Di Vinci's Vitruvian Man
Masks from Ca'macana
Cherries and Bowl
Assorted Lamp Work Rebecca bought
Two birds I bought in Venice for my mother in 1972
Venician glassblowers
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Monday, February 8, 2010
Venice Part 2 – The Artisan
An angular balding man could be seen just inside his shop door slowly and delicately moving a piece of red glass over a propane torch creating a hat to doff the head of a tiny crystalline woman in a cobalt blue dress. His eyes peered over his reading glasses to summon us in, transfixed outside as we were, watching him work. The small shop was filled with hundreds of pieces of individually crafted lamp work in dazzling colors and Rebecca poured over the array with a discerning eye picking out some of her favorite pieces. This glassmaker was among a new breed that have pursued the craft as an art form outside the mainstream of Murano production houses that cater to the throngs of tourists wanting to buy the highly valued Venetian glass for souvenirs.
We were on our way back from the Gallerie dell’Accademia looking for food to eat. We could not agree on someplace for all six of us, so we had gone separate ways when Rebecca, Jon and I wondered into the glass shop. At the dell’Accademia, I found out that Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man of universal proportions, the famous “cosmografia del minor mondo” (cosmography of the microcosm) was kept in a controlled environment to preserve its paper medium and offered for public viewing only every few years. Our glassmaker said there was a rumor it might be displayed in the next month as he carefully wrapped up a miniature 19th Century-looking black and red woman’s boot Rebecca had picked out. Look, he said handing me change, here is your Leonardo man on the Euro coin. I could not tell if his comment was supposed to be endearing or sarcastic. My face must have telegraphed my confusion. He went back to his work and we resumed our search for food.
The idea of universal proportions was the work of the 1st century BCE Roman Architect Vitruvius in his treatise De Architectura (The Ten Books on Architecture) and is considered one of the great treasures preserved from antiquity. Leonardo’s version is by far the most famous of many Vitruvian depictions from the Renaissance and has become the quintessential icon of the symbiosis of art and science. Simply put, it is the single most widely used representation of the artisan. Vitruvius’ extraordinary work also describes the proportional relationships of buildings and surrounds and in detail the techniques used by the Greeks and Romans in construction; great stuff for the engineer Di Vinci and equally interesting to me having been in the Building business for 35 years. In the past year I had left the corporate world of engineering and construction where I spent the majority of my career, to start a company with Sal in Construction Management. After making the move I had quickly realized how far removed I had become from the day to day job of managing people, projects and clients. In the recent past I spent the majority of my time as a Sr. Vice President managing up into the corporate organization that demanded more involvement and control of what I was doing. It is certainly an understandable ambition for any corporate structure but I had become wholly unsatisfied with the disconnection from the work we did. It was important to me to find in my life the right balance of job and personal satisfaction. The artisan of old represented that perfect balance and I hoped it was not yet entirely lost within this world dominated by technology that minimalized the personal connection to craft.
Settling into a café Rebecca, Jon and I were treated to one of our best meals in Venice of simple but deliciously prepared ravioli and arugula salad served by an elderly and unusually formal waiter. We could see our oldest son Nick sitting by himself through the window eating pizza in the café next door. Things had suddenly turned tense in our party when Nick announced that a vigorous texting relationship started in Israel with a long time friend of both our families had become more amorous. The romance consumed him and Domo, Nick’s best friend, became increasingly more upset with Nick’s obsession. To make matters worse, in a fit of frustration Nick bit his cell phone with his teeth when he could not get a signal, breaking the protective lens and rendering it useless. He had to borrow his brother’s phone to continue the chatter. Arguments ensued and Domo devised a punishment charging a Euro each for fighting. He got rich while I could not figure out where my boys were spending all their money. Traveling with six people was proving to be more complicated than it was with just Nick and me in Israel and Greece. The temptations of breaking his gluten free diet was too much and we watched him through the glass, strangely distanced, succumb to it.
We followed after him as he entered the mask shop next door to our café. No ordinary shop, Ca’macana had made the masks for Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in which the characters are up to no good while hiding their identities. It seems Venice had a similar problem and by the mid 18th Century the Republic of Venice had limited mask wearing to 3 months of the year following December 26 until the Carnevale presumably in an attempt to curb Venetian clandestine activities. Nick purchased a devilish red ornamental piece for himself and a plain white one for his text friend back home that he would paint himself. Sal and Domo had also converged on the scene and were purchasing a variety of masks to ship home. With full stomachs giving sustenance and buoying the mood of our party Nick and Domo were able to move past their differences. We left with the Ca’macana faces neatly concealed in bubble wrap stored in a shopping bag that Nick carried with great delicacy for the remainder of the trip.
