Overwhelmed by the Renaissance

A not-quite reading success…

“Every day of our lives we’re targeted by at least one lie about history.” (p. 25)

“The plague is as important as the Mona Lisa to our effort to understand this Renaissance, both terrible and great.” (p. 193)

“When you zoom in on a moment in the past, it’s always (A) messier than you thought, and (B) includes more women.” (p. 234)

“If you know only one thing about Savonarola it’s the Bonfire of the Vanities, the Renaissance’s darkest hour (nope), a mass book burning (nope) and art burning (nope), invented by Savonarola (nope) to exert the stifling force of Church and Faith against the broadening of art, science, and thought that he hated (still nope).” (p. 291)

“ I’ve looked through one of Galileo’s telescopes, it’s in Florence, and realizing it’s less powerful than the plastic Hamburglar binoculars I once got in a McDonald’s Happy Meal filled me with new awe that a cunning mind armed with the right questions can get a long, long way with simple tools.” (p. 570)

My Reading

I only managed to sort-of-carefully read the first 500 pages of Ada Palmer’s tome Inventing the Renaissance. I scanned the rest. It’s much much too long, and it has a number of flaws, the main one being that it is precious in the sense of being affected and self-congratulatory. Worse yet, it’s constantly offering rather ordinary and boring  bits of the author’s autobiography — mainly about her experience as a graduate student and her students’ reactions to the subject matter.

Inventing the Renaissance manages to cover several hundred years of humanist thought, to define many concepts, and to provide sketches of the accomplishments of dozens of thinkers of the age and many patrons of these thinkers. I’m a fan of Leonardo da Vinci, Isabella d’Este, Michelangelo, Lucrezia Borgia, Pico della Mirandola, Niccolò Machiavelli, several members of the Medici family, Benvenuto Cellini (“the Florentine goldsmith-sculptor-assassin-jailbreaker-necromancer”), and so on. It’s interesting to read a not-so-critical view of Savonarola. But eventually the level of detail seems brutal, especially when one’s boredom is amplified by details of the author’s academic career.

Of course the book provides a huge dose of historic narrative, character studies of many Renaissance figures, summaries of philosophical narratives, introductions to the major thinkers and interests of the age (both famous ones and obscure ones), a bit about the politics of art works like Michelangelo’s Sistine chapel, and much more. At the end, there’s even a brief history of printing — which in my opinion deserves more prominence: the author characterizes the introduction of printed books as “an information revolution: not new technology (we’re on the Gutenberg-type press until the nineteenth century) but a distribution network revolution.” (p. 587) I felt that her view was weak.

Unless you are a glutton for an extreme level of detail about obscure points, and unless you are a fan of the author’s fascination with her own life and academic achievements, I strongly doubt that you would enjoy reading this book. And although I have in the past immersed myself in some of the biographies of the same individuals featured here, I found it horrendously dense and challenging to follow, which is not a compliment. I say: leave the reading of this academic stuff to the professionals!

Thinking of Famous Art in the Renaissance

I enjoyed the art history, such as discussion of Michelangelo’s slaves.

Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel. One of the most amazing mural paintings in history:
the book has interesting historical info about this art work and its creator.
Shared with Deb’s Sunday salon at Readerbuzz.

Leonardo’s portrait of Cecelia Gallerani, mistress of Ludovico Sforza, the Duke of Milan was painted when Leonardo was “sent there by Lorenzo de Medici as something between an ambassador and a gift for his Sforza allies.” (p. 326) The ermine is shared with Eileen’s Critters!

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

Photos of art works from Wikipedia

November Kitchen Thoughts

Not a kitchen: beautiful skies over the Woodrow Wilson bridge to Washington, DC.
The highlight of our month of November was a week’s visit for the Thanksgiving holiday.

November in Michigan

In my kitchen in Michigan this month, there’s been much less activity than we enjoyed over Thanksgiving week in Evelyn and Tom's kitchen in Fairfax, Virginia. I’m sharing two kitchens with the bloggers who link up at Sherry’s “In My Kitchen” each month and with Deb’s Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

At home in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Watering my plants, 2 ice cubes each.

