Dear Reader,
In the matter of the daffodils, we can report full trumpeting. We are a family that celebrates Easter, and in the absence of church, we dearly appreciate the brass choir stoutly blaring its golden tones from the pachysandra beds. I am sending a good wish to all of you who have been celebrating religious holidays or other meaningful occasions this Spring.
I also want to extend a special welcome this week to all new readers. An unknown angel at Substack decided to feature Frugal Chariot on Substack’s home page this week, and I’m very grateful to have my work highlighted in this way. Your willingness to spread the word and support this little two-wheeler of a contraption means so much to me, too. Thank you!
We travel this week from Japan to Italy, and from the theme of displacement to the idea of personal pilgrimage. I am so glad to have discovered the writer Hisham Matar through this book, and I sincerely recommend his other work as well.
Review
A Month in Siena
Hisham Matar
Random House, 2019
130 pages
$27.00
Did you know that “aftermath” was originally a farmer’s word? In English, “math” or “meath” is mown hay. The aftermath was the second crop of hay that followed the primary harvest. In 1786, George Washington wrote in his diary, “The aftermath is more valuable, and the Second growth quicker.” But somewhat earlier than that, in the 17th century, “aftermath” had already acquired a figurative meaning with a dark tone: “A period or state of affairs following a significant event, esp. when that event is destructive or harmful.” The O.E.D. cites English poet Robert Fletcher from 1656: “Rash Lover speak what pleasure hath Thy Spring in such an Aftermath?” Was this new connotation derived from an association with the Grim Reaper in a time of plague? I’m not certain, but I wonder. For those of us who have been or soon will be vaccinated against Covid-19, this question is not without resonance. What pleasure will we take in “such an Aftermath?” Where might we be surprised by joy after this time of severe isolation and irretrievable loss?
As a guide we have the writer Hisham Matar, whose most recent book, A Month in Siena, is prescient in its anticipation of current concerns. Matar has lived through a cascade of aftermaths, which followed upon his family’s flight from Libya under Qaddafi, his father’s kidnapping and imprisonment in the 1990s, the 2011 revolution that allowed him and his family to return to search for his still missing father, and the 2016 publication of his memoir about all these events, The Return. That book went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. He lives in both London and New York City, where he is a Professor at Barnard College.
Following his father’s abduction, Matar developed a practice of looking closely at paintings in museums. He would go to a museum, choose a single painting, and visit it every day for a week or more. He developed a particular fascination with and love for the Sienese School of painting, which attained great glory during the 13th and 14th centuries in the works of such artists as Duccio, the Lorenzetti brothers, Giovanni di Paolo, and Simone Martini.
They left me feeling unprepared and in need of translation. They stood alone, neither Byzantine nor of the Renaissance, an anomaly between chapters, like the orchestra tuning its strings in the interval . . . The colors, delicate patterns and suspended drama of these pictures gradually became necessary to me.
Necessary pictures. In the interval. In the interval after his success with The Return, Matar decided on a pilgrimage to Siena, with the goal of spending extended time in contemplating works by artists of the Sienese School.
To look closely at their work is to eavesdrop on one of the most captivating conversations in the history of art, one concerned with what a painting might be, what it might be for, and what it could do and accomplish within the intimate drama of a private engagement with a stranger. You can detect them asking how much a picture might rely on a viewer’s emotional life; how a shared human experience might change the contract between artist and viewer, and between artist and subject . . . This is why these paintings seemed to me then, even from within my initial bewilderment, as they seem to me now, to articulate a feeling of hope.
The book moves chronologically through Matar’s time in the city, and each chapter details an engagement with a particular painting or an experience from his wanderings. His encounters with the paintings tell us much about the history of Siena during the 14th century. His first stop is the Palazzo Pubblico, where he views “The Allegory of Good and Bad Government.” This compelling series of six fresco panels decorates the Sala dei Nove, the council hall where the nine magistrates who governed the city-state met to deliberate. Siena was prosperous, peaceful, and on the rise in those years, and was also unique in having adopted a system of civic rule in place of hereditary aristocracy.
In addition to depicting the key virtues required of rulers, the Allegory shows an assembly of citizens, each one holding the cord or rope of civic duty that binds them to the Common Good. Lorenzetti portrays the Common Good as an old man with an odd beard, and an expression suggesting that nothing about his job is easy. The faces and costumes of the citizens (all men, of course) are expressive and diverse. Matar notes that one man appears to be an Arab, or of Arab descent. Such expressive naturalism on the part of Sienese artists represented an exciting move away from more stylized Byzantine iconography.
Just as Dante chose to write in vernacular Italian rather than Latin, Lorenzetti and his contemporaries filled their works with local character, landscape, and incident. In the panel now titled “The Effects of Good Government,” the people are flourishing: they trade, dance, build rosy-hued towers, and benefit from the assistance of extremely charismatic donkeys.
In a panel now called “The Allegory of Bad Government,” we find Tyranny, sporting fangs and horns, enthroned and flanked by Cruelty, Deceit, Fraud, Fury, Division, and War. Avarice, Pride, and Vainglory hover above. Remind you of anyone?
Duccio introduced this sort of naturalism to the genre of sacred paintings, and audiences were crazy about them. When his great Maestà altarpiece was completed in 1312, crowds filled the streets and the work was paraded in a loop around city before its installation in the cathedral. Officials and citizens led the parade, with women and children behind.
