Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Change Was Not Slow

In my last posts (now some weeks past), I touched on ways Renaissance thought and behavior differed from our own. One habit of our minds is to see the past as homogenous, changing slowly, and constantly becoming more modern (what we used to mean by "progress" before we became disillusioned about it). It's an illusion born of our own lazy rationalizations. The idea that change was slow would have come as a shock to many people in many places in the past. To them the world could be wild and unpredictable.

Suppose you had been born in London in 1600 and lived to the ripe old age of one hundred. (There were a few centenarians around, though far fewer than today.) You would have lived through one change of dynasty, multiple civil wars, revolution, the beheading of one king, nearly a decade of military dictatorship, a major outbreak of plague, a fire that nearly destroyed your city, an invasion, and the overthrow of another king. You would have seen the birth of the modern British political system in the fights between Whigs and Tories (the latter still going very strong), the issuance of a Bill of Rights, and the balance of parliamentary and royal power.

Meanwhile, almost all of the English colonies in North America were founded, Boston became a major city, British interest in India began with the acquisition of Bombay, and there was an abortive attempt to gain and maintain a foothold in North Africa. Economically, you would have witnessed the birth of stock markets, the first modern economic bubble as tulip speculation ravaged the Dutch economy, and the creation of the Bank of England (along with modern methods of financing war and government debt). Militarily the entire way wars were fought changed on both land and sea, as guns and ships were improved, pikes were replaced by bayonets, sieges were reduced to an exact science, and jurists sought to impose order and restraint through generally accepted laws of war, to prevent a repetition of the horrors of wars in Germany and the Low Countries during the years of your middle age.

Technologically, there were practical experiments with submarines, vacuum pumps were invented (establishing that vacuums do exist and proving Aristotle and the Catholic Church wrong), and Galileo would discover the pendulum while others would put it to use to make more accurate clocks. With the telescope he would discover the moons of other planets and their imperfections (again refuting Aristotle). Hooke and Leeuwenhoek would discover miniscule worlds with the microscope. The scientific method would be formulated and societies created to promote it, Newton and Leibniz would lay out the rules for calculus, Kepler would do the same for planetary motion, and Newton would follow up with rules for motion and gravity.

All of that, plus the political philosophies of Hobbes and Locke, religious radicalism advocating pacifism and communism, visible climatic change (it got much colder and the Baltic repeatedly froze), and rapid changes in style and fashion might have begun to dominate your life. Nor must we forget the decline of witchcraft persecutions, having reached their climax in England in 1644-5 and New England in 1692 (though the last prosecution for witchcraft in England was in 1944).

It was hardly a boring time to be alive. The political change was as rapid as anything we have experienced. Social and intellectual change was almost as great. All of them experienced great swings of the pendulum. Can we really think that change was always slow and moving in only one direction?

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Imitation Not Affection, Pt. 3

In the first two parts of this essay, I strove to define mythic or creative imitation based on my reading of both Iain McGilchrist and J.E. Lendon, considered it in the context of Machiavelli and Durer, wondered if it might have some relationship to Tolkien's idea of "sub-creation," and suggested it is closely allied to the principle of anagogy, which is seeing or moving through and to a higher level of thought or understanding. Having used Durer as an example, I'll continue on with him.

For centuries, one of Durer's most famous and most enigmatic pieces, Melancholia I, has defied full explanation. The tools on the ground are mostly carpentry tools, symbolic of Saturn, who as a god and planet ruled melancholics. The figure of the winged woman is likely to be the soul, while the ladder propped against the structure indicates unfinished work. The sphere, polyhedron, dividers, and magic square may be multivalent, referring to the soul's work, the search for harmony, or the movements of the heavens (specifically Saturn or Jupiter).

The whole engraving may be read allegorically, though all interpretations remain somewhat confused, as is the composition. Wojciech Balus pointed this out and focused instead on the way Durer deliberately manipulated compositional elements in the engraving to create a strong sense of "the undecidable," unsettled, and chaotic sense of melancholy. (See: Wojciech Balus, "'Melencolia I': Melancholy and the Undecidable," Artibus et Historiae, 15:30 (1994), 9-21.) I think Balus is correct without going far enough. The picture is constructed to invite us to share the emotion, move into and through it, and imitate it.

