On wealth: Gonzaga, Este, Borgia, Medici... and Trump

I wrote yesterday of the enormous wealth of the Gonzagas of Mantova,  also mention of the Este family in Ferrara and connections with other gigantically rich families, the Borgias, the Medici and the grasping of those especially for the papacy and expenditure on art and fame which lost them, in several cases, all their wealth.. and in the case of the papacy, half the church to Luther and the Germans generally, resentful, hateful of taxes and 'indulgences' sold by the popes to finance the art of Rome.

Edith Templeton, calling them Renaissance gangsters, questioned their happiness amid their wealth.

Today, reading James Fallows's invaluable political blog at The Atlantic I find a link to a reflection on wealth and Citizen Kane by Donald Trump. Which surely the Gonzagas, Russian kleptocrats of the present, the Koch brothers might do well to have watched at some time. The clip is from a never finished film by Errol Mark Morris, known mostly for his film The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara.

Fallows describes that as 'astonishly introspective' for Trump.

True, but one also sees in it Trump likening himself to Kane.

Here is Orson Welles, including with chorus line,

doing a bit of a Trump in the original promotion for Kane.

It would be sensible of both Clinton and Trump (and Putin)
to watch the Eleven Lessons of Robert McNamara,
not believing all the argument but understanding the tragedy involved in being 'right.'

Also spare a thought for the Gonzagas and Estes and Medicis
persistently at war, for evil or duty or right?
Right/s (diritto/diritti) a word with all its ambiguity, in English and Italian.
In Latin far apart:
iustum: justice, justness, formality, uprightness.
fas: divine law, divine command, Destiny, sacred duty, Right.
— in current times too, there is surely a lot of slippage in crisis or vision from iustum to fas
or rather there is insufficient common understanding of what may be our nations, tribes, states
to avoid conflict in which fas and iustum is confoundedly confused.

McNamara added ten more after seeing the film, see wikipedia

Ravenna

Ravenna is somewhat neglected by tourists – except for those who tumble out of gigantic cruise ships, but I think we will be there before the season. Check later and avoid. We will be 30km away in Forli 20-27 March. 

Ravenna is the outstanding example of mosaic work in the ancient world. It seems unlikely that any photos I might take when there will be less failing to capture them,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Antique_and_medieval_mosaics_in_Italy

"Italy has the richest concentration of Late Antique and medieval mosaics in the world." [Wikipedia]

"In 402 A.D., the Roman Emperor Honorius transferred the Western Roman Empire from Milan to Ravenna as a security measure. The city thus abandoned its more provincial appearance and took on all the pomp and circumstance of an Imperial residence. From that time on, Ravenna was thrice a capital (later of the Ostrogothic Kingdom and Byzantine Empire)." Discover Italy: there are eight UNESCO heritage buildings in Ravenna from those times.

My mentor, the late Mrs Templeman, wrote:

"I will not give any reproductions of [mosaics of Ravenna] in this book. This is the greatest compliment I can pay them."

• p 223, The Surprise of Cremona, Autralian Readers Book Club edition 1955 

In a conversation between herself and the mosaics and a professor, we learn (as I did not learn from any tourist info) that the buildings in Ravenna were decorated with mosaics not to imitate paint, but to imitate carpets, the court having come to Ravenna under byzantine authority, and the habit and pride in the east being to decorate walls with carpet.
There follows at p 226ff a discussion of the design, organisation and colour balance in the mosaics which is such that I can happily say hunt down a copy of the book, we will be taking ours along.

Hilary's review of the book, with focus on Ravenna, is amusing but misses this most important bit.

https://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/how-to/byzantine-and-early-christian-mosaics is good on the symbolism in the mosaics.

from https://www.walksofitaly.com/blog/how-to/byzantine-and-early-christian-mosaics

Mantova according to Edith, part 2 plus a bit more

Ludovico III Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantua and Barbara of Brandenburg
with their children, fresco by Andrea Mantegna at San Giorgio Castle, Mantua, around 1470
source wikipedia

I had in mind drawing substantially on Edith Templeton's The Surprise of Cremona to discuss Mantova here, but have decided to be brief — and bring you a movie, albeit in Italian, but remember one picture is worth a thousand words. 

Nonetheless, Edith's book is an excellent reflective guide, though 60 years old. We will carry it to Mantova.

Descriptive of art and artists, it also dwells with some puzzlement on the Gonzaga family who seized the city in 1328 or so, built the castle to end all castles with fifteen courtyards, churches etc, etc and went bankrupt from extravagance of a wedding in 1608, whereafter most of their pictures sold to Charles I in England, more works seized and taken away by Napoleon and others. This wedding spared no expense, including one of Monteverdi's most notable operas. (The city was devastated by the Thirty Years' War, plague and sacking. It now has an elegance and charm and an integrity from being away from the main tracks of tourist tramping.)

