Brunelleschi's Dome

"In the taut curves of its profile, the force of its volume, and the dynamism of its upward leap, the shape of Brunelleschi's dome suggests the new absolute of the Early Renaissance, the idea of the indomitable individual will . . ." -- F. Hartt.

Filippo Brunelleschi, known to his contemporaries as Pippo, died in 1446 in Florence at the age of 69.

While his early rival, Lorenzo Ghiberti, would be known principally for just two works, the bronze doors on the north and east portals of the Baptistery of Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi is best known today for just one unconventional and breathtaking accomplishment, the design of the cupola for the Duomo, the Cathedral of Florence, which he worked on intrepidly with eyebrows gleefully raised high for 20 years.

Pippo's father was a member of the Cathedral design committee when Pippo was a child, so he had grown up with models and drawings of the early designs for the Cathedral. By the age of 21, however, Brunelleschi has entered the goldsmith trade, and in 1402 he was optimistic about his chances of winning the public competition being held to select a sculptor to create new bronze doors for the north portal of the Baptistery outside the Cathedral. His competition effort was well received, but in the end he placed second to Ghiberti -- and he never forgave him. After his disappointment Brunelleschi found it easy to give up sculpture for architecture, and served along with Ghiberti on the Opera del Duomo committee of 1404, doing his best to make the young sculptor look silly by exposing Ghiberti's lack of engineering expertise at every opportunity.

It is possible that the beginnings of Brunelleschi's vision began to take hold when the committee asked then-current Cathedral architect Giovanni d'Ambrogio to lower his three semi-domes. In 1407, as Vasari records, the Opera del Duomo adopted Brunelleschi's suggestion that a drum be inserted between d'Ambrogio's semi-domes and the center, thus preparing to "lift the weight off the shoulders" of the semi-domes to accommodate a massive central dome. Brunelleschi's influence on the evolution of the Cathedral's design increased in the years that followed until the Cathedral was finally declared his own project in 1420. Thereafter, the Cathedral ultimately took on the characteristics of what is often called Brunelleschi's "paper architecture," his conception of proportional architectural shapes as if on paper, elegantly partitioned and measured across the eye's plane with a geometric simplicity and order unseen in Gothic architecture.

The gigantic central dome itself, visible for miles around Florence, was literally the crown of Brunelleschi's career as a designer, a triumph of engineering as well as a stylistic statement which in some ways set the optimistic tone for the century of Renaissance artistic expression to follow. Brunelleschi solved the engineering problem of building such a large, tall dome -- the largest, tallest dome ever made until that time -- by erecting an internal dome with an exceptionally strong herringbone masonry pattern, surrounded by oak reinforcing beams held together with iron chains and fixed to stone buttresses which connected the inner shell with the outer shell.

While working on his lifetime project, Brunelleschi also managed to work on other projects, such as the Ospedale degli Innocenti (begun 1419) and the Chapter House for Santa Croce (1433), and he revolutionized the plan of church interiors with his designs for San Lorenzo (1425) and Santo Spirito (1434).

Novus Mundus

Amerigo Vespucci -- explorer, geographer and merchant, the first to call the Americas "the New World" and the incidental inspiration for the naming of those continents -- was born on this day in 1451 in Florence.

Vespucci has long taken the rap for being a fraud who had never sailed anywhere special and who had misappropriated the naming rights to the continent discovered by his rough acquaintance, Christopher Columbus. As is usually the case, the real story is a little more interesting than that. Born of a noble family, the classically-educated Vespucci, who grew up with a love of literature, astronomy and geography, ingratiated himself with the powerful Medici family (who were easily impressed by intellectual types) and got himself hired as a sort of purchasing agent and sales rep for their ship-outfitting business in Spain.

A welcome visitor at the court of Isabella and Ferdinand, he watched Columbus' first 2 voyages with interest, and furrowed his brow each time Columbus returned to declare that he had discovered a Western sea route to India. He decided to get to know Columbus a little better, and through his salesmanship became Columbus' key supplier for his third voyage across the ocean in 1497.

Hearing nothing with his skeptical ears that suggested that the coarse Genoan had actually found India, Vespucci decided, as a scientist, that he needed to go and see for himself, so in 1499 he outfitted his own voyage West and set sail under the Spanish flag. Arriving at the northern coast of what would eventually be called South America, he explored the Amazon and promptly fell into the same trap that had snagged Columbus, in that Vespucci initially insisted on calling the Amazon "the Ganges." However, with his superior skills as an astronomer, he did develop a method for determining longitude which became the standard for 300 years, and was able to estimate the circumference of the Earth to within 50 miles.

On his second trip in 1501 (this time on behalf of Portugal rather than Spain), Vespucci made his breakthrough: tracing the coast of the continent down to within 400 miles of Tierra del Fuego, he charted his progress and came to the realization that the land was not India at all, but an entirely "New World" previously unheard of in the courts of Western Europe. With that also came the revolutionary realization that there were 2 great oceans rather than one separating Europe from Asia to the West -- one greater than the one that Columbus had crossed and which Columbus had never even reached because of the big continents that stood between them. Vespucci reported his findings to the Medicis in 2 brief but erudite letters, the first called Novus Mundus (or "New World"), which when published shortly thereafter caused a sensation. He died on February 22, 1512 in Seville, Spain.

Meanwhile, Vespucci himself never presumed to name the new continent for himself; the name came from a map published by a German preacher named Martin Waldseemuller in 1507, who mistakenly declared Vespucci the discoverer of the continent, and upon that claim quite naturally decided it should be named for him. Columbus, for his part, never gave up believing that he had found the route to India, and though he continues to get all the credit for having discovered the New World, it was Vespucci who figured out that it was "New."

Pico's Dignity

Pico della Mirandola was born on this day in 1463 near Ferrara.

A precocious child, Pico was sent to Bologna to study canon law at the age of 14. Canon law began to sicken him, however, and he moved to Ferrara to study philosophy and theology, soon afterward meeting the philosopher Marsilio Ficino. At Padua, he gained a reputation as a public lecturer on scholarly topics, acquired a deep knowledge of Greek and the Semitic languages, and encountered ancient Greek texts by Plato and Aristotle as well as the literature of medieval Judaism. By 1484, under Ficino's influence, he was an avowed Neo-Platonist, employing Plato's methods of inquiry to a critique of the Church.

He studied in France briefly, and upon his return to Florence in 1486, he published his "900 theses" (or, Conclusiones Nongentae in Omni Genere Scientarum), a mélange of dialectics, metaphysics, theology and magic, and brashly announced that he was prepared to defend them in public debate against all the great scholars of Europe. For the impending occasion, he wrote what would become his most famous piece, the Oration on the Dignity of Man, one of the principal statements of Renaissance humanism -- stressing a return to the centrality of man in the universe.

Within a year, 13 of his theses were declared to be heresy by Innocent VIII, who forbade public discussion of the work. Pico recanted, but came back two months later with a a retort addressed to Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Apologia. In the Apologia, Pico took the extraordinary position that the Hebrew Kabbala, the Jewish mystical tradition which provided a means for approaching God directly, was the best logical basis for the belief in a divine Christ.

With Innocent still hot on his trail, Pico fled to France and was arrested there. Innocent died in 1492, and was succeeded by Alexander VI, who absolved Pico of the charge of heresy. With Alexander's blessings Pico returned to his roots in his work the Heptaplus, a mystical interpretation of the Creation. He fell away from Ficino and Lorenzo near the end of his life, when he submitted to the influence of the monk Savonarola and began a period of meditation.

