Areopagus Volume LIV

Welcome one and all to the fifty fourth instalment of the Areopagus. Perhaps you feel, as many do, that July has come around too soon. 'Twas but March mere days ago, was it not? More than six months of the year are done and we have entered the seventh; the second half of 2023 is upon us and 2024 is closer than 2022.

Should the shock of onrushing time disconcert you, for consolation I offer a few lines of Lord Byron. But this is not consolation of the soft and sorry sort; here, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, we find defiance:

Aye, that's the spirit. Let us defy this onrushing July, and not fleeing from its advance stare it straight in the eyes and say: "Here we stand!" Time may think he chases us, but let us chase him for once. Rouse yourselves, Readers, and unfurl your banners, for the cry has been raised: another volume of the Areopagus approaches...

I - Classical Music

Chopin & Beethoven... but not where you expect

Where does one first discover classical music? I suspect everybody has a different story. Once upon a time we could only have heard it in churches, opera houses, concert halls, or schools. Times are changing now. We may hear it on the radio, on television, in a film, or simply stumble across it on the internet. For many of us, however, it is in advertising that we first come across those famous and familiar tunes. Léo Delibes' Flower Duet from the opera Lakmé, Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons, and Edvard Grieg's Morning Mood from Peer Gynt have been trotted out time and time again in this way. And, for the most part, it is done rather cheaply; the music is mere trope. Then again, not always. Somehow I recall that the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, from The Nutcracker, has been used more than once to evoke a sense of fantastical mania, which strikes me at the very least as a faithful use of Tchaikovsky's music.

What do we make of this? Does classical music have a proper context, or not? Is there anything wrong with using classical music in advertising? Does it demean the music? Well, rather than answering this question directly, I simply wish to share with you the advert that introduced me to the great and inimitable Polish pianist Frédéric Chopin, that enduring titan of the 19th century. In 2007, as part of the marketing campaign for a video game called Halo 3, a rather unusual advert was released. Bungie (the studio behind the game) created a huge and highly detailed model battlefield, filmed it, and set the footage to Chopin's Raindrop Prelude. Nobody expected this, and what might have been an immediately forgettable advert (more than 90% of marketing is, apparently, ignored) somehow became... something more? One also wonders how many people who would otherwise never have known Chopin, nor even cared to listen to classical music, had their minds changed as a result of this advert.

There is one more example of successful cross-fertilisation between classical music and popular culture that I wish to share. Many years ago a producer or editor at Sky Sports made the inspired decision to licence Ludwig van Beethoven's Coriolan Overture for the titles of a show called Football's Greatest. Beethoven wrote it in 1807 for a play by the Austrian dramatist Heinrich Joseph von Collin, rather than for Shakespeare's more famous Coriolanus, as is often assumed. In both cases they are based on the life of Coriolanus, a semi-legendary figure from the earliest days of the Ancient Roman Republic. I've always thought classical music and football are a match made in heaven. Perhaps this is why...

The purpose of this discussion is to explore whether classical music has a purpose, or an appropriate context, and what its limits are. Gregorio Allegri's Miserere Mei Deus was composed in the 17th century for performance in the Sistine Chapel alone, where it was played only once a year. The music is extraordinary enough when heard through the speakers of a laptop... so we might wonder what it must have been like when Allegri's masterpiece could only be heard in one place, at one time, and always live. Have we lost the magic of classical music by spreading it so far and wide? Not to mention that Miserere Mei Deus, like so many popular pieces, is religious music. So is there anything wrong with playing it in a non-religious context? Or, rather, is anything lost by doing so?

I hope you'll forgive me the trespass of asking so many questions without endeavouring to answer them, but you may consider the two above examples — of Chopin's Raindrop Prelude over a video game trailer, and Beethoven's Coriolan Overture as part of a football show — as fuel to fire the furnace of your thoughts.

