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Isaac Sligh joins me to discuss the Republic of Georgia, Crusaders, travel writing, audiophiles & more. This is the third of our podcasts on The New Criterion’s Hilton Kramer Fellowship.
Meanwhile, Adam Kirsch come in to talk about the April poetry issue of The New Criterion, the magazine’s Poetry Prize, and more. Following our discussion, Brian Brodeur reads selections from his Poetry-Prize winning book, Some Problems with Autobiography (Criterion Books).
THE NEW CRITERION, May 2023
LETTER FROM THE GOLAN
On security in the Golan, Israeli politics & settler culture.
Israel’s judicial woes exploded just as we were approaching Ben Gurion Airport for our flight home. This time, it wasn’t Syria or Lebanon, Iran or Egypt, or any of the other bad actors surrounding us making trouble, but Israel itself. The protesters became more numerous throughout the day as we neared Tel Aviv. Almost all of them were against the judicial reforms promoted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They took to the highway overpasses and often to the highways themselves. They shuttered the national parks and even staged walkouts at many of the country’s McDonald’s—cutting off our visit to the archeological site of Caesarea, and my family’s meal options, before takeoff.
That the general strike then closed down Ben Gurion International for several hours speaks to the long shadow of the country’s short history. As the founding prime minister of the State of Israel, David Ben-Gurion had more pressing concerns in 1948 than load-testing his nascent country’s governmental architecture, and he left it without a proper constitution. The proposed judicial reforms, and the controversy surrounding them, are the consequences of this legislation delayed, legislation denied, now quickly boiling over into an un-constitutional crisis, right as the country is about to celebrate its diamond jubilee.
It was with some irony that we largely avoided the protests during our final days in the country by touring the Golan Heights. To this day this northeast corner of Israel, taken from Syria in the Six-Day War in 1967, remains contested Israeli territory by all but the United States. In March 2019, President Trump affirmed Israel’s claim to the region. The move elicited condemnation from the European members of the U.N. Security Council and much celebration here. In honor of the U.S. announcement, Netanyahu broke ground on a new settlement named Trump Heights (Ramat Trump) east of the Jordan River, on the road to the former Syrian military headquarters, which has become a brutalist ruin now covered in graffiti. A monument to Trump marks the entrance to the settlement with the sculpture of a bald eagle taking flight from a menorah.
A sign in the Golan warning of the presence of land mines. Photo: James Panero.
The contested status of the Golan has left the region, which in a brief span borders Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan, largely unpopulated since the disruptions of 1967. The battle-scarred hills are still littered with Syrian bunkers and unexploded mines, over which there now falls a contingent peace. One morning we took an old Land Rover up from the Hula Valley into the Height’s rutted dirt roads. “Where are we?” I asked our driver, Royi. “You are in the Middle East,” he replied.
Wildflowers now grow around the rusted barbed wire that crisscrosses the hillside and the numerous signs that read “danger mines!” Mustard flowers, poppies, and tall grasses provide abundant food for the mix of bees, cattle, and wild animals that now call these slopes home. Beef from the Golan is free-range, save for the minefields, and results in some of the most flavorful steak you can find—one evening I dined on a local T-bone and Golan wine at a horse ranch just north of ancient Capernaum on the Sea of Galilee.
Once up on the heights’ plateau, we pulled over. We got out of the vehicle, being sure not to wander off the road. Royi brewed a tea of Golan lemongrass on a camp stove he balanced on the hood of his vehicle. He peeled and handed around slices of local orange—the smell of orange blossoms is a particular treat when walking through the groves in the valley. A hoopoe, the national bird of Israel, with its orange crown and a winged jacket of black-and-white feathers, foraged in a bush by the side of the road. In the distance, we spotted a family of boar circling in the shade of a tree. A herd of Nubian ibex, a vulnerable species that has found its own refuge in Israel, ran along the ridgeline.
An Iron Dome launch site in the Golan, with Mount Hermon in the distance. Photo: James Panero.
