“All Things Are Directed To The Good By The Good, Be Happy In The Present, Don’t Value Reputation, Don’t Seek Prestige, Flee Excess, Flee Trouble, Be Happy In The Present.”
Villa di Careggi, owned by Cosimo de’ Medici, where Ficino operated the Platonic Academy.
This was the inscription painted along the top of the four walls of Marsilio Ficino’s study at the Platonic Academy in Florence in the 1460s. Ficino was a gay hunchbacked priest who was also a medical doctor, an author, a translator, and perhaps the foremost philosopher of the Renaissance. His patron, who sponsored the Academy and commissioned Ficino to translate Plato, Plotinus, and several other neoplatonic, classic, and hermetic ancient Greek texts, was Cosimo de’ Medici. The same Florentine banker who was patron to Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, and just about every other artist and architect who made the Renaissance happen.
The inscription sounds like a cross between new age self-help and a pop song, but when you read Ficino’s books ( a few) and letters (five volumes) you realize that he was no lightweight aphorist. He was a literary, artistic, medical, political, philosophical, and spiritual adviser to everyone from poets to popes. And despite suffering multiple heath issues, including depression (“black bile”) and pending blindness (cataracts), he always brought a buoyant, upbeat joy to his writings. (In person he was supposed to great at a party and loved to play the lyre.)
Marsilio Ficino in fresco painted by Domenico Ghirlandaio.
I’m writing about Ficino because I think this inscription has a lot to say to artists, including photographers. Or maybe just to me. I don’t know. Because unlike stories from painters, for instance, I have a hard time finding stories from photographers about their struggles as artists.
I’ve been reading Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, which is a compilation of the artist’s notebooks from 1962 to 2017 (he died in 2018). He currently has a major retrospective at MOMA, but “success” was a long time coming for the painter and sculptor.
In the notebooks, Whitten not only puzzles through the technical experiments he was conducting by, for instance, adding crystalline silica and powdered aluminum to acrylic paint and dragging it with a giant rake, but also the incredible struggle of creating something new, something specific to him, of finding a vision and worldview. He laid bare what it was like being an artist who was toiling in the shadows for much of his life. And then when he did get a show at the Whitney, he couldn’t afford the paint to make the paintings. He was always needing money.
Two photos of Jack Whitten.
Photographers don’t talk about this kind of stuff in interviews or in writing. My photographer friends don’t even hint at the slog of carrying on in the face of little love from galleries, collectors, curators and publishers. It’s like we have our own omertà, or code of silence. Maybe this struggle is just my personal experience, which I’m totally willing to accept. But in the face of this silence I find deep consolation in reading about the struggles of other artists, mostly painters, and in witnessing that, despite the hardship and doubt, they didn’t quit. In so many cases, that trust in their own work and that irrational persistence eventually paid off.
What exactly does “paid off” mean? What is art’s final reward? That’s a question that Ficino addresses, albeit indirectly, in this passage from a letter:
“I really wish you were asking me, here and now, why I read or write; why I learn or teach; in brief, why I think, say or do anything at all,” he writes. “I answer at once that my sole reason for doing anything is that it delights.” Further on he writes, “Now, I have often noticed that a person who depends upon external things always lives a disturbed and anxious life and suffers many a disappointment, while the only person to live in peace and certainty is the one who leads a life based, not upon the passing show without, but the eternal within himself.” (Vol 2, p. 37.)
Letter handwritten by Marsilio Ficino.
It seems like “the eternal show within” is a pretty good description of the process of being an artist. Eternal, of course, being relative, as in, the show doesn’t close—at least, not until we close. But Ficino’s words bring me back around to the question of why we became photographers in the first place. Why did we decide to make art? And the only conceivable answer I can come up with is Ficino’s reason: for delight.