The painting was so dazzling in its color and realism, and so exceptional in its narrative power—at once reverent of Mary and the Apostles but also unapologetically direct in its fascination with their common humanity, their earthly psychology and emotional life—that it caused the city of Siena to reverberate with a profound depth of feeling.
This grand expression of the worship of Mary was the sort of work which may well have inspired a notable law enacted in 1310. This statute, unearthed by contemporary scholar Hayden Maginnis, made it a civil offense for a woman to be near the altar or choir of a church during services. It also provided an incentive for informants, who were offered a share of any fines. What could have been the impetus for such a law? It seems possible that such pictures spoke to women’s own lives in such a direct and powerful way that they were drawn to them even in defiance of ecclesiastical rules. Indeed, if there is an artist whom I wish Matar had discussed in greater detail in this book, it is Simone Martini, whose Madonnas are so ineffably beautiful. There are two in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Here is one.
When the Black Death arrived in Siena in 1348, it showed no mercy to the maestros of painting. Ambrogio Lorenzetti is believed to have died of it that year. The plague marked a turning point in the history of Siena, and around half the population perished.
In the aftermath the government was fatally weakened, and ten years later the city fell to the Florentines. Just as we have seen a rise in hate crimes against people of Asian descent during the current pandemic, outsiders—especially Muslims in Spain and Jews across Europe—were targeted as scapegoats during the Black Death. Siena’s population did not return to previous levels until the 20th century. And art was never the same again in Europe.
The flowering of the Renaissance and the Baroque took place in [the plague’s] shadow . . . “No thought is born in me which has not ‘Death’ engraved upon it,” Michelangelo wrote in a letter to Vasari.
Aftermath as an operating system, and as a state of mind.
A Month in Siena is far more than a book about art in Siena. It is a book about the history and power of the city itself. Matar deftly captures the ways in which a city can capture the traveler.
That day Siena was as intimate to me as a locket you could wear around your neck and yet as complex as a maze. It completely shielded me from the horizon. My compass could only be guided by it, by its twists and turns, its maneuvers and decisions, by its tastes and purposes. Siena is its own North Star . . . I had never been anywhere so determined, so full of intention and so concerned about my presence, for, no matter which way I turned, the city seemed to be the one determining the pace and direction of my walks.
Savoring and even protecting his solitude, Matar discovers both the secret corners of the city and the hidden purposes behind his own journey. He finds old friends, and makes new ones. He greets in Arabic a family speaking that language, and they welcome him into their lives.
A Month in Siena makes the case, as well as anything I’ve read recently, for the value of a book in which not much happens in the conventional sense of plot or narrative. In scene after quiet scene, we follow Matar’s probing and meditative mind to the places in our hearts and the questions in our hearts that matter most.
There is also a sense in which this book is a tribute to a loving marriage, during a time of separation. The final chapter of the book provides a moving conclusion, as Matar returns to New York and to his life with his wife Diana. He soon revisits the Metropolitan Museum to spend time with a favorite picture, “Paradise” by Giovanni di Paolo. This small painting depicts the reunion of loved ones in heaven.
. . . there are men and women, like the spouses buried together in Siena, holding hands and looking in each other’s eyes. This surely is the way to be, I thought to myself, that one should take hold of those one loves most and simply look into their eyes for a long time, or, perhaps for eternity.
I propose that we make a paradise of our post-pandemic reunions. Let’s take hold and look at everything and everyone that is necessary to us with refreshed and grateful eyes. Let’s look at them for as long as it takes for them to know that they are seen and loved.
Other Forms/Other voices
It has been harrowing this week to read accounts of the trial under way in Minneapolis of Derek Chauvin, the police officer accused of murdering George Floyd. Hisham Matar’s wife Diana Matar is a photographer who has spent her career documenting state-sponsored violence. She has worked all over the world, but her most recent project has been focused on killings by police in the United States. In this series, titled My America, she has documented numerous sites where such incidents have taken place.
In her artist’s statement for this work, Matar quotes from Why People Photograph by the photographer Robert Adams: “There is still time— in the lee, in the quiet, in the extraordinary light.” Her pictures of these places, these aftermaths, disturbing in their quietude and extraordinary in their light, pose the question “Is there still time?
During the hardest part of lockdown, and after my sister had just died, my beloved friend, the photographer Cheryle St. Onge sent me Robert Adams’ book Art Can Help. In this quietly profound volume, Adams praises the artists who “care enough about us to risk our alienation by a picture so taut with despair and fragile possibility.” Diana Matar is such an artist, and so too is Cheryle.
Poem of the Week
If I were to make an art pilgrimage to Italy, it would be to study Piero della Francesca, the 15th-century fresco master. Years ago I had a moving encounter with Piero’s “Madonna del Parto” in the little chapel in Monterchi, nearby to Arezzo. One of the poems I hold most dear in my heart is Jorie Graham’s San Sepolcro.
For Your Reading Radar
Bird lovers may wish to take note of Scott Weidensaul’s new book, A World on the Wing, which is just out from W. W. Norton. Weidensaul tackles in brilliant fashion the vast and fascinating topic of bird migration. Christian Cooper, writing in the New York Times, says the book “brims with spectacle” and praises Weidensaul’s “knack for evocative passages and immersive scenes.” You can check out Weidensaul’s recent interview on Fresh Air for a preview.
Bookstore of the Week
This week most of the links to the books mentioned point to Hennessy + Ingalls, a great bookstore in L.A. that focuses on art and architechture books.
That’s it for now. Wishing you beauty and joy this weekend.
xoxo Nicie