As we continued up to the present Syrian border, we passed Israeli bases and active IDF training grounds. “Iron Dome,” Royi pointed to our right. There they were: mobile sand-colored missile launchers just off the side of the road, trained in the direction of Lebanon. “TANK CROSSING” read another sign nearby. It is a warning that I learned needs to be taken at its word. Our guide during our Israeli stay, a spritely Golan homesteader named Lior, lost all of his bees six years ago when an Israeli tank ran over his forty hives during nighttime training maneuvers. He restored a few of the hives and gave us a jar of his personal supply to take home. He would need the rest in this land of milk and honey for his growing family of “only four” children, as he likes to say.
For lunch we stopped at a farm in central Golan at Moshav Kidmat Tzvi, one of those Jewish cooperative communities, founded in 1981, still deemed illegal by what Israel’s antagonists like to call “international law.” Here the owners, Tami and Babi, served a meal of local abundance: platters of fish and pasta, hummus and cheese, and fruits and vegetables, paired with their homegrown olive oil and wine. The building is made entirely of recycled materials. Tami sits down at our table to explain their history as her cat rubs against my leg. The walls are covered with homemade glass and artwork. A tree trunk grows up in the middle of the room and exits to the outdoors through a hole in the ceiling. Babi offers me a brandy distilled from his own apples. From the charoset and maror of the Passover seder plate, food has always held a central place in Jewish symbolism. Now a fresh cornucopia, shared at this Israeli table, replaces the bitter herbs of Egypt with the succulent fruits of aliyah, or “going up,” to Zion.
This frontier attracts settlers with the same pioneer spirit that you might have found in Oklahoma Territory over a century ago. These are times when Israel resembles nothing less than a young and vibrant United States. Today the settlers vary in their politics. Some are old leftists, the secular holdouts of the kibbutzim. Others are religious idealists, fulfilling what they see as their own manifest destiny. What they share is a spirit for Zionism, the civic virtue that has propelled this nation, despite its conflicts and divisions, to astonishing heights in under a century.
Up at the border, the contrast with these achievements can be most striking. Through its industry and energy, against the odds, Israel has shocked the world with its successes. The triumphs have only brought shame to its Arab neighbors, who have mainly shown themselves to be impotent and corrupt. Beyond the demilitarized zone, the abundance of the Golan ends in a sharp line and gives way to the denuded hills of Syria and Lebanon. On the flank of Mount Avital, with the snow-covered peak of Mount Hermon in the distance, I felt a cold wind blowing across the ridgeline. Here in the late afternoon we overlooked Camp Ziouani, the DMZ outpost operated by the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force—the “useless nations,” as Israelis call them. From all around, a chorus of manic laughter emanated out of the grass. “Jackals,” Lior told me. I was unsure if he was referring to the animals or the Hezbollah bases just beyond.
The Israeli border, with Syria in the distance. Photo: James Panero.
For anyone who doubts the strategic necessity of the Golan to Israel, just visit the old Jewish settlements clinging to the hillsides to the west of the Jordan River. Before 1967, the Syrian border ran right in front of them, straight down the middle of the Hula Valley. The line split the region in two and placed Israeli villagers within sniper range of the militarized Syrian positions overshadowing their settlements from the east. As it is, the region can still be besieged by rocket fire from Lebanon and was under heavy bombardment as recently as 2006. At the time, Hezbollah was firebombing Israel with over two hundred rockets a day. Israel’s aerial fire brigade flew out of Mahanayim airfield, just down the hill from our bed-and-breakfast in Rosh Pina.
The charming village of our stay, a stone’s throw from the city of Safed, is something of the Plymouth of Zionism. The village was settled in the 1880s as one of the first Jewish homesteads in what was then the Ottoman Vilayet of Beirut. The name Rosh Pina, meaning “cornerstone,” refers to Psalm 118:22—“The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.” It speaks to the foundational aspirations of its pioneers. Baron Edmond de Rothschild underwrote the town’s agricultural development, purchasing land to grow crops, which made it one of the region’s first self-sustaining Jewish communities. The eminent Victorian Laurence Oliphant, who gathered support from Christian Zionists for such settlements, visited soon after in 1886, writing:
These consisted of twenty-three Roumanian and four Russian families, numbering in all one hundred and forty souls. The greater number were hard at work on their potato-patches when I arrived, and I was pleased to find evidences of thrift and industry. A row of sixteen neat little houses had been built, and more were in process or erection. Altogether this is the most hopeful attempt at a colony which I have seen in Palestine.
