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Conclusion

“Among his many, or rather innumerable, disciples, the greater number of whom became able masters, Rafaello de Urbino had not one who imitated him more closely in manner, invention, design, and colouring than did Giulio Romano, nor one who was better grounded, more bold, resolute, prolific, and versatile, or more fanciful and varied than Giulio; not to mention for the present that he was very pleasant in his conversation, gay, amiable, gracious and supremely excellent in character.” - Giorgio Vasari

High Praise! But while it speaks to Romano’s technical skill, it says nothing about his originality. Merely that he was a near perfect imitation of Raphael himself. (That being said, his painting is incredibly vibrant and powerful, especially Sala dei Giganti pictured above) Is that what was valued in the artistic profession at this time? In the modern era, it seems like the goal is to make something as different as possible from everything else - to do something no one else has done before. Who thought before Jackson Pollock to try splattering cans of paint over a canvas?

But the fact that Romano’s imitation was so applauded speaks to power of imitation not just in art, but in stories as well. Great stories of both today and of the Renaissance era are derived from great stories of the Classical period. And stories from the Classical period must come from somewhere as well.

I read Winter’s Tale in a class last Spring and recall wondering why it was billed as a comedy and not a tragedy, especially after the deaths of Mamillius and Hermione.

“You , my lord, best know

Who least will seem to do so, my past life

Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true,

As I am now unhappy; which is more

Than history can pattern, though devised

And play’d to take spectators.”

A beautifully tragic line. The change in tone in the last few acts was very striking to me. I remember thinking the first half of the play was very “Shakespearean,” though I am mostly familiar with his tragedies, not so much comedies and histories. Shakespearean is a strange word though, considering how heavily influenced his stories are by other literature and historical events. We apply his name to characteristics of storytelling that existed long before him.

Even though Winter’s Tale is not a history, some of its events bear striking resemblances to Queens’ trials of the past. One tragic aspects of these trials to me is the defendants’ invocations of God in their testimonies. Anne Boleyn said “may God be my witness if I have done him any other wrong,” and Katherine of Aragon, “When ye had me at first, I take God to my judge, I was a true maid, without touch of a man.” They’re appealing to God as though they know they have no one else to appeal to, and that they know they will be executed. Real life serves as the best source material for all stories both tragic and comedic, which brings of the classic question, does life imitate art or does art imitate life?

The details of publications of Shakespeare’s work have some interesting implications about the canonization of great art. The publishing of his works in the folio format as opposed to quarto format suggest that plays were being taken more seriously as an art form, but it seems like sort of a chicken/egg situation. Was it that Shakespeare’s plays were a direct cause of this shift, or that the shift was happening anyway and Shakespeare happened to be a benefactor of the changing tide? Either way, plays, like classical music in recent centuries, are more respected as art forms now - so respected that the audience is expected to shut up and listen throughout the whole thing. But Shakespeare’s existence in the modern world still has ties to its popular roots. He’s widely studied academically of course, but his plays are performed in public open-air venues, which is very different from the sometimes suffocating experience of being in a crowded theater.

What else is interesting is the way his plays were categorized after his death. I had always thought Shakespeare catalogued his own works as comedies, histories and tragedies. In the Folio catalogue, Macbeth and Hamlet are titled The Tragedy of Macbeth and The Tragedy of Hamlet. Were those Shakespeare’s titles or were those titles given to the plays by his colleagues when they published them? Perhaps if he had known his work would be published this way, Shakespeare would have chosen to categorize them differently.

There are some aspects of life in the Renaissance era that simply can’t be compared to life today, and the Jacobean masques are an example of that. There are plenty of parties thrown by rich people and plenty of political gatherings and festivities, but nothing on the scale of, say, the Field of the Cloth of Gold. It technically wasn’t Jacobean because it took place during Henry VIII’s reign but still.

