by Judy Jones
The death penalty was imposed in an arbitrary manner, with no clear criteria for deciding who would live and who would die.
Because it was so seldom used, the death penalty never really functioned as an effective deterrent.
Society’s standards had evolved to the point where the death penalty, like branding and the cutting off of hands, constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
To make matters more painful, there had already been an informal moratorium on executions in 1967, so that six hundred people now sat on death row, awaiting the final decision. Even those justices who favored capital punishment squirmed at the idea of having that much blood on their hands.
In the end, the Court took the wishy-washy stance that capital punishment was unconstitutional at that time because it was arbitrarily and capriciously imposed. Only two justices out of the five-man majority thought the death penalty was cruel and unusual punishment. The Court’s decision left everyone confused as to what to do next—but not for long. Within three years, thirty-five states had redesigned their death-penalty laws to get around the Court’s restrictions, and public-opinion polls showed Americans to be overwhelmingly in favor of capital punishment, thereby disproving at least one of the petitioners’ arguments: that society had evolved beyond the death penalty. In 1975, the Court ruled on the existing laws in five states and found only one (North Carolina’s) to be unconstitutional. In 1976, it reversed its stand altogether; ruling on a batch of five cases, it found that the death penalty was not cruel and unusual punishment per se. Still, no one wanted to cut off the first head. It wasn’t until 1977, when Gary Gilmore broke the ice by insisting that the state of Utah stand him in front of a firing squad, that anyone was actually executed. The first involuntary execution took place in 1979, with the electrocution of John Spenkelink, who had been reprieved by the Furman decision seven years earlier. Since then there have been around one thousand executions nationwide, most by lethal injection. Texas leads the country with the highest number of executions per capita. Why aren’t you surprised? ROE v. WADE (1973)
The decision that legalized abortion as part of a woman’s right to privacy (although Justice Blackmun, who wrote the majority opinion, spent many months trying to prove that abortion was part of the doctor’s right to privacy). According to the opinion, the state only has the right to intervene when it can prove it has a “compelling interest,” such as the health of the mother. As for the fetus, its rights can begin to be considered only after the twenty-sixth week of pregnancy. The Court thus tiptoed around the quagmire of moral and religious disputes raging over the abortion issue and based its decision on the relatively neutral ground of medicine. However, this was not the most airtight of Supreme Court opinions, and it came under constant, ferocious attack for the next twenty years. The state of Texas, for instance, filed a petition for rehearing, comparing the Court’s assertion that a fetus was not a person before the third semester of pregnancy to the Court’s 1857 decision that Dred Scott was not a person. In speeches and articles preceding her ascension to the Supreme Court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg publicly opined that the Court might have avoided a lot of headaches if it had simply based its decision on the grounds of equality instead of privacy and had refrained from getting enmeshed in the gory medical details. Still, by 1993 the court had reaffirmed women’s basic right to abortion so many times that the storm center had shifted from the issue of abortion itself to questions like who should pay for it. Meanwhile, some radical antiabortionists had given up on legal challenges altogether and, in the spirit of the times, just started shooting doctors. Under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, abortion opponents shifted tactics to focus on teenagers. By 2005, forty-four states had laws on the books requiring teens either to notify or get consent from their parents before getting an abortion. Most states allow adolescents to go to court for a waiver if they can show that their parents are, say, alcoholics or abusive. So for the moment, any fifteen-year-old who’s savvy enough to go to court on her own and persuade a judge of the merits of her case can still consider abortion an option. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA REGENTS v. ALLAN BAKKE (1978)
The clearest thing to come out of this, the Court’s first affirmative-action case, was that it probably was not a good idea to try to stage a media event around a Burger Court decision.
The story line, in case you lost it in all the confusion, was as follows: Allan Bakke, a thirty-eight-year-old white engineer, had twice been refused admission to the University of California’s medical school at Davis, despite a 3.5 college grade-point average, which was well above the 2.5 required for white applicants and the 2.1 required for minorities. Concluding that he’d been passed over because of Davis’ strict minority admissions quota, Bakke took his case to the Supreme Court, charging reverse discrimination. The media jumped all over Bakke, in part because it was the first time affirmative action had been tested in the courts, and everyone was anxious to see how much the mood of the country had changed—for better or worse—since the Sixties; in part because the Burger Court’s somewhat shoddy civil-rights record promised to lend an edge to the whole affair.