He died young, on November 17, 1494 in Florence, without leaving a synthesized philosophy, but his critiques were influential: they encouraged scholars to penetrate long-ignored Hebrew texts and enriched theological discussions with an approach to mysticism derived from classical literature. His critique of astrology influenced the work of astronomer Johannes Kepler.

April Freshness

"Renaissance artists and writers were emphatic in their insistence that Giotto was their true ancestor. Perhaps at no other moment in the entire history of painting has a single idea achieved so rapid, widespread, and well-nigh complete a change." -F. Hartt.

The painter Giotto died on this date in 1337 in Florence.

Universally recognized, even in his own lifetime, as the first great Italian master, Giotto was born around 1266 in Vespignano, near Florence, and early on was apparently a student of both Cimabue and Nicola Pisano. Yet Giotto's work represented an astonishing departure from the works of his teachers, the first draft of a bold line between the formalistic religious painting of his Medieval predecessors and the foundations of the Italian Renaissance.

In his earliest work, a cycle of frescoes of the lives of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ on the walls of the Arena Chapel at Padua, Giotto immediately reveals a new, more naturalistic vision of religious painting. Unlike his predecessors who, influenced by the painting traditions of Byzantine iconography, arranged stylized figures on gold leaf backdrops with little discernible emphasis on dramatic intensity or personality, Giotto drew from nature and portrayed his weightier figures in the midst of psychologically familiar moments; imbued the Arena Chapel scenes with clear, uniform light; placed his characters on firm, solid ground with vegetation and architectural ornaments providing a real-life context; and, most startlingly, used beautiful glowing colors -- blues, greens, reds and ivories.

Noting the contrast with Giotto's earlier contemporaries, the critic John Ruskin called attention to the "April freshness" of Giotto's panels; forgiving the modern association of that phrase with laundry detergent, Ruskin's observation is accurate when one looks at the drearily gilded panels being painted in Italy at the time. Giotto's other important works included frescoes at Santa Croce in Florence and a panel, the Ognissanti Madonna.

Just before his death, Giotto designed and began the building of the campanile (bell tower) for the Duomo Cathedral in Florence as official architect of the city. He was one of the best known personalities of his day when he died, and his name was celebrated in the works of Dante and Boccaccio. Dante, incidentally, by legend once asked the homely Giotto why his children were so ugly, to which the artist replied, "My frescoes I make by day, and my children by night."

The Gates of Paradise

Lorenzo Ghiberti's lofty reputation begins and ends with essentially 2 works: the bronze doors depicting New Testament stories on the north portal of the Baptistery (just outside the Cathedral of Florence), on which he worked for 21 years (1403-24), and the bronze doors on the east portal of the same building, on which he worked for 23 years (1425-52).

In 1402, as a 24 year-old painting student without any formal affiliation in metallurgy he entered the competition for a set of bronze reliefs for the north doors, the test subject of which was a panel depicting Abraham's aborted sacrifice of his son Isaac, and was chosen as one of the top 2 entrants, the other being Filippo Brunelleschi. Comparing Brunelleschi's design to Ghiberti's, it is not hard to see why Ghiberti was given the commission. While Brunelleschi's design is bold, naturalistic and dramatic, his twisted figures tearing their way to and fro within the boundaries of the quatrefoil panel, Ghiberti's entire composition displays a graceful, delicate unity, subtly revealing the inner lives of Abraham and Isaac while drawing the eye along the sweeping shapes and lines through a deliberate use of lighting effects. His figure of Isaac is sometimes referred to as the first truly Renaissance nude figure, demonstrating naturalistic values in his detailed rendering of young Isaac's musculature, while at the same time letting the figure exist quietly, in the manner of the very silent nudes of antiquity. (In addition, it turns out that Ghiberti's bronze casting technique was less costly than Brunelleschi's would have been. The Baptistery booster club may not have known anything about art, but they sure knew how to save money.)

Brunelleschi never forgave Ghiberti for winning the competition, and in 1404, when Ghiberti and Brunelleschi were chosen as part of a committee to design the cupola of the Cathedral of Florence, Brunelleschi did his best to make Ghiberti look silly at every turn, setting engineering traps into which the less experienced Ghiberti repeatedly and publicly blundered. For the most part that mattered little to Ghiberti, who was shrewd enough to retreat quietly from the project and to spend most of the energies of the rest of his life finishing the Baptistery doors.

In 1425 he was given the commission for the east doors, which have come to be known as the "Gates of Paradise" (according to legend, so named by Michelangelo, who said they were truly worthy of the honor), depicting Old Testament stories, this time in heavily gilded square panels appearing like paintings rather than reliefs.

Run, Dorando, Run

Dorando Pietri was born on this day in 1885 in Mandrio, Italy.

Pietri was a candy-maker who took up cycle racing in 1904. The following year he switched to running and won his first Italian marathon title.

Though he did not finish in the 1906 Olympic marathon in Athens, he was a sentimental favorite as the 1908 Olympic marathon began at Windsor Castle in England. A half-mile from the Olympic Stadium at Shepard's Bush where the 26-mile race was to end, Pietri overtook South African Charles Heffron, and was the first to enter the packed Stadium. The fast pace of the race had taken its toll on Pietri, however -- he appeared dazed and began running around the Stadium track in the wrong direction. After only a few yards, he collapsed. Zealous British officials, then feuding with the American team and noting that American Johnny Hayes had also passed Heffron and would win if Pietri failed to finish, leaped to their feet, picked up Pietri and, after Pietri collapsed several more times, virtually dragged him around the Stadium track in the right direction and declared Pietri the winner. The Americans lodged a protest, resulting in Pietri's disqualification and Hayes being declared the winner.

Nevertheless, Pietri's valiant struggle at the end of a hard fought race captivated the public imagination. The following day, Queen Alexandra, who had been present at the finish, presented Pietri with a special gold cup. In the U.S., he became the latest hero in the cult of the underdog. Irving Berlin wrote a song about him, and Pietri was invited to appear on the New York vaudeville stage (on a bill featuring boxer Jack Johnson and cartoonist Rube Goldberg), where the story of the Olympic marathon was told by a professional lecturer as Pietri stood awkwardly by, not knowing a word of English.

Meanwhile, Pietri turned professional, beating Hayes twice in marathons held in New York; he even beat two opponents on horseback on his way to winning 50 of 69 professional marathons. Eventually, Pietri retired to Italy where he drove a taxi and received a pension from the government to scout for new marathon runners. He died on February 7, 1942 in San Remo, Italy.

Castagno

Andrea del Castagno died of plague on this day in 1457 in Florence, around the age of 36.

Castagno's reputation served a centuries-long prison sentence for a crime Castagno could not have committed: Vasari wrote that the violent Castagno was so jealous of the painting of his friend Domenico Veneziano that he murdered Domenico one night, and later confessed to the murder on his own deathbed. The only catch, unearthed in the 19th century, was that Castagno had died before Domenico.

While there is now no reason to believe Castagno was a murderer (thus freeing us for a more objective critical assessment of his work) it somehow seems appropriate to imagine that Castagno was an ill-tempered character: contrast his tortured, psychologically dark portraits of the saints with Domenico's serene figures, and the styles give a particle of truth to Vasari's lie.

