Frontier Space - formation of INformation through search instead of REsearch

Samurai Song
By Robert Pinksy

When I had no roof I made
Audacity my roof. When I had
No supper my eyes dined.

When I had no eyes I listened.
When I had no ears I thought.
When I had no thought I waited.

When I had no father I made
Care my father. When I had
No mother I embraced order.

When I had no friend I made
Quiet my friend. When I had no
Enemy I opposed my body.

When I had no temple I made
My voice my temple. I have
No priest, my tongue is my choir.

When I have no means fortune
Is my means. When I have
Nothing, death will be my fortune.

Need is my tactic, detachment
Is my strategy. When I had
No lover I courted sleep.

Robert Pinsky (born October 20, 1940) is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 – 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry. His published work also includes critically acclaimed translations, including a collection of poems by Czeslaw Milosz and Dante Alighieri. He teaches at Boston University

Early on, Pinsky was inspired by the flow and tension of jazz and the excitement that it made him feel. He said it was an incredible experience that he has tried to reproduce in his poetry. The musicality of poetry was and is extremely important to his work.

He received a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship in 1974, and in 1997 was named the United States Poet Laureate and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. He now lives in Newton Corner, Massachusetts, and teaches in the graduate writing program at Boston University.

As Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem Project, in which thousands of Americans of varying backgrounds, all ages, and from every state share their favorite poems. Pinsky believed that, contrary to stereotype, poetry has a strong presence in the American culture. The project sought to document that presence, giving voice to the American audience for poetry.

Pinsky is also the author of the interactive fiction game Mindwheel (1984) developed by Synapse Industries and released by Broderbund.

Pinsky guest-starred in a 2002 episode of the animated sitcom, The Simpsons entitled Little Girl in the Big Ten, and appeared on The Colbert Report in April, 2007 as the judge of a “Meta-Free-Phor-All” between Stephen Colbert and Sean Penn.

Pinsky is often praised for “his grasp of traditional metrical forms and his ability to evoke timeless meaning within the strictures of contemporary idioms.” Critics applaud, “his ability to imbue simple images—a Brownie troop square dance, cold weather, the music of Fats Waller—with underlying meaning to create order out of the accidental events people encounter in their lives.” Commentators admire Pinsky’s, “ambitiousness, his juxtaposition of the personal with the universal, the present with the past, the simple with the complex, and it has been noted that his intellectual style presents challenges to readers, obliging them to unravel the complexity behind the clarity of language and imagery.”

About Robert Pinsky’s first book of poems Robert Lowell wrote, “It is refreshing to find a poet who is intellectually interesting and technically first-rate. Robert Pinsky belongs to that rarest category of talent, a poet-critic.”

In the Times Literary Supplement, William Pritchard called “Sadness and Happiness”, “the best work by any younger poet within recent memory.”

Louis Martz called Pinsky “the most exhilarating new poet that I have read since A. R. Ammons entered upon the scene. In his peculiar and original combination of abstract utterance and vivid image Pinsky points the way toward the future of poetry.”

“The Inferno of Dante” has been celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt as, “the premier modern text for English-language readers to experience Dante’s power.”

“In his poems Pinsky talks, with democratic warmth and intimacy, to the common things of this world. His extraordinary poems remind us that he has always embodied the very ideal he proposes for what a poet can do,” Lloyd Schwarz, The Boston Phoenix

“Robert Pinsky’s poetry is noted for its combination of vivid imagery and clear, discursive language that explores such themes as truth, the history of nations and individuals, and the transcendent aspects of simple acts. Pinsky strives to create an organized view of the world, often confronting and trying to explain the past to bring order to the present. Recurring subjects in his work include the Holocaust, religion, and childhood. Pinsky’s moral tone and mastery of poetic meter often are compared to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets, and the insights conveyed in his analytical works on poetry have led critics to place him in the tradition of other poet-critics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, T. S. Eliot, and W. H. Auden.”