The future of Israel now seems a world away from these pioneers. The risk today is that many in the younger generation, increasingly wealthy and cosmopolitan and centered around the booming tech corridor of Tel Aviv, are seeking to align themselves with the same liberal international order that has proven to offer false shelter for the Jewish people time and again. When they appeal to “democracy” in protesting Netanyahu’s judicial reforms, for example, what they really oppose is his attempt to rein in an unaccountable judicial elite; part of Netanyahu’s proposed reforms would align their nominating process with something closer to the democratic American system. In opposing the legislation of the Israeli Knesset—put forward by its elected members—Israel’s overreaching judiciary has long weakened the country’s borders and thwarted its efforts at counterterrorism. In 2007, Judge Robert H. Bork even noted that Aharon Barak, the former president of the Supreme Court of Israel, had written “a textbook for judicial activists.”
The Golan plateau. Photo: James Panero.
Beyond such policy disagreements, the mass protests are really an attempt to oppose the Netanyahu government through mob rule by drawing on the progressive shock tactics of Antifa and Black Lives Matter. “Whatever individual protesters may have told themselves, the real purpose of the uprising was not to stop judicial reform. It was to get rid of Netanyahu,” wrote Melanie Phillips in the Jewish News Syndicate. “Protesters absurdly claimed that the reform program—proposed by a democratically elected government—was a ‘coup.’ . . . That is the antithesis of democracy.”
Nation-building is tough business. Israel’s burden has been to build one under a contemporary spotlight while being reprimanded by many of the same world powers whose actions necessitated the creation of the Jewish State in the first place. Here is a country the size of New Jersey that is regularly under attack by one or more of its neighbors. Israel’s unabashed struggle for self-survival has been a defining characteristic of its history and the fire fueling its great successes. As Golda Meir, Israel’s iron-lady prime minister, famously said: “If we have to have a choice between being dead and pitied, and being alive with a bad image, we’d rather be alive and have the bad image.” In the Golan Heights, at least, that spirit lives on.
THE NEW CRITERION, February 2023
On “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
It is the contemporary fate of Vittore Carpaccio (ca. 1465–1525), the Venetian painter of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, now with a major new exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, to share his name with a popular dish of sliced raw beef.1 The joint appellation, as it turns out, is not a coincidence. In 1963 the Palazzo Ducale organized its first ever retrospective of this “master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice,” as the National Gallery dubs its current show. La Serenissima at the time was awash in Carpacciomania, so much so that Giuseppe Cipriani, the owner of Harry’s Bar, named his culinary invention after the reds of the appetizing painter.
The famous restaurateur was not alone in appreciating the taste of this last of the Venetian “Primitives”—one who was sandwiched, as it were, between the coolness of Giovanni Bellini and the maniera moderna warmth of Titian and Giorgione. A little over a century before Cipriani paid his respects, John Ruskin unearthed Carpaccio among his stones of Venice. The painter sent Ruskin into a “reverie” approaching a “delirium of fantasy.” Then as now the artist’s great appeal was his stunning architectural staging, one that sets his mythological, biblical, and historical storytelling in idealized Venetian cityscapes.
Vittore Carpaccio, Two Women on a Balcony, ca. 1492/1494, Oil on panel, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, Venice.
In his Guide to the Principal Pictures in the Academy of Fine Arts at Venice of 1877, Ruskin placed Carpaccio at the apex of Venice’s “classic and mythic” age. An honorary member of the Accademia, for weeks Ruskin sat and copied Carpaccio’s monumental cycle of paintings of Saint Ursula, the artist’s most famous set of works, originally created for the Scuola di Sant’Orsola confraternity. “I went crazy about Saint Ursula,” he said of the recently restored works in the Accademia museum. In St. Mark’s Rest, his epilogue to The Stones of Venice, Ruskin even bumped Bellini from his top spot to declare Carpaccio’s Two Women on a Balcony, in the Museo Correr across the Grand Canal, as “The best picture in the world . . . and I know no other picture in the world which can be compared to it.”
