September 2020 - Occasional Glimpses of the Sublime

You know a writer has made their mark when their name ends up becoming used as an adjective: Dickensian and Orwellian spring to mind of course, but we also occasionally see Shavian to describe George Bernard Shaw’s didactic commitment to social purpose, Wellsian to describe a futurism reminiscent of H G Wells, or Tolkienesque for anything with elves or wizards in it. My favourite is Kafkaesque, which describes a nightmarish bureaucratic dystopia, a familiar theme to anyone who has tried to sort out a non-standard transaction with PayPal.

Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a German-Jewish family in Prague and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20^th century literature. His work typically features characters facing surrealistic predicaments and faceless bureaucratic powers, and thus Kafka explores themes of alienation and existential anxiety. Few of his works were published in his lifetime, and all his best-known works such as Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle) were published posthumously. In fact, Kafka had instructed in his will that these unpublished works be destroyed but, fortunately for posterity, his friend and executor Max Brod ignored his wishes.

I read The Castle as a young man travelling the world and spending lots of time in consulates procuring visas, and I remember being hooked. Fortunately, although I spent many an hour in consular waiting areas, my own experience of bureaucracy never matched that of “K.”, the unfortunate protagonist who arrives in a village and struggles to make headway with the shady authorities who govern from the castle on the hill.

K. spends much of the novel trying to secure a meeting with Klamm, the elusive official who might – just might – be able to stamp the necessary forms and obtain for K. his hoped-for residency in the village. Sadly, K. is frustrated at every turn, not least by Klamm’s gatekeeping secretary, Momus.

The novel was unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death from tuberculosis in 1924, though Kafka apparently told Max Brod that K. would continue to grapple with the castle authorities until his death: they would notify him on his deathbed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there”. A suitably ironic conclusion.

Before Raphael was Michelangelo, and before Michelangelo was Leonardo, and before Leonardo was Botticelli, and before Botticelli was Giotto. Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 – 1337) was a painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages, working before the great flourishing in the arts known as the Renaissance. The 16th century art historian, Giorgio Vasari (incidentally, the first man to use the term Renaissance in print), in his Lives of the Painters, credits Giotto with breaking tangibly away from the prevalent Byzantine style and initiating “the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life”.

His two great masterworks were the design of the campanile at Florence Cathedral, and the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. A third may well be the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, though this is disputed: sadly, given the period, many features of his life are hard to substantiate.

Vasari tells some stories about Giotto that sound decidedly fanciful. According to him, Giotto was a shepherd boy, discovered by the great Florentine painter Cimabue drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice. Another story recounts how Giotto drew a lifelike fly onto one of his master’s paintings and laughed when Cimabue tried several times to brush the fly off. Yet another tells how the Pope requested to see an example of his artistic skill and Giotto simply sent him a perfect circle he had drawn in freehand.

Fanciful stories aside, there’s no doubting the achievement of the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes. The subject matter is not unusual for church decoration in medieval Italy, being centred on the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ, but the style for the day was sensational: solidly three-dimensional, with faces and gestures based on close observation, and the characters clothed in garments that hang naturally and have form and weight. The expansive use of ultramarine blue pigment is remarkably effective: when you look at the chapel as a whole, it seems awash with blue (albeit faded with time, sadly).

I’ll finish with another story that’s probably apocryphal (but who knows?). The great poet Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist’s children flitting around, asked (rudely) how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could have such plain children. Giotto, who, according to Vasari was always a wit, replied, “I make my pictures by day, and my babies by night”.