It was now late afternoon and Sal and I had given in to shelling out 18 Euro each for a 24 hour pass to ride the vaporetti (water bus). It was beyond our nature however to consider the extraordinarily expensive water taxi or worse, a gondola. We quickly found out that the best place to ride the vaporetti was the bow of the boat where our speed reaching 15 to 20 knots stirred a constant breeze and blew through the heat of the afternoon. The vaporetti pulled away from the Santa Margherita stop, first backing up and then full throttle forward. As the boat revved up its engine to move forward I watched the island of Guidecca (literally translated to Jew Town) glide by. It was not the area known as the Jewish Ghetto which was located in a cannon foundry on the other side of Venice. I could see in full view the famous Venetian architect Andrea Palladio’s impressive church San Giorgio Maggiore. A 16th Century Renaissance man, Palladio is considered the most influential individual in the history of Western Architecture. Commissioned for many of the most important buildings and churches in Venice of his time, he is best known for his design of Italian Villas. Constructed of brick and stucco, his villas were economical in cost and practical in design. As a dedicated student of Vitruvius he borrowed a great deal from the ideas of classical Greek and Roman buildings and of course universal proportion.
It did not take long to reach San Marco where we could slip off the boat for an espresso and gelato and then get back on. The Florian Café is reported to have brewed the first cup of coffee in Italy and Sal; an avid coffee drinker had to have one. Our waiter with an ego far grander than his job took our order as we all sat around a very small table amid hordes of tourists hustling by. The grand palazzo inspired by Palladio resonated with music from a score of bandstands as pigeons dove in and out of the empty spaces between crowds. An endless line up of shops displayed the volumes of glass artifacts interspersed between cafés and gelato stands. The famous names of glassmakers like Toso and Barovier could be seen advertised in the display windows.
Gianni Toso was only 10 years old when he started working with glass. His family had a legacy of more than 700 years of glass blowing and he was so enriched by it that he would skip school to work 12 hours a day in the factory. He was taught the secrets of the trade handed down generation after generation and at 14 years old attended the Abate Vincenzo Zanetti, Maestro d'Arte fine arts academy for master glass blowers on the island of Murano, where he studied the history and the craft for the next seven years. At 23 disillusioned with the production of tourist glass, Gianni broke from family tradition and set up shop in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice making lamp work. His piece “Jews vs. Catholics” a chess set with Hasidic Jews facing off with Franciscan Monks received a first place award from the Murano glassblowers and he achieved international acclaim when he was commissioned by Salvador Dali to make 12 of Dali’s works in glass. In 1972 he attended an international conference of glassmakers in Zurich where he shared some of the secrets of Venetian Glassmaking for the first time in the world. The collaboration was inspirational to him and he traveled to the United States where he felt the freedom to be able to pursue his art. Today he lives in Baltimore and is considered one of the great glass artists in the world. He works in the traditional medium of glass where many of his contemporaries are using tempered glass to reduce breakage. In joining two pieces together said Gianni in a recent interview with another glass artist, it is critical that the glass for both are heated to the same temperature for the same time so that when they are fit together the bond is strong and the glass does not break. He does not believe in using the tempered glass because it does not teach the right technique. It has taken years of tradition, practice and patience to do it correctly. In a world that believes the technology and not the craft produce the perfect art Gianni says: “Production is from the human being. It does not matter the technology…it’s just the instrument.”
I watched our waiter return with our tray of coffees and desserts. He approached us with an air of superiority. As he leaned down to set the tray on table, he missed the edge ever so indelicately and everything landed on the floor in a heap of molten beverage, pastry goo and broken cups and saucers. The Palazzo stopped right there for everyone to gaze at our party as if we had somehow ruined their vacations. Our waiter walked away and never returned. An eternity went by as people sidestepped the spillage and pigeons became curious, when a new waiter appeared showing us to another table and apologizing for the mess, saying that everything was on the house.
