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WORK TITLE: The Lies of the Artists
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WEBSITE: https://history.nd.edu/people/ingrid-rowland/
CITY: Notre Dame
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NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 343
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 19, 1953, in Princeton, NJ; daughter of F. Sherwood and Joan Rowland.
EDUCATION:Pomona College, B.A., 1974; Bryn Mawr College, M.A., 1976, Ph.D., 1980.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Academic and art historian. Taught at Columbia University, New York, NY, and University of California, Los Angeles, and in Rome programs of St. Mary’s College and University of California, Irvine; University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, professor of art history, 1990-2000; American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities; University of Notre Dame, School of Architecture, Rome, Italy, professor of art history. American School of Classical Studies in Athens fellow, 1976-77; American Academy in Rome fellow, 1981-82; Rockefeller Foundation fellow, 2000; Villa I Tatti in Florence fellow; Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles fellow, 2000-01; John Simon Guggenheim Foundation fellow, 2000-01.
MEMBER:American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Accademia dei Sepolti (Volterra, Italy), Accademia degli Intronati (Siena, Italy), Academia Bibliotecae Alexandrinae (Egypt; founding member).
AWARDS:Quantrell Award, University of Chicago, for excellence in undergraduate teaching; Socio Corrispondente, Accademia dei Sepolti, Volterra, Italy, 2005; honorary D.F.A., Pomona College, 2008.
WRITINGS
Author of foreword to Brushed Aside: The Untold Story of Women in Art, by Noah Charney, Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, MD), 2023. Contributor to periodicals, including American Scientist and New York Review of Books.
SIDELIGHTS
Ingrid D. Rowland is a professor of art history who taught at several institutions before joining the faculty of the University of Notre Dame at its School of Architecture in Rome, Italy. She writes and lectures on classical antiquity and the age of the Baroque. Rowland’s academic research interests include ancient Roman architecture, classical antiquity, classical architecture, Renaissance and the Baroque, and Vitruvius and Hellenistic classical architecture.
The Culture of the High Renaissance
Rowland is the author of volumes that include The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome, which incorporates fifty-six black-and-white plates from rare books to paint a picture of sixteenth-century Rome. Anthony Grafton, a reviewer in the New York Review, noted that Rowland “sees the Renaissance as the birth of a new culture and society.” Grafton observed that Rowland “deftly describes the young artists and warriors” of the era as she “vividly re-creates the majestic, haunted Rome of the late fifteenth century.”
“Especially effective—and particularly fascinating,” Grafton wrote, “are Rowland’s recreations of particular Roman circles and their ways of making scholarship into art.” Grafton concluded that Rowland “brings a lost world to life” and “has given [the reader] a genuinely metropolitan High Renaissance, not only passionate and learned, but also sexy, urbane, and fascinating.” David Watkin, writing in the Architectural Review, called the work an “innovative study.”
The Scarith of Scornello
The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery is the history of how a prank grew out of proportion. The story begins in 1634, when Curzio Inghirami, age nineteen, and his sister Lucrezia, age thirteen, planted a message inside a coated hairball. The text, supposedly written by “Prospero of Fiesole,” was allegedly seventeen centuries old, and it prophesied the incarnation and resurrection of Christ. The young people had left their villa, Scornello, to go fishing with a servant who they intended to be the witness to their “discovery.” Their grandmother told them to throw the first message away, but the brother and sister had planted more than 200 others, with Lucrezia fashioning the hairballs, and Curzio writing the messages. They were amazed at the gullibility of learned adults who believed them, and Curzio defended his finds into adulthood. He was knighted and became a historian, a reformer of law, and a consultant to hagiographers. Linguists and philosophers who debated Galileo’s theories studied the “scarith.”
