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Turrets and spires tower over rich façades and stained-glass windows. Ornate vases sprout up from formal Versaillais parterres made of shrubs and roses. All is reflected in a rectangular pond surrounded by maniacally manicured grass which would inspire envy in the most immaculate Oxbridge lawn. Instead of a royal residence or university quad, though, these grounds host an international court. The building is the Peace Palace, seat of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in The Hague. As the principal judicial body of the United Nations, the ICJ settles disputes between states and gives opinions on contentious points of international law.   This sumptuous courthouse is a physical manifestation of certain abstract debates on the sources of legitimacy of the international legal system, and on the cultural unity of different societies. International organisations often fail to inspire the instinctive loyalty that citizens feel for their domestic institutions.[1] By manipulating our perception of what international organisations look like, grandiose buildings can, quite literally, construct their institutions’ legitimacy.[2] Furthermore, multiple states must cooperate to establish international legal institutions. Therefore, their sites are designed to reflect shared cultural elements of multiple founder nations, even though those nations may vary greatly in social, political, and economic character. Designers of international courthouses must therefore explore what defines human culture and must physically immortalise it. This article will focus on the buildings not only of the ICJ but also of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which too is in The Hague, and of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), in Luxembourg.   The ICJ: A palace for peace   The Peace Palace was originally built to host inter-state arbitrations, which had been a popular means of dispute resolution since the late nineteenth century. Arbitration was used in commercial disputes but also as an alternative to war, slowing down an increasingly costly European arms race. In 1905, 216 proposed designs for the newv courthouse were submitted. The French architect Louis Cordonnier and British landscapist Thomas Mawson won the contract, and the building was inaugurated in 1913. Fig 1. The Peace Palace, which was designed by Louis Cordonnier in 1913. The court’s interior, exterior, and gardens were intended to convey the legitimacy of its institution. Symbolism links the building to the universal ideal of peace.[3] The vaults over the vestibule and ceremonial staircase depict Greek goddesses associated with peace and prosperity. The stained-glass windows along the corridors and in the Great Hall of Justice depict a series of stages in human life and history. They thus suggest the immortality of peace and, by extension, of the Court itself. Gifts from around the world were used as materials, strengthening the sense of international unity: marble from Italy, iron gates from Germany, stained glass from Britain, granite from Norway, jasper from Russia, wood from the Caribbean, and silk tapestry from Japan.   The gardens use symbolism to the same end. Wide terraces make the Palace visually prominent. Religious metaphors abound. The exedrae of the pond resemble the transept of an early Christian basilica. The radially expanding parterres that once spread out here recalled the apsidal chapels of Gothic cathedrals. Plants were chosen with care. Roses, a universal symbol of love, dominate the northern parterres. Small-leaved shrubs and trees create a sense of spaciousness meant to foster peace and intellectual reflection.   For all its symbolism, the Palace was heavily criticised upon its inauguration. Even in the early 1900s, when a few imperial powers dominated the globe through a mix of military coercion and pseudoscientific racism, critics chastised the cultural limitations of the design. Some thought that Cordonnier had taken too much inspiration from sixteenth-century Dutch architecture.[4] Why would a palace meant to represent the universal ideal of peace adopt such a geographically limited style? Moreover, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century the Netherlands had fought the Eighty Years’ War to gain independence from Spain. Some argued that this made Dutch architecture an odd source of inspiration for a palace of peace. Some of Cordonnier’s contemporaries, though, believed that he was not influenced by Dutch architecture at all. The New York Times argued that he was inspired by the Sicilian Romanesque style, which contains elements of Norman and Arabic origin.[5] Perhaps this confusion ultimately serves the institution’s purposes, the lack of a clear architectural inspiration exemplifying the universal nature of the ICJ.   The ICC: Holding the fort   The sandy dunes and dry bushes between The Hague and the North Sea are very different from the glamorous belle époque neighbourhood surrounding the Peace Palace. However, the International Criminal Court chose this desolate location precisely because of its isolation. The ICC deals with persons accused of international crimes such as genocide and crimes against humanity. In 2010, therefore, it instructed the Danish firm Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects to focus on security concerns when designing the building. The ICC also faced a crisis of legitimacy, as powerful non-member countries such as the US and China hampered its work. The Court therefore wanted its new headquarters to assert its legitimacy by visually communicating its values of transparency and accountability.[6] These instructions resulted in a building designed to both maximise security and embody the Court’s values. Fig 2. The International Criminal Court, which was designed by Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects in 2010. The building comprises six towers connected at ground level, and the courtrooms are located in the central tower, which is the tallest. The towers represent hope by ensuring good light and sea views, but they are also surrounded by a moat, which calls to mind a medieval castle. Glass is prominent in the exterior of five of the towers, stressing transparency, but the glass is opaque, obscuring the people working inside for their security. The trapezoidal windows are positioned at differing angles to reflect sunlight. This creates a feeling of glittering movement, but it also hinders snipers. The building has a neutral colour palette, evoking the impartiality of the judicial process and avoiding any colour emblematic of a particular country. However, since extensive whites would interfere with CCTV, the beiges and greys also aid surveillance. In addition, the building’s desolate landscape prevents acts of terrorism: nearby dunes expose anyone scaling them and make it impossible for cars to get close.[7] The design of the ICC building therefore manages to ‘keep one step ahead of the terrorists’[8] while also communicating values of openness and democracy.   The CJEU: Golden towers   The Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg is far-removed, physically and stylistically, from the bleak dunes and muted tones of the ICC. Unlike the ICC, the CJEU is not a criminal court. It is the main judicial organ of the EU, and as such deals with a variety of civil matters including intellectual property, competition, and the single market. Dominique Perrault, the architect who oversaw the CJEU’s major expansion between 1996 and 2019, wanted to underline the CJEU’s twin roles: shaping the EU as a constitutional polity, and mediating between the EU’s member states and its institutions.[9] Accordingly, all design choices were made to create a grand building, the tallest in Luxembourg, that would reflect the might of the EU judicial order.   The CJEU building comprises three golden towers, which dominate the Kirchberg plateau and are easily spotted from Luxembourg’s Old Town. They host the CJEU’s translation services, in charge of ensuring that the CJEU’s cases and documents are interpreted and translated into the 24 official languages of the EU. Placing the translators in the most prominent part of the building symbolises the CJEU’s cultural diversity as well as the access to justice it promotes.   The CJEU’s main courtroom might be the most grandiose space of all. It is accessed via a large, lugubrious entrance hall— the French term salle des pas perdus , ‘hall of lost steps’, is apt—and a staircase of black corten steel. Given this, one feels awed upon entering the courtroom. Inside, gold covers the walls, curtains, lecterns, and chairs. Although the courtroom is partially underground, sunlight floods in from above, filtered through a golden aluminium mesh resembling a blossoming flower. The CJEU building can be seen to represent a modern interpretation of the desire for prestige and grandiosity already embodied in the Peace Palace a century earlier.   Shared gardens and shared history   The three court buildings have common elements all intended to express legitimacy through architecture. For example, all three carefully chose their historical precedents. This is standard practice in architecture when it needs to send a message of authority and prestige: consider the neoclassicism of British imperial buildings and US federal buildings. The ICJ provides the most obvious example, incorporating Gothic, Dutch Renaissance, and Italian Baroque elements. The ICC also imitates the keep, gatehouse, and moat of a medieval castle. While the ICJ’s use of history can be attributed to an early-twentieth-century taste for revivalism, that of the ICC is best attributed to a focus on security. The CJEU also looked to history in its quest for prestige. Its original 1973 building is wrapped like a Greek temple in a pronaos of 116 columns of ten metres each. As the Athenian Acropolis dominated the Attican valley, so the CJEU dominates Luxembourg from the Kirchberg plateau as a modern-day citadel of the EU’s legal power.   Legitimacy can also be expressed through references to the cultures of member states. After all, citizens feel closer to organisations that are culturally familiar. This can be achieved by asking member states to loan or donate works of art, as was done for both the ICJ and CJEU buildings. Architects also consider the cultures of the member states at the planning stage. The features these courthouses share therefore embody what culturally unites disparate countries from every corner of the world.   All three courthouses have gardens. The ICC features five courtyard gardens and one vertical garden atop the courtroom tower. Plants are included from each of the ICC’s 124 member states to emphasise interdependence. The CJEU is planting a ‘garden of multilingualism’ to celebrate the cultural diversity of the EU. Water is another feature the three buildings have in common. The ICJ’s long pool represents peace and harmony. The ICC’s moat enhances security but also creates a tranquil space between the gatehouse and the main building.   While attending an academic conference a year ago, I sat on a bench under a vine-covered pergola at one end of the ICJ’s pond. I was inspired by the idyllic setting to ponder international law and the role of the ICJ in international relations. I believe that mental exploration is one of the reasons prestigious buildings are erected for international legal institutions. The architecture of courthouses helps establish the cultural and legal status of their organisations by creating a visual and symbolic narrative which shapes interactions with the public.   Medieval peasants were encouraged to learn biblical stories by studying the stained-glass windows of gothic churches. Similarly, the grand headquarters of international courts invite the modern visitor to reflect on the role of international law in the world of today. In light of current affairs, such reflection is urgently needed. Alessandro Angelico   Alessandro Angelico is a Politics and Economics graduate from Sciences Po Paris and a Law graduate from Trinity College, Cambridge. He is currently clerking for Judge Tamara Perisin at the Court of Justice of the European Union and, in 2021, will start training as a solicitor at Covington & Burling in London. His passions include private and public international law, food, international relations, and complaining about running. [1] See Nobuo Hayashi and Cecilia M Bailliet (eds), The Legitimacy of International Criminal Tribunals  (Cambridge University Press 2017);   Andrea Bianchi and Anne Peters (eds), Transparency in International Law (Cambridge University Press 2013). [2] Renske Vos and Sofia Stolk, ‘Law in concrete: institutional architecture in Brussels and The Hague’ (2020) 14(1) Law and Humanities 57. [3] Johan Joor and Heikelina Verrijn Stuart, The Building of Peace, A Hundred Years of Work on Peace Through Law: The Peace Palace 1913–2013  (Carnegie   Foundation Press 2013) 33-46. [4] ibid. [5] Arthur Eyffinger, Het Vredespaleis  (Sijthoff 1988) 57-9. [6] Vos and Stolk (n 2) 61. [7] Christine Murray, ‘Transparency, democracy, high-security: Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s International Criminal Court’ ( The Architectural Review , 5 February 2016) < https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/transparency-democracy-high-security-schmidt-hammer-lassens-international-criminal-court > accessed 10 February 2021. [8] Bjarne Hammer, co-founder of Schmidt Hammer Lassen (as quoted in ibid para 20). [9] Jonathan Glancey, ‘Let there be light’ Guardian  (London, 2 December 2008) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2008/dec/02/eu-court-of-justice-architecture > accessed 10 February 2021.

This piece was written in the direct aftermath of George Floyd’s murder on 25 May 2020. Since then, having also been selected as an article for  CJLPA , it has been carefully reflected on in response to the dynamic events that have unfolded since and, indeed, continue to unfold. Since its original editorial process in March 2021, crucial events have followed that undoubtedly provide critical inflections on the article but could not have been included in its consideration. As this article shall propose, works of such current and pressing subject matter must always be considered as ‘a continuous project that does not seek to assume an authoritative final word on the matter’, and to this end, I hope you enjoy reading it.     The brutal and despicable murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 has sparked global outrage and mass protests. His senseless death has raised the fundamental question: what has changed? An edit of Time ’s front cover from 2015, taking the Baltimore Riots as its point of departure has challenged: ‘What has changed. What hasn’t’. The image, with 2015 crossed out and ‘2020’ hurriedly scribbled in, widely shared across social media, epitomises this stasis. George Floyd’s death has also provoked a range of protest and activism, particularly performative activism, which this article seeks to explore. This piece will attempt to navigate the forms of online awareness and activism that have proliferated social media in the aftermath of Floyd’s death and the subsequent protests.   As someone who is trained, or training, in visual culture—studying the history of art at university—my perspective comes exactly from what I am trained and taught: observation. Thus, without the cliché of claiming a virtuous empiricism to my understanding, this work is based on what I have seen and therefore is a result of a certain bubble I inhabit. It is empirically relative to that view, and eagerly encourages discussion from those views that I have perhaps not considered or not even been capable of considering.   Performative activism   In the wake of a prejudiced killing, the internet and social media took to the task of not only raising awareness, but also seeking to educate about forms of racial prejudice and privilege that may be overlooked in society today—a popular infographic outlining the covert and overt forms of white supremacy, comes to mind foremost .   It is encouraging to see that, in the wake of a primitive and perhaps impulsive display of authority and power, education and knowledge are being mobilised as a way to combat this. However, alongside these sources of information, another form of education was being promoted, perhaps more of a chastisement than an education. Countless pages, shared documents, and posts have circulated that are largely written by ‘white people’, exploring the ways in which one can educate and rid oneself of these covert and overt privileges—almost like self-help pages. I have seen these posts being shared and subsequently reposted by said ‘white people’. I cannot help but think of the white person who is appalled by the rampant racism and injustice highlighted by Floyd’s murder but is left feeling a sense of shame and even hatred for themselves by virtue of being ‘white people’. One might argue the self-helping prognoses are at risk of falling into a melancholic apologia that incidentally reinforces those racial differences and oppositions that cause tensions and ultimately, unrest.   Sigmund Freud offers an interesting threshold which these pages and guides ought to be aware of straddling. The complex character of the melancholic is one who ‘represents his ego to us as worthless, incapable of any achievement and morally despicable; he reproaches himself, vilifies himself and expect[s] to be cast out and punished’. In this sense, one might understand acts of racial prejudice as truly despicable. However, the melancholic ‘extends his self-criticism back over the past; he declares that he was never any better’.[1] It is here that we might see the dangers of such scathing self-criticism. If one declares they were never any better (‘What has changed?’) then how can one progress and change? The potential danger of these ‘educational’ articles, unfortunately, is that the phenomena risks ‘white people’ falling into a self-indulgent and masochistic melancholia and thus never really changing. Instead, they are,   perhaps subconsciously, happy to continue repeating this cycle of self-hatred and performative activism and change.   Furthermore, one might question these polemics to ask: which ‘white people’ are they addressing? In the strive for racial justice and equality, it is worrying that people often regress to such essentialist and normative concepts. A nuanced and more subtle approach is needed. There is no doubt that any fundamental change needs to be educated and informed, but it is the way we go about this.   Following the unravelling thread of performative activism, there has emerged a more worrying trend on social media. As part of a spate of ‘quarantine challenges’ initiated by the Instagram and TikTok communities during the COVID-19 pandemic, a new ‘#blacklivesmatter’ challenge has taken to the stories of performative activists. Originating from a single user, the post constituted a black background with the ‘challenge’ to tag ’10 people who won’t break the chain’. This post is shared publicly, featuring the tags of those 10 people who are implored to show their support, who then repost the story tagging another ten people and so on—creating a chain of awareness for the Black Lives Matter movement. Whilst perhaps noble in its intentions, the chain evolves into what can only be described as a mess. Countless tags and graphics clutter the story until the black is crowded out by each story competing to draw attention to itself above the layers.   Seeing these Instagram stories, I could not help but think of the work Untitled (I am an invisible man)  by Glenn Ligon, 1991. Ligon is a pivotal figure in the exploration of black identity, working from a position he describes as his ‘permanent dislocation’ as a black gay male painter working after Modernism. His very practice, painting, is a role defined by its history of entrenched privilege. Darby English describes the profession as ‘largely filled by white heterosexual men who enjoyed a kind of cultural neutrality as a matter of social entitlement’.[2] Negotiating this charged and sensitive culture, Ligon’s work often critiques the socially constructed nature of black identities. The 1991 painting appropriates the opening lines of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) and is painted with stencils in oil paint. In this work, Ligon meticulously brushes paint through the stencil, using the methods of applied handiwork rather than more industrially efficient processes such as using spray-paint or a paint roller, purposefully complicating the manual nature of his process. Ligon desecrates the privileged tradition of oil paint by perverting its application. The frivolous act of painting, indulging in the sumptuous material quality (and cost) of oil paint, is subverted by Ligon’s obsessive and arduous process. Much of Ligon’s other work exploits and manipulates text: as one begins to look at (or read) the painting, viewers are able to discern the initial parts of the opening before it descends into illegibility. Ligon frustrates our urge to read the work, actively provoking it.   One might understand the cluster of indecipherable layers of each #blacklivesmatter story to be a stencil, akin to the 1991 work, slowly drowning the real meaning and intention of that original post, amounting to the facilitation of the neoliberal bubble that often carries such performance activists. Additionally, one worries that, unless anything is to change, the edited Time  front cover may become an iterative ritual for performative activists, scrawling in yet another year of social injustice until it too becomes indecipherable.   These posts have since been denounced, being called out and identified as acts of virtue signalling and performance. Performative activists have been urged instead to take real action. Both of these forms of activism and awareness, as well as so much online activity, operate with the same outdated underlying principle. They operate under the strong belief that politics are a means to change—real action.   The death of politics   As sensationalist a statement as this may sound, the frustration and failure to comprehend how nothing has changed could not be a starker indication of the tragic demise of politics. What, though, does this actually mean?   Politics has become a system of managing what is understood as a risk society, as proposed by Ulrich Beck.[3] In his theory, the telos of power is not necessarily to create change, but instead to keep a steady and stable course. Power has been redistributed to forces such as financiers and technologists whose job it is to manage and evade such risk, while the purpose of politics is changed and its influence eroded. These new structures not only manage risk but build networks that guide and manipulate the risk. To take an example, the ‘quality-adjusted life year’ (QALY) is a measurement used to determine a perfect year in health, assessing the value of medical intervention against disease burden. One QALY, one perfect year. In the UK, that cost is £60,000.[4] This is but one of many sinister calculations devised by the systems of economics to evade and manage such risk.   Thus, instead of generating change and progress, this system assesses the potential risks and manages the outcome for a safer option. The result of this redistribution of power, is that power is now divested amongst several Foucauldian microcosms of power that orchestrate this outcome management, the risk. Therefore, for true change and real action within the political system one must exploit the gaps in these imbricated institutions of power.   Here we return to the protests ravaging the USA in the worst race riots seen since the 1960s. Much of the criticism directed toward the rioting points to the fact that shops are being needlessly looted— what does looting have to do with racial inequality?   If we are to understand economic power as the mesh that binds these imbricated structures, then it comes as no surprise to see rioters looting shops and burning down institutions of economic exploitation in order to gain economic participation, of which looting is the most concentrated expression. Why should rioters have political goals, when politics do not work, and change does not happen? As many posts circulating social media have accurately emphasised – to the ignorance of those criticising riots and belittling the protests – riots and looting are legitimate and profound forms of protest against a system that values goods and services over human life—think back to the QALY.   Furthermore, there is the added complexity of the internet’s entrenchment by these same economic systems of control, precariously marshalling and guiding users through a series of algorithms and personal data collection, into echo-chambers in order to see what one wants to see. Social media platforms such as Facebook, commercially harvesting and mining users’ data and cookie preferences for advertising revenue and a supposedly seamless user experience, facilitate and funnel users into these echo chambers for commercial gain. In turn, they neutralise both the effective and affective power of politics. The protests and riots that take place in the real world, however, rather than the cyber-world—regardless of whether one agrees with them or not—are stark indications of the failure of politics to create change.   Continued occurrences of performative activism, which fundamentally believe in the earnest power of politics to create change, ensure the perpetual stasis remains. For as long as those Instagram chains are sent to friends and like-minded people, and self-help guides for ‘white people’ are offered as the sole means to cleansing oneself of covert or overt racism, the structures of power that facilitate this injustice will still exist. The liberals are placed in one bubble, and the radicals placed in another, bouncing off one another’s cry for change and wondering why nothing is any different—imbuing them with a false sense of political mobilisation.   