Three new fridge magnets from our visit to the National Gallery of Art:
Top: Leonardo's Ginevra (1478)
Lower left: Vermeer's A Lady Writing (1665)
Lower right: Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance (1664)

Food at home: rather simple.

Huevos rancheros with black beans, egg, and yogurt on a tortilla with a bit of chopped cabbage and a lime wedge.

Len’s treat for breakfast.

Salad with peanut dressing.

Israeli Feta Cheese from Trader Joe’s. Thinking of Israel all the time.

In Evelyn and Tom’s Kitchen

Thanksgiving action photos in addition to the many from last week.

Beyond Thankfulness: Some thoughts for November

While celebrating Thanksgiving, I’ve been thinking about how fortunate we are, but also what responsibility our good fortune means to us. For example, consider this statement from the introduction to The Best American Food Writing 2023, editor Mark Bittman:

“Everyone with unlimited access to some kind of food—the majority of people in this country—takes it for granted. We live five minutes from a banana or a Slurpee or a cheeseburger and we consider that normal, even though everything it takes to bring us those things is part of a deeply flawed and destructive system.” (p. xv)

Along with feeling gratitude, we can also try to remember the social and environmental cost of what we are grateful for. A similar thought is in an article by Yvon Chouinard, founder and former owner of the outdoor goods supplier Patagonia. He offered some insight into the need to be responsible when acauiring the goods for which we feel thankful. 

“Since 1999, humans have far surpassed — by billions of metric tons — the amount of Earth’s resources that scientists estimate we can sustainably use. The culprit: our overconsumption of stuff, from shoddy tools to fast fashion that is trendy one day, trash the next.

“Obsession with the latest tech gadgets drives open pit mining for precious minerals. Demand for rubber continues to decimate rainforests. Turning these and other raw materials into final products releases one-fifth of all carbon emissions.

“The global inequality that benefits some and persists for the many, ensures that some of the poorest people and most vulnerable places bear the social and environmental costs of international trade. Research links demand for goods in Western Europe and the United States to the premature deaths of more than 100,000 people in China because of industrial air pollution.” (Source: "The High Stakes of Low Quality," New York Times, Nov. 23, 2023)

The climate crisis is a looming issue that should affect our consumer decisions. According to the Guardian: “The year 2023 will be remembered as a critical year in the escalating extinction, climate and nature emergencies – not least because it looks certain to be the hottest since records began.” 

Every day the news is full of examples of products we buy and use (or items that are integrated into products we use) that seem innocent, but threaten the environment, the workers, and the civil order of the countries where they are produced. Here’s one example from numerous possible impending disasters: the production of palm oil. An article in the Guardian titled “Deadly harvest: how demand for palm oil is fuelling corruption in Honduras” described how growing and harvesting oil palms creates jobs for desperate workers and high rewards for the rich by destroying the natural forests:

“Palm oil, especially from the oil palm’s fruit, has become an essential export business in Honduras, used in the food industry, in beauty products and as a biofuel. Its low production costs make it a cheap substitute for most oils, such as sunflower and olive, significantly lowering manufacturing costs in global markets.” 

Planting of oil palms by small agriculturalists in Honduras destroys stands of essential old-growth mangroves and other trees in areas that the government has set aside as protected national parks. A few rangers are assigned to police millions of acres of parkland, while opportunists are destroying the natural plant life to grow oil palms, and collusion between the rich entrepreneurs and the judicial establishment makes enforcement hopelessly dangerous.

How are Americans like me involved? According to the Guardian article, palm oil accounts for about 40% of global demand for vegetable oil as food, animal feed and fuel — so we are surely using it whether we are aware of it or not — I read the label of a favorite Trader Joe’s cookie, for example, and it contained palm oil! 

Globally, oil palm cultivation is endangering wildlife and forests in many other parts of the world, not merely in Honduras. Not to mention that it’s not very healthy to eat foods made with palm oil, which is used in especially large quantities in cheap, highly-processed foods. Honduras is one small example among many producers of the oil, and palm oil is only one of the many destructive products we unthinkingly buy and use.