In 1882 Henry James set out on his own Venetian tour, Ruskin’s “generous lamp” in hand. In works such as Saint George and the Dragon and Saint Augustine in His Study, James found a “paradise of his own room.” Unlike the “vertical” pull of much of Italian art, James appreciated the “horizontal” window that Carpaccio opened onto the spiritual world, with the terrestrial and the celestial seeming to cohabitate in our own temporal space. Placing him among his favorites Bellini and Tintoretto, James declared that Carpaccio was the “most personal and sociable of artists” for his “care for human life at large.” The anchoring of Carpaccio’s safe harbors seemingly in the actual stones of Venice—with marble paving stones and building façades receding in perspective view—has appealed in many times of rebuilding and renewal: for example during the French Second Empire, through such artists as Gustave Moreau, and following World War I, in the neoclassical fantasies of Giorgio de Chirico.
The times must be right again for another Carpaccio rediscovery. Fortunately the National Gallery (and, undoubtedly, only the National Gallery) has the lending power to mount a major stateside survey of the artist. The first outside of Italy, the display should enkindle our own Carpacciomania. Curated by Peter Humfrey in collaboration with Andrea Bellieni and Gretchen Hirschauer, the exhibition is presented in partnership with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia—which, as with their joint 2018–19 exhibition of Jacopo Tintoretto, will also mount the show at the Palazzo Ducale. In Washington, even without some of his most significant paintings on offer, in particular those from his expansive Saint Ursula cycle, “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” features forty-five paintings and thirty drawings. Gathering work from some forty-eight venues, the transporting exhibition leaves us with much to chew on.
Vittore Carpaccio, Saint George and the Dragon, 1516, Oil on canvas, Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Benedicti Claustra Onlus, Venice. Photo courtesy of Abbazia di San Giorgio Maggiore, Benedicti Claustra Onlus.
While little is known of the young Carpaccio, he clearly became intoxicated by three Bellinis: the brothers Giovanni and Gentile and their father, Jacopo. Together they developed and refined the Venetian understanding of single-point perspective. As an apprentice to the Bellini sons (whether he trained with Giovanni or Gentile or both is not entirely certain), Carpaccio inflated their compositional inventiveness to maximum volumetric effect. Never before had paintings breathed with quite so much fresh air.
Like the brothers Bellini, Carpaccio worked with oil on canvas rather than in fresco, as the new medium was far more resilient in the humid Venetian climate. The availability of printed books and woodcuts added elements of the northern Renaissance to Carpaccio’s cosmopolitan mix, with printed maps and depictions of distant lands informing his visual concatenations.
The results are indeed storytelling at its most masterly. And rather than overwhelming us with such monumental painting cycles as his Saint Ursula, which at nine feet tall by eight to twenty feet wide (and again newly restored) remains in situ at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, “Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” helps us appreciate the painter on a more intimate scale with smaller works. Assembled here, the altarpieces, private devotional paintings, smaller confraternity commissions, and studies and cartoons that he made in preparation for his larger compositions all speak to the artist’s consummate craft and the particular interests of his Venetian patronage.
Carpaccio was the opposite of groundbreaking. In his compositional structuring, he was fortifying. His imaginative worlds were perfected 3D environments, premium-engineered with all Venetian-made parts. Into his spaces he arranged numerous figures far more occupied with one another than with our own subjective point of view. Unlike the later artists of the Venetian cinquecento, with Carpaccio there is no heavy artistic hand to draw us in. We instead get a self-contained universe, a sim-Serenissima where the activities exhibit the same ordered rules as the compositions’ single-point perspectives.
