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Episode 19: "Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants" by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell
105 Plays1 year ago
This week we discuss Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants, an absolutely wonderful gem of a novel from French author Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell. In 150ish pages Énard recreates the Constantinople of the early 16th Century and the brief time Michelangelo resided there to build a grand bridge. If you’ve not read Énard before this is an absolutely fantastic jumping on point.
(We have done A LOT of New Directions this season (with more to come), which isn’t a bad thing but, yes, we’ve noticed and we are trying to be mindful of representing other presses doing the good work of translation.)
Towards the end of the episode Lori mentions a lecture Énard delivered at Barnard College. You can find that here.
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Music: “The Low Spark of High-Heeled Boys” by Traffic
Logo design: Flynn Kidz Designs
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Lost in Redonda'
00:00:01
Speaker
Hi, I'm Tom Flynn. And I'm Lori Feathers. And welcome to Lost in Redonda. Hi, Lori. How are you doing today? Tom, I'm well. How about you? I'm doing okay.
Thanksgiving vs. Christmas Decorations
00:00:20
Speaker
It's finally feeling really like fall here, bright and sunny, but really kind of cold outside. So that's a favorite time of the year for me.
00:00:31
Speaker
Are the Christmas decorations up yet? Oh, God, no. We don't do any of that until after Thanksgiving. Like the day after Thanksgiving, Christmas songs can be played and holiday stuff can start going up. But yeah, we very firmly use Thanksgiving as a bit of a buffer from all the holiday madness kicking off.
00:00:52
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's the way to do it. It seems earlier than ever to me this year. Maybe it's because it's been so warm here and hasn't really felt like November. But yeah, we live in a high rise right beside a restaurant and they're already all decked out.
00:01:10
Speaker
in Christmas and the lobby of our building, which they usually don't put up. We usually don't put the decorations up here until the day after Thanksgiving as well. They put them up earlier this week. It's just like, what's the big rush people? But it is what it is.
00:01:25
Speaker
I've noticed that it's certainly the case in a lot of the stores around here, and I do see some people getting their Christmas stuff up already. I almost wonder if I have something to do with Halloween being on a Tuesday. Some of the other parents at my kid's school were commenting on what a strange week that felt like because Halloween was a Tuesday night. Everything felt often a little weird the rest of the week, and I'm wondering if
00:01:51
Speaker
the day that Halloween falls on in the week impacts how much people want to start celebrating the holiday season. I don't know, just a random thought. Yeah, it feels like the day after Halloween is the new day after Thanksgiving, which I don't like. No, no, it's very strange.
00:02:12
Speaker
We're not going to talk about Christmas today. We are not going to talk about Christmas today.
Exploring Mathias Enard's Novel on Michelangelo
00:02:16
Speaker
And in terms of things that aren't strange, today we're talking about a really wonderful book, Tell Them of Battles, Kings, and Elephants by Matthias Ennard. It's this real gem. I'm actually stealing your word that you used when we were
00:02:33
Speaker
talking before we start recording, it's this real gem of a novel, about 150 some odd pages, yet contains multitudes, is really, really beautiful writing, incredibly evocative, and this slice of history that Inard applies his imagination to, to bring what would in some ways be a very minor incident in the life of the artist Michelangelo.
00:02:59
Speaker
and make it into something so fantastic and beautiful. Yeah, it is a brief little book, but it's a chewy one. It doesn't feel necessarily like it's only 150 pages. It takes place early in the 16th century, mostly in Turkey.
00:03:24
Speaker
and tells a fictionalized little snippet of Michelangelo's life. And one of the interesting things that Inard does, I mean, he's such an artist when it comes to his writing. And so while most of this novel is relatively straightforward in terms of the story and the narrative,
00:03:48
Speaker
interspliced between some of the chapters are this narrative told in the second person, which is really interesting, I think, the way that he weaves that into the story. And I don't know, it's almost like someone is speaking to Michelangelo's subconsciousness in this second-person series of sections. At least that's the way I felt about it.
00:04:17
Speaker
I mean, I think they are. In terms of structurally, I believe that those sections are being told by a musician that is sleeping, or it's always a little unclear who's actually asleep and who's not, but is laying beside Michelangelo, I think, on three occasions. And she just addresses him, but addresses who she is and what she thinks of him.