Discussion of the Gonzaga mind, the persistent search for happiness in the art and construction, in Mantova and Sabbioneta. A fear of death on preoccupation with which she quotes Lorenzo de' Medici, another 'gangster' of the renaissance:

"Fair is youth and free of sorrow
Yet how soon its joys we bury.
Let who would be now be merry:
Sure is no-one of tomorrow."

• quoted at page 161, Readers Book Club edition (Australia) 1955

As elsewhere Edith finds a professor, this time to discuss the Gonzaga extravagance and in response to her perspective that the Gonzaga's creations were just folie de grandeur  the professor responds that this was not so, the immense wealth of the Gonzaga was acquired by plunder in war, that they had no way of sharing the wealth as in modern times building industry, their construction works and commissioning of art enabled sharing of their wealth. And against her observation that Venice, even richer, built dainty palaces compared with the Gonzaga monster, the professor points out that Venice had an entirely different and trade oriented economy. [pp183-4].

We shall go see, Templeton in hand.
-----

I wrote also in an earlier blog entry regarding those times.

The map at right in this text (link also in right column) shows the Po delta in 1570, before effects of an earthquake that year. Note the great lake in front of Bologna, Mantova in a lake and Ravenna out to sea. Chioggia is in the northeastern corner of the map. Venice off the map just north of that. 
Note Ferrara - pointer from the bottom. Ferrara a great rival of the Venetian Republic and hostile to Venetian desires to muck around with the delta and block off their lagoon from floods. 

But then the Este family who had made Ferrara great (their works are what people go to Ferrara to see) ran out of legitimate heirs—and so Pope Clem 8 in 1598, [declaring them a pack of bastards] sent in his army and grabbed the city. But then the same Clem 8 declared a Holy Year in 1600, meaning he would do no warring. The Venetians quickly upped spades and in four years diverted much of the flow away from their lagoon. And then in the south the land grew and the delta marched out to sea (continuing)

source wikipedia
Lucrezia Borgia had died
after difficult pregnancy and childbirth
in 1519

These cities on the north of Italy went through extraordinary times in the Renaissance, the arrival of the printing press, many of them in Venice in particular, altered possession of and entitlement to information (compare with the Shock of the Internet since 2000) and also altered language, enthusiasm for an 'Italian' language, a shift from Latin. The great foundation literary work of Italian language, Orlando Furioso, which draws on Arthurian legend as well as that of Rowland, was written by Ludovico Ariosto who was an administrator for the House of Este. He produced three editions of Orlando Furioso, changes reflecting the 'great argument' about how an Italian language should be, in those years.

Portrait of a Woman by Bartolomeo Veneto,
traditionally assumed to be Lucrezia Borgia.

 Dominant figure in literary direction and music and the popularisation of the madrigal, at the time, was Pietro Bembo.

It was probably a contributing consideration Ariosto's responses to Bembo's advice on his text that Bembo was senior to him in the court of the Este family, indeed senior to the point of carrying on with the wife of the duke of Ferrara, a certain Lucrezia Borgia, daughter of Pope Alex 6.

And, and, we are back to the point, just a bit, inasmuch as also Lucrezia was carrying on with her husband's sister's husband, Francisco II Gonzaga, Marquis of Mantova.

Herewith let me venture, if none has before, that Lucrezia Borgia was surely thus a major influence on the form of the Italian language—and the popularisation of the madrigal.

http://www.ngv.vic.gov.au/explore/collection/work/3746/

Look at those two, sound out the word 'popularisation'  and ask yourself...or ask Rupert Murdoch!

Alfonso deserves credit too, having brought an array of painters and musicians to Ferrara. While Alfonso 'acquired' Ariosto when he inherited Ferrara, in the shining pages of history the visual artists and musicians are way ahead.

--------

The National Gallery of Victoria claims this on the right is the only true painting of Lucrezia Borgia: "We have the only known portrait of the most famous and notorious woman in Renaissance history."

Were a man so described he could certainly be a major figure in literary history...

Hey look, what's she been writing?

To Mantova with Edith, part 1: Edith, Virgil, Aeneas, ... and Dido.

From the Guardian

.

