Paolo Veronese

Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) was born in Verona as Paolo Spezaprada, after his father's profession as a stonecutter. He signed his first paintings with the name Paolo Caliara, taking the name of the nobleman who was his mother's father, in an illegitimate liaison. Once he was established in Venice he was called Veronese to distinguish him from all the other Paolos running around the city.

Veronese was apprenticed to a painter in Verona when he was 13, and to another more successful painter three years later; I wonder if his aristocratic grandfather paid for this? Connoisseurs like to find bits in frescoes by Veronese's two masters that look too good to be their own work and assign these to their young apprentice, but I'm always dubious of that sort of thing. The two images above are details from The Family of Darius before Alexander, 1566; I'm going to be showing mostly details here because many of Veronese's works are so big and complex they just won't display properly on a screen.

Detail from one of Veronese's earliest paintings done on his own, The Conversion of Mary Magdalene, 1548. Not bad for a 20-year old. Veronese won a contest judged by Titian, who thereafter promoted Veronese's work, and he was soon getting important commissions. The power and wealth of Venice was then at a peak, which was reflected in great building and rebuilding campaigns across the city, so there was a lot of work to do. I already wrote here about Veronese's most famous painting, The Wedding at Cana, 1562–1563, which Napoleon stole and put in the Louvre, so I will feature other things.

Some of Veronese's most famous work is in Venice's Church of Saint Sebastian, which was enlarged between 1506 and 1562 according to plans drawn up by the architect Antonio Abbondi.

One of them is The Coronation of the Virgin, painted some time in the 1550s.

Some of the surfaces are tilted at odd angles, but Veronese made the most of them. St. Mark, 1566.

The Martyrdom of  St. Sebastian, 1566. I like this one partly because most martyrdom scenes are so stylized and surreal; here some worthy is just ordering his thugs to beat the annoying Christian to death.

Aristotle and Plato.

Moving on to other work, here is a detail from The Anointing of David, 1555. Veronese has always divided the critics. Some see him as one of the greatest painters ever; others as good enough but in no way the equal of Venice's other great masters, Titian and Tintoretto. Personally I find a whole room full of these overwhelming, but detail by detail they are full of wonders.

The Feast in the House of Levi and details. This was originally going to be a Last Supper but the inquisition was nosing around Venice at the time and they brought Veronese in to quiz him about all the extraneous figures. He is supposed to have responded, “we painters take the same liberties as poets and madmen.” The Inquisitors found nothing heretical in Veronese's beliefs but demanded that he change the name of the painting.

Perseus and Andromeda, 1576.

Juno Showering Riches on Venice, 1566, in the Doge's Palace. Somebody certainly showered Venice with riches, including astonishing riches of art.

Art World Insiderism

Kelly Crow lays out the stark facts about success in the art world:

New artists who show their work early in a relatively small network of 400 venues—like Gagosian Gallery or the Guggenheim Museum—are all but guaranteed a successful art career, the study said. By contrast, artists who exhibit mainly in lower-level galleries and midtier institutions are likely to remain stuck in that orbit.

“There’s this invisible network of trust that exists in the art world, but the group that decides who matters in art was considerably smaller and more powerful than we expected,” said Albert-László Barabási, a data scientist who studies networks at Northeastern and led the study along with several colleagues including a data scientist now at the World Bank, Samuel Fraiberger. Their findings also show up in Dr. Barabási’s book published earlier this week, The Formula: The Universal Laws of Success.

His findings undermine a popular art-world notion that a prodigy could create in obscurity and get discovered years later. Instead, the research suggests that artists who start out seeking connections with powerful curators, dealers and collectors within the nerve center of the art world are far more likely to hit the big time…

“If one of your first five shows as an artist is held at a gallery in the heart of this network, the chances of your ending your career on the fringes is 0.2%,” Dr. Barabási said. “The network itself will protect you because people talk to each other and trade each other’s shows… The art world prides itself on being so open and inclusive, but the truth is the opposite,” Mr. Resch said.