The painting depicting the events resemble work by artists such as Hieronymus Bosch or Pieter Bruegel in terms of scale and scope. The paintings a large, full, dense and busy, with a million things going on, all visible at once. The largest image size I could find of the Field was 2250x1090, which was at least enough to zoom in on some things in the foreground. The king (unsure if it’s Henry or Francis) is riding on horseback to the event surrounded by soldiers, guards, and other aristocrats. On the bottom right, there are people engaging in festivities. People sitting, talking, eating, drinking, and two people appear to be in a drunken brawl. A castle in the background appears to be firing off canons in celebration.

On the top left, there’s a dragon flying in the air, and I’m not sure what that’s about. I know the phrase “Here be dragons” is used on maps along with illustrations of dragons to show that an area is unexplored, but what significance does it have in this context. Is it asking what effect this event will have on the future of Britain and France’s relationship?

Bosch, Christ in Limbo

Bruegel, Netherlandish Proverbs

I have an appetite for sinister and apocalyptic imagery and this Quarles emblem is doing it for me. The emblem goes with Revelations 12:12, when the Devil is terrorizing people on Earth after being cast down from heaven. (I’m not sure if my biblical knowledge is accurate, I’m really just guessing some of this) I think the saints have been called up in the rapture at this point and left the Earth and stars behind. (”Terras Astra Reliquit?”)

Revelations 12:!2 goes “The Devill is come unto you, having great wrath, because he knoweth that he hath but a short time.”

The emblem paints a frightening and desperate picture for the onlookers and people running away. I assume the circle they’re inside of represents basically the whole world. There’s no background, nothing outside of it, showing that the small circle is their whole universe. There’s nothing outside of either. They’ve been completely left behind. What’s scariest is the size of the circle. It’s very small and there’s nowhere to run inside of it. “Unlocke they Clouds, great Thund’rer, and come downe; Behold whole Temples weare thy sacred Crowne; Redresse, redresse our wrongs, revenge, revenge thy owne.” The Devil has come down to undo the peoples’ wrongs and take revenge on them for their sins, and they have nowhere to go. It’s a terrifying and claustrophobic image.

Jonson, the plague, and death

You can’t talk about the 1603 outbreak of the plague without thinking of our own contemporary plague the world is dealing with right now. Several weeks ago, early into this social distancing business, musician Rosanne Cash tweeted “Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear.” Ignoring the fact that the tweet seems like a way to guilt trip people for not being productive enough in their isolation, it’s a clear connection between the plague outbreak in the 17th century and the coronavirus outbreak in the present day.

Though the economy likely suffered in London then as it is all over the world right now, many manual laborers remained well-employed and busy. Even now, while restaurants and stores are closed, construction workers are still out in full force building apartment buildings, paving streets, filling potholes, etc. Not unlike the ceremonial arches that were built in London, New York City is considering mass temporary internment areas for people who succumb to coronavirus there. (NYC deaths are currently averaging 200 daily there) One major difference is that now it’s a mostly children losing parents and grandparents rather, where during the plague the young were dying as well, including Jonson’s young son.

“Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy;

My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy.

Seven years tho’ wert lent to me, and I thee pay,

Exacted by thy fate, on the just day.

O, could I lose all father now! For why

Will man lament the state he should envy?

To have so soon ’scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage,

And if no other misery, yet age?

Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say, “Here doth lie

Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry.”

For whose sake henceforth all his vows be such,

As what he loves may never like too much.”

"Here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry” is a beautiful line, and a particularly tragic offering from someone so well-versed in humor and satire. It brings me back to the DaVinci quote “Supposing that a poet applies himself to represent beauty, ferocity, or a base, a foul, or a monstrous thing, as against a painter, he in his many ways, bring forth a variety of forms.” Poetry can be more than just words on a page, and a poet can create beauty in a variety of forms, including the form a child.

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson had quite a life story. Cinematic even. It would make for a great biopic. I searched to see if there was one and I didn’t find any, but interestingly, Jonson does have his own IMDb page.