Before this contextual diversion, I should refer the reader who would like something more practical to this piece in The Guardian.    :-)

The rest of this drawing on Edith Templeton, 

The Surprise of Cremona, 

page references to the 

[Australian] Readers Book Club edition, 1955 

In preparing for a visit to Mantova, I have been preoccupied by a history of development of the city by one family: by the extent to which the city is presented in many photos as fortress walls, moats, riches, art, beauty, complexity,  accumulated by a few for themselves — on the backs of bleeding many.
Such is tourism: Who built the pyramids, did the emperor really also bury the potters along with the terracotta warriors (well Qin Shi Huangdi buried scholars anyway)? Is this where the Red Guards marched? Don't tell me about the genocide of Aborigines, that's old, I'm here and I'm going to climb that rock because it belongs to all Australians. And after that I'll go to see the Roman Forum, where was it that Caesar was stabbed? Ah touropia, wherefore art thou touropia, let me make a selfie with you.

"Eating cheese in Mantua is a thoughtful business, 

made for pondering over Virgil."

photo from
http://www.jirny.cz/edith_templeton.htm

Edith Templeton is an excellent cicerone though not dull or dry pseudo-professorial, rather a worldly woman with a fine sense of sizing up men, art and other preposterations.
In part I enjoy her writing because she asks questions I have been asking myself, in part because she takes one on adventures in her head to unimagined places.

By Mantova she has warmed again to Dante, so scoffed at in Cremona. But here she focuses on the Roman poet, Virgil, child of the peasant soil outside Mantova, made godly in Mantova a thousand years ago, placed on pillars and posters around Mantova, forever influential in European poetry.

Edith discusses at length Virgil's Aeneid. Wikipedia tells you it is the story of Aeneas, Templeton tells you it is the measuring of Aeneas alongside Dido, queen of Carthage.

From Wikipedia.
I note that as recounted by a classical scholar
Aeneas cannot 'tell' he must 'recount'. 

"The creation of Dido is revolutionary because Dido is the first ill-used woman in literature. A woman who has loved for thirty years and not been ill-used has not lived at all. Therefore Dido is as universally important as Hamlet, Faust and Don Juan.... [T]he heart of Dido's tragedy does not lie in the fact that Aeneas left her. It lies in his unworthiness."

Pages of erudite reinterpretation and relating to the modern (pages 146-157) lead us here:

"I now put her on the scales and see what happens... I put Dido on her funeral pyre, with the sword in her breast, bleeding to death.... I see her rising again in the light of our own times... a fine beautiful woman, not very bright, not very distinguished... Although this time he has not left her for the Italian shore, she knows just as surely that his love for her has died... I see her placing her red bag beside herself and laying herself on the rails and I hear the roar of the approaching train. I have witnessed the end of Anna Karenina."

But, um, yes, Mantova is mainly about the city, the river Mincio and the Gonzagas. For part 2!
———————

From Radio Prague

Another thing that we should say at this stage is that this [quotation at link] is not a translation. Edith Templeton does write in English. How is it that she came to write in English?"She left the country and married an Englishman. In the 30s she worked in London. She worked first in the office of the US Army chief surgeon and then she became a captain of the British Army, working as an interpreter. Later on she moved to India, because her second husband was a doctor. In fact he was physician to the King of Nepal. So she lived in many different countries - later on Portugal and now she's living on the Italian Riviera, so she's a very, very cosmopolitan writer.

The surprise of Cremona

I am seduced by Edith Templeton, or at least by her amazing The Surprise of Cremona which I secured from ebay Australia, in local bookshops I guess because it was a Readers Book Club selection in 1955. A racy selection at the time.

I value this book because it is fun and intelligent, but especially because its sharpness offers points of irreverent entry into the mythologies of Italy. So much tourism in Italy slides on a deep, overdone lacquer of tritely trotted guidebook patter. It's nice to get a fingernail under the shellac. You plainly don't have to agree with everything she says ... and she would find you beyond boring if you did.

Templeton has a razor wit and sense of irony and the naughty haughty of Czech background, reminiscent of I Served the King of England and other wonders of Czech cinema.

But her life of aristocratic origin, French education and marriages to Englishmen giving her a different trajectory from the central figure of that film and a capacity to arrive in Cremona in the early 1950s with a gigantic knowledge – and immediate experience, born in Prague in 1919 – of history and philosophy and outrageous confidence and self-protective sarcasm, plus a world-weary warmth. 

With a local history professor as real or notional source she places Frederick II, who for a time headquartered his Holy Roman Empire in Cremona, on a pedestal (yanks him off when she gets to Parma); takes wonderful potshots at Virgil, Goethe and Dante and admires Pontius Pilate, miscast in a cathedral performance on Good Friday..