“You learn when you break the glass” the master, Gianni Toso said in the interview. The meaning is profound. It is not the final product that matters or even what you do as much as the process you take to get there. It is through the personal challenge of perfection that we achieve satisfaction in what we do. Our party headed back to the vaporetti when we finished our re-served coffees and desserts.
As dusk fell, we rode on, positioning ourselves with each stop to own the front of the boat. Several stops beyond San Marco we were all there and darkness descended on us. In the black water and night sky, rolling slowly out into the Adriatic Sea I felt as if I could be transported back in time to the empire that was once the greatest merchant enterprise in the world. The boat powered through the water and the engine blast brought me back to the sight of Lido directly in front of us, our last stop where the boat would turn around and come back. On the left in the distance were the lights of the glass islands of Murano.
European glasswork recast from “cullet” or glass blocks and shards existed since Roman times, but the making of the raw material was a closely guarded secret and only produced in ancient towns on the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Following the crusades all of this changed and by the late 13th century imported sand and soda ash were being used to make glass in the first Venetian frit furnaces. A new era of glassmaking was born. In 1292, the governing Council of Ten for the stated reason of fire danger ordered the growing industry be moved from the crowded international trade market of the Rialto district to the cluster of small islands known as Murano. The Venetians were to zealously guard the secret they now possessed and confined the glassmakers to Murano. Marriage was allowed only within families from their guild. Under the penalty of death these artisans were also restricted from leaving Venice. So high in importance was it to keep the secret that it was decreed that the Doge himself would pursue any such wanderer and assassinate the traitor on the spot when found. Nevertheless, the Venetians were not the only ones to have the secret in Italy after the Crusades and an industry paralleled Venice in the forests of Altare outside Genoa.
The earliest known discovery of manmade glass dates back to the late 2100 BCE found in cemeteries of the ancient Semite civilization of Akkadians who were also credited with early forms of cuneiform writing and accounting. It is believed that glass was discovered when the soda powder from decomposing plants could be added as flux allowing melting at lower temperatures. The resulting cooled material would dissolve in water and lime was added to solidify. Other minerals would be used to introduce color or clarity.
Following the invention of glass several hundred years later from the same land of Ur where the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers converge, emerged the most important idea in Western Civilization. It was here that Abraham shattered the idols of his forefathers and said there was only one God to worship. There was no longer a god for everyone and everything. There was only one Universal God responsible for everything and you could talk to him. What God told Abraham was to leave this place for the land of Canaan. From then on wherever the Hebrews of Abraham went the making of glass came too.
We had reached our stop at Santa Margherita late in the night and across the way the lights of Guidecca could be seen but Palladio’s church had disappeared in the darkness. Domo and Jon talked about the masks we saw earlier in the day and Nick was busy texting. Things were not what they appeared to be. When the Council of Ten had moved the glass factories to Murano, Guidecca housed a population of about 6,000 Jews who were agents for trade, partners with the Venetians in the vast empire that dominated the Mediterranean for nearly 1,000 years forever opening the door between Europe and the Orient. With the rise of the Venetian Glass Industry on Murano, the vibrant Jewish community on Guidecca of merchants and artisans began to deconstruct giving way to the churches and elaborate villas that exist there now. Signaling the end of a great communion of business enterprise it was at once a foreshadowing of Venice’s decline and the beginning of a more vigorous persecution and displacement for the Jews.
But where the Jews went so did the glass. In the next several hundred years the secret of glassmaking could be found in Spain, France, Germany and then throughout Europe. While the craft survived many of the artists had to renounce their faith as years of Inquisition and banishment prevailed in Europe. Jews had to convert to Christianity or were exiled. Not willing to give up their lucrative business they converted but while the devout continued to secretly practice their faith many did not and both time and prejudice would erase their heritage.
Gianni Toso rediscovered his faith in the late 60’s buried deep within the 700 year history of making glass on the Island of Murano. Rejecting the industry for what it had become he found new inspiration working in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice making his craft and later in America finding the connection between his work and the satisfaction he felt in doing it. He speaks eloquently about the difference between Craft and Art, Craft being what we know and teach others and Art being the ultimate expression of what it means to be human. “In order to be a human being with a high level of humanity we must control the animal what we are,” said the Master Artisan, Gianni Toso. “Art is the most powerful instrument to develop humanity.”
