Lucille Turner's Blog, page 2
August 24, 2016
Turkey's Ottoman Dream
We are living in turbulent times. Regime change is happening around us in many countries for reasons that are unclear to the common of mortals. Where is it leading? As Turkish President Recep Erdogan voices his desire to take Turkey back to the glory days of the Ottoman Empire, you have to wonder what kind of empire he is talking about, a kingdom of prosperity, or a Caliphate of cruelty?
I have been living in a fictionalised version of the Ottoman Empire for the past two years, writing my second historical novel, The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer. What I have discovered about the Ottoman, or the Osman dynasty, as it was known, has both terrified and fascinated me. It clearly fascinates a good number of modern Turks too, as is evident from recent films by Turkish directors, such as Fetih 1453 and numerous others that glorify the seizing of Constantinople, the ancient Byzantine capital, by Mehmet the Conqueror.
Undeniably the Ottoman Empire was highly successful. It was Muslim expansionism in action; the Ottoman Sultanate had a strong religious hierarchy behind it called the Ulema. Religion aside, and on a more optimistic note, trade and the arts flourished under the Ottomans, and some ethnic minorities, such as the Jews, were mostly welcomed. The millet system gave a good deal of administrative autonomy to ethnic minorities; they were permitted to rule themselves as long as they remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire. Individuals could rise through the ranks of the social and military system on the basis of merit, but again, as long as no dissent was heard. On the surface of things, it seemed reasonable enough.
So, let’s take a closer look at the Ottoman success story:
The Ottomans converted a large number of Christians to Islam in the Balkan countries they occupied.
Because remaining a non-Muslim meant giving up your sons to slavery and paying high taxes.
The Ottoman dynasty lasted 600 years
But cruelty became an almost Darwinian factor, since the practice of fratricide (killing male relatives who had a claim to the throne) meant that only the most ruthless members of the dynasty ever became Sultan.
The loyalty of the Viziers, the governing body, meant that there was little real dissent
But the execution of Viziers was commonplace, so much so that a Grand Vizier was said to tuck his will in his robe every morning on leaving his chambers, just in case today was not his day.
The Sultans of the Ottoman Empire wielded great power
But many Ottoman heirs were badly prepared for that power by a practice of virtual imprisonment within the harem, which would have done little more then increase their sex drive.
The Ottoman Empire gained significant territories during its 600-year rule
But it did so at the point of a sword; the Ottoman armies were so feared by Western Christendom that even the mention of them was enough to strike terror into the minds of its citizens, a terror that reverberates even today for that matter, at the thought of any Islamic army.
To be fair to the Ottoman Turks, Western Europe was not behaving much better than they were, at the time. The Italian city-states had spawned a series of condottiere warlords, like Cesare Borgia, for instance, who probably also knocked his brother off for the sake of power. Even in Florence, Renaissance jewel of beauty and art, noblemen were being stabbed in cathedrals by cardinals without so much as an Ave Maria Amen. And fifteenth century England was hardly a beacon of principle. Henry VIII was limbering up to a serious amount of familicide, and his henchman Thomas Cromwell had at his disposal a torture rack worthy of the Spanish Inquisition — whose imaginative range of equipment was sufficient to provoke a gritting of teeth and a crossing of legs in all but the unfeeling.
Violence, then, was fairly commonplace in much of the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is the standards of our present time that make it unacceptable to us. But yet more worrying is the desire to return to those fifteenth century standards. For Turkey to dream of a renewal of old Ottoman ways would be a little like Queen Elisabeth wishing she could send her spouse to the Tower. It simply isn’t done any more. Without a doubt, many countries do look back at their golden age of empire and dream of repeating it, but that, I venture to say, would be a grave error. There is rot at the core of Empire. Holding a large number of conquered countries together requires either great flexibility (which leads to the dissolution of the empire in any case) or great ruthlessness (which may work but only for a while), because at the end of the day it is about one people imposing their will on another and that can never truly be right.
Sign up on the homepage at www.lucilleturner.com to find out what my new book, "The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer" is all about!
I have been living in a fictionalised version of the Ottoman Empire for the past two years, writing my second historical novel, The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer. What I have discovered about the Ottoman, or the Osman dynasty, as it was known, has both terrified and fascinated me. It clearly fascinates a good number of modern Turks too, as is evident from recent films by Turkish directors, such as Fetih 1453 and numerous others that glorify the seizing of Constantinople, the ancient Byzantine capital, by Mehmet the Conqueror.