I feel helpless.

Blog post and photos © 2023 mae sander

The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The first painting we wanted to see in the National Gallery was Leonardo da Vinci’s Ginevra.
Located in a temporary gallery during a remodeling project, it’s first visible through this doorway.

Ginevra de Benci

People looking at Ginevra.

The Modern Art Building of the National Gallery

Walking through the permanent collections, I especially liked this painting: 
“The Flag is Bleeding” by Faith Ringgold.

Special Exhibit: The Land Carries Our Ancestors:
Contemporary Art by Native Americans

We enjoyed the special exhibit of work by Native American artists.

“Curated by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), this exhibition brings together works by an intergenerational group of nearly 50 living Native artists practicing across the United States. Their powerful expressions reflect the diversity of Native American individual, regional, and cultural identities. At the same time, these works share a worldview informed by thousands of years of reverence, study, and concern for the land.” (source)

“Fire Water Woman” by Rose Powhatan

Mural Installation by John Hitchcock (link)

“World Traveler” by Melissa Cody

“Edward Curtis Paparazzi: Chicken Hawks” by Jim Denomie

These art works by Native American painters seemed to me to link very closely with a book I’m reading: Endangered Eating: America's Vanishing Foods by historian Sarah Lohman, in particular the chapter titled “Manoomin: Anishinaabe Wild Rice.” The struggles of Native Americans to stay connected and preserve traditions are documented both in the art works in the National Gallery and in the descriptions of the determined way that tribes in the Great Lakes region struggle to preserve native varieties of wild rice (as opposed to the industrially cultivated and mass-marketed cultivars of this native plant). 

Key passages from Endangered Eating that seem to me to connect to the ideas of the artists:

“Tribes of the Anishinaabeg and their neighbors, the Sioux (Dakota and Lakota), are the only two contemporary Native groups that harvest wild rice. They collect it in the waters of upstate Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and in parts of Canada bordering the Great Lakes. In Minnesota alone, Native peoples consume an average of 350,000 pounds of wild rice annually, about six pounds per person per year. It is the most commonly consumed traditional food. But manoomin is a spiritual food as well, essential to mino-bimaadiziwin, the concept of living a good life. It’s the first solid food fed to Ojibwe infants and it is one of the foods present at funeral ceremonies.” (Endangered Eating p. 140)

“In 2018, the White Earth Nation passed the Rights of Manoomin to protect the remaining wild rice. The law was modeled after the work of the International Rights of Nature Tribunal: much like the legal rights given to corporations under US law, the Rights of Nature grant a natural resource guaranteed rights as a living entity. Under the Rights of Manoomin, wild rice is guaranteed the right to clean water, free from industrial pollution; the right to a ‘healthy, stable climate free from human-caused climate change impacts;’ and the right to be free from patenting and GMO cross-pollination.” (p. 166)

And a Nana by Niki de Saint Phalle

On the balcony outside the exhibit: a sculpture by artist Niki de Saint Phalle.
Her delightful characters are all called Nanas. This is “Yellow Nana.”

The National Gallery of Art is so full of masterpieces that the few hours we had were nowhere near enough to see all of the works we would like to contemplate. We saw just a few of the works from the Dutch Golden age (such as Rembrandt and Vermeer), a very brief look at the wonderful collection of impressionist works, and a quick look at more of the modern art. We’ve been there many times, never enough.

“Still Life with Peacock Pie” by Pieter Claesz

Blog post and photos by mae sander © 2023

Shared with Sami’s Monday Murals

 

La Fée Electricité and the 1937 Paris Exposition

City of Paris Museum of Modern Art

"La Fée Electricité" (The Fairy Electricity, also called The Spirit of Electricity) is an immense mural by artist Raoul Dufy, which depicts the history and application of electricity, including portraits of 110 scientists and inventors. This work is actually an oil painting on hundreds of canvases mounted on wood, and it may be the world's largest oil painting in some sense, but it's far from the largest mural. (For a list of much larger murals see "15 biggest Mural Painting Jobs in the World." For a full look at Dufy's entire painting, see this 360° image.)

