The Infinite Art Tournament, Round One: Gentile da Fabriano v. Gentileschi!

Gentile da Fabriano
c.1370 - 1427
Italian

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Artemeisia Gentileschi
1593 - 1652
Italian

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Vote for the artist of your choice!  Votes go in the comments.  Commentary and links to additional work are welcome.  Polls open for at least one month past posting.

The Running News

Closing the Box

On April 1, celebrating the anniversary of my second running "box" -- an approximate rectangle here on the East Side in which I was trying to run down every street, lane, and alley -- I ventured that I think I'll be able to polish this sucker off in May.  I was right!  Last Saturday, I ran east -- which is up, on this map -- and ran a weird series of loops and twists to take care of a handful of remaining streets.  And then I was finished.

Voila!  And if you are wondering about that area in the northeast (upper left) of the map, it's a locked cemetery.  I am a completist, sure, but not to the extent that I want to get busted for serially breaking into the preserves of the departed.

Although I do not want to start a third box, I do expect to have a little anxiety around figuring out where to run for a while.  Deciding on Sunday's route was no problem, however.  I sat in the coffeeshop watching from the 8.5 mile point as a half-marathon went by.  After most of the parade had passed, I went home, changed into my gear, and jumped onto the course, passing the slow and the exhausted by the score.  It was childish, but it gave me a splendid closed route through the city and made me feel like Superman.  Lots of spectators yelled that I was doing great.  I didn't take any of the water or sports drinks offered by volunteers, though, because I wasn't a registered runner and so it would have been unethical.  After a couple miles of this hijink, everybody else turned left and I turned right, and it became more of a conventional run.

So far this year I'm at around a 860-mile pace, which would make it the Best Year Ever but fall considerably short of my 960-mile goal.  But, the summer and fall months that are the best for running are still ahead of me.

The Avatar Heads East

About the time I split off from the half-marathon last Sunday, my Avatar entered the town of The Dalles, Oregon. He left Portland for the second time about a month ago, and since then has run eastward through the gorge of the Columbia River, cutting through the Cascade mountains.  He's back in Oregon for a stretch after starting out in Washington.  He'll soon cross over again, though, and start moving a bit north of east en route to the waypoint of Moscow, Idaho.

It's not surprising that the running Avatar shares many of the quirks of his flesh-and-blood twin and has taken to counting counties.  He now has 16, 13 in Oregon and 3 in Washington.

The Play-In Artist SubTournament: Phase 1, Flight 11

Phase One Rules:

1. You may cast votes for up to four artists.  
• One vote per artist per person.
2. Since play-in artists were nominated by your peers in the IAT community, including myself, courteous and affirmative voting is in order
• Which is to say, no baggin' on the aesthetic sensibilities of the nominators.
3. Full rules, procedures, and anticipated timeline for the Play-In SubTournament are available on the Play-In SubTournament page.

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Phase 1, Flight 9 will be open until noon Pacific Time, May 25.

Phase 1, Flight 10 will be open until June 22.
Flight 11 will be open for approximately two months.  This is the penultimate flight!

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Henri Cartier-Bresson
1908-2004
French

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Chris Berens
Dutch
born 1976

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Chuck Close
born 1940
American

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Mariotto Albertinelli
1474-1515
Florentine

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Charles Demuth
1883-1935
American

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Walker Evans
1903-1975
American

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Pro Hart
1928-2006
Australian

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J. Slattum
? (contemporary)
American

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Vote for up to fours artists! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. This poll will be open for approximately two months past posting.

The Wednesday Post

L'Union Fait La Force
It's National Sovereignty Day in Haiti!
.

...miscellaneous Haitian stamps from my late grandfather's album.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Left Bracket Second Round: Appel v. Anguissola!

Karel Appel
1921 - 2006
Dutch; worked internationally

Lost to Alexander Archipenko in Round 1.
Knocked out Jean Arp, eventually, in First Round Elimination.

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Sofonisba Anguissola
c.1532 - 1625
Italian

Defeated Italian predecessor Antonello da Messina in Round 1 by two votes -- a one-vote swing would have resulted in a draw. YOUR VOTE COUNTS!
Lost to Fra Angelico by a two-vote swing in Round 2 in a match that was thought to be a tie for more than a year. YOUR VOTE EVENTUALLY COUNTS!!!

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Vote for the artist of your choice in the comments, or any other way that works for you. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting, but likely much longer.

Saint of the Month: St. Bernardino of Sienna!

Francisco Goya, 1746-1828 -- Expected Tournament
Debut August 10, 2013.  The man on the right is thought
to be Goya's self-portrait.

Saint Bernardine of Siena

AKA: Bernadino of Siena, Bernadine of Siena, Bernardino of Siena
Feast Day: May 20.