00:04:45
Speaker
It also brings so much richness and texture, I think, to the world that Ennard is evoking here. I mean, it's a very complicated, interconnected Mediterranean world where folks from all over are
00:05:07
Speaker
interacting, you know, rubbing elbows, bouncing off of each other, going to war with each other, making refugees of one another. And there's this vibrancy to it. And I really feel like those sections in particular, add on to that quite a bit, layer it
00:05:23
Speaker
even more, but also bring some of the artistry that I think you're speaking to to the book. They have the almost the feeling of like a thousand one nights in some ways, you know, and I mean, I think that's probably
00:05:38
Speaker
explicitly, I think he was probably referencing with that. But it does give that sort of folklore equality to what is, as you said, an otherwise fairly straightforward tale. I think that, you know, if you've read any of other other works by Inard, he's he's very interested in this, the the issue of the Orient and the other and how
00:06:05
Speaker
the Orient has oftentimes been eroticized. And this musician is definitely an erotic presence in Michelangelo's existence while he's living in Constantinople. And these issues of East versus West and the blending of East and West and
00:06:28
Speaker
and the Orient with the traditional colonizing white population and what we take from the Orient and what the Orient takes from the Western world, from Italy where Michelangelo was coming from and other points in Europe. It's a theme that runs through, if not all of his work, from my experience, most of his work.
00:06:54
Speaker
It's interesting to note that in the United States, this book Tell Them of Battles, Kings and Elephants came out after the novel Compass.
00:07:08
Speaker
But in France, it was published five years before Compass. And I think that in some ways you can almost see this book as almost a case study for Compass because a lot of the themes that he is touching on in this book through Michelangelo's time working
00:07:32
Speaker
in Constantinople, he really gets into and very much more depth and breadth in compass, which I think is like a 600 page novel, which I also highly recommend to our listeners.
00:07:47
Speaker
This is a good place to start, I think, if you're not familiar with Inard, but you're interested in some of the things that he thinks about and talks about. He's always, in my experience, very attuned to art and to history, and whether or not and encompass you really see this
00:08:10
Speaker
set out more starkly, whether you want to call it this clash of civilizations between East and West, or more of this organic blending. You get tastes of all of that in this book, I
Michelangelo's Struggles and Inspirations
00:08:25
Speaker
think. That's interesting. I had thought to look up where this one fell in his publishing history, but hadn't.
00:08:33
Speaker
It is sort of a quirk of translation that you can get books published in such random orders that I'm trying to piece together maybe the direction of travel in a writer's career can be at times
00:08:48
Speaker
a little tricky, require a little extra legwork, which is obviously why we're brilliant for reading Muriel's spark straight through. Just completely chronologically have to at least once pat ourselves in the back in an episode, I think. Well, I'm just glad that even though they weren't in order, and I don't know, New Directions published both of these books. Open Letter published two of
00:09:14
Speaker
Inard's previous books, Street of Thieves and Zone, and then I guess Inard moved to New Directions for Compass and probably based upon, I'm guessing, the really
00:09:30
Speaker
enthusiastic reception of Compass, I think, around the world. I think it won a lot of prizes in Europe, and I think it was shortlisted in the US for some prizes as well. They probably decided, yeah, let's go ahead and
00:09:48
Speaker
and just publish everything that we can get our hands on by him. And they went back and got this older book. But then, as you know, Tom, they're also publishing a new work by Inard this month. We're recording this in
Michelangelo's Bridge Commission in Constantinople
00:10:03
Speaker
November. And so that comes out this month. And that's a pretty ambitious work as well.
00:10:07
Speaker
Yeah, it seems like ambition is rather, rather a part of what he's doing. And I took a quick look and it looks like Compass won the pre-Goncourt as well as the Booker International Prize and then picked up some other awards around the same time. So, yeah, it definitely launched things for him in some pretty significant ways. Definitely one I'll have to get to. I have it upstairs. I don't think that, yeah, I have not read it yet.
00:10:37
Speaker
so now's about the time where we actually do a little bit of plot so i'll just quickly and it should be quick since it's such a short book basically what we're reading is michael angelo leaving italy i'm going to constant nopal
00:10:53
Speaker
under a commission to build a bridge, a bridge that would connect the two halves of the city, something truly grand and on a scale that is befitting the empire. Michelangelo at that moment in time is very frustrated. It was presented as being very frustrated with the Pope and with the church over
00:11:14
Speaker
Over commissions to do work, he's constantly talking about money, making calculations as to how much things cost or don't cost, who is cheap and cheap, who is not, all those sorts of considerations. And he's mainly convinced to undertake this project. He's nervous about it since while there are no active hostilities between the Italian states and the Turkish empire, it wouldn't be looked on very favorably for him to decamp.
