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Category: Painting

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Architecture Art Degenerate art Painting Table talks

Uncle Adolf’s table talk, 186

the-real-hitler

 

13th June 1943, evening

The French painters—The great artistic achievements of the nineteenth century were German—Architecture in Munich.
 

I cannot make up my mind to buy a picture by a French painter, because I am not sure of the dividing line between what I understand and what I do not understand. I have the same feeling when I look at paintings by Corinth and Trübner—to mention only two of our German artists. These men started by painting pictures of great merit, and then, urged on by pride, they started to produce the most startling and extraordinary works. In literature the Jew has already blazed the same pernicious trail, and artists like Corinth and Trübner have followed them. The result is the frightful daubs with which they now inflict us.

In painting, the Italians were truly great from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth; in the eighteenth century they rested on their laurels, in the nineteenth their light began to wane, and today Italian art is completely degenerate. All this seems quite incomprehensible to me, but I suppose it is the law of averages. In the nineteenth century the greatest masterpieces in every branch were the works of us Germans. In the same period the French, too, had some good artists, but they all deteriorated in time.

When I think of the Paris Opera House, I cannot help feeling that those of Dresden and Vienna are in a very different category. The design itself of the Paris Opera is a work of genius, but the execution, from the artistic point of view, is very ordinary; and the interior is pretentious, overcrowded with decoration and devoid of all artistic taste. We must make sure that the new Opera House which we intend to build in Munich surpasses everything, in every way, that has ever gone before it.

The Palace of Justice in Munich is perhaps the most beautiful example of the baroque of recent times. Typical of the epoch of liberalism is the Palais de Justice in Brussels. It is a cyclops which dominates the whole town; and fancy having the Law Courts, of all things, as the dominating feature of a place! I am quite sure that a man is never more ready to fight for his country than when it is a question of defending the artistic and intellectual heritage of the nation. We have a fresh proof of it today. The destruction of a national monument has a greater effect on public opinion than the destruction of a factory.

_____________________________

Consider obtaining a copy of the complete notes
published by Ostara Publications.

Categories
Conservatism Painting Real men

Alex Linder vs. Hunter Wallace

Editor’s note: The following exchange between Alex Linder and Brad Griffin (a.k.a. Hunter Wallace) has been excerpted from a long thread on Vanguard News Network forum:

Brad Griffin said…

I don’t believe that Jews are 100% to blame for our situation. I believe there are many factors involved and that reducing it to the Jewish Question is simply an oversimplification of a complex process.

Do Jews share a lot of the blame? Of course.

The reigning mythology on WN [white nationalist] internet forum is that Yankees and Jews are somehow opposed to each other, but in the real world they are best friends and political allies and line up on the same side against the South in every national election.

The Jews and Yankees are both in the driver’s seat. They are the senior partners in the Democratic Party. They are allies, not enemies. It is only on the internet where the tiny minority of Northern WNs insist that Yankees and Jews are not on the same side.

I want to create a Southern ethnostate.

In the “Republic of Dixie,” Southern Whites would evolve into a European-style ethnic group, the “Dixians.” The new Southern ethnostate would be based on all the ingredients of a successful European nation: a common ethnicity, a common culture, a common religion, and a common history.

America was a failure because it was a “White Republic” based on race and republicanism. That’s why it ultimately disintegrated. We won’t make the same mistake again.

As we move “Forward” with Obama toward raising the debt ceiling and the inevitable California federal bailout, Texas is destined to lead the way toward Southern secession.

The North won’t resist Southern secession either. Progressives aren’t going to wage war against the South to preserve the Union. They will be left with unbridled control of the remainder of the United States.

100 years ago, there wasn’t a Jewish Question in the South. For the most part, Jews like Judah Benjamin were reconciled to the South’s racial traditions. There were even Jewish members of the original Ku Klux Klan.

Insofar as there was a problem with glorifying and promoting blacks over Whites, Yankees were 100% of the problem.

No one in the Confederacy wrote about the Jewish Question because the racial and cultural threat to the South wasn’t seen as coming from that quarter. Instead, it was the Northeastern Yankee “Black Republicans” like John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison who were out to destroy the Southern of way of life.

As always, the Yankees lined up and voted overwhelmingly for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The White Republic died in 1865.