It’s funny that the benefit of clergy loophole that allowed Jonson to escape execution was referred to as a “Monty Python-esque” move, which of course it absolutely is, but I thought of a different film upon reading that part of his story. In Catch Me If You Can (2002), Leonardo Dicaprio’s Frank Abagnale Jr. lives his life by committing check fraud. At one point he becomes a lawyer and the detective trying to catch eventually asks him how he cheated on the bar exam. Abagnale responds by saying he studied hard and he passed. Both are interesting cases of committing fraud the honorable way.

The rule that says anyone who can recite a Psalm in Latin must be a clergyman is very peculiar though. To me, it seems almost like a failure of the Church of England to fully separate itself from Catholicism. As I understand (I could be wrong) in other parts of Europe before the Reformation, Bibles were primarily in Latin and only clergymen could read them. The Catholic Church could maintain a lot of power as long as common people didn’t have access to the word of God. So that rule would make some sense in a different context, but in the context of a Protestant church, it’s very odd. Why would a church that is seeking to reform hold on to such an antiquated concept?

The text I spent the most time admiring in the rare books room was this geography/cartography atlas which I found completely fascinating. I’ve always been especially interested in geography and always find myself looking at atlases or scavenging Google maps trying to get a sense of the world and a feel for its vastness. I took some effort to find exactly where these places were on a modern map, but to little avail. I was able to find that some of the maps (there were many in the book) were of parts of Wales, but they hardly resembled what the geography of Wales really looks like on an up-to-date map.

I think the concept of the coastline paradox is relevant here. The coastline paradox is the idea that measuring the length of a landmass’s coastline is impossible to do accurately because the closer you zoom in, the longer the coastline becomes. It’s like fractals. The further back you go in time, the less familiar the maps appears to us and the more they differ from how the world actually looks. This is a map of the world by Greek historian Herodotus.

You can identify vague shapes that show people generally knew where they were in relation to other places, but overall, Herodotus’ view of the world is completely unrecognizable to our own. What’s also notable is that Herodotus clearly was less concerned with the intricacies of the coastlines. They appear as smooth scribbles on this map as opposed to the jagged, complex borders that they really are. Even the coastlines and rivers of the Renaissance era maps seem more random than modern maps. It’s easier to be accurate nowadays when we have satellite imagery. Cartography used to be more of a guessing game.

Looking through one of the books (I can’t remember which one) in the rare books room, I cam across a piece of paper with sketches of Britannia coin from 1694. There are also some other scribblings as well as what looks like some penmanship practice. The drawings of the coins stuck with me the most though, and left me with some questions about class and accessibility in the Renaissance.

I don’t have enough knowledge of the period to really speculate on the cost of books, but I do wonder about it. Most literature/art history classes I’ve taken focus on renowned creators with works in the accepted canon of great art, but this class focuses more on how common people spent their time, so it makes me wonder how common people spent their money. Even if someone were to tell me how much a book cost in England in the 17th century, I wouldn’t know how to adjust that to fit my understanding. But did members of the lower/working classes have adequate access to knowledge? Could they easily afford books about science or geography or math?

I can visualize the person who drew these sitting bored in a classroom just doodling away as I myself have often done, (never in this class of course) and it got me thinking about the access I have as an OSU student to a vast library of knowledge. Though I suppose in my case that access comes with the cost of tuition so it’s not easily affordable by any means. But I’m curious how the ease of my access to this book compares to the access of those who actually lived in its time. I guess if the book’s user preferred doodling to reading, it couldn’t have been that expensive.

I spent some time looking through the internet for creative use of speech bubbles in modern comics, but I couldn’t find any that were quite as interesting or had quite the same meta quality as Renaissance era speech scrolls.