The outcome, however, was a two-part decision that merely left most people scratching their heads. The Court declared itself firmly behind the principle of affirmative action, but just as firmly behind Bakke’s right to get into medical school. In effect, it said: Principles, yes; quota systems, no. Some civil-rights groups decided to take this as a resounding success, others as a crushing blow; ditto for the opposition. Some said it left the door open for future affirmative-action measures (there are other ways to promote racial balance besides quota systems, the Court pointed out, and no one was ruling out an institution’s right to take race into account as one factor among many when deciding on an applicant’s qualifications). Others insisted it left an even wider margin for businesses and universities to discriminate against minorities. Some legal scholars pointed out inconsistencies and downright lapses of reason in the justices’ opposing opinions (the Court was split 5–4); others declared the everyone-gets-to-take-home-half-a-baby decision a fine example of judicial wisdom.
Although the haziness of Bakke pretty much ensured that the courts would be gnawing on affirmative-action cases for years to come, it was the press that was really left holding the bag. Screaming headlines that contradicted each other (“Court Votes ‘Yes’ to Bakke”; “Court Votes ‘Yes’ to Affirmative Action”) just made a lot of newspapers look silly and, after a couple of frustrating go-nowhere specials, TV reporters had to conclude that legal ambiguities did not make for optimum prime-time fare. The rest of us got a taste of how unsatisfying Supreme Court decisions would be for at least the next fifteen years.
Ten Old Masters
In a way, we’re sorry. What we had really wanted to do was talk about our ten favorite painters. Then we got to thinking that it should be the ten painters whose stock is currently highest, who are most in vogue in a crudités-and-hired-bartenders way. (Whichever, you’d have heard about Piero della Francesca, Caravaggio, Velásquez, and Manet, all notably absent here.) Then we realized that, if you were anything like us, what you really needed was remedial work, not a pajama party or a year in finishing school. So, here they are, the ten greatest—we suppose that means something like “most seminal”—painters of all time. GIOTTO (GIOTTO DI BONDONE)
(c. 1266-c. 1337)
Giotto’s Deposition
As the little girl said in Poltergeist: “They’re heeere!” By which we mean artists who sign their work, travel in packs, and live lives about which something, and sometimes too much, is known. Before Giotto (that’s pronounced “JOT-to”), the artist hadn’t counted for any more than the stonemason or the glassblower; from here on in, he’d be accorded a degree of respect, authority, and press unknown since ancient Greece. Also in abeyance since the Greeks: the human body, about which the courtly and rigid Byzantines—Giotto’s only available role models—had felt some combination of deeply ashamed and not al
l that interested anyway. Giotto, out of the blue (and we’re waist-deep in the Middle Ages, remember), turned mannequins into people, dry Christian doctrine into vivid you-are-there narrative, mere colored shapes into objects that seemed to have weight and volume, and his native Florence into the art world’s red-hot center for the next 250 years. No painter would prove either as revolutionary or as influential as Giotto for six centuries, at which point Cézanne opined that eyewitness-style reporting on life might not be the ultimate artistic high.
KEY WORKS: The Arena Chapel frescoes in Padua, thirty-three scenes from the lives of Christ and the Virgin Mary and her folks.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Duccio, from neighboring Siena, where life was conservative, aristocratic, and refined, and where ballots were cast for beauty rather than truth. MASACCIO
(TOMMASO DI SER GIOVANNI DI MONE)
(1401-1428?)