By legend Castagno was a shepherd who liked to draw while he minded his flock when he was discovered by a member of the powerful Medici family, who brought him to Florence and arranged for him to serve in an apprenticeship with a master (possibly Domenico, Paolo Uccello or Fra Filippo Lippi). After gaining fame in Florence as "Andrea of the hanged men" for his painting of an execution at the Palazzo del Podesta, he painted for a time in Venice (notably the ceiling frescoes at Codussi's Church of San Zaccaria, 1442), and in 1444 he returned to Florence. His sculptural renderings of figures within organized, credible spaces were distinct from those of his contemporaries by the inner life he gives them through a variety of approaches.

His portrait of St. Julian at SS. Annunziata (c. 1454) is as subtle yet convincing a picture of murderous guilt as had ever been seen in Renaissance painting; his Vision of St. Jerome (c. 1454) by contrast, shows a broadly convulsive, agonizing wilderness prophet, perhaps the most dramatic portrait of religious ecstasy in its time. His masterpiece is an under-appreciated Last Supper (1447), tucked away in a refectory at S. Appollonia in Florence: Castagno paints the familiar scene with a series of marble panels appearing behind Jesus and his disciples, which panels seem to reflect the respective emotional states of the players; behind Judas Iscariot, the panel erupts in a violent, irregular pattern with contrasting colors, suggesting (in a manner which presages the 20th century idiom of Abstract Expressionism) the inner turmoil of Judas at the instant at which, traditionally, the devil seizes Judas's soul.

Italy Wins, and Legends Roam Pittsburgh

On a penalty kick shoot-out, no less. Having witnessed first-hand the focus and attention of the French fans on the Champions League final in Paris in May, when there was no French honor at stake, I can only imagine what the scene must have looked like oustide those bistros on Rue St. Andre des Arts during the match. Afterwards, however, instead of triumphant football crowds marching down the Champs-Elysees, I'm sure there were more than a few mourners clutching their half-empty wine bottles and banging their heads against lamposts, moaning the name "Zinedine Zidane." Say it ain't so, Zinedine.

Meanwhile, Pittsburgh kicked off its All-Star Baseball celebration yesterday with a high-scoring minor league "Futures" All-Star game, pitting American-born minor league stars vs. "foreigners"; the U.S. won, 8-5. Excellent performances were turned in by game MVP-winner Billy Butler, a leftfielder from the Wichita Wranglers in the Royals' system, who hit a two-run homer; and Curacao's Wladimir Balentien (currently playing for San Antonio in the Mariners' system), the DH for the "World" team who hit a homer and two doubles. Having been there to see it, I must confess that another player, Cameron Maybin of West Michigan (a Tigers' farm club) looks like he might be the real deal, going 2-for-3 and grabbing five shots to centerfield. Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins managed the World club in the Futures game, while Hall of Famer Gary Carter managed the U.S. club.

It was a lot of fun seeing all the old-timers milling around PNC Park on Sunday evening, even if it was a little surreal watching them play softball in the "Legends and Celebrity" game with the likes of Jimmy Kimmel, Sarah Silverman, Dean Cain, Franco Harris (who can't hit a softball for beans, although he proved he could lay down a decent bunt), Rob Reiner and Danny Masterson from That 70s Show.

Ozzie Smith and Ernie Banks were as gracious as always -- it's second nature to those guys to be able to convey how grateful they are to the fans and how wonderful it was to come to such a beautiful ballpark. Other fellows we've missed seeing on the diamond for some time and who participated in Sunday night's charade included Goose Gossage, playing a surprisingly limber first base; chatty Fred Lynn; Tommy John, whose history with his namesake surgery did not prohibit him from pitching for the Americans at age 63; John Kruk; Rollie Fingers; Daves Winfield and Parker; Bill Madlock; Bill Mazeroski (pictured), who received a heart-felt standing ovation from the hometown crowd; and Andre Dawson, who looks like he could still play if he really wanted to.

If anyone is counting, the Nationals beat the Americans 7-5 on the strength of Winfield's pitching and his 300-foot homer to left; Gary Carter was named the game's MVP.

Artemisia

Artemisia Gentileschi, one of the few female painters of the Renaissance, was born on this day in 1593 in Rome.

Artemisia lost her mother at 12 and spent most of her adolescence learning in the workshop of her father, Orazio Gentileschi, a significant painter and follower of Caravaggio. At 17, as she was feeling her power as her father's finest pupil, she was raped by another artist in her father's studio, Agostino Tassi. Tassi was acquitted in the ensuing trial, during which her father's property was threatened and, most significantly, Artemisia was subjected to her own trial by ordeal -- she was put to the thumbscrew as a test of her veracity. She later married an obscure painter, a relationship which gave her the ability to practice her art in a man's world without further fear of scandal.

Her art, however, is distinctive for its feminine point of view, and perhaps even more so for its personal content, so temptingly equated with her biographical facts. Among her favorite subjects is Susannah and the Elders (first painted in 1610), a biblical tale in which a young girl is sexually harassed by some men in her community. Most male painters employed the subject as an opportunity to display the female form and usually showed Susannah as a flirtatious participant in the event; Artemisia also painted Susannah in the nude, but (according to some scholars) painted her as a self-portrait, and showed Susannah's anguish at the behavior of the men.

Her treatment of another biblical subject, Judith slaying Holofernes (c.1625), is Caravaggesque in its lighting effects, but is almost clinically violent in its depiction of two women, Judith and her maid Abra, slicing off the head of the Assyrian general.

Artemisia died in 1642. Her works were largely ignored until they began to be noticed by feminist art historians in the 1970s. Since then, she has become an icon of woman's history, and has been the subject of several fictional works, including Agnes Merlet's film Artemisia (1998) and Susan Vreeland's novel The Passion of Artemisia (2001).

Pirandello

"Each one must arrange his mask as best he can -- his outer mask. For inside of it there is then the inner mask, which often fails to square with the outer. And nothing is true!" -- Luigi Pirandello.

Playwright Luigi Pirandello was born on this date in 1867 in Agrigento, Sicily.

A teacher at a girl's school, Pirandello experimented with verse and narrative prose (especially the latter, under the tutelage of Luigi Capuana) and criticized the drama as a second-rate art form -- perhaps in part due to some bad experiences in attempting to bring certain of his early works to the stage. His career path as a playwright, however, was sealed when in 1916 an old friend was cleaning Pirandello's apartment, found one of his old plays and sent it to the director of a Sicilian theatrical company. Once enticed, Pirandello unleashed an avalanche of new plays.

His masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author, premiered in Rome in 1921 -- and after the first performance, a near riot broke out on the stage as actors, critics and members of the audience fought about what they had just experienced. The play ended up being one of the most influential stage works of the 20th century, containing a heavy dose of theatrical self-consciousness, a play within a play and sudden shifts of mood from the comic to the tragic and from the naturalistic to the grotesque, with stock dramatic effects heaped one upon the next with the result that they finally destroy contemporary theatrical conventions altogether.

Underlying his works was a feeling of isolation associated with the impossibility of communication in an absurdly organized world, and a proposed antidote for such impossibility, namely the wearing of another, perhaps more convenient personality. He joined the Italian fascists in 1924 -- perhaps forgiveable only to the extent one understands Pirandello's deep-seated fear of chaos and his own willingness to wear a convenient mask -- and was rewarded by Mussolini for a time with a state-funded theater company.

Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1934 (although some say the fascist-hating Italian writer Benedetto Croce would have been the winner that year were it not for the political intrigues of Mussolini's ambassador in Sweden).

Pirandello died on December 10, 1936.

Dante

The author of the Divine Comedy, known to the ages by his first name, Dante, lived in a turbulent place and time, and knew his share of bitterness and violence. These harsh experiences, however, seem to have inspired Dante, turning him inward in an investigation of the goodness at the core of the human soul and encouraging in him an astonishing sense of hope and vision.