We got back to our Venetian apartment around midnight and Rebecca laid her pieces of lamp work carefully out on the kitchen table. Nick admired his devil’s mask turning it in his hand and moving it on and off his face. Sal rested his tired feet on the couch and Domo and Jon jumped onto their computer games. I emptied my pockets of change and turned over a Euro coin to study Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. As it turns out there is no such thing as universal human proportion. There is only balance to make us upright to strive at a craft whatever that is and push ourselves to learn as much as we can in the lifetime we are given. Self –fulfillment is not what we become; only what we do getting there.
We were on our way back from the Gallerie dell’Accademia looking for food to eat. We could not agree on someplace for all six of us, so we had gone separate ways when Rebecca, Jon and I wondered into the glass shop. At the dell’Accademia, I found out that Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man of universal proportions, the famous “cosmografia del minor mondo” (cosmography of the microcosm) was kept in a controlled environment to preserve its paper medium and offered for public viewing only every few years. Our glassmaker said there was a rumor it might be displayed in the next month as he carefully wrapped up a miniature 19th Century-looking black and red woman’s boot Rebecca had picked out. Look, he said handing me change, here is your Leonardo man on the Euro coin. I could not tell if his comment was supposed to be endearing or sarcastic. My face must have telegraphed my confusion. He went back to his work and we resumed our search for food.
The idea of universal proportions was the work of the 1st century BCE Roman Architect Vitruvius in his treatise De Architectura (The Ten Books on Architecture) and is considered one of the great treasures preserved from antiquity. Leonardo’s version is by far the most famous of many Vitruvian depictions from the Renaissance and has become the quintessential icon of the symbiosis of art and science. Simply put, it is the single most widely used representation of the artisan. Vitruvius’ extraordinary work also describes the proportional relationships of buildings and surrounds and in detail the techniques used by the Greeks and Romans in construction; great stuff for the engineer Di Vinci and equally interesting to me having been in the Building business for 35 years. In the past year I had left the corporate world of engineering and construction where I spent the majority of my career, to start a company with Sal in Construction Management. After making the move I had quickly realized how far removed I had become from the day to day job of managing people, projects and clients. In the recent past I spent the majority of my time as a Sr. Vice President managing up into the corporate organization that demanded more involvement and control of what I was doing. It is certainly an understandable ambition for any corporate structure but I had become wholly unsatisfied with the disconnection from the work we did. It was important to me to find in my life the right balance of job and personal satisfaction. The artisan of old represented that perfect balance and I hoped it was not yet entirely lost within this world dominated by technology that minimalized the personal connection to craft.
Settling into a café Rebecca, Jon and I were treated to one of our best meals in Venice of simple but deliciously prepared ravioli and arugula salad served by an elderly and unusually formal waiter. We could see our oldest son Nick sitting by himself through the window eating pizza in the café next door. Things had suddenly turned tense in our party when Nick announced that a vigorous texting relationship started in Israel with a long time friend of both our families had become more amorous. The romance consumed him and Domo, Nick’s best friend, became increasingly more upset with Nick’s obsession. To make matters worse, in a fit of frustration Nick bit his cell phone with his teeth when he could not get a signal, breaking the protective lens and rendering it useless. He had to borrow his brother’s phone to continue the chatter. Arguments ensued and Domo devised a punishment charging a Euro each for fighting. He got rich while I could not figure out where my boys were spending all their money. Traveling with six people was proving to be more complicated than it was with just Nick and me in Israel and Greece. The temptations of breaking his gluten free diet was too much and we watched him through the glass, strangely distanced, succumb to it.
We followed after him as he entered the mask shop next door to our café. No ordinary shop, Ca’macana had made the masks for Stanley Kubrick’s final film Eyes Wide Shut starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman in which the characters are up to no good while hiding their identities. It seems Venice had a similar problem and by the mid 18th Century the Republic of Venice had limited mask wearing to 3 months of the year following December 26 until the Carnevale presumably in an attempt to curb Venetian clandestine activities. Nick purchased a devilish red ornamental piece for himself and a plain white one for his text friend back home that he would paint himself. Sal and Domo had also converged on the scene and were purchasing a variety of masks to ship home. With full stomachs giving sustenance and buoying the mood of our party Nick and Domo were able to move past their differences. We left with the Ca’macana faces neatly concealed in bubble wrap stored in a shopping bag that Nick carried with great delicacy for the remainder of the trip.
