Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 210

A Slow Injustice?

A California judge has ruled that the state’s death penalty is unconstitutional because it’s too slow and unpredictable:

In a case brought by a death row inmate against the warden of San Quentin state prison, [US District Court Judge Cormac] Carney called the death penalty an empty promise that violates the Eighth Amendment’s protection against cruel and unusual punishment. “Inordinate and unpredictable delay has resulted in a death penalty system in which very few of the hundreds of individuals sentenced to death have been, or even will be, executed by the State,” the ruling read. A death penalty appeal can last decades, Carney said, resulting in most condemned inmates dying of natural causes.

Dylan Matthews looks closely at the ruling:

Carney’s opinion was accompanied by a long appendix table detailing the outcomes of every death sentence between 1979 and 1997 [see above chart]; he excluded sentences after that year because “for all but a small handful of those individuals, state proceedings are still ongoing, and none have completed the federal habeas process.” The data excludes convictions that were overturned by the California Supreme Court and those whose “post-conviction proceedings have not been stayed based on their lack of mental competency to face the death penalty.” …

What’s more, Carney argues, there isn’t anything separating the rare cases where executions actually occurred from the vast majority where they didn’t. Whether someone dies by execution is primarily determined, he writes, “depend[s] upon a factor largely outside an inmate’s control, and wholly divorced from the penological purposes the State sought to achieve by sentencing him to death in the first instance: how quickly the inmate proceeds through the State’s dysfunctional post-conviction review process.”

Andrew Cohen grimly notes that Carney’s rationale “isn’t that the state’s capital system is prone to error, or rife with racial disparity, or arbitrary in its application, even though it is plaintively all of those things”:

Instead, this appointee of George W. Bush concluded that the “machinery of death” grinds too slowly in California for it to sustain itself under the Eighth Amendment. Delay, he contends, is the decisive constitutional flaw in the grim mechanism.

“Just as inordinate delay and unpredictability of executions eliminate any deterrent effect California’s death penalty might have,” Judge Carney wrote, “so too do such delay and unpredictability defeat the death penalty’s retributive objective.” And without those two justifications for capital punishment, deterrence and retribution, the judge argues, there is no constitutional basis for the government to kill one of its citizens, at least none the United States Supreme Court has recently recognized.

Tom McKay calls the ruling “a major state-level victory for death penalty abolitionists,” and law professor Hadar Aviram describes it as “the first time I can think of since the 1970s that a judicial opinion has taken on the death penalty as a whole rather than just the individual.” But Scott Shackford warns opponents of capital punishment not to get too excited:

The ruling is very specific to the nature of the delays in California and thus it’s not clear whether the case has implications outside of the Golden State. Certainly it takes years for other states to coordinate their executions, but it’s not necessarily the case that California’s slow (and extremely expensive! Let’s not forget how expensive it is! California’s highest public salaries are in the prisons and criminal justice spheres.) process is like those in other states.

And also, before anti-death-penalty advocates celebrate, this ruling is about the process, not the outcome. It is not a judgment against the use of the death penalty. It is a judgment against California’s broken system and its inability to apply it fairly and consistently.

Ashby Jones has more on the Golden State context:

For years, critics of the death penalty in California have argued that the system in the state, which often involves numerous appeals and lengthy waits for qualified, court-appointed lawyers, is woefully inefficient. For instance, a 2011 study co-authored by Arthur Alarcón, a judge on the Ninth Circuit, found California had spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment since it was reinstated in 1978 – about $308 million for each of the 13 executions since then.

Mark Berman adds:

Voters in California rejected an attempt to eliminate the state’s death penalty in 2012. There was a push this year to speed up the execution process and shorten appeals (an initiative supported by three former California governors), but it failed to make it on the ballot, so organizers are planning to make a push for November 2016.

But, he notes, the national picture looks very different:

There has been a shift in recent years away from the death penalty, with one-third of the states that have banned capital punishment doing so since 2007. The last state to abolish the death penalty was Maryland last year, though New Hampshire came very, very close earlier this year. Still, executions are happening less often than they did even two decades ago, a decline that has occurred as American support for capital punishment has also fallen.