Throughout much of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, Florence was racked in conflict between the Guelphs (a political faction which recognized the authority of the papacy in secular affairs) and the Ghibellines (an opposing faction who maintained loyalty to the Holy Roman Emperor). Dante's father was a Guelph through and through, whose great-grandfather had died fighting on behalf of Pope Eugenius III during the Second Crusade; Dante's mother, however, was a Ghibelline, and thus Dante was the product of a cross-factional alliance which probably had more to do with assuaging the powers that raged among the local townsmen and nobility than anything as lofty as pope against emperor. Dante Alighieri was born on this day in Florence in 1265.

His parents saw to his education in Latin and in the Christian fathers at the Franciscan school at Santa Croce in Florence, and found a willing pupil, who so loved Virgil's Aeneid that he committed the entire work to memory. When he was but 9, he had a Fred Savage-Wonder Years, love-at-first-sight encounter while attending mass: the graceful 8-year old, white-frocked Beatrice Portinari captivated him, and though he wouldn't see her again for another 9 years (only to "court" her with furtive, tender glances thereafter) -- having in the interim been promised in marriage to Gemma Donati, the daughter of a politically powerful family -- Beatrice became Dante's central inspiration for his writing and his spiritual growth, "the glorious lady of my mind" to whom his imagination could retreat to seek comfort from the harsh realities of politics and war.

Although he fought against the Ghibellines at the Battle of Campaldino in 1289, Dante saw himself as a poet rather than a soldier, writing love poems and sending them to Guido Cavalcanti, the greatest among the new poets in Florence, for critical guidance. When Beatrice died in 1290, Dante's sense of loss set his compass: he spent the next 4 years writing Vita Nuova, a lyric sequence about his chaste, self-denying love for Beatrice, linked together by prose commentaries of critical self-analysis over his somewhat dissipated lifestyle -- written in Italian instead of the usual Latin, lending an intensely personal atmosphere for his explorations. He dedicated the work to his mentor Cavalcanti, yet politics would bring him in conflict with Cavalcanti.

From 1295, Dante gained political influence as a member of the Florentine electoral councils, and in June 1300 he was elected to the ruling council of Florence. By this time, Florence had seen a split among the ruling Guelphs into the "Bianchi" (merchants who wanted peace with neighboring states to improve the trade routes) and "Neri" (the wealthiest banking families who saw Florentine imperialism as the path to greater wealth) factions. Dante, a member of the Bianchi who were then in control of the city, proposed a ritual truce for the violence which called for sending the leaders of the 2 factions into exile. This sent his "first friend" Cavalcanti to malaria-stricken Sarzana, where the poet died shortly thereafter. (Perhaps it would in part be his shame over these events that would lead him to write, in the Comedy, that "the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in time of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.")

The following year, the Neri took control of Florence while Dante was on a diplomatic mission to confer with Boniface VIII, and Dante found himself permanently exiled from Florence, condemned to be burned alive if her ever set foot in Florence again. Deprived of his home, wealth and family and wandering from town to town, Dante distracted himself from his sense of loss and political intrigues by writing, beginning De Vulgari Eloquentia (1304, an argument in Latin for the charms of vernacular Italian as a unifying language of literature among the Italian city-states) and The Banquet (1307, a set of philosophical commentaries on of his own poems).

Yet there was enough rage in him to proceed with his masterpiece, the allegorical poem cycle known as the Divine Comedy (begun 1314), divided into 3 canticles -- Inferno, Purgatorio and Paradiso -- ostensibly as an account of Dante's own journey through the regions of the afterlife. With Virgil (representing human reason) as his guide, Dante scales the nine circles of hell from the "dark wood" of middle age where there is no hope, then up the mountain of Purgatory. As pilgrim and travel writer, Dante takes his readers through an encyclopedic commentary on the morality, political aspirations, philosophies and material desires of the Medieval world (in many cases naming names and taking no prisoners), interweaving autobiographical, historical and mythical elements through dramatic scenes ranging from the sarcastic to the horrifying to the poignant. As he leaves the Inferno, however, reason can no longer be his guide, and faith, represented by his beloved Beatrice, takes over as his guide through Purgatory, where penitents reaffirm their faith and atone for their sins, to Paradise, where after a journey of spiritual awakening and purification, he prepares to see God and attain perfect knowledge.

Dante, by this time a favorite at the court of Guido da Polenta in Ravenna, completed the final cantos of Paradiso on the night of his death, September 14, 1321. Even during his life, the Divine Comedy was a sensation, and his home-city of Florence did him the posthumous honor of appointing Giovanni Boccaccio to deliver a series of lectures on Dante's masterpiece. Chaucer was an admirer of his work as well, and although the apocalyptic aspects of Dante's work fell out of favor somewhat during the Renaissance and Enlightenment eras, Byron and Shelley saw Dante as their forbearer, and later T.S. Eliot quoted freely from Dante, finding in him a modern poet who articulated the meaninglessness of a life without God.

Leonardo Da Vinci

In many of the "most important people of the millennium" lists which popped up at the end of 1999, Leonardo da Vinci placed in the top 10, yet some historians argued that he was not deserving of the honor: as a painter, he produced relatively little work which survives; and as a scientist, while his copious private notebook doodles and commentaries are revealing about the thought processes and unfinished projects of a peculiar Italian dilettante, they produced little in terms of direct, lasting influence.

What continues to attract us to Leonardo, perhaps, is his unrelenting eye, the curiosity which drove him to dissect and probe and theorize in the manner of our 20th century heroes of science and technology. Those notebooks, in which Leonardo wrote from right to left in his careful, angular handwriting so that they may only be read with the aid of a mirror, showed not just a freelancer with an interest in topics ranging from architecture and botany to physics, engineering, cartography, anatomy and military science, but an innovator -- someone who saw his mission as one of searching for tiny lightbeams of visible scientific truth out in the darkness and encouraging their brilliance through previously unimagined practical designs (much as his style of painting seems to present the light of human forms struggling out of the shadows). In that sense, historians notwithstanding, Leonardo's life stands as a sort of signpost for the twinkling millions of anonymous workshop geniuses without specialty, and the elevated admiration popularly held for Leonardo (similar to the feelings reserved for Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin) is a method of doing them honor.

Born on this day in 1452 near Vinci, the illegitimate son of a notary, his lowly social status ensured that the clever child would not be whisked into a traditional profession, thereby allowing him the freedom to shape his own profession as nomad, thinker and craftsman. Seeing artistic talent in him, when he was 16 Leonardo's father apprenticed him to the workshop of Florentine painter/sculptor Andrea del Verrocchio, with whom it is said Leonardo developed a close bond. Some have surmised that Verrocchio used the handsome young Leonardo as the model for his bronze statue of David. Leonardo quickly surpassed the skills of his teacher, particularly in rendering the musculature of the human body, the suggestion of motion and in his bold use of light and shadow (in contrast to the flat "stage" lighting of many of his contemporaries).

He enjoyed some unusual commissions while other more established artists began to leave Florence for the papal art boom in Rome, but abruptly left Florence himself in 1481 to seek his fortune as a military advisor and genius-at-large in the court of Ludovico Sforza, duke of Milan. There he designed fortifications against potential invasions by the French, while filling his notebooks with designs for the most sadistic machines of human destruction one could imagine -- cold evidence of his detachment from other human beings (which he referred to as "sacks for food") despite his obvious admiration for the beauty of the human form. Yet he did not seem to be filled with hatred; rather, his calculating scientific eye seemed to blot out any access in him to love or hate, even as he could cultivate charm, grace and even humor when the company of society served his aims.

