Painting and Orthodoxy

Paolo Veronese, Feast in the House of Levi (formerly The Last Supper),  1573

I've always found it odd that the Inquisition went after Veronese, a very technically brilliant artist, but not perhaps the most thoughtful.  He got dragged before the Tribunal over this painting, which the Inquisitors considered far too light hearted for a Last Supper.  They even threatened Veronese with more serious charges of heresy.  He was ordered to change the painting in 3 months.  Instead, Veronese changed a few details and figures here and there and changed the title.  No more was said and the matter ended.

And yet, the Inquisition never touched Caravaggio, a hustler, a thug, and a murderer from the Roman streets who brought that experience into his religious work.  Some people still find his religious work to be deeply unsettling, especially a painting like The Death of the Virgin showing not some glorious Assumption or Dormition, but a quite dead corpse laid out on a plank surrounded by grieving Apostles.

Caravaggio, Death of the Virgin Mary, 1606

The public was outraged by this painting.  Church authorities obliged the patron of the work, Laerzio Alberti, to remove it from the altar of a chapel in Santa Maria della Scala in Rome and to replace it with a less disturbing work by another artist, Carlo Saraceni.  This is the painting that stands on the same altar today.

And yet, for all the fury over Caravaggio's work, he never faced any Church tribunal.  When he did finally face a magistrate, it was not over any charges of heresy, but to answer for the murder of Ranuccio Tommasoni.

Caravaggio "John the Baptist,"  c.1600

I've always found it curious that whenever Caravaggio paints some nude Roman street boy as "John the Baptist" (in this case, his auburn haired model, apprentice, servant, and probable lover, Francesco "Cecco" Boneri), everyone starts speculating about his sexuality.  What's to speculate about?  Sure the written testimony says that Caravaggio had a mistress or two, but the testimony of the paintings clearly and unequivocally reveals that he really liked boys.  Maybe one of his mistresses posed for his paintings of a clothed Mary Magdalene, but he never painted them with nearly as much gusto as he painted nude Cecco either posing with a love-struck ram in the painting above, or wearing fake wings and sprawling with naked legs akimbo over emblems of worldly power and fame as a laughing Amor.

Caravaggio, Amor Vincit Omnia, c. 1600

And yet, Titian can paint Mary Magdalene wearing only her hair and showing her tits complete with nipples, and everyone takes his sexuality for granted.

Titian, Mary Magdalene, 1533

And Rubens can show boobs busting out all over in his religious work (even Our Lady shows some cleavage here) and no one seems to mind.

Rubens, Virgin and Child with Saints, c. 1640; this painting now stands over Rubens' tomb in Antwerp



EXTRA:

Some scholars speculate that an older Cecco may have posed for the figure of Christ in Caravaggio's Supper at Emmaus.  The resemblance is striking, round cheeks, auburn hair, pouting mouth; but, if Cecco did pose for this figure, then the painting would have to be dated much later than the 1600-01 date that is the consensus among most scholars.  The documentary evidence indicates that this painting was one of Caravaggio's earliest religious paintings, commissioned by Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a patron of Bernini (and would have been a major coup and debut for so young and unknown a painter at the time).  Based on that evidence, I think it unlikely that an older Cecco (or a younger Cecco that the very model-dependent Caravaggio somehow aged) was the model for Christ, but it's an interesting thought.

So Many Anniversaries!

... and Grand Central Station turned 100 last night.  Since that commemoration will be going on all year, I'll do that one later.

Also, Rosa Parks turns 100 this year; it's the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, and it's the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination.  Anything I'm forgetting?

Stalingrad

The Battle of Stalingrad ended 70 years ago today, an important milestone in a year filled with commemorations.

The victors; Soviet soldiers at Stalingrad.

The vanquished; a German soldier at Stalingrad.

The Battle of Stalingrad was probably the biggest single battle in history.  It lasted 6 months and cost the lives of a million soldiers.  Most historians now consider that battle to be the central turning point of the war.  Hitler's drive to seize the oil and gas fields of the Caucasus ended in catastrophe with devastating losses to the German military.  Hitler's war of aggression turned back on him and became a war of defense.  There is a growing consensus among historians that the central conflict of World War II was not Hitler's war with the Western powers, but with Stalin and the Soviet Union.  The War was at its bloodiest in Eastern Europe as Timothy Snyder forcefully demonstrates in his new history, Bloodlands; Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  Hitler and Stalin committed their worst atrocities in the territory that included Ukraine, Belorus, The Baltic States, Poland, Hungary, and Romania.

The fighting in the east was ruthlessly brutal on both sides.  The German military, just as much as the Nazi SS, perpetrated horrific atrocities on the civilian population and played a very willing part in rounding up and murdering Jews.  The Soviet army retaliated brutally against any population suspected of sympathies with the enemy.  They also massacred soldiers and  partisan fighters who might threaten Stalin's imperial designs on Eastern Europe, especially in Poland.  General Georgy Zhukov, General Konstantin Rokossovsky, and other Soviet generals treated their men like so much canon fodder, indifferent to their lives or welfare, throwing waves of doomed men against German firepower.  Conscripts who retreated without orders or who broke and ran were shot by their fellow soldiers coming up behind them.