Garry Wills noted in the New York Times Book Review that Rowland “cleverly uses Curzio’s story to probe them all, drawing a parallel between the handling of Curzio’s and Galileo’s claims in the courts of Medicean Florence and of papal Rome.” Detractors were threatened and chastised, but the Jesuit Melchior Inchofer and other critics took the name Durchundurk and attacked the validity of the scarith. While Prospero wrote on paper, the Etruscans had written on linen. Prospero wrote from left to right, while the Etruscans had done the opposite. It was later discovered that some of the papers had a modern watermark. Inchofer, who had also attacked Galileo, had earlier defended a fraudulent letter, purportedly written by the Virgin Mary.
William J. Connell, who reviewed The Scarith of Scornello in Renaissance Quarterly, wrote: “Rowland does a splendid job of revealing how Curzio, though a forger, was prototypically modern in the way he published his archaeological ‘finds,’ and how careful he was in their defense. His Scornello probably really was an Etruscan site, she suggests, and she shows how even top-caliber modern Etruscologists have been led astray by romantic visions of an imagined past. Curzio Inghirami anticipated archeology’s future in unexpected ways.”
From Heaven to Arcadia and Giordano Bruno
In From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance, Rowland studies the writers, artists, religious figures, and politicians during the period of the Renaissance. Those she profiles include Botticelli, whose illustrations for the Divine Comedy showed him to be a great reader of Dante. The multifaceted Leonardo da Vinci, the genius of Titian, and the talents of Caravaggio, Correggio, and Artemisia Gentileschi are also studied. Egypt is considered in light of Western fascination with that region, as is the legacy of the late Byzantine Empire. Rowland also covers notable contributors to the period who were outside the art world. The publisher’s description of her book at the New York Review of Books website quotes her as saying: “Renaissance life at its most distinctive was the intangible, unworldly life of the mind.” Within her pages, sculptors and artists compete with poets, astrologers, and philosophers, as well as pornographers and prostitutes. The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher is notable for his understanding of many fields of knowledge. Rowland describes the polymath as being “a builder of connections who insisted on seeing harmony in the midst of disorder,” rendering him an outstanding Renaissance figure.
The subject of Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic was born in Italy in 1548 and burned at the stake on Ash Wednesday in 1600, after being named a heretic by the Inquisition. Born Fillipo Bruno, he adopted the name Giordano upon taking his vows as a friar. A brilliant thinker and writer influenced by Aristotle, Plato, and Thomas Aquinas, Bruno spent years in academic study, and he wrote poetry, plays, essays, and philosophical texts, as well as material about his own theory of memorization, astrology, mathematics, and atomic theory. He studied the Hebrew Kabbalah. He was in agreement with Galileo that the earth rotated around the sun, and he was the first Westerner to envision other planets that could support life. Bruno was ordained a priest in 1572, but he abandoned his calling after being investigated for his views. He became a teacher, and Henry III was his royal patron when Bruno taught his memory theories in Paris. He also lived in Switzerland, Germany, and England. Protestants in these countries also considered him to be a heretic, and he was excommunicated from both the Catholic Church and the Calvinist Church. His writings were too advanced for his time, and he was imprisoned in Genoa, Venice, and Rome, where he died, condemned for refusing to recant his positions on doctrine and accept the authority of the Cardinal-investigators, including Robert Bellarmine, the first Jesuit appointed to the Inquisition. The spot where he died is now marked with a statue of Bruno, erected in 1889, that is honored with flowers and candles by artists, students, atheists, and other freethinkers on the date of his death, February 17. A Kirkus Reviews contributor described the book: “Dense and elegantly erudite—a skillful, accessible analysis of complex systems of religion, philosophy and literature.”
From Pompeii
In 2014 Rowland published From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town. The account looks at the views of famous people throughout history who either visited, wrote, or in some way, opined about the state of Pompeii after being covered by volcanic ash. From Mozart to Freud, Rowland shows how the world’s most popular archaeological excavation site has made an influence on people for thousands of years.