00:11:43
Speaker
He'd already created his David and so was of some great renown at that point, part of why he's recruited. So the church would not be thrilled with him going to an Islamic empire and building them something magnificent too. But he's convinced because Leonardo da Vinci had already been commissioned and created a model
00:12:05
Speaker
that no one liked. And so it was not built. So this is an opportunity for him to surpass Leonardo. And throughout the novel, Michelangelo decries, rips on what Da Vinci is doing, Da Vinci's approach to art and to architecture, which is, I think it's interesting because it's getting into a lot of the movements and the debates of the day in terms of how the classics are
00:12:34
Speaker
are engaged with how they influence what people do or don't do in terms of the arts. But this opportunity to surpass Da Vinci is too good to pass up, as well as the money that's promised. So he weaves for Constantinople. He spends his time wandering the city. He's guided by a poet named Masihi, who over the course of the novel more than somewhat falls in love with Michelangelo. And Masihi is a historical figure.
00:13:02
Speaker
Inard does some really wonderful things within the CEI, I think, but we can get into that in a second. But yeah, over the course of the novel, he eventually hits upon the idea for the bridge he wants to build, mix the diagrams, the models are built, they begin construction on it. But before it gets too far along, and before he's fully paid, Michelangelo flees Constantinople after, well, what, to him, appears to be a just brutal murder in his room, but was
00:13:30
Speaker
portrayed by Inard as an attempt on his life and then returns back to Italy. At the end of the narrative, there are a few pages of just historical data that Inard provides that are really enlightening and I think actually do a wonderful job of kind of shilling off the trick he pulled off in this novel. How much he wove together, where his imagination began,
00:13:56
Speaker
where it sprang from the historical facts. But that is the plot in a nutshell. Obviously, there's a lot more to dig into beyond that. One of the things that Inard does so well is the development of Michelangelo's character in this novel. You can really feel his hubris.
00:14:18
Speaker
He's angry after the completion of his sculpture, David, that the Pope isn't just jumping when he wants more money and why he's being ignored or not being responded to in a timely manner.
00:14:41
Speaker
the kind of, well, I'll give him a poke in the eye and I'll accept the Ottoman Emperor's invitation to come to Constantinople. And like you said, wow, won't that be something that'll really piss the Pope off? Because not only am I leaving Italy, I'm leaving Christendom to go and help construct some kind of fantastic structure.
00:15:06
Speaker
a bridge that will span across Constantinople and the Bosphorus connecting the golden horn from the Christian side of the city. And then the Leonardo thing. Leonardo tried and I can do better. And there's an interesting little passage that I underlined on page 51 of the book.
00:15:29
Speaker
And it says, Leonardo's drawing obsesses him. It is vertiginous, but flawed, empty, lifeless, lacking ideals. Decidedly, Leonardo takes himself for Archimedes and forgets beauty. Beauty comes from abandoning the refuge of the old forms for the uncertainty of the present.
00:15:52
Speaker
I thought that was kind of a sign of the way that he's kind of disdainful for Leonardo, but also I thought just a really interesting perspective on what beauty is, abandoning the refuge of the old forms for the uncertainty of the present.
00:16:10
Speaker
And as proud as Michelangelo is, he spends a lot of this book just really frustrated for inspiration. He really has a hard time getting started and knowing kind of how to execute on this project that he's been commissioned to do.
00:16:32
Speaker
in the early dawn light after a night out drinking with I believe with Masihi. They're going across the water and he just has a vision of what the bridge should look like and rushes to draw it and then from there starts to figure out the schematics so they can build a model and so on.
00:16:51
Speaker
Um, but that's about, I don't know, 80 pages, 90 pages into the book. And up to that point, he's just been what we would probably call today doodling. Like he's been drawing like elephants. He's been drawing whatever comes to mind. And that's part of his, you know, he's explicit that that's part of his process that, um, ideas will come through the drawing and that he'll eventually hit upon it. But yeah, it's very much this presentation of, of art.
00:17:17
Speaker
and architecture as a form of genius, right? And that's part of what he hates so much about Leonardo is that Leonardo is sticking to what's come before, to, you know, this is how you progress from this point to this point, and this is what things will look like, and so on. And to Michelangelo, that's just, as from the passage you just read, it just flies in the face of what he thinks art and beauty ought to be.
00:17:47
Speaker
They tried to wine and dine him a lot, taking him to different places and showing him wonderful foods and luxurious fabrics that are coming in from all over because Constantinople in 1509 is very much like the center of the world in terms of trade routes. But he is kind of doodling.
00:18:15
Speaker
It's not so much that he's like goofing off. He doesn't really have any patience for goofing off until until he meets or sees for the first time the musician that pretty much obsesses him from the minute that he sees the musician is kind of androgynous for a while. Michelangelo does not know whether it's a he or she, but
00:18:43
Speaker
What Michelangelo does know is that he's irresistibly attracted to this person in a way that he really has never been attracted to another human being before. There's this really wonderful, when he first sees them, the way they're dressed suggests that they're male, but the way they move and the way they present otherwise suggests they're female. And because of what they're wearing, you can barely see the
00:19:11
Speaker
the ankle and how the ankle belies a strong leg and that their forearms, their shirt ends at the elbow before the bracelets that make noise as they dance. But the forearm muscles are clear and well-developed when the forearm muscles are the most beautiful part of the body as far as Michelangelo is concerned. Yeah, it's just this really rich,
00:19:37
Speaker
like luscious description of a person and of falling in love with a person at first sight. And actually, on that note, I wanted to read a passage describing another person, which is Mesihi. So Mesihi works for the court. He is a calligrapher and a poet. He also provides other functions within courtly life.
