Clean water must be found, strong walls erected. Sand, lime, flooring, stucco? Their use in building, we’re reminded here, is a product of civilization, of men and women trying and failing and trying again, of teaching themselves and passing their hard-won knowledge to later generations.
Hidden within this dry architectural treatise lurks a surprisingly inspiring tale of our species.
The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Aarchitects, Painters, and Sculptors
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By Giorgio Vasari
First published in 1550, revised and enlarged in 1568
Giorgio Vasari was a child of the Renaissance. When he was born in 1511 near Florence, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Titian, and Michelangelo were among the day’s working artists. Vasari himself became an architect and painter of no mean note, but by history’s more demanding gauge, his were only modest gifts. Today he is best remembered not for his images, which include frescoes in the Palazzo Vecchio, but for his words.
Still, by the narrowest literary standards, The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors—which spans the two centuries from Cimabue and Giotto, through Donatello and Alberti, to Correggio and Michelangelo—exerts only a weak claim on immortality. The biographies follow a none-too-varied format—birth, apprenticeship and early success, leading works, death. They are littered with superlatives that come too freely to be completely trusted. And even making allowance for the vagaries of translation, their prose is uninspired.
“Without any doubt this figure has put in the shade every other statue, ancient or modern, Greek or Roman ...The grace of this figure and the serenity of its pose have never been surpassed, nor have the feet, the hands and the head, whose harmonious proportions and loveliness are in keeping with the rest ...Anyone who has seen [it] has no need to see anything else by any other sculptor, living or dead.” That’s Vasari on Michelangelo’s David, his judgment reasonable enough, his enthusiasm properly contained.
What The Lives does uniquely offer is a glimpse into a time and place that boasted perhaps the most inspired concentration of visual artists in history. There, nourished by the warm Italian sun, Ghiberti sculpted his famous Gates of Paradise for the doors of the Baptistry in Florence. Botticelli created The Birth of Venus, Brunelleschi designed the Duomo in Florence, Leonardo composed the Last Supper, and Michelangelo—the culminating genius of the period and Vasari’s friend and mentor—painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
Whatever Vasari’s failings as artist or biographer, he was astute enough to see that in the artists of that blessed age, he was on to something. Today, The Lives offers glimpses of the leading figures of the Italian Renaissance that are, in some instances, all we have.
Vasari traveled widely, knew everyone. His biographies are stocked with anecdotes. For example, Leonardo would buy cages full of live birds at the public market—then set them free. Raphael, run ragged by an apparently overactive libido, came back from one sexual escapade with a violent fever, and died, at the age of 37. And once, one of Michelangelo’s patrons, Soderini, came to see David in the studio and complained that the nose seemed too thick. The chisel-wielding Michelangelo obligingly mounted the scaffolding around the 18-foot sculpture and, just out of Soderini’s sight, made a show of activity that stirred up a cloud of marble dust.
“Now look,” he said, finally.
“Ah, that’s much better,” replied Soderini, inspecting this “new” David. “Now you’ve really brought it to life.”
In 16th-century Florence, artists had the status that athletes or entertainers do today. Popes and dukes advanced prodigious sums for paintings and sculpture, friezes and tombs, in their own honor or for the glory of God. The apprenticeship system assured a rich supply of new talent; if Michelangelo wouldn’t take you on, maybe Raphael would.
For an artist, it was a wonderful time to be alive.
Vasari sensed it, and capitalized on it. Our age can only be grateful.
The Seven Lamps of Architecture
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By John Ruskin
First published in 1849
For 50 years, he was the most powerful influence on the English public in matters of art. John Ruskin, the Victorian critic and essayist, was never shy about saying what he thought about anything, least of all architecture: A building, he declared, should be designed for the ages; to “restore” it is an affront to the memory of its original builders. Cast ironwork is an abomination. Giotto’s Campanile is “the model and mirror of perfect architecture.” The classic Greek key design is “a vile concatenation of straight lines.” The portcullis, or iron grill, much beloved by Tudor architects, is “a monster, absolutely and unmitigatedly frightful.”
These views, and more, expressed with equal adamancy, appear in The Seven Lamps of Architecture. Together with The Stones of Venice, it forms the core of Ruskin’s architectural thinking. The “seven lamps” correspond to seven principles he offers as guidance to the architect—though, of course, the number is arbitrary at best: In a note to a later edition, he refers to his earlier “difficulty ...of keeping my Seven Lamps from becoming Eight—or Nine—or even quite a vulgar row of foot lights.”
No matter; it was all just a means to let fly with his architectural pronunciamentos: Ruskin insists that buildings be built with honest materials lovingly wielded; that the best ornamental work is done in frank admiration of nature, as in much Gothic architecture; that architects build with restraint, in obedience to the dictates of national styles. Exercising that self-restraint, says he, leaves one’s “imagination playful and vigorous, as a child’s would be within a walled garden, who would sit down and shudder if he were left free in a fenceless plain.”
