Over lunch, via a vivid avuncular professor, Jane and I are revisiting the art of the Italian Renaissance. Partly this is a refresher course – we’ve seen most of these works in person; partly a salve for sore hearts – for we miss Italy, where we spent four golden years, almost as much as we love home. My fingertips tremble even to type the words “Italy” and “Renaissance” – but there’s no help for it. We can’t be two places at once: our grandchildren grow up and we grow old. We live in America – and America needs us now, if only to pace the E.R. waiting room while her health hangs in the balance.
What about the art of the Italian Renaissance moves us so? Why do we crave it as cool water from a street fountain when it’s blazing? (I’m thinking Rome again.)
The art is beautiful, yes, undeniably, whatever that means: pleasing colors, forms; startling verisimilitude. But there’s more than that – in the faces, bodies, poses, sacred and secular. These humans are like us, but better somehow: what we yearn to be. They radiate an inner light: honor is the word that comes to mind.
Where has honor fled, we wonder? It quivered still in my childhood air. The War had left us with heroes. Our President was a great man, like him or not. Certain public figures glowed. Officials who betrayed their trust resigned “in disgrace” (imagine!).
Honor – together with its requisite concomitant, shame – is no fact, an identifiable body part, but an idea, the peculiarly human notion that we can be better than we are and that if we fail in this attempt – or fail to make the attempt – we’ve let ourselves and our species down. Puppy Henry chuckles at the idea: creatures are as they are, no better or worse! Likewise Falstaff in his famous takedown:
Can honor set to a leg? no: or an arm? no: or take away the grief of a wound? no. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? no. What is honor? a word. What is in that word honor? What is that honor? air. A trim reckoning! Who hath it? he that died o' Wednesday.
Trump would echo Falstaff’s mockery if he could read. Dying in war is for losers – where’s the upside? The guy who wins is the guy who dies with most stuff.
Honor in my lifetime was slain – by prosperity and the press. Lolling fatsos don’t need honor – they’re groovy as is. Most Americans in my span feared for nothing – not for long – and wanted for nothing. Peace made us passive and dyspeptic. The press undertook to show us the grimy underbelly of heroes. The Internet accelerated the corrosion of reputations hundredfold. There were no heroes if you dug a little; we were all detestable more or less. Psychiatry and history joined in the sport of outing our hideous backstories.
In our hour to paint persons as noble invited derision as naïve: Who you kidding, mate? How sad that is. “I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true,” said Lincoln. “I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.” “True victory,” said Montaigne, “lies in your role in the conflict, not in coming through safely: it consists in the honor of battling bravely not battling through.” “But if it be a sin to covet honor,” said Shakespeare’s King Harry, “I am the most offending soul alive.”
The dream of my life is to shine in my own mind, to appear as Raphael would have painted me.