It was now late afternoon and Sal and I had given in to shelling out 18 Euro each for a 24 hour pass to ride the vaporetti (water bus). It was beyond our nature however to consider the extraordinarily expensive water taxi or worse, a gondola. We quickly found out that the best place to ride the vaporetti was the bow of the boat where our speed reaching 15 to 20 knots stirred a constant breeze and blew through the heat of the afternoon. The vaporetti pulled away from the Santa Margherita stop, first backing up and then full throttle forward. As the boat revved up its engine to move forward I watched the island of Guidecca (literally translated to Jew Town) glide by. It was not the area known as the Jewish Ghetto which was located in a cannon foundry on the other side of Venice. I could see in full view the famous Venetian architect Andrea Palladio’s impressive church San Giorgio Maggiore. A 16th Century Renaissance man, Palladio is considered the most influential individual in the history of Western Architecture. Commissioned for many of the most important buildings and churches in Venice of his time, he is best known for his design of Italian Villas. Constructed of brick and stucco, his villas were economical in cost and practical in design. As a dedicated student of Vitruvius he borrowed a great deal from the ideas of classical Greek and Roman buildings and of course universal proportion.
It did not take long to reach San Marco where we could slip off the boat for an espresso and gelato and then get back on. The Florian Café is reported to have brewed the first cup of coffee in Italy and Sal; an avid coffee drinker had to have one. Our waiter with an ego far grander than his job took our order as we all sat around a very small table amid hordes of tourists hustling by. The grand palazzo inspired by Palladio resonated with music from a score of bandstands as pigeons dove in and out of the empty spaces between crowds. An endless line up of shops displayed the volumes of glass artifacts interspersed between cafés and gelato stands. The famous names of glassmakers like Toso and Barovier could be seen advertised in the display windows.
Gianni Toso was only 10 years old when he started working with glass. His family had a legacy of more than 700 years of glass blowing and he was so enriched by it that he would skip school to work 12 hours a day in the factory. He was taught the secrets of the trade handed down generation after generation and at 14 years old attended the Abate Vincenzo Zanetti, Maestro d'Arte fine arts academy for master glass blowers on the island of Murano, where he studied the history and the craft for the next seven years. At 23 disillusioned with the production of tourist glass, Gianni broke from family tradition and set up shop in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice making lamp work. His piece “Jews vs. Catholics” a chess set with Hasidic Jews facing off with Franciscan Monks received a first place award from the Murano glassblowers and he achieved international acclaim when he was commissioned by Salvador Dali to make 12 of Dali’s works in glass. In 1972 he attended an international conference of glassmakers in Zurich where he shared some of the secrets of Venetian Glassmaking for the first time in the world. The collaboration was inspirational to him and he traveled to the United States where he felt the freedom to be able to pursue his art. Today he lives in Baltimore and is considered one of the great glass artists in the world. He works in the traditional medium of glass where many of his contemporaries are using tempered glass to reduce breakage. In joining two pieces together said Gianni in a recent interview with another glass artist, it is critical that the glass for both are heated to the same temperature for the same time so that when they are fit together the bond is strong and the glass does not break. He does not believe in using the tempered glass because it does not teach the right technique. It has taken years of tradition, practice and patience to do it correctly. In a world that believes the technology and not the craft produce the perfect art Gianni says: “Production is from the human being. It does not matter the technology…it’s just the instrument.”
I watched our waiter return with our tray of coffees and desserts. He approached us with an air of superiority. As he leaned down to set the tray on table, he missed the edge ever so indelicately and everything landed on the floor in a heap of molten beverage, pastry goo and broken cups and saucers. The Palazzo stopped right there for everyone to gaze at our party as if we had somehow ruined their vacations. Our waiter walked away and never returned. An eternity went by as people sidestepped the spillage and pigeons became curious, when a new waiter appeared showing us to another table and apologizing for the mess, saying that everything was on the house.
“You learn when you break the glass” the master, Gianni Toso said in the interview. The meaning is profound. It is not the final product that matters or even what you do as much as the process you take to get there. It is through the personal challenge of perfection that we achieve satisfaction in what we do. Our party headed back to the vaporetti when we finished our re-served coffees and desserts.
As dusk fell, we rode on, positioning ourselves with each stop to own the front of the boat. Several stops beyond San Marco we were all there and darkness descended on us. In the black water and night sky, rolling slowly out into the Adriatic Sea I felt as if I could be transported back in time to the empire that was once the greatest merchant enterprise in the world. The boat powered through the water and the engine blast brought me back to the sight of Lido directly in front of us, our last stop where the boat would turn around and come back. On the left in the distance were the lights of the glass islands of Murano.
