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July 13, 2009

By the end of the nineteenth century, Florence was a key destination for cultured travellers from Europe and America. Writers such as Wilde, Rilke, and Mann, painters such as Degas and Klee, and, not least, the young art historian Aby Warburg and his wife, Mary, flocked to Florence to escape the encroachments of modern life at home and to revel in the city's rich artistic and cultural past. This beguiling book fuses narrative and ideas to consider how the encounter between modernism and Renaissance culture was experienced by both visitors to Florence and its inhabitants. Based on Aby Warburg's letters, diaries, and notebooks, on Italian and German archives and on conversations with E. H. Gombrich (director of the famous Institute Aby Warburg later founded), the book is an intimate guide to life in Florence and the theatres, restaurants, galleries and salons frequented by visiting cultural exiles. At the same time, the book paints an evocative picture of a city at the cusp of the modern age, adjusting to electricity and the motor car on one hand and to social unrest and a clash of cultures on the other. -- publisher's blurb

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I want to sing the non-scholarly-bookish-art-amateur praise of Bernd Roeck's "Florence 1900" published by Yale UP. In fact, I liked it so much that I hate myself for already having finished reading it. And for not knowing enough German to read his other books.

It's highly scholarly and yet very readable. Permeated with valuable information - and interesting tidbits - you'll never find anywhere else because Roeck read the unpublished sources (including Aby Warburg's personal papers and a magazine 'Il Marzocco" that I'd kill to get my hands on - preferably translated and annotated). If there's a book that can vividly portray the zeitgeist of any particular era or place this is it.

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Meanwhile, I need to keep the links to all the interesting things (so many of them in the public domain!) I've learned via Roeck somewhere, so bear with me.

Leo S. Olschki, Florentine collector and bookseller of Renaissance books and prints.
Found a catalog of his ("Choix de livres anciens rares et curieux en vente à la librairie ancienne Leo S. Olschki (1907)" on archive.org from where this pre-darwinian drawing was taken from.

Charles Godfrey Leland's Etruscan Roman remains in popular tradition; (1892) should be entertaining since the information source for the work of this amateur ethnologist were italian "witches" who accepted money in return for the confirmation that secret worshiping of ancient gods and etruscan magic was still in use in Tuscany in modern times...

Jacob Burckhardt's "The Cicerone: An Art Guide to Painting in Italy. For the Use of Travellers and Students (1879)" is online! Burckhardt was seemingly against the "documenting" of history so it ends up being an entertaining collection of informed opinions. And it was the book everybody at that time used an arts oriented travel guide. Of it Nietzsche enthusiastically said: "It seems to me that one should wake up and fall asleep reading Burckhardt's Cicerone: there are few books that can so stimulate phantasy and prepare one for the conception of the artistic.

The aesthetic sensibilities of an age as seen through the writings about Botticelli in Anatole France's "Le Lys Rouge": "Darling, do you not know it is the custom of Florence to celebrate spring on the first day of May every year? Then you did not understand the meaning of Botticelli's picture consecrated to the Festival of Flowers. Formerly, darling, on the first day of May the entire city gave itself up to joy. Young girls, crowned with sweetbrier and other flowers, made a long cortege through the Corso, under arches, and sang choruses on the new grass. We shall do as they did. We shall dance in the garden."

In Zola's "Rome": "Narcisse for his part had not raised his eyes to the overpowering splendour of the ceiling. Wrapt in ecstasy, he did not allow his gaze to stray from one of the three frescoes of Botticelli. "Ah! Botticelli," he at last murmured; "in him you have the elegance and the grace of the mysterious; a profound feeling of sadness even in the midst of voluptuousness, a divination of the whole modern soul, with the most troublous charm that ever attended artist's work."

People in the quattrocento preferred Gozzoli to Castagno. "the affably conciliatory was preferred to the emotionally impressive" as Aby Warburg put it.

Isolde Kurz's Die Humanisten. Lost manuscripts and monks à la Umberto Eco.

Vernon Lee's "Renaissance fancies and studies (1896)".

Bernard Berenson's essays and catalogues. "Among US collectors of the early 1900s, Berenson was regarded as the pre-eminent authority on Renaissance art. His verdict of authenticity increased a painting's value. While his approach remained controversial among European art historians and connaisseurs, he played a pivotal role as an advisor to several important American art collectors, such as Isabella Stewart Gardner, who needed help in navigating the complex and treacherous market of newly fashionable Renaissance art. In this respect Berenson's influence was enormous, while his 5% commission made him a wealthy man." -- from wikipedia

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July 12, 2009

There must be a name for those perception errors in which we incur when, after finding out about something previously unknown, that same something seems to pop out everywhere afterward.

I had never seen people surfing on a river before the last two weeks (in Munich, in the English garden and it did indeed look like a lot of fun) and suddenly the NYT Travel section has a piece about it and how it all started in Germany and there seem to be more and more "standing waves" surfing in land locked places.

Likewise, just a couple of weeks ago I was strolling the streets of Trieste and admiring the antique bookshop previously owned by Umberto Saba. I had even compiled a little personal cultural guide to the city and had it printed on lulu.com - very nerdy I know - which included some of Saba's poetry among the literature references. And now I find the TLS has a piece on him and on his upcoming book, the first translation into english of his work.

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Great finds:

Two Maigret novels in a bouquiniste in Uzés, Provence for 1 euro each. "Maigret hésite" and "Maigret et l'homme tout seul". This last one with a lame denouement but I have to admit I read them mostly for the food. Somebody needs to compile a book with the menus of food and drink Maigret goes through each adventure. My favorite bits are when Maigret gets caught up in work and calls home to say he's not coming to dinner. He invariable asks his wife what was she cooking and invariably gets sad he'll miss that meal.

"Dans son esprit, tandis qu'il dégustait l'andouillete juteuse et croustillante, accompagnée de pommes frites qui ne sentaient pas le graillon..."

"Ils en étaient au dessert. Ils avaient bu, avec les rougets grillés, un Pouilly fumé dont le parfum flottait encore autour d'eux."

"Trieste: Un'identitá di frontiera" by Angelo Ara and Claudio Magris from the nice bookshop at Castelo Miramare. My favourite type of non-fiction literature. What makes a regional or national character, the culture of a place and its people dissected preferably by a self-obsessed native. Or two.

Vies Imaginaires, Marcel Schwob. Bought at the excellent bookshop Goulard in Aix. I own a portuguese translation but it's somewhere in my storage boxes and there's nothing like the real thing.

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The New Yorker has been disappointing lately. Hardly find anything I want to read these days. Too much Malcolm Gladwell type pop sociology based on anecdotes; too much profiling of romance writers and other celebrities of dubious interest and movie reviews I don't care for. The tipping point - aha, a pun - was Gladwell's review of Chris Anderson's Free. I was led to believe that book was a pointless exercise in platitudes and in which the author didn't even bother to reference his sources properly transcribing chunks of wikipedia articles and all. If that's New Yorker worthy...

But not all is lost. My Lapham Quarterly arrived. And it's the most wonderful thing ever. Add to it the TLS and either the LRB or NYRB and I'll be damned if I renew my New Yorker subscription.

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