Treating Peanut Allergies

The results have been announced from a major test of a treatment for peanut allergies:

a yearlong clinical trial of an oral immunotherapy regimen that aims to reduce children’s sensitivity to peanut allergens by gradually exposing them to peanut protein over the course of six months, starting with minute amounts that are carefully measured and increased incrementally under medical supervision as tolerance develops.

The goal of the treatment is not to cure the allergy or enable children to eat peanut butter sandwiches, but to reduce the risk that an accidental exposure to trace amounts will trigger a life-threatening reaction in someone with a severe allergy, and relieve the fear and anxiety that go along with severe peanut allergies. . . .

After six months of treatment followed by six months of maintenance therapy, two-thirds of the 372 children who received the treatment were able to ingest 600 milligrams or more of peanut protein — the equivalent of two peanuts — without developing allergic symptoms. By contrast, only 4 percent of the 124 children who had been given a placebo powder were able to consume the same amount of peanut without reacting.

The treatment does not work for everyone. Though only 4.3 percent of children receiving the active drug experienced side effects categorized as severe, compared to less than 1 percent of the children on placebo, 20 percent of the children in the active treatment group withdrew from the study, more than half of them because of adverse events. Fourteen percent of those on active treatment received injections of epinephrine, a drug used in emergencies, including one child who experienced anaphylaxis and required three EpiPen injections. By contrast, only 6.5 percent of those on the placebo received epinephrine.

Slow exposure to gradually increasing amounts is the time-tested way of treating severe allergies, so it's no surprise that this works. I suppose the hard part was finding a way to get started safely, since peanut allergies can sometimes strike because of exposure to freakily small amounts of the protein.

The authors go out of their way to warn against the home remedy version of this, which has spread through motherhood blogs and the like across America and amounts to giving your child a tiny speck of peanut better and gradually increasing the amount. (Which can work, too.) In fact I bet that will come up in the consideration of whether to approve this treatment: sure, it has risks, but it might crowd out the much more dangerous home treatment.

Tornagrain New Town

Tornagrain New Town is a major new housing development outside Inverness in Scotland, not far from the Culloden Battlefield.

The style is what would be called in America "New Urbanism," but in Britain it's more like "New Villagism." The idea is to recreate the geometry and feel of small town life, instead of anonymous suburbs spreading indefinitely in every direction. The eventual plan is for a community of 12,000 people.

The owner and developer of Tornagrain is the Earl of Moray, and one of the big promoters of this kind of development is Prince Charles. Communities like this are the solution being pushed by the British old guard to problems like the housing shortage and the loneliness and alienation of modern life.

I doubt charming towns are really the solution to modernity's spiritual woes, but, hey, it can't hurt to live in a pretty place.

The town will have a range of prices; this is a block of flats where a 2-bedroom can be had for £137,000, or $175,000. Prices for the town houses seem to start around £200,000 and probably go up quite a bit from there.

I learned about this from the blog of designer Ben Pentreath, who works on the project. Pentreath's blog is a fascinating look at the British elite, people who have flats in London and country places with fabulous gardens, meet their chums for lunch at the Duke of Cambridge, admire restored 1950s Bentleys and Morris Minors, tour estates with the owner, who is referred to by a title like "the indomitable Zara", as guide, and generally wallow as their fabulous Britishness.

I have a strongly ambivalent relationship with these people. On the one hand I love their gardens and their houses, and I share with them a passion for preserving Britain's historic buildings and landscapes. On the other hand their devotion to Victorian landscapes seems to ignore the basic economic realities of both Victorian times, when these landscapes were maintained by badly paid semi-serfs and the nation had to import most of its food, and our own, when the whole apparatus must be constantly subsidized by cash flows from London and the rest of global capitalism. This goes back at least to the eighteenth century, when the gentry began marrying the daughters of rich merchants or Jamaican sugar planters, and continues to this day; I read at least once every year about an amazing historic house restored by a new owner who made a pile of money is some kind of stock speculation.