When the Battle of Stalingrad ended, the victorious Russians showed no mercy to the German invaders.  Thousands of German prisoners perished in Soviet gulags and many who survived were not repatriated until late into the 1950s.  Most of the German dead were left where they fell.  For decades, the steppe around Stalingrad (renamed Volgograd in the 1960s) was littered with the bones of German soldiers.

World War II is conventionally described as "The Good War."  Yet, I see little that was good about anything that happened in Eastern Europe.  I have a hard time describing as "good" the carpet bombing of cities like Rotterdam, Warsaw, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Tokyo, and especially the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
I think of the Second World War as a necessary war.  I'm very grateful that the Russians won at Stalingrad and not Hitler.  We forget how close Hitler came to winning the war.  It is likely that without the Soviet Red Army, American and British forces could not have prevailed against the Germans.  Until Stalingrad, Hitler was winning, and everyone knew it.  I agree with Hannah Arendt when she said that a victory by Hitler would have been equivalent to a nuclear holocaust, the end of civilized human life.  He had to be stopped, even if it meant in the worst way possible.

Hungarian dead at Stalingrad

A wounded German prisoner of war with a Soviet soldier

Stalingrad Memorial decorated for 70th anniversary ceremonies

The Columbia 10 Years Ago Today

Something I wrote today 10 years ago:

The Space Shuttle Columbia was destroyed today.  It broke apart upon reentry over Dallas.  All 7 of the crew certainly perished, though so far, no remains have been recovered.  It happened as I awoke this morning.  I was listening to my usual Saturday shows on the radio as the news came over the wires.  I called my mother and brother who heard nothing unusual that morning.  Other news reports out of Dallas reported a series of loud sonic booms.  It seems these catastrophes always happen in the morning as I am just getting up.  I remember when the Challenger exploded in the morning.  The first plane crashed into the WTC September 11th, 2001 as I stepped out of the shower.

I have no mind for mathematics.  I am not mechanically inclined.  Whatever appreciation for science I have is largely aesthetic.  I like traveling less and less as I get older.  I’m getting more phobic (heights, sharp things, fire, etc.) and more timid with each passing year.  My views and politics are probably far to the left of most mechanically inclined prosaic can-do types.  And yet, I have always been an enthusiastic supporter and admirer of space exploration.  That has not changed with today’s catastrophe.  My most vivid and happiest historical childhood memories from the 60s were not of the Counter-Culture (I was far too young and too remote from all that) and certainly were not of the Vietnam War; they were of the Space Program.  I followed all those space flights with relish from John Glenn in Friendship 7 to the last Apollo flight to the moon in 1972.  I even followed all of the now forgotten missions of the Gemini program.  That is the only aspect of the 60s that I feel privileged to have lived through and witnessed.  All of those mighty projects to put men on the moon were ultimately peaceful despite their Cold War motivations.  They brought people together in a great civilizing enterprise of exploration.  They were great works about something other than war or commerce (even though they began in war and benefited commerce).

Exploration was always risky since the first ancient Polynesian or Viking or Phoenician or Chinese or Greek or Arab set sail in uncharted waters.  The bones of lost and luckless explorers litter the frontiers in history.  Space is vast, disorienting, hostile, and implacably alien.  Exploring even our small part of it is lethally dangerous.  People died and will die again trying to push back that frontier; several Russian cosmonauts, the crews of Apollo 1, the Challenger, and now the Columbia.  I am so grateful for people with the courage and spirit to risk their lives to take a small light up into that immense darkness.  I salute all those who try to expand the realm of the possible for all of us puny little mortals; even when they die trying.

May the seven astronauts who died today rest in peace.

Grave of Robert Falcon Scott in the Antarctic

Ed Koch

Ed Koch, New York City's mayor for 3 terms,  died last night at age 88.

I arrived in New York about 2 years after Ed Koch left office as mayor of New York, so I have no direct experience of his tenure as mayor.  He was mayor when I first visited the city in 1982.

New York City politicians are a little like Texas politicians.  Writers of obituaries always describe both as "larger than life" like the places they govern.  Koch was deeply conflicted, just like the place he governed, and left a very conflicted legacy to the city.

Koch is credited with putting New York back on the road to recovery after the long slide into neglect, anarchy, and bankruptcy of the 1970s.  Perhaps, but he did so frequently at the expense of poor and middle class minorities.  Like just about every mayor since Peter Stuyvesant, Koch was too cozy with the real estate and financial industries.  As did so many other cities in the USA, New York developed itself for the benefit of the transient rich frequently at the expense of the established poor.  Like mayors in other cities, he sometimes pitted ethnic whites against minority populations for political advantage.  In this he was probably no worse and no better than most big city mayors in the USA at the time.

