Author: Mark Hannam

Around six hundred years ago, the Florentine sculptor Donatello made a marble statue, almost two meters tall, of the Jewish prophet Habakkuk.  The statue was commissioned for a niche on the Campanile which stands adjacent to the Duomo in the centre of Florence.   Habakkuk’s large, distinctive bald head looked down on the people below with a stern gaze and disconcerting intensity.  As the authors of my history of Florentine art note, not even the enormous drapery folds, falling with such energy and grandness of scale, distract attention from the head of this prophetic orator, who appears to serve as conduit between the unfathomable and the human.  He looks a true prophet and there appears nothing ‘minor’ about his strength of his thoughts or character.

A century later, in the Lives of the Artists, Giorgio Vasari told a story that while Donatello was making this statue he became so affected by its likeness to life that he used to curse it, saying, Speak, damn you, speak!  Today, I suspect this behaviour is more likely to be read as a sign of Donatello’s eccentricity than his artistic genius, for we would think it implausible that he might seriously have believed that the stone figure he was carving could ever talk back to him, however impressive his achievement.  However, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl made an interesting observation about this story, drawing attention to the book of Habakkuk in the Old Testament, which includes God’s rebuke to those who worship idols: Woe to him who says to wood, “Come to life!”, Or to lifeless stone, “Wake up!” (Habakkuk 2: 19).  Has Vasari conflated the sculptor’s behaviour towards the statue with the warning against sin given by the prophet on whom the statue is based?  Alternatively, as Schjeldahl suggests, is there a more intriguing explanation, namely that Donatello, an artist of unfathomable intelligence, was inspired, or somehow driven, to play out in stone a spiritual danger intrinsic to art.

Continue reading “Talking statues”

There are times when, rather than discovering new and interesting things, is it good to be reminded of important things that you already know.  For me, a recent trip to the movies with my daughter was just such an occasion, as we watched A Complete Unknown, the newly released Bob Dylan biopic directed by James Mangold.  It was good, better than I had expected, and I plan to go again: there was a movie I seen onetime / I think I sat through it twice. 

The film’s title is partly a joke about the very familiarity of its subject, for the story of the nineteen-year old Dylan’s arrival in New York in 1961 and the miraculous series of songs he wrote there in his early twenties is already well known.  Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary film No Direction Home covers the same period in Dylan’s life, and both filmmakers borrow their titles from the chorus of his most famous and important song, written at that time: How does it feel / How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home / Like a complete unknown / Just like a rolling stone.

Continue reading “The unwashed phenomenon”

In parks there are more runners and in pools there are more swimmers, sales of new gym memberships are up and sales of fast food are down.  I have no data to support these claims, but intuitively they seem plausible descriptions of behavioural trends during the first half of January in London.  The start of a new year provides us all with the opportunity to reset our lives, trying a little harder to be the people we would like to be.  We want to be healthier and more focused on the important things of life.  We want to stop giving in to temptation and being distracted by ephemera.  This year, we say to ourselves, I resolve … 

By mid-February, things might seem different.  Doing what we consider to be in our long-term best interest often turns out to be more costly, more tiring, and, perhaps most importantly, less fun than just doing what seems most desirable right now, even when we know that much of the appeal of the immediate pleasure is likely to be a gross overestimation.  I have always enjoyed the saying, with regard to the drinking of cocktails:  One is good / Two is better / Three is too many / Four is not enough.  I recently came across an improved version, from Dorothy Parker: I like to have a martini / Two at the very most / After three I’m under the table / After four I’m under my host.   We all know how quickly alcohol weakens our resolve, but even for the sober among us there will be something which functions in our lives as the “third martini”, the point at which our resolve fails us and we start to do the things we know that we should not do.

Continue reading “Three martinis”

According to Matthew they came from the east, looking for a newly born king.  Neither Mark nor John say anything about the birth, whereas Luke, who does, mentions only shepherds and angels.  Traditionally they have been called wise men, and sometimes magi, a name which refers specifically to an ancient Persian priestly cast, but which has come to be used more generally to mean someone skilled in Oriental astrology and magic, which everywhere were the earliest forms of catalogued human knowledge.  Some think they might have been Zoroastrians. 

In the Western Christian tradition they were three in number primarily, it seems, because Matthew said that they brought with them three gifts, and for some reason the early Western church thought that wise Eastern men could manage one and only one present each.  In the Eastern Christian tradition they were twelve in number, which seems suspiciously like one wise man for each of the days between the date on which the birth was celebrated (25 December) and the date on which their arrival at the scene of the birth was celebrated (6 January).  Around three hundred years after they made their famous journey, the church upgraded them from magi to kings, reflecting no doubt a greater willingness among church leaders to defer to power rather than wisdom.  Around five hundred years after that, their names were first recorded in the text known as the Excerpta Latina barbari: Balthasar (from Arabia or Ethiopia), Melchior (from Persia), and Gaspar (from India). 

Continue reading “Comets”

I greatly enjoy reading long, multi-volume, immersive novels: Marcel Proust – bien sür – , Elena Ferrante, and Thomas Mann.  I also enjoy novellas, short books of fiction that might occupy around one hundred pages or less: Stefan Zweig – natürlich – , Françoise Sagan, and, again, Thomas Mann.  Novellas are not so much immersive as paddling; but, despite their brevity, at their best they clearly signal something important about life.  They have one point to make and they make it speedily.

Last year, a good friend gave me two novellas by Claire Keegan, a contemporary Irish writer.  Although I read a reasonable amount of Irish fiction, I had not come across her work previously.  When I started Small Things Like These (2022), I realised immediately that her writing was of the highest quality, as good as John McGahern (who is very, very good); and that the story she told was both difficult and important.  Subsequently, I have read two more of her books, and discovered that they each share the rare quality of great literature, the ability to capture with some precision the complexities and tensions within normal human relationships, and the moral dilemmas that arise in our everyday lives. 

Continue reading “Small things”