Vintage Reading (19 page)

Dated? Insofar as
Gentleman’s Agreement
’s subject is anti-Semitism, perhaps. By almost any standard short of outright eradication, anti-Semitism is not the pressing problem it once was in America; it exists, but not with its old virulence.

Yet for this very reason this novel is worth reading: It is reassuring to realize that a great social wrong, however entrenched it may seem need not endure forever; that what so recently was bad can, in so short a span of time, be made good.

On the other hand, it is difficult to read Hobson’s novel today without applying it to social wrongs not yet made god. Indeed, one scene bears an eerie harbinger: His charade at last revealed and “I Was Jewish for Eight Weeks” safely set into type, Phil asks jokingly what his next article assignment will be: “I Was a Woman for Eight Weeks?”

On Aesthetics and Style

The Ten Books of Architecture
— Vitruvius

The Lives of the Most Eminent Italian
—

Architects, Painters and Sculptors
— Giorgio Vasari

The Seven Lamps of Architecture
— John Ruskin

The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form
— Kenneth Clark

The Elements of Style
— Strunk and White

_________________________________

In architecture, sculpture, painting, and language, what makes for the sublime and the beautiful?
Don’t know
, the unseasoned, unformed parts of all of us sometimes rise up to say,
but I know what I like
. And yet, over the centuries, writers and thinkers have grappled with such questions and sometimes rooted up some answers. Herewith a few fine examples.

____________

By Vitruvius
Written circa 25 B.C.

Sand mixed with mortar to form cement should be mostly free of dirt. To check, sprinkle some on a white garment, then shake it off. If the garment stays clean, the sand is suitable.

So advised Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, the first century B.C. Roman architect and military engineer whose
Ten Books of Architecture
powerfully influenced the Renaissance. Generations of architects followed his prescriptions, sometimes slavishly—in part because of his practical knowledge, in part his authoritative tone, in part his sheer comprehensiveness.

“I have observed, Emperor,” writes Vitruvius in his introduction to Book IV, addressing Augustus, “that many in their treatises and volumes of commentaries on architecture have not presented the subject with wellordered completeness.” This shortcoming he meant to correct.

Vitruvius offers a primer in the architecture of temples, theaters, public forums, baths, private houses. He discusses principles of harmony and proportion. He ranges over terrain as varied as the layout of rooms in private homes, the design of siege weapons, the building of retaining walls, and the finding of underground springs.

An architect, says Vitruvius, should know enough about music to properly tune the bronze vessels then used in theaters to resonate with an actor’s voice. He should know enough history to explain that caryatids—sculpted female figures in flowing robes that serve as columns in some Greek buildings—originally marked the punishment of the Peloponnesian state of Caryae for siding with the Persians, the sculptures commemorating the slavery of its women.

Vitruvius’ ten books do not merely set out general principles; they are full of numerical proportions, specific advice, injunctions. In a temple whose
arrangement of column s follows the diastyle pattern, the space between columns, we learn, must be three columns wide. To make a blue pigment, grind together flowers of natron with sand, then mix in coarsely grated bits of copper, roll the mixture into balls and place them in an oven. “As soon as the copper and the sand grow hot and unite under the intensity of the fire, they mutually receive each other’s sweat ...[and] are reduced to a blue color.”

Vitruvius advises that the architrave, which rests upon the columns, should be disproportionately larger than the longer columns supporting it—onetwelfth the column height for columns of 25 to 30 feet, but only a thirteenth for columns 15 to 20 feet long. “For the higher that the eye has to climb, the less easily can it make its way through the thicker and thicker mass of air.”

Such would-be scientific explanations might reasonably undermine our confidence in the architectural precepts of Marcus Vitruvius Pollio. Still, Renaissance architects like Alberti and Bramante, Michelangelo and Palladio, drew inspiration from him, and followed his advice. And they hardly disgraced themselves.

Architects in quest of ancient wisdom, however, should not be the only ones to read Vitruvius. “The men of old were born like the wild beasts, in woods, caves and droves, and lived on savage fare,” begins a chapter on the origin of houses. And while his architectural knowledge was the product of eons of civilization, he was still 2,000 years closer to “men of old” than we are now. Reading him, then, takes us back to a time when the built world was not so taken for granted; when a brick was not a standardized 30-cent building material, precisely defined by long-established engineering specifications, but could still get a chapter devoted to the best clays with which to make it and the best times of the year to fire it ...

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.

____________

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.

____________

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.

A Study in Ideal Form

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