Dan Markel zooms out:

Having worked my way through the opinion by Judge Cormac Carney (a GWB appointee), I imagine the outcome won’t stand on appeal to SCOTUS should it get there. That said, with Justice Kennedy as the swing vote deciding on California issues, you never know for sure. Moreover, Justice Breyer has in the past voiced concern about foot-dragging death penalty delays.

What The Hell Just Happened Over The Skies Of Ukraine? Ctd

#Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko calls crash of #MH17 "an act of terrorism." interfax.ru/world/386444—
Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) July 17, 2014

FAA Prohibited U.S. Airliners From Flying Where Malaysian Plane Was Reportedly Shot Down @TPM talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/faa-p…—
Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 17, 2014

A reader adds:

Reading the coverage and the collection of tweets on your blog, I think it’s worth pointing out that whatever the rebels and anyone else might say, the rebels themselves were touting that they had the Buk system less than three weeks ago!

Another:

After reading this remarkable post on the Guardian site, I discovered a report from only hours ago on the ITAR-TASS site about a Ukrainian military craft being downed by rebels (an An-26 mentioned above). It’s too early to conclude anything, of course, but the evidence so far sure seems to point to a fuck up of horrible dimensions on the part of the rebels.

But another urges caution:

I got home from work early and am a bit of an airplane nut, so I turned on the TV to see if there was anything on about the Malaysian Airlines flight. I’m flipping through channels and I see wall-to-wall coverage of this crash. Why? I’ve been watching an ABC News Special Report and you have Ray Kelly talking about terrorism, you have Richard Clarke talking about terrorism, you have (the normally more composed) Martha Raddtz talking about how this is the scariest time in the world that she can recall.

What the hell are these people talking about???

The only story here is that a passenger plan may have been shot down IN THE MIDDLE OF A MILITARY CONFLICT where there were warnings for commercial flights not to pass through the area. There is NO suggestion of “terrorism.” There is NO connection to anything occurring in Israel/Gaza, Syria, Yemen, or Iraq. There is NO connection to ISIS. So why is the media treating these current events as if they are all connected and that the connection is that they all pose an immediate threat to the United States?

There is an interesting story here, particularly for ramifications for Russia’s relations with the EU and how the Ukraine situation is handled in the future. But this is not going to cause the U.S. to become involved in World War III with the Russians. Though it’s hard to think that the U.S. media doesn’t want that.

The hysteria is completely out of control and incredibly irresponsible. I’m not sure there is anything that can be done about this, but covering these kind of events as if they were 9/11 all over again is going to cause the same post-9/11 mistakes and overreach to be made all over again.

We are tracking the coverage and will post credible updates as soon as we get them. Update from a reader, who responds to the most recent one above:

Terrorism doesn’t begin and end with 9-11 and the Middle East or threats to the United States. I guess I understand how many Americans don’t know about much of the past 50 years of activity of ETA, IRA, Red Army Faction/Baader-Meinhof Group terrorism throughout the world. Even that leaves out terrorism by states such as bombing of Venezuelan commercial airline flights by the CIA. Many people around the globe took to America’s post-9/11 propaganda technique of calling their military opponents “terrorists.” This isn’t anything new.

Another reason this is being called “terrorism” is because the Ukrainian government has called these Russian special forces troops masquerading as separatists “terrorists” from the beginning of the conflict. When Ukraine announced the downing this morning, they immediately called it an act of terror. The only difference between these Russian special forces troops and IS (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda besides affiliations is probably suicide missions. IS is no more deadly than when Russian forces were operating in Chechnya. As was previously reported, these same guys in Ukraine have been doing the same thing for years in Georgia and elsewhere. For a good idea on just what types of scheming Russia is doing to regain some territory lost after the fall of communism check out this Foreign Affairs article. Estonia dealt with the exact same pre-op setup with Russians claiming mistreatment of Russian Estonians and fake protest rallies. Most of the protesters in that situation were undercover Estonian security operatives. Estonia never allowed things to progress to a Crimea or Georgia level.

Another:

If this video posted by the Ukrainian security services isn’t a fake, it is a smoking gun:

Essentially you have rebel commanders bragging about shooting down a plane, happily acknowledging it is a civilian one, and subsequently discovering it is Malay.

How Americans See The Border Crisis

A new YouGov poll shows that more Americans attribute it to US immigration policy than to Central American gang violence:

The latest research from YouGov shows that most Americans (58%) think that the main reason behind the surge in child illegal immigration is a belief that the US is or soon will be granting amnesty to children. Only 27% think that the main cause is the increase in violent crime in Central America.

