Spiritual Quote of the Day (Barry Hannah, on Jesus, Who ‘Forgives Our Wretchedness’)

“[A]t the center of all my faith, as at the center of the sadly unvisited Good Book, is a man who also forgives our wretchedness. He was not always strong himself. In the garden of Gethsemane he asked his father to let this cup, the crucifixion, be passed from him. His stumbling under the cross up the Via Dolorosa reminds me always of our own stumbling and crawling, over a mighty rough pathway of words left to us by long-dead writers, toward the good mountain of our deliverance.”— American novelist and short story writer Barry Hannah (1942-2010), “The Maddening Protagonist,” Paste Magazine, Issue 19 (December 2005-January 2006)

The image accompanying this post, Christ Falling on the Way to Calvary (ca. 1514-16), was created by the Italian Renaissance painter and architect Raphael (1483-1520).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Renee Roden, on the Continuing Memory of the Transfiguration)

“The Eucharist—the community’s shared anamnesis or remembering of Christ’s sacrifice and Christ’s revelation of himself in glory—makes Christ truly present in our world. Rather than building a monument in response to holiness, we are called to become the living stones. Our lives, our hearts, and our communities are called to become a testament to the transfiguration we have seen. The church is not real estate. We don’t need to pitch a tent. We just have to go out and share the memory.”—Journalist and author Renee Roden, “A Reflection for the Feast of the Transfiguration,” www.USCatholic.org, July 31, 2023

The image accompanying this post, The Transfiguration, was created by the Italian Renaissance painter Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael (1483-1520).

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Gospel According to St. Luke, on the Visitation)

“In those days Mary arose and went with haste into the hill country, to a city of Judah, and she entered the house of Zechari′ah and greeted Elizabeth. And when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit and she exclaimed with a loud cry, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted me, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the voice of your greeting came to my ears, the babe in my womb leaped for joy. And blessed is she who believed that there would be[a] a fulfilment of what was spoken to her from the Lord.’”—Luke 1:39-45 (Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition)

The image accompanying this post, The Visitation, was drawn by the Italian Renaissance master Raphael (1483-1520), then completed by an assistant.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Eugene Lee-Hamilton, on the Archangel Michael)

 “From out the depths of crocus-coloured morn,
With rush of wings, the strong Archangel came,
And diamond spear; and leapt, as leaps a flame,
On Satan, where the light was scarcely born;
And rolled the sunless Rebel, bruised and torn,
Upon the earth’s bare plain, in dust and shame.”—English poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1845-1907), “On Raphael’s Archangel Michael,” in Sonnets of the Wingless Hours (1894)
 
I’m not making any extraordinary confession in writing that I had neither heard of Eugene Lee-Hamilton nor encountered his poetry until the other day. Considered a minor poet if interesting poet even in his own time, he was rapidly forgotten by the critical establishment after his death. I’d be hard-pressed to think of any anthology of Victorian poetry where he figures at all.
 
So, to satisfy your curiosity: I came across this poem in a review of his work by Edith Wharton, and published in 1996 in Edith Wharton: The Uncollected Critical Writings. The notes to this latter volume indicate that Lee-Hamilton became an invalid as a result of his service in the British Embassy in Paris in the Franco-Prussian War.
 
While Wharton’s fame rests on her novels and short stories, her book reviews and other essays indicate that she was a perceptive reader of others, as in this comment on how the poet’s medical condition affected his emotional state and creative productivity:
 
“He suffered too much, and was too keenly sensitive to all the joy and beauty denied him, not to have his moods of dark relapse; but his verse proves that, as the years passed, he found increasing strength to bear his pain, and increasing consolation, in that very sensitiveness to imaginative reactions that had once been the cause of his intensest misery.”
 