Undeniably the Ottoman Empire was highly successful. It was Muslim expansionism in action; the Ottoman Sultanate had a strong religious hierarchy behind it called the Ulema. Religion aside, and on a more optimistic note, trade and the arts flourished under the Ottomans, and some ethnic minorities, such as the Jews, were mostly welcomed. The millet system gave a good deal of administrative autonomy to ethnic minorities; they were permitted to rule themselves as long as they remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire. Individuals could rise through the ranks of the social and military system on the basis of merit, but again, as long as no dissent was heard. On the surface of things, it seemed reasonable enough.
So, let’s take a closer look at the Ottoman success story:
The Ottomans converted a large number of Christians to Islam in the Balkan countries they occupied.
Because remaining a non-Muslim meant giving up your sons to slavery and paying high taxes.
The Ottoman dynasty lasted 600 years
But cruelty became an almost Darwinian factor, since the practice of fratricide (killing male relatives who had a claim to the throne) meant that only the most ruthless members of the dynasty ever became Sultan.
The loyalty of the Viziers, the governing body, meant that there was little real dissent
But the execution of Viziers was commonplace, so much so that a Grand Vizier was said to tuck his will in his robe every morning on leaving his chambers, just in case today was not his day.
The Sultans of the Ottoman Empire wielded great power
But many Ottoman heirs were badly prepared for that power by a practice of virtual imprisonment within the harem, which would have done little more then increase their sex drive.
The Ottoman Empire gained significant territories during its 600-year rule
But it did so at the point of a sword; the Ottoman armies were so feared by Western Christendom that even the mention of them was enough to strike terror into the minds of its citizens, a terror that reverberates even today for that matter, at the thought of any Islamic army.
To be fair to the Ottoman Turks, Western Europe was not behaving much better than they were, at the time. The Italian city-states had spawned a series of condottiere warlords, like Cesare Borgia, for instance, who probably also knocked his brother off for the sake of power. Even in Florence, Renaissance jewel of beauty and art, noblemen were being stabbed in cathedrals by cardinals without so much as an Ave Maria Amen. And fifteenth century England was hardly a beacon of principle. Henry VIII was limbering up to a serious amount of familicide, and his henchman Thomas Cromwell had at his disposal a torture rack worthy of the Spanish Inquisition — whose imaginative range of equipment was sufficient to provoke a gritting of teeth and a crossing of legs in all but the unfeeling.
Violence, then, was fairly commonplace in much of the world during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It is the standards of our present time that make it unacceptable to us. But yet more worrying is the desire to return to those fifteenth century standards. For Turkey to dream of a renewal of old Ottoman ways would be a little like Queen Elisabeth wishing she could send her spouse to the Tower. It simply isn’t done any more. Without a doubt, many countries do look back at their golden age of empire and dream of repeating it, but that, I venture to say, would be a grave error. There is rot at the core of Empire. Holding a large number of conquered countries together requires either great flexibility (which leads to the dissolution of the empire in any case) or great ruthlessness (which may work but only for a while), because at the end of the day it is about one people imposing their will on another and that can never truly be right.
Sign up on the homepage at www.lucilleturner.com to find out what my new book, "The Sultan, the Vampyr and the Soothsayer" is all about!
August 17, 2016
Religious Extremism and the Mad Friar of Florence
There is nothing new about religious extremism. We have endured it throughout history and we continue to feel its effects today, not just in Muslim countries but all around us. Nor is it the sole product of the Muslim faith; religious extremists have come from other faiths too at different periods in our shared past. The solution to religious extremism is said to be democracy. Democracy promotes the need for religious tolerance and acceptance of our right to differ, but it takes time to instil. There is no magic recipe for it. You cannot implant it like a new organ in an ailing body and expect that it will take overnight. What then is religious extremism, and how does it arise?
Religious extremism means taking a set of beliefs to their very limit, and applying them. Those who do this commit themselves to promoting or carrying out purposely hurtful, violent or destructive acts against others.
