READER SAM’S REFERENCE, in a comment on the previous post, to the biblical story of Adam naming the animals lends thrust to Tallis’ argument on—for lack of a better term—the metaphysics of pointing. // The Genesis narrative distills into a simple, vivid anecdote the substanceN of Raymond Tallis’ thesis in Michelangelo’s Finger. The mythical Adam could hardly identify every beast of the field or fowl of the air. He did not emerge from the dust of creation a systematic taxonomist on the qui vive for all that tagging and classifying. Continue Reading

Michelangelo’s Finger

Maureen Mullarkey

May 6, 2011

ORDAINED ART APPRECIATORS are, in the main, a predictable tribe. Often enough, the freshest and most intellectually satisfying comments on art from outside the expected punditariat. Michelangelo’s Finger: An Exploration of Everyday Transcendence, by Raymond Tallis, is an engaging, erudite excursion into what it means to be human. Tallis, a professor emeritus of geriatric medicine at the University of Manchester and one of Britain’s finest public intellectuals, offers as a guide the human forefinger. He does so with all the wit and eloquence of the poet, novelist and philosopher that he is also. Continue Reading

Artist as Seer

Maureen Mullarkey

May 4, 2011

THE FLATTERING NOTION—fallacy, really—that artists see more than other, unpoetic, people comes to us from the Romantics. The German brand (Hegel, Schelling, Hölderlin, Schiller, Fichte and no small bit of Goethe) has been particularly virulent. Up to a point, of course, that bit about seeing has some merit. Down the centuries, artists were better than bakers, butchers, masons, et alia, at distinguishing one shade of gray from another, arranging colors in pleasing relation to each other, and gauging subtleties of line and hue. Continue Reading

A Glad Easter

Maureen Mullarkey

April 24, 2011

THE RESURRECTION, from Matthias Grünwald’s Isenheim altarpiece, is the single most striking image of the event on which Christianity is founded. It dramatizes the center of the Christian mystery—and, correspondingly, the mystery of man. Neil MacGregor—art historian, director of the British Museum, and man of faith—responds to drama of the painting in his Seeing Salvation. (Published by Yale University Press, the book accompanied his 2000 television series by the same name.) Standing in front of the altar, he says this:

Grünwald shows us what, according to the Gospels, nobody saw.

Modigliani: Middling Modernist & Peacock

Maureen Mullarkey

April 11, 2011

“I WANT A SHORT LIFE BUT A FULL ONE.” Amedeo Modigliani got his wish. In 1920, at age thirty-five, he died, toothless, of tubercular meningitis in a Parisian pauper’s hospital. It was a sordid end to a confident stride into the trenches of la vie maudit. The romance of heroic nonconformity, vital to the cult of bohemia, absorbed the squalor and blessed it. Léopold Zborowski, Modigliani’s first dealer, declared him “made for the stars.” Clement Greenberg, writing under the pseudonym C. Continue Reading

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More on the Pointing Finger

Michelangelo’s Finger

Artist as Seer

A Glad Easter

Modigliani: Middling Modernist & Peacock

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