Civilisation; 4; Man: The Measure of All Things Filler: Interveiw with Gerald Feigan

The following program is a presentation of M-E-T. The presentation of this series and its entirety is made possible by a grant from Xerox Corporation had its worldwide affiliates. The men who made Florence, the richest city in Europe, the bankers and war merchants, the pious realists, lived in grim defensive houses strong enough to withstand party fields

and popular riots. They don't in any way foreshadow the extraordinary episode of the history of civilization known as the Renaissance. There seems to be no reason why suddenly out of the dark streets and forbidding stone facades that arose of building as light and delicate as the Patsy Chapel. By its rhythms and proportions and its open welcoming character, it totally contradicts the dark, gothic style that preceded it and to some extent still surrounds it. What has happened? The answer is contained in one sentence by the Old Greek philosopher Protegraas. Man is a measure of all things. The building in front of which I am standing, the Patsy Chapel, built in about 1430 by the

Great Architect Brunellesco, has rightly been described as the architecture of humanism. His friend and fellow architect Leon Battista Alberti addressed man in these words. To you is given a body more graceful than other animals, to you power of apt and various movements, to you most sharp and delicate senses, to you wit, reason, memory, liken a mortal god. Well, it's certainly incorrect to say that we are more graceful than other animals, and we don't feel much like him awful gods at the moment. But in 1400, the Florentines did. There's no better instance of how a burst of civilization depends on confidence, than the Florentines' state of mind in the early 15th century. Where did it come from, this light economical style, which is unlike anything before or since, I think that it really was the invention of an individual, or Brunellesco.

But of course, an architectural style can't take root unless it satisfies some need of the time. And Brunellesco's style satisfied the need of the clear-headed, bright-minded man who appeared at the Florentines' steam at the moment when the discipline of trade and banking, it's most austere form, was beginning to be relaxed. And life, the full use of the human faculties, became more important than making money. People sometimes feel disappointed the first time they see the famous beginnings for an resource architecture, the Pasi Chapel, the old Sekoste of San Lorenzo, because they seem so small. Well said they are, after the great monuments of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, they don't try to impress us or crush us by size and weight, as all god-directed architecture does.

Everything is adjusted to the scale of reasonable human necessity, that intended to make each individual more conscious of his powers as a complete moral and intellectual being. The dignity of man, today those were the Dionar lips, but in 15th century Florence, their meaning was still fresh and invigorating. One of the second generation of humanists, named Maneti, wrote a book entitled On the

Dignity and Excellence of Man. This is the concept that Brunellesco's friends were making visible. The grandiest of all these testimonies to the Dignity of Man is by Massachio, in the series of fresco's he painted in the church of the Caribbean. Two of them represent the apostles, Peter and Paul, before the acts of mercy, as Saint Peter moves gravely through the streets, his shadow cures a sick, including this noble old man more like a bishops and a beggar. And in the balancing fresco, Peter and his disciples give arms to a poor woman, who is one of the great sculptural creations in painting. What characters they are, morally and intellectually men of weight, the least frivolous of men, infinitely remote from the gay courtyard of Jean-Diberi, who were only 30 years

older. They have that air of contained vitality and confidence. The one often finds in the founding fathers of the civilization, those that come first in my mind are the Egyptians of the first four dynasties. The most famous group in the series represents the story of the tribute money, and the heads of the apostles seem to reflect the high seriousness of the Florentine Republic. It was directed by a group of the most intelligent individuals who have ever been elected to power by a democratic government. The Florentine transfers were scholars, believers in the studio who many tardes, which learning could be used to achieve a happy life, believers in the application of free intelligence the public affairs, believers above all in Florence. The second and greatest of these humanist-chancellors, Leonardo Bruni, compared the civic

