Borges' Library

o-shogatsu

My first impression of the Japanese New Year was of how very quiet it was. This was surprising at first, given how it is the most important holiday of the year in Japan. In the days preceding, people would return to their hometowns in great waves, emptying the cities. And as families gathered together in their homes, it was always as if the entire world had been blanketed in the hush of heavy snowfall.

The First Month-- in addition to its names referring to the coming of Spring-- 新春、猛春、開春—the old calendar term for January was “mutsuki” 睦月. Mutsu means "intimate, harmonious or friendly," so mutsuki signifies that this was the month "when people come together." It’s true, for even nowadays, oshogatsu is a time for families to re-connect. On the times I didn’t return home, I was astounded at the way Tokyo felt like a ghost town during the New Year holiday, when even Shinjuku Station slowed down.

The New Year in Japan is a time of quiet reflection and contemplation. Of course, in America, we make our New Year’s Resolutions, but for most Americans, New Year is more of a party. A celebration of what will probably be another great year.

The first dream 初夢
The first visit to the Shrine 初詣
The first bath 初湯
The first smile 初笑
The first glance in the mirror 初鏡

Along with spring, the self is also reborn and one should experience all the blessings in life as if they were happening for the first time. Contemplation underpins this holiday in a way I wouldn’t have been able to imagine had I not gone and lived there. And I love that. You look at your image in the mirror all the time. The First Glance in the Mirror, however, urges you to step back, empty your mind and really look. 改めてみること。Look again; look deeper, and look with a clear heart, explained my tea teacher long ago.

Mirrors have long played a religious role in Japan. Like many cultures, the Japanese thought they had the power to show a person’s soul. Symbolizing wisdom, one of the Three Sacred Treasures (三種の神器) of the Japanese Imperial family from the beginning of time in Japan has been a mirror. Mirrors are also a symbol of Japanese New Year in the form of glimmering white and transparent mochi. The most popular New Year’s decoration, kagami mochi 鏡餅、is just as the name implies in Japanese, “mirror rice cakes.” Long ago, they were solely offerings traditionally made at shrines and temples. White rice cakes like mirrors to reflect the image of god as well as the soul of the person making the offering.

In Zen literature, there is a recurring motif of an empty-mirror mind. As David Hinton says in China in his new book, China Root, “When thought stops, that moment of awakening, we are wholly present in life as moment-by-moment experience of incandescent perceptual immediacy.” To stand fully present in the moment looking out at the world with mirror-deep eyes. Now that is clarity to strive for!

 

 

 

Fermentation

Sandor Ellix Katz:

Fermentation as Metaphor & The Art of Fermentation

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America's Underground Food Movements

And

Koji Alchemy

Interview with author Rich Shih in Serious Eats

He calls himself a fermentation revivalist. With several award-winning books on the subject and a very large following on YouTube, Sandor Ellix Katz is part fermentation expert and part fermentation superstar. But I wondered: why revivalist? Did fermentation ever go out of fashion? Where I spent my adult life-- in Japan-- fermentation has always stood center stage. From soy sauce to miso and from sake to tsukemono, it is hard to imagine Japanese food without it.

I was inducted into the Way of Pickles early on in my Japan days. The first time I visited my ex-husband’s hometown in Shizuoka, the family egged me on to stick my hand into Grandma’s pickle jar. It was kept underneath the sink, and every day someone had to put their hand deep into the large ceramic jug and stir things up to keep the fermentation process going. Called nukazuke, Grandma Ogasawara was an expert. The nuka “bed” -- made from rice bran, salt, seaweed and some water-- required regular stirring for oxygenation. Why this had to be done with a human hand remained a mystery, one among many. Grandma would toss in cucumbers, radishes, eggplant, carrots, little onions, or anything else she had on hand and then a few days or weeks later, eat accordingly. Because she never tossed out the nuka bed, the flavors became more complex over time. Or so the story goes. In the end, I did stick my hand in and give it a stir—to everyone’s great delight. And his grandma rewarded me with the best pickles I had ever tasted! Rest of review in Dublin Review of Books here.

Foundations of Flavor: The Noma Guide to Fermentation
by Rene Redzepi, David Zilber

 

Feynman Lecture Hall -- The Demos (QM and Waves)

Whenever Chris teaches in the Feynman Lecture Hall, I attend all his classes. I don't understand anything, but I love being in the room anyway. 