It is not all hopeless. There has been a slowly growing self-awareness of these instances of performative activism. Counter-posts have emerged, asking how people will ‘take it further’ beyond the veneer of performance to an audience of followers. These have been what I understand to be the braver and more progressive forms of activism. We unfortunately live in an era of verbal paralysis, where views that might even appear to softly critique the liberal bubble are often denounced and shot down. Those in paralysis are often the ones who, with nowhere to discuss and vary their views, get funnelled into a strong yet silent individualism and take this to polls. For the voices that shout in disbelief at how ridiculous and preposterous the Trump administration is, just as many might be silently responding.   Real change can only happen by identifying instances of performative activism, realising those acts and taking them further. Differences of opinion ought to be resolved not by self-hatred and chastisement and neither should they be vehemently denounced. Instead, we must look to understanding through constructive discussion and critically interrogate those layers and structures of power rather than resort to essentialist discourse.   This might be too idealistic and naïve a conclusion to have, but it is the best I can think, and I invite further discussion and opinion on this.   I must stress the nuanced approach I have attempted to negotiate. My focus is on the responses to the murder of George Floyd, and some of the ways in which people are trying to raise awareness and enact change. My conclusions are not by any means a simple way to tackle the entrenched institutional racism that is evidently rife. Of course, some of my concluding remarks and solutions can be applied to how we might deal with such issues, but this is not my intention. I have in essence taken Floyd’s murder as a point of departure to discuss wider issues relating to methods of social change and protest, just as one might argue the public have taken Floyd’s murder as a point of departure to protest against the continuing racial inequality and institutional discrimination that is rampant. I also hope to have raised interesting perspectives, particularly a cynical insight as to why change may not have occurred—yet.   The above section was to be my conclusion, yet it may seem disparaging at this point to conclude the piece on such an unresolved note. Instead, I would like to present a final concluding point that focuses on the actual process of writing and formalising my understandings on such sensitive issues and in turn, offer a resolved direction.   This piece was first written on 1 June 2020, exactly a week after George Floyd was murdered amidst the exponential rise of protests and rioting in the USA, the impetus of which was to rapidly spread on a global scale. Reflecting on this piece: whilst its message is as imperative as it was originally, I believe it is also important to consider it within that taut sociopolitical context. In the editorial process for its publication in this journal, it came to light that there was an anxiety embedded within the original argument of the piece, most palpable in its conclusion. I have chosen to include that section within the body of the article and not revise it because I understand this entire work to be a continuous project that does not seek to assume an authoritative final word on the matter. I understand it to be a project of continuous ‘interruption’ to keep the dialogue going.[5] Therefore, that very tentativeness forms not only an integral part of my own understanding of performative activism and how to respond to it, but I believe it also expresses a tentativeness more widely within society.   At the time of writing, such an understanding of what I perceived as performative activism was not yet fully, to use the language of social media, trending. Balancing my personal views against the justified tension of the resurging Black Lives Matter movement, I did not want to further problematise this tension, but nonetheless it was an opinion I felt needed to be shared out of personal frustration. Now, revising this piece in March 2021, as the initial tensions slowly settle, I have come to understand my own journey as one that can be reflexive of the wider attitude toward performative activism.   The movement and its forms of activism have come a long way, and at the same time have not. Performative activism still pervades Western political mobilisation and awareness. In the UK, the most prevalent display can be seen in professional football players taking the knee before kick-off, a metamorphosis, or even perversion, of NFL player Colin Kaepernick’s display of protest in the USA, 2016. However, awareness and action against such acts are becoming less controversial as more people tackle displays of performative activism directly, with Wilfried Zaha being the most recent and high-profile footballer to speak out against the performativity of such acts, refusing to take the knee any longer.[6] This is an encouraging step in the right direction and is evident of a dynamic and ongoing development—it is still a trending matter ten months on.   Understanding this work within its own context, one that is still constantly developing, provides a valuable point of retrospect, reminding one of the importance to constantly reflect on the immediacy of our times and providing a constructive marker of progress in negotiating such complex and sensitive issues.   In this self-reflexive approach, I look to promote a more holistic direction toward the issue of performative activism. As the farce of performative activism is slowly becoming more exposed, it becomes clear that such acts operate on the premise of difference and othering. Explored originally, performative activism operates on a framework of virtue signalling, distinguishing one from the immoral and bad Other by displaying acts of superficial activism. Thus, short of perpetuating this binary and constantly questioning, ‘What has changed, what hasn’t?’, political mobilisation must be directed towards looking beyond this binary. It must stop preoccupying itself with this fictitious Other, upholding the system of difference and division. Rather than focusing on individuals, mobilisation ought to be directed to the overarching frameworks and structures that cause the illusionary difference in the first place. In a sense, therefore, the frameworks that perpetuate division are also those which should unite us. Chater Paul Jordan   Chater Paul Jordan is a third-year undergraduate in History of Art at Christ’s College, Cambridge, who has also taken a course in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins, UAL. Chater’s interests lie in contemporary art, visual culture, and postcolonial cultural experiences, particularly focussing from the mid-twentieth century to the present day. His final-year dissertation is titled ‘Performance and Performativity in Black Experiences of Britain’. [1] Sigmund Freud, ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (first published 1918) in James Strachey (ed), The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud  (standard edn, Hogarth Press 1964) 246. [2] Darby English, How to See A Work of Art in Total Darkness  (The MIT Press 2007) 205. [3] Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity  (Sage Publications 1992). [4] David Glover and John Henderson, ‘Quantifying health impacts of government policies: A how-to guide to quantifying the health impacts’ (Department of Health 2010) paras 5.21 and 5.24. [5] Kobena Mercer, ‘Black art and the burden of representation’ (1990) 4(10) Third Text 74. [6] Wilfried Zaha, ‘Why must I kneel to show you that black people matter!’ (10 February 2021) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzYz5yzXCIo > accessed 20 February 2021.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy. —William Shakespeare, Hamlet (1.5.167–68), Hamlet to Horatio.   It has been my good fortune during my professional and personal life to have visited and worked in many countries around the world and to have learned to understand and embrace their cultures. I made it a point when conducting negotiations in a new country not just to understand the legal and commercial situations but to try to understand the people, customs, politics, history, and language, including body language. When an Indian nods her head as you are saying something, it does not mean that she agrees with you—she is being polite. When an Englishman smiles and says he is not entirely happy with a situation, it does not mean that it is mainly acceptable—it probably means that he does not like it at all.   My fascination with different cultures led to a growing realisation of the importance of two things: opening one’s mind to understand the point of view of a person from another land; and explaining one’s own background and position clearly. Failure to do these things often leads to conflict that can be avoided. At a sticking point in a negotiation in Moscow with a successful businessman brought up in Soviet times, I asked him to listen to my explanation of how I was thinking about the issue. I also asked him to explain how he was thinking. By being honest and open about our goals, with me as a representative of a Western multinational and my Russian counterpart with his particular cultural background, suspicions were alleviated and we resolved the problem.   Alongside my work in the law and business, I have retained a lifelong interest in history and archaeology. I completed an MA at the University of Wales in Cultural Cosmology a few years ago. My fascination for the world of commerce and trade led me to write my dissertation on the connection between trading and investing practice—on Wall Street and the City of London—and the study of cosmic cyclical patterns—as practised since earliest times up to and including the current day. Since I was a teenage archaeologist in the 1970s there has been a revolutionary improvement in the technology available to study the past. Carbon dating, geophysics, DNA analysis, and many other innovations have extended our knowledge of the longevity of human history and of the thought processes that different cultures have used to sustain and improve their ways of life. My own research has taken me back to a period beyond Neolithic times to our prehistory as hunter-gatherers. Small bands of humans roamed their section of the Earth in search of animal prey for meat, skins, materials for weapons, and other crops to consume, including berries and wild wheat. Gradually individuals, or small groups of individuals—probably the tribal shamans—began to take note of the timing of the changing seasons, and of how the mysterious comings and goings of the Sun and the Moon and other bright bodies in the night sky seemed to have some connection with those seasons. Knowing the timing of the annual migrations of herds of deer and bison, and of the fruitfulness of wild crops, was a matter of basic survival. Shamans became key advisers to tribal leaders and to their tribes themselves. They would have played a key part in developing their cultures’ views of the Universe and burgeoning religious practices.   The global population of mankind was less than one million, as opposed to the 7.5 billion we now have, which is rising. Many millennia would have passed as populations increased and the daily and monthly and annual cycles of the Sun, Moon, planets, and brighter constellations were better understood and applied to the economic business of daily life. The farming revolution of the Neolithic period led to greater efficiency in the production of calories, substantial growth in populations, and concentrations into settled villages and towns, with hierarchies of power and increased job specialisation. Shamans became priests, and in Egypt and Babylonia combined their religious function with observing and recording the cosmos and advising the kings on how to deal with them.   The reappearance to ancient Egypt of the star Sirius in the heavens meant the flooding of the Nile, which was central to the wellbeing of all Egypt. The Babylonians instigated hundreds of years of record keeping on heavenly movements in a long-term experiment that linked those movements to the prices of their key six commodities. They produced a database that priestly compilers could refer to over centuries as they advised their rulers on the stabilisation of the state. The project was logical and empirical. If the price of barley was high when certain Solar, Lunar, or planetary configurations were in place, then that price would be recorded and checked again when similar cosmic conditions were in place. Done over a very long period of time, patterns and cycles may begin to emerge, with a working predictive system of price and product availability to use in the administration of the state.   By the time we reach Greece we have an example given by Aristotle of the use of this kind of knowledge for financial speculation. He tells us that the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales used knowledge of the likely condition of the annual olive crop to purchase options on olive oil presses for the upcoming year. When a bumper crop duly arrived and demand for the presses rose, he profited mightily from his prescience. Today he would be working in the global commodity markets with Philosophy as his first degree!   As trade increased, so did travel. Long-distance travellers across the world, especially travellers by sea, learned to navigate by the stars to help them brave the dangers of ocean sailing. We might think of Homer’s Bronze Age Greeks sailing to Troy, or the Polynesians navigating vast distances in the Pacific, or Captain Cook on his voyages to Australia. For all, the ability to navigate by the stars was important for ocean travel and commerce.   I have had numerous encounters with businesspeople involved in the study of cultural and economic astronomy and its application to business cycles and the stock markets. They have confirmed to me that practices that first arose in antiquity in this field have been developed substantially in the last two hundred years. Such practices are taken seriously and used by major players in the business world and in the markets. I am fortunate to have friendships with consultants who advise clients across the globe in this field.   Out of the growing practice of empirical cosmology emerged astrology. The first horoscope dates to around 410 BCE, at the time of the Persian Empire. The idea was that individual people could have a character and predictable destiny arising from a birth chart reflected in the heavens. This idea was developed alongside the more mundane activity of matching cosmic cycles to economic activity. Astrology is maligned both by science and the Church as nonsensical or heretical, and is confused with the newspaper version. And yet for much of the last three millennia it has been studied alongside astronomy, and been taken seriously in politics and the financial world. In many of the cultures of Asia, especially in the Indian subcontinent, it continues to thrive, and I have encountered its use in business transactions in India and Egypt. The Supreme Court of India has described it as a science in recent years. I have got to know the underlying traditions and hidden methodologies of cultures in emerging markets. This has helped me understand that our current way of thinking in the West can be matched by subtle and equally effective thought systems elsewhere in the world, especially in Asia.   For the last 40 years, since the creation of the personal computer and then of the Internet, electronic gaming, and social media, large sections of the human race have spent their days staring downwards, fixated on their computer screens and iPhones. We have forgotten to look around us at nature and above us at the skies. We have instead immersed ourselves in an artificial world of electronic technology that can separate us from our links with the cosmos and its cycles. As we contemplate and attempt to address the environmental and social consequences of this way of living, the COVID-19 pandemic has at least given us a chance to slow down, think about our relationship with nature and the rhythms of the cosmos and the natural world, and seek to again understand and realign ourselves with those rhythms before it is too late.   The Dark Skies movement originated in Arizona and is now growing rapidly worldwide, alongside such phenomena as rewilding. It aims to reassert humanity’s birthright to observe clear night skies free from the light pollution that damages our health and sense of being part of a wider Universe. Observing the majesty of the cosmos at night and imbibing the rhythms of nature will hopefully encourage us to treat our planet with more respect as we go about our daily business of earning a living.   At the beginning of this article, I mentioned the understanding I developed in my work in emerging and developing markets of other cultures—understanding of how they thought and operated—and how important this was to my ventures. Similarly, I have come to understand the thought systems developed by many cultures around the world relating to cosmic cycles and the workings of nature. This has broadened my thinking about the intelligence of our ancestors, the hidden power in ancient systems of thought, and how we might use this reconnection with the natural world and the workings of the Universe to our advantage in the future life of humanity.  Jonathan Jones   Jonathan Jones is an international commercial lawyer. In his time in the multinational world, including at ICI and Inchcape, he specialised in developing businesses in emerging markets, working in China, Russia, India, South-East Asia, and much of Latin America as well as doing business in Europe, the US, Africa, and the Middle East. He contributed to the setting up of The Economist ’s Emerging Markets Unit and has spoken on commercial legal issues in many countries. Most recently, Jonathan also worked in the NGO world for seven years on numerous substantial development projects in Africa and Asia, with Save the Children and Comic Relief. Jonathan is a keen student, writer, and speaker on history and archaeology and holds an MA in Cultural Cosmology. He is currently writing a book on humanity’s economic connections with the cosmos from early times to the current day.

Russia annexed the Crimea and started a war in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, but that wasn’t enough; now the Kremlin intends to steal borscht from Ukraine.   I didn’t intend to start an Eastern European culinary clash. My mission was to get borscht recognised as an aspect of Ukrainian national culture by UNESCO, the United Nations cultural heritage agency. Why? I was just fed up with restaurants around the world calling borscht a Russian soup. The last straw was when the Russian Foreign Ministry described borscht in a four-line tweet as one of the ‘most famous and popular dishes in Russia’.                                                        Borscht is one of the most popular dishes of Ukrainian cuisine, but it is more than just a dish. It’s not just about food, it’s about the nation’s cultural identity. The world-famous Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko ate borscht with dried carp. Also, there were Cossacks in a special Cossack register with the second name Borscht and it is rude not to refer to the villages Borschi, Borschiv, Borschivka that are situated in Ukraine. What is more interesting, some people believe in God and some don’t, but I’ve never seen a person that regrets tasting Borscht. Most likely every Ukrainian had Borscht this week. Almost 500 million litres of borscht are eaten in Ukraine every year.   During my ‘borscht expedition’, I’ve made a genuinely notable discovery. There is no canonical recipe of borscht, nor is there regional borscht. However, there are as many recipes for this dish as many families are living here. When two people meet each other and start a family, they give birth to a new Borscht recipe. These recipes vary from region to region, from family to family, from house to house, from apartment to apartment. As I told you before, there are literally as many recipes as families. No doubt, borscht is in our DNA.   Perhaps that is the reason why borscht is an essential element of Ukrainian identity. That is why it has become a key object of Russian propaganda. The pro-Kremlin media uses terms such as ‘borscht war’ and ‘battle of borscht’, while most Russians consider borscht Ukrainian. Once I talked to a German journalist based in Moscow who didn’t understand the fuss around borscht. He asked people on the streets which country borscht is from, and they answered that it is Ukrainian. ‘Then I went to a cafe’, he told me. ‘I asked cooks there: whose is borscht? I was also told that I was Ukrainian. And what is the problem?’ And here is the problem: people understand that borscht is Ukrainian while propaganda claims it is not.   Borscht is Ukrainian, and this historical fact is indisputable. Awkward fact: if you open an article about borscht on Ukrainian Wikipedia and then on the Russian site, you will decide that these are two different dishes. Russian propaganda tries to get its hands on borscht, claiming that this dish comes from the name of the plant borschivnik  (Heracleum), which is supposed to be the main ingredient in their variant. This version is absurdly awkward and doesn’t withstand any criticism because borschivnik is a poisonous plant, which is unacceptable for cooking.   Most likely, the name ‘borscht’ came from the Old Slavic ‘ brsch ’—beet or beet kvass. The first mention of the dish ‘borscht’ dates back to 1584. German trader Martin Gruneweg, who was traveling from Lviv to Moscow via Kyiv, wrote that he had stopped for the night over the Borshchavka river—now the Borshchahivka, which gave its name to Kyiv’s modern western outskirts. When Martin Gruneweg inquired about the history of the river’s name, Kyiv citizens explained that there was once a borscht bazaar in that area. But he didn’t believe it, because according to him, it didn’t make sense for Kyiv people to get so far from the city center for the sake of borscht. ‘Besides, Ruthenians rarely or never buy borscht, because everyone cooks it at home, it is their daily food and drink’, he wrote in his diary.   There are other mentions of borscht. In 1598, the famous Orthodox polemicist Ivan Vyshensky wrote about the peasants who ‘sipwater or borschik ’ from one bowl. There are seven Borshchivs and Borshchenkos in the register of the Zaporozhian Army of 1649 among the Cossacks. Moreover, in the history of the Razumovsky family, researcher Kazimir Valishevsky mentions that the Russian Tsarina Elizabeth fell in love with Alexei Razumovsky, ‘and after she fell in love with Ukrainian borscht.’   Besides, we want to single out one more fact—the researcher of USSR cuisines and the ‘father’ of Soviet cuisines William Pokhlobkin wrote in his book National Cuisines of our Peoples  that borscht is a Ukrainian dish that has gained wide popularity in the world.   There are not only historical arguments when it comes to questions of the origin and affiliation of borscht—there are also the depth of its roots in folk culture, regional distribution, and variety of recipes. In particular, proverbs and sayings are of great importance. For example, a children’s saying: ‘Go, go to the rain, I’ll cook you a borscht.’ In the dictionary of the Ukrainian language of Borys Hrinchenko from 1907, we find more than a dozen words derived from the word ‘borscht’. There are various names of borscht among them— borschik , borschichok , borschishche , borshchisko —and borschuvati  (to eat borscht) and borschivnitsa  (trade in borscht).   So there are no facts that would deny the nationality of borscht to Ukraine. But then how to explain the intensification of the Russian propaganda machine?   Russia seeks to take away our values so that we don’t form a nation. National identity consists of language, food, religion, and life. If you take away all elements, the nation will be vulnerable to aggressive manipulation. The Soviet Union ‘took’ the food from other nations. When it collapsed, as an offspring of the Soviet Union, Russia attributed all the food to themselves. They used the statement, ‘if it was in the Soviet Union, then the borscht is ours.’ As Taras Shevchenko wrote, Russians with their imperialistic thinking are sincerely convinced that ‘you are ours, and your things are ours.’   This propaganda was a crucial thing that forced me to legally consolidate borscht’s status as a Ukrainian national dish. As it turned out, borscht was never officially considered Ukrainian. The first mention of borscht is recorded in Ukraine. It is prepared and eaten by every Ukrainian, but borscht is not Ukrainian at the legislative level. We just didn’t think it had to be documented.   Our team worked hard for a year. I created a public organization—the Institute of Culture of Ukraine—with the support of the Сhumak Company and sent my team on a ‘borscht expedition’ throughout Ukraine. At the same time, we conducted a 12-stage preparation task to collect and approve all documents. It was a complicated process, but we managed to cope with it. Borscht is now on the National List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Ukraine. In March, we are applying for the inclusion of the Ukrainian national dish in the UNESCO list of intangible heritage, and I believe that we will be successful.   For Ukrainians, borscht is more than just a dish. Borscht is a part of Ukrainian identity and our national value. An influential cultural phenomenon and the answer to the question: ‘What unites Ukrainians?’ If it is not worth fighting for, then what is? Yevhen Klopotenko Yevhen Klopotenko is a Ukrainian chef, television presenter, and culinary expert. He has been recognized as one of the most promising leaders in the world of gastronomy and entered 50 Next, a global list of 50 people under 35 who are shaping the future of gastronomy. He also founded a non-profit organization to advance borscht as the national food of Ukraine worldwide. He is working on recognition of borscht as part of Ukraine’s cultural heritage by UNESCO.

