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Kenneth M. Lansing, 1925–2022:
A Voice in the Wilderness of Art Education

February 14, 2023 / Michelle Kamhi / Art Education / 11 Comments

Kenneth M. Lansing. Photo courtesy of Laura Lansing.

I first heard of Ken Lansing in 2002 at the annual convention of the National Art Education Association. In the Q&A of a session entitled “Educating the Museum Educator,” I suggested that not everything displayed in art museums nowadays truly qualifies as art. Following the session, I was approached by a colleague who introduced himself as Herman du Toit, then head of Museum Research at Brigham Young University’s Museum of Art. In response to my comment, he kindly informed me that the question of nonart being treated as art had been raised as far back as the 1970s by Kenneth Lansing in his textbook Art, Artists, and Art Education.

In that book, as I later learned, Lansing had insisted that art teachers needed to adopt a definition of art in order to “operate efficiently and avoid the production of nonart in [the] classroom.”

Though I had only recently begun to delve into the field, it was clear to me that the Lansing caveat had fallen on deaf ears. It was therefore to my considerable surprise and no small delight that just a year later an essay by him entitled “A Definition of Art” was published as an NAEA Advisory (Summer 2003). In it, he renewed his conviction that “art can and must be defined if we are to make any sense out of what we do in the classroom.” He also noted that he had presented a more detailed argument supporting that view in an article in the Journal of Aesthetic Education.1 Rather poignantly, he added: “I have received no reaction to [that] piece since it was published.” Deaf ears indeed!

The JAE article astutely identified basic flaws in the reigning philosophical claim that art could not be defined. Most important, Ken recognized that at the root of both a highly influential 1956 essay by philosopher Morris Weitz and the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein that it drew upon was the mistaken assumption that “usage can never be incorrect.” They accepted as art any avant-garde invention put forward as such, and were therefore constrained to formulate a definition that would include it—an increasingly impossible task.

In his NAEA Advisory, Ken recommended “entertain[ing] the idea that we may have assigned the words ‘work of art’ unjustifiably to certain things in the past.” He therefore advocated adopting an “honorific” definition, based on long-accepted referents. That essentially traditionalist view effectively excluded the problematic inventions of the avant-garde.

Having argued along similar lines in What Art Is, Lou Torres and I welcomed Ken as an ally, and wrote to seek his permission to reprint his Advisory article in Aristos, the online review of the arts we co-edit. Our letter to him noted that we “were struck by how closely [his] concerns regarding the subject correspond to our own.” He readily agreed, responding that learning of our work was a “breath of fresh air,” but warning: “The forces that oppose you are enormous. Art educators at all levels resist attempts at logic and clarity. I think it threatens them.”2

To borrow the memorable last line from the film Casablanca, it was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

We soon published Ken’s Advisory article in Aristos (December 2004), in slightly revised form, under the new title “Why We Need a Definition of Art”—with some supplementary material, including an open letter to colleagues. In that letter, Ken roundly castigated fellow educators for scholarly pretensions that increasingly misled them to “venture into speculations more appropriate for psychologists, sociologists, philosophers, mathematicians, psychiatrists, and politicians” while they ignored the fundamentals of art education. Though we wanted to reprint his JAE article as well, we were regrettably unable to obtain the journal’s permission.

To afford Ken a more complete sense of our viewpoint, we sent him a copy of What Art Is, and were delighted when he informed us that, having read through it twice, he agreed with virtually everything we had written.3 His one “friendly disagreement,” as he put it after reading other work by us, pertained to the place of studio art courses in the upper grades.