00:19:58
Speaker
which is part of how he is interacting with Michelangelo is that he's basically been assigned to take care of Michelangelo while he's working on this project.
00:20:08
Speaker
Clinging to his reed pen, the calligrapher poet gives a face to words, to phrases, to lines or verses. He is known to have drawn miniatures as well, but none of these images seem to have survived unless one of them is still sleeping in a forgotten manuscript. An anonymous painter, Masihi signs only his verses, which are few. He prefers pleasures, wine, opium, flesh, over the austere temptation of posterity.
00:20:30
Speaker
Masihi loved men and women, women and men, sang the praises of his patron in the delights of spring, both sweet and full of despair at the same time. He had no more experience with fatherhood or even marriage than Michelangelo did. Unlike Michelangelo, he found no consolation in faith, even though he appreciated the aquatic calm of the courtyards and mosques, and the fraternal chant of the mouizin on top of the minaret. Above all, he loved the city, the noisy dens where the Janissaries drank, the activity of the port, the accents of foreigners, and more than anything he loved drawing. The black wound of the ink
00:21:01
Speaker
that caress scraping the grain of the paper, which is just holy shit. It's such a remarkable description of a person, but it's also as an act of craftsmanship. Part of what Anard is reflecting on is that within Islam, within this branch of Islam, especially, you don't
00:21:21
Speaker
draw people. You don't make sketches. The calligraphy is how you create the art. And so with the words on the page, he just did the same thing. He just created a version of Masihi that is as full of life and love and interest as any as any portrait could be.
Cultural Contrasts: East vs. West
00:21:44
Speaker
It's really neat. And it's just such, such damn good writing. My God.
00:21:49
Speaker
Yeah, the way that he massages the wording, it's just so, it's just so supple. You know, you just, you almost, if you didn't have to read, look at the words to read them, you'd almost just want to close your eyes and like immerse yourself in this image that he's, that he's building when he's creating, which makes me think that the audio book of this is probably really good. I don't, I haven't checked it out, but, um, but yeah, it's, it's a really,
00:22:19
Speaker
lush and wonderful evocation of this otherness, this kind of the orient and how it's exotic and erotic and kind of very different from the atmosphere that Michelangelo was used to thriving in. The Italian states, the way Michelangelo reflects on the way they're presented in the book, feel like such brutal and
00:22:48
Speaker
gray in some ways, spaces. There is a noise in Constantinople that he creates. There is this jostling of peoples. Michelangelo reflects on the fact that you can see Christians and Jews and Muslims all interacting with one another, eating in the same taverns, having conversations, which is something he would never see back in Florence or in Rome. It really does set up
00:23:17
Speaker
such different societies and different ways for people to interact and live among each other or not. The dancer whom he falls in love with, when they're doing their recitations, when they're addressing Michelangelo in the dark, in the night,
00:23:34
Speaker
They know that Michelangelo can't understand more than like every other word. So they're just talking and it's the rhythms of the voice that at least the first night puts Michelangelo to sleep. But it comes out that they're from Spain. They're from the kingdom of Granada. They're Jewish and they were forced out with the Reconquista and how they should hate him.
00:23:58
Speaker
for being among them. Constantly refers to Michelangelo as a Frank, which is interesting. But again, it's that idea of many peoples all existing within a single space. Not to say that the Ottoman Empire was
00:24:16
Speaker
necessarily all that great in some respects. I mean, we encounter slavery here. Many people are living in, you know, absolute abject poverty, but there is a different understanding, it seems, or at least an artist portraying it as such, of how peoples can coexist in the same space in the same time.
00:24:35
Speaker
Yeah, you get the feeling that there's an appreciation of beauty in Constantinople that's different than the Western conception of beauty. And not just what is beauty, but how is beauty lived? These folks
00:24:55
Speaker
definitely have a different a different pace of life right you know they they enjoy themselves they for the most part don't feel harried or or stressed out i mean michael angelo is kind of stressed out because you know like we said he doesn't know how
00:25:13
Speaker
for quite some time to think about this bridge. And he's constantly as well, like writing letters back home and receiving letters from home. So he's not totally disconnected from what's going on there. And it takes him quite a while to adjust to this different pace and this different lifestyle. And I'm not even quite sure that he ever does completely.