Certainly in today’s world religious extremism is often about terrorist acts in the name of religion, but this hasn’t always been the case. At other times in history it was not technically about harming people but about redeeming them. You could say that it was seen as constructive extremism. It was, if you like, about imposing your views on others in a dictatorial way. The fact that this was also destructive, often only became clear with the perspective of time. History, as usual, eventually illuminates the truth because it provides us with that incredibly useful tool, hindsight. Even in present-day circumstances, with our so-called enlightened way of thinking, one day hindsight will reveal to us more than we can currently grasp about what is happening now.
Political psychologist Neil Kressel defines the mindset of the present-day religious extremist with the following characteristics:
“Idealisation of some past era combined with the belief that the world has gone awry
Declared certainty of the correctness of one’s religious vision
Complete unwillingness to compromise with those who disagree
Powerful denunciation of people with different lifestyles, especially when they involve forms of homosexuality or sexual liberality
Devaluation of events in this world and an intense focus on life after death
Willingness to assume the role of God’s ‘hit man’, defending the deity and his representatives against all perceived insults
Extreme veneration of some religious leader or leaders; Disconcerting lack of concern for earthly evidence, except of the sort sanctioned by the religious system
Routine acceptance of the desired ends as justification for unsavoury means
Adoption of numerous defensive methods for avoiding serious encounters with conflicting systems of belief and their adherents – Dehumanising imagery of non-believers and religious outgroups (most commonly the Jews) and
Strong preference for keeping women in traditional, subordinate roles.” (The mind of the religious extremist, Neil.J.Kressel, globalbreifing.org)
This certainly gives us an idea of what it’s like to be in the head of an extremist, but how does a person become a religious extremist in the first place?
There has been a good deal of talk in the media about this lately. It is widely said that people turn to faith as a solution to past and present problems, whether it is poverty, mental instability, the fallout of political strife or even just opportunism. If we take a look at the past of Florence’s crazed friar, Girolamo Savonarola, we find some interesting and revealing answers to this question.
As a young man, Savonarola was at first nothing like an extremist. He wasn’t even particularly religious. But his life was to take a course that would push him in that direction, satisfying a good number of the requisites for becoming a religious extremist. First, he suffered what is for most people the most disappointing experience of their life, rejection. When he was nineteen, he fell desperately in love with the girl next door. Whether she returned his love or not, is not certain. But in any case he wasn’t considered good enough for her, and his suit was refused; his dreams of domestic bliss and sexual fulfilment were ruined. At the time he was studying to be a physician, but as often happens in such cases, ambition failed in the face of disappointment, and he turned to the one thing he thought could give his life meaning. He joined the Dominican order of mendicant friars; he turned to faith to find a way forward.
He threw himself into it with a fervour marked by the degree of his disappointment. No task was too humble, no penitence too hard. He believed the hand of God was guiding him; he distanced himself from his family, and claimed he was visited by apocalyptic visions of hell. In a very short time he had become a shadow of his former self. His body became weak, his face gaunt, but his mind was driven to compensate. When he arrived in Florence in 1490, terrified by temptation, both his own (since he practised self flagellation on a daily basis) and that of others, he was frantically preaching about the dangers of sin. Before long the bonfires of the vanities were burning in the Piazza della Signoria, and people were throwing their best fur coats, their art and even their false teeth onto the flames in the hope that the fire that awaited them after death would somehow be avoided.
Happily, it didn’t last. Before long the Florentines came to their senses. Savonarola was imprisoned, tortured to extract a confession of guilt then hanged with it. That is not to say that he didn’t have a point to make. His principal claim was that the clergy of his time was immoral and corrupt. This was certainly true. By the fifteenth century the Catholic clergy would stop at nothing, even murder, to gain power. But, as ever, the solution did not lie in scare mongering. If only Savonarola’s life had been different, perhaps his message would have been less extreme, but then if his life had been different he would not have become a monk in the first place. Savonarola sought solace from rejection in the one thing he decided would never let him down, faith. But even then he feared the worst. Divine wrath kept him preaching. Fear had made him a persecutor of the people. Even children became his spies, terrified by the evils of his message. A moral comes to mind: never jilt a lover. Disappointment is a powerful incentive. If we could create a society where everyone had their place, I wonder if men like Savonarola would feel the need to make their point with the full force of divine retribution. Perhaps there would be no such thing.
Read more insights into the past at www.lucilleturner.com
Religious extremism means taking a set of beliefs to their very limit, and applying them. Those who do this commit themselves to promoting or carrying out purposely hurtful, violent or destructive acts against others.