virtues of the public and Florence, with those of a republican rogue. Later he went even further, and compared it to Athens and the age of pedicies, which wasn't far wrong. As I have said before, all the great ages of civilization have seen themselves as part of history, both as heirs and as transmitters, and on Bruni's tomb, the church of Santa Croci, are inscribed the words, history is in mourning. Bruni and his friends had arrived these ideals from the authors of Greece and Rome. Now, much as one would like to say something new about the Renaissance, the old belief that it was largely based on the study of Antique literature remains true. Of course, the Middle Ages derived much more from classical antiquity than used to be supposed, but their sources were limited, their texts corrupt, and their interpretations

often fanciful. Almost the first man to read classical authors with real insight was the paid petrog, that complex figure, the 14th century, that false dawn of humanism, whose level opposites are of fame and solitude, of nature and politics, of rhetoric and self-revelation makes us think of him as the first modern man until we begin to read his works. Petrog never learned Greek, but his younger contemporary Boccaccio did, and so they're entered into Florentine's thought a new regenerative force and a new example. The first 30 years, the 15th century, was the heroic age of scholarship, when unknown works by the greatest writers of antiquity, gaseous, Plato, Cicero, and a dozen others were discovered in monastic libraries, where they'd lain since they were copied in the dark

ages. And he was to house these precious texts, any one of which might contain some new revelation, but Cosimo de Medici built the library of San Marco. It looks to us peaceful and remote, but the first studies that took place there were not remote from life at all. It was the humanist equivalent of the Cavendish Laboratory. The manuscript's unpacked and studied under these harmonious vaults could alter the course of history with an explosion, not of matter, but of mind. Next to the Patsy Chapel, other cloisters of Santa Clauci, also built by Bruno Lesco, some years later, I said that the gaseous cathedrals were hymns to divine light. These cloisters with their round arches, running races in their mirth, happily celebrate

the light of human intelligence, and sitting in them, I found it quite easy to believe in man. When I first came here nearly fifty years ago, I felt this is my true center, well twice it seemed that they were lost. At the end of the German occupation, and once when the floods came, and the officials swimming were my feet are in the ambulatory, but so far the forces of destruction have been defeated. Clarity, economy, elegance, these are the qualities that give distinction to a mathematical theory, and no doubt early Renaissance architecture is based on a passion for mathematics, particularly for geometry. Of course, Gothic architects are designed on a geometrical basis, but it had been a immense

complexity as elaborate and as logical as scholastic philosophy. Nothing could be more geometrical than the Florentine Baptist River, which is one of the earliest buildings in the city. But the Renaissance edited this tradition and designed all sorts of philosophical notions, including the idea that these forms must be applicable to the human body, that each so to say, guaranteed the perfection of the other. There are dozens of drawings and engravings to demonstrate this proposition of which the most famous is by Leonardo da Vichi. Mathematically I'm fairly very cheap, but aesthetically it has some meaning, because the symmetry of the human body and the relation of one part of it to another do influence our sense of normal proportion, and philosophically it contains the dream of an idea which might save us if we could really believe it.

That through proportion we can reconcile the two parts of our being, the physical and the intellectual. The same approach was applied to painting in the system and its perspective by which it was thought that by mathematical calculation one could render on a flat surface the precise position of a figure in space, and this too seems to be invented by Brunellesco. But we can see it best in the works of his two friends, Giberti and Donatello, whose low relief sculpture is really a kind of painting. Giberti's Jacob and Esau on the famous Baptist Redores shows perspective used to achieve a special harmony that has almost a musical effect. Donatello's relief, our sedantony of Padua curing a boy's leg, shows the other use of perspective to height an emotion by a more intense awareness of space. I don't know why I will feel something alarming about an empty amphitheater, which suits the drama of this particular subject.