 

The sign that always makes me wonder. Laser radiation?

 

Whenever I would arrive the technical assist would have already set up all the demos for the day. Even though they look dusty and strangely retro, I think some have been touched by the hands of Feynman himself. 

 

You can see the secret room where all the demos are kept. A pale man is always back there taking care of them.

 

In case you are wondering, that is an old TV.

 

Another peek inside the secret room

 

You might be wondering what he is doing. That makes two of us!

He better not hurt the cat--again!

 

This is the part where I want to leave...

 

Getting worried again...

 

I think I understood this part...

 

Golgotha

I wonder what the student is writing?

 

The empty room

 

East Bridge Stairs

Beautiful East Bridge

 

My sweetheart

My textbook

 

The Universe in a Claypot!

Donabe are made from highly porous clays known for their heat retention properties. The clays for making donabe are --not surpassingly—also well-regarded for making teapots and tea containers. These clays include Shigaraki, Iga, Banko, and Mashiko. As a student of tea ceremony, I grew to love all of these types of pottery—but none more than Iga. Super porous Iga clay has phenomenal heat retention powers. The clay is said to “breath.” It does feel as if it is alive. Iga-ware is known for its fine webs of crackle and subtle color shifts from white-yellows to gray-browns. Iga-ware pots display something of the rustic humbleness of the finest “wabi” teabowls. In the crackle that occurs spontaneously in the firing, one feels the happenstance and great simplicity of nature. My tea teacher used to encourage us to look for landscapes in the surface of the teabowls.

In LA, we might not have long snowy winters, but we do have endless choices for eating hotpot. Not only do we have endless restaurants to choose from, even better, all the things we need to make hotpot dinners at home can be found right here in town. One of my favorites is a Japanese kitchen supply shop in West Hollywood called Toiro. Marie Kondo features one of their Iga claypots on her website. But I recommend visiting Toiro online. The choices for gorgeous pots and tableware will delight you. The owner, Naoko Takei Moore also sells high quality pantry items and has a cookbook to boot. All this dedicated to “your happy donabe life!” Now, who could argue with that?

The book is fun because there are classic and modern dishes. So far, I have been sticking with the traditional ideas--like the sizzling mushrooms and tofu in miso sauce, the ginger chicken and chicken in Ginger Amazake Hotpot, tonjiru, salmon hotpot, lotus root in lack vinegar.... and this year, I will be trying out her Oshogatsu menu--which looks amazing. 

Her book is gorgeous and full of history--and if you use it with her online recipes, you will be in business. Also her the items she sells at her shop are beyond beautiful--not just the donabe--which I love and have three. But the lacquer--and that is really what I have fallen most in love with. 

Reading Cities NOTES

 

Reading Cities:

Alex Kerr on Bangkok

William Dalrymple on Delhi

Simon Sebag Montefiore on Jerusalem

Miles on Carthage

Hattori on the Silk Road

Popham, Seidensticker , Reid and Waley on Tokyo

Nishiyama on Edo

Tanizaki on Osaka

Pitchaya Sudbanthad on Bangkok

Venice Books

 

Top Reads of 2020

 

 

During the pandemic, I read around one hundred books --which is an unchanged number from years past and a much lower number than my pre-social media days. Looking at the stats on Goodreads, it seems like I read fewer pages this year. Maybe I didn't read many long books? I think the longest might have been the Southern Reacg TRilogy by Jeff VanderMeer.

All in all, it was a wonderful year in reading. Highlights below!

Ok, drum roll for my top reads of 2020....

 

2020 Top Read: The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium, by Juan Pimental

***This was the book that stayed in my mind all year! I was so inspired by this wonderful history of science book that I wrote an essay on Durer's Rhinoceros (forthcoming in Pleiades Magazine), and a short story I wrote about the megatherium won a creative writing award judged by the great XXX! Announcement in January***  Megatherium Notes Here

Best in Fiction (Top 3):

#1 Bangkok Wakes to Rain, novel by
Sudbanthad, Pitchaya * (My review in Dublin Review of Books--here) 

#2 Kim Stanley Robinson's Ministry of the Future (3QD Essay Here)

#3 The Shadow King, by Maaza Mengiste

 

Best in Non-Fiction (Top 3):

#1  Freud's Trip to Orvieto, by Nicholas Fox Weber  (Essay in 3 Quarks daily here)

#2 The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, by Kiril Petkov

#3 Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt. An essay I wrote on the painting is forthcoming in a gorgeous Canadian magazine called, Ekstasis. My Bellini Notes are here. 