Published works
Poetry

* Sadness and Happiness (1975)
* An Explanation of America (1980)
* History of My Heart (1984)
* Dying (1984)
* The Want Bone (1990)
* The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996 (1996)
* Jersey Rain (2000)
* Samurai Song (2001)
* Gulf Music: Poems (2007)

Prose
* The Situation of Poetry (1977)
* Poetry and the World (1988)
* The Sounds of Poetry (1998)
* Democracy, Culture, and the Voice of Poetry (2002)
* The Life of David (2006)

As Translator
* The Separate Notebooks by Czeslaw Milosz, with Renata Gorczynski and Robert Hass (1984)
* The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation (1995)
As Editor

* Landor’s Poetry (1968)
* Handbook of Heartbreak (1998)
* Americans’ Favorite Poems: The Favorite Poem Project Anthology, with Maggie Dietz (1999)
* Poems to Read (2002)
* An Invitation to Poetry (2004)

Honors and awards

* Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1997-2000)
* National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship (1974)
* Stegner Fellowship in Creative Writing at Stanford University
* Saxifrage Prize (1980) for An Explanation of America
* William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America
* Nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism (1988) for Poetry and the World
* Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1996) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996
* Ambassador Book Award in Poetry of the English Speaking Union
* Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize (1997) for The Figured Wheel: New and Collected Poems 1966-1996
* Los Angeles Times Book Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante
* Book-of-the-Month Editor’s Choice (1994) for The Inferno of Dante
* Academy of American Poets’ Translation Award (1994) for The Inferno of Dante

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects, or Le Vite delle più eccellenti pittori, scultori, ed architettori as it was originally known in Italian, is a series of artist biographies written by 16th century Italian painter and architect Giorgio Vasari, which is considered “perhaps the most famous, and even today the most- read work of the older literature of art”, “some of the Italian Renaissance’s most influential writing on art”, and “one of the founding texts in art history”. The title is often abridged to the Vite or the Lives.

Background
As the first Italian art historian, Vasari initiated the genre of an encyclopedia of artistic biographies that continues today. He coined the term “Renaissance” (rinascita) in print, though an awareness of the ongoing “rebirth” in the arts had been in the air from the time of Alberti. Vasari’s work was first published in 1550 by Lorenzo Torrentino in Florence, and dedicated to Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. It included a valuable treatise on the technical methods employed in the arts. It was partly rewritten and enlarged in 1568 and provided with woodcut portraits of artists (some conjectural).

The work has a consistent and notorious bias in favour of Florentines and tends to attribute to them all the new developments in Renaissance art—for example, the invention of engraving. Venetian art in particular, let alone other parts of Europe, is systematically ignored. Between his first and second editions, Vasari visited Venice and the second edition gave more attention to Venetian art (finally including Titian) without achieving a neutral point of view. John Symonds claimed in 1899 that “It is clear that Vasari often wrote with carelessness, confusing dates and places, and taking no pains to verify the truth of his assertions.”, while acknowledging that despite these shortcomings, it is one of the basic sources for info on the Renaissance in Italy.

Vasari’s biographies are interspersed with amusing gossip. Many of his anecdotes have the ring of truth, although likely inventions. Others are generic fictions, such as the tale of young Giotto painting a fly on the surface of a painting by Cimabue that the older master repeatedly tried to brush away, a genre tale that echoes anecdotes told of the Greek painter Apelles. He did not research archives for exact dates, as modern art historians do, and naturally his biographies are most dependable for the painters of his own generation and the immediately preceding one. Modern criticism—with all the new materials opened up by research—has corrected many of his traditional dates and attributions. The work is widely considered a classic even today, though it is widely agreed that it must be supplemented by modern critical research.

Vasari includes a 42 page sketch of his own biography at the end of his Vite, and adds further details about himself and his family in his lives of Lazzaro Vasari and Francesco Salviati.

Influence
Vasari’s Vite has been described as “by far the most influential single text for the history of Renaissance art” and “the most important work of Renaissance biography of artists”. Its influence is situated mainly in three domains: as an example for contemporary and later biographers and art historians, as a defining factor in the view on the Renaissance and the role of Florence and Rome in it, and as a major source of information on the lives and works of early Italian artists.

The Vite have been translated wholly or partially into many languages, including English, Dutch, German and French.