The UK’s National Health Service (NHS) was set up in 1948 following the 1942 Beveridge report, a cross-party report which established its core principles. Since then, the two main political parties in the UK, the Conservative and Labour parties, have had differing approaches to how the NHS ought to be managed and financed. Today, healthcare is the largest single item of government expenditure, accounting for 24% of public spending compared with only 7% in the 1950s. This article will map the UK’s healthcare spending over the past 25 years, surveying the approaches of the various governments during this time. It will soon be clear why the NHS is struggling to meet its own performance criteria and why it has battled to deliver much-needed elective care during the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic.   Fig 1 shows the share of gross domestic product (GDP) attributed to healthcare expenditure between 1997 and 2018. Healthcare spending has risen considerably over the last 24 years, starting out at 6.9% of GDP in 1997 before plateauing at 10% from 2009 onwards. However, while UK health-related spending stagnated, the ratio of healthcare expenditure to GDP rose over the same period for four of the six other G7 countries. Simply looking at healthcare spending as a percentage of GDP can, however, be a poor prognostic tool in determining how successful a healthcare system is. For example, in 2017 the US outperformed all G7 nations in this metric, with a total healthcare spend of 17.1% of GDP, but performed poorly in key healthcare success metrics such as healthcare outcomes, equity, and access. Instead of looking at this solely as a stand-alone percentage, it is important to look at its growth over time. Fig 1. The share of UK GDP attributed to healthcare expenditure, 1997–2018. Data: ONS.  Adjusting for economy-wide inflation, fig 2 shows the annual average growth rates in UK public spending on health between 1949 and 2018. Growth in healthcare spending has fluctuated over time, with peaks in spending over the past 40 years largely attributed to Labour governments, as evident in fig 2. Under the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, UK public spending on health averaged a real growth rate of 6%, six times the rate of growth under the coalition government which followed. Fig 2. Average annual growth rates in UK public spending on health, 1949–2018. Data: ONS. The 2008 economic crash   The 2008 economic crash and the subsequent period of austerity severely impacted the economy, contracting the UK’s GDP by 6.3% in Q1 2008. The continued impact of the crash resulted in a Department of Health and Social Care budget that continued to grow, only at a much slower pace than in previous years. Adjusting for inflation, the healthcare budget rose by 1% each year on average in the five years between 2009–10 and 2014–15, compared to the average 3.6% rise since the NHS was established.   The NHS’ five-year deal   In June 2018, then-Prime Minister Theresa May announced a new five-year funding deal that would see NHS funding rise by £20.5bn in 2023–24 compared to 2018–19. An increase of around 3.3%, this is closer to the long-term average of 3.6%, though still lower than it. This long-term commitment to improving NHS funding only applied to services within the mandate of NHS England, and was only sufficient to let it meet its immediate demands. It excluded important areas of the Department of Health and Social Care budget such as capital investment, public health, and the education and training of NHS staff. The government chose not to invest more heavily in innovation, health promotion, and its workforce. This choice has worsened the NHS’ ability to keep up with increasing demand and to adopt new medical technology, and it has contributed to the NHS’ staffing crisis.   Using the lower bound of healthcare spending models means that budgets are almost always increased by the government, with predictions falling short of actual demand levels. This often means making ad hoc budget announcements outside of the usual budgetary process and redirecting money away from capital budgets to fund day-to-day financing of the NHS. This leads to a cycle of poor strategic planning, negatively impacting the quality of investment in the health service. Fig 3. Budget of the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care in real terms (£bn), 2019–22. Data: ONS.   The impact of the pandemic   The nation-wide lockdown aimed at curbing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant harm to the UK economy, contracting the UK’s GDP by over 20% in Q2 2020. The government, in attempting to mitigate the economic impact of the crisis, launched the largest public stimulus program in the post-war period. Vast sums of money have been spent propping up businesses across the country, furloughing staff, and making sure the public sector meets its bottom line. However, the government’s public spending spree, alongside reduced tax revenue and a contraction in GDP, pushed the UK’s debt-to-GDP ratio to its highest in more than 50 years. Unsurprisingly, in less than a year, the eight years of fiscal retrenching under the coalition and Conservative governments has been undone.   The impact of the pandemic on future NHS funding is uncertain, although there could well be an increase as the public becomes more conscious of the importance of healthcare spending and a well-functioning NHS. In the short term, the UK has attempted to manage the pandemic’s negative health outcomes by spending an extra £63.4bn on health and social care. However, with the Chancellor already speaking of the need for ‘hard decisions’, it seems likely that the significantly worse position of the UK government’s finances may cause NHS spending to grow at a slower pace. This is already evident in the reduction of COVID-19 healthcare spending by 65% (from £63.4bn in 2020–21 to a proposed spend of £22.4bn in 2021–22) despite uncertainty surrounding whether the pandemic is likely to end soon. This is without considering the long-term negative impacts of the pandemic, such as the longer waiting lists for hospital treatment. Concerningly, a large proportion of the patients facing longer waiting times are those on waiting lists for elective surgery, such as surgery relating to cancers and cardiovascular disease. The number of people on these lists topped five million during the pandemic, the highest since records began in 2007. This new data suggests that over 9% of England’s population is waiting for care. On top of core NHS spending, the proposed budget to tackle the backlog drawn up by the Cabinet Office has proposed that the government may have to commit anywhere between £2bn and £10bn over the next four years on top of core spending. Recently, core NHS spending has risen from £150.4bn in 2019–20 to £159bn in 2021–22. This only represents a 3.3% annual average growth, which fails to match historical growth of the NHS budget. This is despite the NHS battling through an unprecedented pandemic and recovering from a challenging year. Neither current nor predicted growth matches the 6% average annual real growth achieved during the 14 years of Labour government between 1996–97 and 2009–10.[1]   The rise in the waiting list for non-urgent NHS treatment and the worsening mental health crisis underline the struggle the NHS faces as it tries to return to normal following a year battling COVID-19 pandemic. Short-term increases in healthcare funding have been used to meet new obligations, such as virology services to combat virus mutations, an incredibly successful COVID-19 vaccination campaign, and the ‘Track and Trace’ initiative. Improved funding will make the NHS more resilient to surges in demand, and it is likely to require pandemic-level spending to manage the long-term pressures from COVID. However, with the worsening position of the UK’s finances and the need to save money, it would be challenging for any Chancellor to reduce spending without impacting the health service, as the NHS accounts for 24% of government spending, a figure which is predicted to rise. Fatima Osman   Fatima Osman is a fifth-year medical student at Imperial College London. She completed an intercalated degree in Management at Imperial College Business School where she became interested in Health Economics. She has worked with clinicians and health economists to lead two publications in the field. She is excited to use her skills to formulate approaches to improve the cost effectiveness of healthcare provision by harnessing the power of artificial intelligence and healthtech. [1] Matt Hancock, ‘Secretary of State’s oral statement on the NHS Long Term Plan’ (oral statement to Parliament, London, 7 January 2019) < https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/secretary-of-states-oral-statement-on-the-nhs-long-term-plan--2 >; HM Treasury, ‘GDP deflators at market prices, and money GDP December 2019 (Quarterly National Accounts)’ (7 January 2020) < https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/gdp-deflators-at-market-prices-and-money-gdp-december-2019-quarterly-national-accounts > both accessed 1 March 2021.

Postcards have long been linked to memory formation, sold primarily as ‘souvenirs’, a term itself deriving from the French verb souvenir  (to remember). The mnemonic role of postcards is particularly worth discussing with regard to the cultural output of places where memory is contested, and which have undergone and continue to undergo upheaval resulting from conflict. This is the case of parts of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine, often referred to collectively as ‘Donbas’.[1] Although parts of these regions have been occupied by or engaged in conflict with Russia since 2014, their difficult relationship with memory and trauma long predates that.   Not long after the start of the conflict, photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind came across a bundle of postcards in a post office in Sloviansk, Donbas, with the words ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ emblazoned across idyllic images of the city. Moved by the juxtaposition of the war surrounding her and the close resemblance of the photographs to her British hometown, Taylor-Lind was prompted to entirely reconsider how places at war should be depicted. Together with Donbas-born Alisa Sopova, Taylor-Lind set up a project entitled ‘Welcome to Donetsk’, in which they sent thousands of postcards from Donbas to homes around the globe. Each one bore a handwritten note stating the name of a victim of the conflict, and the circumstances of their death. Their project has led to the creation of a comprehensive list of victims from all sides of the war, with Taylor-Lind stating her intention to continue documenting these names until the end of the war.[2] Fig 1. Lilya Nimenko postcard (Anastasia Taylor-Lind). 'Welcome to Donetsk' project. Courtesy of Anastasia Taylor-Lind. . Turning to an entirely different medium, postcards also play a significant role in prompting discussions of memory in Serhiy Zhadan’s 2010 novel Voroshilovgrad,  centred on Donbas after independence. The novel’s protagonist, Herman, recalls speaking about postcards of the city of Voroshilovgrad (now Luhansk) in his German class during the Soviet era, but struggles to reconcile that memory with a present in which it seems incongruous: ‘I never went to Voroshilovgrad, either. And now there’s no such thing as Voroshilovgrad’.[3] Later in the novel, Olga, an accountant from Herman’s hometown, echoes this sentiment of detachment from one’s own past when her discovery of a collection of such postcards brings back memories of sending them to German pen pals. This prompts a reflection building on that of Herman. She voices a struggle to believe one’s own memories: ‘there’s no such city as Voroshilovgrad anymore, and the boy from Dresden doesn’t write me anymore, and it’s like none of that even happened, or it wasn’t even part of my life’.[4]   Despite the differences in genre—one draws on real-life events, and the other is fiction—the approaches of the two projects to postcards and their mnemonic value have significant parallels. It is therefore worth exploring further how the two converge in their visions of Donbas. They converge firstly regarding the interaction between postcards, naming practices, and memory formation. They also converge on the relationship of postcards to realities past and present, and the perception of postcards as places.   One factor which contributed to starting ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ was Taylor-Lind’s increasing awareness of how conventional war photography casts people living through conflict as ‘characters from a war story’[5]—victims, war dead, combatants—rather than people not so different from the viewer. ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ departs from this convention, writing out the names of those who have died, regardless of whether they were a civilian, combatant, or journalist, and regardless of nationality or political views. The process of naming creates a juxtaposition against the mass-produced postcard. The impact of which is confirmed by the emotional reaction of the postcards’ recipients, many of whom decided to commemorate the person named in their postcard, for example by holding small memorials.[6] Uniting pre-war photos of the region with the names of real people therefore challenges the ‘othering’ of places of war and their inhabitants by underscoring the deeply personal impact of war.   For Zhadan, postcards also provide an opportunity to explore the importance of naming in memory. Herman’s memory of postcards depicting the Voroshilovgrad of his adolescence appears to represent a dichotomy: ‘That city doesn’t even exist anymore. It’s called Luhansk now’.[7] This suggests that renaming a place is tantamount to replacing it, in the most literal sense of the word: re-placing . Memories are cut adrift, with no tangible referent. As   noted by Pavlo Shopin, ‘It is a signifier without a signified’.[8] Indeed, Luhansk has not had a linear history, instead experiencing multiple repetitions: the city’s name was changed no fewer than four times in the twentieth century, finally returning to ‘Luhansk’ in 1990.[9] Herman therefore conveys the sense of illegitimacy and shame accompanying memories from former regimes, a sentiment against which the author appears to push back. Zhadan’s naming the novel ‘ Voroshilovgrad ’, despite it not being set there, reflects Herman’s experience of having memories ‘of’ a place which he has never visited. Zhadan’s focus on naming thus tackles the difficult line between ‘denouncing a regime and devaluing the lives lived under it’,[10] suggesting that naming is significant not only in confirming the existence of a place, but also in legitimising the existence and memories of those who live in its vicinity.   The idea that a place ‘doesn’t exist anymore’, however, goes beyond naming. Such assertions problematise the relationship between past and present. Political changes can suddenly, prematurely transform a postcard from a contemporary vision of a place, into a piece of archive material. In ‘Welcome to Donetsk’, this clash in perceptions is epitomised by the two sides of the postcard, which represent two realities simultaneously—war and peace—but only one place. In this way, the project does not simply tell the same story twice on the two sides of the card, but instead suggests that radically different perceptions of a place must be acknowledged as parts of the same story. In Voroshilovgrad , in contrast, the postcards that Olga finds are incomplete, never having been written or sent, and therefore seemingly bear only one ‘side’ of the story. Prematurely cut off from fulfilling their purpose, these postcards share a certain parallel with the sudden renaming of the city, and with Herman’s sense of incompletion. Nevertheless, Zhadan subverts any sense of unfulfilment, as the unwritten side of the postcard demonstrates that the card is intended for its owner alone. The unwritten side can thus be interpreted as symbolising the characters’ full ownership of their memories, reaffirming the legitimacy of individual perceptions of the past, without moulding them to the expectations of anyone else.   This is to say not that either use of postcards engages explicitly with the reality of place, but quite the opposite. In Voroshilovgrad , for example, characters admit to using postcards to project a desired view of a place. Olga recalls how she would ‘pick out the ones with tons of flowers because I wanted him [a German pen pal] to think that Voroshilovgrad was a fun city’.[11] This is by no means unusual. Daniel Reynolds notes the tendency for postcards to depict ‘clichéd scenic views in garishly enhanced colours’.[12] It can therefore be suggested that postcards create a certain complicity between sender and recipient, with both being aware of their shared part-imagining of place. It can therefore be useful to consider why postcards are chosen over letters by both Taylor-Lind and Zhadan. Through the medium of postcards, the sender brings the recipient within the paradigms of a mutually imagined reality. Jacques Derrida observed that in a postcard image ‘one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far’,[13] and this underlines how the medium of postcards, with the intersection of decontextualised images and a written message, lends itself to an almost floating, quasi-imagining of place. Taylor-Lind’s project speaks to a blurring of boundaries between the real and imagined since, although she specifically chose postcards of pre-war Donbas, these too become subject to imagination, as the basis of those images no longer exists in the state in which it is depicted. Whereas Olga chose postcards based on their novelty, Taylor-Lind chose them based on their banality, in order to evoke greater empathy on the part of the recipient. She explained: ‘In these cards Donetsk looks like an ordinary, peaceful European city, like anyone’s hometown, like my hometown’.[14] This challenges the binaries of the imagined and real, the pre-war and ‘war-torn’, emphasising that places designated as ‘warzones’ were not always so, and that those living in such places are not so different from the postcards’ recipients. Thus, although in both Taylor-Lind’s project and Zhadan’s novel, postcards are reminders of the past, the images of the past on postcards engage with the adaptation and part-imagination of reality, suggesting that this is always part of the experience of a place, and that no single perception of a place is more valid than another.   Yet postcards are not simply valued for their relation to memories of a place. They become places in their own right. In Voroshilovgrad , for instance, postcards are a mnemonic tool for recalling memories associated with a place and time, rather than for remembering the place itself. This is epitomised by Herman recollecting that he ‘never went to Voroshilovgrad’,[15] and yet that his memory of it stems from the postcards which he ‘talked about … in German for years’,[16] demonstrating that memories linked to postcards are only partially connected to place. Olga similarly declares, ‘Maybe these pictures are  my past’,[17] suggesting that postcards are valued more for the   memories they evoke and help to preserve than for the places they depict. In this way, Zhadan’s depiction of postcards resonates with Pierre Nora’s theory of ‘lieux de mémoire’ (‘sites of memory’), ‘where memory crystallizes and secretes itself’.[18] The memories contained within postcards render them places themselves—sites of memory— autonomous but not unrelated to history. This is echoed on the metanarrative level, with the reader ‘remembering’ Voroshilovgrad as a result of the book’s name despite never having been there, and despite the novel not even being set there. Not dissimilarly, Taylor-Lind’s project of remembrance ultimately promotes the production of memory for a recipient who did not experience that place or know that person. Both Zhadan and Taylor-Lind arguably encourage the creation, and not just the preservation, of what could be termed ‘vicarious memory’. Their works therefore portray postcards as an aid not only against forgetting one’s own memories, but also against forgetting the memories of others. Fig 2. Serhiy Feoktistov postcard (Anastasia Taylor-Lind). 'Welcome to Donetsk' project. Courtesy of Anastasia Taylor-Lind. . The communicative aspect of postcards differs between the two, however. In ‘Welcome to Donetsk’, the reaction of the recipients is arguably the most important element of the project, helping to provoke empathy for those in faraway conflicts. As Taylor-Lind notes, the postcards are only half of the story: ‘what they do is provide a catalyst for research, engagement, and conversation within foreign homes’.[19] Zhadan, conversely, has a greater focus on unsent postcards, illustrated when Olga notes, ‘I would just keep all the other ones … And I just found them. A whole stack of them’.[20] Kept almost like an unintentional private archive, and found many years later, they could be interpreted as being unfinished and abortive, telling a story with no satisfactory ending, echoing the characters’ feeling of sudden severance from their past at the fall of the Soviet Union. It could appear that the postcards have been robbed of their purpose. However, it soon becomes clear that, for Zhadan’s characters, not only are postcards for their recipients, but their function as ‘lieux de mémoire’ also aids their original owners. Olga’s discovery of postcards from her past exemplifies this. It prompts not only recollections, but also defiance, and determination to acknowledge memories despite the pressures of collective memory. She states that these memories are ‘Something they took away from me and forced me to forget. But I haven’t forgotten’.[21] In this way, postcards lend tangibility to memory, and the way in which they can be found after many years, as happens in Olga’s case, provides a material parallel to the process of remembering.   Taylor-Lind, on the other hand, emphasises that such ‘lieux de mémoire’ are not only for those who hold memories related to that past. The communicative aspect of postcards can transform postcards into agents of vicarious memory for those detached from, for example, Donbas. ‘Welcome to Donetsk’ therefore turns postcards into mobile ‘lieux de mémoire’, sites of remembrance which are almost tombstones for the victims of the war. Paradoxically, the mobility of postcards makes them more permanent, when there is both a physical and ontological threat to many parts of Donbas, and thus also to cemeteries and sites of remembrance. The differing uses of postcards as ‘lieux de mémoire’ between Taylor-Lind and Zhadan therefore demonstrates that they are not only for those who battle with their own memories, but also for those who wish to remember something, or rather someone, that they never met.   Literature, real-life conflict, and memory intersect in these two examples of cultural production from Donbas, to demonstrate that postcards can be not only tools in remembering, but also in remembrance, through their status as ‘lieux de mémoire’. These representations and uses of postcards hint that the relationship between postcard and place is highly complex. The ‘place’ depicted is often more a result of desired projections of imagination than of lived reality, and postcards become places of memory of their own, independent from the unfolding of history. Comparing the two projects demonstrates the value of postcards in memory, not only in the conventional communicative form, but also for the owner of the unsent postcard. Zhadan in particular suggests that detachment from places and from one’s own memories that is due to sudden historical divides does not have to result in forgetting such memories. Taylor-Lind goes beyond this, using postcards as places of remembrance , creating forms of vicarious memory for the recipients.   Donbas is no stranger to changes in identity and in the status of memories, and this is set to be the case at least for the near future. However, Zhadan and Taylor-Lind use postcards to demonstrate a defiance to the fragility of memory in the region, and to underscore that inhabitants’ memories do not have to be tainted by the actions of a regime. Therefore, although both projects problematise the interplay of memory and place when place can no longer be relied upon as a tangible mnemonic referent, they ultimately converge in their shared use of postcards to represent possibilities for accepting the past, and for empathising with the experiences of others. Alice Mee   Alice Mee is a third-year undergraduate in Modern and Medieval Languages (French, Spanish, and Ukrainian) at Queens' College, Cambridge. She has spent the first eight months of her year abroad working at the Parliament of Ukraine, where she became very interested in matters surrounding the ongoing conflict with Russia. Before returning to Cambridge for her final year, Alice is working with an NGO supporting smallholder coffee farmers in Costa Rica. [1] The name ‘Donbas’ is used here for concision, although its usage remains contested. Dmytro Krapyvenko, ‘Павло Жебрівський: «Донбас —це совковий ідеологічний топонім»’ ( Український Тиждень , 7 December 2017) < https://tyzhden.ua/Society/205344 > accessed 9 March 2021. [2] Anastasia Taylor-Lind, ‘War is personal: how social media brings home news of faraway conflicts’ (2015) 69(4) Nieman Reports 16, 23. [3] Serhiy Zhadan, Voroshilovgrad  (Isaac Stackhouse and Reilly Costigan-Humes trs, Deep Vellum Publishing 2016) 182. [4] ibid 434-5. [5] Taylor-Lind (n 2) 19. [6] ‘WelcomeToDonetsk: Photojournalist Anastasia Taylor-Lind Presents Her Work at HURI’ ( HURI , 14 April 2016) < https://huri.harvard.edu/news/welcometodonetsk-photojournalist-anastasia-taylor-lind-presents-her-work-huri > accessed 22 February 2021. [7] Zhadan (n 3) 181. [8] Pavlo Shopin, ‘Voroshylovhrad Lost: Memory and Identity in a Novel by Serhiy Zhadan’ (2013) 57(3) The Slavic and East European Journal 372, 377. [9] Tanya Zaharchenko, ‘While the Ox Is Still Alive: Memory and Emptiness in Serhiy Zhadan’s Voroshylovhrad’ (2013) 55(1-2) Canadian Slavonic Papers 45, 52. [10] ibid 66. [11] Zhadan (n 3) 434. [12] Daniel P Reynolds, Postcards from Auschwitz: Holocaust Tourism and the Meaning of Remembrance  (New York University Press 2018) 2. [13] Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and beyond  (Alan Bass tr, University of Chicago Press 1987) 13. [14] Taylor-Lind (n 2) 19. [15] Zhadan (n 3) 182. [16] ibid 181. [17] ibid 435. [18] Pierre Nora, ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’ (1989) 26 Representations 7. [19] Taylor-Lind (n 2) 22. [20] Zhadan (n 3) 434. [21] ibid 435.