 

Most unique:

The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality, by Morgan Meis

 

Best in Memoir:

Daniel Mendelsohn's An Odyssey

Other Memoirs Here

Sebald's Rings of Saturn and Vertigo

Posts in Bavarians Category

 

Most Beautiful:

This year saw two great memoir about the Heart Sutra, by Alex Kerr and Frederik Schodt

Notes here.

 

Biggest Surprise Discovery:

Jeff VenderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy 

Sichuan peppercorns and Fly by Jing (I am looking forward to reading Fuchia Dunlap's memoir).

 

Most Thought-Provoking and World Changing:

When Animals Speak: Toward an Interspecies Democracy

 

Food:

 Fermentation as Metaphor, by Sandor Katz (review coming!) Notes Here.

&

Naoko Takei Moore's Donabe and A Universe in a Clay Pot 

 

On Foraging [Reviews Coming]

Don't miss: Eating Wild Japan: Tracking the Culture of Foraged Foods, with a Guide to Plants and Recipes By Winifred Bird 

Feral, by George Monbiot

On Flowers: Lessons from an Accidental Florist
by Amy MerrickForage,

Harvest, Feast: A Wild-Inspired Cuisine Hardcover – 
by Marie Viljoen

Incredible Wild Edibles Paperback – 
by Samuel Thayer

 

Best Science:

Extraterrestrial Languages
by Daniel Oberhaus

 

Best Re-Read: 

Death in Venice in he 2009 translation by Michael Henry Heim and re-read quite a lot on Mi Fu--notes here. 

 

New Journeys: 

This year, I discovered the Heart Sutra at long last--in Japan, our family was part of Pure Land Tradition, so the Heart Sutra was was never on my radar. I was very moved to read about it. My notes are here. My essay on Xuanzang in Kyoto Journal was shared here at 3 Quarks Daily. And my book Goodreads review of Alex Kerr and Frederik Schodt's  books above.

I started reading David Hinton last year --and my astonishment is on-going. My review of his new book is here: China Root is here at Asian Review of Books. 

&

Minae Mizumura: Inheritance from Mother, The Fall of  Language, and review of her new novel coming in Chicago Review of Books coming in February.

**

--2020 Book Towers Below--

 

The First Stack: Orvieto

Maybe like a lot of people, the first time I stepped inside the magnificent cathedral at Orvieto--I had no idea what I was looking at. The entirely painted chapel overwhelms. I looked but didn't see... but back home later, images I recalled puzzled me. Was that Jesus as the AntiChrist? What had we seen and more, how stupid was I not to learn all about it before traveling all the way. But that trip, Orvieto was just a whim. A day-trip escape when we were staying in the strange abbey with the astronomers. Back home, I embarked on a journey in reading to learn everything I could about the frescoes.  

My essay: When Freud Met The Antichrist In Orvieto

And the fantastic and very unique book by Nicolas Fox Weber: Freud’s Trip to Orvieto

Other Books

Seen from Behind: Perspectives on the Male Body and Renaissance Art
by Patricia Lee Rubin

Luca Signorelli --written in 1899 (to enjoy how different art history was back then)
by Maud Cruttwell

The Renaissance Antichrist: Luca Signorelli's Orvieto Frescoes
by Jonathan B. Riess

How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World
by Creighton E. Gilbert

Jo Walton's novel, Lent.

Luca Signorelli: The San Brizio Chapel, Orvieto
by Jonathan B. Riess

Confessions of the Antichrist (A Novel)
by Addison Hodges Hart

The Etruscans
by Lucy Shipley

Dante's Journey to Polyphony
by Francesco Ciabattoni

Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse

Articles

Forgetting Signorelli: Monstrous Visions of the Resurrection of the Dead ,  MARGARET E. OWENS Source: American Imago, Vol. 61, No. 1, Picturing Freud (Spring 2004), pp. 7-33 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable Download Signorelli

Next Year? 

