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#Book of words; a pageant of the Italian renaissance
uwmspeccoll · 2 years
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Fashion Friday: The Mannerism of Michelangelo
The Renaissance period is often synonymous with the greats of Michelangelo, Da Vinci, and young Raphael. These master painters poised "imitation" as preeminent beauty, art as poetry—ut pictura poesis—with Michelangelo arguably harnessing the peculiarities of the human spirit most adeptly in his abstract sprawl of figures, elongating their unseen beauty.
A Renaissance essay on Michelangelo by the nineteenth century art critic Walter Horatio Pater investigates the imagination of the master, calling attention to the artist's wayward loves-at-first-sight and their contradictions with the sculptor's mantra of la dove io t'amai prima, or, where I loved you before.  Pater argues that it is precisely this paradox that comprises harmony: the delight between the sweet and the strange.  
Pater repudiated his own time of the Victorian era, acclaiming the decadence of the Renaissance period as the seizing of life, or more aptly in his own words on living:
           ...to grasp at any exquisite passion... or any stirring of the senses, strange dyes, strange colours, and curious odours, or the work of the artist's hands, or the face one's friend.
It is in his words that we can embrace the unnatural grace of the late Renaissance, the period adorned with the Mannerist style of bold outlines, objects at-play with nature, and form with fantastical animal-humans. This unique style of the Renaissance is attributed to Michelangelo's successors who desperately tried to imitate his alien elegance.
Hidden in the figures of Michelangelo are these languid features, satyrs in repose, where solemnity and "faces charged with dreams" dictate, as described by Pater. Darting poetic thoughts give us a glimpse of the bittersweet temperament of Michelangelo's genius. He wrote of his torments in the pagan frivolities of endless quarrelling and his anger at the Gods for loving him so that he reached an age of eighty-eight years.
In all of his years, Michelangelo claimed his figures to be common, austere persons, yet his hand rendered an inherent surprise and energy that future imitators would exploit in quirky forest gods and lovely monsters.
Ergo, my first fashion plate is titled "DRAGON EWER Dress," odd, but not as eccentric as the last two designs; perhaps you can trace the growth of the outlandish creature in each iteration.
Here is a listing of sources from the UWM Special Collections which I have augmented with digital color and outline to emphasize particular details of my inspiration:
1) A watercolor drawing by (or after) Wenzel Jamnitzer, circa 1575 in the Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, published by Rizzoli International in 1976.
2-4) My interpretation and contemporary design of the DRAGON EWER Dress, SNAIL CUP Dress and DAVID TANKARD Dress based on Renaissance period vessels between 1540 to 1590 as published in the Virtuoso Goldsmiths and the Triumph of Mannerism, published by Rizzoli International, in 1976.
5, 6) French Renaissance plates of frieze borders in Rouen prayer books from 1508; and painted enamel work of Limoges under Italian faience between 1520 and 1540 as published in the Das polychrome Ornament: Hundert Tafeln, by P. Neff in 1880.
7) Walter Pater included an image of Michelangelo's The Holy Family, or, Doni Madonna, at the Uffizi in Florence, Italy in his aethesticism manifesto, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, published by the Limited Editions Club, Stamperia Valdonega in 1976.
8) Costume of the early sixteenth century often in velvets (red is common) and embellished with fewels, gold, lace, fur and feathers as illustrated by Belle Northrup in A Short Description of Historic Fashion published by the Teachers College at  in 1925.
9) An 1592 engraving by Joseph Boillot titled Et Levrs Antipatie (possible translation Antipathy Lips) as published The Renaissance in France: Illustrated Books from the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts, by the Houghton Library, Harvard University in 1995.
10) A drawing or possible woodcut of indentured lions as published in Thomas Wood Stevens' Book of Words: A Pageant of the Italian Renaissance, published by the Alderbrink Press at the Art Institute Chicago in 1909 for the Antiquarian Society.
View my other posts on historical fashion research in Special Collections.
View more Fashion posts.
—Christine Westrich, MFA Graduate Student in Intermedia Arts
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berniesrevolution · 5 years
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“Nicaragua has been conquered like Athens. Nicaragua has been annexed like Jerusalem,” cried the old man, with amazing fire. “The Yankee and the German and the brute powers of modernity have trampled it with the hoofs of oxen. But Nicaragua is not dead. Nicaragua is an idea.” 
—G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill
When G.K. Chesteron wrote his novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill in 1904, it was still just about possible to believe that nationalism was romantic. Nationalism was, in those pre-World War days, primarily characterized as the fight of democratic revolutionaries against tyranny, of subjugate nations against imperialism: the United States, France, Ireland, Greece. It was the triumph of localism and authenticity against the pitiless forces of industry and the stale, performative rituals of cultural elites. The novel’s opening imagines a 20th-century future when the global order has become dull and homogenized. Figurehead-leaders are selected by sortition, and civil life is administered by faceless bureaucrats. This world isn’t quite a dystopia, but it is a place of profound spiritual torpor. After decades of this predictable political routine, a jokester named Auberon is chosen by lottery to be the ceremonial monarch of England. Rather than following the expected procedures, Auberon instead proceeds to amuse himself by forcing the various boroughs of London to adopt faux-medieval heraldry, and adhere to parodically elaborate courtly forms. But this pageant quickly takes on a life of its own: The next generation of Londoners sincerely believes in the invented histories of their neighborhoods, and when a corporation attempts to demolish a block of shops in Notting Hill, the locals take up arms and go to war. This bloodshed is presented by Chesterton not as a tragedy, but as a joyous reawakening. The inhabitants of London—especially those whose lives were formerly bound up in the nation’s business ventures and impersonal administrative structures—rediscover their humanity by acknowledging their natural love for the place they were born, and their willingness to die for its preservation.
