Michelangelo and Western 'Ways of Seeing'
Florence can claim to have been the beating heart of the renaissance, home to names familiar even to those who know little about the period. Michelangelo, Leonardo de Vinci, Dante, and Machiavelli, writers and scholars, artists and sculptors, patronised by the all-powerful ruling Medici family, looking down on the rest of Florence from their hill-side Pitti palace, across the River Arno.
If Florence was the heart of the renaissance, then perhaps the heart of the heart is the Tribune in the Accademia, where Michelangelo’s David stands in elegant contrapposto, towering over the assembled tourist hoards. With the sling that did for Goliath slung casually over his shoulder, David eschews contact with the crowd, gazing over their heads into the middle distance.
David’s victory over Goliath is a universally recognised symbol of successful resistance to hegemonic power, and Michelangelo’s masterpiece was designed to thumb Medici Florence’s nose at the established power of city-states like Rome and the Venetian Republic. But David has come to represent something more than the rise of Florentine power and wealth. The artist and writer Georgio Vasari said that once one had seen David, there was little need to see any other sculpture. For many, David is the greatest work of art ever produced, the pinnacle of human cultural achievement. In the late-eighteenth century, the critic and writer Johann Winckelmann, linked cultural achievement to superior socio-political civilisation. In Winckelmann’s view, great art was synonymous with a politically superior society. There was more to a sculpture than mere aesthetics. The flowing lines of Greek artistic achievement was the symmetry of the rational mind and beautiful body, a melding of moral, intellectual, and aesthetic principles. By bringing such ideas to modern perfection, Michelangelo’s David signals the European inheritance of the Greek ‘cradle of civilisation’.
The concept of a direct cultural line between Classical Athens and modern Europe has long been recognised as a fantasy of Western superiority, but it has remained convenient to configure ancient Greece as the apparent origin of Western culture. The eighteenth-century Orientalist scholar William Jones, noted that the ‘superiority of European talents’ was ‘at least as old as Alexander’. Jones thus attributes a European identity to Alexander the Great, which the Macedonian conqueror would not have recognised.
Winckelmann and his European contemporaries established a particular ‘way of seeing’ all artistic creations. The art of other cultures, and therefore those civilisations in their entirety, were judged not in context, but against the ‘gold standard’ of Greek (and thus Western) art and civilisation, and were found wanting. Spectacular and intricate Hindu carvings and architecture in India for example, were indicative of some kind of civilisation, but they weren’t Greek. William Jones described ‘Europe as a sovereign princess, and Asia as her handmaid’.
Of course, David was from the beginning, an act of cultural appropriation in other ways too. Risking the accusation of an unhealthy interest, I peer up at David’s genitalia, noticing that Michelangelo neglected to provide him with a circumcision. A middle-eastern Jewish cultural icon was thus appropriated for European Christian purposes.
David is therefore more than simply an aesthetically pleasing art-work. He conferred on Renaissance Florentines, a ‘way of seeing’ themselves in comparison to other Italian city-states and provided ‘superior’ Christian Europe with its own self-image, one which to some degree justified ‘civilising’ policies of imperialism enforced on ‘inferior’ cultures such as India. To some degree, David has become Goliath, no longer representing resistance to over-weening power, but the symbol of the hegemonic authority of the West.
The visitors staring up at David today have a new ‘way of seeing’. David becomes simply something else to be photographed. A sea of mobile-phones are raised towards the heavens in an act of supplication. Rather than an act of adoration for a great cultural achievement, David is a sacrifice offered up to the Great God of Modernity in a ritual which captures not just the image but also the soul of the sculpture, and perhaps the soul of humanity. Many do not ‘see’ David at all, lingering only for the time it takes to click through a telephonic menu. They later flick through a gallery of similar images to show their friends what they ‘saw’. The cultural icon is barely the image, and far less the object itself, but the technology which mediates what we ‘see’.
With these slightly depressing thoughts in mind, we walk the short distance to the Ponte Vecchio, crossing the Arno to find a glass of wine and bite to eat. Sitting at the counter of this small trattoria, we discuss with the owner the merits of various regional wines, and on her advice plump for a Montalcino and a selection of crostini. My inquiry as to the relative merits of the Chianti Classico is met with slight pity and a polite, ‘I don’t really think so’.
Where young people in Britain would be imbibing pints of lager in neon sports-palaces of fast food and football, here the youth are arrayed around us sipping good reds and, I imagine in my head anyway, discussing Dante and Machiavelli’s political theory. Of course, this is just my own idealised ‘way of seeing’ Italy. They love their football here, and they must go somewhere to watch Fiorentina. Yet, the Italian pride in their food and wine, and their passion for discussing it, do seem different to back in Blighty. Although British food is now often exceptional and the service professional and friendly, there is a difference.
Sharing food is an intimate act, and intimacy between strangers is perhaps not something with which the British, or at least the English, are entirely comfortable. I suspect there is also some adherence to a Protestant economic hierarchy at work in Northern Europe, where the ‘customer’ enjoys being ‘served’ by the ‘staff’. In Italy, intimacy seems to come easier, along with reverence for food and wine as the very ingredients of civilisation, and respect for its purveyors.
When asked what he thought about Western civilisation, Gandhi suggested it would be a good idea. If civilisation seems in decline in the Accademia, and elusive in the West generally, it is at least still in full flower behind the counter of Le Volpi e l’Uva.