II - Historical Figure

Pheidippides

The Great Messenger

You've probably never heard of Pheidippides. And yet he may well have changed your life, even if only in a minor and surprising way, despite having lived and died well over two thousand years ago.

He was an Athenian soldier and herald who was born in about 530 BC and died in 490 BC. It was during his lifetime that the Persian Empire first invaded mainland Greece. Athens had been encouraging, funding, and organising a revolt among the Greek cities of Ionia (along the western coast of modern-day Turkey) against their Persian overlords. Darius the Great, the Persian King of Kings, ordered a devastating military response, and this invasion culminated at a battle not far from Athens itself. The Spartans had refrained from coming to the aid of the Athenians, given their relative safety in southern Greece, and so this was something like Athens' last stand.

And, under the keen generalship of a man called Miltiades, they were victorious! But Pheidippides noticed a Persian ship sailing toward Athens. He feared their goal was to proclaim a Persian victory, strike fear into the city, and seize it. So Pheidippides set out to deliver news of the victory to his countrymen. He was a herald, remember, or hemerodrome, which translates to something like "professional running courier" — no internet or telephone in those days. And Pheidippides, so history tells us (with a smattering of legend no doubt) arrived at Athens, proclaimed Nikomen! (meaning "we are victorious!) and promptly died on the spot, exhausted.

Did any of this really happen? Most great tales have a kernel of truth in them (sometimes more unbelievable than the legend itself) and in this case we can defer to the Roman historian Livy, who once said of truly ancient and murky history that it contains events which "posterity has found more praiseworthy than credible".

Now here's the rub of it... where did the decisive battle take place? In a town called Marathon. And what was the distance between Athens and Marathon? About twenty five miles. Pheidippides' twenty-five mile run from Marathon to Athens has since become the basis of the global phenomenon that is the marathon, after being reintroduced at the first modern Olympic Games in 1896 and increased to 26.2 miles at the London Olympics in 1908. Little could Pheidippides have known that millions of people all over the world would one day be replicating that mad dash of his, when he gave his life for his country, but such is the strangeness of history...

To end I quote here the final two stanzas of Robert Browning's Pheidippidies, published in 1879, though I do recommend reading the poem in full:

III - Painting

The Day Dream

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1880)

London. 1848. Seven young painters swear an oath to save art from itself. Their names are William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, William Michael Rossetti, Thomas Woolner, Frederic George Stephens, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. And these are their rules:

1. To have genuine ideas to express;
2. To study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. To sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parading and learned by rote; and
4. Most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues

A full-blown painterly rebellion was in the offing, and the British establishment met this group of seven with extreme hostility. Their foundational belief was that art, as it was taught in the academies and seen in the exhibitions, had become conventional. Painters simply did things because that is how they were taught to do it, rather than because they believed it was correct or even because they wanted to. And, therefore, art had strayed from the truth of nature. Painters did not paint what they actually saw, but what they thought they were supposed to see. In particular, these rebellious young artists said, it was the influence of the Renaissance painter Raphael which had been most pernicious. Before him art had been free, truthful, and good; afterwards it decayed and turned stale. Hence they called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

John Ruskin, a hugely infuential writer who became the champion of their cause against the establishment, rather sums up this stance:

The Pre-Raphaelites' favourite artist was Sandro Botticelli, a near contemporary of Raphael who painted in what was fast becoming the old-fashioned way and who had, by the 19th century, been ignored for centuries. So here is one of Botticelli's paintings alongside another by Raphael, both with the same subject. What is the difference? Which do you prefer? Why?

Notice Botticelli's depiction of nature — flowers, grasses, petals — and with what care he has painted it, and how it is not subsidiary to but frames and aligns with his Madonna and child; the image would be incomplete without them. Raphael, meanwhile, gives nature no more attention than as a backdrop. Notice, too, the intensity and vividity of Botticelli's colours versus the mellower and subtler tones of Raphael. One is rich in detail and intensity; the other is all harmony and simplicity. One is mystical and Medieval; the other is Humanist and classicising. These are two wholly different artistic worldviews.