Fuentes: I’m really interested in comparing Signorelli's frescoes to Bosch's heavenly delight. I found it so jarring that Fuentes imagined the Orvieto frescoes flying off the walls in the cathedral in Orvieto and landing as paintings in El Escorial where Philip II proceeded to gaze on them and obsess on them just like he did the Bosch triptych. I was puzzled because Philip II and the Bosch triptych is a case of fact being better than fiction--or so I thought?? But how to improve on the Triptych? But the more I am reading, the more inspired and fascinating I am finding this idea of the genius that is Carlos Fuentes. 

 

The Second Stack: Venice

Venice essays forthcoming at Dillydoun, Ekstasis Magazine and Ekphrastic. 

After Orvieto, we traveled to Venice to see Titian's Transfiguration. But --sad to say--it was under conservation, so all we saw was a huge reproduction in the Frari. Despite this major calamity, the trip still became a kind of Titian pilgrimage, as we were staying in the quarter where Titian lived and found ourselves breaking down in tears in front of his last painting in the Academia. That work, the Pieta, made a great impression on me--in great part because of a fabulous book I read by Mark Hudson, called Titian's Last Days. It was my favorite non-fiction of the year. I wrote about my experience here at the Hedgehog Review. Other wonderful reads on Titian were : Titian: His Life, by Sheila Hale; The Titian Committee, by Iain Pears; Titian: Lady in White, by Andreas Henning (Norton Simon Museum Exhibition Catalog)

On essay I wrote on Bellini is forthcoming in a gorgeous Canadian magazine called, Ekstasis.  Books included, The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370-1480 by Kiril Petkov and Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt. My notes are here. 

Also on Carpaccio: Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation, by Jan Morris [Re-read twice and it's still out to read again!}; Carpaccio: Major Pictorial Cycles, by Stefania Mason

My reading so far:

• Venice Ecology:  If Venice Dies, by Salvatore Settis; The Science of Saving Venice, by Caroline Fletcher; Also fascinating: Venice: Extraordinary Maintenance, by Gianfranco Pertot 
• Venice the beautiful: Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide, by Tiziano Scarpa (and Dream of Venice in Black and White)
• Jewish history:  Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice, by Erica Jong [worst book of 2019]; A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice, by Harry Berger Jr.;Venice and Its Jews: 500 Years Since the Founding of the Ghetto, by Lenore Rosenberg
• Venice the amazing:  The Horses of St Mark's: A Story of Triumph in Byzantium, Paris and Venice, by Charles Freeman [FANTASTIC!!! GOING TO RE-READ];  The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt (runner up for best in non-fiction!) 
• Venice Cooking: Fantastic Cookbook:Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, by Russell Norman. Also FUN: Brunetti's Cookbook, by Roberta Pianaro, Donna Leon.

And not to neglect the classics below: Ruskin's Stone's of Venice, Norwich's A History of Venice, and Jan Morris' famous The Venetian Empire. Also Crowley's City of Fortune, which I am unable to locate despite having bought two copies. Also beautiful: Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, by Sarah Quill.

Venice Notes Here 

 

 

The Third Tower: Talking to Space Aliens and Animals

An Inter-Species Crowd: How To Talk To Animals And Space Aliens

In 2018, I started a tower of books on the topic of animal consciousness. Book list here and the culminating 3 Quarks Daily post here. This year, I wanted to continue pursuing the topic--in fact, had not even put the stack of books back on the shelves since. My interest was re-ignited when I read Daniel Oberhaus’ book Extraterrestrial Languages --after stumbling on a really exciting review in the London Review of Books. But it was not the history of SETI attempts to communicate with alien civilizations that excited me. What genuinely grabbed my attention was when the author made the obvious point that if we can’t even communicate with other species on our own planet, how are we supposed to communicate with aliens? Of course, we have been able to teach primates, Corvids, parrots and other birds, and certainly dolphins a lot of our human language — But how many words do we speak of Dolphinese or Chimpanzine? And what songs can we sing to in Whale-song?

Coincidentally in my UCLA creative writing class Writing the Fantastic, the first exercise was to write from a non-human POV. So this all led me back first to the books on animal consciousness and communication.

This perfectly aligned to some recent books on philosophy. I believe we are on the precipice of a new paradigm. More and more intellectuals—from Timothy Morton, Eva Meijir, and Paul Kingnorth’s Dark Mountain Movement to Bay Area Greats: Donna Haraway, Anna Tsing, Michael Pollan and Jenny Odell, we are hearing about a new way of being in the world. Starting with the Great Donna Haraway, these thinkers are not only telling us we need to stay with the trouble, but they are heralding a new age of interspecies democracy and solidarity with non-human people.

