...
If only television could be like this. Imagine Wes Anderson making a colorcoded series on the life of Frank Lloyd Wright, in which the architect's constructions coincide with the milestones of his career, in vivid technicolor sets and superfluous detail. The italians had the service of Roberto Rossellini, dramatizing the 'Age of the Medici' for public television, and for the pride of florentines & tuscans everywhere. A little more than PBS' Masterpiece Theatre, a little less than Roma, città aperta, the series reconstructed the typical constraints of television by utilizing the TV's small frame to maximize the props, sets, and scenic detail which illustrate (and sufficiently condense) the spirit and material lifestyle of the time. We are treated to what we can only accept to be highly researched, accurate depictions of the streets, people, and costumes of the period. (The numerousness of the types of hats worn by the characters, for one, demonstrates the extent of the research that went into the series; the hats and costumes, the alembics, hourglasses, thick tomes, scrolls and skulls that litter the tables in every scene are sumptuous and multiple...)
...
Glimpses of political comment: a shepherd, suspiciously eloquent, harangues a traveling cavalcade of bankers who are on their way to Firenze. He alludes to the decline of cultural values at the hands of banks and bankers, who devalue the art of local living, local custom, the local trades and goods that enrich and define the city-state. Trade is affected when unnecessary supermarkets are created, and surpluses that hoard and deprive the guilds of their focused mastery in certain crafts do much to strangulate the particular grandeur of the City; the specific artistry of guilds is compromised when one craftsman, apprentice, or master passes on to another city-state and divulges the age-old secrets of coat-making, carpet weaving, sword-smithing. A city starts to lose its name, its prestige, its singular fame...
This shepherd, who sports a self-carved cane, and uses his legs to carry him from region to region, over mountain pass and through valleys, may as well be Ezra Pound on his walking tour of Italy, denouncing usury and lamenting the arrival of modern warfare and displaced distant-reaching economics.
...
Part II: The Power of Cosimo.
When Cosimo de Medici was exiled through the influence of the rival Albizzi family, he took away the banking relationships he had carefully put together in Florence. Resultingly, in his absence Florence suffered a slight economic decline that caused some amount of social tension, intimations of civil war, and a clamor for Medici's return by his steadfast allies.
Rosselini demonstrates the grandeur of Cosimo's return through the modesty with which he walks, unaccompanied by guards or friends, back into Florence, he its favorite everlasting son. Cosimo is the rare, perhaps impossible example of the 'Good Banker' (or so we are led to understand). The Medici bank performs international transactions, but it stays avowedly florentine: its profits and scale of power are decidedly invested in the resurgence and cementing of Florence's prestige as a city-state of culture, trade, and wealth. Cosimo, a man of humble, provident standards, wields his power behind the scenes: Florence is Oz to the foreigners who travel there, startled to find it at the head of scientific and philosophical innovation; and Cosimo is the Wizard behind the curtain, sparing a few words from time to time in private conversation with his elite cabinet of philosophers, economists, and cardinals, words that eventually sink ships, devastate foes, exile barbarians at the gates of far-off towns.
Amusingly, Rossellini outlines a typical soiree Cosimo hosts for Florence's elite, and we are charmed that instead of gossiping about celebrity outtakes, possible award nominations, and sex scandals, the partygoers quaff local organic chianti and gather around Leon Battista Alberti as he ruminates on the invention of the camera obscura with dutch diplomats and english counselors; a party no modern-day place on earth can pretend to match...
...
Part III: Leon Battista Alberti
For the final piece of his lavish Age of the Medici television series, Rossellini and his crew focus on the specific contributions and philosophy of Leon Battista Alberti, papal curate and trusted adviser in Cosimo's inner circle.
We are led through... a continuity of the philosophical methods of antiquity that informed the discoveries of the modern. Leon Battista is taken by Rossellini to be the exponent of the Renaissance ideal: neither an everyman nor a factotum, Leon Battista very definably masters all those arts that are united under the aegis of the age's dominant philosophical standard: that all phenomena in the world are interconnected and indivisible; that each body or substance or force which occurs in our sphere depends on the commonality of other cohabiting bodies and substances and forces. Thus, no artist is complete unless he practice and evince competence in all the chief arts: painting, literature, sculpture, architecture, rhetoric. Above all, that art is a science; and as such, that no painter may call himself a painter, or an architect an architect, unless he comprehend and utilize the tenets of geometry, of engineering, and of perspective.
Rossellini's parable of perspective: as Leon Battista repeatedly emphasizes the supremacy of perspective in the arts, Rossellini himself speaks with his pans and zooms on the illustrious entourage who aided Cosimo...
We may understand that Rossellini's historical parable, albeit involved in the accuracy of depiction and in historical veracity, seeks to persuade us that film (even when in the narrow box of television) relies on perspective and continues the philosophical methods of antiquity lovingly recreated in these educational films. When Leon Battista Alberti sermonizes on the precedence of perspective in the arts and sciences, the camera shifts, starts to zoom on his physiognomy, then pans over to the tablature beside him that like a rudimentary powerpoint presentation limns the features of la prospettiva in action, and then sways over the room and the frescoes, graphs, sculptures, and beakers that litter the tables, the walls, the groundspace, and we understand that Alberti speaks of, presages, film too...
No comments:
Post a Comment