The Florentines extremely proud of this invention, which they thought wrong as it turned out, was unknown to antiquity. But has it anything to do with civilization? Well, when it was first invented I think it had. The belief that one could represent a man in a real setting and calculate his position and arrange figures at a demonstrably harmonious order. This belief expressed symbolically a new idea about man's place in the scheme of things and man's control over his own destiny. As an aid to realism, perspective is of no importance. The realistic painters of flounders got on very well without it. Not as a symbol, it means something, and it's as a symbol that it passes into the decorative arts of the early Renaissance, and one finds it in the, as a principal theme of those wooden inlays in paneled rooms or quastals, which are a repertoire of Renaissance

symbolism. The spective was concerned with a representation of tones, if only because it was by the pale floor and the seating arcade that the system could be shown to advantage. And in the 15th century painters did a number of pictures of ideal tones which are both architectural harmonies and the perfect setting for social men. Our bounty describes in his great book on building the necessity of a public square by young men may be diverted from the misdiverseness and folly, natural to their age. And under handsome porticoes, old men may spend the heat of the day and be mutually serviceable to one another. I think that period of Francesca, who derives so much from Alberti, may well have had this as similar passages in mind when he painted this the most harmonious of all ideal

cities. The early floratine Renaissance was an urban culture, bourgeois, properly so-called. Men spent their time in the streets and squares, and in the shops. A good floratine says one of their moralists, star-simpré abotéga, is always in the shop. And these shops were completely public. You can see in this engraving how a craftsman's workshop was opened to the street, so that passers-by could see what was being done and rival artists make scathing comments. The Renaissance historian of art, Vasari, when he asked himself why it was in Florence, small elsewhere, that men became perfect in the arts, gave us his first answer, the spirit of criticism, the air of Florence making minds naturally free and not content with mediocrity. And this harsh, outspoken criticism meant that there was no gap of incomprehension between

the intelligent patron and the artist, our contemporary attitude of pretending to understand works of art in order not to appear philistines would have seemed absurd to the Florentines. They are a tough lot. Many people, since Bruni in 1428, have compared them with the Athenians, but the Florentines were more realistic, whereas the Athenians loved philosophical argument. The Florentines were chiefly interested in making money and paying appalling practical jokes on stupid men. However, they had a good deal in common with the Greeks. They were curious, they were extremely intelligent, and they had to a supreme degree, the power of making their thoughts visible. I hesitate to pronounce the much-abused word beauty, but I can't take a substitute. Like the Athenians, the Florentines loved beauty.

This is a constant source of surprise to anyone who knows them. But as Walter Pater said of Michelangelo, out of the strong came false weakness. Donatello paid an even more direct tribute to the anti-concept of beauty and his bronze date, the body is almost disturbingly physical, and the head is derived from that of

the great male beauty of the ancient world, the emperor Hadrian's beloved Antinuous, although the sharper Florentine accent that makes it far more attractive. Donatello's David stands in the hall of the bargello once a court of justice and a prison. Now a museum, but still quite a good place to get the flavour of 15th-century Florence. Because it not only contains great works of the Florentine imagination like the David, but also the portraits of famous Florentines. The were, a few likenesses of individuals of the 14th-century, Dante, Gertrach, Charles V. France, Ronda Berry, but they were exceptional. These are all medieval people, represented as figures that symbolise their status. The painter of the Spanish chapel is Santa Maria Novela, although he included so much lively detail, made his popes, kings, and bishops into stereotypes.

Their status would have been recognised all over the Gothic world. But these proudly individual characters wished to record for posterity exactly what they would like. In fact, many of these busts are done from actual death-masks, which even great artists like Donatello didn't hesitate to incorporate into their work. Of course, this bronze relief isn't a taller death-mask. It's the self-portrait of their characters who often fits in and out of the programme, the architect and universal man Leon Batista Alberti, what a face, proud and alert, like a willful, intelligent racehorse. Among other things Alberti wrote an autobiography, and as we should expect, he is not inhibited by false modesty. He tells us how the strongest horses trembled under him, how he could throw further and jump higher and work harder than any man.

He describes how he conquered every weakness because a man can do all things if he will. It's with a motto of the earlier Renaissance. And it's reflected in the heads of Renaissance heroes as they have come down to us in their memorials, in Donatello's Gartemalata in Padua. And, of course, these heads are so much idealised as to be, in our sense, scarcely portraits at all. Realistic portrait trial, the use of the accidents of each individual face to reveal in her life wasn't a Florentine or even an Italian invention. It was invented in Flanders, and came to an immediate perfection in the work of Jan van Eyck. No one has looked at a human face with a more dispassionate eye and recorded his findings with a more delicate hand. But in fact, many of his sitters wear Italians.