Certainly in today’s world religious extremism is often about terrorist acts in the name of religion, but this hasn’t always been the case. At other times in history it was not technically about harming people but about redeeming them. You could say that it was seen as constructive extremism. It was, if you like, about imposing your views on others in a dictatorial way. The fact that this was also destructive, often only became clear with the perspective of time. History, as usual, eventually illuminates the truth because it provides us with that incredibly useful tool, hindsight. Even in present-day circumstances, with our so-called enlightened way of thinking, one day hindsight will reveal to us more than we can currently grasp about what is happening now.
Political psychologist Neil Kressel defines the mindset of the present-day religious extremist with the following characteristics:
“Idealisation of some past era combined with the belief that the world has gone awry
Declared certainty of the correctness of one’s religious vision
Complete unwillingness to compromise with those who disagree
Powerful denunciation of people with different lifestyles, especially when they involve forms of homosexuality or sexual liberality
Devaluation of events in this world and an intense focus on life after death
Willingness to assume the role of God’s ‘hit man’, defending the deity and his representatives against all perceived insults
Extreme veneration of some religious leader or leaders; Disconcerting lack of concern for earthly evidence, except of the sort sanctioned by the religious system
Routine acceptance of the desired ends as justification for unsavoury means
Adoption of numerous defensive methods for avoiding serious encounters with conflicting systems of belief and their adherents – Dehumanising imagery of non-believers and religious outgroups (most commonly the Jews) and
Strong preference for keeping women in traditional, subordinate roles.” (The mind of the religious extremist, Neil.J.Kressel, globalbreifing.org)
This certainly gives us an idea of what it’s like to be in the head of an extremist, but how does a person become a religious extremist in the first place?
There has been a good deal of talk in the media about this lately. It is widely said that people turn to faith as a solution to past and present problems, whether it is poverty, mental instability, the fallout of political strife or even just opportunism. If we take a look at the past of Florence’s crazed friar, Girolamo Savonarola, we find some interesting and revealing answers to this question.
As a young man, Savonarola was at first nothing like an extremist. He wasn’t even particularly religious. But his life was to take a course that would push him in that direction, satisfying a good number of the requisites for becoming a religious extremist. First, he suffered what is for most people the most disappointing experience of their life, rejection. When he was nineteen, he fell desperately in love with the girl next door. Whether she returned his love or not, is not certain. But in any case he wasn’t considered good enough for her, and his suit was refused; his dreams of domestic bliss and sexual fulfilment were ruined. At the time he was studying to be a physician, but as often happens in such cases, ambition failed in the face of disappointment, and he turned to the one thing he thought could give his life meaning. He joined the Dominican order of mendicant friars; he turned to faith to find a way forward.
He threw himself into it with a fervour marked by the degree of his disappointment. No task was too humble, no penitence too hard. He believed the hand of God was guiding him; he distanced himself from his family, and claimed he was visited by apocalyptic visions of hell. In a very short time he had become a shadow of his former self. His body became weak, his face gaunt, but his mind was driven to compensate. When he arrived in Florence in 1490, terrified by temptation, both his own (since he practised self flagellation on a daily basis) and that of others, he was frantically preaching about the dangers of sin. Before long the bonfires of the vanities were burning in the Piazza della Signoria, and people were throwing their best fur coats, their art and even their false teeth onto the flames in the hope that the fire that awaited them after death would somehow be avoided.
Happily, it didn’t last. Before long the Florentines came to their senses. Savonarola was imprisoned, tortured to extract a confession of guilt then hanged with it. That is not to say that he didn’t have a point to make. His principal claim was that the clergy of his time was immoral and corrupt. This was certainly true. By the fifteenth century the Catholic clergy would stop at nothing, even murder, to gain power. But, as ever, the solution did not lie in scare mongering. If only Savonarola’s life had been different, perhaps his message would have been less extreme, but then if his life had been different he would not have become a monk in the first place. Savonarola sought solace from rejection in the one thing he decided would never let him down, faith. But even then he feared the worst. Divine wrath kept him preaching. Fear had made him a persecutor of the people. Even children became his spies, terrified by the evils of his message. A moral comes to mind: never jilt a lover. Disappointment is a powerful incentive. If we could create a society where everyone had their place, I wonder if men like Savonarola would feel the need to make their point with the full force of divine retribution. Perhaps there would be no such thing.