One certainly doesn’t chose the path of art the way college students decide to major in accounting. It can’t be the money, security, and comfort promised by the choice. So when did we (by which I mean “I”) start to expect more from art than just delight? When did we start to expect exhibitions, gallery representation, books, interviews, awards, and cha-ching print sales? For me, it’s a little bit like this:
I’m an opossum, sitting there organizing my photobook dummy in Lightroom, when gradually I sense that there’s a python up close and personal. “Oh, hey,” I say. How long has it been there? What are its intentions? I’m thinking about the marsupuial-themed calls-for-entry I bookmarked. The python strikes just to numb me. “Whoa. That was intense,” I say. Now I’m thinking, “Hey, if I could photograph this, there’s that exhibition opportunity at the Field Museum about predators and prey I could enter…” Slowly the python loops coil after coil around my pudgy abdomen. “I am so….ready for…a…solo…” I wheeze, wondering why I don’t have a gallery yet. As the python squeezes and my deeply “unsuccessful” artistic life passes before my eyes, I gasp out, “I…want…a Guggenheim.”
The process, for me, of wanting or expecting more from photography than delight is a bit gradual. Insidiously gradual. And yet everything I’ve learned in this life tells me that focusing on the outcome rather than the process leads to suffering. I know this, and yet, being human, I’m susceptible to wanting what I see others getting. And if I’m not vigilant, that’s exactly what I end up wanting, rather than reminding myself to just go make photographs.
Cosimo de’ Medici, the patron we’d all like to have, but he’s dead.
In another letter, this one addressed to “Mankind,” Ficino writes: “You seek satisfaction everywhere, on the principle that after you have found this one thing, you will search for nothing further. But you are always seeking anew as many things as possible, for the very reason that nowhere do you attain this one thing.”
The ever-elusive “if only….” As a poet in graduate school at New College of California in the 1980s, I came to believe that in writing I was serving Poetry itself, a thing that was bigger than me and towards which I directed all my efforts. The poet Michael Palmer, who taught in the program, talked about the French concept of the petit moi and the grand moi—the little me and the big me. Operating from the little me, the sad little ego, was the trap I was trying to avoid.
The poet Michael Palmer.
I hear photography graduate school instructors talk about the self-focused students these days who are not aspiring to engage, participate in and enlarge the field of photography so much as to build their personal careers. The opposite of Ficino’s call to not value and seek “Reputation” and “Prestige.”
But why not seek these? If I don’t seek them, I won’t get them, right? Here’s the perennial rub, which Ficino also talks about: when you seek it, it recedes from you. And that’s if you’re lucky. You could also seek it and achieve it at the cost of making temporarily popular art but not the more complex and challenging art you are capable of making. And popular for how long? Look through twenty or thirty-year-old art and photography magazines. Check out the names of the highly-touted artists, the ones in the gallery ads, the ones who won awards. Recognize those names? A few, perhaps, but most? Nope.
For me, I’m trying to focus on Ficino’s assertion that all things are directed to the good by the good. What does that mean? I think it says that—let’s say that being true to your artistic vision and self, rather than twisting it to win reputation and prestige, is “good.” If we do this, then good will come to us from the good. Sounds simplistic, but I believe instead it’s actually quite complex. Because it posits that good is rewarded. It posits that good is, essentially, directed, and that it’s directed by a limitless source of good. That is a huge leap of faith.
Exactly the kind of leap of faith it takes to be an artist. I have never experienced anything that calls for so much faith over so long a period of time as being a photographer. How many times have the lizard-tongue thoughts of giving up flicked through my brain? Many. Do I ever entertain such thoughts for even a second? Never. Do I ever wonder why I don’t give up? All the time.
But I resolve, on a daily basis, to embrace the delight I feel when I step out the door with my camera. To relish the downloads to my computer that follow. And to anticipate the composition of my next photobook, with all the uncertainty and puzzlement that entails. I believe I’m serving the larger fields of Photography and Art in my own particular way, and in a way that delights me. So maybe I can be happy in the present.