Alberti, the colonel who employed Alberti's secretary. And Arnold Feeney, a member of the international world of the world trade, banking, people diplomacy. And perhaps it was only in such a society that these evolved and subtle characters could have accepted the revelation of their personalities. Verneck's exploration of personality extended beyond the face. He shows people in their setting and lovingly records the details of Arnold Feeney's daily life. His wooden patterns for walking in the muddy streets of brooch, his little dog of nameless breed. His wife's elaborate sleeve, his own fur-lined cloak, and convex mirror. And above all, his splendid brass chandelier.

And by a miracle that defies the laws of art history, he was able to show them to us enveloped in daylight, as real as if it had been observed by Fermil of Delft. This sensibility to atmosphere the Florentines never attempted. They were a sculpture-minded people. But in their portrait busts, they came to achieve an almost Flemish realism. How likely Florentine word is our to the confident faces that we see in Victorian photographs. This is the professional man, a doctor. His face lined with a wisdom of experience, in fact he was on a teller's doctrine, saved his life. And this is a businessman called Pietro Bilini. A character in one of our bare-piece dialogues says, a man cannot set his hand to more liberal work than making money.

For what we sell is our labor, the goods are merely transferred. Yes, that was rarely written in 1434, not in 1850. And contrary wise, if you dressed Milini in 19th century clothes, he would look perfectly convincing. But this atmosphere of liberal materialism is less than half the story. After the middle of the 15th century, the intellectual life of Florence took a new direction, very different from the robust civic humanism of the 1430s. Florence had ceased to be a republic in anything but name. And from the 30 years, it was virtually ruled by that extraordinary character, Lorenzo de Medici. His father and grandfather had prepared the way for him by their activities as bankers. He himself was no financier, he'd lost a great part with family fortune. But he was a politician of genius.

Who could distinguish between the reality of power and its altered trappings? The frontest piece of his book of poems shows him in the streets of Florence dressed as a simple citizen, surrounded by girls who are singing his ballads. What our contrast is this modest printed page to the rich manuscripts of the Duke of Betty. In fact, Lorenzo was a good poet and a most admirable patron of other poets, also of scholars and philosophers. But he wasn't much interested in the visual arts and the paintings by which his period is remembered were commissioned by his cousin, Lord and Zeno. When it was for, Lord and Zeno, the Porticelli painted the works in which the Florentine sense of beauty appears in its most evolved and peculiar fall, the spring and the birth of Venus. In the earlier of them, the spring, the subject is derived from Ovid, but this classical inspiration is given a new complexity by memories of the Middle Ages. The pagan divinities sway before a background of leaves like a gothic tapestry, got a marvelous

feat of the imagination. As for the heads, they're a discovery of beauty that means much more to us than the full smooth oval of antiquity. As for the The subject of Bhattacharya's other great allegory, the birth of Vedas, is taken from a contemporary poet, Paulitziano.

Paulitziano was part of a group of subtle Florentines who are inspired by the late Greek philosophers known as Leo Platerists, and he was there hoped they might reconcile these pagan philosophers with Christianity. And so, Bhattacharya's Venus, not at all the amorous trumpet of paganism, is pale and withdrawn and dissolves into his image of the Virgin Mary. The discovery of the individual was made in early 15th century Florence, nothing can alter that fact.

But in the last quarter of the century, the Renaissance owed quite as much to the small courts of northern Italy, Ferrara, Mantua and above all Urbino, this small and rather remote town on the eastern perimeter of the Aponines. It could be argued that life in the court of Urbino was one of the high watermarks of Western civilization. The reason is that this court and its dominions were protected from the surrounding ruffians by Federigo Montefeltro, the first Duke of Urbino, the greatest general of his day, was also a humane and intelligent man. And the town itself, with its soft pink bricks, so different from the harsh stones of Florence, seems to reflect the same feeling of humanity. It's small enough for a good ruler to know all the inhabitants and listen to their troubles, which in fact is exactly what Duke Federigo did.