The same poll finds that 58 percent disapprove of the president’s handling of the situation and that 47 percent believe that deporting the migrant children as soon as possible should be a top priority. Dara Lind scrutinizes this last finding:

More than anything, the poll shows that Americans don’t agree on the right policy response because they don’t agree on the facts.

Americans are split on whether or not children would be safe in their home countries; 39 percent think they’re fleeing unsafe places, while 36 percent think they have somewhere safe to return. … It’s easy to look at this sort of confusion and take away the idea that Americans generally want tens of thousands of kids to be deported. The poll does show that’s true, to an extent. But that’s also because Americans are looking at the confusion in Washington and on the border and gravitating toward the option that seems most decisive — and in this case, that’s throwing more money at the border, and fast and furious deportations.

The Fickleness Of Politics

In Britain, the cabinet re-shuffle is a time-honored tradition. Careers are brutally culled, or made, or ignored. And sometimes, it can get truly humiliating. So this week, Michael Gove, a plucky, principled but controversial education minister got the sack and was demoted to chief whip in the House of Commons. But his bad day was about to get worse: he both lost his first scheduled vote and got stuck in the loo for good measure:

His mishap was highlighted by Angela Eagle, the shadow leader of the Commons, who told MPs: “I’d like to welcome Mr Gove … he hasn’t had the most auspicious of starts. Yesterday, he not only lost his first vote but he managed to get stuck in the toilet in the wrong lobby and he nearly broke his own whip.” … William Hague, the new leader of the Commons, defended his colleague, who was not present in the chamber, against the Labour mockery. “You made fun of what he was doing yesterday – knowledge of who is in the toilets in whatever lobby is a very important piece of information for any chief whip. I take this as evidence he was carrying out his duties very assiduously.”

Westminster will miss William, who’s quitting Parliament at the next election, and one of the most humane, sane and funny politicians ever to wield power in London. Yes, I’m biased. I’ve known him since our days at the Oxford Union together. The best prime minister Britain never had, as they say, and a rather gifted historian as well. Check out his biographies of Wilberforce and Pitt The Younger.

Western Values

Devastating image of dead child on a Gaza beach by @TylerHicksPhoto. http://t.co/mnzl9ob99j pic.twitter.com/F2zi96Zx7I

— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) July 16, 2014

Why did NBC yank a Gaza reporter who saw children killed on the beach? gaw.kr/sGm9DMM

—
  (@Gawker) July 17, 2014

Larison makes the case that Israel doesn’t really have such values anymore:

[Douglas] Murray … says that Israel “takes western values seriously and fights for the survival of those values,” but that seems to be almost exactly the opposite of what has been happening in Israeli politics over the last ten or fifteen years. Some of this may depend on what Murray wants to include as “Western values” and what he thinks it means to “fight” for them, but it would be fair to say that Israel under its last two governments has become increasingly illiberal domestically and even more heavy-handed in its dealings with its immediate neighbors. The occupation has become more entrenched than it was at the turn of the century, and support for a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians has dwindled significantly. If Murray is right that this is what being a “Western country” involves, then I suspect most people in the West would rather be something else.

And it’s not getting any better anytime soon. Recent research by Anna Getmansky and Thomas Zeitzoff forecasts that the political upshot of the current conflict will be to move Israel even further to the right:

In research that is forthcoming in the American Political Science Review, we use variation in the range of rockets from Gaza to Israel to estimate the effect of terrorism on voting in the Israeli elections from 2003 through 2009. During this period, the rockets’ range has continuously increased, allowing us to examine what happens to voters who come into the range of rockets from Gaza compared to similar voters who live outside that range. We find that the vote-shares of right-wing parties that typically oppose concessions to Palestinians increase by 2-7 percentage points among voters within range of rockets. We further argue that voters “reward” right-wing incumbents electorally even if rocket range increases while they are in office, because right-wing parties are perceived to be more competent in dealing with security threats. …

So what does the current round of violence mean for the future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict following the recent round of violence? Our research as well as other studies would suggest a pessimistic outcome. Given the increase in the number of Israelis who are within the range of rockets, and the high number of Palestinian casualties, the recent round of fighting is likely to cause individuals on both sides to harden their attitudes towards each other, making a peaceful resolution of the conflict less likely.