(The image accompanying this post, Saint Michael Vanquishing Satan, was painted by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael in 1518.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Enuma Okoro, on the Gospels’ Visitation Narrative)

“I hope there's a way we can each figure out how to be an Elizabeth to a Mary in our lives, and vice versa. That we can step forward with someone else into that uncertain space of a transforming life mixed with blessing and challenge, to stand alongside another person's journey, trusting that in that act we too are somehow fortified and encouraged on our own walk.”— Nigerian-American writer and speaker Enuma Okoro, on the “Visitation” narrative in the Gospels’ Advent story, in “The Art of Life: A Season for Solidarity,” The Financial Times, Dec. 11-12, 2021 

The image accompanying this post is Visitation (c. 1517), a painting by the Italian Renaissance artist Raphael (1483-1520) that now hangs in the Museo de Prado in Madrid, Spain.

Quote of the Day (Ingrid Rowland, on Raphael, ‘Artistic Entrepreneur’ of the Italian Renaissance)

“As the mature man's skill and sophistication are gradually stripped away, we realize how remarkable his [Raphael’s] career really was, and how utterly unlikely: how many factors, how much hard work and ruthless self-criticism, combined to transform a promising young painter into an artistic entrepreneur of a kind that Italy had never seen before: painter; architect; designer of jewelry, sculpture, and graphics; pioneer of historical preservation; artistic theorist.”—Univ. of Notre Dame professor of architecture and history Ingrid Rowland, “The Virtuoso,” The New York Review of Books, Aug. 20, 2020

I never got around back on April 6 to take note of the 500^th anniversary of the death of Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, a.k.a. Raphael. Unlike contemporaries Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo, he never had the chance to live to late middle age or even old age, having passed away on his 37^th birthday.

Maybe it’s better that I didn’t write about it then, because I might have felt less inclined to consider Ms. Rowland’s appreciation of Raphael’s legacy in The New York Review of Books. She hails not only his “natural facility” as a painter (“on a par with Mozart’s in music and Michelangelo’s in stone”) but also the way he interacted with—and, in turn, influenced—Rome in this “veritable age of entrepreneurs, every one of them giddy with the excitement of intercontinental exchange.”

It is curious that Rowland—using her review of this year’s Raphael exhibition at Rome’s Scuderie del Quirinale—does not tie the painter’s temperament to his ability to attract such a large spectrum of work and patrons.

To the extent that this is possible, I turned to Giorgio Vasari’s short biography of him in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (2nd edn, 1568), which relates how Raphael created a ton of admirers among his fellow painters through his aura of amiability:

“[T]hey were overcome both by his courtesy and by his art, and even more by the good disposition of his nature, which was so full of gentleness and so overflowing with loving kindness, that it was seen that the very animals, not to speak of men, honored him. It is said that if any painter who knew him, and even any who did not know him, asked him for some drawing that he needed, Raffaello would leave his own work in order to assist him. And he always kept a vast number of them employed, aiding them and teaching them with such a love as might have been the due rather of his own children than of fellow craftsmen; for which reason he was never seen to go to Court without having with him, as he left his house, some fifty painters, all able and excellent, who kept him company in order to do him honor. In short, he lived not like a painter, but like a prince.”

All of this stood in sharp contrast to most craftsmen of the time, Vasari insisted, who were afflicted with “a certain element of savagery and madness, which, besides making them strange and eccentric, had brought it about that very often there was revealed in them rather the obscure darkness of vice than the brightness and splendor of those virtues that make men immortal.”

Rowland’s discussion of Rome as an entrepreneurial beehive of the Renaissance has made me want to pick up again a book I laid aside for lack of time: Niccolo Rising, the first installment in Dorothy Dunnett’s sprawling sequence of eight historical novels, The House of Niccolo. Not just a novelist but also an accomplished portrait painter, constant traveler and active philanthropist, she would have been in a unique position to explain to readers how so many influences combined to create the likes of Raphael.

(The image accompanying this post is a self-portrait of the artist from the Art Archive/Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence/Alfredo Dagli Orti.) 

Quote of the Day (George Herbert, With the Music of Easter)

“Awake, my lute, and struggle for thy part

                                                  With all thy art.