The Jews started moving here en masse in the 1880s and 1890s. The White Republic died because Yankees couldn’t stop demonizing the South over slavery. They couldn’t stop themselves from minding our business and taking the side of the blacks.

It happened again in the 1960s.


Alex Linder said…

“Main Jewish Cause” is accurate. “Single Jewish Cause” is a strawman.

VNN focused on jews for two reasons:

1) they are the powers that be, in 2012

2) they are the ones no one talks about

VNN has always mentioned the lesser causes of our racial decline, foremost of which is the jebus cult, which you conspicuously omit to blame at OD [Occidental Dissent]. Without abolitionism, no civil war. Without christianity, no abolitionism.

I have asked to no answer why the Catholic church is far more hostile to nazism than to communism.

Racial and christian worldviews are competitive, not complementary. Race offers a different and superior basis for society, and the church does not want white man to figure that out, as it briefly was under Hitler. The church prefers communism, because as bad as it is, it is temporary, since it runs against basic human nature, and will eventual disappear. Communism is such a repulsive and malignant jewish baby that even the ugly mexican baby of catholicism is appealing beside it. The key understanding is that there is nothing in the jebus cult that has any problem with the white race (or the South, for that matter) disappearing off the face of the earth. If there’s no doctrinal support for whites as whites, the doctrine is bad for us.

Originally Posted by Lew, for Alex:

What, exactly, do you hope to accomplish by attacking Christianity the way that you do? Who is your audience for these criticisms?

Audience is thinking adults. I hope to reduce respect for the cult in general by demonstrating its impotence and delusionality, the jew-obsequiousness of its leaders, and the functional anti-Whiteness of its doctrines. I would like to see the cult disappear among the white race. Christianity is criticized by jews for the wrong reasons, leading unthinking white men to think it must be basically good, just as WN foolishly assume same of Pat Buchanan because jews criticize him. Not so. The cult is a terrible thing—for reasons seldom given. I give those reasons, and I indicate how a race-firster were wise to treat the church, based on real-world evidence.

If a person is a WNist pagan or an atheist (like me), the person doesn’t need convincing Christian theology poses problems for racialists. If a person is a generic Christian, or a Christian with racial sympathies, and they do in fact exist, it doesn’t seem likely your critique will convince them to do anything different.

A christian with racial sympathies is confused and divided of mind, and needs the contradiction brought out so that he can decide which master to serve. And, by the way, as much ego as I use, I certainly don’t expect adult males to bow before me and proclaim me their leader; I expect the power and form of my delivery to put a little doubt behind their facade. And they can think it over privately away and safe from my mocking, which is, yes, quite vicious and harsh.

Related: why is attacking Christianity important when Jews hold much of the real power in society, and to the extent white gentiles hold significant power in society, they are almost all secular liberal egalitarians who reject Christianity?

Those secular liberal egalitarians are almost all christians, in fact. It’s important to attack christianity and conservatism because they are competitors for the minds and support we need for our cause. WN, coming from a Southern conservative background, have not understood this. This is why they freely mix these things. But that’s not what will work. We must distinguish and elevate our racial cause by attacking conservatives as our enemy, as I advocate in my essay elsewhere. Not by mixing with it and drowning ourself in it. We must be intolerant in order to rise, in order to gain the strength to defeat the main enemy—not mushy.

Smoothing over differences doesn’t work. It’s effeminacy. It allows our enemy, jews, to infiltrate and subvert us. It allows our enemy conservatives to steal our men and arguments and fundraising—without ever supporting our positions publicly (perfectly parallel to a girl you would fuck but not introduce to your parents). It creates a gauzy haziness that leaves just WTF we are unclear in the public mind, hence boring and shruggable.

Clarity, distinctions, principles, edges—all these things that are foreign to folks who think that everyone except the principled assholes like me can get along fine under a big tent. Macdonald is politically clueless. Greg Johnson is $$$-interested, and cuts his behavior by his prospects. Our new buddy Jethro [Brad Griffin] inhabits personalities like a hermit crab shells. These don’t get the job done. What does is shown by Golden Dawn, in Greece of all goddam places:

• real men under real names (99% of WN fall off)
• real men not afraid to name the jew and buck jew taboos (100% of conservatives)
• real men not afraid to fight in the street
• real men who spend their time and money helping their people in thousand ways, providing all kinds of services for free, out of love and duty and responsibility

Our situation, in America, is not as desperate as in Greece. So people aren’t looking so much for our leadership. But if they were tomorrow, we wouldn’t have anything prepared. And that’s to our shame, and for the reasons I indicate—we are unwilling to define who we are, and figure out the principles we will back under our real names with our real lives.