Played Elvis Presley to Giotto’s Frank Sinatra. That is, Masaccio took his predecessor’s three-dimensional realism and put some meat on it, encouraged it to flex its muscles and swivel its hips, enlarged the stage it was playing on, and generally shook the last vestiges of middle age(s) out of the whole performance. Thus begins the Renaissance, the era that rediscovered Greece and Rome; that posed the questions “Why?” “How?” and “So what?”; that promoted such novelties as humanism, freedom, and the idea of leading a full life; and that—casting its gaze on the lot of the artist— came up with a support system of studios, patrons, and apprentices. With Masaccio (a nickname that equates roughly with “Pigpen”), we’re at that Renaissance’s heroic beginnings, smack-dab in the middle of boom-town, no-holds-barred Florence, and we’re watching as the new sciences of perspective and anatomy encourage painters to paint things as they appear to the eye. That doesn’t, however, mean you’re going to get off on Masaccio the way your parents or grandparents got off on Elvis. For one thing, Masaccio died at twenty-seven, before he’d really done all that much. For another, until recently most of his extant work was in rough shape or badly lit (those darned Italian churches) or both. Most important, few of us these days are wowed by perspective and anatomy. As a result, Masaccio is what art historians call a “scholar’s painter.” But it was his stuff and nobody else’s that Leonardo, Michelangelo, et al., back in the mid-fifteenth century, were ankling over to the Brancacci Chapel to take a long hard look at.
Masaccio’s The Expulsion from Paradise
KEY WORKS: The Holy Trinity with the Virgin, St. John, and Donors (Sta. Maria Novella, Florence), The Tribute Money and The Expulsion from Paradise (both Brancacci Chapel, Sta. Maria del Carmine, Florence).
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: In this case, not fellow painters, but an architect, Brunelleschi, and a sculptor, Donatello. Together, the three ushered in the Renaissance in the visual arts. RAPHAEL (RAFFAELLO SANZIO)
(1483-1520)
Raphael’s The School of Athens
Button up your overcoat. That chill you’re feeling, coupled with the fact that, if you took History of Art 101, he was the one you got hit with the week before Christmas vacation, means that it’s impossible to smile brightly when the name Raphael comes up, the way you do with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo— the two contemporaries with whom he forms a trinity that is to the High Renaissance what turkey, ham, and Swiss are to a chef’s salad. That said, the thing about Raphael is—and has always been—that he never makes mistakes, fails to achieve desired effects, or forgets what it is, exactly, he’s supposed to be doing next Thursday morning. He perfected picture painting, the way engineers perfected bridge building or canal digging or satellite launching; each of his canvases is an exercise in balance, in organization, in clarity and harmony, in coherence and gracefulness. For four hundred years, right through the nineteenth century, Raphael was every painter’s idol; lately, though, he’s begun to seem a little bland, as well as a lot sticky-fingered, absorbing and assimilating and extracting from other artists (especially Michelangelo) rather than trying to figure things out for himself. Note: With the High Renaissance, painting packs its bags and moves from Florence to Rome, where the papacy will take over the Medicis’ old Daddy Warbucks role, and where Raphael—handsome, tactful, and possessed of a good sense of timing—will earn his reputation as the courtier among painters, a fixture at the dinner parties of popes and princes.
KEY WORKS: The early Madonnas (e.g., Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi, Florence), the portrait of Pope Leo X (Pitti Palace, Florence), the murals in the Stanza della Segnatura (Rome), then the Pope’s private library, especially the one entitled The School of Athens.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Michelangelo and, to a lesser extent (at least they weren’t constantly at each other’s throats), Leonardo. TITIAN (TIZIANO VECELLIO)
(1477-1576)
Welcome to Venice—opulent, voluptuous, pagan, on the profitable trade route to the Orient, given to both civic propaganda and conspicuous consumption— where light and color (as opposed to Florence’s structure and balance) are the name of the game. With Titian, the most important of the Venetians, painting becomes a dog-eat-dog profession with agents and PR people and client mailings, a business in which religious and political demands are nothing next to those of the carriage—make that gondola—trade. Titian was versatile (he did everything an oil painter could do, from altarpieces to erotica, from straight portraits to complex mythologies) and obscenely long-lived (it took the plague to bring him down, at something like ninety-nine), and he dominated the art scene for seventy-five years, with his flesh-and-blood, high-wide-and-handsome ways. He presided at the divorce of painting from architecture and its remarriage to the easel, and assured that the primary medium of the new union would be oil on canvas. Don’t expect rigor or even real imagination from the man, though; what’s on display here are energy and expansiveness. Prestige point: In his old age, Titian, whose eyes weren’t what they used to be, began painting in overbold strokes and fudged contours, encouraging modern critics to praise his newfound profundity and cite him as the first Impressionist, a man who painted how he saw things, not how he knew them to be.