And, really, what does this kind of small Britain nostalgia have for most of its inhabitants, or the world's? Tornagrain looks like a great place for 12,000 people to live, but in Britain millions of people live in crappy flats, many in dangerous towers like the one that burned in London a few years ago; not much hope we'll be able to house them in villages. Nor is there much hope we'll be able to feed 7 billion using Victorian methods. Sometimes the whole back-traditional-farming-and-traditional-communities thing feels like a fad for a few rich people. But I suppose it's too much to ask that the Earl of Moray would solve all our problems, and at least he has provided some housing within the reach of ordinary working folks. So I will let this be what it is, a housing development prettier and better-thought-out than most others, and give thanks that someone with power cares about preserving the landscape that much of Britain a wonderful place.

The Mini Terracotta Army

Chinese archaeologists recently excavated a tomb from around 100 BC that contained a mini version of the Qin Shi Huang's terracotta army.

The tomb is believed to be that of Liu Hong, a prince of Qi, a  son of Emperor Wu (reign 141–87 B.C.) who died young. The tomb is near the city of Linzi in Shandong Province.

Sadly my source does not say how big the figurines are, but the tallest model watchtower is 140 cm, or 4 feet 7 inches, so perhaps about a foot.

Coming Together on Criminal Justice Reform

Criminal justice reform, with the aim of getting less dangerous convicts out of prison and thus off the public dole, has been gaining strength across the nation since Texas enacted a major reform in 2007. The cause is not hard to seek: the great decline in crime we have seen since the peak in the mid 1980s. People are less afraid and therefore more willing to consider the downside of locking them up and throwing away the key. Change has been pushed from both from civil libertarians on the left and two groups on the right, fiscal hawks and Evangelicals who have invested heavily in prison ministries. Post-Ferguson exposés of the ways some local jurisdictions use fines and the threat of jail time to extort money from poor citizens have also played a part, especially in moves to reduce bail for non-murderous offenders.

Now even President Trump is on board:

President Trump threw his support behind a substantial revision of the nation’s prison and sentencing laws on Wednesday, opening a potential path to enacting the most significant changes to the criminal justice system in a generation. . . .

“In many respects, we’re getting very much tougher on the truly bad criminals — of which, unfortunately, there are many,” said Mr. Trump, flanked by Republican lawmakers and law enforcement officials. “But we’re treating people differently for different crimes. Some people got caught up in situations that were very bad.”

The key elements of this reform are using separate drug courts or other means to keep drug users out of prison, and reducing or eliminating mandatory minimum sentences. This is where I have always put my own emphasis. Criminals are not all the same, but mandatory minimums required judges to lock up even those who didn't seem dangerous for very long terms. Legislators cannot take the differences between people into account, so instead of trying to specify the appropriate sentence in advance they should leave it up to judges who have actually seen the defendant and reviewed the case to do that. Obviously judges will make mistakes, but it seems to me that leaving open the possibility for clemency for hard luck cases is important to achieving anything like real justice.

Markenfield Hall

Markenfield Hall is a fourteenth-century manor house in the West Riding of Yorkshire, not far from Fountains Abbey.

Archaeology suggests that the oldest stonework in the castle dates to the mid 1200s. But the main episode of buiding took place in the 1310s when the manor belonged to John de Markenfield, a canon of Ripon Cathedral and a high official under Edward II. Markenfield obtained the necessary royal license to fortify ("crenellate") his house in 1310.

The Markenfields remained an important family of the borders for 250 years; a Markenfield fought for Richard III at Bosworth Field and another for Henry V at Agincourt.

The Markenfields finally fell in the sixteenth century because of their devotion to Catholicism. They joined the Pilgrimage of Grace, a Catholic rebellion against Henry VIII in 1536. One of the leaders was Robert Aske, brother-in law to the Sir Thomas Markenfield of the time. Henry suppressed the revolt and Aske lost his head at Clifford's Tower in York, but the Markenfields survived.