While Ruskin’s prose is sometimes overwrought, his perceptions are often exquisitely keen, plainly the product of much close viewing throughout the architectural capitals of Europe. Out of the sodden mass of diffuse feeling that overwhelms most of us when confronted with some impressive structure, Ruskin extracts real meaning. For example, in the special pleasure many feel for anything wrought beautifully by hand, he conceives an offering on the part of the craftsman, a communion between spirits that simply doesn’t occur with machine-made products.
A moralistic flavor runs through all this, not surprising in one whose parents were both strict evangelists and who made him, as a child, commit lengthy Bible passages to memory. Sometimes, in a rising crescendo of pulpit oratory, groaning with grand sentiments and dripping with moral fervor, Ruskin lets things get out of hand: “Exactly as a woman of feeling would not wear false jewels, so would a builder of honor disdain false ornaments,” he says, mildly enough. But then: “You use that which pretends to have cost, and to be, what it did not, and is not; it is an imposition, a vulgarity, an impertinence, and a sin. Down with it to the ground, grind it to powder, leave its ragged place upon the wall.”
All this was written before 1849, when Ruskin was barely 30. Might he have written otherwise had he been older, more mature, perhaps more balanced in his judgments? We know the answer because a new edition of the book appeared in 1880, with Ruskin’s comments on the original sprinkled liberally throughout. It’s entertaining to hear the elder Ruskin take the younger to task. But he’s no less dogmatic than before, and maybe more.
Back in 1849, for example, Ruskin had condemned heraldic designs as “so professedly and pointedly unnatural that it would be difficult to invent anything uglier.” Three decades later, he recants: “This paragraph is wholly false,” he writes, without really explaining why, except to say: “Enough is said in praise of heraldry in my later books to atone for this piece of nonsense.”
There’s other nonsense in The Seven Lamps of Architecture for which Ruskin never atones—notions that a century later seem silly or simply arbitrary. For example, while stating categorically that “whatever is pretended is wrong,” he argues that ornamental gilding is all right because people are used to the deception by now.
Still, much else here penetrates to the heart of how we see and respond to architecture. After reading it—especially in any edition graced, like the original, with Ruskin’s own fine engravings—one is apt never to see a Gothic cathedral in quite the same way again. And even when Ruskin spouts nonsense, his special blustery brand of it is so entertaining it hardly matters.
The Nude:
A Study in Ideal Form
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By Kenneth Clark
First published in 1956
“What is the nude?” asks Kenneth Clark. “It is an art form invented by the Greeks in the fifth century (B.C.), just as opera is an art form invented in 17th-century Italy. The conclusion is certainly too abrupt, but it has the merit of emphasizing that the nude is not the subject of art, but a form of art.”
Let us be plain: Clark’s study of the nude in art is a work of formal scholarship and criticism. Available in book form only through a university publisher, it was originally presented as a lecture series at the National Gallery of Art in 1953. The author writes in a rich Latinate prose that, while elegant, is not easy. His erudition is daunting; many of his references to artists, paintings, and periods will escape the lay reader. And the shades of feeling, the nuances of idea, that he can discern in a work of art are sometimes so gossamer-thin one can scarcely get a hand on them at all.
And yet, of its kind, The Nude has already become something of a classic, a work so vigorous and human that it transcends the usual limitations of its form.
Right from the beginning, Clark distinguishes—or rather, as he says in a rhythm characteristic of his prose, “The English language, with its elaborate generosity, distinguishes”—between the naked and the nude. “To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes, and the word implies some of the embarrassment most of us feel in that condition. The word ‘nude,’ on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone. The vague image it projects into the mind is not of a huddled and defenseless body, but of a balanced, prosperous, and confident body: the body re-formed.”
In each of the nine chapters, Clark traces how particular ideas and human motifs—Apollo-like reason, beauty, energy, pathos, and the like—have been represented through the nude since antiquity.
For example, he notes that in his work, Temperance, the fourteenth century Italian sculptor Pisano “Christianized” the goddess Venus through “the turn and expression of the head. Instead of looking in the same direction as her body, and thus confirming her existence in the present, she turns and looks upward over her shoulder toward the promised world of the future ... Govianni Pisano had discovered a gesture that was to become the recognized expression of other-worldly longing.” Hundreds of such insights bejewel the text.
To Clark, “the naked body is no more than the point of departure for a work of art.” But what a “point of departure” it is! Unlike a landscape, say, it touches us directly as humans; we see ourselves in it. And its eroticism gives it just that extra tension that artists through the centuries have sought to transmute into higher feeling. Nudes sexy? Clark quotes one professor’s scold that “if the nude is so treated that it raises in the spectator ideas or desires appropriate to the material subject, it is false art, and bad morals.” Nonsense, says Clark, “No nude, however abstract, should fail to arouse in the spectator some vestige of erotic feeling ... and if it does not do so, it is bad art and false morals.”