How much blame or credit can any mayor deserve for the decline and resurgence of New York?  Mayor Lindsay still gets blamed for the city's decline.  But it could be argued that the 1970's slide was the end result of decades of white flight from city centers and government policies that abetted that flight.  The city's bankruptcy came after decades of mismanagement and questionable book-keeping.  Should Mayor Koch get credit for the city's resurgence?  Yes and no.  He reformed the city's financial management.  He worked to bring big profit big spending businesses into the city (especially banks and the financial industry).  But banks and real estate flourished while the city's light industries and port declined.  By the late 1970s, the migration out of city centers was starting to reverse in New York and many other cities.

Ed Koch was allegedly gay and deep in the closet.  Maybe so, maybe not.  His record on gay rights is mixed.  When he was elected to Congress in 1969, Koch became one of the very first politicians to actively seek out and court gay voters in the wake of the Stonewall riots.  In that he was very different from the very liberal (and very squeamish) Mayor Lindsay who hoped the whole gay thing would just go away.  During his third and last term as mayor, Koch signed into law a city ordinance banning discrimination against gays and lesbians in housing and employment.  Gay activists such as Marty Robinson, Morty Manford, and Jim Owles first proposed such an ordinance to City Council members in 1970.  A bill was first introduced in 1971.  The bill sat in committee until 1974.  When it finally came to the floor of the City Council, surrogates for the Catholic Archdiocese made sure that the bill failed and died.  For years afterward, the Council's majority leader made sure that the bill never left committee every time it was re-introduced.  In 1986, Mayor Koch put his support behind the bill and got it out of committee and finally passed.  It was during his third term as mayor.  His administration was deeply mired in corruption and patronage scandals at the time.  In his previous 2 terms, the Mayor showed no interest in advancing the bill or in gay rights at all.  At this point in his career, Koch had little political capital to spend and little to lose, so this effort late in his tenure cost him little.  He was late passing this bill, but better late than never.  It might not now be law without Koch's support.

Koch's record on AIDS is less commendable, knuckling under to pressure from the Catholic Archdiocese to squash the city health department's efforts to educate and promote safe sex to the public.  At the time, AIDS sufferers were about as popular as mildew and Koch was not eager to spend any political capital on their behalf.  He shared the Reagan and Bush administrations' policies of malign neglect when it came to AIDS.  AIDS activists at the time (most notably Larry Kramer) accused Koch of throwing AIDS patients under the bus to save his own closet.  However Koch's AIDS policies were little different from the conventional wisdom of the time (which is no excuse).

I once read an article on Koch by a journalist given to purple prose (and whose name I can't remember) who described him as "an abrasive pavement pounder allergic to trees."

Thanks Mr. Mayor for what you did right, and never mind about the rest.

In memory of the late mayor:

National Pie Day

...seriously, it really is National Pie Day today according to the American Pie Council.  Today is not to be confused with National Pi Day on March 14th.

We'll see just how long the copyright lawyers let this stay up on YouTube:

The Inaugural Poet

Richard Blanco, an openly gay Cuban American poet, was President Obama's selection for the inauguration poem.  The choice was extraordinary, as remarkable as Obama's embrace of the gay rights movement into the broader struggle for human freedom and dignity as manifested in feminism, in the struggle for African American civil rights, in the labor movement, and in numerous other such movements by the marginalized to stake their claim upon the promise spelled out in the Declaration of Independence.

Richard Blanco has a life story that a lot of us who are not Cuban can identify with.

I am seven, I think. My grandmother tells me I eat wrong: "Don't use a straw, ever. Los Hombres don't drink soda with a straw. Now throw dat away and sit up." I look wrong: "Dios mío, you nosin but bones. Dat's why the boys at school push you around. Even a girl could beat you up. Now finish your steak, or else." My friends are all wrong: "I no taking you to dat Enrique's house neber again. He's a Mamacita's boy. I don't want you playing with him. I don't care what you say, those GI Joes he has are dolls. Do you want to play with dolls; is dat what you want señorita?"

I play wrong: "I told your mother not to get you those crayons for Christmas. You should be playing outside like un hombre, not coloring in your girly books like dat maricón Juan Alberto." I speak wrong: "Hay Santo, you sound like una niña on the phone. When is your voice going to change?" And I walk wrong too: "Stop clacking your sandals and jiggling like a sissy. Straighten up por Dios--we're in public." I am wrong ("I'll make a man out of you yet . . ."), afraid to do or say anything (". . . you'll see . . ."), scared to want or ask anything (". . . even if it kills me . . ."), ashamed to be alive.

Substitute grandmother for mother and that could almost be my life's story.  I came to the same conclusion about my mother that Richard Blanco did about his grandmother.  They both loved us the best they could and the best that they knew how.

I am so grateful to be alive to see Richard Blanco and all he represents stand in the same place on Inauguration Day as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou.