First Things RSS Feed - Catesby Leigh

D.C. Gets its Gehry

Mon, 01 Mar 2021 00:00:00 -0500

Washington, D.C.’s cultural apparatchiks have long hankered for a Frank Gehry showpiece. On the eve of the new millennium, the director of Washington’s Corcoran Gallery implored Gehry, then basking in accolades for his titanium-clad Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, to enter a competition to design a major addition to Ernest Flagg’s century-old Beaux-Arts masterpiece. It was not a blind competition. (If it had been, Gehry would never have entered.) It was portfolio-based, which means reputation-based, with a handful of finalists invited to submit designs. Gehry entered and, to the surprise of no one, got the job.

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Monumental Contrast

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 00:00:00 -0400

In the annals of monumental sculpture, James Earle Fraser’s equestrian statue of Theodore Roosevelt hardly ranks as a masterpiece. The Rough Rider is portrayed in frontiersman’s garb and flanked by two figures on foot: a Plains Indian and an African tribesman. Prominently sited before the august Central Park West entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, the equestrian nonetheless forms an important part of a major monumental ensemble. In late June, the museum requested that the statue, which is owned by the City of New York, be removed. What will replace it—an elephant or T. rex , perhaps, or nothing at all?—has not been disclosed. But the result is likely to be another unhappy reminder that we long ago abandoned the monumental aesthetic that offers the public visions of human greatness. “Man as Hero”—to quote the title of a valuable treatise by the painter and critic Pierce Rice—is an endangered species.

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Restoring American Statuary

Mon, 10 Aug 2020 06:00:00 -0400

The White House recently mandated the creation of a National Garden of American Heroes to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The garden, according to the executive order , will feature honorific statues of “historically significant” men and women. Assuming the project comes off, it could end up being a statuary Bridge to Nowhere—a haunting ground for curiosity seekers that fails to attract a broader public. But if the White House manages the project thoughtfully, its value could run deeper than our political fault lines.

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Against Architectural Relativism

Tue, 03 Mar 2020 15:15:00 -0500

Google “Trump,” “federal architecture,” and “Albert Speer” and you’ll get a boatload of results, thanks to recent leaks of a draft White House executive order entitled “Making Federal Buildings Beautiful Again.” The order mandates a reorientation of Uncle Sam’s architectural patronage along traditional—and above all, classical—lines.

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Venice Afloat

Sun, 01 Mar 2020 00:00:00 -0500

An observer of a Spenglerian bent might just write Venice off, taking the floods that afflict the city with increasing frequency as the finishing touches on a long-running spectacle of political, economic, and cultural decline. That decline, spanning half a millennium, has by now reduced the city to the status of a somewhat dilapidated urban museum, its contemporary cultural influence mainly associated with the postmodern follies at the Venice Biennale exhibitions of art and architecture. The failure of the Italian government to address the flooding has the additional effect of making Venice a stand-in for Italy’s political discombobulation. Through such saturnine lenses, it’s not hard to picture Venice as the next Atlantis.

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Building to No Purpose

Sat, 01 Feb 2020 00:00:00 -0500

Together we can shape the future .” So proclaimed a construction fence poster at the gargantuan new Hudson Yards development on Manhattan’s Far West Side. But who would want a future that looks like this? A future of towering expanses of sterile glass grids enclosing buildings devoid of formal resolution or human scale?

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The Florentine Pietà

Fri, 01 Dec 2017 00:00:00 -0500

In the late 1540s, an aging Michelangelo embarked on what he intended to be his culminating sculptural work, commonly known as the Florentine Pietà . Still heavily tasked with official commissions—foremost among them the rebuilding of St. Peter’s—and sometimes incapacitated by kidney stones, he worked on the Pietà at night, wearing a cap of thick paper with a candle. His idea that the sculpture would decorate a church altar in front of which he would be interred was never realized. This Pietà , which reposes in the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo in Florence, is far from complete. In fact, it had to be partially reassembled by another sculptor after Michelangelo himself mutilated it, for reasons that cannot be known with certainty.

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A Memorial to Forget

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 00:00:00 -0400

Monuments have always been intended to embody the past and elevate the spirit, but the new $700-million National September 11 Memorial and Museum in Lower Manhattan is a downer in more ways than one. The same goes for the dismal architectural ensemble taking shape around it.

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Henry Hope Reed, Defender of Decoration

Wed, 22 May 2013 00:00:00 -0400

The distinguished architectural historian Henry Hope Reed died May 1 at age ninety-seven. More than any cultural figure of his generation, Reed perpetuated an awareness of the classical tradition’s enduring role as the indispensable means for improving the human habitat—starting with the city, man’s greatest creation. He regarded The Golden City (1959) as the most important of his numerous books, and indeed it triggered widespread scrutiny of modernism’s sundry dysfunctions. One of Reed’s signal virtues was his intellectual immunity to historicism. He believed in artistic norms, and in normative artistic achievements whose relevance transcends the vagaries of the historical “process.”

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Reviving Sacred Sculpture

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 00:00:00 -0400

The statue of a slender young John the Baptist, seated on a rock with a lamb at his side, only a little over three feet tall and carved about four hundred years ago by a sculptor known mainly to scholars, has a lot to tell us about the spiritual dimension of a classically informed culture of design embracing sculpture and painting as well as architecture.

Younger Catholics have taken stock of the not terribly fruitful modernist tendencies the Church has espoused since the Second Vatican Council, as well as the enduring religious relevance of its classical artistic heritage. As a result, we have new church buildings like the strikingly fine Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity chapel at Thomas Aquinas College in southern California, designed by Duncan Stroik. It is a resoundingly successful exercise in a highly refined architectural idiom that draws on different strands within the classical tradition, from Florentine Renaissance to Spanish Mission.

But this chapel doesn’t boast sculptural decoration on a level with the architecture. Both in form and composition, the statues of Aquinas and Augustine in the niches flanking the main entrance are discordantly crude. Completely static figures, almost primitive in their lumpen realism, and rather dwarf-like in the sense of scale they communicate, they are deeply unworthy of this building. Thomas Aquinas College is not to be singled out for this failure. The huge, deep-relief portrait of Martin Luther King, Jr. dedicated at his new memorial in Washington, D.C. last October is far worse, and testifies more disturbingly to the severe impairment of cultural memory that the Church can help redress.

Classical sculpture’s formal qualities, like their religious origins in Greek antiquity, are little understood today. But they need to be understood if the recovery of the classical tradition now underway in sacred and secular art alike is to be fully realized. That’s why The Young Saint John the Baptist deserves our consideration.

The sculptor, once thought to have been Michelangelo, was in fact Giovanni Francesco Susini, on whom Michelangelo exerted a significant influence through Susini’s teacher Giambologna. It is not known for whom the statue, an underappreciated masterwork in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. was created. The gallery’s curator of sculpture and decorative arts, Mary Levkoff, suggests that it could have been set above a holy-water font in a church in such a way that it would present compelling views to people approaching the font (and the sculpture) from the front or sides. Before the Quattrocento ended, the great Verrocchio had demonstrated what sculpture could do to activate the space not only within but around a niche with his magisterial Christ and Saint Thomas, created for the Orsanmichele in Florence, and the same body of formal knowledge is evident in The Young Saint John the Baptist.

The partially clad Baptist’s extended right hand, which holds the baptismal cup, rests on his left knee, thereby endowing the composition with an emphatic spatial depth. Susini was well aware of Greek sculptors’ concern that their work not be read in merely pictorial terms from static viewpoints”that sculpture be experienced as a spatially dynamic art form.

You don’t just stand in front of Susini’s statue, experiencing it as you would a painting. You move around it. Its spatially active presence makes it more real. That’s what the Greeks and later Michelangelo and the sculptors he most deeply influenced were about: elevating the human figure above the realm of optical phenomena and thereby endowing it with a more visceral presence, a deeper aesthetic resonance, and a greater emotional significance.

Hence the torsion built into the figure of the Baptist. If he were just sitting there facing forward, like many a nineteenth-century “great man” statue, he would offer only discrete quasi-pictorial profiles, front and sides. Instead, the extension of the Baptist’s right arm causes the torso to rotate slightly on the trunk, while the turn of his head in the opposite direction is reinforced by the gentle counterthrust indicated by the left hand planted on the rock on which he sits. In other words, he is still, but he is anything but static.

And with his head turned in one direction and the baptismal cup (in the form of a shell) extended in another, there is an ambiguity as to what his next motion might be. That there are different possibilities is reiterated by the turn of the lamb’s head in the opposite direction from the Baptist’s—a compositional device that provides a lighthearted contrast. Such ambiguity endows the sculpture with greater emotional complexity: The composition is resolved, but there is no suggestion of the completion of an action. Suspended animation of this kind serves to further remove Susini’s Baptist from the realm of commonplace experience, an effect devoutly to be desired in sacred art.

The tranquil mood projected by The Young Saint John the Baptist is a far cry from the haggard, penitential standing Baptist carved by Donatello a century and a half earlier in a static, pictorially oriented, late-medieval realist idiom. A very distinct aesthetic sensibility guided Susini to represent John as a pastoral youth living in harmony with nature, employing a softer, more feminine anatomical topography that ancient sculptors often reserved for Dionysus or Apollo. The eye thus glides along Susini’s figure, rather than being detained by the static muscular forms typical of the male nude.

Not that there wasn’t a fully classical precedent for a more realistic, long-suffering John the Baptist. Greek sculptors took to portraying aging fishermen, peasants, boxers, and hags in this manner after the death of Alexander the Great. Poignant evocations of hard lives in a cruel—indeed, fallen—world resulted. We encounter their echo in the twilight realism of Caravaggio’s sculpturally informed biblical scenes. The very breadth of the classical tradition allows for such diversity of inspiration and interpretation.

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