Reviewing the book in the Wall Street Journal, Dan Hofstadter claimed that Pompeii “remains the Roman realization of the underground level of Herodotus’s mythic labyrinth, and a model, if you wish, of Freud’s unconscious. I am not sure whether Ms. Rowland’s treatment, so highly personal, has a very clear focus. It is more like a month of Sundays with an articulate guide—one who will lead you who-knows-where in this vast and sunlit maze.” Writing in the London Guardian, Emily Gowers stated: “Taking the long view, Rowland retells the fascinating story of the Renaissance ‘pre-history’ of Pompeii, when it was already suspected, thanks to Pliny’s eyewitness account of the fatal eruption of AD79, that a lost city lay under the rubble and washing lines of some coastal village. More creatively, she treats the site as a miracle inseparable from its prodigious hinterland.” Booklist contributor Vanessa Bush observed that “Rowland brings her ‘personal archaeology’ to the task of exploring Pompeii as a scholar.” A contributor to Kirkus Reviews noted that “Rowland provides abundant photographs, but many readers will wish for more about the everyday life of Pompeii.” A Publishers Weekly contributor opined that even though the book “lacks a coherent structure, it wistfully captures the atmosphere of a place both beautiful and dangerous.”
The Collector of Lives
In The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art, Rowland and her coauthor Noah Charney create a biography of the biographer of Renaissance art. Much of what the modern world knows about sixteenth-century art in Italy (particularly Florence) comes thanks to the effort of Vasari, who trained as an artist himself. “It took an audacious leap for Vasari to see himself as the defining chronicler of his era, the preserver of life stories, the collector of paper scraps,” said Deborah Solomon in the New York Times Book Review. “You might say, based on his recollections of his sickly childhood, that he began life as a sensitive boy alert to the threat of physical extinction. In his work, he attached himself imaginatively to a family that would never die—the family of art history, in which he continues to hold a place of pride as its industrious and chatty paterfamilias.” As a writer Vasari “set standards by which some artists would live forever and others (not always fairly) would be cast into outer darkness,” explained a Kirkus Reviews contributor. “He was also an early celebrity journalist, although his subjects weren’t famous.”
The Collector of Lives helps modern readers understand the motivations behind Vasari’s most famous work. “What is remarkable about this book,” declared Richard Rivera in the New York Journal of Books, “is that it buttresses and gives the reader a firm understanding of all the reasons why a man in his 30s would spend so many years visiting sites of masterpieces, writing letters, and interviewing family members to create an epic accounting in three volumes on the notable achievements of painters and sculptors, many of which he never knew. It becomes clear that the overwhelming facts in Vasari’s life and antecedents inexorably led him to the path of being a historical writer.”
[open new]
The Divine Spark of Syracuse
Based on Rowland’s Mandel Lectures in the Humanities is her monograph The Divine Spark of Syracuse, highlighting three prominent figures who exemplified the infectious creative spirit of the titular city. Situated on the island of Sicily and part of ancient Greece, Syracuse was home to mathematician Archimedes and poet Theocritus and was once called Greece’s “greatest and most beautiful” city by statesman Cicero. Centering on three distinct figures from different eras, Rowland’s historical narrative elaborates the crux of their engagement with Syracuse as well as the relevance of ongoing history. Philosopher Plato, visiting around the 4th century BCE, may have been inspired by a quarry prison for Athenian prisoners in his famous allegory of the cave of ignorance in the Republic. Archimedes’s engineering know-how helped save Syracuse from besieging Romans in 214 BCE. Renegade Renaissance painter Caravaggio immortalized Syracuse in depicting its patron saint in Burial of St. Lucy (1608).
In the Times Literary Supplement, Angela Leighton found this volume “delightful,” as Rowland “has a knack of bringing stories to life within a strictly historical context.” Leighton appreciated finding beyond the “enjoyably recounted life stories” a “wealth of fascinating, scholarly detail: circumstantial facts of history, manuscripts lost and found, quibbles of translation, disputes of philosophy or physics. Rowland’s intelligent light touch can speak to a general readership, while never ignoring the complexities of historical evidence, personal testimony, hearsay, or legend.” Leighton concluded that The Divine Spark of Syracuse “offers a packed and thrilling journey into the various pasts of this great city.”