Read more insights into the past at www.lucilleturner.com
August 11, 2016
Botticelli and Da Vinci – Two Artists, Two Visions
Many things influence our lives: the people we meet, the place in which we live. For an artist, influences are the key to how they see the world and make it into art. Both people and place affected the life of Sandro Botticelli, another great painter of Renaissance Italy alongside Leonardo da Vinci. It is certain that the two men would have met; perhaps they were even great friends. If so, they would have had an influence on each other. While Leonardo was working as an apprentice around the age of 16 in Verrocchio’s workshop, the centre of Florence’s art in the 1460’s, he would have had occasion to meet other young artists, apprentices like himself. Botticelli was older than Leonardo by several years, and their characters were very different, right from the start. How different were they, and how did it affect their work?
Verrocchio’s workshop, which once stood on the corner of present-day Via de’ Macci in Florence (a fact I discovered after intensive research at the National Library of Florence) is now a run-down café and empty storehouse. Times have changed. The ring of hammers and fizz of soldering irons that would once have seeped from the famous workshop has been replaced by the whirr of the espresso machine. But if you pause there for a moment you can still imagine what it must have been like to work for the man who could open the doors to the Medici powerhouse.
Verrocchio was known above all for his sculpture, but he was also a great artist in his own right. Leonardo learned an enormous amount from him, and probably saw the master craftsman as a kind of father figure, or at least as the man who kick-started his career. Without the influence of Verrocchio, Leonardo could have ended up drafting contracts in a corner of his father’s notary office. Instead he was swept into a world he loved, and into a craftsman’s guild that saved him from the obscurity of his illegitimate birth and poor education.
Now that he had made it into the fold, Leonardo had to prove himself. It was during the painting of The Baptism of Christ, a work attributed to Verrocchio but certainly shared by his apprentices as a study, that Leonardo made his impact. At that time there was another youngster working there beside him, a sensitive, graceful youth with fair hair and slightly dreamy hooded eyes. He would have made a very physical contrast to Leonardo, who was certainly darker, probably leaner and doubtlessly more intense. But it was not only their looks that formed a contrast. Their style of painting too was different and Verrocchio, as he observed them from his master seat in the workshop, must have seen it straight away. As if determined to set them side-by-side, so that one could learn from the other, he gave them each a task — one angel each. Leonardo was to paint one of the angels in The Baptism of Christ, while Sandro Botticelli would paint the other.
The result, when you look at it, is interesting. One angel is more static and flat; the other seems to move in another dimension within the canvas, reflecting greater light. Leonardo’s angel seems more alive, more divine. Still, there is a pathos to Sandro Botticelli’s angel that may reflect his personality and contrast to the drive and intensity of Leonardo’s hand, even then. How did things evolve after that?
One thing to remember when you compare the two men and their work, is that Leonardo went on to become Renaissance Man, Sandro did not. By Renaissance Man I mean that Leonardo, in the true spirit of the Renaissance ideal, went on to study everything. He became not just an artist, but also an inventor, a natural scientist, a kind of physician, a philosopher, an engineer and even a sculptor, for a while. Sandro Botticelli, on the other hand, remained simply an artist. He even went on to open his own workshop, producing statuettes by the dozen for the masses at one point, but also producing what is arguably one of the most beautiful mythological paintings ever gazed upon: Primavera, Spring.
Sandro’s different vision could be called an incomplete one, or it could be called a poetic one, but however you see it, the result was very different to the kind of free-handed style Leonardo used to develop the figures in his paintings. Leonardo’s work had realism, spatial depth and intensity of light and shadow. Botticelli’s paintings still lay on the edge of realism. They were more stylised, less three dimensional, less real. But that didn’t make them less remarkable or less beautiful, depending on how you qualify beauty. Because of this lack of realism, Botticelli’s style has often been called idealistic. If the style reflects the character of the man, it could well be true.
Later in the 1490’s, when Leonardo returned to Florence after a long period of absence in Milan, he would have found it greatly altered. Florence was in the grip of Friar Savonarola at the time, a crazed zealot who believed that the people of Florence should atone for their sins by burning their most precious possessions on great fires he had built in the Piazza della Signoria, known as the bonfires of the vanities. The people of Florence were, he said, essentially damned.