1. Introduction Music theory is white. —Philip Ewell Thus begins Philip Ewell’s article ‘Music Theory and the White Racial Frame’.[1] His rigorous analysis of the systemic racism and white supremacy in music theory, and his subsequent lectures on assimilationism in music, have certainly created a tidal wave in Western academic circles, with some institutions responding by acknowledging ‘racism and bias in their program’ and subsequently revising their curricula.[2]   The response to this impactful debate was rather different in China—one might describe it as nearly nonexistent. A month after an article on Ewell was published in The New Yorker , a schedule appeared on the Chinese social media platform WeChat .[3] Released by one of the few elite conservatories in China, the schedule detailed all upcoming lectures in the conservatoire’s ‘2020 Season of Academic Music Studies’.[4] There were 26 lectures in total on the schedule: 22 on Beethoven, with the 4 remaining lectures on music and neuroscience, European philosophy and aesthetics, musical semiotics, and ancient Chinese music. A pattern similar to the one Ewell described in his article had emerged: a large emphasis on European theories and disciplines dominated by white men, a brief segment about Chinese music, next to nothing about the music traditions and theories elsewhere in the world—and certainly nothing about music and race. The brief segment about Chinese music which was included was, incidentally, about the ancient music of the Han people—the largest ethnic group in China—and thereby excluded Chinese ethnic minorities. Therefore, one naturally doubts whether Ewell’s ideas and the significant debate around them have entered the horizons of academic music studies in China at all.   A quick search on Baidu , the largest search engine legally accessible in China, shows that no discussions in Chinese were made about Ewell and his work except for one post on the zhihu.com, the Chinese equivalent of the question and answer website Quora, by a PhD student based in Canada whom I know personally.[5] It was at this point that I began to question whether the issue of race and music is discussed at all in mainland Chinese academia. I entered several different combinations of the keywords ‘music’ ( yinyue , 音乐), ‘race’ ( zhongzu , 种族), ‘ethnicity’ ( minzu,  民族) and ‘racism’ ( zhongzuzhuyi , 种族主义) on the website of CNKI, a major research and information publishing institution in China. However, the search results contained mainly journal articles on blues and hip-hop music written by researchers in cultural studies, and some on the preservation of traditional music of ethnic minority groups in China. This debate had been virtually overlooked by the Chinese community of music scholars.   Racism in Chinese culture: Nonexistent or overlooked?   One might argue that Ewell’s analysis of the white racial frame and of racism in music is ‘utterly irrelevant in the Chinese context’ because racism ‘is a modern phenomenon which originated in Europe’.[6] This is the argument used by Xu Wei, who, writing for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), had defended a song-and-dance number in China’s state-run Spring Festival Gala against claims of racism. It featured a Chinese actress ‘wearing blackface and fake buttocks’ to portray an African mother who gushes, ‘I love Chinese people. I love China’.[7] Xu, referencing Pierre-André Taguieff and Clifford Geertz, argues that the show was not, in fact, racist in a Chinese context, for the following reasons: Racist symbols depend heavily on cultural contexts. Several popular characters in Chinese traditional operas were often portrayed with black faces (citing PRC premiers Zhou Enlai and Wen Jiabao). Blackface portrayals of African characters by Chinese people show that ‘African people and Chinese people are one family’.[8]   2.1. Chinese racial frames: Old and new, Eastern and Western   What Xu fails to acknowledge, however, is the supremacist undertone of the show. China and Chinese people are portrayed as the cultured forces which offer civilisation and generous help, while African people remain subservient, singing their praises. This undertone calls to mind the complex history of racism in Chinese culture. The ancient Chinese concept of ‘Sinocentrism’, and the ‘Sino–barbarian’ dichotomy, would let one ‘regard all foreigners as objectively inferior’ and view China as ‘the most advanced civilisation in the world’. They were overwhelmed by the influx of European culture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[9] This drastic change meant that the Chinese ‘idea of “race” (zhong [ 種], “seed”, “species”, “race”) transitioned from cultural exclusiveness to racial exclusiveness’, but it also brought white supremacy—and even anti-black racism—to China.[10] The resulting modern Chinese mindset regarding race and culture can therefore be interpreted as a subversion of the ancient ‘Sinocentric’ model by the European idea of white supremacy. It was further complicated by xenophobic, anti-Western propaganda, as well as the regime’s ever-changing relations with other communist states, which influenced the history of communist China.   Another way to interpret this mindset would be to use Dr Ibram X Kendi’s concept of non-white assimilationism, which Ewell drew on profusely in his lectures, whereby people of colour express ‘the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviourally inferior and is supporting cultural or behavioural enrichment programmes to develop that racial group’.[11]   The overlaps and clashes between the two racial frames resulted in a unique phenomenon. Chinese culture was often deemed ‘backwards’, but it was also revered as a symbol of national pride, because of the complex origins of China’s nationalism—a mixture of Westernisation, iconoclasm, and Sinocentrism. Because of China’s major defeats at the hands of European nations and Japan in the nineteenth century, European and Japanese ideals gradually came to be perceived as superior yet at the same time foreign and untrustworthy. Soviet/ Russian culture was at first revered because of the rise of the Communist Party of China and the subsequent establishment of the PRC. However, its influence later waned because of the Sino-Soviet split and the post-Mao, reform-era influx of Western culture. African and other Asian cultures, including those of ethnic minority groups in China, stay at the bottom of the hierarchy, as they do in the white racial frame. While some suggested that authorities in the PRC tended to ‘portray racism as a Western phenomenon’, outbursts of racist and Han-chauvinist sentiments still occur in modern China. Exemplars are the 1988 Nanjing anti-African protests and the racist actions against Africans in Guangzhou amid the COVID-19 crisis.[12] One can therefore conclude this is solid proof that racism and a unique duality of racial frames do indeed exist in modern China, which overlap and clash with the European white racial framework.   2.2. Eurocentrism in Chinese music and the Chinese racial frame   In the domain of music, especially of music academia, this Chinese racial frame takes the form of a reluctant but futile acceptance of assimilationism and, as a result, European supremacy. Shen Yang Yandi, the deputy director of the China Association of Music Theory, admitted in an interview that there is ‘no Chinese mother tongue in a musical sense, or, to put it differently, we have lost our [musical] language’.[13]   He illustrated this by pointing out that ‘80% of what we teach in conservatories is Western music (西方音乐, “music from the West”), same with our concert life’, and that even ‘the concert itself’ and the modern Chinese orchestra was developed in China by ‘copying Western art’. This means that Western music is in a dominant position in China, and is an unavoidable reality. Yang believed that the reason for this reality was that Western music, a tradition of art music, had no equivalent in classical Chinese culture, and that China did not have a powerful tradition of art music in a Western sense, causing profound confusions and clashes when Western music was introduced in China. He furthered his argument by stating that ‘we still understand it—“Western music”—insufficiently and superficially’, which ‘made the destructive effect [of the introduction of Western music] all the more violent’. While lamenting the absence of ‘a reliable, comprehensive biography of Beethoven’ in Chinese and ‘a serious Chinese scholarship on Beethoven’s 9 symphonies’, Yang also fleetingly mentioned the ‘preservation of Guqin, Kunqu, long song and Muqam as world heritages’.[14]   However, Yang did not discuss any other musical traditions, such as jazz, blues, rock, gamelan, or Indian classical music, except for a fleeting acknowledgement of the ‘impingement we face from [Western] popular music’, despite many of these traditions also being ‘powerful and rich traditions of art music’ and some also coming from the West.[15] Here, Yang reveals not only the dominance of ‘Western music’ in China, but also the underlying assumption that the default ‘Western music’ (or, ‘music from the West’) for him and his audience should be European classical music. This is precisely the assumption attacked by Ewell in his articles, blog posts, and lectures. Yang’s subtle dismissal of popular music, and the conspicuous absence of other classical music traditions from his remarks, indicate his own conforming to the aforementioned Chinese racial frame, and possibly, to some extent, to assimilationism and the white racial frame. Above all, Yang’s interview is a brutally honest depiction of the systemic Eurocentrism which permeates the contemporary Chinese music scene. Shen Qia’s comment should serve as an appropriate conclusion to this section: ‘In China, Eurocentrism has made a more profound impact on music than any other artistic fields’.[16]   Case study: Racial-Ethnic frames in Li Chongguang’s Basic Music Theory   Ewell investigated the white racial frame of music theory by examining widely used American music theory textbooks and looking for patterns in their musical examples. I believe the same analysis could be performed on Basic Music Theory  by Li Chongguang, a ‘foundational music theory textbook’ which influenced ‘generations of Chinese people who wished to enter the world of music’ and is still widely used to this day.[17] First published in 1962, the book was based on Elementarnaya Teoriya Muzyki  by Igor Vladimirovich Sposobin with ‘additional sections on Chinese music’. It remains one of the best-selling music textbooks on Chinese e-commerce platforms.[18] It is therefore plausible to use Basic Music Theory as the Chinese counterpart to Ewell’s selection of American music theory textbooks. I analysed musical examples in Basic Music Theory  using the same method as Ewell (fig 1). Fig 1. Racial/regional demographic data for musical examples from Basic Music Theory . Of the 333 musical examples in Basic Music Theory , 253 (roughly 76%) were written by composers who identified as Chinese, or had been transcribed by formally trained Chinese composers from ‘folk tunes’ which originated in mainland China. 79 examples (roughly 24%) were by composers who were mainly active in Western and Eastern European countries (including Tsarist Russia and the USSR). 1 (less than 1%) was supposedly transcribed from a (North) Korean ‘folk tune’. None of these examples came from outside China, Korea, or Europe. None of them was composed by a person of African or American heritage, or indeed from any other musical cultures. The book succeeded in introducing students to key concepts in Western functional harmony, and to the Chinese pentatonic scales, as well as the Chinese Gongche  notation and the numbered musical notation system which was popular in China at the time.[19] However, it made no effort to introduce or even mention any other musical traditions, let alone other theoretical systems. Therefore, I share Ewell’s conclusion that these music theory examples are ‘literally, from a critical-race perspective’, Chinese or white, and ‘virtually nothing else’. [20]   The stark racial and cultural imbalance illustrates how the duality of Sinocentric and Eurocentric racial frames in China intertwined and morphed into a complex cultural phenomenon, which influenced the writing of Basic Music Theory , and by extension, the entire discipline of academic studies of music in China. The book alone was not enough to construct such a far-reaching racial frame; instead, it was a product of precisely that racial frame, born out of China’s unstable relationship with Western culture over the last 200 years—‘sometimes like the devil, but sometimes like a beauty’.[21] This unique and complex fixation led Li Chongguang and other Chinese music theorists at the time to focus solely on music from China and Europe, ignoring vast traditions of music and music theory from other parts of the world. Such a narrow, Eurocentric, and Sinocentric perspective has already been acknowledged and scrutinised by Chinese musicologists. Few have made a clearer observation than Shen Qia, who commented in 1993 that the so-called ‘openness’ of the Chinese music circle has often been a fixation on ‘the West’ as the only frame of reference. This fixation is in fact narrow-minded and conservative.[22] His assessment of the lamentably narrow perspective of musicology in China testifies to the accuracy of my analysis above. Indeed, music scholars in China have not taken up music theories from outside China and the West as valid reference points.   Furthermore, Li Chongguang’s Basic Music Theory  shows a tendency to diminish the cultural identity of ethnic minority groups within China. Of the 139 traditional Chinese musical examples in the book (categorised as folk tunes rather than works of specific, identified composers), only four are identified by ethnicity. The rest are identified by province, despite many being important songs by ethnic minority peoples. Perhaps to promote official narratives, the book credits key Mongolian and Uyghur songs by their respective provinces, not by their ethnicity. The epic folk song ‘Gada Meiren’, for instance, is labelled an ‘Inner Mongolian folk song’, which diminishes the ethnic tensions that the song reflects.[23] Borjigin Burensain, for instance, cast the events described by the lyrics of the song as ‘an ethnic conflict between the Mongols and the Chinese over Mongol land’ and a ‘campaign against Chinese colonisation’.[24] This subtle suppression of ethnic minority identities, intertwining with the Sinocentric and Eurocentric racial frames, forms a spectre of racial-ethnic frames that haunts the book yet has often been overlooked. One can therefore draw parallels between my analysis of Basic Music Theory  and Ewell’s analysis of American music theory textbooks. While the American music theory classroom has been shaped by the white racial frame, its counterpart in China has been influenced by a different yet similarly oppressive racial-ethnic frame born out of the clashes and the eventual fusion between Sinocentrism, Eurocentrism, and Han chauvinism.   4. Conclusion and suggested revisions   In my analysis, I have attempted to reveal the far-reaching impact of the white racial frame and Eurocentrism. The white racial frame is not only a Euro-American problem but also, one can argue, a significant component of the racial-ethnic frame behind modern Chinese music. My analysis therefore calls on musicologists in the West to re-evaluate the impact of the white racial frame and Eurocentrism on music and theory, from a global perspective. The discussions on race and music theory can therefore be conducted on a global scale, expanding from Ewell’s America-centric perspective to a true multicultural dialogue between music scholars from around the world, in order to acknowledge, comprehend, and eventually tackle this problem.   In the same interview where he admitted that China had ‘no (musical) mother tongue’, Yang Yandi remarked that the trend of globalisation has begun in China, and that ignorance of ‘other worlds’, especially the West, is no longer defensible. His call for a better musical understanding of ‘other worlds’ seems to suggest his advocacy for diversity in China’s music theory classroom, but what follows shows a more nuanced picture. Yang was advocating for diversity, yet he insisted on selecting the ‘Western World’ as the world out of all ‘other worlds’ for the Chinese music community to understand.[25] His call for diversity was thus still insinuating the validity of China’s Eurocentric approach to music from ‘other worlds’. Following Ewell’s recommendations for the American music theory community, however, I believe that Yang’s call for a more globalised approach could be expanded to address the racial-ethnic frame in Chinese music theory. The racial-ethnic frame itself, along with its history and impact, needs to be acknowledged and analysed by the community of music scholars in China and, subsequently, taught as the historical component to theory for music students in China. The music theory curriculum itself can be expanded to cover more traditions—for instance, by including music traditions and theoretical frameworks of Indian, African, American, and South-East Asian peoples—rather than focussing solely on China and the Western classical tradition. Such a broadened scope, combined with a more comprehensive understanding of the Western classical traditions, could arguably act as a more inclusive approach to Yang’s problem.   Finally, it is vital that music scholars in China establish effective means of communication with colleagues from across the world. A good start would be introducing more accurate Chinese translations of non-Chinese scholarly texts to music scholars in China, as well as more accurate English translations of Chinese texts to non-Chinese music scholars. Via this potential avenue of collaboration, along with others, problems posed by racial frames in music and music theory can be dissected to reimagine more diverse and inclusive theoretical frameworks of global musical traditions, which in turn could become a new source of musical innovation. David Chu   David Chu is pursuing an MSt in Musicology at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He is interested in the intersection between music and ideology, and in new possibilities in tonality. He served as Assistant Conductor of the Sun Yat-sen University Orchestra from 2016 to 2020 and has composed and orchestrated for a variety of ensembles. [1] Philip A Ewell, ‘Music Theory and The White Racial Frame’ (2020) 26 Music Theory Online < https://doi.org/10.30535/mto.26.2.4 >. [2] ‘Cornish College of The Arts - Music Department’ ( Facebook , 23 June 2020) < https://www.facebook.com/CornishMusic/posts/3297682836937718 > accessed 1 March 2021. [3] Alex Ross, ‘Black Scholars Confront White Supremacy In Classical Music’ ( The New Yorker , 14 September 2020) < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/09/21/black-scholars-confront-white-supremacy-in-classical-music > accessed 1 March 2021. [4] ‘Upcoming Events | 2020 Music Academic Season: Autumn Fusion, 活动预告 2020 音乐学术季秋融’ WeChat < https://archive.vn/H4x38 >, saved from < https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/CjuU82Wd2d90qUdF7KgdIQ > accessed 1 March 2021. NB: All Chinese names and titles are rendered in the Romanised pinyin. Unless otherwise specified, all translations from Chinese into English are mine. [5] Patrick Huang, ‘Philip Ewell’s Musicology Lecture (Oct 27), Philip Ewel 的音乐学讲座 [10.27 的音乐学讲座]’ < https://web.archive.org/web/20201104140239/https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/267960072 > accessed 1 March 2021. [6] Wei Xu, ‘Do Not Use The Racism Label Randomly 不要把种族主义的帽子随便乱戴’ ( Ministry of Foreign Affairs of The People’s Republic Of China , 2018) < https://archive.vn/H4x38 >, saved from < https://www.fmP.R.C.gov.cn/zflt/chn/jlydh/mtsy/t1536004.htm > accessed 1 March 2021. [7] Jane Perlez, ‘With Blackface And Monkey Suit, Chinese Gala On Africa Causes Uproar’ The New York Times  (New York, 16 February 2018) < https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/world/asia/china-africa-blackface-lunar-new-year.html > accessed 1 March 2021. [8] ibid. [9] Guy G Ankerl, Global Communication Without Universal Civilization  (INU Press 2000). [10] Barry Sautman, ‘Anti-Black Racism In Post-Mao China’ (1994) 138 The China Quarterly 413 . [11] Ibram X Kendi, How to Be An Antiracist (Penguin Random House 2019). [12] Hsiao-Hung Pai, ‘The Coronavirus Crisis Has Exposed China’s Long History Of Racism’ Guardian (London, 25 April 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/coronavirus-exposed-china-history-racism-africans-guangzhou > accessed 1 March 2021. [13] Yang Yandi, ‘Yang Yandi: Western Music And Its Research In China, 杨燕迪：西方音乐及其研究在中国’ ( Nanjing University Marxist Social Theory Research Center,  南京大学马克思主义社会理论研究中心,   2008) < https://archive.vn/Sf0sI >, saved from < https://ptext.nju.edu.cn/bf/33/c12245a245555/page.htm >. [14] ibid. [15] ibid. [16] Shen Qia, ‘The U-Shaped Journey Of The Idea Of Chinese Music Through The 20th-Century, 二十世纪国乐思想的’, U ‘ 字之路’ (1994) Music Studies, 字之路 67. [17] Li Yuhong, ‘Two Textbooks in The Development Of Basic Music Theory As A Discipline’, 基本乐理’学科发展中的两本教材’ (2005) Music Education In China, 中国音乐教育 33 < http://www.cqvip.com/QK/82024X/20057/16031120.html >. [18] Li Chongguang, Basic Music Theory , 音乐理论基础 (twenty-sixth edn, People’s Music Publishing House 2001). [19] ibid. [20] Ewell (n 1). [21] Shen (n 19). [22] ibid. [23] Li (n 18). [24] Borjigin Burensain, ‘The Complex Structure of Ethnic Conflict In The Frontier: Through The Debates Around The “Jindandao Incident” In 1891’ (2004) 6 Inner Asia 41 < https://doi.org/10.1163/146481704793647171 >. [25] Yang (n 13).