The Lies of the Artists
Rowland investigates perspective and artistic transcendence in The Lies of the Artists: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750. Considered a testament to genius in the Renaissance era was the ability to portray scenes and images that “lied” to the viewer—tinkered with ordinary reality in a way evoking the sublime. Rowland looks at exemplary works from the likes of reputed masters such as Raphael, Titian, and Michelangelo as well as oft-overlooked figures including sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni and brilliant painter Artemisia Gentileschi. Rowland bolsters her analysis with salient details about the artists’ personal lives and artistic methods.
A Kirkus Reviews writer appreciated how Rowland’s ongoing dialogue with Giorgio Vasari’s Renaissance-era volume Lives of the Artists lends “additional authenticity” while also allowing Rowland room to “add personal touches and flashes of humor.” The reviewer found the book “enjoyable” especially because Rowland’s “enthusiasm for her subject is contagious” and will inspire readers to seek out those artworks not included in the illustrations. The reviewer hailed The Lies of the Artists as offering a “novel approach to Renaissance art,” as seen with “fresh eyes.”[close new]
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
America, January 19, 2009, Janice Farnham, review of Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic, p. 32.
Architect’s Journal, February 3, 2000, Robert Adam, review of Vitruvius: Ten Books of Architecture, p. 46.
Architectural Review, March, 1999, David Watkin, review of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome, p. 89; December, 1999, Robert Tavernor, review of Vitruvius, p. 94.
Booklist, March 1, 2014, Vanessa Bush, review of From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town, p. 14.
Choice, July, 1999, P. Grendler, review of The Culture of the High Renaissance, p. 2009; May, 2000, P. Emison, review of Vitruvius, p. 1641; July, 2005, D. Pincus, review of From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance, p. 1976.
Christian Science Monitor, August 22, 2008, M.M. Bennetts, review of Giordano Bruno.
Discover, September, 2008, Michael Mason, review of Giordano Bruno, p. 72.
Guardian (London, England), April 9, 2014, Emily Gowers, review of From Pompeii.
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, summer, 2007, Thomas Kuehn, review of The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery, p. 117.
Journal of Modern History, March, 2008, Kenneth L. Feder, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 174.
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2008, review of Giordano Bruno; February 1, 2014, review of From Pompeii; September 1, 2017, review of The Collector of Lives: Giorgio Vasari and the Invention of Art; October 15, 2024, review of The Lies of the Artist: Essays on Italian Art, 1450–1750.
Library Journal, February 15, 2005, Barbara Walden, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 145.
London Review of Books, March 31, 2005, John Bossy, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 12.
Nation, September 10, 2008, Paula Findlen, review of Giordano Bruno.
New Republic, November 5, 2008, Peter N. Miller, review of Giordano Bruno.
New Scientist, August 20, 2008, Sam Kean, review of Giordano Bruno, p. 47.
New York Review, March 4, 1999, Anthony Grafton, review of The Culture of the High Renaissance, pp. 34-38.
New York Review of Books, February 24, 2005, Joseph Connors, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 18.
New York Times Book Review, January 5, 2005, William Grimes, review of The Scarith of Scornello; January 16, 2005, Garry Wills, review of The Scarith of Scornello; December 19, 2008, Anthony Gottlieb, review of Giordano Bruno; December 1, 2017, Deborah Solomon, “How Giorgio Vasari Invented Art History as We Know It.”
Publishers Weekly, June 30, 2008, Dava Sobel, review of Giordano Bruno, p. 170; January 13, 2014, review of From Pompeii, p. 62.
Renaissance Quarterly, fall, 2005, William J. Connell, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 903.
Spectator, November 20, 2004, Sarah Bradford, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 43.
Times Higher Education Supplement, July 22, 2005, David Ridgway, review of The Scarith of Scornello, p. 28.
Times Literary Supplement, September 14, 2007, Theodore K. Rabb, review of From Heaven to Arcadia, p. 28; September 20, 2019, Angela Leighton, review of The Divine Spark of Syracuse, p. 28.
Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2014, Dan Hofstadter, review of From Pompeii.
Washington Post Book World, August 10, 2008, Marc Kaufman, review of Giordano Bruno, p. 4.
ONLINE
New York Journal of Books, https://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/ (April 25, 2018), Richard Rivera, review of The Collector of Lives.
New York Review of Books, http://www.nybooks.com/ (March 30, 2009), description of the book From Heaven to Arcadia.
Notre Dame Rome website, https://rome.nd.edu/ (January 29, 2025), author profile.
University of Notre Dame website, https://history.nd.edu/ (January 29, 2025), author profile.
Ingrid Rowland
Ingrid Rowland
Professor
Emailirowland@nd.eduOffice219 O'Shaughnessy Hall
EducationPh.D., Bryn Mawr CollegeTime Period(s)Early ModernTheme(s)IntellectualGeography(s)Europe
Prof. Ingrid Rowland writes and lectures on Classical Antiquity, the Renaissance, and the Age of the Baroque for general as well as specialist readers. A frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, she is the author of The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth-Century Rome (1998), The Scarith of Scornello: A Tale of Renaissance Forgery (2004), From Heaven to Arcadia (2005), Giordano Bruno, Philosopher/Heretic (2008), and From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (2013), and Villa Taverna (2014), the official history of the residence of the U.S. Ambassador to Italy. In 2009, she was awarded the Society for Italian Historical Studies's Howard R. Marraro Prize for Giordano Bruno. Rowland has also published translations of Vitruvius' Ten Books of Architecture (1999) and Giordano Bruno’s Italian dialogue On the Heroic Frenzies(2014), an edition of the correspondence of Agostino Chigi from a Vatican Library manuscript (2001), and the exhibition catalog The Ecstatic Journey: Athanasius Kircher in Baroque Rome (2000).
As an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Chicago, she received the Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Prof. Rowland previously taught at UCLA and Columbia University, as well as in the Rome programs of St. Mary's College and the University of California, Irvine. After completing a BA in Classics at Pomona College, she earned her Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Greek Literature and Classical Archaeology at Bryn Mawr College. She has been a Fellow of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the American Academy in Rome, the Villa I Tatti in Florence and the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Corresponding Member of the Accademia dei Sepolti of Volterra and the Accademia degli Intronati of Siena.
Ingrid D. Rowland
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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ingrid Drake Rowland
Born August 19, 1953 (age 71)
Alma mater Pomona College
Bryn Mawr College
Occupation(s) Classical scholar, professor, author
Ingrid D. Rowland (b. August 19, 1953[1]) is a professor in the Department of History at the University of Notre Dame.[2] She is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Biography
She is the daughter of Nobel Chemistry Prize laureate Frank Sherwood Rowland.
Rowland completed her Bachelor of Arts degree in classics at Pomona College in 1974[3] and earned her Master's and Ph.D. degrees in Greek literature and classical archaeology at Bryn Mawr College.[2]
Based in Rome, Rowland writes about Italian art, architecture, history and many other topics for The New York Review of Books.
Publications
The Culture of the High Renaissance: Ancients and Moderns in Sixteenth Century Rome (1998)
The Place of the Antique in Early Modern Europe (1999)
The Scarith of Scornello: a Tale of Renaissance Forgery (2004) based on the "Etruscan" forgeries of Curzio Inghirami
The Roman Garden of Agostino Chigi (2005)
From Heaven to Arcadia: The Sacred and the Profane in the Renaissance (2005)[4]
Giordano Bruno: Philosopher/Heretic (2008)
From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town (2014)
The Divine Spark of Syracuse (2019)
Awards and honors
Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing, Robert B. Silvers Foundation, 2021[5]
Socio Corrispondente, Accademia dei Sepolti, Volterra, Italy, 2005
Founding Member, Academia Bibliotecae Alexandrinae (Egypt), 2004
Elected Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2002
Fellow, Getty Research Institute, 2000–2001
John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, 2000–2001
Rowland, Ingrid D. THE LIES OF THE ARTISTS MIT Press (NonFiction None) $34.95 12, 17 ISBN: 9780262549097
Seeing Italian art with fresh eyes.
