Chasing beauty in Florence
Just some photos from my trip last week, and some housekeeping notes.
If you’re just here for the Fra Angelico paintings, scroll past the next bit…
The first time I went to Zecchi, 12 years ago, it was more as an art-nerd tourist attraction, to go and buy something from the world-famous Zecchi. And I’m happy to say that things have progressed so much with my painting work that I actually needed to go there, because the things I use in my work can’t easily be found anywhere else.
How to Substack: moving forward
So, today I’d like briefly to talk about World of Hilarity as a thing, and how we’re going to proceed. I’m really happy with the decision to start focusing hard on Christian sacred art as a theme; history of, technical aspects of, philosophy of, etc. And everyone seems to like it. But I could use a little reader input on how best to move forward.
This afternoon I was talking to with my friend Dr. Peter Kwasniewski about the technical aspects of running a Substack. I explained that the basic procedural model is blogging - it's basically indistinguishable, you just write down whatever you’re thinking about - but the distribution model makes a huge difference. A blog is just a website sitting there waiting for people to come and read. If you want to build a readership you have to post a lot and promote like crazy. Frequency creates a sense of urgency and "buzz" and a blog that goes a week or more without a new post is considered dead.
But a Substack is a newsletter format. Readers like what they see and choose to sign up to receive your posts in their email - it’s a lot more relaxed, but blogging-style frequency isn’t the best idea. Imagine it’s like a physical, paper newsletter - do you want that popping into the front door letterbox several times a day? Would you read them all? No way. Same with email: no one wants to be bombarded with multiple posts a day, or even per week, just showing up randomly.
I find there’s a subconscious feeling when you’ve signed up for someone’s Substack that you’re in some sense obliged to read it, so sending people too much stuff puts a kind of burden on them. Too much and they’ll feel like they can’t keep up with it, or they're being left behind and quit. But then the other side of not doing it too often is to be absolutely reliable about your schedule - which I really fail at a lot, as we saw this week. And I have to admit that I’m kind of struggling with the two posts a week format.
A successful Substack works by rationing reader attention on a reliable schedule. It’s a bit like TV shows back when we all had TV sets. We'd look forward to our favourite shows, catching up with the characters and stories, once a week. I lived in Vancouver when the X-Files became a massive hit. You’d gather in each other's houses for watch parties. It was such a phenomenon that the pubs and bars' business association of Vancouver wrote in desperation to the production company asking that the show air some other time than Friday nights at 8pm. Their places were emptying out, with people stampeding for the doors to make it home - or to a friend's place - in time to watch it. (The bars started holding X-Files Night parties, so that worked out.)
The idea with a newsletter/Substack format, is a bit like that. You produce regularly and stick to your topic and people start getting used to tuning in every week, and a sense of community develops as we work slowly through ideas together.
I've found personally - mainly because writing isn’t my main work anymore, and I have to carve out time for it from other higher priority work - I’ve found it pretty daunting to produce two in-depth, long-form pieces a week. But when I started I was thinking more like a blogger, where frequency was as important as scheduling. So I said I'd do Wednesday and Saturday posts, as a starting point. But I’ve found that very difficult to keep up because the point is to develop ideas more fully, and that takes a lot of thought and time. And it takes time for people to read and digest it, since the posts tend to be longer.
My problem is that I'm physically pretty limited these days. Post-chemo fatigue is a thing, and turns out not to get better with age. I'm finding I have to be careful about rationing energy, very strict about a regular sleep schedule, eating properly and taking vitamins and whatnot.
Turns out Florence is kind of horrible.
So a day like two Saturdays ago, when my friend and I drove up to Florence and ran around town shopping and looking frantically at art, dealing with city traffic and fighting through crowds and then a 2hr drive home, left me completely flattened for more than a week. I was able to get two productive half-days of work in last week and felt like I'd swallowed a handful of lead pellets, or someone had turned the gravity up way too high.
Of course my regular Saturday post was out of the question, because Florence, but even my Wednesday post was postponed until Friday. And the following Saturday failed again (this is the Saturday Post on Tuesday). I've got a commission that needs finishing this week or I'll miss this month's shipping window from Naples, so any available energy had to be channelled into that. Last week’s Wednesday post I got lucky because I had found some old writing on a topic that happens to be quite current right now, and got a good piece out of it without too much extra writing. But that was cheating a bit.
But I was still determined to get a second weekly post in today, before starting over tomorrow, and thought y’all might enjoy just some of the 100-odd Florence photos with some commentary. And that gave me the idea that maybe a slight modification of the scheduling model would be OK.
What if we keep Saturday very light and easy going, no deep thoughts or 3000 word articles, but more just photos and videos from places I get to go and interesting things I get to look at - we’ve got some pretty great stuff right here in Narni, for example. Or we could maybe do a small fine-focus thing on a particular painting or painter - and save the long-form essays for once a week on Wednesdays. Give everyone some space.
The Convent of San Marco
I promise some day I’ll get one of those holder things that steady your videos so they’re not so jiggly. It was early March, which is the closest thing there is in Florence to low season. It really wasn’t overly crowded and we got as much time as we liked in front of each painting.
The reason Fra Angelico’s paintings are so meditative, so contemplative, is that’s literally what they were for. Some of his most famous frescos were done on the wall of each of the friars’1 cells and were there to provide visual assistance to contemplative prayer.
Most of the top floor of the convent of San Marco is devoted to the cells, and even with tourists, the place retains a sense of peacefulness.
I took over a hundred photos, some of them just for my own use in studying the painting and gilding techniques, but quite a lot of them very much worth looking at. But I think we can save them for later.
Thanks for reading to the end. If you would like to see some of my “real” work, my painting, you can click on my Ko-Fi page, Hilary White; Sacred Art, here, where you can also drop a few coins in the tip jar if you enjoyed this.
Right now this blog is not directly monetised, and painting and donations from supporters and patrons are my sole source of income. If you sign up to be a monthly patron, you can join my private patrons-only chat group on Signal.
You can also follow me at Hilary White: Sacred Art on Facebook and see a little hint of the Old Hilary White; journalist being cranky on Twitter too. Many thanks to all who have contributed to make it possible to keep working - the “struggling artist” thing doesn’t last forever, but it is a struggle for a while. Stay tuned.
Dominicans are mendicants - meaning they move around, taking positions in different places as they’re needed, teaching and whatnot, so not strictly speaking monks. Monks - like Benedictines and Carthusians - are purely monastic and stick in one place all their lives. So Dominicans, like Franciscans, are properly called “friars” and they technically live in a convent, not a monastery. Though if you want to call them monks that’s fine too.
The amount of Fra Angelico’s work you were able to peruse and all the pictures you took…almost stupefying! I’ve loved his work portraying St Francis, but the rest of this is gratifying to see. Thanks.
I thought I recognized curly grey haired old St. Peter as the "One of the Apostles at the Last Supper, the fresco of the refectory." I enjoy your writing about art history and your artwork immensely. I too write and do art, but only a little bit of art, since I am able to publish my writings but hardly ever publish or sell my art. I too have been formulating a theory of sacred art, mostly in the back of my mind, and I think you are on the correct track when you write about the departure from iconography during the Renaissance. Artists became like rock stars, instead of mystical humble portrayers of invisible mysteries. And eventually the content and purpose of art was emptied of all religious association, and you have the blasphemous decadent art that inevitably followed. A huge subject. If I ever write up my ideas, I'm sure I'll reference yours. Keep up the great work!