I've heard the boiled-egg story told in connection with the Duomo in
Florence - that Bernini(?), in competition with other architects, sat
around trying to balance an egg on one end and finally did so by crushing
it against the table. So he got the commission. God knows how old this
particular topos is. Or perhaps this was a well-known trick among artists,
navigators, and con-men.
Of course, any correction of misconceptions of the Middle Ages must begin
with the bad press this "middle age" received from Petrarca and his
intellectual progeny, many of whom were remarkably ill-informed and may
well have thought the world was flat. After all, they labeled the
architecture of their indigenous cathedrals "Gothic" because they thought
such designs - ugly, asymmetrical, and lacking in proper perspective -
could only have been the work of the same barbarians who sacked Rome.
Considering that these buildings had been under construction even in their
grandfathers' time, one might be disinclined to take an optimistic view of
their historical sensibilities. J.H. Elliott, in _The Old World and the
New_, is very good on the subject of the Renaissance and its attachment to
outmoded information, even when classical authorities were being undermined
by new scientific findings. Given that many geographers and men of letters
relied on Antique, rather than medieval, authors for their knowledge, it
might well be the case that some of them, following the fashion and reading
Pliny, Tacitus, Aristotle, and Ptolemy (inter alia), gave credence to these
sources rather than to the Bible, generations of more recent scholarship,
and their own common sense. The best and briefest treatment of how it all
started is still Theodore Mommsen, "Petrarch's Conception of the Dark Ages"
_Speculum_ 17 (1942): 226-242. See also Panofsky's collected articles in
_Renaissace and Renascences in Western Art._
Carol Symes
[log in to unmask]
[log in to unmask]
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|