In Search of the Magnificent
I inherited a city of brick and intend to leave a city of marble. (Pope Julius II)
Last week a generous friend invited me to Frankfurt in Germany, to see the once-in-a-lifetime Sandro Botticelli exhibition, celebrated at the Staedl Museum, an impressive Neo-renaissance building in the Florentine taste that somehow survived the Allied firestorm. It stands on the banks of the river Main and faces the usual jumble of modernistic buildings and ugly skyscrapers, all suited to prompt a pang of nostalgia for times long gone by. Especially if one is stuck for nearly three hours in an endless queue while bracing subzero temperatures.
The exhibition runs since mid-November, the day was mid-week, but the onslaught had in no way diminished. Sluggish in any case, did the advance regularly come to a halt because previous worshippers were loath to leave the sanctuary and congested the trajectories. Yet the mood was excellent. Plenty of tongues abounded, German apart, and as the crowd warmed to each other, it turned out that some people had come from far away places to witness the wondrous pageant, among them a diminutive savant from Kyoto, a jolly and clearly well-off couple from Seattle and an Italian aficionado who had driven all the way by car because he disliked airplanes.
Three hours in the cold is a tough way to prepare oneself for a feast of the eyes, but in this case proved gratifying. Because the alleviating truth is that our great Christian-European inheritance must be still going strong, no matter how hard the Peddlers of Ugliness try to make us believe otherwise. The delightful chatter of personal views concerning the great man, the earnest comments on this or that of his paintings, or simply expressions of happy anticipation, made abundantly clear how important the part is that Classical Art still plays in modern life. But it shows also how urgently we need a coherent policy that vigorously and unequivocally defines its present equivalent as a seamless continuation of our marvellous artistic past. Because here, on a cold winter morning, and just as in every other exhibition of this kind, issued once again the simple proof that beauty expressed on canvas is an essential human need, and in unbroken demand since the Masters of Altamira and Lascaux received the first divine spark that set it off.
Botticelli was a protégée of Lorenzo de Medici, ruler of Florence, also known as theMagnificent. A banker and astute politician, who, instead of financing a mercenary army to protect his fief, managed strategies, intrigues and counter-intrigues solely by means of a brilliant intellect while lavishing his money on local artists, some of them future giants of the visual arts. Blessed with an inscrutable eye, an unerring sense for beauty and perfection, has he come down to us as one of the finest minds that ever walked the earth.
While standing dumbfounded between the works he made possible, one begins automatically to think of the many contemporary artists who defy the politically correct dogmas of crap and vulgarity and refuse the connected thirty pieces of silver which can easily turn into millions, but instead paint breathtaking landscapes, sensitive portraits, marvellous still lives or radiant nudes, usually sold for a pittance and only found in the internet after an extensive search.
What a feast it could be if a new Lorenzo de Medici rallied them and presented them in a great exhibition to an expectant crowd like this!
So why didn’t it happen yet? Is it possible that the Decline of the West has indeed so far advanced that there are no more wealthy men and women afoot who have an unfailing eye for artistic greatness? Who enjoy it, collect it, promote it or regale it to museums that have been rigorously cleared of crap? Who, needless to say, abhor modern art like the Black Plague? And who may believe it a good idea that future generations and encyclopaedias will remember them lovingly as saviours of our great inheritance?
Or can it really be true that all the money in the world is owned by the charlatans who gnaw since a hundred years at the very roots of Christian Art, and prepare to topple it once its life sap has dried up completely?
It isn’t as if there weren’t patrons of the arts.
Take the London Royal Academy of Art. Once one of the world’s most hallowed institutions, cradle of truly great artists, run by the likes of Lord Leighton, could it always rely on a dedicated band of sponsors. Even to this day. With the sad difference that presently the gentlemen style themselves Patrons of Contemporary Art, which says it all. Because beneficiaries are not those who might develop into a future Botticelli, Constable or Turner, but installationists, representationalists, videoists, photographists, or downright fecalists like Tracy Emin whose much lauded magnum opus is a menstrually soiled bedstead littered with fag ends, used condoms and similar examples of artistically expressive items.
And it is not only schools and academies that get in this way desecrated, but our temples of worship as well. You may remember a revolting installation that graced the St. Paul’s church in east London, mounted with the intention “to support the interaction between art and spirituality, to provoke debate at a local and international level.”
Crap-art parlance that leaves everyone mystified except the professional morons who runTate modern and the RA.
The truly intriguing question is of course why the indigenous heirs of Empire builders and their marvellous art ever allowed this to happen, royalty included. It can’t be possible that the Peddlers of Ugliness have them all in their pockets.
Or can it?
An artistic genius like Botticelli doesn’t step out of nowhere. It takes hundreds of fine artists, not to mention an intellectually fertile environment, to spawn someone like him. And it is therefore the lesser ones, still excellent craftsmen and women, who need our particular care and attention, because they will make it possible that hundreds of years from now, and provided mankind survives, another queue will be waiting to worship an artist born around the turn of the second millennium. As pallbearer of a glorious second Renaissance, and not a ridiculed freak of the most hideous era in art a human mind can imagine.
This article was first published at the Occidental Observer.
Posts
