The Art of War

Since the Arnolfini Portrait is a world-famous Dutch masterpiece, why is its home today the National Gallery in London?  Like so many of the ills of today’s world, the fault lies with the French.  Specifically, I blame Napoleon.

As opposed to so many paintings of this era, we know exactly who painted it:  Jan Van Eyck.  Since his signature is in the middle of the painting, there is no argument.  The painting, at right, shows a man and a wife holding hands in their bedroom.  However, about everything else, there are endless arguments. 

The couple is probably an Italian merchant and his wife (who is probably not pregnant) and this is probably depicting their wedding, and we probably know their names.  Or, the woman may be dead and the painting is a commemoration.  Or...it is a painted version of a legal contract, giving the woman the right to conduct business while the husband is away.  Or….the painting could be interpreted to mean something completely different.  If you put three art historians in a room, you will get four opinions.

The painting is full of iconography, so that each and every object might have several different meanings.  The dog at the lady’s feet, for example, may represent fidelity, or lust, or may just be a wedding present from the husband to his wife.

(Or it could simply be the family dog, but that’s way too simple!)

Created in 1434, the painting originally belonged to a member of the Arnolfini family—naturally, exactly which one is hotly debated—and it stayed within the family for decades.  Sometime early in the Sixteenth Century, the painting was acquired by Diego de Guevara, an ambassador working for the Duke of Burgundy.  We don’t know how or why Guevara obtained the painting, but we do know he donated it to Margaret of Austria, the Duchess of Savoy and a member of the ill-fated Habsburg family.

Upon Margaret’s death, the painting passed to her niece, Mary of Hungary, who moved to Spain in 1556.  Upon her death, it was inherited by King Philip II of Spain, who (when he wasn’t losing the Spanish Armada to Queen Elizabeth) enjoyed his large private art collection.  The painting stayed in the royal palace in Madrid for at least a century and a half. 

Given time, the Hapsburgs successfully managed to kill themselves off through a dedicated and extensive program of inbreeding.  Upon the passing of the last Spanish Hapsburg, Charles II, the painting, along with the rest of the Spanish Empire was claimed by the new royal family, the Bourbons.  Throughout all of this, the painting remained in the Royal Palace of Madrid.

Generations of court artists were influenced by the work—Philip II had the painting copied with his two daughters as the subjects.  (I would show you the painting, but it is remarkably ugly, resembling two misshapen girls encased in massive iron bells.)  Diego Velasquez undoubtedly knew the painting and was probably influenced by it when he painted his masterpiece, Las Meninas.   (And I don’t have to show you that painting, as I have previously written about it.)

For over a century, the new royal family of Spain kept with tradition and inbred themselves to the point where the royal heirs could spend an entire day in a corner, quietly licking their own eyebrows.  In the early Nineteenth Century, this resulted in King Charles IV and his son, King Ferdinand VII, both of whom were so inept, that they easily qualified as honorary Hapsburgs.  As they angrily quarreled over whose turn it was to misrule Spain, they invited their neighbor across the Pyrenees, Napoleon Bonaparte, to help them settle the dispute.

Napoleon put both fools under house arrest and placed his brother, Joseph, on the throne of Spain.  While undoubtedly a better ruler than either of the previous monarchs—a low bar—the imposition of a Bonaparte upon the throne angered the people of Spain, touching off a civil war that eventually expanded into an invasion by the British Army with the help of Portuguese troops. 

The British Army was superbly led by Arthur Wellesley, the Marquis of Wellington, and the French began slowly losing control of Spain.  King Joseph, realizing that he was about to lose the war, looted as much of Madrid as he could grab, loaded up the wagons with his loot, and set off for France.  Among the loot were two hundred paintings that were simply—and rather crudely—cut from their frames in the Spanish Royal Palace.

Joseph had waited too long to abscond with his treasure.  After the Battle of Vitoria, several heavily laden French wagons loaded with priceless treasure fell into the hands of British soldiers.  Despite the strict orders of General Wellesley, not all of the treasure was returned to Spain and the restored King Ferdinand.  Some of the stolen art work found its way to London, such as the Rokeby Venus, while other work turned up in France, and still other valuable pieces simply vanished.

Some reports said that the British soldiers broke off the battle early when they discovered the incredible wealth waiting to be “liberated” from the French wagons.  General Wellesley was so furious that he wrote in a dispatch, “We have in the service the scum of the earth as common soldiers.”