This is not a game, just because we treat it like one.

Whites prove by their behavior they support our basic position: they, South and North, want to live among other whites. And not be discriminated against because of their race. And not have the borders left open, and citizenship held cheap. And they want sexual normality, and just ordinary decency on tv, so you can actually watching something in the day or evening that you don’t cringe every fucking five seconds if your parents or grandparents are in the room.

Every fucking one of you knows exactly what I mean. This is the shit-kultur that jews have built—and we let them. And your goddam jesus dick suckers have had 2,000 years to get your shit in order, and you have fucking failed. You are a big plate of stewed cats anuses to me, perhaps tasty to some imagination-free slant-eyed third-shift Kia employee, but unfit for human consumption. Get the fuck out of the way, you fucking jebus nuthuggers. WE will clean up culture; you sad fags aren’t woman enough for the job. I figuratively piss on the grave of your imaginary jewish science-fiction hero.

Just listen to the tone of the MacDonald, Johnson and Parrott conversation. The first two are professionally deformed, per the French expression. Incapable of inciting passion in people by nature of the discipline their background has required of them. Parrott I think has an inkling.

I wish you fags who presume to doubt me would read the Golden Dawn thread, and watch some of the videos.

That’s what’s going on in WN. It’s not some 90-yo jerkoff speaking in coded language to old ladies, it’s young men raising arms, flags, chants—roofs, as da niggers say. Figure it out. Jesus Christ, I am so fucking tired of being a remedial common sense teacher I could puke.


Brad Griffin said…

Here in the South, the Southern Baptist Convention was the last mainstream institution in the entire country to fall into line with the anti-white mainstream culture. They didn’t figure out that “racism” was a sin until the mid-1990s.

Linder conveniently ignores the fact “racism” was coined by European and Jewish atheists. He ignores the fact that the Soviet Union—which was officially atheist—pushed “racism” into the mainstream through its tentacles in world communism.

He ignores the fact that it was the secular universities, not the churches, where this nonsense got started in America. It was secular intellectuals like John Dewey who fell the hardest for it in the 1930s and 1940s and who made “racism” taboo in the aftermath of the Second World War.

After “anti-racism” had triumphed in the universities and among the intelligentsia in the 1930s and 1940s, then other mainstream institutions began to fall in line with the new consensus. Every single mainstream institution has been infected by this disease and the churches were among the most resistant but for some reason Linder blames the churches instead of the secular intellectuals who spearheaded the movement.

Here’s a reality check for Alex:

(1) You will never guess which state was the first to legalize gay marriage. It was Vermont which is the most secular, the most atheist, the least religious, and one of the least conservative states in America.

(2) The Jesus nuthuggers have gotten out of the way in the Northeast. They have gotten out of the way in Britain and Scandinavia. They certainly aren’t standing in the way in San Francisco.

And the result? It is precisely those places where cultural degeneracy has been taken to its greatest extreme. It is precisely those places where cultural degeneracy is called “progress,” not “worse is better.”

Does anyone know of an atheist country that is “pro-White”? The Soviet Union was officially atheist. Vermont is the least religious state in America. San Francisco is one of the least religious cities.

Alex is always picking on the British: in 2012, the British are thoroughly de-Christianized; in 1912, Britain was thoroughly Christian. Has the decline of Christ-Lunacy in the UK or Sweden or Norway over the past century produced a more racialist society? Is there anyone here who is excited about the prospects of racialism winning a mass following in San Francisco or Vermont?

Religion is a barrier that makes the Jew an outsider.

Alex Linder said…

One movement arose to restore white supremacy over a continent; the church opposed. I’m not sure what else you need to know. The top prelate in Greece has also condemned Golden Dawn in Greece.

The church, like the anti-white NWO socialists that spawned from it, is universalist, and universalism is inherently anti-white.