00:25:41
Speaker
I mean, he definitely opens himself up to the eroticism of the people through his attraction to the musician and some of the temptations and the scintillating things that happen with the musician in public and in private. But I think that
00:26:06
Speaker
He's still who he is, a Western man, I think, through and through. I can't tell at times in the novel what is upsetting Michelangelo the most. Obviously, as you mentioned, he has an incredible amount of hubris. His pride is intense, and certainly one of the things that drives him in his creations.
00:26:32
Speaker
Part of the reason I wanted to also read that bit about Masihi is that the notion of posterity, how Masihi wasn't terribly concerned, at least this version of him, with being remembered. He was more concerned with living and being in that moment and the experience of the moment. And I think for Michelangelo, there is this notion of
00:26:52
Speaker
remembrance of creating great works. So he wants to do the work for the Pope, not just because he wants to be paid, but also because he wants his work there. He wants his work remembered and seen moving forward.
00:27:08
Speaker
But to your point, he does wake up in the morning and draw and work on that. And then in the afternoon, Manuel, who's connected to the house that he's staying at, reads to him. I mean, that's how he spends the heat of the afternoon. So there certainly is a little bit of a shift from what seems like a frenetic constant working when he first gets there. So I think you're right. I think he does somewhat adjust. And
00:27:35
Speaker
He doesn't normally drink, but he definitely drinks while he's in Constantinople. He even allows himself to be bathed once or twice. The fact of how bad he smells is brought up in a couple of cases. There is also this other way of, I'm trying to think of how best to phrase it. There's a moment where Michelangelo, because of
00:27:59
Speaker
his position, because of the esteem with which he's held, is allowed into spaces that he normally wouldn't be. And one of them is a library. And he marvels at the way the light moves through the room and how the windows were constructed, just so that instead of feeling like you were being crushed by the size and the scale of this library, that instead you feel like you're in the center and bathed in light. That moment, as well as another,
00:28:27
Speaker
where he goes into a mosque, he just thinks about how different the architecture is, the presentation of these buildings are, how they are bright and new and clean as compared to the
00:28:43
Speaker
crumbling vaulted ceilings in Rome. So again, I did not know very much at all about an arts project, what he's doing in some of his novels beyond this one. But I'm very much seeing from what you've said, Laurie, and also just from the example of this novel, that tension that he's exploring in the work.
00:29:03
Speaker
Yeah, and I think there's I can't find it right now in my book, but I think that there's a direct quote from the book about how Michelangelo's gaze has been transformed, which I think is a lovely expression.
00:29:21
Speaker
by his exposure to the Orient, by these experiences that he's having because he's seeing things in a totally new way and a new light. He's having very different experiences
00:29:38
Speaker
and he's appreciating a different type of beauty that transforms the way he looks at beauty and what beauty is and his own art.
00:29:53
Speaker
I was able to quickly find the passage, I think, Laurie. Michelangelo owe much to Istanbul. His gaze is transformed by the city in otherness. Scenes, colors, forms will permeate his work for the rest of his life. The couple of Saint Peter is inspired by Santa Sophia and by Yazid's mosque. The Library of the Medicines is inspired by the Sultans, which he visits with Manuel. The statues in the chapel of the Medicines and even the Moses for Julius II bear the imprint of attitudes and characters he met here in Constantinople.
00:30:22
Speaker
again as a reflection on artistic practice as well, like how he's taking these things in and just the idea that Michelangelo, who's so famed for his work and so thoroughly connected to some of the great works of the Catholic Church in major Catholic churches, that attitudes and faces are being pulled from the Ottoman Empire and put up onto St. Peter's is
00:30:49
Speaker
I mean, it's it's fascinating. It's also really delightful. It's very neat. It's very neat. And just one of the things I really enjoy about this novel is what sometimes or often really good historical fiction does is it just goes into.
00:31:05
Speaker
something that you just don't know anything about, that it brings to life basically a month or so in Michelangelo's life, but explains or makes a case for its importance or the importance of any month in someone's life in terms of how it affects everything that comes next.
00:31:25
Speaker
And the end notes that have some of the historical information, there is a sketch of the bridge across the golden horn included at the end of the novel. According to the end notes, that drawing was not discovered until within the last 20 years. It was found in a library in a forgotten manuscript. So again, just these ideas of posterity and how things
00:31:52
Speaker
continue to travel and move along and how that then inspires or works on a later artist in an art to bring it back to life in a new form. I love this novel because it reminds me so much of what I love about novels and about engaging with literature. It's transformative. And yeah, this is just a really quite wonderful book.