Rowland is a respected historian at the University of Notre Dame who has written a series of books about the art of the Renaissance. This collection of essays focuses on artists who "lied": that is, who were able to depict reality in a way that went beyond the realistic to reach a sublime level. This was considered a pinnacle of achievement, and Rowland traces the idea through some of the key works of the era. Several of the artists discussed here, such as Raphael, Titian, Bernini, and Michelangelo, are famous, but Rowland finds new things to say about them by delving into their biographical details and working methods. She also does much to rescue the reputations of figures who are almost forgotten, such as Bertoldo di Giovanni, a sculptor of "beguiling little masterpieces," and Artemisia Gentileschi, an artist of "brutality and brilliance" and one of the few successful female painters of the time. Rowland frames much of her analysis with a book written in the period,Lives of the Artists, by Giorgio Vasari, who was himself a fair artist as well as an author. This gives her own study additional authenticity and provides the opportunity for her to add personal touches and flashes of humor. It all makes for an enjoyable collection, of interest to art aficionados and general readers alike. Rowland does not include pictures of all the works she cites, but her enthusiasm for her subject is contagious and many readers are likely to enjoy tracking them down for themselves.
A novel approach to Renaissance art.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Rowland, Ingrid D.: THE LIES OF THE ARTISTS." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A811898616/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=caf1f4b6. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.
Ingrid D. Rowland
THE DIVINE SPARK OF SYRACUSE
125 pp. Brandeis University Press. Paperback, $19.95.
978 1 51260 305 7
"Syracuse is the greatest and most beautiful of all the Greek cities", wrote Cicero in his long court case Against Verres, the Roman governor who stripped many of Sicily's towns of their artistic riches. Home to the mathematician Archimedes and the poet Theocritus, Syracuse also hosted many famous visitors from "mainland" Greece, among them Sappho, Pindar, Aeschylus (who may have produced his Women of Etna in the theatre there, in about 475 BC), as well as Plato who came three times, and wrote the Republic partly in reaction to the licentiousness and corruption of its politics. The city would not see such intellectual and artistic flowering again. When I first visited it some thirty-five years ago, the old centre of Ortygia was semi-derelict, a ghost town haunted by its past, and my main experience was of being assaulted by some ragged children feeling for my money--in those days Italian women often carried notes in their bras for safekeeping!
In 2005 Syracuse was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and renovation of this beautiful town was given a welcome boost. The old centre became largely pedestrian, the population increased and property prices began to rise. I returned last Christmas to find the place transformed, even if the cost of that transformation was a tourist market of B&Bs and souvenir shops. Yet Etna's sudden eruption one day, visible behind the modern spire of the Madonna delle Lacrime (Our Lady of Tears), was a reminder of the sheer fragility of this terrain which sits on the geological fault line between Europe and Africa. Built in 1957 to commemorate a weeping picture of the Madonna, this church seems an apt symbol for the sad history of colonization, poverty, emigration and natural disaster which subsequently marked this one-time centre of Mediterranean trade and culture.
In this delightful book, based on her Mandel Lectures in the Humanities, Ingrid Rowland tells a story which weaves history, biography and a sense of place around three figures from the past: Plato, Archimedes and Caravaggio. For the non-specialist reader like myself, this unusual combination makes for a page-turning read. Plato's life and writings are put in the context of the demoralizing Spartan wars and disastrous Athenian offensive against Syracuse in 415 BC; Archimedes' brilliant engineering feats in the context of the two-year Roman siege of the city in 214 BC; and Caravaggio's painting of the "Burial of St Lucy" (1608) in the context of Renaissance city-state politics, factional interests and ruthless banditry. The title echoes a sentence from "Plato's" Seventh Letter (its authorship disputed), which defines philosophical wisdom as that moment when, after long deliberation, "a light ignited by a leaping spark ... comes to life within the soul". That light is the connecting thread between chapters, between philosopher, mathematician and painter, as well as being a particular feature of Syracuse itself.