And so it was to Botticelli that the Pre-Raphaelites looked for inspiration, though nature was to be their ultimate guide. In The Day Dream we find Rossetti, like Botticelli, framing his subject with and weaving her into an abundance of leaves and boughs, almost like the elaborate patterns of a Medieval manuscript, and the whole atmosphere is rather dark, mystical, and fantastical. One might even notice a certain resemblance between Botticelli's Madonna and Rossetti's day-dreamer. This is not to say that Rossetti was an imitator; far from it. He, true to the Pre-Raphaelite cause, painted what he saw, how he saw it, regardless of rules about colour, drawing, and composition, and imbued it all with genuine emotional intensity. This is compelling and honest art.

Why were the Pre-Raphaelites so controversial? Well, consider what the British establishment expected of its young artists. Here is what art was "supposed" to be like:

Upper Left: The Mall in St. James's Park by Thomas Gainsborough / Upper Right: The Ladies Waldegrave by Sir Joshua Reynolds
Lower Right: Vertumnus and Pomona by Richard Westall / Lower Left: Amelia Stewart, Marchioness of Londonderry by Thomas Lawrence

Compare these establishment paintings with the selection of Pre-Raphaelite art below. What differences do you notice? I suspect you see them immediately. But regardless of thematic choices and the Pre-Raphaelites' open assault on the establishment, one ought to ask: how do these paintings make me feel? Once we ask this, I suspect, the differences become even more apparent, for we look past external visual facts and into what the art means. What we might emphasise above all about the Pre-Raphaelites is this: a love of Nature. Their art is filled, inevitably, with flowers and foliage, rich detail, and vivid colours. They painted the world as it appeared to them, and even where it is stylised it is not idealised, as in the art of the establishment. The result, then, is a form of art necessarily more emotional than intellectual.

Upper Left: The Two Crowns by Frank Dicksee (1900) / Upper Right: Bertucciova Nevesta by Edward Robert Hughes (1895)
Lower Left: Love Among the Ruins by Edward Burne-Jones (1894) / Lower Right: Ophelia by John Everett Millais (1853)

The official Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood did not long last. By 1853 it had essentially disbanded, after various personal and social scandals had rocked the group. But their members and associated artistic circle continued to paint in much the same rebellious way, albeit with growing differences in style and theme, and later followers adopted their artistic principles. They were, ultimately, victorious.

Indeed, the influence and ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites endured and even dominated in Britain through to the end of the 19th century and, in some sense, beyond. Both Symbolism and Expressionism can perhaps be traced to them, especially via Rossetti, and the broad Medievalism that swept Britain in the 19th century owes as much to the Pre-Raphaelites as it does the Romantics and the Neo-Gothic architects. But in the 20th century they fell completely out of favour; Pre-Raphaelite art was regarded as tacky and outdated Victorian froth, and much of it was sold on the cheap. That has all changed in recent years and they have enjoyed a startling but much-deserved resurgence in popularity.

IV - Architecture

How Air Conditioning Changed the World

New technology always has unforeseen consequences. One such example is air conditioning. It has, of course, made the world far better materially. Our quality of life has been much improved thanks to climate-controlled environments: these machines keep us warm in winter and cool in summer, largely to the benefit of our health. For this we are surely very grateful. And, from a commercial point of view, air conditioning is reported to make people nearly 25% more productive! Make of that what you will...

But, unwittingly, air conditioning also swept away five thousand years of architectural development. Read this passage from The Ten Books on Architecture, written by the Roman architect and military engineer Vitruvius during the 1st century BC:

Perhaps you can see where I'm going with this. One of the biggest and most important challenges for builders of the past was to ensure that houses, churches, castles, and any other such structures were suitable for the local climate — as Vitruvius explains. This might mean keeping cool in summer and warm in winter, protecting against earthquakes or floods, dealing with heavy rain or snow, managing the flow of air and wind, and so on. And doing all of this was also restricted by the cost, nature, and availability of construction materials.