Brad Griffin said…

How so?

The church approved of slavery for centuries. The church approved of racialism for centuries.

Is there any historian who argues that Disraeli was anti-White? Every historian that I know of argues that Britain became more racialist after the 1850s.

Alex Linder said…

It became less elitist. In his novels he [Disraeli] wrote that blood is everything, and the world is ruled by a tiny minority behind the scenes, and in both instances he meant jews. Britain was already well into universalist fantasies at that point, and guess where those fantasies originated? In the sicko christ cult.

Christianity is liberalism. Or, as Spengler put it, christianity is the grandmother of bolshevism. Without christ-insanity, you wouldn’t have the progressive, secularist, communist garbage—the latter is simply an evolution of the former. They are both anti-white, and no different than the Republicans are from the Democrats.

Brad Griffin said…

That’s a stretch.

There is nothing in the Bible about natural rights. There is some talk in the Bible about equality in a purely spiritual otherworldly sense, but there is also talk about genocide and blood and soil and homophobia and patriarchy. The Bible explicitly endorses slavery.

The first thing that Jacobins did in France, who were inspired by the Enlightenment, was to behead King Louis XVI and overthrow the Gregorian Calendar and demonize the Church.

“Liberty” is the most important liberal value. Ron Paul is a liberal. Libertarianism is a species of liberalism.

Alex Linder said…

Originally posted by Griffin:

Ironically, it was also Oliver Cromwell who came up with the idea of the British as a superior “White” master race. There wasn’t much talk of “white supremacy” in Britain or Western Europe before Cromwell’s time.

Per E. Michael Jones, protestantism has always been very closely tied to jews. All these sub-cults imagine they are the real new jews. They’re idiots. Dangerous idiots.

The point is, British men came up with this idea of forcing everyone into their system. Everyone wants to be us. Everyone is jealous of us. One size fits all.

That’s why sane men have long observed, if it’s British or chrisitan, it’s usually a pretty lousy thing, and we don’t want it. Look at these creeps have made of the world, working hand in glove with the jew.

The only way out was indicated by NS, and the church you defend specifically, overtly and repeatedly denounced.

Christianity is the author of Europe’s decline. When the church goes, the racial animal will rebound. And that, I fervently hope, is what we are seeing harbinger of in Greece. From my lips to god’s ear that it will be the same in the US when the time comes.

Mississippi christian conservatism—nigger, please. You don’t produce Hitlers down there, you produce Shep Smiths.

Brad Griffin said…

Well, Christianity is pretty much dead in Britain and Scandinavia, and behold the result.

Alex Linder said…

Originally posted by Griffin:

Surely, you meant to say German supremacy, right?

No, not supremacy, merely leadership. Millions of Europeans understood what Hitler was doing, and felt it was needed and worth fighting for, even though they were not Germans.

Our point here is the church you’re defending did everything it could to destroy Hitler and undermine him. So for you to pose the idea the church is a defender of Europe’s racial health is unhistorical and ridiculous. Quote:

The church approved of slavery for centuries. The church approved of racialism for centuries. Salvation in the next world doesn’t imply racial equality in this world.

Slavery isn’t a pro-White institution. Whites have been enslaved many times. By jews and other muds.

The church’s universalism makes it anti-White. The fact it has not a single expressly pro-white doctrine or dogma makes it inherently anti-white.

The fact is that from day one, what was new and original about the church was that it was for everybody—it cut across all racial and social lines. This is why I tell you that christianity is liberalism. When these progressives go off against the christians, it’s exactly like Republicans doing battle with democrats. A big sham. They agree on basics, and they’re both against white racial solidarity. They both envision a new world order. One will bring about pan-mixian nirvana by digging wells, fixing cleft palates and adoption; the other will bring it about by speech codes and hate crimes laws and drone bombings. They pursue the same agenda by different means and emphases.

The white cause is wholly different.

Brad Griffin said…

I’m not seeing this great opposition between Christianity and “the white cause” in the South considering how Christianity and racialism coexisted here for over three centuries.

Alex Linder said…

That’s because you mistake mere contemporaneity or correlation for causation, like most of your mental inferiors.

[Quoting Griffin:]

The Church dominated European culture when all this talk about “whiteness” got started in the first place.