Flood of artist biographies
The Vite started a wave of artist biographies. Other, mainly 17th century biographers often were called the Vasari of their country. Karel Van Mander in The Netherlands was probably the first Vasarian author with his Het Schilderboeck (The Painters’ Book) from 1604, the first comprehensive list of biographies of painters from the Low Countries.Joachim von Sandrart (1606-1688), author of Deutsche Akademie, was known as the “German Vasari”. In England, Aglionby’s Painting Illustrated from 1685 was largely based on Vasari as well.

View of the Renaissance
The Vite is also important as the basis for discussions on the development of style, It influenced the view art historians had of the Early Renaissance for a long time, placing too much emphasis on the achievements of Florentian and Roman artists while ignoring those of the rest of Italy and certainly the artists from the rest of Europe.

Source of information
Finally, it has also been for centuries the most important source for info on Early Renaissance Italian (and especially Tuscan) painters and the attribution of their paintings. In 1899, an author like John Addington Symonds used the Vite as one of his basic sources for the description of artists in his 7 books on Renaissance in Italy., and nowadays it is still, despite its obvious biases and shortcomings, the basis for the biography of many artists like Leonardo da Vinci.

Contents
The Vite contains the biographies of many important Italian artists, and is also adopted as a sort of classical reference guide for their names, which are sometimes used in different ways. The following list respects the order of the book, as divided into its three parts. The book starts with a dedication to Cosimo de’ Medici and a preface, and then starts with technical and background texts about architecture, sculpture, and painting. A second preface follows, introducing the actual “Vite” in parts 2 to 5. What follows is the complete list from the second (1568) edition. In a few cases, different very short biographies were given in one section.

Part 2
* Cimabue
* Arnolfo di Lapo, with Bonnano
* Nicola Pisano
* Giovanni Pisano
* Andrea Tafi
* Gaddo Gaddi
* Margaritone
* Giotto, with Puccio Capanna
* Agostino and Agnolo
* Stefano and Ugolino
* Pietro Lorenzetti (Pietro Laurati)
* Andrea Pisano
* Buonamico Buffalmacco
* Ambrogio Lorenzetti (Ambruogio Laurati)
* Pietro Cavallini
* Simone Martini with Lippo Memmi
* Taddeo Gaddi
* Andrea Orcagna (Andrea di Cione)
* Tomasso Fiorentino
* Giovanni da Ponte
* Agnolo Gaddi
* Berna Sanese (Barna da Siena)
* Duccio
* Antonio Viniziano (Antonio Veneziano)
* Jacopo di Casentino
* Spinello Aretino
* Gherardo Starnina
* Lippo
* Lorenzo Monaco
* Taddeo Bartoli
* Lorenzo di Bicci

Part 3
* Jacopo della Quercia
* Niccolo Aretino (Niccolò di Piero Lamberti)
* Dello (Dello di Niccolò Delli)
* Nanni di Banco
* Luca della Robbia
* Paolo Uccello
* Lorenzo Ghiberti
* Masolino da Panicale
* Parri Spinelli
* Masaccio
* Filippo Brunelleschi
* Donatello
* Michelozzo Michelozzi
* Antonio Filarete and Simone (Simone Ghini)
* Giuliano da Maiano
* Piero della Francesca
* Fra Angelico
* Leon Battista Alberti
* Lazaro Vasari
* Antonello da Messina
* Alessio Baldovinetti
* Vellano da Padova (Bartolomeo Bellano)
* Fra Filippo Lippi
* Paolo Romano, Mino del Reame, Chimenti Camicia, and Baccio Pontelli
* Andrea del Castagno
* Domenico Veneziano
* Gentile da Fabriano
* Vittore Pisanello
* Pesello and Francesco Pesellino
* Benozzo Gozzoli
* Francesco di Giorgio and Vecchietta (Lorenzo di Pietro)
* Galasso Ferrarese
* Antonio Rossellino
* Bernardo Rossellino
* Desiderio da Settignano
* Mino da Fiesole
* Lorenzo Costa
* Ercole Ferrarese
* Jacopo Bellini
* Giovanni Bellini
* Gentile Bellini
* Cosimo Rosselli
* Il Cecca (Francesco d’Angelo)
* Don Bartolomeo Abbate di S. Clemente (Bartolomeo della Gatta)
* Gherardo Silvani
* Domenico Ghirlandaio
* Antonio Pollaiuolo
* Piero Pollaiuolo
* Sandro Botticelli
* Benedetto da Maiano
* Andrea del Verrocchio
* Andrea Mantegna
* Filippino Lippi
* Bernardino Pinturicchio
* Francesco Francia
* Pietro Perugino
* Vittore Scarpaccia
* Iacopo detto l’Indaco (Jacopo Torni)
* Luca Signorelli

