The changes in church facades show the faddish aspect of the Humanist wave in all its glory.

Here’s a church front in Padua:  simple brick, with the shape of a standard Roman Basilica – high central aisle with two lower sides aisles.

Here is a huge church in Venice with roughly the same form, but some gothic ornament added.

The Renaissance came, found facades of brick, and like Augustus and Rome, left them of marble.  Pagan temple facades abound, covering the brickwork of the Christian temples.  Architects worked for generations on novel combinations of columns, pediments, hiding the form of the basilica or reflecting it in the shape of the facade.  This example pretty much masks the side aisles with a nearly square front.

Eventually the thrill of imitating the ancients began to wear thin, and architects went in search of new excitement, including dynamic Baroque styling, and little ‘jokes’ that their sophisticated patrons would enjoy.  Notice the pediment over the main front door that is broken into three pieces, something that would have made Palladio vomit.

Searching for the location of our hotel, after booking it online months ago, I saw this image on GoogleMaps.  A villa with a front lawn extending the width of the town?

Last week, I found myself there, walking that grassy avenue, the Vialone.  It was built by the owner of Villa Giulia, visible on the right, with formal gardens at the lakeside, so that he could have an unimpeded view of both arms of Lake Como.  It’s always a bit strange to find oneself walking terrain that one has previously only known from a map or aerial view.  Was someone watching me from above?

The Vialone terminates in a flight of steps down to the lake on the western side.

Walking the Vialone in the direction of Villa Guilia, facing east.

I noticed this image on the porch of San Zeno in Verona, a splendid Romanesque church.  Rabbits have a curious set of associations in our culture, don’t they?

• Cute and cuddly
• Pesky and destructive
• Fertile, too fertile
• Innocent
• Malign

Not sure what the Christian symbolism behind a rabbit being preyed upon is – I noted it on another facade in Venice, I believe.  One source implied that it alludes to the struggle of the human soul to elude Satan, but it is also true that rabbits sometimes represent souls in thrall to Satan.  There’s one in the lower portion of this detail from Bosch’s vision of Hell.

From Herman Melville’s Typee:

Among the islands of Polynesia, no sooner are the images overturned, the temples demolished, and the idolators converted into NOMINAL Christians, that disease, vice, and premature death make their appearance. The depopulated land is then recruited from the rapacious, hordes of enlightened individuals who settle themselves within its borders, and clamorously announce the progress of the Truth. Neat villas, trim gardens, shaven lawns, spires, and cupolas arise, while the poor savage soon finds himself an interloper in the country of his fathers, and that too on the very site of the hut where he was born. The spontaneous fruits of the earth, which God in his wisdom had ordained for the support of the indolent natives, remorselessly seized upon and appropriated by the stranger, are devoured before the eyes of the starving inhabitants, or sent on board the numerous vessels which now touch at their shores.

When the famished wretches are cut off in this manner from their natural supplies, they are told by their benefactors to work and earn their support by the sweat of their brows! But to no fine gentleman born to hereditary opulence, does this manual labour come more unkindly than to the luxurious Indian when thus robbed of the bounty of heaven. Habituated to a life of indolence, he cannot and will not exert himself; and want, disease, and vice, all evils of foreign growth, soon terminate his miserable existence.

But what matters all this? Behold the glorious result!—The abominations of Paganism have given way to the pure rites of the Christian worship,—the ignorant savage has been supplanted by the refined European! Look at Honolulu, the metropolis of the Sandwich Islands!—A community of disinterested merchants, and devoted self-exiled heralds of the Cross, located on the very spot that twenty years ago was defiled by the presence of idolatry. What a subject for an eloquent Bible-meeting orator! Nor has such an opportunity for a display of missionary rhetoric been allowed to pass by unimproved!—But when these philanthropists send us such glowing accounts of one half of their labours, why does their modesty restrain them from publishing the other half of the good they have wrought?—Not until I visited Honolulu was I aware of the fact that the small remnant of the natives had been civilized into draught-horses; and evangelized into beasts of burden. But so it is. They have been literally broken into the traces, and are harnessed to the vehicles of their spiritual instructors like so many dumb brutes!

Walking back to our apartment – canal, then an alley, then space.  That’s the progression of a walk in Venice.

Dylan called them locusts, and said they sang in sweet harmony.

Venice can can get overwhelming:  the sun, the crowds, the art, the beauty…how much of stuff like this scene above can you take?  Sometimes you just have to flee the city.

Fortunately, The Lagoon beckons.  Within it, are several islands:  Murano for the glass manufacturers; the cemetery; Burano, a small island community of brightly painted houses; and Torcello, about a thirty-minute boat ride a way.  It’s a rather forlorn, marshy place, and practically no one lives there any longer, but it was the place where the people of the Veneto first sought refuge from the Hun invaders.  It grew into a city, but poor resource management led to the silting of their lagoon, bringing mosquitos and malaria, and bad fishing.  They up and left for what became the city of Venice.  The citizens of the new city, practical to the core, looted Torcello for its stone, we would say recycled, so only a few buildings remain.

Not quite the Grand Canal of Venice, but at the end of the walk, there is a nice surprise.

I am not talking about Cipriani’s, the tony restaurant outpost of the ‘famous’ Harry’s Bar that is right down the path from Santa Maria Assunta, but the mosaics inside that church, seen in the left of the photo below.  The structure on the right is the Fosca Basilica, and it is quite plain inside.

The counter-façade of Santa Maria, i.e. the wall inside of the main facade, is covered with a Byzantine-style mosaic of The Last Judgment that is incredible.  (The photos are not mine.)  The one below shows the final trumpet raising some of the dead, including a few that met their ends in the jaws of large fish.