The church never spoke a word in racial defense of Europe. The church is international. There are more non-white christians than white christians. In light of that fact, it is ridiculous to say the church is a pro-white institution. It’s a universalist delusion factory. One of the three ugly desert sisters, as has been said.

Brad Griffin said…

Fifty years after he first started doing work for the magazine, Norman Rockwell was tired of doing the same sweet views of America for the Saturday Evening Post in the early 1960s. The great illustrator was increasingly influenced by his close friends and loved ones to look at some of the problems that was afflicting American society. Rockwell had formed close friendships with Erik Erickson and Robert Coles, psychiatrists specializing in the treatment of children and both were advocates of the civil rights movement.

His most profound influence was his third wife, Mary L. “Molly” Punderson, who was an ardent liberal and who urged him in new directions. On December 14, 1963, Rockwell did his last cover for the Saturday Evening Post and he began working for Look magazine. Look magazine finally gave Norman Rockwell the opportunity to express his social concerns.

Rockwell’s first painting was The Problem We All Live With, one of his greatest paintings.

rockwellThis painting depicts Ruby Bridges, the little girl who integrated the New Orleans school system in 1960, being escorted to her class by federal marshals in the face of hostile crowds. It’s a simple picture, the disembodied figures of 4 stiff suited men and the vulnerable yet defiant figure of a school age African American girl marching lockstep. To the right is a tomato staining a wall, obviously thrown at the girl but just missing. My eyes focus on the girl and her immaculate white, a contrast to the graffiti stained wall in the background. As a painting it’s a wonder with its composition conveying Rockwell’s message in a few simple figures.

An even greater departure from Rockwell’s usual sweet America paintings is Southern Justice, painted in 1963. Rockwell did a finished painting, but the editors published Rockwell’s color study instead, and I think his color study conveys the terror of the scene more successfully.

It depicts the deaths of three Civil Rights workers who were killed for their efforts to register African American voters. It is done in a monochrome sienna color, and it is a horrifying vision of racism. A look of it can be seen here.

Rockwell’s most optimistic view of the civil rights movement was Negro in the Suburbs, painted in 1967. It depicts an African American family moving into a white suburban neighborhood. The African American children look over by the kids in the neighborhood, with all the children sharing a love of baseball, America’s game. This painting can be found in this gallery.

In that painting, Norman Rockwell depicts an ideal, all-American, high trust, happily integrated neighborhood, which is the polar opposite of the integrated neighborhoods that actually exist.

You could turn on CNN or The Weather Channel or watch any movie in Black Run America (BRA) and you will find the same sort of disingenuous nonsense that Norman Rockwell was peddling in the 1960s.

Alex Linder said…

All I see is how easily christian motifs of the sliced savior turn into “civil rights” morality plays and paintings.

Categories
Architecture Art Civilisation (TV series) Demography Isaac Newton Kenneth Clark London Painting Rembrandt

Civilisation’s “The Light of Experience”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some excerpts of “The Light of Experience,” the eight chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


I am in Holland not only because Dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind [the revolution that replaced divine authority by experience, experiment and observation], but because Holland—economically and intellectually—was the first country to profit from the change. When one begins to ask the question, ‘does it work?’ instead of ‘is it God’s will?’ one gets a new set of answers, and one of the first of them is this: that to try to suppress opinions which one doesn’t share is much less profitable than to tolerate them.

Nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holland. What sort of society was it that allowed these intellectual time-bombs to be set off in its midst? Inside the old almshouse of Haarlem, which is now a picture gallery, there is plenty of evidence. We know more about what the seventeenth-century Dutch looked like than we do about any other society, except perhaps the first-century Romans. Each individual wanted posterity to know exactly what he was like.

One can’t imagine groups like this [Rembrandt’s Syndics] being produced in Spain or seventeenth-century Italy, even in Venice. They are the first visual evidence of bourgeois democracy. Dreadful words—so debased by propaganda that I hesitate to use them. Yet in the context of civilisation they really have a meaning. They mean that a group of individuals can come together and take corporate responsibility; that they can afford to do so because they have some leisure; and that they have some leisure because they have money in the bank.

