Michelangelo Buonarroti goes down in history as one of the world’s most annoyingly arrogant artists. Of course, he also goes down in history as one of the world’s most amazingly brilliant artists, and undoubtedly the two facts are connected. Still, he was hard to take.

And he started out his jerkish career young. Check out this self-portrait–notice his nose? How it’s kind of lumpish and flattened? Here’s why: it was broken for him by the artist Pietro Torrigiano. Michelangelo had apparently made fun of his drawing skills, just as he made fun of everyone’s drawing skills. Torrigiano told the tale himself: “One day he provoked me so much that I lost my temper more than usual, and clenching my fist, gave him such a punch on the nose that I felt the bone and cartilege crush like a biscuit. That fellow will carry my signature till he dies.”

And so he did!

Michelangelo’s arrogance made itself felt in all his dealings–with popes, dukes, kings, cardinals, and all the power-brokers of Renaissance Italy. Pope Leo X, who disliked confrontation, said “Michelangelo is impossible, and one cannot deal with him.” The only pope who got the better of Michelangelo was Julius II, who bullied the artist into painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Leo was a Medici, and the Medici had rather less success in bending Michelangelo to their will. Yes, they got him to design the Medici Chapel for the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence, but he never finished the project and family members were less than thrilled with the result. Two important statues in the chapel were intended to commemorate Giuliano de’ Medici (1479-1516), Duke of Nemours, son of Lorenzo the Magnificent, and his nephew Lorenzo II de’ Medici (1492-1519), Duke of Urbino.

One problem? Compare the following images:

Frankly, they don’t look like one another at all. I could do the same with the other statue of Lorenzo, but the result would be the same. The Medicis might have been hugely powerful, but they were a homely bunch. Michelangelo transformed them into Greek gods.

Obviously, people noticed that the statues bore no relationship to the departed dukes, but when asked Michelangelo had a simple reply: “In a thousand years, no one will know how they looked.”

Yet another detail from Secret Lives of Great Artists!

Coming tomorrow: Caravaggio takes verisimilitude too far.

Posted: November 23rd, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Artists, Art.
Comments: 9513

Look very closely at this woman. Notice anything odd? Probably not–you’ve seen it so many times it has ceased to look strange. But really look at her and you’ll notice something odd. The Mona Lisa has no eyebrows.

What gives? Some art historians have claimed that the subject of the portrait, Lisa Gherardini must have plucked her eyebrows, following a whim of Florentine fashion, but that appears unlikely since other portraits of the period, including those by Leonardo da Vinci, show women with eyebrows. Either Leonardo never got around to painting them or they were inadvertently removed in a later restoration.

What’s strange about it is that we totally miss the missing eyebrows since the portrait is so familiar. If you met someone on the street without eyebrows, you’d perk up–if you saw a completely unknown painting of someone without eyebrows, you’d pay attention. The iconic Mona Lisa? You recognize it and then don’t look any further.

Just another fascinating art fact from Secret Lives!

Coming tomorrow — we prove yet again that Michelangelo was an arrogant SOB.

Posted: November 21st, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Artists, Art.
Comments: 1662

This is one of my favorite facts from Secret Lives of Great Artists–one that ended up not making it in the book.

So Western art post-Rome began as religious art, controlled by the church. After the Great Schism when the Catholic Church in Rome broke with the Byzantine church in Constantinople, the artistic traditions of the two regions also diverged. In the west, art gradually became more and more realistic and you end up with the High Renaissance. In the east, the reverse happened. Art became increasingly controlled by the church, taught in church schools, practiced in monasteries, and controlled by religious dictates.

So here’s the best part: by mandate, eastern icons only depicted saints from the waist up. It simply Would Not Do to see a full-figure saint, even if that saint were fully clothed, because, you know, you could think about what was under the robes. The artist might imagine what was under the robes while painting them. Worshippers might get ideas. And when you’re supposed to be meditating on a holy image, the last thing you need are ideas.

My opinion? Byzantine priests had very dirty minds.

Tomorrow: why Mona Lisa is “plucky gal.”

Posted: November 20th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Artists, Art.
Comments: 2

Write a book: check.

Write another book: check.

Maintain any semblance of a normal life while writing said books: Er, not so much.