Scum or not, supposedly the British soldiers sold and traded the priceless treasure among themselves.  For weeks, masterpieces were won and lost as the soldiers gambled among themselves.

“I’ll see your Goya and raise you a Titian.”

The British efforts in Spain were ultimately successful, the French left Spain and Napoleon’s Empire eventually collapsed.  In 1815, following his victory over Napoleon at Waterloo, Wellesley became the Duke of Wellington.  (And we will ignore that a painting by Velasquez, which once hung in the Spanish Royal Palace is still hanging in the Duke’s London home.)

Coincidentally, several years later, British General James Hay offered to sell the Arnolfini Portrait to the Prince Regent (later George IV).  When questioned on how he came to own the Flemish masterpiece, Hay explained that he had purchased the painting from the owner of a French inn, where he was recuperating from a wound suffered in the Battle of Waterloo.  The fact that General Hay had been also present at the Battle of Vitoria is a mere coincidence.

Every parent is familiar with this defense.  Whenever you find a hitherto unidentified toy in their possession, upon questioning your child you will inevitably be told, “Oh, that?  It’s been in the toy box a long time.”

While General Hay was certainly a highly decorated soldier, he was certainly not an art connoisseur.  It makes you wonder why he bothered to buy the piece from the French innkeeper.

After enjoying the painting as it hung in his London home for a decade, the Prince Regent finally declined to purchase the painting—no doubt in part due to the general’s somewhat questionable ownership.  When the masterpiece was returned to Hay, he promptly loaned the painting to an acquaintance.  For thirteen years, the general saw neither the painting nor the friend. 

When the British National Gallery was formed, General Hay suddenly remembered his painting, eagerly selling it to the gallery for a measly six hundred pounds (roughly $70,000 in today’s money).  The painting remains in the gallery today. 

For those of you taking the quiz, let’s review.  The Flemish painting of an Italian couple was given to the Spanish court by an Austrian duchess, where it was spirited away by a French Army led by a Corsican pretender before being recovered by a British General, who briefly loaned it to an English King, before selling it to a London gallery. 

So Much Storage, So Little Need

An offer I received in the daily flood of spam email has had me pondering all week about computer storage and how it has changed over the last five decades.  Specifically, what started all of this was Newegg’s offer to sell me a terabyte solid-state hard drive for only $99.  And that included free delivery.  For those of you unsure, a terabyte is a thousand gigabytes or a million megabytes. (Or, as we used to say in Texas, a whole shit pot lot full!)

I distinctly remember that as a couple of other computer nerds and I were sitting around shooting the breeze many decades ago, we wistfully surmised that whoever was the first to have a terabyte of memory would rule the world—proving that any one of us was just a lab accident away from becoming the world’s first super villain.  (A theory since proven correct by Google). 

This amazing hard drive is just a little bigger than a deck of playing cards and due to its solid state (no moving parts) is faster than a stabbed rat—it can damn near give you your data before you ask for it.

While I have no need for the drive, I cannot stop mentally comparing it to earlier hard drives I have worked with.  In a very short time, technology has improved by a staggering amount. 

In 1979, I wrote a modestly small database program for a modestly small city’s police department.  Laughably simple by today’s standards, at the time it was the cutting edge of software for the emerging field of personal computers.  (Remember, this was several years before the IBM PC hit the market.)  My program kept track of parking tickets, allowing the operator to search for unpaid tickets by searching on any field.

At the time, no one was keeping track of the parking tickets.  If someone came to the city hall to pay a fine, the clerk had to search though a pile of thousands of outstanding tickets.  If a ticket was misfiled, it simple vanished, likely to never be paid or even located. 

When I offered the program to the police department, there was only one small hitch in the offer, it would require the police department to purchase a Winchester Drive.  Today, that term has fallen out of use, I’m not sure that many people even know it refers to, but in the Seventies, it was written WINCHESTER DRIVE, and hinted at the kind of incredible technology that could only be found at NASA.

Developed by IBM, a Winchester Drive was the first practical hard disk drive: a mechanical means of storing data on large rapidly spinning plates.  Sort of a bastard cross between a record player and a tape recorder, the first such commercially available drives were 24-inch platters spinning hundreds of revolutions per minute.  Since the first model held two 30 megabyte platers, the IBM project manager called the device a “Winchester Drive” after the venerable .30-30 rifle used by John Wayne and almost everyone else who has ever gone deer hunting. 