For most of history people around the world built with local materials according to immediate wants, needs, and limitations. In heavily forested regions houses were made from wood and in arid regions from mudbrick or adobe. Where stone was found people used that for their walls; where reeds were freely available we used them to thatch our roofs, and in other places it was slate or turf. You can only build with what you've got.

The result of this matrix (needs plus wants plus available materials) is that architecture once differed all around the world, from region to region and even village to village, because no situation was ever identical. There were some similarities: thatched roofs and adobe were both relatively global features of architecture, say. But, even then, in no two places were they ever designed or used in the same way. There were a hundred thousand different solutions and a hundred thousand different styles of architecture.

Enter concrete, steel, plumbing, air conditioning, and so on. These were huge technological leaps which overcame many of those age-old problems in one fell swoop. And, with globalisation, the emphasis on locality has also been erased. Suddenly everybody, everywhere in the world can build with the same materials, both because knowledge has been shared and because these materials can be shipped to or made anywhere, not to mention the economic and demographic incentives for doing so.

But even if we can build houses and high rises more cheaply and quickly with concrete and steel... what about climate control? That's where air conditioning comes in. What started as a solution to the problem of humidity disrupting colour printing in the early 1900s soon became the 20th century's most understated technological revolution. We can build everything the same, everywhere, with no regard for climate, because air conditioning will look after that for us. And so whereas the architectures of Norway and Syria were once necessarily different because they had to deal with different conditions, they can now be identitical, because the conditions have become (up to a point, at least internally) identical. Think about a city like Dubai, with those soaring glass towers in the middle of the desert. This would simply not be possible without air conditioning.

This is only one explanation for why what is usually called "traditional architecture" has disappeared from much of the world. There are other readings of this change which look to socio-cultural, economic, political, and other developments. No doubt they can never be fully disentangled from one another and must, in the end, be weighed up and balanced to be fully understood. But the fact remains that air conditioning has played a central role in quite literally changing how the world looks and feels. Rarely has there been such an important architectural innovation.

V - Rhetoric

Anapodoton

Language is all about deletion and implication. You ask, "would you like a glass of water?" and I reply with, "I would." That is, rather than, "I would like a glass of water," which is what I really mean. But our brains are powerful enough to intuitively infer this additional, unstated meaning, through context. When you realise this you start to see it everywhere — sentences or phrases which, on their own, mean essentially nothing and are often grammatically incorrect, but which in context reveal a deleted and therefore implied meaning.

Well, anapodoton is the application of this principle to rhetoric. Specifically, it is the statement of only one half of a well-known saying. The most obvious example is, "When in Rome..." In fact, we rarely hear the other half of this saying — "do as the Romans do" — because it almost always known as an anapdoton. This is grammatically incorrect, of course, because the when from "when in Rome" demands a second clause to be completed. And yet it makes perfect sense. Once again we see that the rules of language are complex, subtle, and rather beautiful tools which can be manipulated in near innumerable ways to bend speech and writing to our purposes and meanings.

Other examples of anapodoton might be:

• Where there is a will (there is a way)
• All that glitters (is not gold)
• A rose by any other name (would smell as sweet)
• If at first you don't succeed (try, try again)

In all cases, should you be familiar with the sayings in question, you will not need the bracketed part to understand the meaning. Most interesting of all is that many sayings have been used so frequently as anapodota that they are largely known in that form alone:

• Speak of the Devil (and he shall appear)
• Plus ça change (plus c'est la même chose)
• The grass is always greener (on the other side)

Anapodoton is similar to aposiopesis, a device I wrote about several weeks ago, in which you trail off or abruptly stop what you're saying in order to give the impression that you can't carry on or don't want to, whether because you are overcome with emotion or the matter at hand is too sensitive or shocking or difficult to mention.