Most prominently, in a chapter on art education in Who Says That’s Art? (a copy of which I sent him in December 2014), I argued that past 8th grade studio art courses should be offered only as an elective. He, however, firmly believed in their value for general education. That difference notwithstanding, he lauded the book as “absolutely wonderful . . . both scholarly and readable,” and noted that my definition of art had set a “higher standard” than his own.4 A later message advised that the book was one that “every art educator should read, and read carefully.”5

In August 2021, Ken sent us a summary outline of his own thoughts about art and art education. In it, he noted the significant difference between meaningful works of representational art and essentially “decorative” abstract work, stressing that the former should be the primary focus of art education. He also cautioned against “endless boundary breaking,” as well as the moral and ethical relativism he had observed in a student of his decades ago who went on to become prominent in the field. Teachers, he held, have an obligation to promote work embodying beneficial values. Finally, he appended this kind note to Lou and me: “Even if we disagree here and there, I want you to know that I think you have made the most important contributions to art education in my lifetime.”6

Last June, I had the pleasure of sending Ken a copy of the published version of “The Lamentable Consequences of Blurring the Boundaries” (Visual Inquiry: Learning & Teaching Art, 10:2, February 2021), previously sent him in draft form. In it, I credited him for his prescient insistence on the need for teachers to define their subject. He didn’t respond, but some weeks later I was surprised by a message on my answering machine from his daughter Laura. When I phoned back, she explained that she was helping her dad make phone calls to people whose friendship he valued.

The unspoken subtext was that in his 97th year, Ken sensed that the end was near, and that this would be our last conversation. He once again expressed his keen appreciation for our work and thanked us for our friendship. I, in turn, took the opportunity to repeat our gratitude for the interest and support he had given us over the years. Rarely does one have the chance for such closure, and it is a testimony to the calibre of Ken’s character that he had made it possible.

A week before Thanksgiving last year, Laura Lansing wrote to let me know that Ken had died on September 21st. I told her of my intention to post this tribute to him and asked if there were any information she would especially like me to include. In addition to noting that Ken had been a devoted husband and father, she reported that he was especially proud of having received the NAEA’s Manuel Barkan Memorial Award.

Conceived in honor of Manuel Barkan, the award is presented to an individual who, through published work in either Art Education or Studies in Art Education, has contributed a “product of scholarly merit to the field.” Ken’s winning article was “The Effect of Drawing on the Development of Mental Representations” (Studies in Art Education, Vol. 22, No. 3 [1981]). Reporting on a series of drawing exercises done with kindergarten classes, it dealt with an important cognitive aspect of a foundational skill in art education, and presents a marked contrast to the latest Barkan Award article: “Art Education Beyond Anthropocentricism: The Question of Nonhuman Animals in Contemporary Art and Its Education,” by Mira Kallio-Tavin in the same NAEA journal.

According to the University of Georgia, where Kallio-Tavin is a “Distinguished Professor of Art,” her award-winning article

recognizes current problems in human co-existence with nonhuman lives and speaks to the urgent needs of environmental, ecological, ethical, and social justice concerns of current times. The publication develops and decenters humanist-centered philosophy in art education through posthumanist lenses, introducing critical animal studies to the field of art education.

Attempting to unpack that turgid account would go far beyond my scope here,7 but it surely calls to mind Ken’s observations quoted above about scholarly pretensions that increasingly lure art educators into arcane speculations while they ignore the fundamentals of art education.

More telling evidence of that point is the sort of work Kallio-Tavin regards as art. Here is one example:

Joseph Beuys explored the human separation from other species and made a point on human-centeredness in his 1974 performance, I Like America and America Likes Me, in which he spent 3 days in the René Block Gallery in New York with a wild coyote.

Whether one regards that bizarre example of “performance” as a sincere expression of some sort or rather as the product of either an artworld charlatan or a deranged mind, it is not a work of art, properly speaking. It is instead an example of postmodernist anti-art.8

An award-winning “distinguished professor of art” should surely recognize the difference. Her failure to do so is a clear indication of the extent to which nonart is now the subject of art education, fully realizing the fear Ken Lansing so presciently sounded decades ago.