If the doors of perception were cleansed then everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern. —William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell Once upon a time … … … a true story … … … I lived in a cave.   A four-day journey on a rattling bus across Europe carried me to Greece when I left London after quitting journalism. It finally became clear the work was imprisoned in a web of commerce, with ideals at best an occasional flimsy afterthought. Truth and justice were liked but not essential. Making money through pandering to thoughtless appetites was. Murdoch’s Fox is the flower of 50 years’ evolution since then.   What is meaningful, true and humane in this labyrinth of life? At seven years old I fell in love with Botticelli’s painting Venus and Mars . The peaceful dream of the gods drawn with such perfect clarity and painted in colours balanced between subtlety and lusciousness, all amazed me with beauty. When I reached 12, Man’s continuing history of inhumanity through war, Holocaust, nuclear bomb, slavery, and starvation horrified and angered me. At 15, Keats’ line from Ode on a Grecian Urn , ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, seemed the key to understanding. Ten years later the doors to my inner life were more fully opened in my cave. Fig 1. Venus and Mars (Sandro Botticelli c 1485, tempera and oil on poplar, 69.2 x 173.4cm). © 2021 The National Gallery, London. This hidden shelter was up a cliff on a rocky island in the middle of the myriad blues of the Aegean Sea. Big enough to house one person, its spiral form had been carved by sun and wind from the limestone escarpment. The sandy floor moulded comfortably to my sleeping body. The pale stone inner tip of the spiral swirled up in front of the opening making a partial screen. Inside, a ledge provided storage for my few belongings and a place for a candle at night. There, alone, I was immersed in the fundamental essences of life—earth, fire, air, and water. Asleep at night embraced by encircling stone, each morning I would be woken by the sudden glare of the sun as it rose above the hills opposite and shone hot on my face. Sparkling air all round, turquoise sea lapped into the cove below my cliff. In such simplicity the connection was forged between my inner being and the great forces outside.   This experience has been coursing through my life ever since, opening me to a Universe in which the miracle of consciousness aligned with the wonder of imagination have evolved in us. Looking to the night sky, its beauty balances out fear of its impossible depths. To observe with the naked eye Saturn 800,000,000 miles away on the other side of the Solar System, as we were able to after twilight for the last months of 2020, is to be transfixed by the beauty of the planet and the idea of its being. Seeing that minute, perfect circle of pale pink light in the darkness confirms we belong here with it. We connect in the pattern of mutual existence, the space between us shrinks, and loneliness is assuaged. We know a little more of where and what we are.   ‘Where are we?’ ‘What are we?’ ‘Why are we?’ These questions have been asked for thousands of years since the first enquiring gaze to a sky filled with stars connected us to its mystery. We know some of the answering stories, but the original words are gone along with sound of song or movement of dance. It is visual art which leaves its permanent mark. Stories willed to us by prehistoric ancestors are those directly told through the beauty, energy, and intelligence of the paintings and engravings made most often in the protective environment of caves.   With the exception of 2,300-year-old Chinese manuscripts concerning cave art, it is barely 150 years since prehistoric tools and artefacts were found by us and intelligently noticed. In 1879 María Sanz de Sautuola and her lawyer father, an amateur prehistorian, discovered the ravishingly beautiful paintings of bison herds on the walls of the Altamira cave in Spain. We do not need to know precise cultural causes for their creation. Why these paintings were made sits wordless in the works themselves. Strong sweeping lines describe with masterful accuracy the muscular forms of the bison. Perfect strokes lead down haunches to delicate cloven hooves which suggest the precision and speed of the animals. Love drove the early cave artists to constantly observe and practice—just as it has continued to drive artists throughout the ages to attempt to capture the mystery of the beauty of life. The Altamira masterpieces are of similar age to the fabulous 17,000-year-old paintings discovered on the walls of the Lascaux caves, France, in 1940. Since the invention of modern dating techniques, there has been a speeding up of discovering further Palaeolithic art in caves all over the world, including recently a 45,000-year-old painting of a magnificent purple pig in Indonesia.   Striving to know when human consciousness was born, we hope to find ourselves back there then to make more sense of being here now. Toolmaking was for a time considered the practice that defined humanity until we discovered that great apes, with whom we share common ancestors, modify natural objects to make tools for obtaining food and even as weapons.   No—the evidence we seek is not in artefacts but in art.   What is art, and from where? It comes from noticing everything around us with our conscious mind and from noticing everything around us with our subconscious mind. It comes from fears, desires, and dreams, the imagination and language that emerged during the separation between us and other animals. Fear became wonder. We turned our experience into recorded form intentionally in rituals of remembering, projecting, and invoking. It is love and beauty, physical and metaphysical—the very heart of being human.   Beauty is life itself resonating with more power than usual. We feel more intensely at the encounter whether the cause is sorrow or joy. In his Poetics  Aristotle said the experience given by the tragedies, a heightened, transformative awareness, opens to catharsis—the cleansing necessary to move on.   Ceremonies and rituals have used all functions of the arts to give access to expanded consciousness so we can let go of fear and embrace being more fully alive.   Recently the art of performance poetry was powerfully set at the centre of much-troubled America in a highly symbolic ritual—the Inauguration of President Biden. The ceremony took place on the stage of the opened cave of the Capitol. The young poet Amanda Gorman, her yellow coat the shaman’s cloak evoking the rising sun after so many months of darkness, her slender hands moving with grace and beauty to the rhythm of her words, entranced those who heard and saw. Her incantation enchanted; a spell to heal us out of sadness towards belief in the unity and goodness of our future.   It is only with principles of justice, the balance of sharing and generosity, that we will be able to build lasting, creative civilisations. This virtue is practiced in abstract form in art through various polarities including symmetry-asymmetry, order-chaos, stasis- kinesis, crystallinity-amorphism, and many others, which reflect the constant juggling of forces as life changes over time and new patterns emerge.   Reading about the 100,000-year-old painters’ workshop in the Blombos Caves, South Africa, filled me with the joy of fellowship. Adding pleasure to my sense of connection is a photo showing the landscape to be similar to that around my cave in Greece.[1] The organised system of paint production that was in hand in Blombos Cave suggests it was both studio and laboratory; art as the first science. Analysis of paint on neatly stacked pallets shows that animal fats were used as binders for the ochre pigments which were ground there. For the past 600 years linseed oil has been used to bind oil paint. The methods are closely allied.   Art has been the binder of human history for hundreds of millennia, fundamental to cultures in every part of the world. It connects us to our origins both through looking and through practice. It finds pattern in the unpredictable so that we can feel at ease, not just survive. It exercises human hand, eye, mind, and heart and supports self-discovery for confident participation in the world. This is what makes it so important in education.   The creative mind needs exercising as do all other parts of the body.   A function of art is to open up the cave in every one of us.   A major function of education is to help people discover their innate creativity. Art revolves round the exploration that draws these abilities out, validating imagination as well as contributing to intellectual learning and evolving morality. Advances made by educators during the past 40 years have focused on how to stimulate students’ creativity to enable them to participate more actively in their own education. Recently an unimaginative government has reversed this approach, re-establishing old, narrow formulae which are easier to administer and measure but disadvantage large groups of people. Now emphasised is training—for reiteration of data, rather than education—for expression of understanding. Two subjects which have been cut significantly are art and music.   Art has defined us for more than 300,000 years. How can we possibly expect to nurture civilisations if we remove from the process the core characteristic of our humanity?   Art practice uses body as well as mind. Eyes and hands are exercised by use which feeds neural pathways in the brain. Its combined physical, emotional, and intellectual stimuli give people of widely differing abilities a chance to find their way through the maze and to share their discoveries with each other. Collaborative projects can provide a format wherein students initially explore and express themselves individually, then form groups to exchange and design together, reinforcing the sense of belonging with pleasure of shared responsibility.   Academic subjects taught with art can engage students at many levels. Shortly before the first COVID-19 lockdown I was privileged to teach chemistry through art to a large group of 11-13-year-olds. The project was in praise of the Periodic Table of the Elements, which had filled me with wonder when I was their age. I wanted these students, too, to be inspired by the beauty of the structure of the atomic universe. Each participant chose an element to research and create as sculpture in response. The commitment of the group, the varied beauty of their sculptures, and the way they helped each other and discussed their methods and meanings, were inspirational. Academic children deserve encouragement to open and explore their inner poetic world with the practical exercises art offers; the less obviously academic deserve opportunities to identify with the processes of science which can be made more accessible through art. Young, inattentive minds can open suddenly to academic work after practicing art. Fig 2. Hexagons in Arpeggio (Willow Winston 2018, brass, variable configuration) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018. One example of the innumerable possible static positions. © Willow Winston. Fig 3. Hexagons in Arpeggio (Willow Winston 2018, brass, variable configuration) at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2018. Sculpture changed by visitors into different configurations. © Willow Winston. Simple exercises can open up experience in surprising ways. I often ask classes to start drawing with eyes closed. You never know where it will take you and that is the point. You don’t need to know where you are going. You just need something that sets you on the journey, that gives you confidence to dare.   Society publicly declares its relationship with art through the environment it makes. Psychological spaces erected throughout cities point to the quality of our shared inner life. Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly mechanistic. Undue profit prevails. Buildings are the new investment bank: 3D savings accounts that do not cater to the community visually, socially, or spiritually. Increasingly we neglect how to integrate with nature, the principle by which all beautiful cities of the world were built.   London City Island in the River Lea was developed recently on the dominating monetary principle. What an opportunity missed! No visual harmony is attempted between curving river and concrete. There stand dull boxes, most with dull-coloured cladding, seven to 27 storeys high, crowded top-heavy onto the slender peninsula. Strictly identical windows divide each façade. No change in rhythm, it is all spondee—the monotonous meter used by Virgil in his poem the Aeneid  to emphasise the brute horror of the one-eyed cyclops in his cave.   Why are we building towers that resemble high prisons? If we must build on a vast scale to make our civilisations function economically, much higher standards of public aesthetics are essential or we will destroy what we love. However, without laws that loosen the grip of corporations which control most of the building industry, without making planning processes transparent and truly accessible, without genuinely including communities in choices during development, and without splitting enormous profits, currently made by the few, for fairer sharing with communities where development takes place, our yearning for widespread humane architecture will be unrequited.   From junior education onwards, Environmental Studies, using both art and science, should become a core subject. By infusing art into a critical curriculum more of the population may consciously demand fulfilling environments, as with growing science awareness they are demanding action to counter climate change. These go hand in hand.   An imagined international cooperative, www.Super-Bauhaus.com,  would collate world heritage building design for study in every architecture and engineering school. Paintbrush and pencil would be used exclusively one day each week with some designs made with left or non-dominant hand to banish habit and release the unexpected. World music, too, would be included in courses to promote deeper exploration of rhythm in every aspect of building. Dance, including Laban’s theories on the body moving through Platonic geometries, would open minds to how shaped space affects emotion.   Effective application of these studies for large-scale building will require future generations of computers to incorporate organic function and accessible personal programming. Individual creativity could then be applied more directly than current limited, predictive programmes allow. The human race, of infinite variety, abilities, and potential, is a treasure of the world’s future. Dedicated to beauty and truth through art and science, the cave and tower could integrate in harmony. Fig 4. Thames Tide Rising (Willow Winston 2004). John Laing Equion Head Office, London. Willow Winston   Wide-ranging art practice, including engraving, painting, and theatre design, laid the foundations of Willow Winston’s sculpture. Her metal constructions embody in material form the beauty and emotional power of abstract mathematical concept. With work in public collections in the USA, the UK, and Canada, she has exhibited on both sides of the Atlantic and taught from postgraduate to primary level. Committed to collaborating on innovative educational methods, she is developing ways of using art to teach sciences. Recently she was appointed Patron of Centrepieces Arts Project for Mental Health. [1] Bruno David, Cave Art  (Thames & Hudson 2017).