Rowland, who has written widely on ancients and moderns, has a knack of bringing stories to life within a strictly historical context. So here, she recounts how Plato, dismayed by Athenian politics, set sail for Sicily in 388 or 387 BC at the age of forty. Dionysius, the city's autocratic ruler, was keen to welcome poets and philosophers, though his motives were mostly self-aggrandizing. The poet Philoxenus, for instance, was twice thrown into prison for refusing to praise the tyrant's own poetry, and Plato, similarly, having failed publicly to approve his philosophical acumen, was hastily shipped off, ending up in the slave market of Aegina where a friend recognized and freed him. Rowland is particularly good on these local, familial accidents of history. Surprisingly, Plato accepted two further invitations to the city, only to be disappointed each time. Syracuse, however, may have inspired the famous image in the Republic of the world as a dark cave, lit by fire which throws shadow-puppet figures on a wall. She is not the only scholar to suggest that the image may have derived from the lightless, limestone quarry where many Athenian prisoners were left to die--a place which, curling in on itself, also produces an extraordinary acoustic of echoes. Centuries later it was Caravaggio who, having heard Falcone's piece for four voices (two of them the echoes), dubbed this quarry "the ear of Dionysus".
Archimedes, by contrast, was a native, and his engineering skill was crucial in fending off the besieging Romans in 214 BC. Though he is best remembered for his bathtub "Eureka" moment, Rowland reminds us of the other inventions of this mathematical genius: his water screw which is still in use, his defensive catapults of iron darts, the huge grappling hook which could topple a boat in the harbour, the parabolic reflector which could (perhaps) set fire to wooden objects at a distance--though this is a disputed attribution--and, more luxuriously, the huge cargo ship sporting twenty banks of oars, a gymnasium, gardens and a library, which was then given to Ptolemy of Alexandria who turned it into a tourist attraction. Archimedes' death at the hands of an impatient Roman soldier whom he kept waiting while finishing a diagram was recognized, even by Rome, as a tragic loss.
Caravaggio, however, was a fleeting visitor --a convicted escapee, first from Rome where he had murdered a man, then Malta where, after a brawl, he was put in prison, and again escaped, probably with the help of friends in high places. His honouring as a member of the Knights of Malta for "virtue" requires a little stretching of the imagination, but evidently the widespread fame of this rascally and irascible young painter was reason enough. Rowland then focuses on Caravaggio's painting of the "Burial of St Lucy", commissioned during his stay in Syracuse. Patron saint of the city, her name meaning light, Lucy's feast falls appropriately on the shortest day of the year. At this point, as the book returns to its underlying theme, I could have wished for more extended discussion of Caravaggio's painterly light effects--his spot-lighting chiaroscuro (like that of the prisoners' quarries and of Plato's cave) which so brilliantly dramatizes the figure of St Lucy lying dead in the catacombs outside Syracuse.
Alongside these enjoyably recounted life stories, however, is a wealth of fascinating, scholarly detail: circumstantial facts of history, manuscripts lost and found, quibbles of translation, disputes of philosophy or physics. Rowland's intelligent light touch can speak to a general readership, while never ignoring the complexities of historical evidence, personal testimony, hearsay, or legend. In its mere hundred pages, The Divine Spark of Syracuse offers a packed and thrilling journey into the various pasts of this great city. By the end it has become one of the main protagonists.
Caption: "The Ruins of the Temple of Jupiter in Syracuse" by Ettore de Maria-Bergler, 1891
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 NI Syndication Limited
https://www.the-tls.co.uk/
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Leighton, Angela. "Life within the soul: Stories of a beautiful Greek city." TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6077, 20 Sept. 2019, p. 28. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A631798295/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=116f6bb5. Accessed 8 Jan. 2025.