Titian’s Venus of Urbino
KEY WORKS: It’s the corpus, not the individual canvas, that counts. Right up there, though: Madonna with Members of the Pesaro Family (Frari, Venice), Rape of Europa (Gardner Museum, Boston), Venus of Urbino (Pitti Palace, Florence), and Christ Crowned with Thorns (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Giorgione, who played sensualist, die-young Keats to Titian’s long-lived, Spirit-of-the-Age Wordsworth. EL GRECO
(DOMENICOS THEOTOCOPOULOS)
(1541-1614)
He was, in the words of Manet, “the great alternative.” Though of late El Greco’s been positioned as the seasoned thinker, rather than the God-happy wild man, either way he was too much of an anomaly to have real impact on his contemporaries—or to found a school of Spanish painting. (Both of those would have to wait for Velázquez to come along, a few years later.) In fact, it was the twentieth century that made El Greco’s reputation, applauding his distortions— especially those gaunt, tense, strung-out figures—and his creation of an inward, fire-and-ice world, complete with angst and hallucination. From Van Gogh through the young Picasso and the German Expressionists, up to the American Abstract Expressionists of the Forties and Fifties, all of whom had a big I-gotta-be-me streak, El Greco has served as a patron saint. A little history: “El Greco” was the nickname given to this footloose Greek (“Greco,” get it?) by the citizens of rarefied, decaying Toledo, Spain, when he arrived there after a boyhood spent among Byzantine icons, followed by stints in Venice (where he glanced at the Titians) and Rome (where he offered to redo Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling). Which is funny, inasmuch as we tend to think of his vision as more Spanish than anybody’s but Cervantes’. For art historians, he holds two records: “Last of the Mannerists” (those anticlassical eccentrics who knew you couldn’t top Raphael at the perfection game, and decided to put all their chips on weirdness instead) and “most distu
rbingly personal painter ever.” Critics go into raptures over his “incandescent”—some prefer “phosphorescent”—spirituality. Whatever: Here’s a painter you’ll always be able to recognize on any wall in any museum in the world.
El Greco’s Toledo in a Storm
KEY WORKS: First and foremost, Burial of Count Orgaz (Santo Tomé, Toledo), the largest and most resplendent El Greco. Also: Toledo in a Storm and Cardinal Niño de Guevara (both at the Metropolitan, New York), the latter a portrait of Spain’s menacing, utterly unholy-looking Grand Inquisitor.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Like we say, none among his contemporaries. But forms, with Velázquez and Goya, the trinity of Great Spanish Painters. PETER PAUL RUBENS (1577-1640)
Not an anal retentive. From factory headquarters in Antwerp (now Belgium, then still the Spanish Netherlands), Rubens, the “prince of painters,” purveyed his billowy, opulent, robust, and sensual portraits, altarpieces, landscapes, historical tableaux, and mythological treatments to the Church, the town fathers, private patrons, and virtually every royal household in Europe. (It helped that he was as much a diplomat as an artist, entrusted with secrets of state by, among others, the Infanta of Spain, and hence provided with entrée to all the best palaces.) To be associated with the name Rubens: First, success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams: financial, professional, and personal. Second, Flemish painting, which began with the restrained van Eyck, proceeded through Bosch and Brueghel, and reached its culmination now, an art that was drumming up a full-tilt Catholic sumptuousness even as its north-of-the-border Dutch cousin was becoming more and more Protestant and bourgeois. Third, the concept of the baroque, the organizing principle behind all seventeenth-century art— dynamic, emotional, exuberant, and asymmetrical in all those places where the classicism of the High Renaissance had been static, poised, and balanced; a principle that, among other things, decreed that the work of art was greater than the sum of its parts. Anyway, Rubens created and created and created, and if his altarpieces didn’t seem particularly mystical or his bacchanals all that wild and crazy, still, there was enough sheer activity in each of them that you couldn’t really squawk. For the conscientious: There’s always the chance that you’ll forget which painting is Rubens’ and which is Titian’s (and anyone who tells you that’s impossible because the two men are separated by a hundred years and half of Europe is lying). Just remember that Titian subordinated the whole of his painting to its parts, Rubens the parts to the whole; that Titian valued serenity, even in an orgy scene, Rubens tumult; and that Titian painted the equivalent of Vassar coeds, Rubens Ziegfeld showgirls.