I should point out that 30 megabytes is—by today’s standards—almost nothing.  A letter to my grandkids uses up about half a megabyte.  Thirty megabytes would not store the email I receive in one day.  The smallest iPad sold today has over 4000 times that much memory.

Personal computers were rare at the time and the vast majority of the ones available used cassette tapes for storage.  Only a very few could afford the $500 it took to buy a floppy disk drive, and those available would store only about 75 kilobytes (roughly the size of a single email message today).

The police department was willing to buy the program from me, but only if I also sold them the required hard drive and installed the software on it—a condition I eagerly agreed to.  This was the first piece of computer hardware I ever sold, and eventually would lead to my opening up a couple of computer stores.

The hard drive I selected was 10 megabytes, 8.3 megabytes after the drive was formatted.  It was a 24-inch platter spinning at 300 RPM, housed in a yard square metal box about 10 inches tall.  It took a special table to handle the weight and soak up some of the vibrations.  It was a monster.

And it was expensive—$3900.  That doesn’t sound like much today, but it was the same price as a new Chevrolet Malibu.  And the Malibu would probably last a lot longer.  The expected service life of a hard drive was only 3-4 years.  In order to purchase it, I had to get a short-term bank loan.

Luckily for me, everything worked out well.  Collections on old parking tickets increased dramatically, the proceeds paid for the entire installation within two years.  The hard drive worked well, and five years later the program and the data were transferred to a larger and faster computer.  Eventually, I rewrote the software to work simultaneously on two computers—a baby network!—and the software was still being used a decade after it was originally written.

By today’s standards, the whole operation was a joke.  As a test, I recreated the application on my iPhone using HanDBase software.   It took less than 5 minutes, and my phone is faster and holds more storage. 

While I lust to own that new solid-state drive, I really don’t need it.  A terabyte is a hell of a lot of data storage.  Back in the nineties, Microsoft was looking for a way to publicly prove the scalability of its software, so it decided to put a database of over a terabyte online for public inspection.  The problem was finding a set of data that large.  (By comparison, the complete works of Shakespeare would take up about 1 millionth of a terabyte.  Add the Old and New Testaments, and we are up to 2 millionths.)

The original plan was to publish every single transaction of the New York Stock Exchange since inception, and make the data public and searchable.  Unfortunately, it turned out that such a massive database would only use up about half a terabyte.   Even if you threw in all the Chicago commodity trades, it was still far short of a terabyte.

Finally, in 1997, Microsoft put online its Terraserver, a database containing the satellite photos of everywhere on Earth, a database of 2.3 terabytes.  The physical server was a Compaq computer (basically the size of a one-story office building 25 feet wide and 45 feet long), briefly the largest computer in the world.  If we were to duplicate that server today, it would indistinguishable from any other desktop.

I can remember spending hours with my geographer friend, Jack Wright, staring at what previously had been unthinkable.

Yes, Microsoft invented what today we would call Google Earth, a free service that still uses an overlaying music interface that Microsoft invented.  Microsoft wasn’t really interested in providing data for the consumer, or even good service, so they dropped the ball and Google snapped up the market, swallowing it whole.

Personally, I am unlikely to ever need that much data storage.  I’ve been writing this blog slightly in excess of ten years and have calculated that at the current rate of accumulating copies of the files associated with this weekly screed, I would use up a terabyte sometime in May, 3815. 

But, I may buy that drive anyway.  My wife, The Doc, could fill it with cute cat photos in about a week.

Random Thoughts of a Student, Again

Having retired from teaching at the university, I have now returned as a student, seeking a degree in a field in which I have no experience, little talent, and no expectations that this new degree will ever be even remotely profitable.  I am now a freshman in Art History. 

Two thousand and ten years ago, a guy named Virgil said, “Happy is he who can discover the causes of things.”

Going back to school makes me as happy as a tornado in a trailer park! I love the discussions, the excuse to buy and read new books, and the exploration of virgin intellectual territory?  I  just generally like being back in a classroom without the responsibility of being the teacher and while I’m genuinely having fun, there are a few things about being back on campus that stand out and make me wonder.

The following are just a few of the random thoughts I have had during the last two weeks at Enema U:

—Where are all the other retired people?  In almost every class that I taught, there were a sizable number of non-traditional students (that’s educationalese for ‘old farts’).  There seem to be relatively few in my art classes.  Perhaps the people with artistic talent have already taken these courses and those without any talent—like me—are generally smart enough not to try.

