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Quotes on the Front Page: Henry James On Venice, Goethe On Language

It takes a great deal to make a successful American, but to make a happy Venetian takes only a handful of quick sensibility. – Henry James

Кто не знает иностранных языков, тот не имеет понятия о своем собственном. – И.-В. Гёте

The Quotes on the Front Page are back, this time in a bilingual edition and in a form that can easily added to Pinterest or saved for good memory as an image.

Quotes: Henry James on Venice – 1

[Before St. Mark's and public hospital, Venice, Italy] (LOC)


The sentimental tourist sole quarrely with his Venice is that he has too many competitors there. He likes to be alone; to be original; to have (to himself, at least) the air of making discoveries. The Venice of to-day is a vast museum where the little wicket that admits you is perpetually turning and creaking, and you march through the institution with a herd of fellowgazers. There is nothing left to discover or describe and originality of attitude is completely impossible… But this is not the fault of Venice; it is the fault of the rest of the world.

Henry James, The Italian Hours.

The image is courtesy of The Library of Congress. See Flickr page for details.

The Death of Blogging

When the “is blogging dead?” debate broke out, I thought: I am sure I read about this elsewhere, and it wasn’t on Wired. Ah, here it was: I read about it on Manchizzle blog, on 27 August, the title being precisely “Is blogging dead?” Only it had more to do with the low-down in meetings of Manchester bloggers, rather than the state of entire blogosphere.

Now, the Wired argument was such that today blogosphere has become a marsh, and every sane non-blogger will not start a blog, while every sane blogger will stop blogging. Furthermore, the article claimed that blogging is being submersed by Twitter and Facebook and various Social Media and Networking sites, whereby it is terribly hard for an amateur (and even professional) blogger to rise to the top.

The question is: precisely what kind of “blogging” is claimed to have died? With platforms like WordPress and Typepad allowing the users to have not only posts but pages, too, blogging is as useful as ever. Maybe in a couple of years I will be a web developer, building my own sites, but at the moment I take some pride in that immense technical learning curve that blogging has offered to me. So, blogging as a platform, when it allows the user to custom-build their own web site, seems to be quite lively.

Blogging as a form of online activity – this is a different matter, yet again, it depends on the point of view (and as we know, this point can be a major obstacle to seeing things). Ultimately, though – and this is what I have just written elsewhere – it is the purpose to which the blogs are written that is either dying or waning:

And here is the rub, and it is actually printed on the front page of WordPress.com: you are urged to start a blog “to express yourself”. This is true even for a business blog, for in the end a business that ventures into blogging is expressing something, be it their policy, product, or expertise. Well, what happens if someone expresses their “self” better than you? Or if the whole process of “self-expression” is too much of a labour? The beginning of a blog may be a technical question, but the blog’s sustainability rests entirely in one’s personal resources. And by that I don’t mean money or even the time you have to spare on your blogging efforts. What you know, what you remember, and how you use this, are the cornerstones of a successful blogging venture.

We are to discuss this tomorrow, 11th of November, at 6pm at the first Social Media Cafe in The Northern. There will be a panel of speakers, precisely on the subject, chaired by Sarah Hartley of The M.E.N., and, of course, there will be blogging afterwards (so again, what is dying?).

In the meantime, let me update you on the state of Los Cuadernos. I added the translation button, so please feel free to traslate the site into your native language. In fact, I’d really love you to do this and let me know if the quality is acceptable.

The email subscription to Los Cuadernos is now also available.

Now, back in August I said that I was thinking of adding categories to the blog, but wasn’t sure how this would work. If you now follow down the sidebar, you will see the result of my thinking. The ‘tags’ are assembled into categories by subject, and there are many of them, starting with Literature, Cinema, Music, Photography, and including Events Coverage and Special Projects, Renaissance, Art, as well as History and Fashion.

Raphael, Degas, and the 16th c. music

2004 saw the first exhibition of Raphael in England. In November I happened to be in London, and my first visit to the National Gallery naturally included a voyage to the Sainsbury Wing. I had mere half an hour to enjoy some 40 works of one of the Titans of Renaissance. To see them, I had to gently if politely wriggle past some visitors, or queue up where it was impossible to squeeze through. Everyone who knows the Sainsbury Wing will recall its catacomb-like interior: low ceilings, dim light, rather small rooms with dark walls – hardly a backdrop for the rich Italian masterpieces.

At exactly the same time they were exhibiting Edgar Degas upstairs. The works of French artist resided in two or three well lit halls with tall ceilings and light pastel-colour walls, there were not many visitors (it was one of the first days of exhibition, I should note). Most paintings were of medium size, in front of every second or third of which there stood a Far-Eastern girl with a pad and some crayons, copying the works of one of the greatest Impressionists. To this day I cannot fathom why these two exhibitions could not be swapped places.