It seems incredible to us now that people could believe such things, but then there have always been those in the world who are vulnerable to fear, and there still are. Sandro Botticelli, who had remained in Florence all this time, was severely affected by Savonarola’s vitriolic preaching. He fell into depression and became interested in Dante’s vision of hell. His sketches reflected this. They are the visions of a tortured mind, and a far different cry from the naked beauty of the three graces of Spring.
It is likely that Leonardo remained a close friend of Botticelli, perhaps helping him through this difficult period and keeping him safe from his demons. Leonardo himself was a deeply religious man in many ways, but he was not a dogmatic one. He saw God in Nature but he did not fear God. His religious representations are framed by nature; they rest in nature’s cradle, not in the hand of God.
Even if Leonardo managed to help his friend get over this difficult period of his life, Botticelli never returned to the idealism and beauty of his earlier classical work. Mythology was replaced by religious subject matter, and thus it continued until his death in 1510. Religious fervour had seeped beneath his skin; no amount of pigment, even Leonardo’s, would paint it away.
Verrocchio’s workshop, which once stood on the corner of present-day Via de’ Macci in Florence (a fact I discovered after intensive research at the National Library of Florence) is now a run-down café and empty storehouse. Times have changed. The ring of hammers and fizz of soldering irons that would once have seeped from the famous workshop has been replaced by the whirr of the espresso machine. But if you pause there for a moment you can still imagine what it must have been like to work for the man who could open the doors to the Medici powerhouse.
Verrocchio was known above all for his sculpture, but he was also a great artist in his own right. Leonardo learned an enormous amount from him, and probably saw the master craftsman as a kind of father figure, or at least as the man who kick-started his career. Without the influence of Verrocchio, Leonardo could have ended up drafting contracts in a corner of his father’s notary office. Instead he was swept into a world he loved, and into a craftsman’s guild that saved him from the obscurity of his illegitimate birth and poor education.
Now that he had made it into the fold, Leonardo had to prove himself. It was during the painting of The Baptism of Christ, a work attributed to Verrocchio but certainly shared by his apprentices as a study, that Leonardo made his impact. At that time there was another youngster working there beside him, a sensitive, graceful youth with fair hair and slightly dreamy hooded eyes. He would have made a very physical contrast to Leonardo, who was certainly darker, probably leaner and doubtlessly more intense. But it was not only their looks that formed a contrast. Their style of painting too was different and Verrocchio, as he observed them from his master seat in the workshop, must have seen it straight away. As if determined to set them side-by-side, so that one could learn from the other, he gave them each a task — one angel each. Leonardo was to paint one of the angels in The Baptism of Christ, while Sandro Botticelli would paint the other.
The result, when you look at it, is interesting. One angel is more static and flat; the other seems to move in another dimension within the canvas, reflecting greater light. Leonardo’s angel seems more alive, more divine. Still, there is a pathos to Sandro Botticelli’s angel that may reflect his personality and contrast to the drive and intensity of Leonardo’s hand, even then. How did things evolve after that?
One thing to remember when you compare the two men and their work, is that Leonardo went on to become Renaissance Man, Sandro did not. By Renaissance Man I mean that Leonardo, in the true spirit of the Renaissance ideal, went on to study everything. He became not just an artist, but also an inventor, a natural scientist, a kind of physician, a philosopher, an engineer and even a sculptor, for a while. Sandro Botticelli, on the other hand, remained simply an artist. He even went on to open his own workshop, producing statuettes by the dozen for the masses at one point, but also producing what is arguably one of the most beautiful mythological paintings ever gazed upon: Primavera, Spring.
Sandro’s different vision could be called an incomplete one, or it could be called a poetic one, but however you see it, the result was very different to the kind of free-handed style Leonardo used to develop the figures in his paintings. Leonardo’s work had realism, spatial depth and intensity of light and shadow. Botticelli’s paintings still lay on the edge of realism. They were more stylised, less three dimensional, less real. But that didn’t make them less remarkable or less beautiful, depending on how you qualify beauty. Because of this lack of realism, Botticelli’s style has often been called idealistic. If the style reflects the character of the man, it could well be true.
Later in the 1490’s, when Leonardo returned to Florence after a long period of absence in Milan, he would have found it greatly altered. Florence was in the grip of Friar Savonarola at the time, a crazed zealot who believed that the people of Florence should atone for their sins by burning their most precious possessions on great fires he had built in the Piazza della Signoria, known as the bonfires of the vanities. The people of Florence were, he said, essentially damned.
