Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Foundations of Civilization

I wasn’t always aware of how lucky I was to see their work. I didn’t realize at first that, at one time, they could only have been viewed in person, in the most rarefied halls of power - palazzos and basilicas, the retreats of popes and patrons. Ordinary folk probably never even knew what they were missing, the divine refinement, the frozen grace and enthralled power, the creative genius and soul-searing depth of truly great art. In the 16th century, ordinary folk had better things to worry about - like food and damnation and such. The Sistine Chapel ceiling was both literally and figuratively out of reach. The Medici villas were out of the question entirely.

Later came the era of the Grand Tour, when privileged young men would visit history’s great sites; the repositories of renaissance masterworks were standard fare, and thus the works of DaVinci and Buonarroti grew to be more widely recognized. More books started being printed, and these more frequently included reproductions of humankind’s cultural heritage - pyramids, Roman ruins, and the increasingly obligatory Pieta or Last Supper. Leonardo and Michelangelo’s names assumed a firmer place in the public consciousness. Their works themselves were still beyond the typical person’s ability to view personally, but now that person began to have a better sense what he was missing. Some of Mike’s architecture and monumental sculpture, after all, were part of the local popular landscape; Lenny’s Gioconda grin became a veritable and venerable idiom. Reverence developed for the artists themselves as almost superhuman creative forces. Their well-deserved fame outshone the ages. As much as their art, they personally had become icons.

In 1966, the publishing industry that had been so instrumental in initially establishing their ultra-historical status reinforced the iconficiation of the greatest renaissance artists with a pair of colossal tomes: not books, nor even catalogues - tomes, weighty and massive, lavishly flyjacketed, possessed of independent gravity. These were too huge to be read - they belonged on coffee tables, if not in lieu thereof, as a grandiose tangible demonstration of the possessor’s cultural chops. They seemed to intone, in a rumbling cultured voice, “only the best is good enough.” Crammed with gorgeous photographs and Palatino typography, these two enormous publications subsumed the entire oeuvres of two of history’s most acclaimed creative spirits.

Those books got around. Half a century of interior design magazines featured them prominently, their spines like girders gilded with Romanesque lettering the size of my palm, advertising pure sophistication, lending timelessness to brand-new rooms by their very presence. Even today, they keep popping up. These books took on the luster of their vaunted subjects. If you couldn’t have an original fresco or bust in your personal palazzo, these museums-in-print made plain that it wasn’t for lack of culture. It was just bad timing, but you were obviously on your way to making up for that.

I never knew how those books wound up in my home as I grew up, but they were fixtures as permanent as the etchings of Oxford or the antique vellum sheet music pages that hung in thick wood frames in our dining room. I often pulled them from the octagonal occasional table where they resided and leafed through their hundreds of lurid colorplates, their closeups of a single straining sinew, the cryptic sienna notes and scribbled fantasies.... I’d lose hours wending my way through the collected collections of Michelangelo and DaVinci, till many of their works were as familiar to me as favorite teevee shows. It didn’t seem strange at all to me to have such detailed knowledge of great European art from four centuries prior. There was no sense of privilege. I was just killing time with the masters and their masterpieces. Who didn’t?

I did appreciate the art on an aesthetic level. It was powerful and inspiring, and afforded a high-quality escape even for a semi-jaded youth such as was I. I discovered that I’d educated myself when the old familiar San Pietro Moses or the genesis of caricature came up in class in college, and I found I missed the opportunity to hoist those mammoth tomes onto my lap for a refresher and reunion.

But the tomes were back at home, such as it was. Three years into my undergrad path, my folks separated and “home” became more like “house where I’d grown up.” With each passing season, more of the physical objects I’d treated as permanent while I grew up, diffused almost osmotically out into the world. When it came time a few years later for me to set up housekeeping of my own, I was given leave to pick my way through many of the remaining contents. I declined most of that opportunity, but when I did move into my new pad, Leo and Mike came along with me.

Over the ensuing twenty and more years - longer than I’d spent growing up with them in the first place - I’ve continued to spend time among those outsized pages, exploring details, perusing commentary, inhaling long- and short-term history. But these revisitations, over time, grew less frequent. The tomes reverted to items of decor, mere shelf-fodder… and then space re-arranged itself yet again and the shelf where the renaissance art books lived wound up being deep in a deep closet, back up in the archival stacks, no more even to be seen accidentally, stored so as to avoid the inconvenience of disposing of them otherwise. When I wanted to see art, after all, it was as close as my computer: type in a name and up pops a museum, rotating sculptures in 3-D, infinitely-expandable closeups to the individual brushstroke. And not just my two heavy-hitters, but also Botticelli, Raphael, Titian, all those crazy cats. My DSL wire had made a tireless volume of timeless art nearly obsolete.

Of course, the books had those luscious tactile qualities, smells, and substance, that the screen just couldn’t replace, but that was a sacrifice I was willing to make for the sheer space freed up by not having the books out all the time. On the other hand, the desktop computer was set upon a less-than-optimal desk top. If I set my chair down low, I could view the monitor directly, but my back paid the price. If I sat up properly, I had to crane my neck down to see the monitor and still was aching when I stood up again.

Thus it was that Mick and Leo were pressed once more into fruitful service. Leo laid down on the desk, with Mike atop him (as it is my understanding would have been okay with Leo anyway back in the day).  Upon these two, I set the monitor, lifting it up a good six inches and bringing the infinite world of web-based information to my eyes with comfortable ease. The faux-engraved letters of those broad linen-bound spines still proclaims their immutable genius, but this time they are not epitome, but foundation. I wonder if either of them would have appreciated the irony.