I wrote a lengthy text about it in Russian in the same 2004, contemplating on how these two exhibitions manifested our attitude to art. I was probably a bit harsh to suggest that it was easy to admire the classical art because then no-one would find a fault in your taste, but on second thoughts this is hardly far from the truth. Indeed, one would rather be ridiculed if they admitted liking pop music than if they admitted liking Mozart. Same with Raphael. As Henry James put it, Raphael was a happy genius, and by looking and admiring his Madonnas we seek to find happiness, too. Raphael is also easier to comprehend, unlike his contemporaries. Leonardo is very intellectual, to which La Gioconda is a good proof. Michelangelo’s devotion to the physique is sometimes baffling, as can be seen, for instance, in the figures on the Medici monument. Raphael, on the contrary, is always pleasant, always radiant, always rich in colour, and even if his end may not be as happy as his paintings, we probably shall still forget about it when we observe his work.

It is different with Degas. Degas was known for his perfectionism, and many times in his life he turned to rework his own paintings, as the examination of certain works, e.g. Portrait of Elena Carafa, shows. The name of the exhibition – “Art in the Making” – further highlights Degas’s critical, intellectual approach to his work. The British art historian Kenneth Clark in his book “The Nude: A Study in the Ideal Form” (N.Y., 1956) says, in particular, that Degas excelled at what the Florentine artists of the 16th c. would call “disegno” (i.e. a drawing, a sketch). He focused on a human figure as his main theme, but aimed to capture the ideal image of the movement of this figure, and especially the energy of this movement. Degas’s painting is more vigorous than Raphael’s, and his Madonnas are not only nude, they are also depicted in the poses or at such activity that many of us would still deem inappropriate. Still, again in the words of Clark, had the figures painted by Michelangelo come to life, they would have scared us to a far bigger extent than Degas’s naked women.

Thanks to his colour palette, techniques, and themes, Degas appears more disturbing, almost revolutionary, compared to Raphael. I noted in my text that in the three centuries, from Raphael to Degas, the very attitude to art had changed. As far as Madonnas are concerned, after the European revolutions of the 19th c. and on the eve of the First World War they became more emancipated, they drank absinthe and spent evenings in the Parisian cafes. Their blurred faces, loose hair and outrageous nudity were the symbols of their time, the sign of the fear of changes and of the vulnerability in the face of the outer world. Their movement and individuality were more prominently expressed in comparison to their Renaissance predecessors. Like many other Impressionists, Degas is much more “relevant” to our time, but as it happens we prefer to turn to what gives us hope and faith, and Raphael seemed to be a perfect saviour. Apparently, I concluded, when people turn to the classical art, they seek peace; and when they find peace, they’ll think of a revolution.

Nevertheless, I bought a wonderful CD at the Raphael’s exhibition, The Music of the Courtier, which contained several beautifully performed pieces by the late 15th – 16th cc. composers. One of this, Dilla da l’acqua, by Francesco Patavino (1497?-1556?), performed by I Fagiolini, has become an instant favourite, and I hope you enjoy it too.

http://media.imeem.com/m/xMPLqzqmmW/aus=false/

The paintings used (from top, left to right, clockwise):

Raphael, La Donna Velata (c. 1514-1516)
Edgar Degas, Portrait of Elena Carafa (c. 1875)
Raphael, Madonna of the Pinks (c. 1506-1507)
Michelangelo, The Tomb of Giuliano de’ Medici (1526-1531)
Leonardo da Vinci, La Gioconda (c. 1503-1506)
Raphael, Madonna Connestabile (c. 1502)
Edgar Degas, La Coiffure (Combing Her Hair) (c. 1896)
Edgar Degas, Russian Dancers (c. 1899)
Raphael, Ansidei Madonna (1505)
Raphael, Lady with a Unicorn (c. 1505-1506)
Edgar Degas, Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando (c. 1879)
Edgar Degas, Young Spartans Exercising (c. 1860)
Edgar Degas, After the Bath (c. 1890-1895)
Raphael, St Catherine (c. 1507)

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The Saddest Work of Art in the World (Leonardo, Last Supper)

In the recent years we’ve heard a lot about Last Supper – a large mural by Leonardo created for his patron, which can be seen at Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan. Cenacolo (Last Supper) featured prominently in The Da Vinci Code and in many subsequent publications and TV programmes that aimed at “decoding” the novel by Dan Brown.

I wanted to quote, however, two passages from the works of Henry James, in which he contemplates on this work by the great painter. As we know, the mural has been in the state of decay for centuries, but James seems to have interpreted the reason for its survival in beautiful and passionate narrative. There is much more to one of Da Vinci’s great works than a quasi-female head, and the two passages below explain this.

“… the prime treasure of Milan at the present hour is the beautiful, tragical Leonardo. The cathedral is good for another thousand years, but we ask whether our children will find in the most majestic and most luckless of frescoes much more than the shadow of a shadow. Its fame has been for a century or two that, as one may say, of an illustrious invalid whom people visit to see how he lasts, with leave-taking sighs and almost death-bed or tiptoe precautions. The picture needs not another scar or stain, now, to be the saddest work of art in the world; and battered, defaced, ruined as it is, it remains one of the greatest. We may really compare its anguish of decay to the slow conscious ebb of life in a human organism. The production of the prodigy was a breath from the infinite, and the painter’s conception not immeasurably less complex than the scheme, say, of his own mortal constitution. There has been much talk lately of the irony of fate, but I suspect fate was never more ironical than when she led the most scientific, the most calculating of all painters to spend fifteen long years in building his goodly house upon the sand. And yet, after all, may not the playing of that trick represent but a deeper wisdom, since if the thing enjoyed the immortal health and bloom of a first-rate Titian we should have lost one of the most pertinent lessons in the history of art? We know it as hearsay, but here is the plain proof, that there is no limit to the amount of “stuff” an artist may put into his work. Every painter ought once in his life to stand before the Cenacolo and decipher its moral. Mix with your colours and mess on your palette every particle of the very substance of your soul, and this lest perchance your “prepared surface” shall play you a trick! Then, and only then, it will fight to the last – it will resist even in death” (Henry James, Italian Hours: From Chambery to Milan, 1872).