Vittore Carpaccio, Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon (recto); Letter Rack (verso), ca. 1492/1494, Oil on panel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
The exhibition begins with Ruskin’s “best picture in the world,” the Two Women on a Balcony—but here presented even better than in Ruskin’s day. Sometime in the 1700s this small work, most likely part of a set of folding shutter doors painted for a Venetian palace, was divided from its upper half. The lower portion with the two women eventually went to Venice’s Museo Correr. The upper part, now titled Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon, ended up at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The panels, dated together to ca. 1492/94, were only reidentified as being part of the same composition after conservation efforts in the early 1990s. This exhibition now temporarily reunites for only the second time in recent history what was clearly intended to be a single whole—the line of a lily stem even connects the two parts. Their happy reunion begs to remain permanent, if only the Getty and Correr could arrive at a loan agreement to share the works.
In the lower panel, the women gather on a balcony filled with birds and dogs. The scene is busy with domestic activity even if the women (and their dogs) appear somewhat bored by the pet play. The upper panel suggests the reason for their tedium. Above and beyond them, the men have loaded onto their gondola-like boats for a lively hunting and fishing expedition out on the lagoon. The components together reveal the ordering of Venetian society in one view. As both groups contend with their animals, the women in the foreground, who seem little interested in what is happening below the balcony, add humor to the recreation of their husbands beyond. The clever division and animated activity of the entire panel reveal Carpaccio’s great ingenuity with composition, compressing and expanding space to his will to contain his full “care for human life at large,” as Henry James put it. That the scene is clearly cut off to the left would certainly suggest that some additional Carpaccio is still out there waiting to be rediscovered—just look for the matching balustrade and rear end of a brown dog. Adding to this intrigue, the verso of part of the known panel is painted with personal letters appearing to hang from a line in trompe l’oeil. As much as we might appreciate him by the slice, Carpaccio is best enjoyed whole.
The organization of Carpaccio’s compositions was no accident. His studies of faces, architecture, and perspective were exacting. His deliberative process might help explain why we are now left with more of Carpaccio’s preparatory work than almost any other artist of his time. The National Gallery presents thirty of these drawings both to let us appreciate his working methods and to help illustrate his larger paintings that cannot travel. Among these examples, a blue double-sided sheet from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford is a standout. Titled Head of a Young Woman in Profile (recto) and Head of a Young Woman in Three-Quarter View (verso), the drawings from ca. 1488–89 served as studies for two of the numerous faces in Carpaccio’s Apotheosis of Saint Ursula, one of the paintings in the Accademia cycle. The drawings are not necessarily innovative. They even may have been copies of works by Pietro Perugino and Pinturicchio. Still, through their exquisite modeling created with hatch marks of white and black chalk and washes of brush and brown, they reveal a luminous grace.
Carpaccio’s extensive compositional planning did not necessarily serve him well as his reputation contended with the rise of the modern style of Titian and Giorgione. Even at the time of Ruskin, in 1871, Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle wrote that Carpaccio was “without any poetry of fancy” in their History of Painting in North Italy. In her current catalogue essay, “Carpaccio as a Draftsman,” Catherine Whistler concurs that he was “overshadowed by the poetic genius of Titian.” Even Peter Humphrey writes that “set against the more heroic and classicizing art, the work of Carpaccio must have appeared staid, quaint, and irrelevant.” At the very least, Humphrey continues, “his narrative paintings and skills as a storyteller may be seen as a vital link in the continuous tradition in Venetian painting from the late Gothic style of the early fifteenth century to the late baroque of the eighteenth.”
But there is more to Carpaccio than merely his role as a historical connection between the painting styles of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Venice. His appeal is in locating us in spiritual space and infusing this built environment with pious order. We can see why the scuole, those social and charitable organizations of Venice, all commissioned him to paint their lives of Saint George and Saint Stephen and Saint Ursula and the Virgin Mary. The worlds he envisioned were immersive. They could be entered, touched, and breathed. The paradise he creates is indeed “of his own room,” to which he extends a welcoming invitation.
“Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice” opened at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., on November 20, 2022, and remains on view through February 12, 2023. The exhibition will next be on view at the Fondazione Musei Civici, Palazzo Ducale, Venice (March 18–June 18, 2023).