Of Virgil

His famous gentle melancholy, which lends itself superbly to pastoral elegaic poems, and which was imitated by all Europe in all ages, was not the picturesque which one might think it to be

but rather a pent up anger at the Roman army's confiscation of his peasant parents' farm between Cremona and Mantova. He ate his heart out in his writing, then

During his last days he went to live in the country near Naples... Why didn't he go and live on the banks of his native Mincio instead, among the barren stones, the slimy marshes and the bitter willows, over which he had shed his heart-blood...

On Good Friday she is appalled that a angelic young tenor is cast as Pontius Pilate in a performance in the cathedral with "three hundred yards of choir boys"

This was quite wrong of course, Pilate was an impeccable high Civil Servant, nothing unearthly about him. ... he could not afford another uprising, all because of a new religion. New religions were two-a-penny in those days. I think he retired to the south, when he was pensioned off, to Naples or Sicily... Pilate is my favourite figure in the New Testament. He is the model of a detached, fair, and judicious colonial governor who hesitates before making a move and prefers tact and negotiation to violence.

Of the pope's triple excommunication of Frederick II she writes:

I think this reckless excommunicating is silly. It is bound to lose its effects after the first time.

She reports of Dante's visit to Cremona and his finding sufficient time there to quarrel with a nobleman Cavalcabo. Having earlier admired greatly the traditional buildings of Cremona and disparaged buildings with added-on baroque facades she notes that

The Cavalcabo Palace still stands. It is one of those well-bred buildings whose beauty derives from superb craftsmanship and proportions, with no trimmings, substantial and discreet, like a well-tailored suit. The Cavalcabo family still live there. 

Cavalcabo was 'black', that is, he was Guelf and supported the Pope, whereas Dante was 'white' and supported the Emperor. This is, of course, just what one would have expected of Dante. He would quarrel with anybody if he possibly could. It was merely a matter of giving him enough time.

... and then a wonderful summation of history and its writing:

The professor tells me that Dante's faction, the Whites, were called in Dante's time, the 'accursed faction'.
"Was it true?" I ask. "Did very nasty people belong to it? Or was it called Accursed because it was against the Pope?"
The professor regards me with astonishment. "Oh, no. It was only called Accursed because it lost."

Then an account of how Dante fell out with the Whites, concluding (and this may have been a novel expression then):

If [Dante] had lived today, he could have held his Annual Party Meeting in a phone box.

This is such a cut across the conventional weaving of Dante into so much hortatory carry-on in Italy. We have a glimpse of the Cremona mind, albeit through a turbulent Czech mind.

Whereafter the professor begins the most interesting part of Cremona's history: the story of the Surprise of Cremona, for which you must find your way to page 45 of my edition.

St Sigismondo

I have a book hard to put down. And very hard to quote in brief.  I note two things:

• we could go to Cremona one hour by train from Mantova to see a stylish town whose best buildings by this account are pre-baroque, some much older.
• and then 15 minutes by bus to the edge of Cremona we could see St Sigismondo. Templeton is enraptured on entering.

Reading resources


We booked at San Severino Marche with only slight information. The history offered by wikipedia which one does not manage to finish unless one is a genealogy freak, the attractive airbnb offering (having looked at listings for perhaps a hundred other apartments in the region), the google street view of the town.

It's hard to find literature on Le Marche. I ordered from Betterworld books a second hand copy of Footprint Italia Umbria & Marche USD9.48 and found that the author, a serial writer of travel guides, spent four months in Italy, based in Perugia. The section on Le Marche is difficult to find, it occupies a space at the end about the size of an index and reported on a couple of drives, no doubt reading over coffee pamphlets and over wikipedia at dinner.


Enter the Touring Club of Italy and their The Marches: A Complete Guide to the Landscape and National Parks, and One Hundred Towns Including Urbino USD18.21 delivered, which from the jump has historical and cultural depth (and of course the mention of Urbino probably trebled its sales).

Having enjoyed the introductory perspective in the TCI guide on why this region is as it is (which time to write about when there) the authors come (in road trip description) to the ancient centre of Camerino and then, of San Severino Marche, they say:

Camerino's long-time enemy, the Ghibillene town of San Severino Marche, lies to the northeast, at the end of the upper Potenza valley, and is surrounded by the natural beauties of the Grillo valley and the centuries-old Canfaito beech woods on Mt San Vicino. An important town in Picine and Roman times (as the remains of Septempeda just outside the town demonstrate), it was influential in the 14th and 15th centuries in the development of the International Gothic style in European painting, through the brothers Lorenzo and Jacopo Salimbeni. Still today, the aristocratic appearances of San Severino Marche, with its palaces and frescoed churches, blends beautifully with the medieval atmosphere created by the many lookout towers and ruined castles in the surrounding area. 