Really Existed? Yes.
Timeframe: 1380 – 1444.
Place: Italy

Credentials: Canonized by Pope Nicolas V in 1450.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: advertisers, compulsive gambling, lungs, respiratory problems, and hoarseness, public relations, Italy, and San Bernardino, California.
Symbolism: a short, elderly Franciscan with three mitres at his feet, a tablet inscribed IHS.

Saint Bernarndino is in the top tier of the Catholic saints, and I confess that this puzzles me a little.  He keeps company on canonical short-lists -- books that treat of 100 or 200 saints, for instance -- with key figures from the gospels or the history of the early church, with important Popes and Christian kings, and with people whose martyrdom or working of miracles is the stuff of legend.  He seems a little out of place in their company.  What St. Bernardino was, was, a highly successful revivalist.

After a pious childhood (he was an orphan raised by his aunt, and there are many tales casting him as a real prodigy in the condemnation of vice) he entered service at a hospital in Sienna.  When it was abandoned by its doctors in the face of a horrific plague, he rose to the occasion, recruiting other young men to help him in giving hope, comfort, and such medical treatment as could be drummed up under the circumstances.  It is interesting to me that I've found no account implying that St. Bernardino's hospital was a site of miraculous cures; instead, they say that he got the place running again, kept the staff as cheerful as possible, and probably saved a lot of lives through his courage, hard work, and administrative abilities.  It's hard not to admire this aspect of the man, but the hospital work is not considered central to his story.

Having become a Franciscan monk after the end of the plague, Bernardino became an itinerant preacher.  He traveled all over Italy, giving fiery and inspirational sermons that drew huge crowds.  We are told that his voice was initially to weak for him to be a good speaker, but that the Virgin Mary intervened to give him volume appropriate to his task.

Bernardino's trademark gesture was ending his sermons by holding up a tablet on which the name of Jesus was written, and inviting the crowd to "adore Christ with him on their knees."  This apparently angered a lot of people, and led the Pope to personally prohibit him from preaching for a while.  I think I understand this: the tablet is an object, and to use it as a focus of worship could be construed as an act of idolatry.  All sources treat this objection as having been silly and misguided, however, which leads me to a hypothesis about why Bernardino is considered an important saint.  I wonder if his tablet provided a sort of "test case" by which physical objects -- by extension, the traditional iconography of the modern western Catholic Church -- were determined to be admissible in the practice of Christian worship.  (The Wiki* implies that Bernardino's relative prominence among saints owes something both to active advocacy by the Franciscan order and to his living late enough to have left a relatively robust cultural paper trail.)

A standard depiction of St. Bernardino, painter unknown.
Three mitres on the ground represent three bishoprics that
he turned down so as to continue his preaching.  The
likeness is consistent with other portraits of the saint.

Saint Bernardino will not be everyone's favorite saint.  His sermons inveighed against vice generally, but also gambling, the pursuit of luxury, and frivolity in general.  He invented the "bonfire of the vanities," at which his listeners were invited to throw invitations to vice -- cosmetics, fine clothing, mirrors, musical instruments, and art** -- into the flames.  He was staunchly anti-gambling, radically homophobic, and virulently anti-Semitic, and some writers imply that he was influential in solidifying these attitudes within the moral framework of late medieval Christianity.

Butler's Lives of the Saints reports in passing, in the offhand way that book often ends the story of a saint, that the holy man made many successful predictions, cured lepers, and on four occasions brought the dead to life.  I have a story that Bernardino's body bled after his death until two rival families agreed to end a feud, and another that says that, three or four weeks after he died, a lot of blood suddenly poured from his nose.  This latter, incidentally, is a strikingly unusual miracle: the incident would certainly mark a departure from the usual laws of nature, but it's a departure that does no obvious good and would provoke no real sense of awe, except perhaps among the coroners.

(I don't know about you, but ~I~ was certainly curious: the dogs are named, indirectly, for St. Bernard of Menthon. There are at least 24 saints named Bernard.)

Jacopo Bellini (1400–1470) -- Tournament non-participant.
(father of Gentile Bellini, currently 2-1 and between matches)

El Greco (1541-1614, although always seeming three centuries later)
Expected Tournament Debut August 17, 2013

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*I generally don't look up the Wikipedia article on a Saint of the Month until I have completed my own article.  I am perhaps less interested in the actual lives of the saints than I am in the whole cultural-historical concept of "The Lives of the Saints."  

** Art consigned to flames at the vanity bonfires of St. Bernardino and those who took up his idea probably include some work of Botticelli, and almost certainly some Fra Bartolomeo.

The Infinite Art Tournament, Round One: Gaudier-Brzeska v. Gauguin!

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska
1891-1915
French; worked in England

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Paul Gauguin
1848 - 1903
French; worked in France and Tahiti

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Vote for the artist of your choice! Votes go in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. Polls open for at least one month past posting.