While in Milan, Leonardo painted one of his most famous works, The Last Supper (1495-98), on the wall of the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, recalling Castagno's earlier Last Supper in its composition (except that Judas now sits on the same side of the table as the other disciples) but surpassing it in Leonardo's intimate rendition of the emotional states of each disciple at the moment Christ predicts his betrayal, and in his use of an ideal (rather than purely realistic) perspective design in which there is no place one can stand to make the lines of the picture come right. As to the latter innovation, Leonardo employed a kind of super-realistic plane of experience with which to engage the viewer, in effect "cheating" on the perspective to emphasize the drama, with Christ at the mathematical center of the mural and Judas' diagonal planes jutting exaggeratedly away from Christ, identifying his separateness. Use of this kind of super-real perspective would become a hallmark of the High Renaissance in the work of his younger contemporaries, Michelangelo and Raphael.

In 1502, Leonardo went to work for Cesare Borgia designing more fortifications and hydrological plans, making maps and giving strategic advice, although Borgia's mercurial temper ultimately drove Leonardo away within a few months. Back in Florence the following year, Leonardo began his portrait of the 24-year old Lisa di Antonio Maria Gherardini, wife of Florentine big shot Francesco del Gioncondo. Known as Mona Lisa, or La Gionconda, the portrait took Leonardo three years to complete, and ultimately he never gave it to Sr. Gioncondo, as it was in his own estate at the time of his death. Since then it has become the most famous of Leonardo's works, if not the most famous painting in history, a definitively reusable pop culture referent (see Nat King Cole's hit song, "Mona Lisa," 1950, among other manifestations) as well as the subject of years of intense analysis and comment by art critics, Renaissance historians and Sigmund Freud, among others. Thus, it is probably too easy to overstate its influence, yet it is clear that Leonardo's singular decision to paint the entire torso and head of Sra. Gioncondo in three-quarter view (as opposed to the close facial portrait typical of the time) became the standard in serious portraiture well into the 19th century.

Leonardo spent his last years as the beloved wise man of the French court of Francis I, ironically after spending so many years in the service of Italian nobles obsessed with French attacks. Vasari says that Leonardo stubbornly raised science over God even as he met his end on May 2, 1519 near Cloux, France, while other sources suggest he spent his last hours in pious observance, asking God to forgive him for squandering his time on science instead of his God-given talent for painting. It is perhaps more important to note that for Leonardo, art and science were intimately related, one toiling in the service of beauty and the other in the service of truth, both beginning and ending under the watch of the preeminent human eye.

Aquinas

St. Thomas Aquinas died on this date in 1274 at Fossanova around the age of 50.

The youngest son of an Italian count, Tomasso d'Aquino was sent to the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino at the age of 5, but when Emperor Frederick II was excommunicated, the monks went into hiding, and Thomas resumed his education in Naples. There Thomas encountered not only the works of the Christian fathers, but in the shadow of Frederick's intellectual tolerance, new exposure to Islamic and Greek writers such as Ibn Rushd and Aristotle. Excited by this intellectual climate, Aquinas decided on a life of study, preaching, teaching (and poverty), and attempted to join the Dominican brotherhood in 1244.

His family was apparently against the idea, imprisoning him in their castle for a time. His older brothers tried to break his resolve by sending a prostitute into his room; according to legend, Aquinas drove her away with a burning stick from his fireplace. After they relented, Aquinas studied under Albertus Magnus in Cologne, where he acquired the nickname "Dumb Ox" -- not so much for his intellect, but for his massive, slow physique. Albertus would say: "We call him the dumb ox, but the bellowing of that ox will resound throughout the whole world."

In 1251, he was ordained a priest and went to Paris where he received his masters in theology in 1256. Although he was modest and unassuming, Aquinas quickly became a master of the scholastic method of teaching, which entailed reading to a small group of students from a theological text (Peter Lombard's Sentences, 1148-51, a collection of opinions from church fathers, was the basic one), briefly explaining the point being made, and then analyzing the questions presented by it.

Within the swirling currents of the "new" Islamic and Greek philosophers posing questions about the existence of the world which did not seem to be adequately answered by the early church fathers, Aquinas increasingly found his scholastic analysis feeding on and reacting to Greek and Islamic sources, employing Ibn Rushd and Aristotle as counterpoints and methodological guides. He masterfully synthesized the disparate perspectives of the church fathers, and harmonized the "natural reason" expounded by the "new" philosophers with reasonable and rationally defensible Christian faith.

Where St. Augustine and his followers had proposed an unadorned faith through the notion that human reason had been hopelessly tarnished after the Fall of Adam and Eve, Aquinas, in his master work, Summa Theologica (c.1265-73), preferred to maintain that natural reason could be used to discover some extent of truth through the study of the evident effects of God's work in the world, and that grace completes the picture by filling in what cannot be learned from reason alone.

From this foundation, he created his "5 proofs" of the existence of God: (1) everything that is moved must be moved by something else, and since there is motion there must be a first mover; (2) from the sequence of efficient causes in sensible things, we can deduce a first efficient cause at the beginning of the sequence, which is God; (3) something in existence is necessary, and we may suppose that God is that which does not owe its existence to anything else, but is the cause of all necessity; (4) "more" and "less" are aspects of "greatness," which must be a reflection of some perfect "greatness" we call God; and (5) from the existence of "governance" and "guidance" as structures within the world, "there is therefore an intelligent being by whom all natural things are directed to their end. This we call God."

Writing Summa Theologica was an obsession for Aquinas: he ate and slept little during the years of its composition, and employed up to 4 secretaries at a time to take dictation on up to 4 topics at once; some even said he dictated in his sleep. Then, on December 6, 1273, he suddenly stopped dictating, apparently suffering a stroke during the Wednesday morning mass. With impaired speech, he answered a follower who asked why he had stopped working on the Summa Theologica, "I cannot [continue] because all that I have written seems like straw to me." Asked by Pope Gregory X to attend a council at Lyons, he died during the journey.

He is depicted in Dante's Divine Comedy as the vehicle by which the pilgrim may obtain knowledge as he yet climbs to heaven -- which is perhaps a fair distillation of what Aquinas was all about. He was canonized in 1323 and declared a "doctor of the church" in 1567 -- no mean feat for a man who, by nuance and rigorous logical discipline, managed to use the words of heathens to infuse the chaos of early Roman Catholic theology with a structure which would endure for centuries.

Michelangelo

If no one with genius other than Leonardo da Vinci had been available to groom the collective aesthetic of the Italian capitals of the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the High Renaissance might have been a much colder and darker period. As it was, Michelangelo Buonarotti would not sit still for Leonardo's detached skepticism; Michelangelo's unabashed creative gestures were passionate invocations of the divinity of human muscle and flesh, to be rehearsed openly in the beauty of divine daylight.

As creator, Michelangelo aspired to be a star, to achieve nobility through his craft -- a most improbable outcome for a short, squat, unwashed, doodling stonecutter with a broken nose, in his time or perhaps in any other -- but he certainly achieved stardom at some level, raising the social station of the grand artiste in the process.

His abusive father had been the mayor of Caprese, the Tuscan town where Michelangelo was born on this day in 1475, and he claimed noble lineage, which to him was inconsistent with Michelangelo's desire for an artistic career. Perhaps as a result, Michelangelo's mercurial persona would be defined by the inner struggle between his supreme exterior self-confidence in his abilities and his barely submerged fear of not being appreciated; plagued by both pride and guilt in their most painful extremes, he labored to prove to his father that his pursuits were genuinely noble, while dutifully sending his father and brothers money for their care and feeding.