The History of "La Fée Electricité"

The mural, which occupies six hundred square meters, was originally commissioned for the 1937 International Exposition in Paris. The mural's original location was the exposition's Pavillon de la Lumière et de l’Électricité (Pavilion of Light and Electricity) near the Eiffel Tower. The architecture and design of this pavilion was very modern and impressive, including the world's most powerful searchlight and other effects that lit up the night during the exposition.

Paris Exposition, 1937: Pavilion of Light and Electricity.

Special effects at night at the pavilion.

A number of prominent artists were commissioned to produce works for several of the pavilions of the 1937 exposition. Of these works, the most lastingly famous is Picasso's Guernica, which was created for the Spanish pavilion. Guernica showed the massacre of the residents of Guernica, a Spanish town that supported the Republican side of the ongoing Spanish Civil War. The Republicans sponsored the pavilion but soon afterwards, lost the war to the Fascists. Picasso's painting remained a tribute to the Republicans and the victims of Fascism. It was on display in the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 1939 until the restoration of democracy in Spain in 1981.

In 1964, Dufy's enormous mural was installed in the City of Paris Museum of Modern Art, donated by the French national electric company, Électricité de France. Its vividness was restored by work done to it in 2021.

A few of the figures from "La Fée Electricité"

Members of the Royal Society

"Let there be light - and colour! How many Fellows of the Royal Society can you spot in Raoul Dufy’s fresco ‘La Fée Electricité?" is an article about some of the famous scientists in the mural who were members of the British Royal Society. It's fun to look for the famous and less famous scientists throughout history that appear in this amazing work of art. 

Benjamin Franklin
American but a member of the Royal Society.

Royal Society members including Franklin.

While I have seen this mural, I did not photograph it, but have used photos from the website of the owner, the  City of Paris Museum of Modern Art and from the website of the Royal Society. At the Detroit Institute of Arts, I did see a preliminary watercolor that Dufy made before creating the immense oil-painted mural.

Water Color Version at the Detroit Institute of Arts

Although much smaller than the mural in Paris, this sketch is actually quite large!

Detail of classical Greek philosopher/scientists in preliminary sketch.

Detail of Leonardo da Vinci and Gallileo.

We saw the water color version, which belongs to the DIA, in a wonderful exhibit called “After Cubism.”

Blog post by mae sander, shared with Sami's Monday Murals.

Japanese Screens

Tigers from a room-dividing screen at the Kotohira Shrine on the island of Shikoku. (source)
Artist: Maruyama Okyo (1733-1795) 

Reading a few Japanese detective novels reminds me of how fascinating I have always found Japanese art, and  especially the architecture and decoration of certain old-style homes and temples.

From our 1994 visit to Kyoto.

Rooms in these buildings were very sparsely furnished, and divided with sliding screens called fusuma, which were often decorated with paintings called  fusuma-e. Looking for examples of these paintings, I discovered that many of them are very old, as well as learning that some contemporary artists are now practicing this traditional art in a modernized way. 

Modern fusama paintings. (source)

When I visited the temples of Kyoto a number of years ago, I was most impressed by the dry garden at the Ryōanji temple, as well as the interior, which included many of the classic paintings. 

Ryōanji garden (Wikipedia)

Interior of Ryōanji Temple. (source)

A screen from Ryōanji, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. (source)

In the late 19th century, Ryōanji, a now-famous and popular tourist site, had hard times and sold a number of the fusama-e to Western museums and to collectors. A few years ago, some of these lost works were restored to the temple. 

Painted screens restored to Ryōanji in 2019 (source)

In classic Western art, murals, frescos, and wall paintings have been popular at various times in history, and many famous artists are well-known for their achievements in this genre of art work. For example, "The Last Supper" by Leonardo da Vinci is one of his most admired works (not counting Mona Lisa!) I think of these Japanese works as a parallel type of art, made to decorate homes and public spaces, but reflecting the highest achievement of the artists of their time. I'm sharing these thoughts and these images with Sami's weekly blog event, "Monday Murals."