We are being invited into the artist's mind. Put another way, the print becomes a powerful form of non-verbal communication, one dependent not on a "reading" of the symbols but communicated by the disharmonious composition and comprehended by human abilities of empathy and mimesis. These are the means of putting ourselves into the mind of another, of understanding melancholy by imitating the artist's state of mind. Imitation (per McGilchrist) is fundamentally a matter of empathy and mimesis by which we may learn about anything from deep emotions to the skills of the most complex disciplines and professions.

I have pursued the theme of imitation in Durer because he gives it masterful expression, allows us to see different sides of it, and also because he illustrates another theme from McGilchrist essential to understanding the Renaissance: the idea of the "skill that hides itself." This may sound like an odd notion, but we are all familiar with these skills in some basic form. As Sam Willis notes in The Fighting Temeraire (Pegasus Books, 2010, 136-137); these are akin to learning to ride a bicycle: they may be imitated, never taught, and cannot be readily described.

We have a tendency to think of skills as things, precisely definable and measurable, absolutely testable and certifiable. (This misunderstanding of skill is one of the points at which our modern educational system, indeed our whole culture, has begun to crumble.) The ancient, medieval, and early modern world had a different, more organic understanding. Looked at this way, a skill was a mystery mastered over time, an indissoluble portion of a whole body of lore and knowledge; the expression of that skill, whether in a painting, a piece of joinery, a necklace, a book, or anything else was proof of mastery, a matter of quality, not of abstract testing. Most importantly, it became implicit knowledge, very much in the sense of David Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order (Routledge, 1980). What this means is that it was internalized to the point at which the execution of the skill was effortless and "self-hiding" in McGilchrist's formulation. The ultimate self-hiding skill for the Renaissance man or woman was mythic, creative imitation.

So let us return to the example of Durer's Melancholia I. His skill was hidden on multiple levels. We have already seen how he manipulated conventional compositional techniques to create the desired effect. Balus goes into great detail on this, showing for instance, how he raised the vanishing point of the perspective to create a sense of unease, and how he complemented this by removing many of the horizontal lines that would visually point to the vanishing point outside the frame of the picture. The extent of Durer's concealed skills does not end there. The polyhedron that dominates a part of the print is extremely complex and very difficult to draw in perspective, a real virtuoso performance given the tools and techniques of the days, as Terence Lynch observed in the 1980s. (Terence Lynch, "The Geometric Body in Durer's Engraving Melencholia I," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 45 (1982): 226-232.)

Durer also gives us important clues to how self-hiding skills and imitation declined and were eventually replaced by modern concepts of measurable, certifiable skills and training. After his years in Italy, he had acquired a solid grounding in the new techniques of perspective. He capitalized on the new market for instructional texts that flourished in the last decades of the fifteenth century by publishing books on the proper way to draw in perspective and create mechanical drawing aids. This was part of a flood of books that explained the "mysteries" of many crafts and created an atmosphere in which it became possible to reduce the mysteries to simple sets of skills that could be taught to anyone. The foundations for the rationalization of work had begun.

Once skills could be reduced to instructions, the methods for learning them changed. They could be learned in parts and with a much reduced attention to imitation. The importance of imitation was gradually reduced over the subsequent four centuries, replaced by modern methods of teaching and working, and left as the preserve of small children and certain professions. Method could replace skill and deep understanding. If McGilchrist is correct, then it also represented a transition from a way of learning and understanding that privileged the strengths of the right hemisphere to one that relied more heavily on the left. Whether he is correct about this or not, it made possible key aspects of our modern world, with its emphasis on ease of learning, exact reproduction, rationalization of work and knowledge, and mechanization. We are materially richer for that, but we are in crisis; what comes next?