Part 4
* Leonardo da Vinci
* Giorgione da Castelfranco
* Antonio da Correggio
* Piero di Cosimo
* Donato Bramante (Bramante da Urbino)
* Fra Bartolomeo Di San Marco
* Mariotto Albertinelli
* Raffaellino del Garbo
* Pietro Torrigiano (Torrigiano)
* Giuliano da Sangallo
* Antonio da Sangallo
* Raphael
* Guillaume de Marcillat
* Simone del Pollaiolo (il Cronaca)
* Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio
* Domenico Puligo
* Andrea da Fiesole
* Vincenzo da San Gimignano and Timoteo da Urbino
* Andrea Sansovino (Andrea dal Monte Sansovino)
* Benedetto da Rovezzano
* Baccio da Montelupo and Raffaello da Montelupo (father and son)
* Lorenzo di Credi
* Boccaccio Boccaccino (Boccaccino Cremonese)
* Lorenzetto
* Baldassare Peruzzi
* Pellegrino da Modena (Pellegrino Aretusi)
* Giovan Francesco, also known as il Fattore
* Andrea del Sarto
* Francesco Granacci
* Baccio D’Agnolo
* Properzia de’ Rossi
* Alfonso Lombardi
* Michele Agnolo (Giovanni Angelo Montorsoli)
* Girolamo Santacroce
* Dosso Dossi and Battista Dossi (Dossi brothers)
* Giovanni Antonio Licino
* Rosso Fiorentino
* Giovanni Antonio Sogliani
* Girolamo da Treviso (Girolamo Da Trevigi)
* Polidoro da Caravaggio and Maturino da Firenze(Maturino Fiorentino)
* Bartolommeo Ramenghi (Bartolomeo Da Bagnacavallo)
* Marco Calabrese
* Morto Da Feltro
* Franciabigio
* Francesco Mazzola
* Jacopo Palma (Il Palma)
* Lorenzo Lotto
* Fra Gocondo
* Francesco Granacci
* Baccio d’Agnolo
* Valerio Vicentino (Valerio Belli), Giovanni da Castel Bolognese (Giovanni Bernardi) and Matteo dal Nasaro Veronese

Part 5
* Marcantonio Bolognese
* Antonio da Sangallo
* Giulio Romano
* Sebastiano del Piombo (Sebastiano Viniziano)
* Perino Del Vaga
* Giovann’Antonio Lappoli
* Niccolò Soggi
* Niccolò detto il Tribolo
* Pierino da Vinci
* Domenico Beccafumi
* Baccio Bandinelli
* Giuliano Bugiardini
* Cristofano Gherardi
* Jacopo da Pontormo
* Simone Mosca
* Girolamo Genga, Bartolommeo Genga and Giovanbatista San Marino (Giovanni Battista Belluzzi)
* Michele Sanmicheli
* Giovannantonio detto il Soddoma da Verzelli
* Bastiano detto Aristotile da San Gallo
* Benedetto Garofalo and Girolamo da Carpi
* Ridolfo Ghirlandaio, Davide Ghirlandaio and Benedetto Ghirlandaio
* Giovanni da Udine
* Battista Franco
* Francesco Rustichi
* Fra’ Giovann’Agnolo Montorsoli
* Francesco detto de’ Salviati
* Daniello Ricciarelli da Volterra
* Taddeo Zucchero

Part 6
* Michelangelo Buonarroti (Michelangelo)
* Francesco Primaticcio
* Tiziano da Cadore (Titian)
* Jacopo Sansovino
* Lione Aretino (Leone Leoni)
* Giulio Clovio, manuscript illuminator
* Bronzino
* Giorgio Vasari