They did not learn the lesson, however. Displayed in the Markenfield chapel is a replica of a famous relic, a banner bearing the Five Wounds of Christ, which in the sixteenth century had become a Catholic symbol. On 20 November 1569 a crowd of northern Catholics gathered in the courtyard of Markenfield, heard mass, and then, flying the five wounds banner, set out for London to cast down Elizabeth and place Mary Queen of Scots on the throne in her stead. This revolt was simply called The Rising. It, too, was defeated, and this time Sir Thomas de Markenfield fled the country with a price on his head. The estate was seized for High Treason and granted to one of Elizabeth's favorites, Thomas Egerton, Master of the Rolls.

Egerton never lived at Markenfield, and for the next two hundred years the manor was leased to tenants. In 1761 Fletcher Norton, 1st Baron Grantley bought the house, replaced the roof of the Great Hall and generally put the place in order again.

The house has descended through the family to the 7th Baron Grantley, who began a restoration and modernization project in 1980. Today the house still belongs to the family but it is open to the public for two months a year.

It is also advertised as a wedding venue under the name of Moated Medieval Manor House Markenfield Hall.

What a remarkable place, and to think that despite being an expert of sorts on the reign of Edward II I never heard of it until today.

Simone Weil

There is no area in our minds reserved for superstition, such as the Greeks had in their mythology; and superstition, under cover of an abstract vocabulary, has revenged itself by invading the entire realm of thought. Our science is like a store filled with the most subtle intellectual devices for solving the most complex problems, and yet we are almost incapable of applying the elementary principles of rational thought. In every sphere, we seem to have lost the very elements of intelligence: the ideas of limit, measure, degree, proportion, relation, comparison, contingency, interdependence, interrelation of means and ends. To keep to the social level, our political universe is peopled exclusively by myths and monsters; all it contains is absolutes and abstract entities. This is illustrated by all the words of our political and social vocabulary: nation, security, capitalism, communism, fascism, order, authority, property, democracy. We never use them in phrases such as: There is democracy to the extent that... or: There is capitalism in so far as... The use of expressions like "to the extent that" is beyond our intellectual capacity. Each of these words seems to represent for us an absolute reality, unaffected by conditions, or an absolute objective, independent of methods of action, or an absolute evil; and at the same time we make all these words mean, successively or simultaneously, anything whatsoever. Our lives are lived, in actual fact, among changing, varying realities, subject to the casual play of external necessities, and modifying themselves according to specific conditions within specific limits; and yet we act and strive and sacrifice ourselves and others by reference to fixed and isolated abstractions which cannot possibly be related either to one another or to any concrete facts. In this so-called age of technicians, the only battles we know how to fight are battles against windmills.

Revolution does not necessarily correspond to a higher, more intense and clearer awareness of the social problem. The opposite is true. . . . In the torment of civil war, principles lose all common measure with realities.

More here.

In Japan, the Kei Truck Garden Contest

Not sure how this started, but it is now an official event sponsored by the Japan Federation of Landscape Contractors. Like bonsai gardens on wheels. Fascinating.

Amazon in Queens and Arlington, Virginia

In announcing that it will create major corporate centers in Queens, New York and Arlington, Virginia, each with 25,000 employees, Jeff Bezos said,

These two locations will allow us to attract world-class talent that will help us to continue inventing for customers for years to come.

The rationale for this whole exercise was that Amazon plans to grow at a rate that they think will outstrip the supply of skilled labor in Seattle, and the deciding factor in picking these locations was that they think they can hire thousands of programmers and other professionals to work in them. (Well, there was also the billions in tax incentives, but mostly likely all the cities and states on their list made similar offers.)

And this explains why around the world mega-cities continue to swell while smaller cities languish. Companies headquartered in smaller cities -- Kellogg's, Corning -- have terrible trouble recruiting executives, largely because executives are married to other professionals who can't find jobs in a small place. The way for big corporations to thrive is to locate themselves where there are lot of educated workers to choose from.

Greek Pots

From a recent sale at Gorny und Mosch. I particularly like this lekythos – a vessel used to pour funeral libations which was then usually put in the tomb, which is why we have so many.