Leonardo da Vinci is a constant of the Western cultural tradition. We grow up with a vague sense of Leonardo’s achievements, knowing him to be a general titan of art and science. Our cultural attachment to Leonardo, however, has expanded beyond the individual himself. In the mid-sixteenth century, Giorgio Vasari writes voraciously about Leonardo in Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects . This mammoth   work offers Vasari’s take on the ‘great’ artists of history and his own time, thus marking the birth of art history as a discipline in the West. Vasari enjoys great and lasting political, cultural, and artistic influence. His book is dedicated to the powerful Cosimo de’ Medici, and his Lives discuss and pay homage to well-established Florentine and Roman artists. This political patronage solidifies a precedent of systematic exclusion that we continue to navigate in our own contemporary. Reading Vasari with a critical eye, we understand that his artist biographies conceal just as much as they reveal.   History itself is a creative, authored, and imperfect account of the past. In the essay ‘What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo da   Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist’, art historian Patricia Rubin supports this claim. She writes, ‘Renaissance biography was a commemorative art. Its aim was to preserve and to exalt the names and deeds of worthy men in order to provide examples, both of actions and of their rewards’.[1] The Leonardo that we are introduced to and encouraged to remember is necessarily a mythologised version of Leonardo, prompting us to ask how exactly Vasari codifies the myth of Leonardo through biography, and how we might continuously be rehearsing this myth.[2]   The career of Leonardo, the original ‘Renaissance man’, is too polyvalent and illustrious to digest at once. In this research paper, I will focus on Leonardo the architect, specifically in regards to the Château de Chambord (fig 1). I will consider primary sources such as Leonardo’s own writing on and sketching of architecture, alongside secondary sources which allege his involvement in the design of Chambord. The central question that puzzles art historians is the extent to which the architect Domenico da Cortona relied on Leonardo’s original sketches in his ultimate design and construction of the French château. My objective, however, is not to make any final claims about design origins. Rather, it is to consider the legitimacy of Leonardo’s association with the project, and examine the value we attach to individual achievement. How does the knowledge that the great ‘artist-genius’ himself may have been the mind behind Chambord affect our appreciation of the already awe-inspiring architecture? Does Leonardo’s relation to this architecture necessarily change what we see? To better understand these questions, I will engage with Vasari and Rubin, as well as other art historians such as Anthony Blunt, Ludwig Heydenreich, Patrick Ponsot, and Hidemichi Tanaka. In doing so, I hope more clearly to discern the relationship between Leonardo the myth and Leonardo the architect. Fig 1. Château de Chambord, France. Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0 (disclaimer of warranties included), , via Wikimedia Commons (unmodified). . In his Lives , Vasari endeavours to elevate painting to its rightful place as an honorable liberal art, alongside grammar, rhetoric, and music. To do so, Vasari must distance art from its connection to manual labour and establish it as an intellectual pursuit, associated with divinity itself. Vasari’s affinity for melodrama comes across from the very start of Leonardo’s biography:   The greatest gifts often rain down upon human bodies through celestial influences as a natural process, and sometimes in a supernatural fashion a single body is lavishly supplied with such beauty, grace, and ability that wherever the individual turns, each of his actions is so divine that he leaves behind all other men and clearly make himself known as a genius endowed by God (which he is) rather than created by human artifice.[3]   In the soap opera that is Vasari’s Lives , Leonardo holds star status. Furthermore, Leonardo is an intellectual (‘Vasari’s portrayal of Leonardo, who is presented as a philosophizing artist’[4]). His art is so natural that it creates reality. He is a great man who is the creator and definer of his zeitgeist.[5]   Vasari explains away Leonardo’s inability to finish projects, arguing that it is a result of the artist’s unending curiosity. Leonardo famously only finished a handful of pieces in his career and although Vasari would have desired more completed pieces, he writes: ‘[T]he truth is that Leonardo’s splendid and exceptional mind was hindered by the fact that he was too eager and that his constant search to add excellence to excellence and perfection to perfection [is] the reason his work was slowed by his desire’.[6] As with all biography, the work tells us as much about the author as it does the subject. Vasari and his peers prize a certain heroic individualism and we must read his work within this context. If nothing else, the art historical canon is a study of imperfect practitioners who represent their imperfect realities. History, we are told, rhymes more than it repeats. As we explore the rhythm of the art historical canon, we unearth Vasari’s own biases and eccentricities riddled throughout his life of Leonardo.   Notwithstanding the author’s fingerprints on the work, Rubin argues that Vasari paints a lively picture of Leonardo, as a man we want to know and remember. She asserts that Vasari did ‘know Leonardo in ways that we cannot. Friends and acquaintances of Vasari’s … had known Leonardo and could supply their reminiscences. And there were certainly echoes of Leonardo’s words still to be caught in Florence in the 1520s when Vasari arrived there’.[7] Vasari’s extravagant and sometimes absurd tone is distracting, but Rubin reminds us that under the exorbitant layers lies a certain intimacy with Leonardo. Leonardo’s notebooks offer an insight into the artist’s perception of himself, but Vasari presents us with what ‘men’ saw when they turned their gaze towards Leonardo. Vasari’s contemporary cultural appraisal of Leonardo ‘is a fabrication, not a fiction’. Rubin goes on to write that ‘with Vasari’s biography, Leonardo entered history as a charming, complex and compelling character. He is associated with the highest goals of art and with the marvelous powers needed to investigate them’.[8] In his Lives , Vasari sets into motion the mythical Leonardo, who then marches across history, enchanting and engrossing us right up until the present day.   Complicating the narrative is intimidating and hard, but also enriching and essential. In her influential essay ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, Linda Nochlin writes that ‘when we ask the right questions about the conditions for producing art there will no doubt have to be some discussion of the situational concomitants of intelligence and talent generally, not merely of artistic genius’.[9] Nochlin contends that we must question norms and deeply ponder why they seem natural and set in stone. When we do so, Leonardo emerges from under the shrouded veil of the artist-genius, into the light of a much more complexly interesting artistic and political network of collaboration and cooperation.   The myth of Leonardo casts its shadow across the Château de Chambord, a formidable castle nestled in the French countryside. Built between 1519 and 1547, Chambord is palatial. It is symmetrically bookended by rounded corner towers, with a roof forested by chimneys, turrets, and spires. In his 1952 article ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Francis I’, Heydenreich argues that ‘it is known that in the last years of his life, on the banks of the Loire, Leonardo da Vinci worked out for his royal master—no doubt Francis I’s request—a vast project for the amelioration of the Sologne’.[10] These improvements were to take the form of a château named Romorantin, for the king’s mother. In line with Vasari’s characterisation of Leonardo, Heydenreich describes the artist-architect as ‘the most universal of Renaissance artist-philosophers’, and continues:   This castle of Chambord as it was in fact built—enormous and fantastic—is perhaps the only ‘ideal architecture’ of the renaissance ever carried out. And the singularity of its conception can only be explained by the intellectual cooperation of two minds gifted with similar creative ingenuity: Francis I and Leonardo da Vinci.[11]   All this talk of universality and idealism is simultaneously born out of and feeds into the myth of Leonardo. Heydenreich merges the political and the aesthetic, contending that Chambord’s uniqueness could only be the result of a collaboration between the king (munificent patron) and Leonardo (celebrated artist-genius).   Tanaka, in ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Chambord?’, endeavours to determine what hand Leonardo had in the architecture of Chambord. Much in step with Heydenreich, he writes:   None of Leonardo’s surviving architectural plans is clearly intended for the château. And yet the initial inspiration for Chambord—for its square keep on a central plan, with four round corner towers and a spectacular double spiral staircase at its heart—could hardly have come from an ordinary architect.[12]   Both scholars agree that Leonardo had a hand in the design of Chambord, but they differ in the extent to which they discern this participation.   Heydenreich is convinced that the singularity of Leonardo’s genius establishes his clear and substantial role in the design. By contrast, Tanaka concludes that it is likely Leonardo drew up initial plans for Romorantin and that, after Leonardo’s death, Cortona took them up for Chambord and naturally modified them. Tanaka asserts that Leonardo ‘must have prepared [the plans for Romorantin] in detail, so it is entirely possible that his plans for that palace were closely studied and even adopted by Cortona for the new project replacing it’.[13] Blunt echoes Tanaka’s argument—an argument that emphasizes the layers of cooperative design that went into the ultimate design of Chambord. Blunt, in his seminal book Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700 , expresses skepticism of Heydenreich’s unwavering   commitment to his thesis being based on stirring yet ambiguous evidence. Blunt asserts:   [Heydenreich] maintains that Leonardo was responsible for the conception of Chambord, but the arguments in favor of this view are not quite conclusive. On the other hand, it is certain that Leonardo designed the château which Francis intended to build for his mother at Romorantin, for which drawings survive.[14]   Leonardo died on 2 May 1519, and the planning of Romorantin stopped abruptly. It is likely, however, that Cortona dusted off these drafts when he began his work on Chambord that same year. This possibility of Chambord’s cooperative design does not fit within the bounds of Vasari’s singular definition of greatness: the individual and original genius.   Let us take as an example the attic windows at Chambord. Tanaka postulates that the similarities between Leonardo’s drawings for Romorantin and the actual design of Chambord’s stately windows are no coincidence: ‘A window which Leonardo drew for Romorantin is very similar to an attic window at Chambord, in that both are rectangular and have scallop-shell pediments as well as three ornamental vases’.[15] Tanaka considers it feasible that Leonardo never intended to build the château at Chambord, but that his designs were nonetheless used as a guide to the younger Cortona for his great architectural masterpiece.   As time passes and we move further from the spring of 1519, it becomes increasingly difficult to completely solve this particular Leonardo-related quandary. Over the years, the château has been remodelled and restored, making it harder to trace the genius of Leonardo, if it was there at all in the first place. ‘Subsequent modifications in a more refined French style have obscured the original Italian design … making it all the more difficult to detect the hand of Leonardo’.[16] This possible ‘Frenchification’ of original Italian design (which would correspond with Francis’ efforts to strengthen central power in France and expand the French empire) may explain Blunt’s problems with Heydenreich’s claim. Blunt notes that ‘in its general appearance Chambord is entirely French and still largely medieval. The massive round towers with their conical tops could be matched in any fifteenth-century château’.[17] In this way, capricious history plays games with art historians, who are certain. In ‘Les terrasses du donjon de Chambord: un projet de Léonard de Vinci?’, Ponsot adeptly concludes: ’D’une certaine manière, tous ces constituants mal connus du passage du temps contribuent à rendre plus difficile encore l’interprétation d’une œuvre hors du commun’.[18] (‘In a certain way, all of these little-known elements of the passage of time contribute to making an extraordinary work even more difficult to interpret’.) Because of the uncertain factors of time and memory, it is almost impossible to demonstrate decisively Leonardo’s connection to Chambord.   We always bring ourselves to the act of interpreting. This reality is beautifully articulated by Peter Schjeldahl: ‘I like to say that contemporary art consists of all art works, five thousand years or five minutes old, that physically exist in the present. We look at them with contemporary eyes, the only kinds of eyes that there ever are’.[19] Our attempts to discern any obvious trace of Leonardo in the remarkable Chambord prove fruitless. Because we expect solidity and non-change, that fact the Chambord has been formed and reformed by history surprises us. As Rubin adeptly writes, ‘Leonardo was not only a subject of Vasari’s history. He was subjected to history’.[20] In our desperation to loosely attribute art and architecture to Leonardo, perhaps we are asking the wrong questions and losing out on the much more interesting possibility of an interconnected history. Instead of asking whether Leonardo was the architect of Chambord and trying to conclusively trace his singular and genius hand, we could ask how Leonardo’s work and thought contributed to the artistry of others. How were others shaped by the legacy of Leonardo, just like Leonardo, while undeniably talented and remarkable, must have been shaped by the artists before him? I am less compelled by great men than by the societies that cultivate and receive them. Vasari provides us with an intimate, albeit veiled, connection to Leonardo. Cortona’s connection to Leonardo is real and significant. By investigating and acknowledging the legitimacy of other people’s work, we begin to observe a more real image of Leonardo: what men saw and now what people continue to see. Ruairi Smith   In May 2021, Ruairi Smith completed her undergraduate degree in Contemporary Studies and French at the University of King’s College, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada. Next, she will study Art History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland. At the time of this publication, she is tree-planting in northern British Columbia—spending her free moments reading MFK Fisher and playing euchre. [1] Patricia Rubin, ‘What Men Saw: Vasari’s Life of Leonardo Da Vinci and the Image of the Renaissance Artist’ (1990) 13(1) Art History 34. [2] Janette Vusich, ‘Leonardo: a legend in his own time’ (lecture, The University of King’s College, Halifax, Nova Scotia, 16 January 2020). [3] Giorgio Vasari, ‘The Life of Leonardo Da Vinci, Florentine Painter and Sculptor (1452–1519)’ in Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects  (first published 1568, reissue edn, Oxford   University Press 2008) 285. [4] Rubin (n 1) 35. [5] Vasari (n 3) 290. [6] ibid 292. [7] Rubin (n 1) 39-40. [8] ibid 43. [9] Linda Nochlin, ‘From 1971: Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ ( ARTnews , 30 May 2015) < www.artnews.com/2015/05/30/why-have-there-been-no-great-women-artists/ > accessed 9 March 2021. [10] Ludwig Heydenreich, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Francis I’ The Burlington Magazine (1952) 94(595) 277. [11] ibid 276, 285. [12] Hidemichi Tanaka, ‘Leonardo Da Vinci, Architect of Chambord?’ (1992) 13(25) Artibus Et Historiae 85. [13] ibid 94. [14] Anthony Blunt, Art and Architecture in France, 1500-1700  (Yale University Press 1999) 276. [15] Tanaka (n 12) 100. [16] ibid 85. [17] Blunt (n 14) 15. [18] Patrick Ponsot, ‘Les Terrasses Du Donjon De Chambord: Un Projet De Léonard De Vinci?’ (2007) 3(165) Bulletin Monumental 259. [19] Peter Schjeldahl, ‘The Art of Dying’ ( The New Yorker , 23 December 2019) < https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/23/the-art-of-dying > accessed 20 December 2020. [20] Rubin (n 1) 38.

Maggie Hoag is Deputy General Counsel, Americas, at the auction house Christie’s. She studied art law at Stanford, and was involved in the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting  Salvator Mundi for a historic $450 million.   CJLPA : Tell us a little about your background. How did your experiences culminate in a career at Christie’s, and could you summarize your career progression there?   Maggie Hoag : I have a university background in languages (French and Italian), art history, and architecture. After graduation, I joined Christie’s’ Chicago office as an intern. While in that position, I worked closely with the Trusts and Estates group, who focused on initiating and maintaining strong relationships both with clients and their estate planning advisors. I knew that I wanted to find a career that focused on art, but I wasn’t interested, nor did I think I would be successful, in being a specialist nor a curator, rather desiring a more business-focused role. I discovered that there was such a thing as ‘art law’ and—while I didn’t plan on ever being an attorney—the concepts intrigued me. I applied only to law schools that had a strong focus on art law and intellectual property law. At Stanford, I trained under one of the pioneers of the area, Professor John Henry Merryman, who focused heavily on cultural property law. I went on to find externships in the industry and then start my career at Hughes Hubbard & Reed in New York. They had a very strong museum law practice and I helped build a roster of clients including museums, cultural organizations, galleries, collectors, and artists. After six years in private practice, I landed at Christie’s. And now, it’s ten years later!   CJLPA : Could you describe your current role?   MH : My current role is Deputy General Counsel, Americas. Initially, when I started at Christie’s, I acted as the legal liaison for a variety of specialist departments, working as a partner though the auction and private sale consignment process, through the sale itself, and then handling any post-sale issues. Now my role is both more focused and more broad—it certainly diversified over the years. A few particular focus points are, firstly, playing the legal lead for the 20/21 department—which includes art from the Impressionist period to the present day—as well as spearheading the legal oversight of cultural property issues, primarily for the Antiquities and African/ Oceanic departments. I take a lead position on identifying deal risks, particularly with large multimillion-dollar collections of art from trusts and estates. I handle bits of employment law and intellectual property and—lately—have been wrapping my head around NFTs, blockchain, and cryptocurrency!   CJLPA : Where does your passion for law come from?   MH : Honestly, I don’t know that I can definitely state that I have a ‘passion for law’. I do have a passion for art and a passion for making deals happen with both sides coming out as pleased as possible. I love to solve problems and find pragmatic business-savvy solutions. I very much enjoy getting to know our clients and their legal representatives and figuring out how to navigate a deal that addresses their particular concerns while keeping my client, Christie’s as a whole, in a safe and profitable position. One fact about being a lawyer—you really are simply bringing a certain way of thinking logically to a situation. To me, law is more of a mindset. There is a misconception that lawyers get in the way and that their only role is to scare everyone about risks, but that is actually only a type of lawyering and not a type to which I subscribe.   CJLPA : What are some career highlights for you? And what is the most rewarding part of your role?   MH : I would have to highlight a few stellar consignments, including the Ebsworth Collection, the greatest privately owned collection of American modernist art that ever came to market, which set thirteen artist records with Edward Hopper’s Chop Suey  selling for over $91 million, the sale of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi , which sold for an historic $450 million to a deep pool of bidders and required what seemed like endless negotiation and research, and—of course—our recent sale of STAN, a nearly complete 67-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton, for nearly $32 million, nearly four times its pre-sale high estimate. STAN showed several aspects of what makes working at Christie’s so rewarding—many different teams coming together to figure out the complex legal and operational challenges involved with selling a dinosaur, and a novel pairing of our head of Scientific Instruments, Globes and Natural History department in London with our Chairman of our now-titled 20/21 department in New York. The research started in January 2019. The sale happened in October 2020. We had planned to have lines around Rockefeller Center so that New Yorkers and tourists alike could view this glorious beast. Instead, we got hit with COVID—no visitors allowed! Our operational team worked their magic so that STAN could face the Plaza through our windows. The bidding went on for more than 10 minutes, which is a lifetime in the auction world.   CJLPA : How are you involved in promoting art law to a new generation, or future practitioners?   MH : I take mentorship very seriously, on both a formal and informal level. I speak with law students and early law school graduates on a weekly basis as they look to shape their own career paths. Interestingly, I recently had the chance to hire onto my team two of my former interns whose interest in the field continued through their early careers until they each made their way back to Christie’s as in-house counsel. On a separate level, I speak at a variety of workshops and symposia, familiarizing more seasoned attorneys who may have never heard of or practiced in the field.   CJLPA : What tools do students need to practice art law? Where do you see most art lawyers come from: career changers or those who join the field as soon as they’re qualified?   MH : As noted earlier, I speak with many students who are interested in the field. They want me to say that having a passion in art and art law is enough. It’s not. The most important tool is that you need to be a good lawyer—a true generalist with the ability to make difficult and reasoned decisions. Other key skills are knowing when you can make a gut decision and when you need outside specialized advice. Having the confidence to make those decisions and being able to communicate to your clients why you are taking the position that you are is sacrosanct. A junior attorney has to be comfortable with herself in order to be respected by her clients. As far as joining the field, at least in the US, training at an established law firm is key. Heading straight from law school to a museum or auction house is both unlikely and impractical. An attorney practicing in-house at a museum or auction house does not have time to provide adequate training. While I no longer work the same immensely long hours and weekends as I did in private practice, any in-house attorney will tell you that there is no break to the day.   CJLPA : Why should a student study art law? What would you hope their next steps would be?   MH : Art law is usually a semester-long course so there isn’t much room to ‘specialize’ in it while at law school. However, a student can take advantage of the many internships and externships that cultural institutions offer (albeit unpaid!). Then you can see if you like it and hone in on what you like about it. For me, I know one of my skills is drafting contractual documents that don’t read like they are from 250 years ago—‘heretofore’, ‘whereas’—but instead make sense to a businessperson. That said, if I were drafting contracts for the sale of widgets that make a car engine run, I would go mad. At the end of the day, I am working on a contract for a masterwork of art that may have been in the same collection for generations. I get to see and love the art when it arrives at Christie’s. I get to participate in the excitement of someone else competitively bidding in a packed room full of collectors and dealers for the chance to hang that masterwork on her own wall. As far as next steps, speaking with art law practitioners is a good step, with those who are in-house or at a law firm, and with those in transactional and litigation practices.   CJLPA : Are there legal considerations in art law that you don’t find in other areas?   MH : Yes, a few. There are issues of authenticity and provenance. There are laws specific to cultural property and endangered species. In New York City, we have auction regulations with which to abide. No doubt we have to consider copyright laws in both the art and our images. The art market seems to be moving to a more regulated environment—certainly on the anti-money laundering front. Like the legal world generally, there is a lot to know, and you have to keep a finger on the pulse. Alexander (Sami) Kardos-Nyheim, the interviewer, is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of CJLPA .

