courtyard, it became widely copied by Renaissance artists, and it would become the exemplar work for neo-classical sculpture. Napoleon stole it during his 1796 campaign, where it was housed in the Louvre; Rome got it back in 1815 after Napoleon's exile.

The second major work in the Octagonal Court is the Laocoön:

Laocoön was a priest of Poseidon; there are a large number of different stories about why Poseidon punished him by having him and his sons destroyed by great serpents. Sophocles says it was because Laocoön married; Virgil says it was because he tried to prove that the Trojan Horse was a trap. This group of figures is usually thought, on the authority of Pliny the Elder, to have been the work of three sculptors from Rhodes, assuming that we have the same statue (Natural History, XXXVII, 4):

Beyond these, there are not many sculptors of high repute; for, in the case of several works of very great excellence, the number of artists that have been engaged upon them has proved a considerable obstacle to the fame of each, no individual being able to engross the whole of the credit, and it being impossible to award it in due proportion to the names of the several artists combined. Such is the case with the Laocoön, for example, in the palace of the Emperor Titus, a work that may be looked upon as preferable to any other production of the art of painting or of statuary. It is sculptured from a single block, both the main figure as well as the children, and the serpents with their marvellous folds. This group was made in concert by three most eminent artists, Agesander, Polydorus, and Athenodorus, natives of Rhodes.

The group we have is not, in fact, sculpted from a single block, but consists of seven interlocking pieces, but it could very well be that Pliny was simply mistaken. In any case, the association with the one described by Pliny has lingered with the statue since it was rediscovered in a vineyard near St. Mary Major in 1506; Julius II, hearing about it, sent Michelangelo and Giuliano da Sangallo to see if it was worth buying. Since it obviously was, Julius II bought it, and it was his putting it on display along with the Apollo that is the first step in the creation of the Vatican Museums. Like the Apollo, the Laocoön was taken to France by Napoleon and returned to Rome after Napoleon's defeat.

A third sculpture is also of note, the Peseus Triumphant, which was sculpted at the turn of the nineteenth century by Antonio Canova, and which shows what neoclassical sculpture was able to accomplish on the basis of its inspiration by these works:

From the Octagonal Court we moved to the Hall of Muses, where one can find the Belvedere Torso:

According to legend, Julius II asked Michelangelo to complete the fragment, but Michelangelo refused because it was too beautiful to modify. And it is arguably the only classical sculpture that has been even more influential and important than the Apollo and the Laocoön.

All of this was great indeed, but we were hardly begun.

to be continued

A New Poem Draft and a Poem Re-Draft

This World of Woe, So Wonderless, So Bland, So Sad

This world of woe, so wonderless, so bland, so sad,
blasé in worldly wisdom, yet unwise,
will blather words of love, for words are all it's had,
and never will have else, for love it does despise.

The worldly sages sigh in unfulfilling dreams;
they build up vanities to light a raging blaze.
Their meanings are banal, no matter how they seem,
for love is flame so bright it would their vision daze.

Amen, I say to you, they have their one reward.
The only love they have is symbol of their hearts,
a snake that eats its tail, a self-inflicting sword,
a legacy soon lost to folly, part by part.

And you -- take care to love, not love as madmen rave,
but love that seeks the good, that by the good can save.


Angels with Their Feline Faces

Angels with their feline faces
soaring through the empty spaces
meow a song like godly graces;
they sport in ecstasy.

Every wing like wild flowers
sparkles with some hidden power,
turning minute into hour
and aeviternity.

   Play the tambrel and the drum;
   Juda's lion is now come.

Whiskers white with zeal are burning
in the wheels of love now turning,
emblems of some endless yearning,
in spheres most heavenly.

Eyes like slits of searing fire,
sparks of infinite desire,
pour out light in swaying gyre
of cosmic liturgy.

   Lions roar above my head,
   praising Zion newly wed.

Like a shawm for holy masses
like wind through spiring garden grasses,
prayer of the saints now passes
through angelic harmonies.

Every halo like a story
wraps around the world with glory,
burning like the heavens hoary
with frosty dignity.

   Send the message far and wide:
   the Lion-Lamb has wed his Bride!

These ministers of wind and flame,
moving in their spirit-game,
praise the everlasting name
of true divinity.

A purr goes out throughout the ages:
though the dragon shouts and rages
his doom is writ in sacred pages
of God's vitality.