00:32:22
Speaker
Personally, I find myself oftentimes a bit dismissive about a lot of historical fiction. It's like, oh, it's historical fiction. I'm not really interested in that. I think it's because I feel as though
00:32:39
Speaker
I'm going to get a lesser experience when it comes to the use of words and expression and the use of imagination. But Inard kind of busts all of those rules away with a book like this because
00:32:59
Speaker
Yeah, it is historical fiction, and I don't know which word in this case you would emphasize more, historical or the fiction. But I think throughout it, you see Inard's wonderful, generous imagination at play, just trying to think of what it would be like to be this renowned Italian artist coming into this
00:33:26
Speaker
so different place and trying to do something not only that's going to please the Ottoman emperor, but also cement his name for posterity, not only in the Western world where it's pretty much already cemented, but in this whole other Eastern place whose tentacles extend so far into
00:33:52
Speaker
Persia and the Far East and everywhere. To have your major work like this that kind of is a set piece for the city and to have been the person to create that pretty much seals the deal for you, I think, worldwide that you are going to be this unforgettably famous
00:34:17
Speaker
forever person. And yeah, so Inard just does a really good job, I think, of not just kind of giving us a rundown of events, situations, contacts, but like we mentioned before, he really does a great job, I think, of more than
00:34:40
Speaker
anything a character study of Michelangelo who this who this man might have been how he might have thought about things and how he might have experienced this place one of the things that comes across really clearly is Michelangelo's intelligence and this is someone who is not just a Gifted artist but someone who can really kind of look into the heart of things to really understands
00:35:07
Speaker
really understands how the world works. Like when he is described physically, it's made very clear that he's not especially attractive. Like his ears stick out. His nose got broken when he was a kid. So it's a little askew. His features just aren't great. But he is incredibly attractive to many people because of the intelligence and the fierceness of his gaze and just sort of like the almost like the heat that comes off of him from this
00:35:37
Speaker
this furnace almost. One of the things that I think is really kind of engaging or I really enjoyed about this presentation, Michelangelo, is he's also quite shrewd. As much as he spends time worrying about the pope finding out where he is and worrying about money, he also has a really good understanding of how the world works.
00:36:00
Speaker
When he delivers the schematics and the model to the vizier and makes its way out to the sultan, everyone loves it. Everyone's thrilled with it. And he's handed a rolled up parchment. He's expecting to be paid in that moment and to be done and be on his way. But the parchment actually gives him ownership of a village in Bosnia.
00:36:24
Speaker
And as I explicitly said, Bosnia, because I think throughout and our kind of drops in contemporary nation states so that I think we can quickly figure out both the scale of the empire, like just how big it is, but also so we have an idea of where this village actually is.
00:36:44
Speaker
And he's furious because he expects to be paid. He expects to be on his way. And he's told by Masihi that that's just an extra gift that he'll be paid once work actually begins on the bridge. And he almost collapses because he thinks to himself, OK, they want to keep me here and they know how to keep me here. And the way to keep me here is to keep holding back the money the same way that the pope wants to keep him around.
Masihi's Influence and Downfall
00:37:12
Speaker
He just he gets
00:37:13
Speaker
how power works. I found that really engaging. Frankly, it just made him even more three-dimensional. He isn't just a brat whining. He actually gets that. What he can do is important and matters. And because it matters, people with more power than he has will do their best to control him and to keep him under their thumb as best they can.
00:37:43
Speaker
again, just a really wonderful detail to throw in there about a great artist.
00:37:51
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm not sure that the money matters more to him than the posterity, but it's pretty clear that he's got family members that are, you know, they need money. They want money. And he's famous for God's sake. So, you know, come on, where's the money, you know? Why can't you send some money back home to your brothers, you know?
00:38:15
Speaker
So yeah, the money thing is a real priority for him and he is frustrated by the fact that despite the huge influence he has and how important he is not only back in Florence but here in Constantinople, he's not a particularly powerful man when it comes to
00:38:42
Speaker
the institutions of power, the Catholic Church in Italy and the Pope and then the Sultan in Constantinople. So he's in some ways just like a vassal, just like the rest of the people. He's waiting for
00:38:59
Speaker
He's waiting for the anointment or the nod or whatever it's going to take to get what he wants and what he thinks that he's been working for, that he deserves to be compensated for the work. Yeah, he definitely has almost the day laborer attitude towards things. I mean, he has a great artist, but at the same time he's a craftsman and he's someone whose skills are valuable. The value of his skills is not entirely determined by him.
00:39:28
Speaker
clearly chafes against that. Masihi, also an artist, a poet, but Masihi is in a different position in that he is basically looked with favor on by the vizier. And so he has this position at court. He doesn't seem to want for much of anything. He doesn't really seem to want much other than to be out in the taverns until dawn and just engage with the beauty of the world.
