On Alcman

Do not judge the man by the stone. Simple is the tomb to look on, but holds the bones of a great man. Thou shalt know Alcman the supreme striker of the Laoconian lyre, possessed by the nine Muses. Here resteth he, a cause of dispute to two continents, if he be a Lydian or a Spartan. Minstrels have many mothers.

Text: Antipater of Thessalonica, The Greek Anthology VII:18 translated by W. R. Paton. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1917
Image: Marble stele [MAMA XI 70 (Sebaste)], 3rd century AD, Private collection

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Doric

“…I went to Paestum, and there saw Doric temples for the first time, symbols of severity, simplicity, harmony, and strength. There was the pure vein to be traced in the quartz of Roman accumulations and grossness…

Doric purity is not a thing to be expected again in history, at least not yet. It indicates a people that knows its small place in the universe and yet asserts its dignity. In early Christian art there may be simplicity and naïveté, but never self-knowledge. The aspiration in it is childlike. For anything like Doric fortitude in the West we must look to the castles, not to the churches; and the castles are Christian only by association. Here then was an ultimate point of reference, a principle of manly purity, to mark one extreme in the moral scale of all human arts…”

Text: George Santayana, My Host the World. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953
Image: Alexander John Ellis, two daguerreotypes of the temple of Hera at Paestum, 1841. via Getty Images

 

Leonard Cohen’s Hydra

Not knowing quite how to respond to the death of an artist who has meant so much to us we have chosen, in no particular order, some photographs from Leonard Cohen’s life on Hydra, the Greek island where we also have lived many ancient and instantaneous hours. And yes we have sung Suzanne there, in an open boat in the old harbour under the Milky Way. May his memory be a blessing.

Magic Mirror

Robert Frank 92

Today we congratulate Robert Frank on his 92nd birthday. The Swiss-born photographer became a tireless and penetrating investigator of American life, crisscrossing the nation and depicting it from every angle. His work is too well-known to require any comment from us, apart from the suggestion that now seems an important moment to contemplate the state of the Union, in the mirror of Frank’s lens and otherwise.

Images: Portrait of Robert Frank, © Wayne Miller/Magnum; all others © Robert Frank

Homme barbu (Clésinger) à l’allure sombre

Gustave Le Gray
daguerreotype, 1848
Private Collection?

The Acropolis

Félix Bonfils
photograph, c. 1868-75
Princeton University Library

We find this a particularly evocative old view of the Acropolis, across mostly vacant fields now embedded in the hectic center of modern Athens; and we imagine the generations of slow feet that carved the path between the Temple of Olympian Zeus and the rustic buildings in the foreground. The next time we visit Athens, which will hopefully be soon, we will search for traces of that lost road.