Notes

  1. “Is a Definition of Art Necessary for the Teaching of Art?,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 14, No. 3 (July 1980), pp. 51-58. ↩
  2. Letter from Kenneth Lansing to Louis Torres and me, November 19, 2004. ↩
  3. Email message from Ken to Lou Torres and me, March 23, 2005. ↩
  4. Email message from Ken Lansing to me, December 23, 2014. ↩
  5. Email message from Ken Lansing to me, March 19, 2017.  His assessment presents quite a contrast to the deprecating review posted on the book’s Amazon.com page by Paul Duncum, a professor of art education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign—in the same department where Ken had taught for more than two decades until his retirement in 1986. ↩
  6. Email message from Ken to Lou and me, August 1, 2021. ↩
  7. Yet I cannot refrain from observing that the very goal of “decenter{ing} human-centered philosophy” strikes me as absurd. Every living species and organism is necessarily self-centered for its own survival. What is remarkable about human beings is not our “human-centeredness” (which is natural and not at all blameworthy) but the extent to which we consider, and accommodate to, the needs of other organisms in our frame of reference. ↩
  8. On the distinction between art and anti-art, see “Understanding Contemporary Art,” Aristos, August 2012. ↩
abstract art, anti-art, definition of art, Joseph Beuys, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Manuel Barkan Memorial Award, Mira Kallio-Tavin, Morris Weitz, National Art Education Association, Paul Duncum, posthumanism, relativism

Art Education Update

August 20, 2022 / Michelle Kamhi / Art and Politics, Art Education / 2 Comments
Chardin - Young Student Drawing

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin, Young Student Drawing (ca. 1738), oil on panel, 21 x 17.1 cm, Kimbell Art Museum.

Though I’ve been silent on the topic of art education in these pages for nearly two years, I’ve frequently weighed in on it elsewhere. Since those articles would no doubt be of interest to my readers here, what follows is a brief summary of their genesis and content.

Owing to space limitations, “Art History Gone Amuck” (previously noted)—published in the Fall 2020 issue of Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars—omitted a crucial aspect, which I covered in a subsequent AQ article: “The Lamentable Politicization of Art” (Winter 2020).

That was followed by “Poisoning the Well of Art Education” in the same journal (Fall 2021). It deconstructed the “anti-racist” agenda of the National Art Education Association—an ultimately destructive agenda inspired by critical race theory’s bogus claim that the United States is “systemically racist.”

The predominantly negative response to that article by NAEA officials and members prompted me to write “Confronting Woke Groupthink in Art Education,” just published in the Summer 2022 issue of Academic Questions. It is a slightly revised version of an article by the same title that appeared online in the NAS blog in December of last year.

In another vein, I was invited to contribute an essay to a symposium on art education in the British journal Visual Inquiry (August 2021). Entitled “The lamentable consequences of blurring the boundaries,” it deplores the open-ended concept of art that now prevails among art teachers as in the artworld at large. And it credits Kenneth M. Lansing for being the only prominent art educator to warn against such an open-ended view decades ago. (His comment on “Woke Groupthink in Art Education” [scroll to end of article] is also significant.) As I will observe in a response to the symposium to be published in Visual Inquiry, many of the other contributions exhibited the deplorable intersectional groupthink I had written about in Academic Questions.

“Should We Normalize Sexual Deviance?” (American Greatness, June 5, 2022) does not deal directly with art education. But it responds to a suggestion made by a high school art teacher during a session at the 2022 NAEA convention. “Canary in the Coal Mine of America’s Future” (American Greatness, August 21, 2021) is also tangentially relevant to art education, since it debunks crucial assumptions about immigration that are promoted by many art teachers, as I noted in the Wall Street Journal more than a decade ago.

Given such trends, one may well conclude that what passes for “art education” today is more deleterious than beneficial.

critical race theory, Kenneth M. Lansing, National Art Education Association, National Association of Scholars, Visual Inquiry

Honoring America’s Promissory Note

July 4, 2022 / Michelle Kamhi / General / 4 Comments

A Fourth of July message from Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University, rightly emphasizes the need for every generation of Americans to engage in thoughtful, informed reflection on, and debate about, our founding principles. His message focuses on the Constitution but, given its timing, it is of course intended to apply to the Declaration of Independence as well. Those magnificent documents contain what Martin Luther King, Jr., memorably referred to as the “promissory note” of equal liberty that all Americans fall heir to and are obligated to work toward in word and deed.