00:39:54
Speaker
But that life is a very tenuous one, right? We're told in the end notes that Missy, he dies relatively young because the vizier dies and is out of power and he he's not able to convince anyone else at court to take him on. And so now he's.
00:40:14
Speaker
Now what is he? He's poor. He's destitute. So that understanding of where artists lie in the grand scheme of things, how they move through the world or don't, it's an interesting one. And I was thinking earlier about how so much of what Michelangelo is doing while he's in Constantinople is made possible by the fact that he's basically interacting with the upper crust.
00:40:40
Speaker
But that's not accurate. He's not interacting with the upper crime or the heights of society. Those are the folks that are at court. He is engaging with a relatively wealthy merchant class and the folks that are on that same level by the virtue of where they are at court, like Masihi.
00:40:58
Speaker
So that too just creates another part of this portrait of a place in time that Endart is creating. All the stratifications of the society, all the tensions that are at play, from basic survival to how you find enjoyment in life. Yeah, it's very interesting.
00:41:20
Speaker
He mentioned Inard's end note at the close of the novel that kind of runs through the facts behind parts of the story. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't recall the dagger being mentioned in the end notes. I believe it is. Give me one moment.
00:41:42
Speaker
I ask that in the context of whether we should talk about the dagger, because it does play a pretty good role in the book. I think we should, and it does appear in the endnotes. The black damask seal dagger inlaid with gold is exhibited in the treasure room at Topkapi Palace. And before we get into the dagger bit, these endnotes, again, it just
00:42:01
Speaker
He's just running down the list of all the things that happened, that were real, that he used to construct this novel. And so after listing all this sketch project for a bridge for the Golden Horn, a tribute to Michelangelo was recently discovered in the Ottoman archives, as well as the inventory of possessions abandoned in his room.
00:42:23
Speaker
this page of just this thing and this thing and this thing and this thing, and then you turn the page and it's the last line of last writing in this book. For the rest, we know nothing. I'm like, all right, thanks Mathias. We get it. You're very good. You did good research and you wrote really well. It's a very remarkable flex, I found. But why don't we go ahead and get into the dagger?
00:42:49
Speaker
Part of the time Michelangelo is in Constantinople, he's looking for someone who can make
00:43:00
Speaker
a elaborate and ornamental kind of dagger that, is it a friend back in Italy, has requested that he bring, or is it a family member? I'm not quite recalling. I believe it's a merchant connected to his family that has made this request that Michelangelo designed, have it made, and that he'd pay for it, but the request is coming through his brother when he's writing to his brother about various matters.
00:43:29
Speaker
Yeah. And so he, you know, writes back to his brother, you know, tell this guy that, you know, I'm going to be able to bring this dagger back. I found someone to make it. And, but then the dagger kind of plays a pivotal role towards the end. Do you, do you want to talk about that Tom? Or are we going to do not do spoiler alerts?
00:43:50
Speaker
Let's get into it. A little bit of a spoiler for the end of the book. It's 150 pages, folks. You can burn through it. Definitely read this one. But yeah, if you don't want to know how the last, frankly, like 10 pages or so play out, then stop listening here.
00:44:06
Speaker
But actually, before we even talk about those pages, I just want to remark that when when Missy he took Michelangelo to the foundry to which again was a special privilege afforded him to have this dagger made his initial design was rejected because it looked too much like because it looked like a Christian cross and was, you know, designed to do that. It was it's it's not really supposed to be a functional dagger so much as an ornament though it is, of course, still a dagger.
00:44:34
Speaker
So he takes the sketch and within 40 minutes has altered its shape and altered the design so that it's in some ways perhaps more beautiful but no longer shaped like a cross. And Masihi and the man at the foundry are just staggered at how fast he was able to change it to make sure that it
00:44:59
Speaker
it still functioned the way he needed to function. I mean, it's a really wonderful scene demonstrating how talented Michelangelo is, like just how he can see the world and also how he can then translate that onto the page through his drawings. I just
00:45:18
Speaker
I like those sorts of descriptions. But towards the end of the novel, Michelangelo now has the dagger. He is either going to send it to the merchant, or if he can leave soon, he'll bring it with him. There is a celebration or a party of sorts. Is it for the Feast of St. John? That sounds right.
00:45:42
Speaker
So there's gonna be a celebration at the house that Michelangelo is staying for the Feast of
Climax: Assassination Attempt
00:45:47
Speaker
St. John. He'd previously met a Christian merchant, I believe named Arslan, who helped to arrange the music, helped to arrange the celebration. It's also been the reason that Michelangelo's had any interaction with this musician since the first night he saw them. He also can't quite figure out
00:46:08
Speaker
what this merchant is, like who the guy is. He's built like a soldier, but he clearly is of the merchant class. There's a weird tension between Masihi and this guy, but he kind of just
00:46:22
Speaker
glosses over it in no small part because he's expecting the musician to arrive that evening. So he's not really going to worry about why, you know, his two friends don't necessarily like each other. Masihi that evening, Masihi had previously been given by Michelangelo the deed to the town because it wasn't of any use to Michelangelo and it was a way for him to thank his friend.