Amsterdam was the first centre of bourgeois capitalism, the chief banking centre of Europe. I don’t say much about economics in this book chiefly because I don’t understand them—and perhaps for that reason believe that their importance has been overrated by post-Marxist historians. But, of course, there is no doubt that at a certain stage in social development fluid capital is one of the chief causes of civilisation because it ensures three essential ingredients: leisure, movement and independence.

♣

In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society. However irrational it may seem, I believe in genius. I believe that almost everything of value which has happened in the world has been due to individuals.

Nevertheless, one can’t help feeling that the supremely great figures in history—Dante, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Newton, Goethe—must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all-embracing, to have developed in isolation.

Rembrandt is a crucial instance of this conundrum. It is very easy—indeed rather more convenient for the historian—to imagine Dutch art without him; and there was no one else in Holland remotely comparable to him—nothing like the group of poets and dramatists who preceded and accompanied Shakespeare. Yet the very fact that Rembrandt was so immediately and overwhelmingly successful, and went on being successful—his etchings and drawings never went out of fashion—and that for twenty years almost every Dutch painter was his pupil, shows that the spiritual life of Holland needed him and so had, to some extent, created him.

However, any attempt to relate art to society gets one into a false position. The greatest of all pictures based on the facts of vision wasn’t painted in the scientific atmosphere of Holland, but in the superstitious, convention-ridden court of Philip IV of Spain: Las Meninas, ‘The Ladies in Waiting’, which was painted by Velasquez about five years before Vermeer’s finest interiors.

The enlightened tidiness of Hooch and Vermeer and the rich imaginative experience of Rembrandt reached their zenith about 1660. During that decade the leadership of intellectual life passed from Holland to England. Towering above all these remarkable scientists [Boyle, Hooke, Halley, Wren] was Newton, one of the three or four Englishmen whose fame has transcended all national boundaries. I can’t pretend that I have read the Principia, and if I did I wouldn’t understand it any more that Samuel Pepys did when, as President of The Royal Society, it was handed to him for his approval. One must take on trust that it gave a mathematical account of the structure of the universe which for three hundred years seemed irrefutable. It was both the climax of the age of observation and the sacred book of the next century.

♣

What is civilisation? A state of mind where it is thought desirable for a naval hospital to look like this and for the inmates to dine in a splendid decorated hall.

Painted Hall
Royal Hospital
Greenwich, London

The strange thing is that none of the nineteenth-century writers (except Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If, from the balcony of the Greenwich Observatory, I look beyond the order of Wren’s hospital I see, stretching as far as the eye can reach, the squalid disorder of industrial society. It has grown up as a result of the same conditions that allowed the Dutch to build their beautiful towns and support their painters and print their works of philosophers: fluid capital, a free economy, a flow of exports and imports, a dislike of interference.

Every civilisation seems to have its nemesis, not only because the first bright impulses become tarnished by greed and laziness, but because of unpredictables—and in this case the unpredictable was the growth of population.

Categories
Art Christendom Christian art Civilisation (TV series) Counter-Reformation Friedrich Nietzsche Inquisition Kenneth Clark Michelangelo Painting

Civilisation’s “Grandeur and Obedience”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Grandeur and Obedience,” the seventh chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, and my brief comment.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:


In my previous post criticizing Erasmus I mentioned how the modern mind is too coward to approach the main psychosis of Christendom, the doctrine of hell. Unlike the previous entries on Civilisation, of the episode about the Counter-Reformation I’ll barely quote the essentials to annotate what I have just said in that post. Clark said:

The first thing that strikes one is that those who say that the Renaissance had exhausted the Italian genius are wide off the mark. After 1527 there was a failure of confidence; and no wonder. Historians may say that the Sack of Rome was more a symbol than a historically significant event: well, symbols sometimes feed the imagination more than facts—anyway the Sack was real enough to anyone who witnessed it.

If you compare the lower part of Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, which was commissioned by Clement VII as a kind of atonement for the Sack, with a group in Raphael’s Disputa or with the Creation of Adam, you can see that something very drastic has happened to the imagination of Christendom.

Michelangelo had been reluctant to undertake the Last Judgement; under Clement’s successor, Pope Paul II, he was persuaded to continue it although with a rather different purpose. It ceased to be an act of atonement, or an attempt to externalise a bad dream, and became the first and greatest assertion of the Church’s power, and of the fate that would befall heretics and schismatics. It belongs to a period of severity, when the Catholic Church was approaching its problems in rather the same puritanical spirit as the Protestants.