An article I wrote last year is relevant here. Entitled “Canary in the Coal Mine of America’s Future,” it offers a defense of the melting pot ideal inspired by our founding documents. Honoring those documents requires remembering what they actually stand for, which is too often obscured by America’s critics in today’s media and classrooms. In that connection, it is also worth reading “Frederick Douglass Didn’t Hate America, and Neither Should You,” by Angel Eduardo, on the Substack page of the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism.

Heartfelt wishes for a Happy Fourth!

education, Frederick Douglass, July 4, Martin Luther King Jr.

Debunking Jasper Johns

January 31, 2022 / Michelle Kamhi / Art criticism, Art History / 16 Comments

Jasper Johns - Racing ThoughtsJasper Johns: Mind/Mirror—a mammoth two-part show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Philadelphia Museum of Art through February 13, 2022—is the most comprehensive retrospective ever devoted to Johns’s work.

What entitles him to an exhibition of such unprecedented scope? In the Whitney’s exalted view (generally shared by the artworld mainstream):

Johns’s groundbreaking work sent shock waves through the art world when it was first shown in the late 1950s, and he has continued to challenge new audiences—and himself—over a career spanning more than sixty-five years. . . . [His] early use of common objects and motifs, language, and inventive materials and formats upended conventional notions of what an artwork is and can be.

Circumstances have kept me from visiting the exhibition in person. But I know enough about Johns and his work to suspect that I would have found it mind-numbing in the extreme. Because I subscribe to the old-fashioned idea that art needs to do more than challenge prior notions of what art is.

In lieu of an exhibition review, therefore, I cull here some of my previous thoughts about Johns and his ill-founded artworld repute.

To begin, here’s what I wrote in Who Says That’s Art? (links are added here):

The pointlessness openly admitted to by [Robert] Rauschenberg also characterizes the work of his younger colleague Jasper Johns. Typical works by Johns featured in a 2008 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum included such banalities as Coat Hanger II and Flashlight, both from 1960. Johns first achieved fame in the 1950s, with paintings of flags and targets. Regarding his choice of these pictorially unpromising subjects, he told Time magazine: “[P]ainting a picture of an American flag . . . took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows.”1 On another occasion he explained: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look for it. . . . I feel that what I am doing is quite literal.”2 And another: “[Such subjects] are just the forms . . . which I have chosen to limit and describe space.”3

Nor do Johns’s notebooks suggest any deeper meaning or thought. Among their aimless jottings are the following: “Put a lot of paint & a wooden ball or other object on a board. Push to the other end of the board. Use this in a painting.” And “Take a canvas. / Put a mark on it. / Put another mark on it.”

What Johns and Rauschenberg did is in no significant way comparable to what true artists have always done. As their own words attest, they made no attempt to embody meaning intelligibly. Instead, they were engaged in what my grandmother might have referred to as potchkeeing around in the studio. As translated by Leo Rosten in The Joys of Yiddish, that apt term means “To fuss or ‘mess around’ inefficiently and inexpertly.” One of Rosten’s sentences illustrating the word’s proper use fits perfectly here: “He potchkees around with paint and they call him a painter.”

In “Modernism, Postmodernism, or Neither?,” I had previously cited Johns’s inane sketchbook jottings and further observed:

Notwithstanding the mindlessness of such an approach to the creation of art, the head of the prestigious Wildenstein art gallery in New York—a gallery famed for its handling of Old Master paintings—recently referred to Johns as today’s “greatest living artist.” Surely a sign of just how precipitously the artworld has declined from any meaningful standard!

Also indicative of the artworld folly regarding Johns’s work was this brief note by Louis Torres and me in the January 2004 issue of Aristos:

When the expanded and renovated Museum of Modern Art in New York reopens next year, one of the new acquisitions you will have a chance to see is a drawing by Jasper Johns entitled Diver (1962–63)—“one of the most important works on paper of the 20th century,” according to the ever-credulous Carol Vogel of the New York Times. At nearly seven feet tall and six feet wide [!], the work is said to be worth over 10 million dollars. According to John Elderfield, the museum’s chief curator of painting and sculpture, it is “the most profound and intense work of art that Johns has created in any medium.” Purportedly alluding to novelist Hart Crane’s suicide by drowning in 1932, the drawing was a study for the painting of the same name. Just in case you can’t make out much from Johns’s inept scrawl, here is Vogel’s description: “Drawn on brown paper with charcoal, chalk, pastel, and probably watercolor, the work abstractly suggests a diver in motion, showing two sets of hands, one touching and pointing down as though preparing to dive and the other coming back up as if the figure were rising.”