In his seminal 1961 work The Destruction of the European Jews , Raul Hilberg proposed a thesis that sought to explain a perceived lack of Jewish resistance. Jews in the ghettos of Europe, he suggested, ‘hoped somehow that the German drive would expend itself. This hope was founded on a 2000-year old experience. In exile the Jews had always been a minority, always in danger, but they learned they could avert or survive destruction by placating and appeasing their enemies’.[1] In the case of the Nazis, this, for Hilberg, became a fatal assumption. It was, however, an uncomfortable argument, one which undermined suggestions of Jewish defiance and appeared to install an image of almost supine historical passivity in its place. Two responses in particular can be said to have emerged. One was to emphasise the immense difficulty involved in open resistance, particularly when armed. Weapons were nearly impossible to source in ghettos and camps, German forces were fully capable of destroying any rebels, and it was far from clear what the Nazis intended until for many it was too late. The second was to broaden the meaning of ‘resistance’ beyond narrower definitions. A process undertaken by scholars such as Meir Dworzecki and Nachman Blumental through the 1960s, it was often encapsulated by the Hebrew term amidah  (roughly, ‘stand’). Defiance, it was argued, could in fact be ‘spiritual’.[2] Now, it seemed, Jewish victims had claim to resistance after all.   Predictably, the bounds of ‘spiritual resistance’ have since then remained amorphous, relying less on a set inventory of actions, and more on perceived intent. Shirli Gilbert’s description of the concept’s historiographical usage, though focussed on music, is essentially valid for all activities which are said to comprise it, namely anything that serves as ‘a life affirming survival mechanism through which they [victims] asserted solidarity in the face of persecution, the will to live, and the power of the human spirit’. Acts which supposedly expressed this range from clandestine education and the creation of art and music, to the writing of diaries or chronicles and the splitting of rations.[3] Though it could be as simple as a general resolution to live with dignity, it is particularly these cultural and intellectual activities, so well studied in the context of the ghettos, that have dominated discussion of spiritual resistance and which appear more in redemptive post-war narratives from survivors—as Yiddish poet Leivick Halpern declared, ‘In mines, in bunkers, in sewage pipes, on the threshold of the gas chambers Jews sought strength in prayer, in poetry, in song’.[4] Central too to the idea, therefore, is its status as a collective phenomenon, enacted on behalf of all Jewry. For Nechama Tec, ‘what they [Jews] shared was a belief that no one was alone and that, with the help of others, resilience could turn into resistance—acting not just on behalf of oneself to survive, but on behalf of an entire community of people’.[5] Spiritual resistance by extension takes on an almost indestructible quality, which transcends the death of any one victim or the destruction of the body, and which characterises at the very least a broad swathe of Jewish victims’ lives under National Socialism.   In some respects, this has marked a welcome shift. Unlike unrealistic expectations of armed rebellion, spiritual resistance allows a more varied appreciation of how Jews might present defiance in the face of enormous persecution. There remains, however, much to criticise in the concept. By moving away from the often redemptive, expurgated accounts of post-war testimonies, whose narratives are perhaps inherently exceptional by virtue of their tellers’ survival, we can instead consider material written during the period in question. These sources contain an immediacy, uncertainty, and even banality of experience which better characterises the lives of most Jews in Nazi ghettos. This shifted focus can then let us identify the concept’s various flaws. Central among them is its tendency to overlook the physical reality of the ghettos and camps, assuming a sort of immortality to spiritual resistance which ignores how bodily exhaustion and degradations severely limited one’s capacity to engage in its practice. In turn, this extreme scarcity produced nearly inescapable divisions and hierarchies, precluding any simply collective face to resistance. Not only did this limit access to acts which might constitute spiritual resistance, such as cultural performance, it also affected their content. While statements from the likes of Halpern assume these activities were somehow innately dignifying, they could in fact reflect the grim, despairing reality of the ghetto. When what little remained of spiritual resistance is placed in this holistic context, it emerges as a fleeting, uncharacteristic experience in lives defined instead by hunger, division, and degradation.   *   Jacob Clemenski, member of the socialist Jewish Labour Bund, described post-war a particularly striking visit to a Warsaw Ghetto cabaret.   When we reached the nightclub the street was dark. My escort suddenly said to me: ‘Be careful not to step on a corpse’. When I opened the door the light blinded me. Every table was covered by a white tablecloth. Fat characters sat at them eating chicken, duck, or fowl … The audience crowding the tables was made up of the aristocracy of the ghetto - big-time smugglers, high Polish officers, and all sorts of big shots … The audience ate, drank, and laughed as if it had no worries.[6]   Though likely an embellished account, it approximates the truth—in the ghetto, spaces to escape its realities were often exclusive to the point of the grotesque. While a majority starved, a select caste could at least momentarily enjoy comforts that staved off the spiritual degradation others experienced. Indeed, by April 1941, Emmanuel Ringelblum, organiser of the secret Warsaw Ghetto archive Oneg Shabbat (‘Sabbath Delight’), could list 61 different cafés which provided food and music to a privileged clientele, often dependent on authorities in the Judenrat or even the Gestapo.[7] Nor was this unique to Warsaw. The Łódź Ghetto Chronicle, which documented life in the second largest of the Nazi ghettos, noted on 24 November 1943 how ‘small centres for the cultivation of music have sprung up over time; to be sure, only for a certain upper stratum’.[8]   Even more open performances tended to be marred by reminders of these inequalities. Dawid Sierakowiak, a young communist whose diaries provide invaluable insight into Łódź, recorded his attendance on 27 May of a Krawiecka Street concert. ‘The whole of select society gathered, bloated and dressed up. The gap between various classes of people in the ghetto grows wider and wider. Some steal to feed themselves, others feed themselves officially, while the rest are swelling up and dying of hunger’.[9] Hierarchy of a more formalised sort was also used to intrude upon cultural and educational efforts in the ghettos, often rendering them exercises in self-promotion. The Łódź Chronicle, which was almost certainly vetted by Judenrat head Chaim Rumkowksi, provides numerous examples of this. A September 1941 entry reporting on a children’s play ended by noting that, ‘After the Chairman’s speech, the little children made a ring around him on the stage and danced joyously accompanied by the sound of music and cheers for the ghetto’s first citizen’.[10] For Łódź diarist Leon Hurwitz, the motivation behind cultural programming was clear—‘the dictator [Rumkowski] organises concerts so that he can deliver speeches’.[11] Such divisions, however, were not solely the impositions of a ghetto elite upon a silently resentful majority. Indeed, what could morally constitute spiritual resistance was often disputed at the time. This would also refute any monolithic image of Jewry as presenting solely unified defiance, and it complicates easy assumptions that certain acts are necessarily resistive. For Hermann Kruk, a conservative Bundist in Vilna, proposals to open a ghetto theatre amidst such suffering appeared outrageous, and he resolved to boycott the event alongside the local Bund—‘the streets of the ghetto are to be strewn with leaflets: “About today’s concert. You don’t make a theatre in a graveyard!” The police and the artists will amuse themselves, and the Vilna ghetto will mourn’.[12] Riven by internal acrimony and inequality, spiritual resistance almost never presented the straightforwardly collective defiance that its historiographical proponents demand.   Under these pressures, it is perhaps unsurprising that the content of such cultural performance rarely tallied with a model of spiritual resistance. Shirli Gilbert’s powerful study of music in the Holocaust moves beyond Romantic notions of art as an inherently pure expression of high emotion. Though some concerts would play Beethoven and Mahler (in the Warsaw orchestra’s case, only to earn extra money for food), many of the most widespread and inescapable forms of ghetto music were far from uplifting or affirmatory of human dignity.[13] One song particularly popular in Warsaw, titled ‘Money, money’, focussed on the squalor and materialism of the ghetto, with lines such as ‘Money, money, money is the best thing, / Back home I ate oranges / Today I am eaten by lice and bedbugs … / The Jewish policeman is just a scoundrel, / Puts you on the train and sends you away to a camp’.[14] Though perhaps tinged with gallows humour, its basis remained a sense of grief and desperation. Indeed, in a survey of original songs composed in the Warsaw Ghetto, Gilbert concludes that ‘their spirit was most often one of sadness, despair, and cynicism’.[15] Their performance by street beggars and children in many case only compounded their depressed tone, and the activity was evidently one motivated by desperation for some sustenance rather than any desire to display spiritual defiance. The Łódź Chronicle documents a similar episode in an entry of 5 December 5 1941 on ‘the ghetto’s latest hit song’, the content of which ‘tells of the yekes  [recently arrived German Jews], forever hungry and searching for food, and the “locals” who make fun of them and quite often take advantage of their naïveté and unfamiliarity with local customs’.[16] Cultural performance here, far from being innately defiant, could in fact express contempt for the ghetto’s outgroups.   Moving beyond artistic creations to the practice of prayer furthers this picture of how content often became divorced from spiritual resistance. While prayer might appear an exemplary case of the phenomenon, the exhortation involved often tended more towards pleading for salvation than towards any pledge to resist Nazi oppression. Many of the best-preserved sources on the ghettos are from socialists and intellectuals less likely to be fervently religious, but indications nonetheless exist of a primary focus upon salvation rather than resistance. As Chaim Kaplan, a Warsaw Ghetto diarist and educator, recorded, the city’s Jews ‘poured its supplications before its Father in Heaven in accordance with the ancient custom of Israel’ following the announcement of the ghetto’s creation.[17] The rabbi of Grabow’s letter to the Łódź ghetto, warning inhabitants of the existence of the Chelmno death camp, finishes meanwhile with the lines ‘O Man, throw off your rags, sprinkle your head with ashes, or run through the streets and dance with madness. I am so wearied by the sufferings of Israel, my pen can write no more. My heart is breaking. But perhaps the Almighty will take pity and save the “last remnants of our People.” Help us, O Creator of the World!’[18] Characterised by supplication more than defiance, even prayer eschews easy identification with spiritual resistance.   An examination of the act of writing can bring together these two criticisms of spiritual resistance—that of compromised collectivity and that of compromised content. Often construed as a form of witnessing that promoted solidarity in the face of Nazi erasure, it is generally exemplified by the creation of Oneg Shabbat or by the likes of Kaplan, who declared in his diary his undying duty to ‘write a scroll of agony in order to remember the past in the future’.[19] It is in this context that historians such as Zoë Waxman can refer to ‘the collective response of other ghetto diarists’ as compared to those embedded in ghetto hierarchy, whose morally compromised roles ensure, according to Waxman, that they ‘“write not of a shared sense of suffering, but of isolation and disconnection’.[20] It would, however, appear that many Jews unconnected to ghetto hierarchy felt no particular impulse to express a sense of collective solidarity or dignified resistance. Sierakowiak’s diary is a case in point. His entries castigate ‘the rotten, bourgeois-bureaucratic basis on which the ghetto exists, and on which it will perish’, though he himself is quick to take advantage of it where possible. Entries range from angry documentation of popular abuses of the ghetto’s coupon system, to decrying Rumkowski’s creation of an exclusive and well-supplied ‘rest home’ for ghetto officials as ‘a disgraceful blotch on the carcass of the administration’.[21] Already possessing little faith in ‘native’ Łódź Jews, his initial consideration of new Western arrivals as ‘all Christians and Nazis’ is hardly indicative of common feeling either.[22] Yet perhaps his most startling repudiation of solidarity comes with his frail mother’s deportation, upon which his loyalties narrowed to her, and his misanthropy broadened to almost everyone remaining. His blame immediately fell upon foreign Jews as well as the Nazis. Her fate had been sealed ‘solely because of the evil hearts of two Czech Jews, the doctors who came to examine us’. His grief was compounded by the fact that others, even the dozens of children elsewhere in their apartment block, were not seized in her place. Wishing for a pogrom if the confusion might release her, he noted, ‘What do I care about another mother’s cry when my own mother has been taken from me!? I don’t think there can be ample revenge for this’.[23]   Sierakowiak’s increasing disregard for any collective empathy was something observed and acted out by many other diarists. Two other diaries from Łódź, written respectively by an unknown boy and unknown girl, come to similar conclusions. As the anonymous girl wrote, ‘You may fall and nobody will pick you up. A human being is worthless, dozens of them are not important. People are disgusting. Everybody cares only for himself’.[24] The anonymous boy, who wrote his entries in four languages in the margins of a French novel, saw events as a general condemnation of mankind. Though he sensed at points a ‘collective suffering’ among the Jews, his outlook was grim. ‘I am already unfortunately convinced’, he remarked, ‘that humanity (without exception, I believe, and the rest of it could behave in similar circumstances much like the Germans) is a sordid rabble of greedy beasts devoid of any pity or mercy’.[25] Perhaps particularly telling, however, is the fact that even projects such as Oneg Shabbat, which Waxman identifies as an exemplar of collective testimony, denounce the Jewish community for cowardice and division. In an entry for the archive entitled ‘The destruction of Warsaw’ documenting the massive deportations of later 1942, Yiddish novelist Yehoshua Perle declared, ‘Three times, 100,000 people lacked the courage to say: No. Each of them was out to save his own skin. Each one was ready to sacrifice even his own father, his own mother, his own wife and children’.[26] Though the Ghetto Uprising of April 1943 did substantially change subsequent narratives, it is a passage that illustrates well how collective form did not necessarily imply content to match. Instead, it could speak exactly of that ‘isolation and dislocation’ which Waxman attributes solely to compromised, hierarchical voices.   Given the unromanticised content which written sources tended to record, it follows that their motivation was rarely as simple as bearing collective testimony. Instead, the reason for keeping a diary was often an attempt to ensure one’s own emotional survival. This approaches an individualised, introspective sort of spiritual resistance. As Jeffrey Shandler notes in his study of the autobiographies of Jewish youth before the Holocaust, contemporary literary culture often impelled the opposite of a collective response—‘the act of reading almost invariably correlates with a marked turn toward introspection’ and ‘the discovery of a language with which to depict the inner self’, a development which in turned spurred the keeping of diaries.[27] For the anonymous girl, the idea of writing on behalf of Jewish community was evidently foreign; as she noted on 10 March 1942, ‘I talked to Mrs. Robard for a long while and quite involuntarily I let slip that I was writing a diary. She said she would like to read it. I’d made a silly mistake. I don’t want anybody to know about it and nobody is going to read it’.[28] Sierakowiak, meanwhile, dismissed the idea of leaving the ghetto for ‘work in Poznan’ partly because of his weakened strength, and partly because of the literary life he sporadically sustained: ‘I would miss my books and “letters”, notes and copybooks. Especially this diary’.[29] Even Kaplan, significantly older and self-consciously a historical witness, found at points a similar role for his diary, noting, ‘This journal is my life, my friend and ally. I would be lost without it. I pour my innermost thoughts and feelings into it, and this brings relief’.[30] Oneg Shabbat, meanwhile, again presents an unexpectedly mixed picture. For Ringelblum, his group’s exposure of Nazi exterminations to the foreign press was far from a universally redeeming achievement. It only meant that their deaths would not ‘be meaningless like the deaths of tens of thousands of Jews’.[31] Israel Liechtenstein, a contributor to Oneg Shabbat, reasserted its collective creed, asking in his last will and testament amid the Summer 1942 deportations, “May we be the redeemers of all the rest of the Jews in the whole world”. However, his conflicted sentiments are revealed in a reversion to a model of testimony as an individualised, exclusive act later in the document. He declares, ‘I only want remembrance, so that my family, brother and sister abroad, may know what has become of my remains. I want my wife to be remembered … Now together with me, we are preparing to receive death’.[32] Motivation for writing was never, therefore, as clear-cut as a simple desire to represent and immortalise all Jewry. Instead, its basis was often deeply and exclusively personal.   Moving beyond the psychology of the individual to consider that of the ghetto as whole further indicates why spiritual resistance foundered. The ephemerality of hopeful moods, dissipated by constant panics or disasters, posed particular challenges. Indeed, Jews within the ghetto often lacked what might be termed emotional autonomy—that is to say, a capacity for self-constructed, selective ‘spiritual’ development independent of terrible events which forced a response, often of grief or despair. For all Sierakowiak’s attempts to use literature and learning to provide comfort and find purpose, the final anguished lines of his entry on his mother’s deportation testify to its limits: ‘even the greatest rainfall can’t wash away a completely broken heart, and nothing will fill up the eternal emptiness in the soul, brain, mind, and heart that is created by the loss of one’s most beloved person’.[33] Josef Zelkowicz’s account of Łódź ghetto deportations in September 1942 demonstrates on a broader basis how quickly collective hopes and efforts might be raised and then dashed. Following news that the ill were to be deported, Zelkowicz records a strange, unified energy as the ghetto inhabitants set out to warn the rest of the community: ‘No one walked through the streets—everyone ran. And who had the strength or the time to run—No one at all!—So we took to the air ... Our wings were clipped at their roots, and yet we flew’. The endeavour was, however, quickly spoiled, in large part by the actions of the Jewish Police. ‘Hundreds of Jewish policemen stand guard; the executioners can do their work in peace. No one will hinder them … Now all who come running find their wings truly clipped … their throats issue such strange, crude, entirely non-human sounds ... It is incomprehensible how so many tears can come from weakened and exhausted people who haven’t the strength to breathe’.[34] Zelkowicz’s metaphor of wings collapses as the futility of the effort is revealed, and almost animalistic grief and helplessness returns. It was a reaction similar to that which the anonymous boy in Łódź recorded in more muted tones on 15 July 1944. Having been relieved at the end of deportations, his happiness was dashed by reports of a letter which described the mass execution of Jews. ‘I was overcome with joy but a few hours later’, he noted, ‘this joy of mine was spoilt’.[35] If spiritual resistance had to be sustained to truly characterise Jewish life in the ghetto, then it was this emotional fragility and shifting mood which often hindered it. As the Łódź Chronicle remarked, ‘The ghetto… lost the habit of thinking more than a few hours ahead’.[36]   What, therefore, was left of spiritual resistance in the ghettos? The admission that its practice was never remotely as collective, straightforward, or characteristic of ghetto life as historiography often suggests, does not demand its existence be entirely discounted. For certain individuals, such as Yitshok Rudashevski, it was a genuine and central mode of thought. Engaged deeply in Vilna communist youth clubs, he spoke with an optimism very rare in other diaries. As he noted on 11 December 1942, ‘We sat at meagre tables and ate baked pudding and coffee and were so happy, so happy. Song after song resounded… We have proved that from the ghetto there will not emerge a youth broken in spirit’.[37] Indeed, it appears that those involved in such groups were perhaps most likely to feel a sense of solidarity and defiance. It was in similar circumstances that Sierakowiak could lecture on Lenin to his young comrades or contemplate active resistance, even if he eventually rejected it.