At 13, Michelangelo became an apprentice to the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. After 3 years with Ghirlandaio, however, Michelangelo felt he had learned all he could there and transferred to Bertoldo di Giovanni's school in the Medici gardens, focusing on his true love, sculpting, and studying the Medici collection of antiquities. Staying at the home of Lorenzo de Medici, he would often dine shoulder to shoulder with the despot, getting first-hand lessons in being larger than life. Michelangelo was 17 when Lorenzo died, and his services were no longer required as the political situation in Florence began to shift, so he went briefly to Bologna, where he carved a few small figures for the tomb of St. Dominic, before arriving in Rome at age 20.

In Rome he came into his own. His super-large full-length nude figure of a brash and drunken Bacchus (1496-7) was an homage to the pagan antiquities he studied at the Medici palace. Its sensuality was striking and new for its time, but it was the sheer artistry of the piece which helped to secure for him a commission by a French cardinal for a massive piece to be, by contract, "the most beautiful work in marble" in Rome, a work which was to become the Pieta (1498-1500): a quiet yet majestic tableau of the timeless grief of the young and beautiful mother Mary holding the lifeless body of Christ in her gigantic lap. When it was unveiled, the crowd at St. Peter's speculated that it must have been the work of a mature and seasoned sculptor, inspiring Michelangelo to steal into the cathedral at night to carve his signature into the finished piece so that there would be no mistakes in attribution.

In 1501 he accepted a commission in Florence for a statue of David for a buttress on the Duomo. The finished work (1501-4) was a 14-foot tall rustically muscular nude, a defiant warrior at rest whose confidence seemed to be a much more fitting symbol for the Florentine Republic; the Republic in fact hijacked the piece from the church and placed it in front of the main entrance to the Palazzo Vecchio, where it became not only a symbol for Florentine democracy, but for the confluence of classical harmonies and heightened sense of drama which would define the High Renaissance. He also turned out a graceful Madonna and Child (known as the Bruges Madonna), a brightly-colored round painting of the Holy Family (the Doni Tondo), a round relief (the Taddei Tondo) and began work on a battle mural for the council chamber inside the Palazzo Vecchio which was to face a likewise unfinished battle mural by da Vinci, before his time in Florence was cut short by a summons from Pope Julius II in 1505 to work on a design for Julius' future tomb.

The tale of Julius' tomb is a long and frustrating one: Michelangelo designed a grandiose free-standing structure ornamented with over 40 life-sized figures; Julius interrupted the commission in 1506 to divert funds to the building of St. Peter's; Michelangelo left in a huff, but returned to the project on and off for 40 years with the end result that Julius' tomb was redesigned on a more modest scale in accordance with the wishes of Julius' cheap heirs, and the only figure Michelangelo actually contributed was the imposing, horned Moses (c. 1515).



In the midst of Michelangelo's disgust over the project, Julius goaded the reluctant sculptor into undertaking the painting of a fresco cycle on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican, a project which put Michelangelo on scaffolding for the next 5 years. He worked quickly, even heroically, to complete cycle -- peopled with muscular studies of the Old Testament prophets, classical sibyls, scenes from Genesis (including the potently mythic Creation of Adam, with the white-bearded Lord extending His finger and bestowing upon the first human a potential particle of His divinity) -- in a relatively short period of time given its impossible scope. At their freest, his compositions were dizzying, painful tangles of arms and legs, bathed in fresh, sunlit coloration, and his characterizations are vibrant and emotionally alert; and his loving attention to the beauty of the human form -- Michelangelo's conception of the holiness of Man -- became the touchstone for a generation of Mannerist painters. He was instantly hailed as the supreme master of the age.

Back in Florence after Julius' death, Michelangelo was now feeling his power as a boundless visionary, and did not hesitate to plunge his energies into architectural projects at San Lorenzo, attempting to create a union of architecture and sculpture in designs for the Medici Chapel and the Biblioteca Laurenziana before political instabilities drew him personally into the conflict between the Republicans and the Mediceans. He took the side of the Republicans and assisted in fortifying the city. When it fell to the Mediceans in 1530, the order was put out for his assassination, but the canon of San Lorenzo hid Michelangelo until a pardon could be obtained for him so that he could complete his work on the Medici Chapel.

Feeling chastened by Florence, and perhaps a little out of sorts over his ill-fated "pursuit" (possibly platonic, but ardent nonetheless) of a young Italian nobleman through letters and poems, Michelangelo moved to Rome and never returned. There Paul III commissioned Michelangelo to paint The Last Judgment on the end wall of the Sistine Chapel (1536-41), another triumph, but very different from his ceiling frescoes; given the atmosphere of war and treachery which blazed through Italy at the time, it is not surprising that Michelangelo's mood would be darker, even wrathful.

For the last 20 years of his life, Michelangelo served as the architect of St. Peter's, designing the finishing touches of the project which had begun under Bramante in 1506 (including its distinctive dome) and ultimately defining the massive, explosive style which dominates that corner of Rome to this day. He was working on another, rougher Pieta when he died of pneumonia on February 18, 1564, the undisputed star of Renaissance sculpture, painting and architecture.

Boccherini

Composer and cellist Luigi Boccherini was born on this day in 1743 in Lucca, Italy.

The son of a professional double bass player, the genial, sentimental Boccherini studied in Rome as a youth and returned to his native Lucca as a virtuoso cellist. He made his first major impression as a teen composer traveling around Europe with his father and the violinist Filippo Manfredi, playing well-received concerts of Boccherini's two-part sonatas and reaching Paris in 1768. There the ambassador from Spain invited Boccherini to become a chamber composer in the court of the Infante Luis, the brother of Charles III, in Madrid.

Despite the ambassador's promises, Boccherini's 1770 reception in Madrid was not as grand as the receptions he had been receiving around Europe; nonetheless, Boccherini admired the fact that several members of the royal court were accomplished string musicians and he settled gratefully under Luis' patronage, adopting Madrid as his home -- a city on the far fringes of the European music scene. As the big fish in a small pond, Boccherini wrote a number of lyrical string quintets set in a variety of moods, including the quintet in E, op. 11, which contains his famous "Minuet" -- the kind of playful yet weightily constructed Late Baroque chamber music which would garner him the teasing moniker of "Mrs. Haydn." Also famous is his "Night Music of Madrid," the string quintet in C, op. 30, which humorously approximates the sounds of a summer's evening walk through the streets of Madrid, including a riotously unstable performance by a group of blind buskers and the march of a military band.

Quintets were, to say the least, an unusual medium (quartets were the norm), but for Boccherini they were probably dictated by the fact that Luis also had a noted string quartet, the Font family, in his retinue, and the quintet form gave Boccherini the opportunity to display his own virtuosity without offending the least facile Font by leaving him out of the group.

The Infante and his wife died in 1785, but by that time he had caught the ear of the cello-playing Frederick William II of Prussia, who invited Boccherini to become his court composer. (It is believed that Boccherini fulfilled that role from over 1,500 miles away in Madrid rather than joining the court in Berlin, which if true makes him a striking pre-Internet example of long distance employment.) Frederick William died in 1797, however, leaving Boccherini in the wilderness without a patron. He stayed in his Madrid outpost, living on a meager pension from the estate of the Infante and earning a few extra pesetas from his compositions, including a few written at the request of the French ambassador in Spain, Lucien Bonaparte.