Paul III took the two decisions that were successfully to counter the Reformation: he sanctioned the Jesuit order and instituted the Council of Trent. [The Counter-Reformation] was also a period of austerity and restraint, typified by the leading spirit of the period, St Carlo Borromeo, whose legendary asceticism is commemorated in this picture.

How had that victory been achieved? In England most of us were brought up to believe that it depended on The Inquisition, the Index, and the Society of Jesus. I don’t believe that a great outburst of creative energy such as took place in Rome between 1620 and 1660 can be the result of negative factors, but I admit that the civilization of these years depended on certain assumptions that are out of favour in England and America today. The first of these, of course, was belief in authority, the absolute authority of the Catholic Church. This belief was extended to sections of society which we now assume to be naturally rebellious. It comes as something of a shock to find that, with a single exception (Caravaggio), the great artists of the time were all sincere, conforming Christians.

And so what most repulsed Nietzsche, the restoration of Christianity after the Italian Renaissance, was consolidated.

Categories
Art Civilisation (TV series) Free speech / association Kenneth Clark Martin Luther Montaigne Painting Protestantism Reformation William Shakespeare

Civilisation’s “Protest and Communication”

For an introduction to these series, see here.

Below, some indented excerpts of “Protest and Communication,” the sixth chapter of Civilisation by Kenneth Clark, after which I offer my comments.

Ellipsis omitted between unquoted passages:

The dazzling summit of human achievement represented by Michelangelo, Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci lasted for less than twenty years. It was followed (except in Venice) by a time of uneasiness often ending in disaster. For the first time since the great thaw civilised values were questioned and defied, and for some years it looked as if the footholds won by the Renaissance—the discovery of the individual, the belief in human genius, the sense of harmony between man and his surroundings—had been lost. Yet this was an inevitable process, and out of the confusion and brutality of sixteenth-century Europe, man emerged with new faculties and expanded powers of thought and expression.

In this room in the castle of Würzburg are the carvings of Tilman Riemenschneider, one—perhaps the best—of many German carvers in the late Gothic style. The Church was rich in fifteenth-century Germany, and the landowners were rich, and the merchants of the Hanseatic League were rich; and so, from Bergen right down to Bavaria, sculptors were kept busy doing huge, elaborate shrines and altars and monuments like the famous group of St George in the old church at Stockholm: a supreme example of late Gothic craftsman deploying his fancy and his almost irritating skill of hand.

The Riemenschneider figures show very clearly the character of the northern man at the end of the fifteenth century.

First of all, a serious personal piety—a quality quite different from the bland conventional piety that one finds, say, in a Perugino. And then a serious approach to life itself. These men (although of course they were unswerving Catholics) were not to be fobbed off by forms and ceremonies. They believed that there was such a thing as truth, and they wanted to get at it. What they heard from Papal legates, who did a lot of travelling in Germany at this time, did not convince them that there was the same desire for truth in Rome, and they had a rough, raw-boned peasant tenacity of purpose. Many of these earnest men would have heard about the numerous councils that had tried throughout the fifteenth century to reform the organisation of the Church. These grave northern men wanted something more substantial.

So far so good. But these faces reveal a more dangerous characteristic, a vein of hysteria. The fifteenth century had been the century of revivalism—religious movements on the fringe of the Catholic Church. They had, in fact, begun in the late fourteenth century, when the followers of John Huss almost succeeded in wiping out the courtly civilisation of Bohemia. Even in Italy Savonarola had persuaded his hearers to make a bonfire of their so-called vanities, including pictures by Botticelli: a heavy price to pay for religious conviction.

The Germans were much more easily excited. Comparisons are sometimes an over-simplification; but I think it is fair to compare one of the most famous portraits, Dürer’s Oswald Krell, with Raphael’s portrait of a cardinal in the Prado [above]. The cardinal is not only a man of the highest culture but balanced and self-contained. Oswald Krell is on the verge of hysteria.

Those staring eyes, that look of self-conscious introspection, that uneasiness, marvellously conveyed by Dürer through the uneasiness of the planes in the modelling—how German it is.

