★★★★
In 472 BC Aeschylus’ new play Persians was performed in Athens. It was based on recent history: the great victory at the Battle of Salamis eight years before. Many members of the audience, and the playwright himself, had fought in the battle, and Xerxes was still very much alive (he was murdered seven years later).
★★★★½
On 1 January 1660, a young clerk in the Exchequer in London began to keep a diary. He wasn’t the first diarist in history, far from it; but he was the first to find such potential in the form, and to make of his diary more than a dry chronicle of the times, or a self-examination of sins. This diary was different. From its very first page it showed an almost shocking candour as the young clerk recorded not only his work and social life, but also the most frank and intimate details about his marriage and his own turbulent sexual desires. This honesty sat alongside a lively intelligence which drank in all the events of the world around him. This clerk was Samuel Pepys and, from a historical point of view, he couldn’t have chosen a better moment to start such a detailed account of his life.
(British Museum, until 15 November 2015)
When you think of Louis XIV, chances are that you think of Versailles. The Hall of Mirrors; the fountains and festivals; the gold, glass and glitter of the Ancien Régime. But medals? Maybe not. And yet Louis was responsible for one of the most ambitious and innovative of all medal series, the Histoire medallique. Published in 1702, towards the end of his reign, it aimed to celebrate and promote his victories, both as a military commander and an administrator, and to gloss over his defeats and failures.
(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, 7 May 2015)
We all know that in Shakespeare’s day women weren’t allowed on the stage. Recently several productions have tried to recreate the flavour of those original performances: Mark Rylance’s Twelfth Night and Richard III productions come to mind. But even these don’t give an accurate flavour of what Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences would have seen. Female roles were played by young boys aged between 12 and 22 years old, highly skilled actors who would specialise in playing women until at a certain stage they were no longer able to convince with the illusion (many ended up transitioning across the gender divide and took on male roles within the company).
★★★★½
A Portrait of Costanza Piccolomini
Now here is a love story with a sting in the tail for Valentine’s Day. Written with novelistic verve by Sarah McPhee, a professor at Emory University, it is an example of how art history can be brought to scintillating, pulsing life when done well. McPhee’s point of departure is a striking marble bust of a woman, carved by Bernini in 1637 and traditionally believed to record the features of a woman named Costanza with whom he was passionately in love. Her husband was one of Bernini’s assistants.
★★★½
The History of an Extraordinary Operatic Phenomenon
I should really have kicked off my Baroque reading project with this book by Patrick Barbier. It’s a useful introduction which offers a broad survey of the history of the castrati across Europe, from their beginnings in the church choirs of Byzantium, Spain and the Vatican, up to their twilight years as outdated anomalies, and the departure of the last few castrati from the Sistine Chapel choir at the beginning of the 20th century. Barbier’s focus though, predictably and gratifyingly, is on the heyday of 18th-century opera and, to my relief, he prefers anecdotes and colour to the technicalities of musical vocabulary.
★★★★
I’ve had an unintentionally Baroque-themed summer, so you’ve got a series of posts on countertenors and castrati coming up. (I was going to apologise for it in advance, but I’ve changed my mind: if one person discovers Leonardo Vinci or Franco Fagioli because of these posts, I’ll be happy.) It’s all because I’ve spent the summer shuttling back and forth across Europe for work, which sounds glamorous, but actually just means that I’m more familiar with the layout of Schipol airport than anyone could really desire. It’s been hard to concentrate on books so I’ve been trying to teach myself about music instead. You’ve already had my Artaserse post and there’s plenty more where that came from, although I will start reading more novels again soon, I promise.
★★★★
The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom
My goodness, it’s been a busy couple of weeks. Now at last the winter frenzy of work has been wrapped up; and today I experienced that most blissful of feelings: clearing my desk, closing down my computer and leaving the office for Christmas. No doubt the holidays will fly by very quickly, but I hope to spend a good proportion of them curled up with a good book. Luckily I have more than enough of those to choose from (though one of the novels on my to-read list is the kind of thing you might be rather surprised to see here; but more of that soon). For the last week or so, however, I’ve been kept occupied by a gripping, dense and rather enjoyable history book – a sweeping panorama of Europe in the two centuries which straddled the end of the first millennium.
★★★
How the Renaissance began
The winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction, this book was recommended to me during our Sicily trip a year ago, in the course of a rather splendid dinner-table conversation. It tells the story of Poggio Bracciolini, an Italian humanist who worked at the papal curia and who, during the upheavals after the Council of Constance, sought to distract himself by going book-hunting in the monasteries of Germany. Poggio dreamed of finding previously unknown classical texts in these monasteries, preserved by chance through years of copying as part of the monastic discipline. He and his fellow humanists had already uncovered fragments of letters and treatises, but the discovery that Poggio would make in 1417 would come to have a powerful impact on the very roots of Western philosophy: the full text of De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things) by Lucretius.
★★★½
Voyages of a Viking Woman
I realised that I was going to get along rather well with Nancy Marie Brown when I read the opening sentence of her first chapter: ‘The first time I saw a Viking ship in the water, I was struck with the desire to stow away on it‘. I was immediately charmed. Brown started out as a science writer, but she’s recently had the chance to return to her first love: Norse culture and mythology. Her writing is consequently an appealing blend of specialist and enthusiast.
The Idle Woman 