Which led us to ask: “What?”

On the mental somersaults engaged in by critics who strive to find meaning in Johns’s inane work, I noted the following in Bucking the Artworld Tide:

In suggesting a possible lesson for a high school art class studying American painting after World War II, [Arthur] Efland unquestioningly accepts a highly dubious interpretation of a work by Jasper Johns. He approves the notion disseminated by the critic Robert Hughes (in his televised American Visions series) that the “submerged text of Johns’s target paintings connects to the stresses of Cold War America.” In addition, he accepts Hughes’s claim that Johns’s Target with Four Faces (1955) may also relate to the sense of personal paranoia that Johns, a homosexual, probably felt in a period when homosexuality was thought to have (as Hughes put it) “secret affinities with Communism.”

Such interpretations fly in the face of everything Johns has ever said about his work, however. To judge from his own repeated statements, his creative choices were arrived at casually, the product more of whim and happenstance than of paranoiac feelings of any kind. On his use of flags and targets as subjects, for instance, he told Time magazine in 1959: “[P]ainting a picture of an American flag . . . took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets—things the mind already knows.” He told another interviewer: “My primary concern is visual form. The visual meaning may be discovered afterward—by those who look for it. . . . I feel that what I am doing is quite literal.” And another: “[Such subjects] are just the forms that interest me and which I have chosen to limit and describe space.” Finally, Leo Steinberg, the art historian who first put Johns on the artworld map, has reported: “I . . . once ask[ed] why he had inserted these plaster casts [in the target painting], and his answer was, naturally, that some of the casts happened to be around in the studio.” As for why Johns cut off the masks just under the eyes, he told Steinberg: “They wouldn’t have fitted into the boxes if I’d left them whole.”4 So much for paranoia—Cold War or homophobic.

I rest my case.

Notes

  1. Jasper Johns, quoted in “His Heart Belongs to Dada,” Time, May 4, 1959, 58. Johns added: “A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.” ↩
  2. Jasper Johns, quoted in Selden Rodman, The Insiders: Rejection and Rediscovery of Man in the Arts of our Time (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1960), Ch. 6. ↩
  3. Jasper Johns, quoted from Milwaukee Journal (June 19, 1960) in Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews, ed. by Kirk Varnedoe (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1996), 82. ↩
  4. Leo Steinberg, “Jasper Johns: The First Seven Years of His Art,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972), 35, 37, 32. ↩
Jasper Johns, Leo Steinberg, meaningless "art", Robert Hughes

Delving into an Incomparable Work of Renaissance Portraiture

October 8, 2021 / Michelle Kamhi / Art History / 2 Comments

The double portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and Battista Sforza by Piero della Francesca in the Uffizi Gallery, Florence, is an intriguing masterpiece by one of the greatest painters of the Italian Renaissance.

Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro - Piero della Francesca

Portraits of Battista Sforza and Federico da Montefeltro, ca. 1473–1475, by Piero della Francesca. Oil on wood. 19 in. x 13 in. per panel. Uffizi Gallery. (Public Domain)

Most familiar to art lovers are its superb profile portraits of two notable early Renaissance personages. But it also comprises, on the back of the portrait panels, uniquely captivating allegorical scenes, representing each of them in a triumphal procession, above a simulated parapet bearing a Latin inscription.

Triumph of Federico da Montefeltro

Triumph of Federico da Montefeltro, by Piero della Francesca. ca.1473–1475. Oil on wood. 19 in. x 13 in. Uffizi Gallery. (PD-US)

Triumph of Battista Sforza

Triumph of Battista Sforza, by Piero della Francesca. ca. 1473–1475. Oil on wood. 19 in. x 13 in. Uffizi Gallery. (PD-US)

Though now displayed in a rigid modern frame, the work was originally designed as a portable folding diptych (two-panel painting), hinged to fold with the allegorical scenes on the outside. Thus it was no doubt intended for intimate personal reflection rather than for public display.