The Napoleon of Notting Hall is, in its way, hard to place on the modern political spectrum. On the one hand, it feels like a novel for the era of Standing Rock: It tells the story of a small neighborhood that bands together against a cabal of businessmen to defend a small piece of the world they happen to hold in reverence. In the words of the leader of the rebellion: “That which is large enough for the rich to covet is large enough for the poor to defend.” It’s a book about the triumph of oddballs, hobbyists, and idealists over the well-monied forces of avarice and indifference. It celebrates the idea that there is poetry in ordinary life, and that ordinary people have a deep, instinctive hunger for poetry. On the other hand, The Napoleon of Notting Hill—which is often read as an allegory of nationalism—also feels like a novel for the era of Breitbart, which is constantly inveighing against the evils of multiculturalism, globalization, and cosmopolitanism, and, in the same breath, suggesting that loyalty to one’s country of birth is paramount, rendering all other moral obligations moot. War is a central feature of The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and is treated as an ordinary and even healthy human activity, without any significant long-term repercussions. Notably, all the characters in the book are men. We see them kill each other in an honorable spirit of good fun, but what their grieving wives and children think of the whole stupid business, we never discover. There are no wartime atrocities: The conflict has no civilians per se, and so we don’t see any terrified civilians killed. Keeping things vague, of course, is the only way you can possibly make a war narrative jolly, as if it were a sports match or a paintball fight. This kind of merry, Renaissance Faire LARPing might indeed be preferable to a colorless bureaucratic existence; but who wouldn’t choose bureaucracy, however frustrating and inadequate, over the killing fields of Flanders?
The dichotomy set up by The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and modern proponents of nationalism, suggests that there’s a binary choice between a dreary, monotonous global monoculture and the geographically-determined separation of human populations into personified groups. G.K. Chesterton envisions loyalty to place as something intensely local. The smaller the country, the purer the patriotism, so that loyalty to your street and your neighborhood is the purest loyalty of all. We can take issue with this assertion, of course: In the same way that plenty of people aren’t blessed with loving families, many people aren’t lucky enough to be born into a community that welcomes and nurtures them. An insistence on the primacy of the natal hearth, for such people, is a cruel form of emotional bondage. But even if we accept that some people, at least, are profoundly attached to the place they live, the extrapolation of the intimate emotions a person has about the scene of their childhood, or the place they’ve made their home, onto a political unit as large as a nation is a peculiar intellectual leap.
There’s a notion that love for one’s country is an old human emotion, but if we understand “country” as “nation,” it can’t possibly be an old human emotion, because nations are a very new thing in human history. Scholars have struggled to even come up with a coherent description of what a “nation” actually is. Is it defined by ethnicity and language? Most nations aren’t ethnically, culturally, or linguistically unitary (or were only made so by conscious social engineering), and that includes the small nation-states of Europe, as well as big imperial states like the U.S., Canada, and Russia. France, for example, often thought by outsiders as a prime example of a culturally cohesive nation with deep historical roots, began its political existence a multiethnic, multilinguistic territory. The post-revolutionary state engaged in systematic suppression of minority languages like Occitan, Catalan, Basque, and Breton in order to force the populace to view themselves as members of a unified republic. Separatist movements in Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, and the northern territories of Italy (whose flaghead separatist party, the Northern League, has now emerged as a major anti-EU force in Italian politics) show the fragile identity of many of these European nations, which U.S. Americans tend to mistakenly perceive as ancient, undiluted cultural archetypes.
Another definition of nationhood tends to disregard the supposed historic or hereditary legacies of nation-states, and instead focus on nations as groups of people defined by their common assent to a set of laws or principles. (This is what is often derisively referred to by modern-day fascists as the “proposition nation.”) This definition, however, is somewhat difficult to pin down. No citizen of a state is actually ever given a meaningful opportunity to assent or dissent from the social contract of the geographic area into which they are born. Many people spend their whole lives in a state of passionate opposition to the laws of the state that is theoretically their legal protector. Many other people who would willingly assent to the laws of a particular country are arbitrarily denied the opportunity to become citizens, because they happen to have been born in the wrong geographic location.
In the end, most theorists have simply had to throw up their hands and admit that a nation (as coined by Benedict Anderson) is simply an “imagined community.” A nation exists if people believe that they are members of a nation. In other words, a nation is a kind of collective delusion, which will vanish into thin air the minute enough people decide that they’re sick of playing pretend.
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