A Few Other Screens from Various Sources

A modern screen at Shinjuan, a structure in the Daitokuji temple complex in Kita-ku, Kyoto
by artist Kamikokuryō Isamu. (source)

Senrin Yamagishi’s painting of a cherry blossom tree at Kodaiji temple in Kyoto, Japan. (source)

Koji Mizutani, At Yoshino, 2003. (source)

Blog post © 2023 mae sander. Images as credited.

Walter Isaacson's Leonardo

Mona Lisa: "the culmination of a life spent perfecting the ability to stand at the intersection of art and nature. The poplar panel with multiple layers of light oil glazes, applied over the course of many years, exemplifies the multiple layers of Leonardo's genius. What began as a portrait of a silk merchant's young wife became a quest to portray the complexities of human emotion, made memorable through the mysteries of a hinted smile, and to connect our nature to that of our universe. The landscape of her soul and of nature's soul are intertwined." (Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci, p. 475)

This Little Free Library continues to know what I should read and have it waiting for me. Current reading: a pristine copy of Leonardo  da Vinci by Walter Isaacson. It's a beautiful work full of color illustrations included directly in the text, so that it's really a joy to read. (I can't believe someone just anonymously gave it away to me!)

Leonardo was surely one of the most talented and imaginative humans of all time, and Isaacson clearly holds him in awe. There's much more to this famous painter than a few well-known surviving masterpieces such as Mona Lisa, several other portraits, and the overpowering -- though unfinished -- paintings of the Virgin with Saint Anne and others.

Isaacson's book describes Leonardo's art, his scientific work, and his vast quantity of notebooks full of notes, sketches, and diagrams. Isaacson also clearly examined the huge body of Leonardo scholarship, and conveys it in a very interesting way, including a discussion of how scholars authenticate newly found "Leonardo" works.

Leonardo's interests included human anatomy, animal anatomy, fluid dynamics, military machines, learning how birds fly, imagining man-made flying machines, creating maps and charts, studying geometry, and many more subjects beyond art. His accomplishments were amazing and often far ahead of his contemporaries' understanding. There's one problem with these accomplishments: he virtually never published his work. In quite a few cases, if scientists had known what he knew, the course of intellectual history would have been very different.

Leonardo's studies often began with the motive of drawing and painting better images. For example, he believed that understanding the nerves and muscles was a essential to creating the type of drawings and paintings he wanted to make. Among many studies, he examined the muscles of the face to learn how to create more realistic facial expressions -- like a smile. He often went far beyond what was needed for artistic purposes.

In Leonardo's anatomy studies, he worked at a hospital doing dissections, and worked with a professor of medicine. As he learned about the anatomic structures that could lead to better art, he became fascinated by the subject. He then went further and further, such as observing and sketching the mechanics and fluid flow of the heart, veins, arteries, and even capillaries, and even opening a living pig to see the heart's live function. His observations and detailed experiments of how the heart's aortic valve works were especially impressive: one particular discovery, recorded in his unpublished writings, was only rediscovered in the 1960s! (p. 419)

Isaacson's organization of the overpowering collection of materials at his disposition is an awesome feat in itself. He combines biography, art criticism, intellectual history, and more in what I would see as a seamless whole. His descriptions of the major art works are insightful. He explains the events and circumstances of Leonardo's life during the time he was painting. Individual chapters cover Leonardo's work in major areas of scientific and engineering studies, placing them in their historic and scientific context. As a result it's a wonderful and readable book. Although I have read about Leonardo and also about the history of his era, I learned a great deal.

Isaacson's chapter on "Vitruvian Man" is an example of the masterful way he presents his research into the artist. This chapter made me look at this famous work in a new way. Originally described in the work of the Roman author Vitruvius (who lived in the first century BCE), these classic proportions of the human body were the subject of discussions among a set of friends of Leonardo. Several of them also tried to illustrate the idea of a man inscribed in a circle and an offset square. However, only Leonardo made this diagram into a lasting and incredible work of art.