Despite the diptych’s artistic quality and distinctive content, no documents have as yet shed light on its genesis. Since Federico was a highly erudite patron of the arts, and Piero is known to have spent time in Urbino during the period leading up to the likely date of the diptych, it has generally been assumed that Federico commissioned the work himself.

In-depth consideration of the work’s imagery and inscriptions in the light of key biographical information about the subjects casts serious doubt on that long-standing assumption, however. It also suggests a much more interesting origin, as I will point out below.

First, a little about the couple represented in the diptych.

Who Were These People?

Federico da Montefeltro (1422–1482) and Battista Sforza (1446–1472) were the count and countess of Urbino, a hill town in the Marches region of eastern Central Italy. The Uffizi Gallery website erroneously refers to them as the “duke and duchess of Urbino.” Since Battista died two years before Federico (often spelled Federigo) was elevated to the dukedom, she never became duchess of Urbino.1

Federico was the greatest of all the Renaissance “condottieri” (commanders for hire)—not for his military prowess alone but for his creation of a ducal court second to none in cultural development and refinement. Baldassare Castiglione’s classic Book of the Courtier dubbed him “the light of Italy.”2

Battista—Federico’s second wife—was a scion of the powerful Sforza dynasty centered in Milan. Classically educated and schooled in the formal duties of court life from an early age, she was a remarkably fit consort for Federico, though 24 years his junior. Not yet 14 when they married, she bore him no fewer than seven children and capably managed their domain during his frequent absences in the pursuit of military campaigns.

Piero’s Depiction

Both Federico and Battista were widely praised in their day for their virtuous qualities and their benevolence as rulers. Piero’s depiction of them amply reflects such nobility of character, showing them in dignified profile high above a landscape backdrop suggestive of their domain.

Clemente medal of Federico da Montefeltro

Medal of Federico da Montefeltro, by Clemente da Urbino. 1468. (Saiko/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

Comparison with other portraits of Federico, both earlier and later, reveals the extent to which Piero idealized and refined the battered warrior’s features to suggest dignity and probity. A telling contrast is the homely countenance shown in a medal by Clemente da Urbino dated 1468. Though probably a few years earlier than the Piero portrait, it lacks the vigor of the later depiction.

Less is known about Battista’s actual appearance. But a striking aspect of Piero’s depiction of her is her extreme pallor compared to Federico’s sanguine complexion. While it may simply be due to conceptions of feminine beauty in that era, it has also been interpreted as indicating that she was no longer living when the portrait was painted.

Significantly, the pairing of such profile portraits with allegorical scenes on their reverse is unique among extant paintings. It was characteristic of commemorative medals dating back to antiquity, however, and thus endows the work with a decidedly monumental quality.

The Allegorical Triumphs

The allegorical scenes on the back of the portraits are especially rich, both stylistically and iconographically, and their meaning is enhanced by Latin inscriptions on the simulated architectural parapets below them.

Their iconography draws on a long and complex tradition harking back to Roman triumphs in celebration of major military victories.

Jean-Guillaume_Moitte_-_Scene_from_the_Arch_of_Titus

Jean-Guillaume Moitte’s reconstruction (ca. 1791) of the Triumph of Titus panel from the ancient Arch of Titus, Rome. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. (Public Domain)

That tradition had been greatly enriched by a series of allegorical poems penned in the 14th century by the early Italian poet Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch). In contrast to the Roman military triumphs, Petrarch’s Triumphs were allegories of philosophic and moral abstractions: Love, Chastity, Death, Fame, Time, and Eternity. Piero’s luminous pictorial triumphs contain elements from both the classical and the Petrarchan traditions. Federico’s triumphal car is drawn by a team of white horses, as was customary for victorious commanders in antiquity. Like them, he is also crowned by a winged personification of Victory.