Sunday, January 2, 2011

Imitation Not Affectation, Pt. 2

In the previous post, we looked at mythic (or creative) imitation, noting that it is not what we normally mean by that word. It is a deep psychological process of absorbing, re-imagining, and reinterpreting the character of another person or culture from the past into one's being. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, this was tied closely to the Imitation of Christ, but like most human phenomena, imitation is nuanced and many-hued.

Albrecht Durer was the leading Northern Renaissance painter and probably the greatest master of woodcut. Among, other distinctions, he composed more self-portraits than anyone prior to Rembrandt. The earliest is a silver-point he did at the age of 13, but the one I find most interesting and disturbing is the "Self-Portrait in a Fur-Trimmed Coat" (1500). As with some of his depictions of Christ, such as the "Self-Portrait as the Man of Sorrows" (1522) and his "Head of the Dead Christ" (1503), where he used himself as a model, this self-portrait, through the use of formal compositional elements borrowed from depictions of Jesus, is a conscious portrayal of the artist as Christ. It intrigues me more than the "Man of Sorrows" because of the detail and the haunting gaze. Are we to take this, as Erwin Panofsky and Roland Bainton did in the 1940s as an Imitation of Christ? Bainton writing of this and other works: "Such examples enable one to comprehend how fully the men of that generation moved in a perpetual Passion Play in which each and all might take the role of Christus." (Roland H. Bainton, "Durer and Luther as the Man of Sorrows," Art Bulletin, 29:4 (1947), 272.) That would place it solidly in the tradition of mythic imitation previously discussed.

Should we see this in the context of Renaissance individualism? Could he be likening the artist's creativity to that of the deity's? Is he seeing himself as a reflection of Christ with a clear-eyed stare into the mirror? I think all are possible and may have co-existed with the Imitation of Christ in Durer. We are seeing something of the beginnings of modern ego there but tinged with humility, piety, and imitation; not in the form it would take a century-and-a-half later when Newton drew parallels between himself and Christ in a prideful way.

It is too easy to read our own ideas into Durer's work, but elements of the Imitation of Christ, or as Bainton put it, living out a passion play, is clearly part of this. This is clear in some of his later works, where he identifies his own illnesses with Christ's suffering. But I am also suggesting that, at least in the 1500 self-portrait, he is commenting on his own talent and creativity by creating a formal portrait that is a compositional imitation of paintings of Jesus. There may be an element of ego in this; I think that's why I am bothered by his eyes, but there's much more. The closest recent equivalent I find is in Tolkien's writing on what he called "sub-creation". This is the idea (I am simplifying here) that no human can be truly creative, in any independent sense, but rather that all human creations must be a reflection of the Creator. If the sub- or secondary creation was complete and convincing, it would not require suspension of disbelief and would contain it's own truths, reflecting higher truths. This allowed Tolkien to create a world that was not Christian while still reflecting his very devout Catholicism. (See his 1938 essay "On Fairy-Stories" in J.R.R. Tolkien, Tree and Leaf, Houghton Mifflin, 1989.)

Although it is a considerable extension of his idea, I think the best way to think of both Tolkien's and much of Durer's best work, including the self-portrait of 1500, but also his amazingly detailed nature studies, such as his famous Young Hare, The Little Owl, and even The Large Turf (literally a watercolor study of a piece of dirt and grass), is to consider them as anagogic. There is a tradition going back to early medieval times of four ways of reading the Bible: literal, allegorical, tropological (moral), and anagogical. We are all too familiar with the literal and allegorical. The tropological way of reading the Bible involves finding moral parallels that move beyond mere allegory, metaphor rather than simile. If you can find anagogic in a dictionary, you are likely to find something about a mystical reading of the Bible. It is an act of seeing (literally being led) through to a higher reality beyond the word or image. The four modes of interpretation naturally became models for interpreting the Book of Nature, as well as holy writ. Both Tolkien and Durer engage in allegory on occasion, but at their best, they go beyond, seeing through the reality in front of them to the numinous beyond. That is what I believe happens in truly mythic imitation, it leads us through or beyond ourselves into a new level or mode of understanding, of being, but that takes us to the next part of this discussion, and that is another post.