I have discovered there are certain things not compatible with book writing, like, oh, eating anything that resembles a healthy diet. Providing my family anything that resembles a healthy diet. Also, laundry. The laundry situation really got out of hand. We had a major case of Barbara bed for a month. (Barbara bed? That’s when you pull clothes out of the dryer and put them on the bed to fold, but then you get tired and just go to bed anyway, shoving the clothes down to the foot of the bed. Named after my friend, you guessed it, Barbara.) I’m working through it–I folded for an hour the other night. There’s still more to be folded. Sigh.

But! I turned in the manuscript on Monday. As always, I learned a ton–Philip Glass, for example, used to drive a cab in New York, even after he was becoming well known as a composer. Not long after the premiere of his first opera, Einstein on the Beach, at the Met, a woman got into the cab, noticed his name and said, “Young man, do you know you have the same name as a very famous composer?”

The really modern stuff gave me fits, just like it did with the artists. Extreme modernism is hard to take–and there’s really a lot of similarity in terms of attitude between someone like John Cage and Marcel Duchamp.

Anyway, I’m planning some major, serious, intense blogging in the next mostarting right away, all focused on the artist’s book. So stay tuned!

Posted: November 20th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Composers, Music, Personal musings.
Comments: 4

Dear TCU students:

Please don’t interpret what I’m about to say as criticism. I was once one of you lo these many years ago, and verily I say unto you, Go Frogs. Nevertheless, as my research reaches a fever pitch and you and I are required to share the resources of the Mary Couts Burnett Library (a much-maligned woman who was put in an insane asylum by her husband) (the woman was locked up, not the library) (I wrote an entire chapter on Edward Elgar today), a few things need to be worked out.

1) Quit moving my footstool.

I can’t possibly reach the top two shelves of the stacks without help. Therefore those handy-dandy rolling footstool favored by libraries are necessarily to the progress of this book. And so why do I have to keep moving my footstool into my aisle? Last week, I had left it conveniently positioned in front of Rachmaninoff, and yet when I returned today it was two aisles over. What’s the problem here???

2) Quit checking out my books.

I know that you may consider the books yours as much as mine–or even the property of Texas Christian University–but you are wrong. Until this manuscript is safe in the hands of Quirk Books, I’m laying claim to them all. So whoever checked out all the books on Dvorak that aren’t in Czech? Give them back. You know you’re not going to start working on that term paper until after Thanksgiving anyway. Those books are just taking up space in your dorm room. I only need them for a few days, I promise, and I don’t know have time to learn Czech.

Oh, and whoever has the Mahler books? Same to you.

3) Quit parking in the visitors parking lot.

You are not a visitor. You have a Delta Gamma bumper sticker and a Horned Frogs window decal. Just because the other lots were full doesn’t mean the visitors lot is fair game.

4) To the bicyclist who zipped past me on the Cantey hill just west of Forest Park as I slowly and painful crept foreward in the lowest gear, gasping for air: you too will be 37 some day. Wipe that smirk off your face.

5) To the girl walking behind me telling her two friends about this group study room where you can totally make out with your boyfriend and no one even knows you’re there? OK, first, ick. Second, everyone’s known about that room for years; I attended this school 15 years ago, my friend. Third, neither I nor your buddies believed you when you said you had just “heard about it from a friend.”

Thank you for your prompt attention to these matters. With a little patience and understanding–and an agreement that I get first refusal on all composer biographies–we can make these next few weeks tolerable for everyone.

Yours truly,
Elizabeth

Posted: October 20th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Composers.
Comments: none

Three-thousand, seven-hundred and ninty-six. That’s how many pages I’ve read in the last five days.

At least, that’s how many pages were in the books that I’ve plowed through. I can’t claim to have read every single one. The biography of Wagner, for one, tended to go into lengthy and detailed descriptions of his operas, complete with psychological insights drawn from the composer’s life, and I skipped right past them.

One thing that a master’s degree in English gets you: an ability to read quickly and to skim like mad.

Yes, I can do a close reading with the best of them. My thesis spends pages and pages on about three lines of poetry. But believe me, the only way you get through a seminar on Faulkner is to hit the high points.