In addition, Federico is accompanied by four allegorical figures, seated at the front of his car. They differ from those of Petrarch, however, instead representing the four cardinal virtues of the Catholic faith, which also had roots in ancient Greek philosophy. They were Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance—attributes especially relevant to leadership.

In contrast, Battista’s triumph represents the three theological virtues, which were generally regarded as especially relevant to the feminine sphere. They are Faith, Hope, and Charity. Most important here is the figure of Charity, who sits at the forefront of the car holding a pelican.

That attribute has particular significance, as it was not generally employed in secular contexts. Because the pelican was believed to pierce its breast to feed its young with its own blood, it had come to symbolize Christ’s sacrifice for mankind. As we shall see, it bore poignant relevance to Battista.

Next to Charity is the personification of Faith, holding a chalice and a cross. Standing behind Battista and facing toward the viewer is the figure of Hope. The other standing figure, garbed in gray with her back turned to us, may represent a nun of the Clarissan order, with which Battista had close personal ties.

As in Petrarch’s Triumph of Chastity, Battista’s triumphal car is drawn by unicorns, emblematic of Chastity, further suggesting her virtuous character.

The Latin Inscriptions

Important clues to the date and genesis of the diptych are offered by the prominent transcriptions below the triumphal scenes. Federico’s inscription clearly alludes, in the present tense, to his greatness as a commander. Rendered in English it reads:

The famous one is drawn in glorious triumph
Whom, equal to the supreme age-old captains,
The fame of his excellence fitly celebrates,
As he holds his scepter.

In contrast, Battista’s inscription begins by referring to her in the past tense.

She who retained modesty in good fortune
Now flies through all the mouths of men
Adorned with the praise of her great husband’s deeds.

Moreover, the phrase “flies through all the mouths of men” echoes lines that the Latin poet Ennius had penned as his epitaph:

Let no one honor me with tears or on my ashes weep. Why?
I fly living through the mouths of men.

Made famous by the more eminent Latin writer Cicero—who quoted them in his philosophic meditations on death—the epitaph of Ennius was taken to mean that the fame of a virtuous person extends beyond death.

The clear implication of Battista’s inscription, therefore, is that she was no longer living when the diptych was created.

Who Commissioned This Remarkable Work?

In his 2014 biography of Piero della Francesca, James R. Banker argues (based in part on the Latin transcriptions) that the diptych was painted “soon after Battista’s death,” and that it was commissioned by Federico “to memorialize his wife and their marriage.”3

While I agree about the date, I have long believed that Federico’s commissioning the diptych would have been incompatible with the tragic circumstances surrounding Battista’s death. Let me summarize the main events here.

When Battista died, in early July 1472, Federico had just returned home following his most celebrated military campaign. On behalf of the Medici rulers of Florence, he had suppressed a rebellion by the city of Volterra, a mineral-rich Florentine tributary. In gratitude, the city of Florence had granted him the rare tribute of a live triumph, to which Piero’s pictorial triumph may well allude.

Equally important, in January of that year Battista had at last given birth to the couple’s only son and heir, Guidobaldo—after 11 years of marriage, during which she had borne at least six daughters. The death of his young wife so soon after that joyous event inspired intense mourning on Federico’s part, and an outpouring of sympathy throughout Italy.

To compound the tragedy, it was reported that Battista had prayed for a son and heir worthy of her noble husband, offering her own life in return—a pledge she had now fulfilled. The pelican of Charity in her triumphal scene is a likely allusion to that sacrifice.

Given that sorrowful context, I argued decades ago in a thesis on the diptych that the verses inscribed under the triumphs “strike a jarring note.”

The proud vaunt of Federico’s inscription seems inappropriate to his grief. And the meager praise of his beloved countess, whose fame is said to derive not so much from her own virtue as from the deeds of her famous husband, is an ungenerous … final tribute; one would think that the paintings were more a monument to Federico than a commemoration of his consort. Surely this is not the most fitting memorial a bereaved husband could devise for a wife who was eulogized by all Italy.4

Consequently, I proposed that the diptych had been commissioned for Federico, not by him—as both a tribute to him and a consolation for his great loss.