So, below are the books that I read and resulting 3 Quarks Daily post An Inter-Species Crowd: How To Talk To Animals And Space Aliens

Bay Area Thinkers:

The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene 3rd ed. Edition

Both by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan

Other New Movement Philosophers

Dark Mountain Movement

Hyperobjects, by Timothy Morton

Also by Morton: Dark Ecology for a Logic of Future Coexistence

and Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist and Other Essays by Paul Kingsnorth

Inter-Species Crowd

When Animals Speak by Eva Meijir

Timothy Morton's Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People

Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway

Consciousness: Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist
by Christof Koch

Looking ahead, I will be reading a lot of memoirs. I would love to finish Fuentes as well next year. 

Fuentes: I’m really interested in comparing Signorelli's frescoes to Bosch's heavenly delight. I found it so jarring that Fuentes imagined the Orvieto frescoes flying off the walls in the cathedral in Orvieto and landing as paintings in El Escorial where Philip II proceeded to gaze on them and obsess on them just like he did the Bosch triptych. I was puzzled because Philip II and the Bosch triptych is a case of fact being better than fiction--or so I thought?? But how to improve on the Triptych? But the more I am reading, the more inspired and fascinating I am finding this idea of the genius that is Carlos Fuentes. 

 

Venice Books

 

My Venice Essays:

My Miracle in Venice (Ekstatis Magazine)

Titian: A Painter Crawling Toward God (Hedgehog Review)

Venice: A Drowning City (Dillydoun Journal)

 

We traveled to Venice in 2019 to see Titian's Transfiguration. But --sad to say--it was under conservation, so all we saw was a huge reproduction in the Frari 泣泣泣泣泣.

Despite this major calamity, the trip still became a Titian pilgrimage, as we were staying in the quarter where Titian lived and found ourselves breaking down in tears in front of his last painting in the Academia. That work, the Pieta, made a great impression on us both--in great part because of a fabulous book we read by Mark Hudson, called Titian's Last Days. It was my favorite non-fiction of the year. I wrote about my experience here at the Hedgehog Review. Other wonderful reads on Titian were : Titian: His Life, by Sheila Hale; The Titian Committee, by Iain Pears; Titian: Lady in White, by Andreas Henning (Norton Simon Museum Exhibition Catalog)

One essay I wrote on Bellini, called My Miracle In Venice, was published in a gorgeous Canadian magazine called, Ekstasis.  Books included, The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370-1480 by Kiril Petkov and Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt. My notes are here. 

Also on Carpaccio: Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation, by Jan Morris [Re-read twice and it's still out to read again!}; Carpaccio: Major Pictorial Cycles, by Stefania Mason

My reading so far:

• Venice Ecology:  If Venice Dies, by Salvatore Settis; The Science of Saving Venice, by Caroline Fletcher; Also fascinating: Venice: Extraordinary Maintenance, by Gianfranco Pertot 
• Venice the beautiful: Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide, by Tiziano Scarpa (and Dream of Venice in Black and White)
• Jewish history:  Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice, by Erica Jong [worst book of 2019]; A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice, by Harry Berger Jr.;Venice and Its Jews: 500 Years Since the Founding of the Ghetto, by Lenore Rosenberg
• Venice the amazing:  The Horses of St Mark's: A Story of Triumph in Byzantium, Paris and Venice, by Charles Freeman [FANTASTIC!!! GOING TO RE-READ];  The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt (runner up for best in non-fiction!) 
• Venice Cooking: Fantastic Cookbook:Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, by Russell Norman. Also FUN: Brunetti's Cookbook, by Roberta Pianaro, Donna Leon.

And not to neglect the classics below: Ruskin's Stone's of Venice, Norwich's A History of Venice, and Jan Morris' famous The Venetian Empire. Also Crowley's City of Fortune, which I am unable to locate despite having bought two copies. Also beautiful: Ruskin's Venice: The Stones Revisited, by Sarah Quill.

The Frari with the reproduction hanging in the painting's place in the altar

Below: Vendetta should not be in that pile since that book is about Urbino. 

