“[I]n these Italian films . . . they love not just the lead characters, they love everybody in the frame, . . . they love everybody, warts and all.”
- Director Alexander Payne on Dino Risi’s Il Sorpasso (1962) and Italian cinema
Does a writer have to like the artist he or she writes about? I think the obvious answer is no. A good subject needs many qualities, but lovability is asking too much. The trouble is that writers still have to figure out how to write about a time or place or work they do care about – or else why write? – and about people who range from the saintly to the despicable. Alexander Payne creates films in which he shows an almost divine attentiveness to his (often unappealing) characters’ humanity, but there are other ways to love a subject, too.
I thought about this while reading Ingrid Rowland and Noah Charney’s The Collector of Lives, her book Giorgio Vasari and his Florentine contemporaries. It’s a book aimed at a general audience, and one of the easiest paths to popular success is to focus on a charismatic subject, particularly one who wins the reader’s admiration and sympathy. Renaissance Florence was full of admirable artists, but a little short on sympathetic ones. The television series Medici made the most of the title family’s rapaciousness, intrigues, and murderous tendencies, but neglected the art that’s the main reason we still care about them. Apparently, lovable figures and great art don’t go easily together in dramatic form. But Rowland and Charney find what seems to me an elegant solution: they love everybody in the frame.
But that doesn’t mean approving of them. Let me illustrate this by talking about how film director Jim Jarmusch loves minor characters. In his film Night on Earth, we hop from Los Angeles to New York, then Paris, Rome and Helsinki, each time sharing a single taxi ride with driver and passenger late at night. There is no connecting narrative and no unifying idea, just a framing device, the nighttime taxi rides. Jarmusch’s characters give viewers plenty of reasons to dislike them: argumentative riders who start yelling matches, arrogant jerks who mock the working stiff at the wheel, and even a heedless cabbie who fails to notice his passenger having a heart attack. What’s more, all the characters are little more than sketches. The key is that they all have something at stake and their struggle to get that something starts to matter. We know almost nothing about these drivers and passengers, but they are alive enough that we want Helmut (the driver who can’t drive) and YoYo (the passenger who won’t stay in the back seat) to get to Brooklyn, even if it’s just to put both of them out of their shared misery.
Rowland and Charney give the reader greater depth on Vasari, of course. The studio system, the role of ancient texts, the system of artistic patronage, and Vasari’s various projects all appear in due course. But the authors also paint dramatic pictures of the scene in a typical artist’s workshop or the childhood of a young artisan, they quote from cranky letters by Vasari where he argues with a stingy Medici, they recount the jealousies and resentments among artists or between teachers and apprentices. Lengthy quotations give the reader a sense of individual voices as they explain, inveigh, brag, and wheedle.
This is more than just a way of making the era come to life or “show don’t tell.” It’s a strategy that gives humanity to all the figures in the scene, as we observe them bustling around the city, pausing to gossip, nursing a long-held resentment, or contemplating their approaching end. When we get away from the “lead characters”, the whole scene comes alive, so that the people at the center seem to breathe real air– the breeze through the window and the stench from the trash heap– and become more vivid, as well. It’s a strategy many biographers should learn from.