Aha, so that's why we found it interesting. You can look up the unfamiliar words in wikipedia and follow trails on and on from there. Where this (to me) stands out from most guides in is in the way it succinctly orients the reader to thirst to understand more. The harking back to history reminds me of conversations in 2010 in Viterbo with a man whose family had lived in one house there from the 1300s and a man on a train who said that the reason why Vitorchiano was still intact was that they kept onside with the Romans. I still puzzle of questions I did not ask of the man in Viterbo because I was too taken aback by the thought of a family being in place from the 1300s: did they buy when real estate prices crashed as I imagine likely after the pope moved from Viterbo to Avignon? Were they lawyers who profited from the estate work after the Black Death? Were they artisans who improved themselves and escaped feudal ties when their laws of supply and demand shifted their way after all the deaths? Towns in Italy are not simple.

I also have, a heavy weight to fall on you when it puts you to sleep, the Oxford History of Italy. I agree with the reviewer Greenberg at Amazon, the book is a tiresome puzzle, like trying to read a biochemistry text.

I went, pleased with the TCI's Marche book, to see if there is something as good on Romagna. And instead found this marvellous 'review-in-place' of a travel book by Edith Templeton (whose 1960s Shades of Grey novel called Burton was banned, less famously than works of Lawrence and Joyce). Which among other things gave me some reinforcement for decisions not to stay in Ravenna or Urbino. Yes, classy you say, I've taken a positive view of something that supported my unarticulated hunches.

I think that I am perhaps a part-time shabby semiotician at heart. Wikipedia tells us that semiotics is

the study of meaning-making, the study of sign processes and meaningful communication.[1] This includes the study of signs and sign processes(semiosis), indication, designation, likeness, analogy, allegory, metonymy, metaphor, symbolism,signification, and communication.

or put more simply, taking in many aspects at once to form impressions; .... reading too many books at the same time. Partly my training in anthropology; never to run with a single line of interpretation.


The great semiotician (among other things) Umberto Eco died this year. I have returned to reading his Baudolino. Which it seems to me embodies perhaps much autobiographical (as good books must) and also a being-in-the-past-and-present-at-the-same-time as well as a desperate entanglement of mythical and 'real'. Some resemblance to the (lesser but large) complexity of Paolo Sorrentini's film Il Divo; or an array of other writing and film in Italy, which some simpler cultures find hard to engage with. See also the discussion between musicians in John Turturro's Passione, pointing at the way immensely complex Neapolitan songs have been taken to America in particular and turned into mush (reimported to Italy, of course, the lubricate the machinations of the 'latin lover' among the tourists). Baudolino helps me open my eyes and heart to different things, as well as helping me smile and feel alive. Vale Eco. Grazie Turturro.

Oh and also down off the shelf Sandor Marai's Conversations in Bolzano, a wonderful tale of Casanova in Bolzano, in the Austrian corner of Italy, the Alto Adige, fleeing north, escaped from prison in Venice. Reminder of Austria-Hungary's influence and occupation of this end of Italy for so long, but also just plain rewarding as a delicious multicultural or vibrant-cultural work by an author who should be more widely known.  More than seems evident in the tourist-tramped areas of Italy, Le Marche (compare perhaps with the similarly named The Borders in the UK), this somewhat isolated region, is a place of multiple languages and cultures with long histories.

In Baudolino Eco says, through his character the Greek scholar Niketas, in Constantinople almost a millenium ago:

There are no stories without meaning. And I am one of those who can find it even where others fail to see it. Afterwards the story becomes the book of the living, like a blaring trumpet that raises from the tomb those who have been dust for centuries. ... Still, it takes time, you have to consider the events, arrange them in order, find the connections, even the least visible ones.

In the generality of the tourist experience people are lined up to hear a bunch of settled conventions, a set of notions for looking at specified objects, texts crafted to meet a commercial purpose and to avoid losing customers by being complicated.

I have no desire or capacity to do as Niketas suggests in terms of finishing, tying all the knots. Rather, to hunt and identify strings, to swim among a diversity of stories and images and ideas and sounds and voices, hope to hear and notice them and achieve at least a sense of the incompleteness of the strands.

My discomforts at this travel begin with the unease of burning the carbon to get there, then have me conflicted not enraptured at the sight of castles and palaces build by bastards to hurt or exploit, the work of artists indentured to such bastards and bigoted hypocritical churchmen put in place from feuding dominant families. I am sucked in, nonetheless, and will try to keep my values.