And so I have torn through nearly 4000 page devoted to the lives of Liszt, Wagner, Verdi and Brahms. This of course, is all for the next book, Secret Lives of Great Composers, which is due so soon–and for which I so much to write–that I feel sort of faint everytime I think about it.

I will share a few quick points:

* Verdi’s poor wife had to spent months at time talking only to him and the servants, because the residents of the small town where he bought a farm wouldn’t speak to her since she had a bad reputation. She wrote a lot of letters–for which you can’t blame her.

* Liszt refused to be paid for teaching gigs when he was an old man, despite teaching literally thousands of students. He considered it a gift.

* Wagner was a great big honking jerkwad. You may have suspected as much, but believe me, it’s far worse than you imagined.

And now, my friends, that sound you hear is a whip cracking me back to the manuscript. Here’s to hoping the biographies of Dvorak and Puccini are shorter.

Posted: October 13th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Composers, Music.
Comments: none

One of my single favorite facts from Secret Lives of Great Artists is that Andy Warhol once did a guest stint on The Love Boat. I cannot tell you of the joy with which I greeted this information. I think I actually emailed my editor right away. It was just too wonderful. So ridiculous, so camp, so Warhol.

I did some digging around on the internet to try to find a clip, but failed–perhaps because of the short amount of time available to me, perhaps because not much was available a year ago. But, my friends, it is a glorious new day, and YouTube has not failed us. Behold the glory that is a serious Western artist on the shlockiest show in history:

Is that not the most awkward encounter ever? Poor Tom Bosley looks like he would like to climb out of his skin.

I know about this video because one of the producers at KERA found it while I was on the air. My first radio experience went pretty darn well, considering. I only forgot one major fact (oh, David Hockney, your name escaped me) and only babbled a little about Edward Hopper. Best of all, my immune system and nervous system had some kind of pow-wow and agreed to give me a day off from my cold. Combined with a hefty dose of Afrin, you’d never have known I was ill.

Unfortunately, my immune system is like one of those mean witches or genies in fairy tales who will give you want you want–but make you pay later. So from Monday night on I have been sick as a dog. A miserable, sniffling, snorting, shivering mess. I seem to be coming out of it finally–today I’m beginning to see death as the least preferable outcome to this virus. Yesterday, not so much. (Tuesday night I actually begged my husband to knock me unconscious. He refused, damn him.)

I am now so behind that my previous behindness pales in comparison. It may be light-going on the blog the next few weeks–not like it’s been heavy-going, but it may even be lighter than usual. We shall see. When I consider at the number of chapters I have to write for Secret Lives of Great Composers and the time in which I have to write them, I’m tempted to hide under my desk until December.

Unfortunately, my editor is a woman of remarkable fortitude, and I suspect she would find me.

Anyway! If you’re interested in the KERA broadcasts, you can download the broadcast here from KERA’s website (I’ll move it to the book’s site when I get a chance). Come back and share a comment when you’re done! And enjoy watching Warhol–love that wig.

Posted: October 2nd, 2008 under Uncategorized.
Comments: 1

Quick announcement — I’m going to be on the radio today talking about Secret Lives of Great Artists!

If you’re in North Texas, tune in to KERA 90.1 from noon to one — I’ll be on the Think show. You can also listen live online (http://www.kera.org/audio/) or download the podcast later. (I’ll provide a link when one is available.)

I would be more thrilled if I hadn’t come down with a cold this weekend. I spent most of yesterday in bed feeling sorry for myself and snuffling. Today I’m much better, so I think I’ll muddle through. I can always collapse later, right?

Posted: September 29th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Artists.
Comments: none

There should be a special circle in hell reserved for people who highlight in library books. I mean, really. I understand the desire to highlight–I indulge in the occasional underlining. But taking a fluorescent orange highlighter to a book the property of the Texas Christian University library and intended for generations of scholars? That’s just wrong.

And isn’t it strange what other people highlight? The biography of Mendelssohn that I’m reading right now has the most odd and inconsistent highlighting. It’s as if the Rogue Highlighter were randomly marking up lines whenever the mood struck.