In a sense, The Nude offers an erotically skewed course in the history of art. Are not most of the greats well-represented here? Polykleitos and Praxiteles are. So are Michelangelo and Botticelli, Picasso and Renoir, along with reproductions—298 of them—of their work. The Nude is like a perfect detail isolated from a larger canvas.
The Elements of Style
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By William Strunk, Jr. and E. B. White
Earliest edition, by Strunk alone, appeared in 1918
First joint edition appeared in 1959.
The world would be a better place if everybody read The Elements of Style; if it were read not just by writers and journalists, but by all who write legal briefs, job applications, love letters, or notes to the teacher; read even by those who never write anything. Even a single reading of the Strunk and White classic imparts at least temporary immunity to bureaucratic gobbledygook, technocratic jargon and psychobabble. If we all wrote and spoke clearly, without resort to weasel words and fuzzy generalities, maybe we’d all feel more at home with one another.
This is not too grand a judgment to make of so slim a book; it is not making too much of it. The Elements of Style stands as a monument to clear thinking articulately voiced. Indeed, the terrible problem any writer faces in reviewing it is simply to live up to its injunctions. As the words click from the keyboard, he’s apt to feel Messrs. Strunk and White peering over his shoulder, remarking on each empty phrase and murky thought.
William Strunk, Jr. was a Cornell professor who, back in 1918, had his little rule book on prose expression printed privately. A revised edition appeared in 1935. Twenty-two years later, a former student of Strunk, the noted essayist E. B. White, wrote a New Yorker piece about “my friend and teacher” Strunk and his book. In 1959, with that piece to serve as introduction, The Elements of Style reappeared with revisions, deletions, and a new chapter by White. This is the edition better known today as “Strunk and White” than by its formal title.
White’s charming introductory tribute to Strunk leads off this guidebook. It is followed by a chapter on rules of usage, another on principles of composition, and a concise rundown of “Words and Expressions Commonly Misused.” The final chapter is White’s own “Approach to Style,” advanced through Strunkian rules such as “Do not affect a breezy manner,” and “Write with nouns and verbs.”
None of this, of course, hints at the sparkling clarity here; it is a delight to read and for the first-time reader, may be experienced as revealed wisdom. “Prefer the specific to the general,” is the essential Strunk speaking. For example, he says, the sentence “He showed satisfaction as he took possession of his well-earned reward” just won’t do; much better is “He grinned as he pocketed the coin.” And we grin in recognition of Truth.
In the clear, crystalline world of Strunk and White, acts of a hostile character become hostile acts. The phrase in the last analysis is “bankrupt”; the word interesting is “unconvincing ... Instead of announcing that what you are about to tell is interesting, make it so.” As for an occasional colloquialism, “simply use it; do not draw attention to it by enclosing it in quotation marks. To do so is to put on airs, as though you were inciting the reader to join you in a select society of those who know better.”
The final chapter on writing style displays all White’s own mastery of the essay form. “Writing,” he says, “becomes a question of learning to make occasional wing shots, bringing down the bird of thought as it flashes by. A writer is a gunner, sometimes waiting in his blind for something to come in, sometimes roaming the countryside hoping to scare something up.” Then come 21 of White’s own rules, echoing the voice of his mentor—as when he describes words like rather, very, little, pretty as “leeches that infest the pond of prose, sucking the blood of words.”
One paragraph appears twice within The Elements of Style. Originally penned by Strunk in advancing his dictum to “Omit needless words,” White repeats it verbatim in his introduction. Here it is:
“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.
“There you have a short, valuable essay on the nature and beauty of brevity,” wrote White. “Sixty-three words that could change the world.”
VIII
One-Of-A-Kinds
A Room of One�
��s Own — Virginia Woolf
The American Language — H. L. Mencken
The Little Prince — Antoine de Saint Exupery
The Education of Henry Adams — Henry Adams
Flatland — Edwin A. Abbott
Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston
A Mathematician’s Apology — G. H. Hardy
My Life — Isadora Duncan
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas Kuhn
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Some books that could be seen as falling under some other category nonetheless seem unique—absolutely distinctive, one-of-a-kind. Whether by virtue of the idea that drives it, as in Flatland, or the peculiar voice that marks it, as in The Education of Henry Adams, or by the sheer power of its argument, as in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, these are books that can never be mistaken for any other.
A Room of One’s Own
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By Virginia Woolf
First published in 1929
In October, 1928, at the age of 47, the great English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf was asked to give a series of lectures on the subject “Women and Fiction.” Now, imagine that subject in the hands of your garden-variety pedagogue. Imagine the tired theorizing, the belabored academic posturing, the gray tide of literary references. And imagine such a discourse’s likely effects upon the hapless listeners.
By a brilliant lecturer, the talk might conceivably turn out provocative, even profound. But downright pleasurable? A sheer delight? Enchanting?
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