His palace began as a fortress built on an incredible rock, and only when he had fought his way to security, could he afford to give it the sweet and delicate details which make it one of the most beautiful pieces of architecture in the world. The palace Urbino has a style of its own. The arcadey courtyard, what I'm standing now, isn't speedy and springy like Brunelleska's

cloister, but calm and timeless. And the rooms are light and airy, and so perfectly proportioned that it exerts one to walk through them. In fact, I think the interior is the most beautiful in the world, and the only palace that I can go around without feeling oppressed and exhausted. Chorist enough, we don't know the name of the architect who's responsible for this masterpiece. A famous fortress builder named Glorana did the substructure, but he left to have been a long before the lived-in part of the palace was begun.

But the painter, Pierrot de de Fransheska, was there at exactly the date when he was being decorated, and personally, I believe that he was responsible for its style. The architecture in this picture by Pierrot, which is in Urbino, shows exactly the same kind of delicate detail when finds round the doors and windows of the palace, and it was painted one ten years earlier. However, I think that the noble proportions of the whole sense of space must reflect the character that you can self. His biographer named Vespasianity Beastichie refers again and again to the Duke's humanity. He asked the Duke, what is necessary in ruling a kingdom? The Duke replied Esteret Umano to be human. Whoever invented the style, this is the spirit that permeates the palace of Urbino. As a part of civilization, the palace of Urbino extended

beyond the 15th century. The great architect of the Hyun-lesauce, Bramante, was a native Urbino, may even have worked in the palace when it was being completed. The court painter was a silly old creature named Ravani Santi, the sort of obliging mediocrity whose old welcome in courts, even in the court Urbino. No doubt the ladies, when they were in need of a design for embroidery used to say, let's send for dear old Mr Santi. And when he came, he brought with him his beautiful little son Rafaelo.

And so Rafael, one of the subsidizing forces of the Western imagination, found his earliest impressions of harmony and proportion and good manners in the court of Urbino. Good manners. There was another product over Urbino. In common with other Italian courts, Ferrara and Manchua, young men went there to finish their education. They learned to read the classics to walk gracefully, speak quietly, play games about cheating or kick each other on the shins, in short to behave like gentle men. After Federigo's son and successor Guido Baldo, the notion of a gentleman who has given classic expression in a book called Il Courtigiano, the courtier by Balazaric Castiglione. It had any immense influence, the emperor Charles V had only three books beside his bed,

the Bible, Machiavelli's Prince, and Castiglione's courtier. For over a hundred years, it formed everybody's notion of good manners. Actually, it's very much more than a handbook of polite behavior because Castiglione's ideal of a gentleman is based on real human values. He mustn't hurt people's feelings or make them feel inferior by showing off. He must be easy and natural, just as Castiglione himself appears to be in his portrait by Raphael, and he mustn't be a mere worldling. The courtigiano ends with a moving discourse on the subject of love. Just as Botticelli's spring, unites the tapestry world of the Middle Ages with pagan mythology, so Castiglione's courtier unites the medieval concept of chivalry with the

ideal love of Plato. There's no doubt that the Court of Urbino, under both Fiderigo and Guiderbaldo, was

a high point in the history of civilization, and the same is true in a lesser degree of the Court of Mantua. The palace of Mantua lacks the exhilarating likeness and lucidity of the palace Urbino, but it contains one room in which more than anyone else perhaps, one can get an idea of civilized life in an Italian court. It's the room decorated by the court painter Andrea Mantua. Birds and cherubs and people look down from an imaginary hole in the roof, and you use a perspective. Then come painted busts of Roman emplers, but the scene below isn't a tall archaeological.