And as Keating points out, Netanyahu is actually to the left of the most vocal members of his cabinet:

One aspect of the situation that’s gotten comparatively little attention is that hardline members of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Cabinet seem to be pushing the Israeli government toward a more aggressive campaign. Netanyahu is hardly pushing for accommodation, but the most aggressive political pushback he’s gotten during this campaign is from the right, not the left. Yesterday, Netanyahu fired his deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, a member of his own Likud party, for saying that the short-lived cease-fire yesterday had humiliated Israel. Netanyahu had faced heavy criticism in the Cabinet for accepting the Egyptian-proposed cease-fire, particularly from Danon, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett of the right-wing Jewish Home party.

Meanwhile, Yglesias flags a recent poll suggesting that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians really want two states:

Strikingly, this conclusion that 27 percent of Palestinians and 35 percent of Israelis favor a two-state solution is likely an overstatement of the actual level of popular support. …

[T]he international community’s comforting image of a tragic conflict being driven by misguided extremists on both sides is somewhat obsolete. Mainstream opinion on both sides now shows a decided lack of enthusiasm for foreigners’ favored solution. Which by no means makes a Two-State Solution impossible — public opinion is somewhat malleable, a real peace treaty in the hand might seem more appealing than a hypothetical one, and even in democracies unpopular measures are enacted all the time. But it’s wrong to simply assume that if the current wave of violence dies down, the larger conflict will naturally proceed to resolution.

Perhaps that’s why Bernard Avishai hopes for a major American intervention in the peace talks:

What the Obama Administration seems unable to grasp, or finds inconvenient to admit, is that the peace process cannot just be paused; to say that the parties to the conflict must want peace more than Americans is to condemn them to leaders who, in the short run, benefit from conflict, and hand Americans, and everyone else, an insufferable future. Obama reiterated, this week, that the status quo is unsustainable. But what is he prepared to do about it, other than offer Kerry as a mediator? Kerry must persist in demanding a ceasefire, of course—but, if he gets one, he must seize the moment to finally publish an American plan for a larger peace.

Such a plan, endorsed by all world powers, can at least temporarily redeem Abbas’s leadership by giving hope—what Obama has called a “horizon”—to young Palestinians who, watching Gaza but not only Gaza, are thinking apocalyptically. Netanyahu says he will stop the operation when he can be assured of “quiet,” which sounds reasonable enough. But it is morally reckless to think that peace is the same thing as quiet, which can be purchased, if only temporarily, with intimidation.

Good luck. Read my take on the permanence of the Greater Israel project here.

(Update: A tweet that was briefly live on the post contained an image that was from Lebanon in 2006, not current day Gaza: “Israeli girls write messages such as “to (Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan) Nasrallah with love from Israel and Daniele” on shells destined for targets in southern Lebanon. Photo: Afp Ap”)

This Worm Can Handle Its Alcohol

By modifying their genetic makeup to alter a molecular channel that binds alcohol in the brain, scientists have developed worms that can’t get drunk:

Normally, when worms are put in a petri dish that contains alcohol, they become drunk. For a worm, this mean not being able to wiggle from side to side as much. It also means crawling much more slowly. But with the modified channel, the worms acted just as they did without the alcohol. The researchers were able to do this by tweaking the human alcohol target just enough to prevent “a research model worm from getting drunk,” said Jonathan Pierce-Shimomura, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study, in an email to The Verge. …

The researchers now hope to develop drugs that would have the same effect in mice — and eventually humans. “We found a way that future drugs may target a single human brain protein, called the BK channel, to stop alcohol from activating it and causing intoxication,” Pierce-Shimomura said. If the scientists could find a drug that has the same effect as the mutation, they might be able to help people overcome addiction and the effects of withdrawal.

But Becky Ferreira cautions against celebrating too soon:

As promising as the findings sound, it will likely be many years before they will be tested on humans. And as Motherboard’s Michael Byrne warned a few weeks back,“off-switches” for addictions may be tantalizing, but they won’t necessarily be cure-alls. For now, we’ll just have to be satisfied with the fact that the great enterprise of science has gifted the world a bunch of mutant worms that can’t get drunk.