The crosse taught all wood to resound his name,

                                                  Who bore the same.

His stretched sinews taught all strings, what key

Is best to celebrate this most high day.”—British poet George Herbert, “Easter,” in The Temple (1633)

The image accompanying this post is the painting The Resurrection of Christ, by Raphael (1499-1502).

Song Lyric of the Day (Charles Wesley, on the ‘Love Divine’)

“O Love divine, what hast thou done!

The immortal God hath died for me!

The Father's coeternal Son

bore all my sins upon the tree.

Th' immortal God for me hath died:

My Lord, my Love, is crucified!”—“O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done,” lyrics by Charles Wesley, music by Isaac B. Woodbury

Charles Wesley (1707-1788) might have been the younger brother of John Wesley, the founder of Methodist faith, but he had his own unique voice within the movement, as well as within the history of Christianity. That comes from having written nearly 9,000 hymns—an average of 10 poetic lines a day for 50 years—a record that no other Christian composer (no, not even the ubiquitous Isaac Watts) has equaled. John might have made his listeners think, but Charles made them lift their voices.

On this date 225 years ago, Charles Wesley died. I think that he would have been glad at the thought that, on certain days (such as this one), the anniversary of his death has fallen on Good Friday, when Jesus “bore all my sins upon the tree.”

The image accompanying this post is Crucifixion with Sts. Mary Virgin, Mary Magdalen, John and Jerome (ca. 1503), an oil-on-panel work by the Italian Renaissance painter Raphael. This masterpiece now hangs in the National Gallery in London.

Quote of the Day (Giorgio Vasari, on Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel)

“When the work was uncovered everyone rushed to see it from every part and remained dumbfounded. The Pope, being thus encouraged to greater designs, richly rewarded Michelangelo, who sometimes said in speaking of the great favours showered upon him by the Pope that he fully recognised his powers, and if he sometimes used hard words, he healed them by signal gifts and favours. Thus, when Michelangelo once asked leave to go and spend the feast of St. John in Florence, and requested money for this, the Pope said, ‘When will this chapel be ready?’ ‘When I can get it done, Holy Father.’ The Pope struck him with his mace, repeating, ‘When I can, when I can, I will make you finish it!’ Michelangelo, however, returned to his house to prepare for his journey to Florence, when the Pope sent Cursio, his chamberlain, with five hundred crowns to appease him and excuse the Pope, who feared what Michelangelo might do. As Michelangelo knew the Pope, and was really devoted to him, he laughed, especially as such things always turned to this advantage, and the Pope did everything to retain his good-will.”—Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Artists (1550)

Say what you want about Pope Julius II (and in a prior post, I said quite a lot about this “warrior pope,” little if any of it complimentary). But one look at this image also says this: you have to give him credit for knowing genius when he saw it.

On All Saints Day in 1512, Michelangelo Buonarroti staggered the world of the Renaissance when his work on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel was exhibited to the public for the first time.

When the artist completed it, his immediate sensation might have been sheer physical relief. As Vasari, the fine artist who gave us even finer biographical sketches of the great paints and sculptors of the time, put it: “Michelangelo had to stand with his head thrown back, and he so injured his eyesight that for several months he could only read and look at designs in that posture.” (For someone like myself with a severe fear of heights, it’s equally daunting that he did all of this work atop a 60-ft. scaffold.)

The artist’s second feeling might have been sweet vindication in the game of artistic and Vatican politics. In his section on this great work of art, Vasari notes that the commission resulted from a booby trap laid by an enemy, the architect Donato Bramante. At least some modern scholars have disputed Vasari’s contentions (evidently held by Michelangelo himself) that a) Bramante was a kinsman of Raphael, and b) that the two, in an effort to undermine a rival for patronage, convinced Julius to hire the sculptor in an area where he felt less sure of himself: painting. (Michelangelo really wanted to do the tomb of the pontiff.) Nevertheless, Michelangelo felt angry enough about these two that he was still complaining three decades later that they caused the only troubles he ever had with the pope.