“…I have seen all great art treasures in Italy;… but I have looked at no other picture with an emotion equal to that which rose within me as this great creation of Leonardo slowly began to dawn upon my intelligence from the tragical twilight of its ruin. A work so nobly conceived can never utterly die, so long as the half-dozen lines of its design remain. Neglect and malice are less cunning than the genius of the great painter. It has stored away with masterly skill such a wealth of beauty as only perfect love and sympathy can fully detect. So, under my eyes, the restless ghost of the dead fresco returned to its mortal abode. From the beautiful central image of Christ I perceived its radiation right and left along the sadly broken line of the disciples. One by one, out of the depths of their grim dismemberment, the figures trembled into meaning and life, and the vast, serious beauty of the work stood revealed. What is the ruling force of this magnificent design? Is it art? is it science? is it sentiment? is it knowledge? I’m sure I can’t say; but in moments of doubt and depression I find it of excellent use to recall the great work with all possible distinctness. Of all the works of man’s hand it is the least superficial” (Henry James, Complete Tales: Travelling Companions, 1870).

Citation is from Henry James, Italian Hours. Penguin Classics, 1992.

Visiting London -1

Since I’ve arrived in England, I almost never failed to visit London in spring. I visited the capital in early April in 2004, then in late March in 2005, I skipped 2006 for personal reasons, but now it’s April 2007, and I’m in London again. There must be, I feel, some kind of force in the working that brings me to London every year in spring.

Invariably, as well, every time I visit it, I experience a powerful feeling of being liberated. I know you’re already thinking that I feel being liberated from Manchester, but it’s not true. I still like Manchester a lot, not least because, as I said many times, I don’t suffer from hay fever in the North West. I don’t exactly suffer from it in London, but I do have to take medication.

This feeling of freedom comes simply from the fact that London possesses much more space than Manchester. It is the fact, and there is little sense to try and pretend that the vastness and grandeur of London can be substituted for something else. It can’t, and it will never be. London is not a desert, it’s the same kind of city of steel, and concrete, and brick, like Manchester, and indeed, like many other modern cities. It is its space that people like me love and miss. More than that, it is the space in the city centre that I personally miss a lot.

With me, it all comes from personal experience, of course. In Moscow, I used to lose myself in those endless serpentine boulevards, just strolling down old slopy streets with buildings of different periods and colours, or walking across bridges, stumbling accidentally into previously unnoticed little architectural gems, or revisiting the places that I have long discovered and fallen in love with. Moscow, in a way, is like Venice in Henry James’s Italian Hours that I am currently reading. So much has become known about it since the uplift of the Iron Curtain, so many people have visited it and are planning to visit in future, that it is hardly possible to say something totally new.

Same goes for London. But the fact that all hidden gems of this city have already been discovered and categorised doesn’t diminish the allure of the place. I most certainly don’t feel intimidated by it. The reason why I like going there and why now I am writing about it is the same that made James write about Venice, as he explains in this short introduction to the chapter on his reflections on this city.

It is a great pleasure to write the word; but I am not sure
there is not a certain impudence in pretending to add anything
to it. Venice has been painted and described many thousands of
times, and of all the cities of the world is the easiest to
visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find
a rhapsody about it; step into the first picture-dealer's and
you will find three or four high-coloured "views" of it. There
is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject. Every one
has been there, and every one has brought back a collection of
photographs. There is as little mystery about the Grand Canal as
about our local thoroughfare, and the name of St. Mark is as
familiar as the postman's ring. It is not forbidden, however, to
speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-
lover Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said
about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty. It
would be a sad day indeed when there should be something new to
say. I write these lines with the full consciousness of having
no information whatever to offer. I do not pretend to enlighten
the reader; I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I
hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love
with his theme.

Henry James, Italian Hours (a full text at Project Gutenberg).

Unless you have already read it, this book by the late Prof Roy Porter is a great introduction to the history of London’s growth. I bought London: A Social History back in 2002, at Waterstones in either Bolton or Blackpool, and it was one of the most interesting semi-academic readings I’ve ever come across. The rich vocabulary of a Londoner who also happened to be a seasoned and versatile academic made up for a vivid and engaging reconstruction of London’s history from the times immemorial to the present day. It doesn’t contain many illustrations, and those that were included in the book are black-and-white. But I shall once more underline his style and language; together, they provide you with all colours and detail you need to paint a picture of London’s history.

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