Time To Put Down The Pixie?

Nice to see the patriarchal lie of the manic pixie dream girl is still alive and well in student films #yaaaaaay http://t.co/N2goexAxd9—
Aaron Lockman (@TheLockPerson) March 12, 2014

Nathan Rabin, who coined the term “manic pixie dream girl” in a 2007 essay, regrets it and wants to retire the term:

In an interview with Vulture, “Ruby Sparks” writer-star Zoe Kazan answered a question about whether her character was a Manic Pixie Dream Girl by asserting: “I think it’s basically misogynist.” … Here’s the thing: I completely agree with Kazan. And at this point in my life, I honestly hate the term too. I feel deeply weird, if not downright ashamed, at having created a cliché that has been trotted out again and again in an infinite Internet feedback loop. I understand how someone could read the A.V. Club list of Manic Pixie Dream Girls and be offended by the assertion that a character they deeply love and have an enduring affection for, whether it’s Diane Keaton’s Annie Hall or Katharine Hepburn in “Bringing Up Baby,” is nothing more than a representation of a sexist trope or some sad dude’s regressive fantasy.

But Lisa Knisley defends the term as an “intensely useful and important” way of describing a real element of our culture, not just movies and TV:

The ability to shorthand what seemed to be a pervasive and powerful cultural ideal of white femininity embodied by the on-screen MPDG has been invaluable as I came to feminist consciousness and began to more deeply analyze the representations of femininity marketed to my generation. But, more than that, the concept of the MPGD doesn’t just describe a gendered film trope—it helps me make sense of non-fictional gender relations as well.

I’d be hard-pressed to say I’ve ever met a real-life MPDG, of course. Flesh and blood women, no matter how they come off at first, are inevitably more complex and substantial than the superficial waifs of our collective pop culture fantasies. Still, for women of my generation, perhaps especially middle-class, heterosexual, white women, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is one powerful version of our ideal selves and many of us have found ourselves emulating her, wanting to become her.

Elisabeth Donnelly stakes out a middle position, arguing that Rabin’s initial diagnosis of the MPDG was valuable but agreeing with him now that it has become an cliché catch-all for lazy critics:

Where Rabin’s trope started to feel cruel was in the semi-pointless appellation of “manic pixie.” Perhaps it was applicable to the female characters in Garden State and Elizabethtown, but would you really call anyone else a manic pixie, beyond, say, Tinkerbell? In all honesty, when it comes to writing about half-baked, terrible characters in art, we need to use a broader range of terms beyond just slotting all wispy girlfriends into the Natalie Portman-in-Garden State slot. Go deeper. Write with more eloquence about why the character is underwritten, why the lack of an interesting woman in a movie is a problem. Pin it on the follies of the art.

Previous Dish on the MPDG here, here, and here.

Faces Of The Day

Three days ago, a grieving father put out a request on Reddit:

My daughter recently passed away after a long battle in the children’s hospital. Since she was in the hospital her whole life we never were able to get a photo without all her tubes. Can someone remove the tubes from this photo?

The Reddit community answered with the images you see above. Cari Romm is moved:

[S]ocial media-driven responses to death can range from uncomfortable—is hitting “Like” on a Facebook death announcement supportive or crassly insensitive?—to the downright cringe-worthy, like the Tumblr “Selfies at Funerals.” But every so often, the world wide web offers up to the bereaved some small piece of atonement for its missteps. …

Selfishly, it’s comforting for the rest of us, too. The longer we exist on social media, the more loss we’ll all eventually live out through our computer screens. Let’s hope that this, rather than funeral selfies, becomes the future norm for public grief.

Inside The Mind Of Hamas

In an interview with Zack Beauchamp, Hussein Ibish offers his take on what the Gaza crisis means for the militant group’s strategic position:

Hamas has been desperately trying to get out of this morass that it’s found itself in; it really feels trapped and desperate. And they tried to foment trouble in the West Bank, and it didn’t succeed. They didn’t get anything out of the unity agreement, so it’s falling back on what it knows sometimes gets results — which is rocket attacks. What they are hoping for, this time, is concessions not from Ramallah or from Tel Aviv, but from Cairo, Egypt. I don’t think that most people understand that — it’s all about Egypt.