The dead do not have it easy in these scenes of judgment.

Better make sure that you are on the right side of the scale used to weigh souls!

It took a while, but I finally made it back to Venice, La Serenissima, my favorite city.  This picture of San Marco was taken before the place was truly mobbed in the afternoon.

The view from the living room window of our apartment is quite peaceful.   It’s in a 17th century palace, seeminly on another planet from the tourist hubs of the city.  Well, everyone wants to see the same things, and who can blame them?

The stucco on the ceiling is amusing…

The small plaza, or campo, outside the palace is adorned with this nose piece from a shell that lodged in the wall when the uprisings of 1848 were being put down.  At that time, before Italy was a unified and independent country, this territory was ruled by the Austrian Empire.  The inscription below the shell piece is a quotation from Gabrielle D’Annunzio, the proto-fascist adventurer-poet, denouncing the odious barbarians, the Austrians.  He later engaged in a famous venture to ‘liberate’ another small city from the barbarians after WWI, an inspiration to Mussolini for his March on Rome.

Seaweed glistening in the sun, thick and green, a sign of health.  The canal waters seem cleaner than I remember from my last visit.

From the SINTEF report on the debate over the human impact on climate change:

Conclusions

To illustrate the way that scientific, political and ethical
concerns are mixed in the debate on Anthropogenic Global
Warming, this report used the by now famous quote from
Gro Harlem Brundtland, that “doubt has been eliminated“,
and that “it is irresponsible, reckless and deeply immoral
to question the seriousness of the situation” as a point of
departure. The goal of the report was to enter this debate
and battlefield of arguments and take stock of the debate
about anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Based on the 
present review of this debate there are several conclusions
to be drawn. The first and simplest one is that considered
as an empirical statement, the assertion that doubt has been
eliminated on AGW is plainly false. Although as documented
the levelof agreement in the scientific literature that AGW
is occurring is quite extensive,the magnitude of dissent,
questioning and contrarian perspectives and positions in
both scientific discourse and public opinion on the question
of AGW evidently contradicts such a proclamation.

I read The New Jim Crow some months ago, but put aside my posting on it because it is simply too depressing, but prisons were on my mind again this weekend when I heard a talk by David Rothenberg at our local public library.  He is the founder of The Fortune Society, which provides support for ex-offenders who want to reclaim their lives after doing their time – more on that later.

I have commented before (here and here) on the American prison-industrial complex, but this book was extraordinarily powerful:  not because it said anything surprising, but for the detailed manner in which it documented the rise of the War on Drugs, the crudely political appeals it employed, the systematic racial bias found in the effects of its policies, and the punitive and devastating impact it has on African-American and Latino populations in the country.

For crimes which rarely result in the incarceration of young white men, young black men are being sent to jail in incredible numbers, and for long periods, and while there, in crowded and often inhumane conditions, they are simply warehoused.  Then, eventually, they are sent home.  The rising rate of imprisonment, shown below, has not been linked with any reduction in crime, and most of the victims are non-violent offenders.  When released, they are subject to a wide array of fines and restrictions that shocked me – new details – in their resemblance to practice in 17th and 18th century Europe:  For example, it was news to me that convicted criminals must pay the costs of their trials!  (Only in these drug cases.)  Not to mention that all their property can be confiscated.  A new class of debt-fine-peons has been created that is peopled by men already at a severe handicap for reclaiming their lives through gainful employment.

The two charts following clearly indicate the remarkable position of the USA regarding imprisonment of its own citizens.  What is it about the USA that requires that we incarcerate people at nearly seven times the rate of China, France, or Australia?  The second chart below indicates the clear racial bias of the War on Drugs:  there is ample evidence that drug use and related criminal activity is no higher, it may be lower, among citizens of color than among whites, yet their rate of conviction and imprisonment is many times higher.  The problem is obvious, and it is only sustained by a system in which there is money to be made off of the prison system and political hay to be made.

Michelle Alexanders’ book is perhaps most interesting in her history of the political side of the War on Drugs, which got going under Reagan.  It was a great Republican theme, Law and Order, that allowed all sorts of coded appeals to racism no longer legitimate with the formal end of segregation and Jim Crow.  It worked wonders, and it’s not dead yet.  It doesn’t matter that we have an African-American president:  he’s not bucking this system much, and he talks about ‘shared sacrifice‘  as he advocates cutting social welfare programs.

I searched for negative commentary on the book out of curiosity regarding the response of conservatives.  I found little!  Most of the negative reviews were from leftists who felt that the author had not gone far enough in her critique.  (She may agree with them, but she clearly stated that she had very specific goals for this book, i.e., to expose the unfairness and destructiveness of the War on Drugs and our incarceration policies.)  I did find one review in Forbes, or a business journal like that, and it was generally favorable!  The author had clear libertarian leanings, and some of those people are not happy with these policies.  Indeed, Alexander points out that many conservatives initially resisted Reagan’s declaration of war on drugs because it would expand Federal power into the arena of state law enforcement.

David Rothenberg’s talk was moderated by former governor of NJ, Jim McGreevey.  He spoke of his career in show biz, and he’s a great storyteller.

You can hear him  Saturday mornings on WBAI, a local super-left-wing station that I rarely listen to since it’s filled with ranting and absurd propaganda, where he plays Broadway tunes and discusses social issues.  His organization is named for a play he produced in the 60s that was one of the first to honestly portray the brutal conditions in prisons:  the ensuing discussions of the show, including participation by ex-convicts, inspired him to create the agency that has expanded and is a model today.