Reams of art criticism have been created about the Sistine Chapel over the past 500 years, but I think Michelangelo might have best enjoyed reading about himself in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s travelogue Italian Journey (1816), in which the titan of German letters admits that he had grown “so enthusiastic about Michelangelo that I have lost all my taste for Nature, since I cannot see her with the same eye of genius as he did.”

Here’s the part that would have brought a smile to the competitive artist’s lips: “From the chapel we went to the loggias of Raphael, and, though I hardly dare admit it, I could not look at them any longer. After being dilated and spoiled by Michelangelo’s great forms, my eye took no pleasure in the ingenious frivolities of Raphael’s arabesques, and his Biblical stories, beautiful as they are, do not stand up against Michelangelo’s.”

One of my memories as a kid was watching the 1965 film adaptation of Irving Stone’s biographical novel of the creation of the Sistine Chapel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, with Charlton Heston as Michelangelo and Rex Harrison as Julius. What sticks in my mind (indelibly, because it was repeated ad nauseum) was the pontiff’s importunate question— “When will you make an end?”—and the artist’s equally disgusted response—“When I am finished!”

Through five centuries, millions of visitors to the site—and even more who have beheld it through lavishly illustrated books or some visual medium—are likely to agree that the wait was worth it.

(The image here is, of course, a detail of the great fresco from the ceiling on The Creation of Adam.)

This Day in Religious History (“Warrior Pope” Julius II Gets Tough With Venice)

April 27, 1509—Summoning the wrath that earned him the sobriquet pontefice terribile, Pope Julius II struck back at the rulers of Venice by putting the entire city-state under an interdict. Thus, all God-fearing members of this center of commerce and culture—whose leaders had recently crossed the Vatican—found themselves under a solemn ecclesiastical edict cutting them off from the sacraments.

Nowadays, we know Julius best through his association with two transcendent artists whose unfortunate lot was to be rivals for his patronage. Raphael painted the pope’s upstairs rooms in the Vatican palace, then did Julius’ portrait—the image accompanying this post.

You’d never know, scrutinizing this image without any knowledge of the subject, that Julius was positively feared—maybe even more than longtime executive editor Abe Rosenthal was in the New York Times newsroom! If anything, the pope’s portrait reminds me of King Lear at the end of his rope—and, indeed, at the time of his sitting Julius had survived one life-threatening illness and was a year away from succumbing to another.

Julius was pretty much what you’d expect in a Renaissance pope:

* Promiscuous—he’d fathered three daughters out of wedlock by the time he became pope in his early 60s, and he gave away one in marriage during his reign.
* Corrupt—he’d resorted to bribery to play kingmaker (or, in this case, pope-maker) for Cardinal Ciba (i.e., Innocent III), then used the same skullduggery to secure his own election 19 years later.
* Cultured—though best known for commissioning the basilica of St. Peter, the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel, and Michelangelo’s Moses for his own tomb, Julius also issued in 1512 a papal bull establishing the Capella Julia for the study of music and the chant.

Besides Raphael, the other artist most strongly associated with Julius is, of course, Michelangelo. I suspect that, like me, at least some of you have an image of him drawn from Irving Stone’s The Agony and the Ecstasy. In the 1965 film adaptation, one scene lingers, more than 35 years later, in my memory, of Rex Harrison as the pope, raising his voice to Michelangelo (Charlton Heston, naturally) on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, demanding: “When will you make an end?”

“When I am finished!” comes the reply, the eternal cry of the perfectionist artist.

Harrison’s casting in the role was doubtless a function of box-office clout—after all, he’d only just won the Oscar for My Fair Lady. But Hollywood execs could not have asked for anyone better suited to this role, because “Sexy Rexy” (he was, like Henry VIII, married six times) was the sole shining light of the 1963 film that launched a thousand Tinseltown nervous breakdowns, Cleopatra.