Miracle on the Bridge of San Lorenzo NOTES

 

 

1)

The Gallerie dell'Accademia Museum in Venice contains three famous paintings on the subject of the Miracle that occurred the Bridge of San Lorenzo in 137o.

Above is the Miracle of the Relic of the Holy Cross at the Bridge of San Lorenzo, by Gentile Bellini.

Below is Gentile Bellini's Procession of the True Cross in Piazza San Marco and the Miracle of the True Cross by Vittore Carpaccio. 

There is one fourth painting, also very famous, in which the reliquary containing the relic appears.

This is the Portrait of the Vendramin Family, by Titian, now in the National Gallery in London.

2)  

Helena's journey to the Holy Land to find the True Cross is a story that overwhelms one in Jerusalem-- as it is told and re-told. Jerusalem was her city, after all.

Having traveled there as an old woman of eighty, she worked tirelessly founding basilicas (pointing her imperial fingers and saying, "this is just the place for a basilica") and searching tirelessly for the true cross.  Digging down-- in her dreams and at excavation sites-- she was to eventually uncover those three crosses, and gaining divine help she discerned which of the three was the cross that Christ died on. Likened by Evelyn Waugh to that of the Three Magi, Helena's one historic act of devotion would live on in history-- generating the obsession with relics that would come to dominate the Middle Ages and lead to the building of the greatest church in Christendom--the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

This search for truth-- for metaphor and something eternal is what drives Saint Helena and captured Waugh in his own seeking. His novel on Helena is wonderful. And its message is simply stated at the end of the story:  Above all the babble of her age and ours she makes one blunt assertion. And there alone is Hope. 

After visiting the Holy Land for his novel Helena, Waugh wrote: 'One has been at the core of one's religion. It's all there, with superhuman faults and its superhuman triumphs, and one finally realizes, perhaps for the first time, that Christianity did not strike its first roots at Rome, or Canterbury, or Geneva or Maynooth, but here in the Levant' In the novel, loosely based on the life of St Helena, he writes: 'Above all the babble of her age and ours, she makes one blunt assertion, that Jesus died at a particular time and at a particular place. And there alone lies hope.'

3)

Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom-- Evelyn Waugh

Back then, the story of the True Cross was new to us both.

Having its origins in the medieval Golden Legend, it tells the tale of the Cross from its beginnings in the tree of knowledge in the garden of Eden. A shoot of this tree was planted at Adam’s grave by his son Seth. After many centuries, this shoot grew into a giant tree. It was then cut down to build a bridge, which the Queen of Sheba passed across when she was on her way to visit King Solomon. As she traveled over the wooden bridge, she saw a terrible vision and warned Solomon that the future Savior of the world would be killed using a wood from the bridge. This, foretelling the end of the Jewish kingdom, Solomon hid the wood from the bridge in a swamp.

From the Queen of Sheba to Saint Helena the fantastical tale of the True Cross was part of the Medieval imagination down into the Renaissance, when Piero della Francesca painted his frescoes in the Basilica of San Francesco in Arezzo between 1450-1460.

Standing side-by-side in the apse first thing in the morning, my husband and I had the place to ourselves. The paintings overwhelmed—almost pressing me into the ground with their power. Then, when I turned to my new husband, I saw tears in his eyes.

4) In the crowd, we see Caterina Corner, the former Queen of Cyprus.

The question arises: what was Caterina Corner, the former Queen of Cyprus, doing in Gentile Bellini’s painting?

Bellini painted the picture in 1500, when the relic had been in Venice around one hundred and fifty years and was already legendary for performing miracles-- like curing a man of madness (as painted by Carpaccio) and reviving the dying son of a merchant from Brescia (as painted by Bellini in the other picture). Despite the fact that the miracle occurred long before Bellini was born, he did not hesitate to add people from his own time.  Perhaps Bellini added the luminous Queen because of her legendary star-power. But there is also a more intricate web weaving her into this story.

Cyprus has traditionally been included in the tale of the True Cross. Another medieval legend told of the Empress Helena stopping on the island on her way back to Rome from Jerusalem. Trying to pacify evil demons who were bothering the local inhabitants, Helena was said to have hidden numerous fragments of the True Cross around the island. The Cyprus connection could be another reason Bellini painted the former queen so prominently in the picture.

