How Times Flies!
It seems just the day before the day before yesterday that the Antigone team was scrambling together to launch our website into the world, but it was, in fact, four years ago. How ฯแฝฐ ฯฮฌฮฝฯฮฑ แฟฅฮตแฟ! How tempus fugit! How Fortune spins her wheel. Well, now that we have several birthdays under our belt, we don’t need to make a song and dance as each annual cycle whizzes by, so we will keep this brief.
We’re nearing 450 articles on the website, and some 1.5 millions words about myriad aspects of the Greco-Roman worlds and how they have shaped subsequent millennia, illustrated by nearly 5,000 images. All of this is freely available, and continues to welcome in readers from every country the world over. Our top twelve countries are predictable enough (United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Spain, France, Greece, Poland) but we are thrilled to have a keen audience in countries such as Brazil, the Philippines, Turkey and Japan. We’re so grateful to all who read our articles, share them with friends, discuss them in teaching, and use them to propel their own curiosity. To all who have been kind to, and supportive of, the project over the last four years, we give our most warm and sincere thanks.
230 writers, some based at 62 different universities around the world, and some drawn from all walks โ and stages โ of life have written for the website. And, until recently, they did so for free, purely out of love for our shared subject. Now that we are under the aegis of the Pharos Foundation, we can at last pay people a modest sum, and we look with great excitement as to what lies ahead.
Back to work, then, but not before a little poetry and art:
Antigone, Thebanus honor, virtutis acumeN,
Tu tantum nobis das generosa bonI:
Gaudia nunc quinto fer plura, precamur, in annO
Ne careat forsan viribus AntigonE.
Antigone, glory of Thebes, pinnacle of virtue, you nobly give us so much good: now, in our fifth year, bring us more joy, we pray, lest Antigone somehow run out of steam.
Michelangelo knew enough Latin to get through a contract or liturgical text, but he was never comfortable reading ancient literature. He learnt what he knew about Classics through talking at length with some of the the most learned men of the Renaissance: as a teenager he was friendly with Politian, one of the greatest philologists of all time, and Marsilio Ficino, the neo-Platonic philosopher who translated Plato into Latin.
Instead of books, Michelangelo studied antiquities, and knew them so well that by the age of 21 he could effortlessly produce convincing forgeries of Roman sculpture (an early patron, Cardinal Riario, was certainly fooled).
Michelangelo’s immersion in the visual and physical culture of the Classical world was so thorough that you often cannot tell where his imitation of the ancients ends and his own original inspiration begins. No wonder he became a ‘classic’ in his own lifetime: the only way to do so is to drink deeply from ancient springs. And speaking of drink:
‘The children’s bacchanal’ is one of a series of drawings that Michelangelo produced for his young friend Tommaso de’ Cavalieri in 1533/4. This is a scene from a Roman sarcophagus brought to life: like so many great Renaissance artists, Michelangelo was fascinated by the little ‘putti’, ‘Cupids’, ‘erotes’, or ‘spiritelli’, which are never purely decorative, either for the Romans or their Renaissance followers. Here the ‘spiritelli’ represent the soul as it exists when untamed by reason, intellect or divine love, and is driven solely by appetites. For Neo-Platonists, drunkenness represents the unknowing captivity of the soul by the body. Here too, it isn’t simply what every parent needs at a children’s birthday party.
There is a lesson in this picture, demonstrated by at least one of the adult figures at the bottom of the frame: no matter how lightly you take your own duties, never spike your own punch. The safest Madeira is always in cake form. You worship Bacchus at your peril: be careful about the rites you observe, or your dignity might become the sacrifice.[1]
So let us party today with prudence!
Notes
| ⇧1 | At one point the drawing was lost for over a century but its fame has always endured, not least because Michelangelo’s little bacchanal circulated all over Europe in the form of engravings, whose production he must have authorised: there are good examples of such copies at, for example, the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA, USA). |
|---|