The cynical wit of Harrison’s Julius Caesar in the 20th-Century Fox debacle represented a thin veneer for a character born to dominate. A life in the theater had prepared the actor exceptionally well for this (particularly so when he scared ingénue co-star and musical newcomer Julie Andrews practically out of her wits before the Broadway opening of My Fair Lady).

How does Julius Caesar relate to Julius II, besides the superficial matter of that first name? Go back to the beard in the Raphael painting. Julius II wore it as a tribute to the destroyer of the Roman Republic, who had gone hirsute as a pledge against his enemies in the field, the Gauls.

If possible, Julius II had even more enemies than Caesar: the French, successors to the Gauls as a troubling presence to the north, but also the Turks and the Bolognese. You can imagine this pope as a chieftain, a commander, even a Carnegie-style captain of industry with his disdain for the hoi polloi, support of culture, and demand for results right now. But you can’t possibly envision him as a successor to St. Peter, the fisherman all too aware of his own frailty even as he became the rock on which the Church was built.

One person who definitely couldn’t see Julius as successor to Peter was Erasmus of Rotterdam. In 1517, four years after Julius had died, the humanist scholar satirized the first pope meeting his most recent deceased successor in Julius exclusus e coelis.

In it, St. Peter, standing at the pearly gates, inquires of Julius what he has done to merit entrance. The reply becomes the occasion for a ferocious (and, conveniently for the author, anonymously published) attack in which the late pontiff is blamed for an entire catalogue of sins—not just simony and sorcery, but also—especially telling for the pacifist humanist—the fact that Julius “kept great armies in the field,” leaving a trail of blood across Italy.

General Sherman had nothing on Julius. In a suit of gleaming silver armor, the pontiff led armies into battle himself, and would leave even cardinals shaking in their boots when they quailed at following his path through snowdrifts that reached as high as their chests--even when they were mounted.

Before assuming the papacy, Julius had been regarded as a good friend of Venice. But before long, by taking various places in the Romagna—territory that belonged in those days to the papacy—by filling various religious offices without input from the pope, and by subjecting clergy to a secular tribunal rather than ecclesiastical courts, leaders of the watery city-state pushed the pope into cooperating with Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I and King Louis XII of France in the League of Cambrai.

Julius was not at all happy about this alliance—he was a kind of clerical but undemocratic Garibaldi, hoping to unite Italy by driving out hated foreigners such as the French—but he’d do what he felt he had to in order to protect papal prerogatives.

I’m not going to bore you with the multiple switches in diplomatic and military policy that ensued at the papal court during these years—they gave me whiplash just trying to follow it all. Instead, I’ll leave it to John Julius Norwich, summing things up with typical effortless elegance in A History of Venice:

“In scarcely more than four years, the three principal protagonists in the war of the League of Cambria had gone through every possible permutation in the pattern of alliances. First France and the Papacy were allied against Venice, then Venice and the Papacy ranged themselves against France; now Venice and France combined against the Papacy—and, indeed, all comers….Alliances were matters, above all, of tactical convenience; when they no longer served a useful purpose they were broken off and new, more promising ones formed in their place….Ultimately, always, there was only one rule to be followed: that of each man for himself.”

Then as now, armies cost money. Amazingly, Julius left the papal coffers full at the time of his death—but, as a product of the curial culture of the time, he’d perpetuated a cycle of spending, then looking for any ready means to pay for his high art and low wars.

His successor, Leo X, was such a spendthrift that he hired Dominican friar Johannes Tetzel to sell indulgences to raise funds for Julius’ pet project, an entirely rebuilt St. Peter’s Basilica. That sale sparked Martin Luther’s wrath.

The consequences of that righteous anger were spelled out in a sermon I heard some years ago in my parish. An English Jesuit was escorting some friends through the Sistine Chapel. Gaping at the ceiling, they inquired how much the magnificent images had cost.

“Half of Europe,” the priest answered drily.