As I further suggested, it is tempting to think that the donor of such a splendid gift might have been none other than the eminent patron of the arts Lorenzo de’ Medici—who would have had particular reason to honor Federico, given the crucial victory at Volterra.


This piece is based on my M.A. Thesis (about which, see “Remembering Howard McP. Davis,” For Piero’s Sake, October 20, 2020). It was originally published, without notes, in Epoch Times, September 1, 2021.


 

Notes

  1. Battista is properly referred to as “Countess” by Elaine Hoysted, for example, in “Battista Sforza, Countess of Urbino: A Privileged Status in Motherhood,” Socheolas: Limerick Student Journal of Sociology, Vol. 4(1), April 2012, 100–116. ↩
  2. Denis Mack Smith, “Federigo da Montefeltro,” in The Horizon Book of the Renaissance (American Heritage Publishing, 1961), 321-28. ↩
  3. James R. Banker, Piero della Francesca: Artist & Man (Oxford University Press, 2014), 146–51. ↩
  4. Michelle Kamhi, The Uffizi Diptych by Piero della Francesca: Its Form, Iconography, and Purpose. M.A. thesis, Hunter College, C.U.N.Y., 1970, 52. ↩
Federico da Montefeltro, Piero della Francesca, Renaissance portraiture, Uffizi diptych

Lessons on Education from Books Our Children Read

September 4, 2021 / Michelle Kamhi / Education, General / 10 Comments
Irate parents at school board meeting

Irate parents at Loudon County, VA, school board meeting. Yahoo! News.

Nearly four decades ago, I produced an educational film entitled Books Our Children Read.1 It documented a constructive approach to resolving parent-teacher conflict over education in a rural Ohio school district, at a time when such conflict was erupting in violence in other American communities.

The film focuses on the study of literature in the English curriculum. But the issues it deals with and the insights it offers are broadly pertinent to other areas of education. And they remain even more relevant today, when American schools are being torn apart by profound disparities between parental values and the “progressive” agenda of the education establishment.

As I wrote in the Study Guide to the film,

What sort of education is possible in an environment of confrontation? Can meaningful education occur if . . . parents feel that their deepest convictions and values may be undermined in the classroom? Can children caught between loyalty to family and identification with school feel other than confused?

In that connection, it is worth remembering the following observations by Thomas Jefferson, quoted in the Books Our Children Read study guide:

To compel a man to [support] the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves is sinful and tyrannical.

[I]t is better to tolerate the rare instance of a parent refusing to let his child be educated, than to shock the common feelings and ideas by the forcible . . . education of the infant against the will of the father.

I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.

Who Should Be Teaching Whom?

Recent trends have cast doubt on the assumption that education is exclusively from the top down, because those officially charged with teaching the next generation often seem alarmingly devoid of what Jefferson alluded to as “wholesome discretion.”2

With respect to the issues now roiling American schools—from transgenderism to racism—the view expressed several decades ago by Professor Allan Glatthorn, in the book Dealing with Censorship, remains especially relevant. As further noted in the film’s study guide, he rightly argued that “dialog between schools and the communities [they serve] needs to go far beyond the patronizing condescension and manipulation that too often pass for school public relations.” In his clear-sighted view:

[T]eachers need to show more acceptance and respect for values other than our own. Most of us are intellectuals who see ourselves as liberated, but too often such intellectual independence becomes distorted into a smug conviction that the traditional values of church, country, and family are childish aberrations that must be corrected.

Glatthorn’s sage advice applies equally to today’s school boards and administrators, whose heavy-handed imposition of misguided “progressive” attitudes and policies is being opposed with justified ire by the parents whose children are entrusted to their educational supervision.

Notes

  1. Readers who would like to view a clearer print of the film than that on Vimeo can search for it in libraries on WorldCat. ↩
  2. Regarding dubious ideas all too readily embraced and promoted by today’s education establishment, see “Canary in the Coal Mine of America’s Future,” American Greatness, August 21, 2021; and “Poisoning the Well of Art Education,” Academic Questions, Fall 2021. ↩
A Day No Pigs Would Die, Allan Glatthorn, conservative values, controversial literature, parents vs. teachers
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