À mon chevet: Adriatic

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

Great art should affect you physically, it should "tune us like instruments," because painting is an intensification rather than a distortion of the material world. "We must look and look and look till we live the painting and for a fleeting moment become identified with it," writes Bernard Berenson. "A good rough test is whether we feel that it is reconciling us with life." Berenson, in yet another battered, age-old paperback I own, called this "the aesthetic moment," which is "that flitting instant, so brief as to be almost timeless, when the spectator is at one with the work of art," so that he "ceases to be his ordinary self."

I feel this with Byzantine art: an art that Berenson called, in order to be exact, "medieval Hellenistic art," that is, a remnant of ancient Greece. To him, this art is "precious refulgent, monotonous," and ends around 1200 "as a gorgeous mummy case." I don't mind the monotony, and yes, there is the touch of beauty-in-death about it. But Byzantine art to me, exactly as Berenson suggests, has always been classical, in the sense that it evokes its forebears in ancient Greece. Thus, it is a fusion of East and West, and what the Adriatic is all about -- a guidepost in my journey. I keep Berenson's thoughts in mind as I enter San Vitale.

-- Robert D. Kaplan, Adriatic, p. 46

This new book came to my attention because of a review written by Prof. Thomas F. Madden for the New York Times this spring. Kaplan is a journalist who synthesizes enormous amounts of poetry, literature, history, and academic writing in a gripping narrative, as he travels from place to place around the Adriatic Sea. In search of what he calls, in his subtitle, "A concert of civilizations at the end of the Modern Age," he begins his examination of the relationship of East and West on the Italian side of that body of water, in Rimini and Ravenna, moving to the Balkans and down to Greece. According to Prof. Madden, who not coincidentally has written a new history of Venice, Kaplan errs only in glossing over La Serenissima as a focal point.

Kaplan actually makes a sort of circular journey, noting that his interest in Rimini, where the book begins, goes back to a much earlier visit to Mistra, a ruined medieval city in southern Greece, a connection to his final destination, the Greek island of Corfu. In Mistra he became interested in Georgios Gemistos Plethon, the neoplatonist scholar who visited Florence in 1439, sparking an interest in Plato and the Greek language in Cosimo de' Medici, and thus helping to light the fire of the Renaissance.

During a visit to the home of a fellow writer, Kaplan learns that Sigismondo Pandolfo Malatesta, the rather infamous condottiere and patron of the arts, stole the remains of this great humanist figure during his occupation of Mistra. Malatesta took the scholar's body back to Rimini to be buried near the Tempio Malatestiano built with his money by Leon Battista Alberti. This Malatesta is descended from the family of Paolo Malatesta, condemned with his lover, Francesca da Rimini, to the second circle of Dante's Inferno, and thus within the first few pages the book captured my attention.