It seems incredible to us now that people could believe such things, but then there have always been those in the world who are vulnerable to fear, and there still are. Sandro Botticelli, who had remained in Florence all this time, was severely affected by Savonarola’s vitriolic preaching. He fell into depression and became interested in Dante’s vision of hell. His sketches reflected this. They are the visions of a tortured mind, and a far different cry from the naked beauty of the three graces of Spring.
It is likely that Leonardo remained a close friend of Botticelli, perhaps helping him through this difficult period and keeping him safe from his demons. Leonardo himself was a deeply religious man in many ways, but he was not a dogmatic one. He saw God in Nature but he did not fear God. His religious representations are framed by nature; they rest in nature’s cradle, not in the hand of God.
Even if Leonardo managed to help his friend get over this difficult period of his life, Botticelli never returned to the idealism and beauty of his earlier classical work. Mythology was replaced by religious subject matter, and thus it continued until his death in 1510. Religious fervour had seeped beneath his skin; no amount of pigment, even Leonardo’s, would paint it away.
April 6, 2016
Sex and The Harem
As N. M Penzer says in his book, 'The Harem: Inside the Grand Seraglio of the Turkish Sultans', we imagine the Sultan of the harem to be ‘a vicious old reprobate’ who is ‘surrounded by hundreds of semi-naked women, in an atmosphere of heavy perfumes, cool fountains, soft music and over-indulgence in every conceivable kind of vice that the united brains of jealous sex-starved women could invent for the pleasure of their lord’. In other words, as exotic tales of the Arabian Nights, rumps from
On Polymaths
The world finds polymaths worrying. Those who are good at everything are usually bullied, toppled from their pedestals, and criticised. Look at Socrates, Aristotle and Newton. All were criticised, even persecuted at some point in their lives. Aristotle once said, ‘to avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.’The most famous polymath of all time has to be Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance gave us a number of brilliant scholars, artists and sculptors, not to mention writers.
March 25, 2016
Leonardo the Polymath
The world finds polymaths worrying. Those who are good at everything are usually bullied, toppled from their pedestals, and criticised. Look at Socrates, Aristotle and Newton. All were criticised, even persecuted at some point in their lives. Aristotle once said, ‘to avoid criticism, say nothing, do nothing, be nothing.’
The most famous polymath of all time has to be Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance gave us a number of brilliant scholars, artists and sculptors, not to mention writers. It was an explosion of talent, the like of which we had never seen before. But even then, surrounded as he was by like-minded scholars and patrons, Leonardo had a hard time getting his point across.
Leonardo da Vinci is a name that leaves much unsaid. In full, it would have been Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, which gives information in the order of man, father and town. Born into a split family, Leonardo carried the stigma of illegitimacy with him all his life. Both his parents married apart. Tucked away as a child in the hamlet of San Pantaleo, an easy distance from his father, Leonardo would have felt excluded from society right from the start.
Known mainly for his paintings, he spent practically every moment that he had trying to make sense of the world and our place in it. Drawing these impressions and discoveries was just the end result, or the process of investigation. But even as an artist, Leonardo was the kind of person who ruffled feathers. Often accused of leaving a commission unfinished and moving on to something else, he was an easily distracted perfectionist, which makes for a busy working day.
What drove him on? I would say it was partly curiosity but also a profound sense of compassion, and his compassion almost cost him his liberty and his career. When finally he came close to excommunication for persisting with dissections on human subjects as a part of his ambition to understand the functioning of the human body, he became something of a liability for the Medici of Florence.
If you had been wandering the streets of Florence in 1480 you may have come across a cloaked figure slipping incognito through the crowds towards the hospitals of the city, in search of the dying and the dead. He would have been discrete, because performing dissections on a cadaver was not, at that time, considered as the motor of progress and research. On the contrary, it was butchery, profanity and quite frankly downright nasty. Artists did it though, because they wanted to understand the muscles of the limbs they sculpted and sketched. Leonardo may well have started out with that in mind, but his curiosity soon found a far grander impetus.