Many images show the scrolls coming out of peoples’ mouths, indicating that definitely represent literal speech. But in other cases, like the figure on the far left, they appear to exist as physical objects being carried. Do the scrolls exist within the world of the image, or are they merely their for the viewer/reader to see? There’s a level of abstraction to these scrolls that suggest the beginnings of modern or abstract art. Instead of simply ascribing objects and people to the concepts they’re commonly associated with like art did up until this time, the artist or illustrator adds a hint of surrealism to the picture.

At the same time, it could obviously be argued that speech scrolls lead to speech bubbles and the modern art of cartooning. Interesting that these Renaissance images could be the birth of both a kind of “high art” (modernism, surrealism, etc.) and “low art.” (cartoons, comics, graphic novels) With that said, this is the most creative use of speech bubble I could find from the 21st century, though I’m sure there are more out there.

#speech scrolls

Charts!

Bud Roach pointed out something I found very interesting during his appearance today. He explained spoke about the leeway that written music gives to individual performers in early music - at least the style of music that he was playing. Orchestral music is obviously much more precise and calculated.

But the written music didn’t include every single note that the instrumentalist needs to pluck, or the exact rhythm they need to pick or strum. It was more of a chord chart, not unlike what jazz musicians use today. Bud said that purpose of these charts for instruments like lute, theorbo, and classical guitar, was to give the player some level of freedom to express themselves within the context of the song. They could express themselves vocally as well. Secular music was about individual expression and emotional impact rather than blind devotion and collective worship.

In America in the 20th century, jazz also emerged as a radically expressive form of popular music. It was radical in comparison to the rest of the music in America and Europe at the time. in terms of its aesthetic and the way its songs were structured, it was completely new and different. Fascinatingly, jazz music in its written format, takes on a similar form to the music that Bud demonstrated in his performances. A jazz rhythm section doesn’t have a melody, but it does have chord charts. The music usually doesn’t contain exact rhythms or notations, but simply the necessary chords to the song. They’re expected to play the correct chords in the correct time signature at the correct tempo, but other than that they have complete freedom. They can voice the chords however they want and improvise rhythms. In both jazz and early Renaissance music, only the skeleton of the song is written on the page; the musicians flesh it out themselves, in whatever way feels best to them.

Ben Johnson’s thoughts about poetry and art apply to modern mixed media just as well as they did to early forms of artistic expression. They also have meaning in regard to how illustrated books are seen today as opposed to how they were seen in the Renaissance.

Pictures are definitely a useful tool to use in place of written description, and are therefore abundant in books for children who are still learning to read. But because of this, pictures in books are seen as childish and immature. (at least they always have been in my experience) Maybe imagining something based on written words requires greater intellectual or mental effort, and so it is seen as more adult? Johnson certainly seems to feel that way. He also thinks that describing something is more difficult than painting or drawing it. In “The Mind,” he writes, “Not that you art I do refuse; but here I may no colours use.”

There’s always someone to complain integrity and originality being lost when a book is adapted to film. (just as there used to be complaints when a poem was adapted to song) And these complaints are valid, as the original author’s vision may be tampered with, and the images each readers conjured in their own heads will be challenged by new cinematic portrayals.

But is it really better to do the intellectual work of forming your own image based on the words on the page? There’s nothing wrong with it, of course, but there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with simply looking and absorbing an already formed image either. In his notebook, Da Vinci writes, “Supposing that a poet applies himself to represent beauty, ferocity, or a base, a foul, or a monstrous thing, as against a painter, he in his many ways, bring forth a variety of forms; but will the painter not satisfy more? Are there not pictures to be seen, so like the actual things, that they deceive men and animals?” In the case of Da Vinci’s paintings, I would say his work is almost deceptively realistic. And I would say the same for film, which of course wasn’t around to be considered by Da Vinci or Johnson. There’s a myth about the 1896 short film L’Arrivee d’un train a La Ciotat that the incoming train actually deceived the audience and convinced them that they were about to be run over by a real train. While probably not true, it would give credit to Da Vinci’s argument.