   Rejoice, for they have slain the Beast;
   rejoice and join the wedding feast!

Making a Peaceful and Decent Future a Little More Probable

If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and — to return to my first instance — toads, one makes a peaceful and decent future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

George Orwell, "Some Thoughts on the Common Toad"

Feast of the Incarnation

The Feast of the Annunciation is unusually late this year for everyone on the Gregorian calendar, because March 25 fell across Easter Triduum, which are the most holy days of the year and thus capable of displacing even so ancient and important a feast as Annunciation. The Annunciation then gets displaced to the next appropriate day. It was last Tuesday for the Maronites, but the Latin Church only gets to it today. The reason for the difference is the Easter Octave. Venerable feasts of especially great importance were extended out, so to speak, as eight-day feasts. Thus the full week after a feast takes on something of the importance of the feast starting the octave. The custom became especially popular in the West, which began to have so many octaves that it became quite unruly, which led to attempts at organization in the nineteenth century (which were not especially successful) and finally, in 1955 Pius XII eliminated all octaves except for three: Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost. [In the Ordinary Form, the Pentecost Octave was also eventually eliminated (which was arguably a mistake, since it included some of the most venerable and influential prayers in the calendar).] So we have been in Easter Octave, with each day its own solemnity and extension of Easter itself, with the result that, in the Latin Church, today was the first day that could take the Feast of the Annunciation.

Feast of the Annunciation
by Christina Rossetti

Whereto shall we liken this Blessed Mary Virgin,
Faithful shoot from Jesse's root graciously emerging?
Lily we might call her, but Christ alone is white;
Rose delicious, but that Jesus is the one Delight;
Flower of women, but her Firstborn is mankind's one flower:
He the Sun lights up all moons thro' their radiant hour.
'Blessed among women, highly favoured,' thus
Glorious Gabriel hailed her, teaching words to us:
Whom devoutly copying we too cry 'All hail!'
Echoing on the music of glorious Gabriel.

Edmund Duncan Montgomery

Last week I happened to go to the Elisabet Ney Museum here in Austin. Elisabet Ney (1833-1907), who was grandniece of Marshal Ney of the Napoleonic Wars fame, was a German sculptor. She had wanted to be a sculptor since she was young (perhaps because her father was a stonecarver himself); her parents opposed it, so she went on a hunger strike, and was serious enough about it that her parents finally sent her to the Munich Academy of Art. She opened a studio in Berlin in 1857 and began to have various important men sit for her. One of the museum's important pieces is a bust of Arthur Schopenhauer. Elisabet married (reluctantly, because she was opposed to marriage as an institution, and while the marriage seems largely to have been a happy one, she continued to treat the fact of being married as a legal technicality and nothing more) a Scottish philosopher and doctor named Edmund Montgomery, and Montgomery, who saw Schopenhauer and his poodles regularly, convinced the pessimist to have his features sculpted. Among her other commissions were busts of Jacob Grimm, Otto Bismarck, Giuseppe Garibaldi, and Richard Wagner. She eventually emigrated with her husband to Texas, where the Texas state legislature eventually began paying her for various sculpted portraits. Her works are found throughout the world, and there are a fair number in the Texas State Capitol and the U.S. Capitol, but the Elisabet Ney Museum has the largest collection. The Museum itself was the studio she set up in Austin, which she called Formosa.

Obviously, one of the things I found interesting was the philosopher Edmund Montgomery (1835-1911), about whom I don't think I had heard before. It turns out he was well respected and rather prolific, with a large number of articles in Mind, The Monist, and the International Journal of Ethics. There was a brief resurgence of interest in him in the 1950s, but other than that he seems to have faded completely from view (as many respected philosophers at that time have). He continued his scientific work to the end (at one point studying protoplasm and one-celled organisms every day for five years straight). He was a sort of vitalist, and so one of the running themes in his scientific work is that it is impossible for life to be nothing but an interaction of cells. One of his usual points, found, for instance, in "Are we 'Cell Aggregates'?" (Mind 7.25 (1882): 100–107), is that by definition a cell is a relatively autonomous unit, so the claim amounts to saying that all activities of living organism consist of nutrition and very limited cell-to-cell stimulations, which leaves mysterious how any of it gets coordinated at all. One of the things he was particularly interested in, on this point, was the capacity of complex organisms to rebuild and reconstitute themselves. His conclusion was that organisms are in fact relatively fundamental unities; composed of many molecules, they nonetheless in some ways function as if they were single molecules. His position seems to me to be sometimes misrepresented -- his claim is not that there weren't biological units we could call cells, but that it is not possible to understand cells fully except as parts of living organisms -- even with unicellular organisms, it is their integrative activity as organisms, not their relative autonomy as cells, that is the primary principle of explanation. His own view was that biological phenomena strongly indicated that life consisted in an "identical, indivisible, perdurable, and self-sustaining substance" (“The Substantiality of Life”. Mind 6.23 (1881): 321–349), a sort of monad integrating the various phenomena we associate with living things. He often calls this the vital organization, thus leading to the name occasionally given to his philosophy -- the Philosophy of Organization.