00:46:46
Speaker
I'm gonna see he hands over that deed to this merchant to find out that the guy's a spy. He works both sides. He works both for Venice and for the Sultan. And the musician has been employed that evening to murder Michelangelo in his sleep.
00:47:02
Speaker
And there's this passage where they're, they're explaining why they have to do this and how if, you know, Michelangelo had been able to fall in love with them, then, then they wouldn't be able to follow through with this. And it's, it's an interesting passage. Um, but Michelangelo wakes up to the musician dead on the floor with the dagger through their heart and the see he standing over them. As soon as the see he heard what was happening, he ran to protect Michelangelo and within
00:47:32
Speaker
within the course of the novel, the musician was about to stab him, had picked up the dagger and was preparing to murder him.
00:47:41
Speaker
And Michelangelo feels that Masihi killed the musician out of jealousy because Masihi loves Michelangelo. Yes. And so Masihi kind of runs away, flees before he really has an opportunity to explain to Michelangelo about this traitorous person and that he was just trying to protect him.
00:48:04
Speaker
I mean, see, he even knows that he's going to lose that the only way for him to save his friend's life is to lose him, that he's going to have to get him out of the city, that he's not safe, but that the actions he's going to take are going to destroy, destroy the relationship. Um, it's, I mean, it's really Missy. He's reaction after the fact is really quite heartbreaking. I mean, he.
00:48:30
Speaker
He was in love with Michelangelo. He truly loved him and it was not requited and that was okay. But then to have Michelangelo hate him is crushing as, as frankly, it would be right.
00:48:44
Speaker
Yeah, the novel ends on that rather sad note, but then we also learn that soon after Michelangelo leaves, and he's already working on the Sistine Chapel back in Italy in Rome, the Vatican in September, I think of.
00:49:04
Speaker
of 1509 and there's a horrible earthquake which actually really happened that destroys almost all of the city and certainly any part of the bridge that might have been constructed at that time.
00:49:18
Speaker
The portions that were built crumbled into the Bosphorus and were swept away. And what was left was salvaged for use in rebuilding the city. At one point, early in the novel, when Michelangelo went into the Santa Sophia Christian church that then converted into a mosque, all the walls were bright white with white plaster. He's later told that that was to cover up all the religious art from the church.
00:49:46
Speaker
And when the earthquake hit, the plaster fell off, revealing the evangelist's faces again.
Novel's Impact and Final Reflections
00:49:53
Speaker
And Art just has a real flair for those kinds of details. Yeah.
00:49:57
Speaker
Yeah. Well, what a wonderful book. I mean, if you really haven't read Inard before, pick up any book by him and try it. I think, like we said, certainly this one is a wonderful place to start, especially if you just want to find out what Inard's writing is like and give something a try before you dig into one of the
00:50:26
Speaker
one of the other thicker books. But after you read a few, you'll see these themes emerging. And I actually recently listened to a lecture that Inard gave at Barnard College a few years back. And talking about his interest in the Orient and the kind of not politically correct
00:50:52
Speaker
philosophy of Orientalism, as Edward Said set it forth, and the issues about Western colonialism and Northern Africa and the Middle East, and just thinking about the ways that the East and the West are constantly and have constantly through centuries
00:51:16
Speaker
just transformed one another in the ways that we, not just in art, but just like in knowledge where, you know, I think a lot of mathematics and algebra and things like that come from Persia. And that that's the case with a lot of
00:51:34
Speaker
sciences and knowledge that comes from the East and what some people call the Orient. And while there is a lot of death and destruction that happened with the cultures clashing, there's also been a lot of assimilation and borrowing and copying and transforming that's taken place
00:52:00
Speaker
with the the melding and the blending of the two cultures. So it's a really fascinating area to look at. And he's got such a great way with words and imagination to kind of make these stories kind of, you know, really sparkle and come alive. This is a perfect afternoon book. You can get through it in a few hours and notice the light changing on the walls as as you read it. Yeah, I can't recommend it highly enough.
00:52:28
Speaker
And I'll also drop a link to the lecture from Inard in the show notes of folks are so inclined and as I will most likely be doing this evening, they can check it out. But yeah, this was really fun. This is such a wonderful, wonderful novel. I was very happy when you suggested that we talk about it, Tom, because it gave me an opportunity to take a look at it again. And it's just as good the second time around. Absolutely.
00:53:00
Speaker
you