(Or perhaps it was to ward off sleepiness. I have to admit this particular biography manages to tactfully conceal anything interesting in Mendelssohn’s life. I’m finding this to be the case in a surprising number of composer’s biographies. One bio of Beethoven did its best to either ignore or downplay all of the composer’s famed eccentricies–and this is a guy who attracted crowds of small boys when he walked through the streets of Vienna. It’s as if the author was so enamored of the composer and so convinced of his status as a Great Man that the weird behavior was somehow embarassing. It’s like a family painstakingly covering up Grandpa Joe’s multiple infidelities and horrible drinking problem because he was, after all, a deacon in the Baptist church.)

If highlighting is a literary misdemeanor, forgery has to rank as a felony. Author Lee Israel is getting a good amount of attention for her new memoir Can You Ever Forgive Me?, which recounts her years as a literary con artist and forger. Israel had been a successful and renowned biographer when she ran into a financial rough patch. To make ends meet, she started faking letters from such authors as Dorothy Parker, Noel Coward, and Lillian Hellman. Eventually she owned half a dozen antique typewriters and was selling the letters for $100 a pop; then she started lifting real letters from libraries and archives. Eventually, Israel was caught and convicted. She spent time on house arrest and years on probation.

Kurt Anderson interviewed Israel in last week’s episode of the NPR program “Studio 360.” It was an interesting piece, but I found Anderon’s glee at Israel’s stunt troubling. It reminded me of the pleasure we take in movie capers like Ocean’s Eleven–it’s a hoot to see how the cons get away it. This week, Anderson responded to a number of letters that he had received about his interview, and he admitted to reconsidering his interview after people complained he was too easy on Israel.

And a good thing, too!

Israel’s crime might be seen as victimless. No one was physically harmed, and although overly trusting dealers lost money, we’re talking hundreds of dollars, not millions.

But to me, what Israel did is unconscionable. All I have as a writer and researcher is the faith of my editors and readers that I am an honest professional.

Yes, some magazines and book publishers have fact-checkers, but not all of them. Quirk couldn’t afford to pay someone to fact-check every single item in my books. That fact, frankly, keeps me up at night. I check and double-check, but I still worry. What if I remember something wrong? What if something get changed unintentionally during editing? What if I read the wrong biography, the one that everyone in the field knows is unreliable? It’s not unusual to find conflicting information in different bios–and I’m not always in a position to know who to trust. I use my best judgement and hope for the best.

Even the most trusted publications can and have been duped by unscrupulous journalists, as the Stephen Glass and Jayson Blair episodes revealed. Literary scholars and publishers were fooled by Israel–two of her faked letters ended up in a volume of collected letters of Noel Coward. What does that do to all the students and scholars relying on that volume? How can you believe anything?

The fact is that for several of my publications I could make up stories from whole cloth and my editors would never know. Believe me, a trade journal is not going to call my sources and read back my quotes to them for confirmation. Similarly, for Secret Lives of Great Composers, I could probably invent some marvelous episode in the life of Mendelssohn that would enliven an otherwise dullish chapter. Unless Quirk happens to employ an editor with a background in Mendelssohn studies, they’d never know. 

But I won’t do that. For one thing, if I were caught–or rather, when I were caught–it would ruin my career, since all I have is my reputation. For another thing, it’s wrong.

So Israel didn’t murder anyone. Good for her. But I take no enjoyment in her stunt.

Although at least, as far as I can tell, she didn’t willfully highlight anything.

Posted: September 14th, 2008 under Literature.
Comments: 1

It’s so incredibly gratifying to have people like my work. I found this review at the eNotes book blog. Here’s an excerpt:

I’ve never met an artist worth knowing who wasn’t, in some way, certifiable. In her very entertaining and informative work, Secret Lives of Great Artists: What Your Teachers Never Told You About Master Painters and Sculptors, Elizabeth Lunday lives up to the second half of her book’s title by dishing the dirt on some of history’s best visual artists. 

Secret Lives is one third comic book, one third history text, and one third People Magazine for people with brains.  C’mon, even us smarty-panties love a good dirty story.  Right?  Right??

And how funny that the author headlined the post with a quote from Cezanne — “L’espirit m’emmerde!” We’re having a real Cezanne week here at the Dilettante. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t have pleased him at all.

Posted: September 7th, 2008 under Secret Lives of Great Artists.
Comments: none