Another of his ideas, closely related to this, was that psychology was the purest science, because it was the only one in which the phenomena are directly observed -- all other sciences are built entirely on psychological phenomena and our assumptions about them. (See on this point, for instance, “The Unity of the Organic Individual”. Mind 5.20 (1880): 465–489, particularly 488-489.) He was also firmly opposed throughout his philosophical career to the notion that we could have any kind of a priori knowledge, so he thought that psychology could only serve in this role if it recognized that consciousness was interacting with a real world:

I am confident that positive proof of the existence of a world of efficient powers beyond our conscious content -- a world to which our own efficient Subject belongs -- can be readily given to all who admit the existence of other beings like themselves. For it is incontestable, and in keeping with the forceless character of psychical occurrences, that we become conscious of the existence of other beings, not in the least through awareness of anything forming part of their conscious content. When we perceive another human being, this perception does not contain any of his conscious states.

[“Mental Activity”. Mind 14.56 (1889): 501-502; emphasis in original]

In a sense, he can be seen as trying to find a middle way between idealism on the one side and mechanical materialism on the other; this aspect of his view he often calls Naturalism.

Despite his prolific publication, Montgomery was relatively isolated from the main streams of intellectual activity, and has occasionally been given the epithet 'the Hermit Philosopher of Liendo', Liendo being the name of his plantation in Hempstead, Texas.

A Sort of Translation

Reason itself was there in the beginning, and Reason was with God, and Reason was God; he was with God in the very beginning. Everything was made through him, and nothing that was made, was made without him. There was life in him, and that life was light to the human race. That light shines in darkness; darkness could not grasp him. A man named John, sent from God, came for testimony, to testify about the light, so that through him everyone might believe. That man was not the light, but he did testify about the light.

The true light enlightens everyone born into the world. He was in this world, which was made through him, but the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his; what was his did not accept him. But those who did accept him, who believed in who he was, received from him the authority to become God's children, not by blood, not by physical impulse, not by voluntary choice, but by God. So Reason itself was made physical, living among us; indeed, we saw his splendor, a splendor belonging to the Father's one offspring, full of blessing and truth. About him, John testifies out loud, 'Here is the one about whom I said that the one after me came before me, for this man was before me.'

We have received blessing upon blessing from his abundance. Torah was given through Moses, but blessing and truth come from Jesus Christ: No human eye has ever seen God, but the Father's one offspring, who is in his Father's heart, has told of him.

(John 1:1-14)

Maronite Year XL

The Second Sunday of the Resurrection is usually called New Sunday in the Maronite Church, although in typical Maronite fashion, they also use the Latin Church name of Divine Mercy Sunday. The focus of the Sunday is on the appearance of Christ to the disciples after the Resurrection.

New Sunday
2 Corinthians 5:11-21; John 20:26-31

When the goodness of our Savior God appeared,
not by our justice but by His mercy He saved,
washing us clean with the baptismal waters,
anointing us with the renewal of the Spirit
who pours forth with glory from Christ our Savior,
adopting us heirs to a life everlasting.

Who is in Christ, a new creation becomes;
the old man is vanished in rebirth of new life,
as God, who has justified us through His grace,
is reconciling us to Himself through Jesus.
For the kindness of our Savior God has come,
bringing us resurrection of soul and body.

By Your resurrection, Lord, You joined all things,
uniting heaven and earth into one great choir.
In the Upper Room You manifested truth,
bringing peace and consolation from Your rising.
Therefore we confess Your true divinity,
Your humanity, and Your generosity.