What Hamas can get can only come from Egypt. From Israel, they’re demanding the release of prisoners that were part of the shahid squad [a Hamas military group] that was arrested when Israel was pretending they didn’t know the teenagers were dead. Israel tracked them down and dealt Hamas a serious blow. Which is why Netanyahu isn’t so interested in getting into an artillery/aerial exchange with Hamas — the Israelis frontloaded their retribution. It was all done in the West Bank, before the bodies were found.

Allison Beth Hodgkins also views Hamas as having been backed “into a corner where it had to chose between the Russian roulette of escalation and irrelevance”:

It chose the former — a high stakes gamble to reclaim the mantle of resistor in chief on behalf of the struggle and shore up its tenuous stake in the Palestinian marketplace.

To a large degree, Shlomi Eldar gets it mostly right here when he says that Hamas’ main objective is to avoid looking like a defeated movement. What it really can’t afford to look like is a religiously conservative version of Fatah: weak, ineffective and seen as trading a continued hold on power for continued occupation. While the business of governing the fractious Gaza Strip has forced Hamas to make compromises in order to pay the bills and keep the sewage from overflowing, these compromises have required enforcing the November 2012 ceasefire on all the resistance factions in the strip. This is no easy task in good times (or not so bad times), but with the popular mood turning from generally irritated to downright irate, groups like Islamic Jihad, the PFLP and other new challengers smell blood in the water.

In light of this weakened position, Mitchell Plitnick advises the militants to cut their losses:

There simply isn’t an endgame that represents progress for Hamas. In 2012, when then-Egyptian President Morsi brokered an agreement, Hamas could claim a few minor concessions from Israel (which never really materialized once there was no pressure on Israel to follow through with them). There will be nothing of that sort here, but Hamas seems to be desperately clinging to the hope that it can extract something to base a claim of victory on.

That’s a terrible gamble. It is much more likely that the refusal to agree to a ceasefire is giving Netanyahu exactly what he wants: the chance to deliver a blow to a weakened Hamas regime in Gaza. Hamas has given Netanyahu the means to do this without having to overcome the global opposition that was apparent at the beginning of the current fighting.

Renaissance Kitsch

Reviewing the exhibition “Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino: Diverging Paths of Mannerism” at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Barry Schwabsky applauds the works of Rosso Fiorentino for displaying “truly bad taste.” He argues that “whatever is cringe-inducing in Rosso’s pictures is more or less inextricable from what sometimes makes them so breathtaking”:

Rosso [aka "Florentine Red"] offended established taste almost from the get-go. Vasari tells us that the young artist wouldn’t stay with any master, “having a certain opinion of his own that conflicted with their manners.” Commissioned in 1518 to paint an altarpiece, he invited the patron, Leonardo di Giovanni Buonafede, to view the work in progress; alas, “the Saints appeared to him like devils,” according to Vasari, and so “the patron fled from his house and would not have the picture, saying that the painter had cheated him.”

The work, Madonna and Child With Four Saints, also known as the Spedalingo Altarpiece, was exiled to a small provincial church, where it slumbered until the nineteenth century; in 1900, it was admitted to the collection of the Uffizi and has now moved across town for the Palazzo Strozzi exhibition. As David Franklin writes in the catalog, the learned Carthusian who was so horrified by Rosso’s painting thus far “was a prolifically experienced if conservative patron of altarpieces” whose “reaction, although vehement, was well-informed.”

Schwabsky goes on to describe what makes the painting so unnerving:

Most demoniac in appearance is the harsh and wasted figure of St. Jerome on the right. Franklin suggests that the red-haired St. John on the left—the artist’s namesake, and the only one of the painting’s figures (aside from the infant Christ and the sweetly earnest cherubs at Mary’s feet) who doesn’t appear to be an emanation of the blue shadows swirling around the Madonna’s legs—is Rosso’s way of announcing that the painting was intended as his “impassioned personal contribution to the hothouse atmosphere of Florence in the first two decades of the 16th century.” I shouldn’t wonder. In any case, despite Vasari’s claim that it was all a misunderstanding and that Rosso intended to “sweeten the expressions” of the saints in the process of finishing the painting, they retain to this day the “savage and desperate air” that drove the poor churchman running from Rosso’s door.

(Image of Madonna Enthroned with Four Saints by Rosso, 1518, via Wikimedia Commons)