In all, Boccherini produced 137 string quintets, 91 string quartets, over 50 string trios (over 350 chamber works in all), 30 symphonies, a dozen cello concertos and an opera, although many of his works were lost or destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. He survived the death of his wife and daughters and died on May 28, 1805 in Madrid, Spain at the age of 62, in poverty and relative obscurity.

Antonello da Messina

The painter Antonella da Messina died on this day in 1479 in his hometown of Messina, Italy at about the age of 49.

Despite having spent only a year and a half in Venice (1475/6), Antonello da Messina is considered to be the most influential painter in Venice of the 15th century, urging Giovanni Bellini toward his great mature works. Vasari said he was the first Italian to paint in oils, a claim which has been disproven, but nonetheless he was a pioneer of the medium.

The son of a Sicilian stonecutter, it is supposed that he received his early training from a minor Flemish-influenced painter in Naples (where he probably first saw the work of Jan Van Eyck), and that in his 20s he worked alongside Petrus Christus, Van Eyck's pupil, in Milan. His affinity with the Flemish style made his work startlingly different from the work of contemporary Italian painters, with its quiet absorption of living details bathed in bright daylight and shadows. His St. Jerome in His Study (see below, 1450-55; National Gallery, London) is an inquiry into the saint's interior life through an exploration of the ordinary artifacts of his scholarly chambers, with the lion lurking in the shadows on the majolica floor representing the palpable reminder of St. Jerome's desert hermitage.

Interior life is central to his magnificent portraits, including his masterpiece Virgin Annunciate (above, c. 1465; Museo Nazionale, Palermo). Shown in three-quarter view in the Flemish manner which Antonello helped to popularize in Italy, the Sicilian-featured Virgin pauses gravely in the shadow of her blue veil, marking the text of Isaiah with the weight of one hand while the other is raised gently, marking her acceptance of her fate as much as her surprise in receiving the message. As with the portraits of Van Eyck, the background is dark, emphasizing the luminescence of the veil and her knowing face. Here Antonello manages to combine the best of both Flemish and Italian traditions -- the eye for household detail and the weight and grandeur of his subject -- in a work which transcended both, pointing (as the ever-perceptive Frederick Hartt observes) to the next century and the innovations of Caravaggio.

A glowing Portrait of a Man (c. 1465; National Gallery, London), placed in the same dark background, is sometimes thought to be a self-portrait. His Crucifixion (National Gallery, London) and St. Sebastian (Gemaldegalerie, Dresden) date from his Venetian visit, after which he returned to his workshop in the relative obscurity of Messina.

Ugly Tom

"Giotto born again, starting where death had cut short his advance, instantly making his own all that had been gained during his absence, and profiting by the new conditions, the new demands -- imagine such an avatar, and you will understand Masaccio." -- B. Berenson.

Masaccio, a giant in the history of Western art, was born Maso di ser Giovanni on this day in 1401 at Castel San Giovanni di Altura.

Although he was not known to have shown particular artistic talent as a youth and was not associated with any great teacher of painting, Masaccio (loosely translated as "Ugly Tom") managed to enter the Florentine guild of painters, the Arte dei Medici e Speziali, at the age of 20, having demonstrated his full competence as a painter. Rather than look to other painters as mentors, however, Masaccio studied the works of the sculptor Donatello and the architect Filippo Brunelleschi, two artists who, as successors to Giotto, had fully embraced classical antecedents and instilled them with the life and spirit of their age.

In his first known work, the San Giovenale Triptych (1422), Masaccio followed the example of his mentors by shunning the decorous and other-worldly International Gothic style which still pervaded Florentine painting of that era: his saints exist in real daylight, have human weight, they are visibly uncomfortable and display grim faces; the Christ child is a chubby, awkward baby sticking two fingers in his mouth.

Most importantly, however, like Giotto, Masaccio wanted to demonstrate dramatically that intellectual distinction and learning were essential aspects of the great painter -- pictorial symbols abound in the Triptych, such as the grapes of the Eucharist in the child's hand and the stiffness of the child foretelling the scene of the Pieta.


In 1425, Masaccio began his collaboration with Masolino (loosely translated as "Fat Tom") on the frescoes of the Brancacci Chapel at the Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, and painted the fresco which is acknowledged by many as his masterpiece, the Tribute Money. Depicting the story of a confrontation between St. Peter and a Roman tax-gatherer (as told in Matthew 17:24-27), upon which local church leaders sermonized in favor of the payment of taxes to earthly rulers to support defense, Masaccio treats the event almost as contemporary journalism, showing Christ and his disciples in the plausible light and shadows of an Arno Valley landscape.

His Crucifixion (1426) showed a sophisticated understanding of the use of perspective, and is specifically designed to be seen from a low point of view, as was his final known work, Trinity (1427-8; fresco at Santa Maria Novella in Florence). In Trinity, we see the unity of all that was great in Masaccio's work: the sculptural reality of the figures, portrayed in an elaborate architectural setting with a keen sense of the tricks of perspective in realization of the theories of Brunelleschi; and the dramatic, literary character of the scenario, imbued with mysterious yet evocative visual references to past and present.

He died an untimely death at the age of 26, cause unknown, leaving behind an astounding body of work for a man his age which can only be explained by a combination of uncommon drive and vision.

Boccaccio

Giovanni Boccaccio, who died on this day in 1375 in Certaldo, Italy, was born to an unknown Parisian woman, the illegitmate son of a Florentine merchant who had gone to France on business. When Giovanni was 3, his father took him away from his mother to Florence, where the father soon married a Florentine who bore him another son, on whom Giovanni's stepmother doted.

From that point on, the most productive core of Giovanni Boccaccio's life and work can be explained as a series of episodes about searching for or losing feminine affection. His father sent the neglected teen to school in Naples, the playland of Italia (where it was said that no young woman who arrived as a virgin would leave as one). There Boccaccio studied business for 6 years, followed by a 6-year course in canon law.

Although wasting these 12 years on something other than developing his skills as a poet would be his lifelong regret, Boccaccio settled well into the Neapolitan social scene, eventually becoming the lover of Maria D'Aquino, the illegitimate daughter of King Robert. Maria would become his Beatrice and his Laura, styled in his writings as his "Fiammetta" ("flame") -- although it should be said that while he admired the work of Dante and Petrarch and their chaste devotion to their muses, unlike his courtly heroes Boccaccio had actually embraced his muse in the flesh, and thus his passions could not help but be expressed more earthily.

With Maria as his inspiration, Boccaccio wrote a string of somewhat mediocre romances drawing upon earlier sources: Filocolo (1336-8, on the ancient love story of Floire and Blanchefleur), Filostrato (1339, with the Trojan War as his setting) and Teseida (1339-41, the first Tuscan epic poem). While spotty, they were popular, becoming the inspiration for several of Chaucer's works.

Maria soon grew tired of Boccaccio and dumped him, and shortly thereafter he was recalled to comparatively austere Florence by his overstressed, financially strapped father. He wrote 2 stilted moral allegories before finding his footing with Fiammetta (1343), in which he reversed the roles of himself and Maria D'Aquino, relating the story of the agony of a woman abandoned by her lover.

To support himself, Boccaccio accepted several diplomatic posts on behalf of the Florentine government while writing his masterpiece, the Decameron (c. 1348-53), about 10 fashionable young people (the late Medieval versions of OC kids, no doubt) who flee Florence during the Black Plague to a country villa and tell each other tales to pass the hours -- 100 rich, colorful, sometimes bawdy stories about clever women and clumsy men, the pious and the depraved, the king and the beggar -- through which Boccaccio showed his virtuosity in shading different voices, passions and moods.

