Men for All Times
BROOKS, THOMAS R.
Men for All Times Lions and Foxes By Sidney Alexander Macmillan. 375 pp. $12.95. Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor" What can we now learn...
...The Renaissance man is an ideal, and today we are likely to believe an impossible one, for modern man cannot embrace all current knowledge as we think Da Vinci did in his time...
...he is at his weakest in chapters like the obligatory one on "Women in the Renaissance...
...Alexander effectively traces the emergence of the Renaissance through transformations in the visual arts...
...Our art is abstract, dehumanized, nonfigura-tive, moving around again toward the Madonna of the Duecento, "a flat nonperson floating on a flat nonspace...
...We hanker for a new Cellini, forgetting that, by his own account, he murdered with impunity...
...We are back to the Medieval pattern...
...But Fra Lippo Lippi's Madonna is a Tuscan mother occupying a Tuscan space...
...Thus man emerges as the true focus of the Renaissance universe, "Nicodemus towering over, dominating, pitying, enclosing Christ...
...And the Renaissance, he finds, is "curiously akin to our own time [in] the conquests of new techniques the exhilaration of standing on the brink of new worlds . . the melancholy of having been cast adrift from old secure moorings...
...A good deal, contends Sidney Alexander, a biographer of Michelangelo, translator of Guicciardini and lecturer for the last 20 years at Italian branches of various American universities...
...Alexander is best in those chapters where he draws zesty portraits of the leading Renaissance figures...
...Natural colors appear and, at the center, a real person...
...If so, Alexander cautions us to remember that the Renaissance was a cruel age as well, when every patrician reserved the right to put the "Question of the Cord" to his plebeians, drawing them up by the wrists to expedite questioning...
...Although often convincing and always entertaining, giving a full measure of the joy that comes from time traveling, the author's quick shuttle from the 20th to the 16th century sometimes yields no more than empty observations...
...We do learn from history, yet the lessons are not always clear and the grades are often passed out too late...
...aphorisms cannot always be made to substitute for analysis...
...He believes history is "exemplary," offering "a rich stock of parallel situations, never exactly like our own, but close enough, when contrasted, to result in special illuminations...
...He demonstrates how a Madonna of the Duecento, gold-backed, "is not a person but a symbol floating on an unreal background...
...His book is admittedly a distillation of lectures, and it suffers from this...
...Further developments follow: Da Vinci throws off scientific notions with encylopedic abandon, Michelangelo reveals life beneath the stone with "the hand that obeys the intellect...
...Or, perhaps we really lust after the same freedom from restraint...
...We are in full flight from those awesome demigods afloat on the Sistine ceiling...
...Indeed, this is the theme of Lions and Foxes, which he embroiders with his extensive knowledge of the Renaissance, fashioning from the contrasts shafts of intelligence about our own times...
...Still, Lions and Foxes does stimulate our interest, and we do nod in agreement with its summation of the Rensissance: "That curious mixture of elegance and brutality, refinement and vulgarity, reason and superstition, those fine flowers growing on the battlefields have long gone to dust, but we walk that ground, and to know where we are going we had better know where we came from...
...Collectivities of one sort or another are beginning to take over from individualism," Alexander writes...
...As he perceptively phrases it, "our watches drip and time is a scramble...
...Reviewed by Thomas R. Brooks Author, "Toil and Trouble: A History of American Labor" What can we now learn from the Renaissance, that age of I'uomo universale so dissimilar from our age of the specialist...
...Alexander proceeds to contrast this vision with our present image of man as a victim whose center cannot hold, an atom shattered into microcosmic particles and anti-particles...
Vol. 58 • March 1975 • No. 7