And the relic did come from Cyprus. It came to Venice in the possession of Philippe de Mézières, who was chancellor to the Cypriot King Peter of Lusignan. Peter reigned from 1358 -1369 over what was the world’s last crusader kingdom. The two men—Philippe and his King, -- formed an alliance of friendship and faith based on their shared dream of reclaiming the Holy Land. Joining forces with Peter Thomas, the future Latin patriarch of Constantinople, they traveled from court to court around Europe trying to drum up support for a new crusade. It was Peter Thomas who gave Philippe the relic.

Philippe had brought the relic with him to Venice, where he was working to persuade the Venetians to join the new. But after receiving the devastating news that the King had been assassinated, Philippe withdrew into seclusion (with the relic) at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista. Later, he would reward the Scuola for their two years of spiritual support and comfort by donating the precious relic to them in 1369. 

Seven more kings followed Peter of Lusignan to rule the island before Caterina Corner became the Queen. Born in Venice, she was married off to King James II in 1468 as a young girl. Sadly, the king died almost as soon as she arrived on the island. Though she was pregnant at the time of her husband’s death, the baby would die as well. Given this sad turn of events, she was pressured to cede her kingdom to the doges of Venice. In compensation, she was allowed to keep her title and crown and to reinvent herself as the Lady of Asolo, after being granted the fiefdom in Veneto, in 1489. Her court at Asolo was later immortalized, first as the fictitious setting for Pietro Bembo's platonic dialogues on love, Gli Asolani, and later by Robert Browning in his poetry collection Asolando. There is also Donizetti’s wondrous opera, Caterina Cornaro. I am surprised we haven’t had “Catarina: the Movie” yet!

It is not hard to understand why she appeared so prominently in paintings, poetry and in music. She was like a movie star. Painted by Titian, Giorgione, Belleni, and Durer, Catarina was both dazzling and tragic. Perhaps not unlike Lady Diana. Her depiction in Bellini’s painting only made the miracle at the Bridge of San Lorenzo even more miraculous.

Books

The Anxieties of a Citizen Class: The Miracles of the True Cross of San Giovanni Evangelista, Venice 1370-1480 by Kiril Petkov

Daughter of Venice: Caterina Corner, Queen of Cyprus and Woman of the Renaissance by Holly S. Hurlburt

Venice NOTES

 

 

For me, one of the great highlights of the last decade of my life was traveling back to Venice. We went for nine days in June, 2019. It had been thirty years since I last saw the city. 

We traveled to Venice for one big reason: to see Titian's Transfiguration.

But --so sad to say--it was under conservation. Great excuse to go back! But we did make a kind of Titian pilgrimage, staying in the quarter where we lived and breaking down in tears in front of his last painting in the Academia.

That work, the Pieta, made a great impression on us--in great part because of a fabulous book we read by Mark Hudson, called Titian's Last Days. It was my favorite non-fiction of the year.  I wrote this about my experience on Vox Nova at Patheos.

I also wrote for the Hedgehog Review: A Painter Crawling Toward God.

We traveled for Titian but returned in love with Tintoretto. 

Also on Titian: Titian: His Life, by Sheila Hale; The Titian Committee, by Iain Pears; Titian: Lady in White, by Andreas Henning (Norton Simon Museum Exhibition Catalog)

On Carpaccio: Ciao, Carpaccio!: An Infatuation, by Jan Morris [Re-read twice and it's still out to read again!}; Carpaccio: Major Pictorial Cycles, by Stefania Mason

My reading so far: Venice Is a Fish: A Sensual Guide, by Tiziano Scarpa (and Dream of Venice in Black and White): If Venice Dies, by Salvatore Settis, Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice, by Erica Jong [worst book of 2019]; A Fury in the Words: Love and Embarrassment in Shakespeare's Venice, by Harry Berger Jr.;Venice and Its Jews: 500 Years Since the Founding of the Ghetto, by Lenore Rosenberg; The Horses of St Mark's: A Story of Triumph in Byzantium, Paris and Venice, by Charles Freeman [FANTASTIC!!! GOING TO RE-READ]; The Science of Saving Venice, by Caroline Fletcher; The City of Falling Angels, by John Berendt (runner up for best in non-fiction!) Also fascinating: Venice: Extraordinary Maintenance, by Gianfranco Pertot 

Fantastic Cookbook:Venice: Four Seasons of Home Cooking, by Russell Norman. Also FUN: Brunetti's Cookbook, by Roberta Pianaro, Donna Leon