Although Boccaccio was somewhat dismissive of the work (a first edition was not printed until near the end of his life), later generations mined it deeply as it became a compelling source of theme and story for Chaucer (again), Shakespeare and Dryden, among others. Impoverished at 37, Boccaccio met the great Petrarch, who invited him to join his household for a time as a kind of literary junior partner. The influence of Petrarch and his own receding faculties as a womanizer turned him away from Italian vernacular (except for one last vicious swipe at the fickle character of women in Corbaccio, 1354-55) toward writing scholarly works in Latin. For a time he supported in his household a rather disagreeable Greek scholar who made, at Boccaccio's request, the first translation of Homer into Latin.

From about 1360, Boccaccio entered the clergy and assumed a most austere lifestyle; only Petrarch convinced him not to burn his writings and his library. His final literary gesture was his delivery of a series of public lectures in Florence about Dante's Divine Comedy.

Getting Some Perspective

Painter Paolo Uccello died on December 10, 1475 in Florence, Italy at the age of 78.

An early Italian Renaissance master, Uccello was an obsessive student of the science of perspective as proposed by Leonbattista Alberti. Legend has it that Uccello once refused to follow his wife to bed, acknowledging "What a sweet mistress is this perspective."

Nonetheless, Uccello displayed an astonishingly original approach, ultimately taking his studies almost to the point of comedy: in his most famous works, the panels comprising The Battle of San Romano (c. 1445), weapons and pieces of armor seem to have fallen on the ground along grid-like Albertian orthogonals which illustrate the underlying perspective of the picture, and one soldier has even managed to die along one of these orthogonals. In his dramatic fresco Deluge (1445-47) in the Green Cloister at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, lightning bolts and ark hulls converge on the vanishing point and a ladder floats in perfect parallel to the ark, once again revealing the Albertian grid.

Uccello's quirky use of perspective may have resulted in two of his patrons complaining of the "unconventionality" of his work, and he seems to have received few commissions. It is thought that he was asked to repaint an equestrian portrait of Sir John Hawkwood in the Duomo because his deadpan use of perspective logic resulted in too much of the horse's underbelly being shown.

Despite his overarching interest in perspective, Uccello had a light touch when painting human figures, as shown, for example, in the charming, delicate St. George and the Dragon (c. 1456).

St. Francis of Assisi

Today is the 679th anniversary of the passing of Francis of Assisi.

He was a dropout; a nudist; a collector of strays -- stray animals and stray humans; in short, Francis of Assisi was a hippie. Not at all the sort of character who gets much air-time on network TV in the 21st century. The fact that Pope Innocent III proved to be a generous broadcaster (positioned, as he was, as a primary arbiter of air-time in 13th century Europe) is nothing short of miraculous -- a testament to Francis' charisma and the allure of his gentle mien during an era of unforgiving brutality.

The son of a successful wool dealer, young Francis was addicted to courtly romances about knights and comely maidens, but after fighting as a mercenary in a battle against Perugia when he was 20, his interest in the trappings of knighthood subsided as he became a prisoner of war for a year. After his release, he experienced several epiphanies which, to his father's irritation, led him to give away all of his money and belongings to the help repair God's house (occasionally stealing from his father for such charitable purposes), singing songs of praise and pausing on his road-hikes to kiss lepers on their mouths.

Soon his father decided Francis needed to be locked away as a madman and beaten, but his mother freed him and Francis took up sanctuary in the chapel of St. Damian, to which Francis had provided some of his charity. Incensed, Francis' father marched into ecclesiastical court demanding what had been stolen from him and seeking a declaration of Francis' disinheritance. Francis was all too happy to oblige his father with respect to the latter purpose, taking the opportunity in court to strip naked and hand his father his clothes to emphasize the point. He would have walked out that way had not the astonished (if not somewhat bemused) bishop loaned Francis his own cloak. As Dante would later observe, it was at that moment that Francis joyfully took Lady Poverty as his wife.

Skipping down Tuscan roads, he gained a following: first, a dropout lawyer; next, a peasant; then, a lapsed knight -- one after another, Francis accepted them all, without novitiate. Together they wandered from town to town, begging for staples (no cash accepted) and irritating the sober merchants of Italy with their gleeful antics in the service of Christ. Preaching to the birds (giving rise to his reputation as a tamer of wild beasts), attracting a congregation by playing on a see-saw, dancing and shouting praise with all the verve and intensity of James Brown at the Apollo, Francis was an extraordinarily carefree clown who drew lost souls tightly to him.

When news of his stunts reached Innocent III, the Pope sought a meeting with Francis. Instead of smothering Francis' little movement, however, the Pope saw beyond the gags, convincing himself of Francis' absolute faith and the vigor with which he inspired the illiterate peasantry with his self-imposed poverty and suffering and with Christ's message of love and forgiveness -- things Innocent believed the spiritually sleepy Catholic church then needed badly, despite the unorthodoxy of Francis' methods.

Innocent III recognized the Franciscans as a monastic order in 1210 and named Francis as a deacon, the only religious office Francis would ever hold. Despite Francis' antipathy for rank and organization (leading some to see him as a precursor to 19th and 20th century anarchists), his order grew steadily, and in 1212 he established a "sister" order with the help of his friend St. Clare, the "Poor Clares."

Despite the joy he felt in humility and asceticism, he was quite human. He could be a strict disciplinarian, once ordering a shy monk to preach in the middle of Assisi in his underwear as a way of penetrating the monk's obsession with his own problems -- only to feel guilty about the punishment he assigned to the monk and to join him and preach alongside him in support, stark naked. He also pined, at times, for female companionship, but dealt with it in his own way -- once by going out into the snow and building a poignant snow-wife and snow-child as a way of imagining what he had left behind by the choices he made in his life.

Zeal was his salve, however, and in 1212 he went on a mission to Syria, followed by a mission to Spain in 1214. In 1215, he attended the 4th Lateran Council, where he met St. Dominic. Francis had no interest in administering what had become a flock of 5,000 Franciscan brothers, making no provision for them when they converged on Assisi for a chapter meeting in 1219; the Church stepped in to provide some organization, with buildings and a steady income, despite the damage it did to Francis' original mission of living simply and honoring God.

Rather than face the dissolution of his tribal beginnings, Francis joined the Crusades as a missionary in Egypt and Palestine. Without knowing the language, the gaunt, bleary-eyed Francis sung his sermons to uncomprehending but unavoidably sympathetic infidels. He even gained an audience with Sultan Malik al-Kamil, whom he tried unsuccessfully to convert; the Sultan sent him back home, asking Francis to pray for him "that God may deign to reveal to me that faith which is most pleasing to him." The trip took its toll on Francis' health, leading him to settle down to certain philosophical matters, such as dictating (and ultimately negotiating with the Church) the rules by which he hoped the Franciscans would live, emphasizing poverty, chastity and obedience to Christ.

In 1224, his hands began to bleed while he prayed in the Apennines, by which it is said he began to assume the likeness and sufferings of Christ himself. Near the end, he dictated the stanzas which became the Canticle of the Sun, a poetic account of his view of nature as a signification of God; he died shortly after dictating a stanza in praise of death itself. Shortly after his death, his earliest followers were run out of the Franciscan order; there was no room for them in the reformed order which had resulted from the Church's intervention. Yet Francis was canonized only 2 years after his death, and it is hard to think of more than a half dozen figures in the history of the Church who are as beloved as the hippie from Assisi.