It shows the Gonzaga family as large as life, also their dogs, their courtiers, their old retainers, and one of their celebrated dwarfs. In spite of the formidable frontality of the Martianus, the spirit of the whole group is

extremely natural, little girl asks if she may eat an apple, but her mother is interested to know what news the mark was has just received from his secretary, and in fact it is good news that her son has been made a car. And in another scene, the mark was goes to greet him, accompanied by his dogs, and his younger sons. Hot and agreeably in four or a century. One of the younger children holds his hand and little boy takes the hand of his elder brother. It's still without the odious composites, it was to grow up in Europe during the next century, and reach its zenith at Versailles. I must say that even Mantalia has not been able to make the newly created car door look like a very spiritual type, which reminds one of the obvious fact that this kind of social

organization depended entirely on the individual characters of the rulers. In one state, it is Minda Malatesta, the Wolf of Remedy, who did things that even the most advanced theatrical producer would hesitate to put on the stage. In the laboring state Federico Montefelthro, the god-fearing father of his people, and yet both of them employed Alberti and both were painted by Peter de la Francesca. Federico was a lover of books, who made the palace world be known into one of the finest libraries in Italy, but when he read them, he left his arm around, and he needed to. This was one of the weaknesses of Renaissance civilization, and the other, no less obviously, was that it depended on a very small minority, even in republican France, Renaissance touched relatively few people, and in places like Urbino and Mantua, it was practically confined

to the court. This is contrary to our modern sense of equality, but one can't help wondering how far civilization would be involved if it had been entirely dependent on the popular will. W.B. Yates actually used the example of Urbino, who need rest to perme to a wealthy man who promised the subscriptions of the Dublin Gallery if it were proved that the people wanted pictures. He said, and Guido Baldo, when he made that mirror school of courtesy, where wit and beauty learned their trade upon Urbino's Windy Hill, had sent no runners to and fro that he might learn as shepherds will. One may or light course, but it much lacks them herself, but at a certain stage it's only in a court that a man may do something extravagant for its own sake, because he wants

to, because it seems worth doing, something like the extraordinary wooden inlays in this study. It's sometimes through such willful, superfluous actions that men discover their powers. All the same, as when walks through these splendidly extravagant rooms, one can't help thinking, what about the people in the fields? All those shepherds who, Mr Yates, rightly, suppose the Guido Baldo did not consult on matters of taste through good matters. And they not have had a kind of civilization of their own.

Well, there is such a thing, as a civilized countryside, looking at the Umbrian landscape with its terraces of vines at Olives and the dark vertical accents of the cypresses, one has the impression of timeless order. There must have been a time when he was all forested swamp, shapeless, formless, and to bring order out of chaos is a process of civilization. But of this timeless rustic civilization we have no record beyond the farmhouses themselves, whose noble proportions seem to be the basis of Italian architecture. And when Renaissance artists looked at the countryside, it was not as a place of ploughing and digging, but as a kind of earthly paradise. This is how it appears in the first evolved landscape in European painting, the background of Van Eyck's adoration of the lamb.

The foreground is painted with medieval sharpness of detail, but our eye pass against the tars and dense greenery of laurels and palms floats into a gleaming distance. Already awareness of nature is associated with the desire to escape, and the hope of a better life. And such it remained in the work of the Van Eye Bellini, the founder of Venetian painting, who first used his backgrounds to create a mood in which the actual story of the picture can be more vividly felt.

Bellini was a religious painter. His landscapes intensified the traditional subjects of Christianity. His pure poor journey was to extend the humanisation of the landscape to contemporary life, and in this picture he is discovered, or I suppose one should say rediscovered, one of the comforting illusions of civilized man, the myth of Arcadia. Of course, it is only a myth, a country life isn't at all like this, I leave not a picnic and detect the sandwiches and wasps buzz around the wine glass. But journey has shown us how fundamentally pagan it is. His Arcadia is as much a tribute to antiquity, as were the republican virtues of the Florentine humanists, and as much part of the rediscovery of man. But in his a senseful, rather than his intellectual nature.