The main difference is that anapodoton specifically refers to a subordinate clause which lacks a major clause, and also that the listener or reader is expected to know what words are missing, whether because they've heard them before or intuitively, whereas aposiopesis has an element of doubt or openness.

What's the point of anapodoton? Well, there's something incredibly elegant about not saying words you don't need to say and allowing implication to do the work for you; it draws on language's subtlest elements. Equally important is that it directly engages our listener or reader by inviting them to complete our words; these minor moments of participation are not to be underrated.

VI - Writing

Meeting Michelangelo

I have often written that writing is a way of thinking, and I have argued that to write letters (for example) forces us to confront ourselves more fully and to draw out who we really are. What about poetry? Well, there are many arts: painting, sculpting, film-making, dance, music... and then there's poetry and prose. These last two are bundled in with the rest and yet they are, it seems, wholly distinct.

Where am I going with all of this? Michelangelo Buonarotti, regarded by many as the greatest of all Renaissance artists, even more so than Leonardo or Raphael, is a rather distant figure. We know him for his monumental triumphs of sculpture — David or The Tomb of Pope Julius II — and for his overwhelming, almost viciously vigorous paintings — the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and The Last Judgment, on its wall — and for his colossal architecture — the dome of St Peter's Basilica. He makes for a rather aloof figure, and his biographers say much the same: a tempestuous and brilliant man for whom nothing was impossible.

Less well-known is that he wrote poetry — and that his poetry is perhaps not what we expect from this colossus of the Renaissance. Far from the peerless and unreachable Michelangelo, so much a genius that we can barely understand him, we find a deeply sensitive, passionate, uncertain, pious, and conflicted man. His multitude of poetry mixes sonnets and madrigals, praise of Dante and gratitude to Pope Julius II, meditations on God and death, and explosions of ardour, whether unrequited love or uncertainty about whom and how to he ought to love. Suddenly we meet him eye-to-eye and the divine Michelangelo, as he was and is so often called, becomes all too human. Here, then, are three of Michelangelo's lesser-known creations:

Every conception that a man can find

On the Brink of Death

Bring back the time when blind desire ran free

The point here is twofold. First, that Michelangelo wrote poetry! This is, in itself, surprising enough. And, secondly, how his poetry reveals a wholly different side to Michelangelo — because writing has an immediacy and intimacy which no other form of art can match. That doesn't mean it's the best, of course, but only that it does something the others cannot. David and The Last Judgment reveal to us the genius, and we can only glean knowledge or a sense of the artist behind it by implication; his sonnets reveal to us Michelangelo the man, a human in many ways like you or I or any other. Writing is the most immediate form of art because words have no presence. They are representations of our thoughts and feelings on paper, whereas in other forms of art the medium is itself something of a barrier between artist and audience. Michelangelo's poetry, then, offers a direct view into his heart and mind in a way that no painting or sculpture ever could.

VII - The Seventh Plinth

Once again, my Gentle Readers, the Seventh Plinth is yours. Last week I asked you this:

What, if any, should be the limits to freedom of speech?

And here was how you responded:

Laura W

Susan S

Rafael W

Sarah S

Liam M

Hunter F

Dylan H

Nate S

Question of the Week

And for this week's question to test your critical thinking:

What is the point of reading poetry?

And that's all

Expanding on this week's question about poetry: why read anything at all? And, if we do read, why bother reading through old and ancient things? Geoffrey Chaucer, once notably and not unfairly described as "the father and first founder and embellisher of ornate eloquence in English", has an answer:

What is new must inevitably become old, and that which is old shall one day promulgate the new. A cycle, then, just as day leads into dusk, and dusk into night, and night into dawn, and dawn into day. So the Wheels of Fortune and Time roll on, and another volume of the Areopagus has lived its little life, until from these ashes another instalment shall arise next week? Possibly. But, then again, Lord Byron couldn't stand Chaucer! Cheerio & all that.

Yours,

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