European glasswork recast from “cullet” or glass blocks and shards existed since Roman times, but the making of the raw material was a closely guarded secret and only produced in ancient towns on the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean. Following the crusades all of this changed and by the late 13th century imported sand and soda ash were being used to make glass in the first Venetian frit furnaces. A new era of glassmaking was born. In 1292, the governing Council of Ten for the stated reason of fire danger ordered the growing industry be moved from the crowded international trade market of the Rialto district to the cluster of small islands known as Murano. The Venetians were to zealously guard the secret they now possessed and confined the glassmakers to Murano. Marriage was allowed only within families from their guild. Under the penalty of death these artisans were also restricted from leaving Venice. So high in importance was it to keep the secret that it was decreed that the Doge himself would pursue any such wanderer and assassinate the traitor on the spot when found. Nevertheless, the Venetians were not the only ones to have the secret in Italy after the Crusades and an industry paralleled Venice in the forests of Altare outside Genoa.
The earliest known discovery of manmade glass dates back to the late 2100 BCE found in cemeteries of the ancient Semite civilization of Akkadians who were also credited with early forms of cuneiform writing and accounting. It is believed that glass was discovered when the soda powder from decomposing plants could be added as flux allowing melting at lower temperatures. The resulting cooled material would dissolve in water and lime was added to solidify. Other minerals would be used to introduce color or clarity.
Following the invention of glass several hundred years later from the same land of Ur where the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers converge, emerged the most important idea in Western Civilization. It was here that Abraham shattered the idols of his forefathers and said there was only one God to worship. There was no longer a god for everyone and everything. There was only one Universal God responsible for everything and you could talk to him. What God told Abraham was to leave this place for the land of Canaan. From then on wherever the Hebrews of Abraham went the making of glass came too.
We had reached our stop at Santa Margherita late in the night and across the way the lights of Guidecca could be seen but Palladio’s church had disappeared in the darkness. Domo and Jon talked about the masks we saw earlier in the day and Nick was busy texting. Things were not what they appeared to be. When the Council of Ten had moved the glass factories to Murano, Guidecca housed a population of about 6,000 Jews who were agents for trade, partners with the Venetians in the vast empire that dominated the Mediterranean for nearly 1,000 years forever opening the door between Europe and the Orient. With the rise of the Venetian Glass Industry on Murano, the vibrant Jewish community on Guidecca of merchants and artisans began to deconstruct giving way to the churches and elaborate villas that exist there now. Signaling the end of a great communion of business enterprise it was at once a foreshadowing of Venice’s decline and the beginning of a more vigorous persecution and displacement for the Jews.
But where the Jews went so did the glass. In the next several hundred years the secret of glassmaking could be found in Spain, France, Germany and then throughout Europe. While the craft survived many of the artists had to renounce their faith as years of Inquisition and banishment prevailed in Europe. Jews had to convert to Christianity or were exiled. Not willing to give up their lucrative business they converted but while the devout continued to secretly practice their faith many did not and both time and prejudice would erase their heritage.
Gianni Toso rediscovered his faith in the late 60’s buried deep within the 700 year history of making glass on the Island of Murano. Rejecting the industry for what it had become he found new inspiration working in the Jewish Ghetto of Venice making his craft and later in America finding the connection between his work and the satisfaction he felt in doing it. He speaks eloquently about the difference between Craft and Art, Craft being what we know and teach others and Art being the ultimate expression of what it means to be human. “In order to be a human being with a high level of humanity we must control the animal what we are,” said the Master Artisan, Gianni Toso. “Art is the most powerful instrument to develop humanity.”
We got back to our Venetian apartment around midnight and Rebecca laid her pieces of lamp work carefully out on the kitchen table. Nick admired his devil’s mask turning it in his hand and moving it on and off his face. Sal rested his tired feet on the couch and Domo and Jon jumped onto their computer games. I emptied my pockets of change and turned over a Euro coin to study Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man. As it turns out there is no such thing as universal human proportion. There is only balance to make us upright to strive at a craft whatever that is and push ourselves to learn as much as we can in the lifetime we are given. Self –fulfillment is not what we become; only what we do getting there.
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