With journey's picnic, the balanced enjoyment of our human faculties seems to achieve perfection. But in history, all points of supposed perfection have a hint of menace, and your journey himself discovers it in that mysterious picture known as the tempesto. What on earth is going on? What is the meaning of this half-naked woman cycling a baby, this flash of lightning? This broken column, nobody knows, nobody has ever known. It was described in George O. Lee's own time as a soldier and a gypsy. Well, whatever it means, it certainly doesn't show any confidence in the light of human

reason, a man can do all things, if he will, how naive alberti's statement seems, when I think of that great bundle of fears and memories that every individual carries around with him to say nothing of the external forces which are totally beyond his control. George O'errny, the passionate lover of physical beauty, painted this picture of an old woman and inscribed it, called tempo, with time, where I can see that she must once be the beauty. It's one of the first masterpieces of a new pessimism, new because without the comfort of religion, that was to be given final expression by Hamlet. Truth is, I suppose, that the civilization of the early Renaissance was not broadly enough

based. The few had gone too far away from the many, not only in knowledge and intelligence, this they always do, but in basic assumptions. When the first two generations of humanists were dead, their movement had no real weight behind it, and there was a reaction away from the human scale of values. Fortunately, they left in sculpture, painting, and architecture, their message to every generation that values reason, clarity, and harmonious proportion and believes in the individual. The presentation of this series in its entirety is made possible by a grant from Xerox

corporation had its worldwide affiliates. Afterward, to examine certain aspects of Western civilization in the 1970s, James Day talks with Dr. Gerald Fagan, surgeon, author, artist, and consultant. Whether or not he's a Renaissance man, Dr. Gerald Mason Fagan certainly is a generalist. He's a surgeon, a former psychiatrist, he's done research in ventriloquy, he's a former editor and director of Ramparts Magazine, he's a painter, a sculptor, and a lapidary. These, among other things. Dr. Fagan, I would think that today there is a tremendous pressure upon us to become

specialists, perhaps less so than ten years ago. Do you see any trend away from a high degree of specialization? Yes, I do as a matter of fact, I think the wheel is turning away from specialization. What is happening to the young people is that they're getting tired of being labeled and they have found through their parents that specialists are stuck in corrals and they don't get a chance to see what's on the other side of the fence. Is it the measure of man that he can develop a very high degree of proficiency in a given thing, or that is the measure of man that he can do a wide variety of things and I suppose this is the Renaissance man, or is it both? Well, the number of men who can do both are naturally limited, quite like in Nardo. Because it requires something else in addition to the creative drive and the imagination

and the talent, it requires an intersection of a proper chronological moment when there is a vacuum for the particular thing that he does, like today classical musicians are not doing as well as they used to because no matter how good they are, right. When a man has an enormous curiosity and a creative drive and he discovers something that carries him along, he'll move along with it and he'll do it and take infinite pains and become what we usually regard as a genius. For the rest, it's possible for each man to explore everything and make a certain number of choices and decide that these things are for me and this is what I'm going to do. Sequentially or concurrent leader, anyway, he wishes. That's the message of now and I feel unhappy that so many kids are dropping out into drug areas where they really don't have the perception to see, to create.

It's pretty scary, the whole thing now, but art has always been a scaffold which enables you to walk across a kind of a fire of insanity. It really is a representation of all the irrational things that are in us, but we no longer can perceive because we've been trained into our present character. So I cherish the artist and I think that if there's nothing else, a man should try one of these things so he can see how the irrational is actually the story of the times. Lord Clark is obviously attracted to the period of the Florentine Renaissance. You hold a new prospect for a period, a similar period in the future when the lawyer begins to work in stained glass. I think it's already here, but it isn't recognizable because it's out of focus. You see in those days you had your dose or your patron and he selected a number of young

men who had talent and so most of the people were left out of it. But nowadays this is emerging in spots all over the world and I don't think it'll ever be quite that way because the concerns were different. There they talked about the dignity of man and they talked about scale, you know, bringing man into proportion with his artifacts and vice versa. You know that he talks about the chapel at Potsy. It's the first time that they did something which was the measure of man. And now the measure of man is more biological, we've discovered that we're not taking care of his biological needs. So that's affecting design and I think you'll find less fine doors and fine gold work to have Salini and more things which will embellish our biosphere. Thank you.

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