Click here for Full Issue of Fidelio Volume 3, Number 2, Summer 1994 The speakers were also unified in -;.--- .. ,---------- having been brought together by the EX HI BITS _ Schiller Institute and by the policies of Left:Portrait medalof Byzantine American statesman Lyndon LaRouche, Emperor John VIII Paleologus, by whose proposals fo r a physical-economic Pisanello. approach to rebuilding the world's devas­ tated economies were constantly cited. The speakers included: • Prof. Taras Muranivsky of the Ukrainian University in Moscow, who described the collapse of production in Russia. We expected help from the "invisible hand," he said, but got "a kick from the invisible foot." We have to come together around ideas, he said, and he believes LaRouche's ideas are the best. • Human rights activist Viktor Kuzin, a fo rmer member of the Moscow City Council. Kuzin reported on the political destruction that has accompa­ Right: Leon BattistaAlberti 's large-scale nied the imposition of shock therapy. self-portrait (c. 1438), an immediate There is no democracy in Russia, he precursor of the portrait medal. emphasized, but a criminal dictatorship by Boris Yeltsin, who is very stubborn and could cause conflicts inside and out­ side the country, even possibly civil war. The West must urgently rethink the 'Currencyof Fame' Brings shock therapy approach, to deal with this danger. • Dr. Wolter G. Manusadjan, a Renaissance People to Life physicist and president of the International Ecological Academy, which magine a gallery of photographs of are those of bankers like Lorenzo de elected Lyndon LaRouche as a corre­ I the men and women who shaped his­ Medici, religious reformers like sponding member in fa ll 1993, who tory in the period of the fifteenth to sev­ Savonarola, Melanchthon, Martin explained why LaRouche was asked to enteenth centuries, known as the Luther, monarchs like Mary, Queen of join the scientificacademy. Golden Renaissance ofEurope: the fa ces Scots and Elizabeth I of England, • Konstantin Cheremnykh, a jour­ behind the achievements in art, philoso­ Francis I of France, and Charles V of nalist and trained psychiatrist from St. phy, science, statecraft, and literature. Spain, merchants, artists, chancellors Petersburg. Cheremnykh described how Imagine, too, that the gallery not and finance ministers, soldiers and sul­ the Russian people are being driven to only recorded the most fa mous names, tans. Every fa ction in the brutal wars moral degradation by their poverty, while but also those whose contribution to his­ that racked Europe after 1500, as Venice the law of free trade imposed by Yeltsin is tory may have been more enduring­ set out to set the new nation-states leading to the elimination of whole vul­ albeit less fl ashy-than that of kings, against each other, is represented. nerable sections of the population. dukes, and high prelates: namely, the The show will travel to New York • Dmitri Glinsky, from the League Christian humanist scholars who trans­ City in May, to The Frick Collection, of Independents, a group which broke fo rmed the intellectual life of Europe which published the splendid catalogue out of Democratic Russia because of dis­ and trained its leaders: men like edited by Stephen K. Scher with photog­ gust with the liberal reforms. Glinsky Erasmus of Rotterdam, Vittorino da raphy by John Bigelow Taylor (Abrams, emphasized how today's reformers were Feltre, and Guarino da Verona. $95 hardbound, $50 softcover). a corrupt mafia,and urged the fo rmation "Currency of Fame: Portrait Medals of a new elite which would be pro­ of the Renaissance," an exhibit inaugu­ Invention of Portrait Medal Western without shock therapy. rated in January at the National Gallery The basic fo rm of the Renaissance por­ Proceedings of the seminar have been of Art in Washington, D.C., is just such trait medal was invented by Antonio issued as an EIR White Paper entitled a portrait gallery of many of the protag­ Pisanello in 1438, as a kind of sculpture "The Effects of I.M.F. Shock Therapy on onists of the Renaissance, in a medium free from any connection with coinage. Russia and the Newly Independent fa miliar only to specialists: the portrait Such medals were part of a broader fe a­ States." medal. Among the fa ces you will meet ture of the Renaissance, the sudden 85 © 1994 Schiller Institute, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission strictly prohibited. blossoming of portraiture in the early terizing the sitter-came into 1400's throughout the urbanized parts being at the Council of Ferrara­ of Europe, especially Italy and the Low Florence, the watershed event of Countries. Suddenly, not just sacred the years 1438-42. This was the figures, nor even just monarchs, but great ecumenical council which middle-class burghers and upstart sol­ reunified, briefly, the