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Opener
The human dimension
By David Pryce-Jones
My family shares a
house in Florence, the city
of the high art of the Italian
Renaissance. To go into
the museums and churches
there is to be in touch with
the Old Masters, and the
experience has the effect
of making you sense that
there is more to life
than you thought.
And that, I take it, is the purpose of all art. Writing novels
as I do, I have learned that no matter whether the theme
is positive or negative, success depends on being able to
create this mysterious sense inherent in good art that life
would offer more if only you reached out for it.
The Old Masters had an advantage: They were religious,
or at least worked in an atmosphere of religious
faith. Over a period of four or five hundred years, the
core subject of painting was the fate of every human
being after his or her death, either salvation or damnation.
Angels and beauty on one side of the picture
or fresco, demons and ugliness on the other side. Put
another way, art used to be akin to worship, a paying
of respects to whoever or whatever gave the artist his
gifts. Like the huge majority of people today, I am an
agnostic, which means a lot of hard work to find in
today’s art the moral equivalent of faith.
A great friend in Florence was Sidney Alexander,
alas, no longer with us. A big man in every sense, also
shambling and shambolic, he had fought in the U.S.
infantry in Italy during the war, and stayed on afterwards
on the scheme organized by Senator Fulbright
to pay the university education of every ex-serviceman
who wanted it. A man of the widest culture, Sidney
played the flute and gave concerts, learned Latin in addition
to Italian and created impeccable translations of
the Odes of Horace and the classic work of the Renaissance
historian Francesco Guicciardini that have both
been published by a university press. He also wrote
the biography of Marc Chagall. His special study,
however, was Michelangelo, about whom he published
several books. One day, he agreed to guide me
on an explanatory tour of the works of Michelangelo
that are to be seen around Florence. Standing in front
of the famous statue of the young biblical David sizing
up the shot that will kill Goliath, he quoted some lines
from a poem by Michelangelo to the effect that a “Yes”
and a “No” moved him equally. Sidney was saying
that Michelangelo’s greatness lay in his understanding
that the difference between the good and the bad is an
issue for human beings, not God.
In my mind’s eye, I still see Sidney turning to me
CUBISM
SQUARED
Read Sidney
Alexander’s poem,
“Portrait of the
Artist’s Child in
a Predicament,”
published in The
New Yorker, at
artenol.org
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