Quote:
Originally Posted by Roger Slater
Why can't a person be interested in more than one thing?
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Thank you, Roger. I’ve been struck in this conversation by how defensive people have seemed, as though I or Bill was saying: Ok, we’re going to tie you to a chair now to talk about beauty and make you write a poem at the same time. People have been free to ignore the subject, but have chosen not to. And I’d be blind not to notice that many great artists and writers would have rather filed their taxes than discuss the nature of beauty.
The Picasso example is a case in point. I’m sure you’re right, Michael, that Picasso would have talked the practical hands-on realities of making those sculptures (which I saw in a Newshour documentary just the other day). The same no doubt is true of Michelangelo, no slouch of a sculptor himself. Did you know, however, that his work was informed from start to finish by the Neoplatonic ideas on beauty that were
de rigueur at the Academy (there’s that word again) just outside Florence, run by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, who personally translated Plotinus and the so-called
Hermetica of Hermes Trismegistus? True fact. Those works and discussions they evoked have much to do with the approach to form, the theory of perspective, notion of beauty, that Michelangelo and others were on about. And yet, Michelangelo in his workshop probably would rather have talked about more practical things, his tools, the stone, some little section he couldn't get quite right, the weather, what he was having for lunch.
Of course he didn’t think consciously about Hermes Trismegistus while he was painting or sculpting. But his education in the Neoplatonic philosophy of beauty that catalyzed the Florentine Renaissance was behind everything he did. If you've read his sonnets you’ll have seen references to it.
This is why, Ed, I disagree that the proof of the worthiness of what I’ve stated here is in any poems I write or do not write. The proof is already out there, in the art I mention above, in centuries of Islamic art, in the poetry of Dante or Rumi—all of which was saturated with such thought. Rather, the burden would be on you to show how art in the present, which generally lacks any ideological bearings beyond art as self-expression and a vague sense of art for art’s sake, approaches the scope and transformative power and penetrating depths and heights of the Florentine Renaissance or the Caliphate of Cordoba or for that matter the English or German Romantics. All of which were deeply informed by a consciously articulated, metaphysically-rooted idea of beauty.