Roman diers of fo rtune, with their wives and Catholic and Greek Orthodox daughters, began to appear in life-size churches, as well as other portrayals which recorded their fe a­ Christian churches in Africa and tures with greater or lesser degrees of Asia, through universal accep­ idealization. tance of the phrase Filioque ("and Renaissance portraiture is extraordi­ from the Son") recited in Nicene narily im portant as a mark of the historic Creed. This emphasis on the watershed of 1440, when the oligarchical equal role of the Son (Christ) to control of societies through empires was God the Father, had long been shaken, and the modern nation-state interpreted in the West as emerged. Theorized by Dante in his expressing the responsibilities of essay De Monarchia in the early 1300's, individual human beings to con­ Guarino da Verona the nation-state was firstmade concrete tinue the work of divine by King Louis XI of France in the mid­ Creation, by contributing new discoveries who directly inspired England's Geoffrey dle of the next century, in the wake of and inventions beneficialto all mankind. Chaucer and the parallel projects of ver­ the Council of Ferrara-Florence. Out of nacular poetry in France, Spain, and else­ that revolution have come the last six­ Petrarch's Republican Ideal where, was the moving fo rce behind a hundred years of progress, which The idea of individual achievement and European-wide project to train a younger increased the human population of the the "good life dignifiedby practical activ­ generation in Classical Greek, recover globe from several millions to today's ity and rendered delightful by beauty Plato's dialogues and translate them into five billion souls. This was spurred by and learning appealed strongly to the western languages, and more generally upper classes of the Italian city­ recover the treasures of Greek and Roman state," writes curator Stephen K. culture. The young Nicolaus of Cusa had Scher in the catalogue introduc­ entered the orbit of Petrarch's philosophi­ tion. cal heirs by at least the time he matriculat­ "In the early fo urteenth cen­ ed at the University of Padua in 1416. This tury one man in particular gave put him in the position of having been impetus to this development­ exposed, while very young, to both the Francesco Petrarch [1304-74] northern (Brotherhood of the Com­ .... Petrarch assumed that mon Life [SEE p. 42, this issue]) and south­ human talent, if properly used, ern (Petrarchan) branches of the was certain of recognition. Augustinian movement that surged after Therefore glory, or fa ma, was the Black Death-a dual heritage which inevitably the result of excel­ helped equip him fo r his exceptional place lence, or virtus, and this virtus among the many geniuses of his era . .� was a fu nction of a man's entire 8 personality .... " First Renaissance Medals "iii I Petrarch's fa ther was exiled The painter Pisanello was not only the � with the great poet Dante presumed inventor of the true portrait ::; Cecelia Gonzaga, by Pisanello (1447). Daughter of Alighieri's White Guelph party medal, but one of the fe w major artists to the rulers of Ma ntua, she mastered Greek at age in 1302. Petrarch, born in 1304, engage in this activity, usually carried out seven and was a star pupil of Vittorino da Feltre. survived the cataclysm of the by specialists. He was probably born in Black Death of 1348, took a Pisa (in Tuscany, near Florence) around the development of science by one of the leading role in efforts to establish a 1385, and moved to the north Italian city protagonists of the political and ecclesias­ republic in Rome at mid-century, and set of Verona in 1404. Like Cusa later, he tical battles of the day, Cardinal Nicolaus up intellectual-political networks all over was involved in networks circulating ofCusa, in the 1440's and 1450's. western Europe. manuscripts in 1416, which pinpoints It is not accidental that the portrait An Augustinian Christian, Petrarch him as a member of the Petrarchan medal-which plays a unique role in the was the first major figure to explicitly movement. In 1431 he was engaged by midst of this flowering of portraiture reject the influence of Aristotle over sci­ Pope Eugenius IV in Rome. He was in because it adds texts and usually, on the ence as it was studied in the universities, Ferrara in 1438 and witnessed the arrival reverse, a narrative or metaphor charac- particularly in Venice. This Italian poet, of the Greek emperor John VIII 86 widely used fo r three centuries. grammar, music, moral philosophy, At his fu neral he was praised mathematics, dancing, astrology, history, fo r singled-handedly turning and drawing alternated with exercise Ferrara into a center of the new and games in an environment offering humanistic culture by the time no frivolous distractions ...