He tells the tale himself of keeping a vigil beside a dying man, wishing he could save him. He dreamed of beating death, of lodging a spanner in its implacable wheel. Before long he was sweating in the back rooms of the hospitals of both Florence and Milan, surgical knife in one hand, sketchbook in the other, leaving no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored. What he saw, he drew. What he drew he thought about, read about, tried and tested. Picture him trying to cut an eyeball with a knife at four in the morning and you will have a good sense of his desperate mission, his frustration and ultimately, the hot water into which he waded, feeling the urgency of what needed to be done.
It was fortunate for him that he did not end up in the Alberghetto, Florence’s prison in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, as the crazed friar Savonarola later did (although for very different reasons). Instead he ended up in Milan, in the clutches of the Duke, with his endless requirements and demands, his warfare and his errors. Nevertheless, Leonardo being Leonardo, he still managed to produce a masterpiece. The Last Supper, which he painted on the refectory walls of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, would have been carted off by invading French armies if they could have removed it. Instead it stayed put, slowly rotting on account of the experimental concoction of materials he used to fix it there.
Leonardo’s passion and compassion made him a polymath. His obsessive determination to understand, while the majority around him were happy with half-truths, often made him enemies but it also made him a name that has endured for over five hundred years. It will doubtlessly endure for five hundred more.
The most famous polymath of all time has to be Leonardo da Vinci. The Italian Renaissance gave us a number of brilliant scholars, artists and sculptors, not to mention writers. It was an explosion of talent, the like of which we had never seen before. But even then, surrounded as he was by like-minded scholars and patrons, Leonardo had a hard time getting his point across.
Leonardo da Vinci is a name that leaves much unsaid. In full, it would have been Leonardo di Ser Piero da Vinci, which gives information in the order of man, father and town. Born into a split family, Leonardo carried the stigma of illegitimacy with him all his life. Both his parents married apart. Tucked away as a child in the hamlet of San Pantaleo, an easy distance from his father, Leonardo would have felt excluded from society right from the start.
Known mainly for his paintings, he spent practically every moment that he had trying to make sense of the world and our place in it. Drawing these impressions and discoveries was just the end result, or the process of investigation. But even as an artist, Leonardo was the kind of person who ruffled feathers. Often accused of leaving a commission unfinished and moving on to something else, he was an easily distracted perfectionist, which makes for a busy working day.
What drove him on? I would say it was partly curiosity but also a profound sense of compassion, and his compassion almost cost him his liberty and his career. When finally he came close to excommunication for persisting with dissections on human subjects as a part of his ambition to understand the functioning of the human body, he became something of a liability for the Medici of Florence.
If you had been wandering the streets of Florence in 1480 you may have come across a cloaked figure slipping incognito through the crowds towards the hospitals of the city, in search of the dying and the dead. He would have been discrete, because performing dissections on a cadaver was not, at that time, considered as the motor of progress and research. On the contrary, it was butchery, profanity and quite frankly downright nasty. Artists did it though, because they wanted to understand the muscles of the limbs they sculpted and sketched. Leonardo may well have started out with that in mind, but his curiosity soon found a far grander impetus.
He tells the tale himself of keeping a vigil beside a dying man, wishing he could save him. He dreamed of beating death, of lodging a spanner in its implacable wheel. Before long he was sweating in the back rooms of the hospitals of both Florence and Milan, surgical knife in one hand, sketchbook in the other, leaving no stone unturned, no avenue unexplored. What he saw, he drew. What he drew he thought about, read about, tried and tested. Picture him trying to cut an eyeball with a knife at four in the morning and you will have a good sense of his desperate mission, his frustration and ultimately, the hot water into which he waded, feeling the urgency of what needed to be done.
It was fortunate for him that he did not end up in the Alberghetto, Florence’s prison in the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio, as the crazed friar Savonarola later did (although for very different reasons). Instead he ended up in Milan, in the clutches of the Duke, with his endless requirements and demands, his warfare and his errors. Nevertheless, Leonardo being Leonardo, he still managed to produce a masterpiece. The Last Supper, which he painted on the refectory walls of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, would have been carted off by invading French armies if they could have removed it. Instead it stayed put, slowly rotting on account of the experimental concoction of materials he used to fix it there.
Leonardo’s passion and compassion made him a polymath. His obsessive determination to understand, while the majority around him were happy with half-truths, often made him enemies but it also made him a name that has endured for over five hundred years. It will doubtlessly endure for five hundred more.
