The clearest thing to come out of this, the Court’s first affirmative-action case, was that it probably was not a good idea to try to stage a media event around a Burger Court decision.
The story line, in case you lost it in all the confusion, was as follows: Allan Bakke, a thirty-eight-year-old white engineer, had twice been refused admission to the University of California’s medical school at Davis, despite a 3.5 college grade-point average, which was well above the 2.5 required for white applicants and the 2.1 required for minorities. Concluding that he’d been passed over because of Davis’ strict minority admissions quota, Bakke took his case to the Supreme Court, charging reverse discrimination. The media jumped all over Bakke, in part because it was the first time affirmative action had been tested in the courts, and everyone was anxious to see how much the mood of the country had changed—for better or worse—since the Sixties; in part because the Burger Court’s somewhat shoddy civil-rights record promised to lend an edge to the whole affair.
The outcome, however, was a two-part decision that merely left most people scratching their heads. The Court declared itself firmly behind the principle of affirmative action, but just as firmly behind Bakke’s right to get into medical school. In effect, it said: Principles, yes; quota systems, no. Some civil-rights groups decided to take this as a resounding success, others as a crushing blow; ditto for the opposition. Some said it left the door open for future affirmative-action measures (there are other ways to promote racial balance besides quota systems, the Court pointed out, and no one was ruling out an institution’s right to take race into account as one factor among many when deciding on an applicant’s qualifications). Others insisted it left an even wider margin for businesses and universities to discriminate against minorities. Some legal scholars pointed out inconsistencies and downright lapses of reason in the justices’ opposing opinions (the Court was split 5–4); others declared the everyone-gets-to-take-home-half-a-baby decision a fine example of judicial wisdom.
Although the haziness of Bakke pretty much ensured that the courts would be gnawing on affirmative-action cases for years to come, it was the press that was really left holding the bag. Screaming headlines that contradicted each other (“Court Votes ‘Yes’ to Bakke”; “Court Votes ‘Yes’ to Affirmative Action”) just made a lot of newspapers look silly and, after a couple of frustrating go-nowhere specials, TV reporters had to conclude that legal ambiguities did not make for optimum prime-time fare. The rest of us got a taste of how unsatisfying Supreme Court decisions would be for at least the next fifteen years.
Ten Old Masters
In a way, we’re sorry. What we had really wanted to do was talk about our ten favorite painters. Then we got to thinking that it should be the ten painters whose stock is currently highest, who are most in vogue in a crudités-and-hired-bartenders way. (Whichever, you’d have heard about Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Velásquez, and Manet, all notably absent here.) Then we realized that, if you were anything like us, what you really needed was remedial work, not a pajama party or a year in finishing school. So, here they are, the ten greatest—we suppose that means something like “most seminal”—painters of all time. GIOTTO (GIOTTO DI BONDONE)
(c. 1266-c. 1337)
Giotto’s Deposition
As the little girl said in Poltergeist: “They’re heeere!” By which we mean artists who sign their work, travel in packs, and live lives about which something, and sometimes too much, is known. Before Giotto (that’s pronounced “JOT-to”), the artist hadn’t counted for any more than the stonemason or the glassblower; from here on in, he’d be accorded a degree of respect, authority, and press unknown since ancient Greece. Also in abeyance since the Greeks: the human body, about which the courtly and rigid Byzantines—Giotto’s only available role models—had felt some combination of deeply ashamed and not all that interested anyway. Giotto, out of the blue (and we’re waist-deep in the Middle Ages, remember), turned mannequins into people, dry Christian doctrine into vivid you-are-there narrative, mere colored shapes into objects that seemed to have weight and volume, and his native Florence into the art world’s red-hot center for the next 250 years. No painter would prove either as revolutionary or as influential as Giotto for six centuries, at which point Cézanne opined that eyewitness-style reporting on life might not be the ultimate artistic high.
KEY WORKS: The Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, thirty-three scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary and her folks.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Duccio, from neighboring Siena, where life was conservative, aristocratic, and refined, and where ballots were cast for beauty rather than truth. MASACCIO
(TOMMASO DI SER GIOVANNI DI MONE)
(1401-1428?)
Played Elvis Presley to Giotto’s Frank Sinatra. That is, Masaccio took his predecessor’s three-dimensional realism and put some meat on it, encouraged it to flex its muscles and swivel its hips, enlarged the stage it was playing on, and generally shook the last vestiges of middle age(s) out of the whole performance. Thus begins the Renaissance, the era that rediscovered Greece and Rome; that posed the questions “Why?” “How?” and “So what?”; that promoted such novelties as humanism, freedom, and the idea of leading a full life; and that—casting its gaze on the lot of the artist— came up with a support system of studios, patrons, and apprentices. With Masaccio (a nickname that equates roughly with “Pigpen”), we’re at that Renaissance’s heroic beginnings, smack-dab in the middle of boom-town, no-holds-barred Florence, and we’re watching as the new sciences of perspective and anatomy encourage painters to paint things as they appear to the eye. That doesn’t, however, mean you’re going to get off on Masaccio the way your parents or grandparents got off on Elvis. For one thing, Masaccio died at twenty-seven, before he’d really done all that much. For another, until recently most of his extant work was in rough shape or badly lit (those darned Italian churches) or both. Most important, few of us these days are wowed by perspective and anatomy. As a result, Masaccio is what art historians call a “scholar’s painter.” But it was his stuff and nobody else’s that Leonardo, Michelangelo, et al., back in the mid-fifteenth century, were ankling over to the Brancacci Chapel to take a long hard look at.
Masaccio’s The Expulsion from Paradise
KEY WORKS: The Holy Trinity with the Virgin, St. John, and Donors (Sta. Maria Novella, Florence), The Tribute Money and The Expulsion from Paradise (both Brancacci Chapel, Sta. Maria del Carmine, Florence).