[38] Another strong case for spiritual resistance is made by charities such as ZTOS (Jewish Society for Social Welfare), CENTOS (Federation of Associations for the Care of Jewish Orphans in Poland), and TOZ (‘Safeguarding the Health of the Jewish Population’), which continued to operate in the ghettos, with German permission.[39] CENTOS, to take one example, was by the summer of 1941 serving 30,000 hot meals a day, with hot milk for 1,000 undernourished children.[40] Judging from Kaunas ghetto’s charitable sanitary organisation, the motivation may well have been consciously resistive. As one of its volunteer doctors put it, their activities aimed to ensure ‘that the young people should emerge from the ghetto in the glorious future, not sick, broken or weakened, but healthy, both physically and spiritually’.[41] It is also important to recognise the remarkable extent of reading and learning in the ghettos. Sierakowiak could devour Schopenhauer and learn several languages at once, while the anonymous girl from Łódź recorded how her friend, before being deported, passed her ‘many scientific books’ along with ‘the diaries of her friend and her friend’s brother’.[42] For some, this could present a method of mental escape, just as how certain inhabitants might find imperfect solace in the flawed cultural events of the ghetto. To discount such ghetto cultures in an effort to present an exclusively ‘dark’ reading of events tends towards the ahistorical.   Such admissions, however, should not prevent considering these phenomena in careful context. While Jewish charity efforts were impressive, they were rarely prohibited and could do little to prevent extreme hunger and desperation for a vast number. In Łódź, the Chronicle could baldly state by May 1942 that ‘the great majority of the ghetto is starving’, while Corni estimates that by the year’s close 760,000 had already died of ‘natural causes’ in Polish ghettos alone.[43] Moreover, whether many of these activities, particularly reading and schooling, were genuinely conceived of as spiritual resistance by those who engaged in them, can seem dubious. This suggests the term is better understood as a retrospective label applied by historians, but comparatively unrecognised by those in the ghettos. Indeed, it is very hard to find more than one or two authors who explicitly employ terms such as ‘resistance’ or ‘defiance’ in this context. For both Sierakowiak and Rudashevski, these activities were often simply a way to pass the day. As the former noted in typical fashion on 19 April 1941, ‘There is no work, only rain. I’m wandering around, idling all day long. Together with a group of friends, Communists, we’ve started to learn Esperanto’.[44] For Rudasehvski, meanwhile, writing on 17 September 1942, ‘It is a terrible time when you cannot settle down to some kind of work and you waste days on nothing’.[45] While defiance did enter the latter’s rhetoric as his involvement in communist youth clubs continued, it appears that those elements of ghetto life which might seem to survive as spiritual resistance, were often the least conscious or articulated. To categorise them as resistive, therefore, may simply divorce them from the reality in which they were actually understood.   Even had reading and learning always constituted defiance, however, they were still restricted. Attempts at schooling, for example, often cited as spiritually resistive, still constituted a severely limited enterprise undertaken in totally unfit classrooms. In Łódź, the proportion of children in elementary education was slightly higher than the fifth or so taught in Warsaw, but schools were banned by Rumkowski by the summer of 1942 amid massive deportations and fear they reduced the number available to work.[46] For the high school classes of 1939-41, only 700 students registered in the ghetto ‘gymnasium’. In a population of 160,000 or so, these were not significant figures.[47] Ghetto writing was, similarly, almost certainly a minority activity. As Waxman admits, ‘no study of testimony can be comprehensive, as the vast majority of victims perished without ever writing down their experiences’.[48] The fact, moreover, that some attempted to represent all Jewry in their accounts had little relevance to the experience of the vast majority to which they laid claim, unaware as it was of activities such as Oneg Shabbat. Even more formalised events only constituted at most a few hours a month for the majority of inhabitants, marred by unwelcome reminders of reality. Sierakowiak’s remark that the Krawiecka Street concert ‘was just better background for meditation on the theme “what I would be eating now if there were no war…”’ is but one example which belies the Chronicle’s more hopeful assessments.[49] Ultimately, spiritual resistance could do little in its limited expressions to cure the ghetto’s iniquities. As Adam Czerniakow wrote on 8 July 1942, ‘I am reminded of a film: a ship is sinking and the captain, to raise the spirits of the passengers, orders the orchestra to play a jazz piece. I have made up my mind to emulate the captain’.[50]   *   In this vein, it is worth briefly exploring what did  characterise Jewish lives in the ghettos. This will further demonstrate the minimal salience of ‘spiritual resistance’ to the large majority of inhabitants. While it is perhaps dangerous to identify any experiences of too specific a sort, the most common on a general level appear to be hunger, division, and degradation. It was the first of these, hunger, and especially the murderous scarcity that emerged in all ghettos (with the partial exception of Theresienstadt), which induced many of these communities’ worst dysfunctions. It is not therefore surprising that food became the central, endlessly recorded preoccupation of almost all ghetto sources. As Kaplan remarked, ‘Our constant song—potatoes! ... It is our whole life. When I am alone in my room for a few moments of quiet, the echo of that word continues in my ears. Even in my dreams it visits me’.[51] The desperate tactics to obtain more rations were grimly noted by Adam Czerniakow, head of the Warsaw Judenrat. ‘In the public assistance shelters’, he wrote, ‘mothers are hiding dead children under beds for 8 days’.[52] Indeed, such were the pressures created by extreme shortage that resentment within the ghetto fractured the family unit, extending beyond the usual targets of foreign Jews and the Judenrat. The Chronicle’s very first entry, for example, recorded an eight-year-old boy informing on his parents to the Jewish Police, demanding they be punished for stealing his food.[53] It was an experience shared by the anonymous boy too, consumed by guilt over eating his younger sister’s food, and one which Seriakowiak recorded with increasing anger towards his father, whose greed he blamed for ‘pushing mum into her grave’.[54] Division did not, it must be noted, imply ‘atomisation’—that is to say, a total breakdown of all networks. Vital connections remained which sustained Polish Jews and excluded their Western peers, ensuring that the former were at points literally half as likely to die of hunger.[55] Yet these networks were hardly likely to lead to sustained armed resistance, which characterised ghetto life even less than its spiritual counterpart. Undertaken at desperate moments where the choice was liquidation or a last-stand fight, it generally involved small numbers. Of the 50,000-60,000 Jews still living in Warsaw’s ghetto in April 1943, between 250 and 800 took up arms.[56]   It is in this context therefore, that common feeling and compassion tended to dissolve. The general reaction to the ending of deportations provides a particularly striking case of this. Rather than prolonged grief for those taken, the typical response was happiness at survival and delight at the greater amounts of food to go around. As Zelkowicz noted in the Łódź Chronicle following giant actions in September 1942, ‘There is not the slightest doubt that this was a profound and terrible shock, and yet one must wonder at the indifference shown by those … from whom loved ones had been taken. It would seem that the events of recent days would have immersed the entire population of the ghetto in mourning for a long time to come and yet, right after the incidents, and even during the resettlement action, the populace was obsessed with everyday concerns—getting bread, rations, and so forth—and often went from immediate personal tragedy right back into daily life’.[57] Writing privately, he remarked that ‘nearly three years in the ghetto have schooled the people well. They have learned to feel so at home with death that death has become more obvious and more ordinary than life’.[58] Even Sierakowiak, admittedly grief-stricken at his mother’s deportation, was soon forced to return in his diary to his preoccupations of work, food, and reading. The anonymous boy from Łódź remarked that ‘It is the best indicator of our unbelievable psychological degradation that in the ghetto people are equally upset by the disappearance of a few bites of bread and by the death of their own father’. While this may have been an exaggeration, it certainly caught some of the truth.[59]   The extent to which communal feeling might collapse even beyond the context of food is demonstrated by the case of Jacob Gens, head of the Vilna Ghetto. When his Jewish police participated in the Nazis’ extermination of fellow Jews in October 1942, having bargained the number to be killed down, many responded with weary sympathy. As the Bundist Herman Kruk remarked, ‘The tragedy is that the … public mostly approves of Gens’s attitude. The public figures that perhaps this may really help’.[60] A sense of humiliation was therefore to be expected among many ghetto inhabitants. Again and again, the language of bestialisation arises in witnesses’ accounts. The anonymous girl in Łódź declared, ‘Our life is so tragic, so degraded. They treat us worse than pigs’.[61] Sierakowiak wrote, ‘We are not considered humans at all; cattle for work or slaughter’. The anonymous boy noted, ‘We are slaves devoid of free will, who are happy when trodden upon and beg only that ignore not be trodden to death’.[62] Even Rudashevski found pessimism hard to escape in holistic assessments of the ghetto: ‘Our life is a life of helpless terror. Our day has no future’.[63] All four, moreover, are presumed to have been eventually exterminated along with their relations. As even Robert Rozzet, an advocate of an enormously broad view of resistance, will admit, no optimistic account can hope to ‘overshadow our understanding of the heart of the Holocaust, which is comprised of terrible suffering, impossible dilemmas and death’.[64]   Spiritual resistance is therefore of limited utility in understanding life in the Nazi ghettos. In particular it underestimates the suffocating pressures which tended to break efforts at collective defiance, foster internal divisions, and irreparably colour all activities which are assumed to have constituted its practice. Within the broader context of the vast majority of inmates’ lives, it was at most an ephemeral phenomenon, subordinated to greater concerns. Indeed, perhaps most troubling of all is the concept’s tendency to ignore the physical pressures upon ghetto inhabitants. The march of starvation, disease, and fatigue disintegrated attempts at spiritual resistance, if they were even recognised as such by those who performed them. Whilst Warsaw’s Rabbi Nissenbaum may have declared that ‘[t]he enemy wants the soul but the Jews offer their bodies instead’, most found the two to be fatally interlinked.[65] Sierakowiak constantly noted his failing capacity to write and learn as his body degraded—on 29 April 1942, he wrote, ‘I don’t have any will, or rather any strength, for studying … Time is passing, my youth is passing, my school years, my power and enthusiasm are all passing’. Eight days later, he remarked, ‘we are in such a state of exhaustion that now I understand what it means not even to have enough strength to complain, let alone protest’.[66] Oneg Shabbat, meanwhile, records volunteer teachers despairing at the difficulty of teaching to the starved. As one put it, ‘How do you make an apathetic, hungry child, who is all the time thinking about a piece of bread, interested in something else?’[67] No dichotomy existed between ‘body’ and ‘soul’—as the former failed, so did the latter. If spiritual resistance can be salvaged, therefore, it must be placed within a context of physical suffering and applied sparingly, conceived more as an individual and often failed attempt   to preserve the self. It is typified by the introspective writers of the ghetto, rather than the collective, consciously defiant framework often used. What was needed in such an environment was not resistance but a brutal process of adjustment—the narrowing of compassion, the repression of the emotional damage wrought by the personal tragedies almost all underwent in the ghettos, and a doomed focus on survival. Trapped between such impulses, spiritual resistance was for most a tainted and fleeting experience. Nathaniel Rachman   Nathaniel Rachman is a recent History graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford. He will start an MPhil in American History at Christ’s College, Cambridge, this October, with a focus on the New Deal era. In In his spare time he is an amateur cat fancier. [1] Karel C Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair (Harvard University Press 2004) 69. [2] Or Rogovin, ‘Between Meir Dworzecki and Yehiel Dinur: amidah in the writing of Ka-Tzetnik 135633’ (2018) 24(2) Holocaust Studies 203, 203-05; Robert Rozett, ‘Jewish Resistance’ in Dan Stone (ed), The Historiography of the Holocaust  (Palgrave Macmillan 2004) 345. [3] Shirli Gilbert, Music in the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2008) 2, 7. [4] ibid 11. [5] Nechama Tec, Resistance: Jews and Christians who Defied the Nazi Terror  (Oxford University Press 2013) 15. [6] Saul Friedländer, The Years of Extermination (HarperCollins 2008) 149. [7] Gilbert (n 3) 28. [8] ibid 12. [9] Dawid Sierakowiak, The Diary of Dawid Sierakowiak (first published 1960; Kamil Turowski tr, Oxford University Press 1998) 174. [10] Lucjan Dobroszycki, The Chronicle of the Łódź Ghetto 1941-1944  (Yale University Press 1984) 75. [11] Gustavo Corni, Hitler’s Ghettos  (Arnold 2003) 154. [12] Friedländer (n 6) 383. [13] ibid 151. [14] Gilbert (n 3) 21-3. [15] ibid 39. [16] Dobroszycki (n 10) 92. [17] Zoë Vania Waxman, Writing the Holocaust (Oxford University Press 2008) 11. [18] Dobroszycki (n 10) xxi. [19] Corni (n 11) 8. [20] Waxman (n 17) 9, 25. [21] Sierakowiak (n 9) 79; Corni (n 11) 174. [22] Corni (n 11) 182. [23] Sierakowiak (n 9) 218-6 [24] Alexandra Zapruder, Salvaged Pages  (Yale University Press 2002) 236. [25] ibid 375. [26] Friedländer (n 6) 528. [27] Jeffrey Shandler, Awakening Lives  (Yale University Press 2002) xxix-xxx. [28] Zapruder (n 24) 236. [29] Sierakowiak (n 9) 174. [30] Corni (n 11) 8. [31] Waxman (n 17) 16. [32] ibid 32. [33] Sierakowiak (n 9) 226. [34] Alan Adelson and Robert Lapides (eds), Lodz Ghetto  (Viking 1989) 322-3. [35] Zapruder (n 24) 383. [36] Dobroszycki (n 10) xxix. [37] Zapruder (n 24) 217. [38] Sierakowiak (n 9) 107. [39] Dan Michman, ‘Jewish Leadership in Extremis’ in Stone (ed, n 2) 333. [40] Corni (n 11) 213. [41] ibid 215. [42] Sierakowiak (n 9) 9; Zapruder (n 24) 232. [43] Dobroszycki (n 10) 169; Corni (n 11) 218. [44] Sierakowiak (n 9) 81. [45] Zapruder (n 24) 206. [46] Corni (n 11) 211. [47] Adelson and Lapides (n 34) xiv. [48] Waxman (n 17) 2. [49] Sierakowiak (n 9) 164-5. [50] Friedländer (n 6) 395. [51] Waxman (n 17) 26. [52] Corni (n 11) 137. [53] Friedländer (n 6) 146. [54] Sierakowiak (n 9) 219. [55] Corni (n 11) 182. [56] Waxman (n 17) 46. [57] Dobroszycki (n 10) 255. [58] Adelson and Lapides (n 34) 325. [59] Zapruder (n 24) 376-7. [60] Friedländer (n 6) 436-7. [61] Zapruder (n 24) 241. [62] ibid 375. [63] ibid 198. [64] Rozett (n 2) 358. [65] Corni (n 11) 146. [66] Sierakowiak (n 9) 160-4. [67] Friedländer (n 6) 150.

Fig 1. Portrait of Lucrezia Panciatichi (Bronzino 1545, oil on panel, 102 x 85cm). Uffizi, Florence. Wikimedia Commons. accessed 14 June 2021. The Petrarchan ideal of beauty runs as a fortified vein through art history’s marble foundation. In his sonnets, the poet Petrarch idealises and idolises his object of desire, the beautiful and moral Laura. It is precisely here, in our reading of Petrarchan poetry, that we find the root of the blond and milky-white female sitter—a European standard of beauty that haunts us to this day. In his 1548 treatise On the Beauty of Women , Agnolo Firenzuola endorses this narrowly particular vision of the ‘beautiful woman’. Firenzuola’s writing stems from and contributes to the apparatus of canonical art history, where our ideals and standards are ratified in male-centric European societies and codified by male-centric European institutions. Agnolo di Cosimo, known to us by his sobriquet Bronzino, paints a strikingly distinguished portrait of a female sitter in his Lucrezia Panciatichi  (c 1540). As I assess Bronzino’s Panciatichi , I am convinced that the painter is under the influence of  Petrarchismo . I am equally convinced, however, that while Bronzino   may not break the conventions of ideal beauty, Panciatichi holds a firm command over her viewership and rejects the role in which she has been cast: object of desire.   In his dialogue, Firenzuola brandishes six essential qualities of ideal beauty. He asserts:   When a woman is tall, well-shaped, carries herself well, sits with grandeur, speaks with gravity, laughs with modesty, and finally exudes the aura of a queen, then we say, ‘That woman seems majestic; she has majesty’.[1]    Although majesty is a moral quality, rather than a bodily comportment, I am nevertheless able to picture Panciatichi fulfilling these majestic criteria. Bronzino paints Panciatichi centred and symmetrically upright—evenly lit as she refuses to be swallowed up by her shadowed surroundings. Along the balanced plane, to the sitter’s left and right, stand Roman columns, a nod to the order and rationality of antiquity. Within this grand setting, there is a certain grandeur in her posture and the symbols of wealth she wears. Panciatichi is draped in rose satin and burgundy velvet. The artist’s careful use of shadow creates delicate textural folds and shapes a delightfully luxurious puff and a fashionably rumpled sleeve. The manner in which she is dressed reflects not only Panciatichi’s social status but also her moral virtue. We gaze at an elegant, charming, and graceful sitter, imagining that she does indeed speak with gravity and laugh with modesty.   Bronzino’s smooth brushstrokes lend a balance and clarity to Panciatichi’s face. Her hair, tightly pulled back, is coloured in step with Firenzuola’s decree that ‘the proper and true color of hair should be blonde … tan, tending toward a darker hue, and two brush-strokes of this will be enough for us’.[2] The artist also matches the litterateur’s colour palette in Panciatichi’s lips. Her mouth is symmetrical, proportioned to the rest of her face and ‘hemmed by Nature with two lips that seem to be of the finest coral, like the edges of a most beautiful fountain’.[3] Below stretches her ivory neck. It is almost unimaginably long: ‘one likes a throat with very delicate skin, slender, long rather than short’.[4] Here, Bronzino inhabits Firenzuola’s ‘one’, further universalising the arbitrary female ideal.   We travel down the rounded slope of Panciatichi’s shoulders, along the contoured pleats of her dress, and our eyes rest finally on her hands. Her left hand sits lightly at the rounded edge of the armrest and discloses a wedding ring. Bronzino’s care in painting his sitter’s fingers meets Firenzuola’s criteria: ‘Fingers are beautiful when they are long, straight, delicate, and slightly tapering toward the end, but so little as to be scarcely perceptible’.[5] Panciatichi’s right hand keeps her spot in a book, a gesture which reminds me of Sofonisba Anguissola’s Self-Portrait , where Anguissola too paints herself holding an open book. I am all too aware that Bronzino’s Panciatichi is likely in the midst of reading a prayer book, and the painter wishes to signal her religious piety. Still, I am happy for my Anguissola association. For just a moment, the unintending Bronzino is excluded from a secret that I hold with Anguissola and Panciatichi.   I keep returning to Panciatichi’s eyes. Bronzino opts to paint her facing the viewer, instead of in profile. Painting in profile is a common tool with which artists emphasise the female sitter’s modesty. Thus, Bronzino initiates our intense and intimate relationship with Panciatichi. There is a severity to her expression, an unflinching stillness that demands our attention and respect. Although the painting is a closed composition—Bronzino hems in his sitter on the canvas—I have the unshakable feeling that she is gazing out from the strictures of the ornate gold frame beyond me. In his privileging of sight, Firenzuola unsurprisingly prizes the eyes above all else. He writes that through the eyes ‘in which the noblest and most perfect of all the sense resides, through which our intellect gathers, as through windows of transparent glass, everything is visible’.[6] Panciatichi’s eyes are alert but she glazes past us viewers. If Bronzino’s goal is to render his sitter’s eyes ‘windows of transparent glass’ where ‘everything is visible’, he falls short. The beautiful Panciatichi does not shirk our judgemental attention. Rather, she subtly eludes her viewership all together. Her gaze incites a brief moment of insecurity: in our innate introversion as viewers, we are left feeling uneasy. Ruairi Smith   In May 2021, Ruairi Smith completed her undergraduate degree in Contemporary Studies and French at the University of King’s College, on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in Nova Scotia, Canada. Next, she will study Art History at the University of St Andrew’s in Scotland. At the time of this publication, she is tree-planting in northern British Columbia—spending her free moments reading MFK Fisher and playing euchre. [1] Agnolo Firenzuola, On the Beauty of Women (first published 1548; Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray trs, University of Pennsylvania Press 1992) 41. [2] ibid 41. [3] ibid 28. [4] ibid 60. [5] ibid 67. [6] ibid 26.