Bible Title Pages

There are various reasons for works of literature to have illustrations and title pages. It could be simply to make a book eye-catching or sellable, or to give the work a sense or feeling of status. It could also be another way of explaining the themes and stories and concepts of the book to people who can’t read. The various title pages of the Bible shown in class gave legitimacy to all these ideas.

- The King James Bible is the most aesthetically pleasing and the least visually hectic of the three we looked at. The top and bottom of the image are divided by a structure that creates space between the characters and figures. The most relevant imagery (the lamb, the cross, the dove, etc.) are at the center at the top, which makes them the viewers main focus. The whole arrangement provides a sense of symmetry and beauty, which makes the picture enjoyable to look at.

- The cover of Henry’s Bible is a lot busier, and much less pleasing to look at. It’s also clearly more about King Henry than it is about the gospels themselves. The illustration contains little to no actual biblical imagery, but rather shows a busy London street with Henry at the top providing bibles to citizens. It seems like a stunt, like a rich person making a large public donation to a charity organization. The cover is meant to display Henry’s status and “generosity,” and not to disseminate the gospel.

- I think the last example best performs the role of actually presenting the contents of the book visually. The title card is surrounded by depictions of major stories and occurrences in the Bible, such as creation, Moses receiving the ten commandments, and the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ. It tells an extremely simplified and condensed version of the contents of the book.

Interestingly, the order in which these were published says something about how illustration developed as an art form over time. The King James Bible, the most recent, is by far the most well-illustrated in my opinion. Not only in terms of how realistic the figures are, but also in terms of how well it’s structured. The other two in comparison seem very messy. It’s difficult to look at the images as a whole, but it’s also difficult to focus on one singular object because everything is so close together.

Music in the home and in public

The role that music plays in the comfort of one’s home and in public concert venues seem to me to have remained similar over the last half century. Dramatic advancements in technology over time have shaped the way music is listened to and practiced, but thematically, things are more or less the same as they were in Dowland’s time.

Music existed as an outlet and an activity for people and families to engage in at home. Most people were musical amateurs (as most people are in any given field) and played/sang for fun in the leisure time. One of the ways technology has changed this is that, with the advent of recorded music, the “in-the-home” music experience is often more based on listening than on actively playing. In public, music was an event and a spectacle performed by professionals and viewed by everyone else. It still is today.

Music being both a spectacle and a recreational activity may have sparked the division of music into genres. I think a lot of Dowland’s compositions with lyrical themes of love and romance played a large part in this as well. His songs can be seen as an early incarnation of pop music. While Christian music was (and still is) almost exclusively about the glorification of God and the Church, Dowland’s music was both relatable and personal. Different songs like “Fine Knacks” and “Flow My Tears” conveyed different moods and became more meaningful in certain situations. Some songs were good for fun, jovial gatherings, while others were relevant in more emotional circumstances. While both religious and popular music are FOR the people, Dowland’s songs seem more OF the people.

Renaissance Man

When I was a much younger and much less educated, I thought that this drawing was the “Renaissance Man.” While that obviously isn’t strictly correct, it’s not that far off either. It’s from the Renaissance period, it’s one of the most famous known depictions of a man, and it was drawn by the definitive Renaissance man himself. Thinking about the term and how it’s still applied today leads me to consider how significant it is that the Renaissance in Europe lines up with the Early Modern period. A lot of concepts introduced during the Renaissance still exist in our modern world.

Most people today don’t participate in the breadth of studies and subjects that Da Vinci did, there are a lot of people who are well-versed and active in multiple fields, by they academic, scientific, artistic, etc. There are musicians with degrees in astrophysics, philosophers and sociologists who write screenplays, and Senators who have been to space. I think today, when a lot of careers are extremely specialized and take up a majority of someone’s time, it’s important to remember that it’s possible to engage in and advance numerous branches of knowledge.

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