Four pages later Clark devotes several pages to Erasmus of Rotterdam, whom Bronowski praised even more in The Ascent of Man. I have quoted Clark at length on the German character because I believe that Nietzsche was spot on in blaming Luther and Protestant hysteria for the restoration of Christianity when Christendom was falling apart in the times of the Renaissance popes. But in the next entry I will try to convey some of my antichristian thinking by taking the Catholic Erasmus to task. Meanwhile let’s continue with Clark’s views:

In 1506 Erasmus went to Italy. He was in Bologna at the exact time of Julius II’s famous quarrel with Michelangelo; he was in Rome when Raphael began work on the Papal apartments. But none of this seems to have made any impression on him. His chief interest was in the publication of his works by the famous Venetian printer and pioneer of finely printed popular editions, Aldus Manutius. Whereas in the last chapter I was concerned with the enlargement of man’s spirit through the visual image, in this one I am chiefly concerned with the extension of his mind through the word. And this was made possible by the invention of printing.

Printing, of course, had been invented long before the time of Erasmus. Gutenberg’s Bible was printed in 1455. But the first printed books were large, sumptuous and expensive. It took preachers and persuaders almost thirty years to recognise what a formidable new instrument had come into their hands, just as it took politicians twenty years to recognise the value of television. The first man to take advantage of the printing press was Erasmus. He poured out pamphlets and anthologies and introductions; and so in a few years did everyone who had views on anything.

This should remind us of our own age! Take heed of the elucidating excerpts from a 2009 interview of James Bowery by Jim Giles.

Bowery said: “We are essentially living under a theocracy. I call it Holocaustianity but other people call it political correctness. It’s essentially a canon of morals that have taken over Christianity, and the primary sins of this religion involve ‘racism’ which is an undefined word, and anti-Semitism (sexism is certainly down their list; it is like a venial sin, not a mortal sin). So people have been indoctrinated in this by the media and the academia. The government has passed legislation about these morals to make them violation of law. So people [in the 21st century] are essentially in a medieval mindset, living in a theocracy. It’s just that it is not operating under that name… Right now people are essentially in a State where there cannot be a Protestant Reformation. You can’t have other religions than this State religion of political correctness” (39:40).

And later during the interview Bowery added: “Let me go back to my point about the theocracy, and the dissolution of the theocracy in Europe. The Gutenberg press created a situation in which the monopoly of the Church on the written word was broken. A large portion of what the Church was about was media control. So through the media control they could indoctrinate the populations and maintain, you know, a revenue stream. The Gutenberg press broke that. Now all of a sudden you get lots of other voices. As I said, I have been working in this Internet stuff since the early days” (1:29:42).

And that is altogether crucial for our cause. Bowery concludes: “I knew this time was coming. The Internet is the new Gutenberg press. And the theocracy is being taken apart because its control of the media is being taken apart. And we are getting a new Protestant Reformation and following on the heels of that, people are going to say: ‘Look: We have our own beliefs… This is the way things should be.’ Even the Jesuits just couldn’t stand up to that. I don’t think the Jews can’t either.” (1:31:35).

That’s exactly why Erasmus was so notable, as the nationalist Internet bloggers will be equally notable from the standpoint of a latter-day Clark in the coming ethno-state, once the current theocracy falls apart.

Both Erasmus and Luther were involved in important translations of the Bible that shaked the medieval worldview. Although in the next episode Clark spoke highly about Counterreformation art, after the last indented quotation he said: “Whatever else he may have been, Luther was a hero; and after all the doubts and hesitations of the humanists, and the hovering flight of Erasmus, it is with a real sense of emotional relief that we hear Luther say: ‘Here I stand.’” However, at the same time Clark was also dismayed that the Protestants smashed the colored glasses of beautiful Catholic churches, and that artistic images of the Virgin were decapitated.

But it had to happen if civilisation was not to wither, or petrify. And ultimately a new civilisation was created—but it was a civilisation not of the image, but of the word.

But even the Protestant reaction had to be triumphed over, this time by secularism.

It is refreshing to see, in the closing remarks of the episode, Clark praising Montaigne as “completely sceptical about the Christian religion” and of Shakespeare as “the first great poet without a religious belief.”