—For the zillionth time, I went to the library and discovered that they did not have what is considered to be a standard reference book.  There are whole fields where I own more books than this damn library has.  What the hell are the library people spending the money on?  The library now sports a coffee shop, lots of group study room, and luxurious office spaces, yet it  seems to be canceling subscriptions to journals at a record pace.  Who the hell is running this shit show?

Universities used to brag about their libraries.  At Enema U, they seem to be apologizing for having one.  Periodically, this state has referendums on education, usually for erecting new buildings.  I have a modest referendum proposal that would immediately improve education:

At any educational facility funded by the state, the total budget for playing football cannot exceed half the amount spent on the library.

In the last two weeks at school, I have heard not a single student or faculty member mention football, but several have complained about the library.  By contrast, the Chancellor and Provost—affectionately known as Moose and Squirrel, have sent several emails about athletics and not one about the library.

—I have heard students complaining about a few things besides the cost of tuition.  There is a problem with parking and the cafeteria food is horrible.  In both cases, the university tends to treat the students as a seam of ore that has to be strip-mined.  The company that has been awarded an exclusive right to sell food on campus is best known for its dining facilities at airports and prisons, neither of which is noted for fine dining since they all use the same cookbook, “Fifty Shades of Gruel”.

The students hate the cafeterias, the university responds by requiring freshmen to live on campus.  It doesn’t take a genius to envision that such tactics will further hurt the declining student recruitment.

If you mention the problems of parking to any administrator, I guarantee that the answer will be:  “When I went to the University of Who Gives a Fuck, we had to park in a different county, then walk uphill in the snow to campus,” says the administrator that had actually gone to a small Ivy League college with ample student housing in a town with a subway system. 

I have never yet met a university administrator smart enough to realize that you never win an argument about customer satisfaction.  If the majority of students think a situation is a problem, it is.  And students will increasingly go to universities that understand this.

—Students are loud.  If I can hear the music coming out of your earbuds from ten feet away, the obvious hearing loss is the least of your problems—You may have brain damage.

And what the hell is going on with all the women in lace-up combat boots?  Over the last half century, I have broken both ankles and one knee.  I have had six different operations on one leg and spent more than a little time using a cane or crutches.   Yet, somehow, I can still walk down a hallway outside a classroom without sounding like a crippled Clydesdale crossing a wooden bridge.

 —Don’t you just hate it when you are posting on Facebook and you are suddenly rudely interrupted by a jogger bouncing off your windshield?  Well, this has never actually happened to me, but it must happen frequently on campus.  Several times a day I see someone walking across campus totally unaware of anything around them except their phones.  Naturally, I go and stand in front of them. 

There are students who check their phones every five minutes, even during class.  I can’t help but wonder if they do that during sex.

Maybe it is because I am taking art classes, but all morning I have been trying to imagine a Norman Rockwell painting of a slack-jawed youth of today staring into an iPad.  Seems impossible.

—Once again, I am forced to admire the work ethic of adjunct professors who frequently labor like Dickensian orphans.  They work for less than minimum wage, are given no benefits, have absolutely no job security, and are treated by the tenured faculty as if they were lepers on fire.  Yet, despite all that, adjunct professors work harder than ugly strippers.

If the university administrators worked half as hard as the adjunct professors, the university would be far better off.  Hell, if we paid the legion of administrators the same kind of salaries as the adjuncts, they could afford to have a real library.

—Why hasn’t someone sat down with all of the students and objectively discussed the possibility of their majors ever leading to a job?  There are way too many students seeking careers in fields with no possibility of employment.  If you are one of the 40 choral music majors at a state agricultural school, someone should tell you that there was not a single person in that field hired anywhere in this state in the last two years. 

There are far too many people seeking degrees that all but guarantee they will never be employed in their field of study.  Outside of academia, the chances of someone with a degree in Gender Studies getting hired in that field is roughly the same as the chances of an alchemist being hired by Dow Chemical.

Total student debt is now a staggering $1.5 trillion dollars.  And since the student loan business was nationalized by the Obama administration, these debts are carried by the Federal Government, meaning that students cannot default on these loans even through bankruptcy.   With the willing and eager aid of universities, almost any student instantly qualifies for loans that will prove to be impossible to repay.

In the last twenty years, the cost of textbooks has doubled, as did the amount of debts owed by students.  At the same time, universities are cutting the number of classes offered and utilizing low-cost online education that has yet to be proven effective. 

If greedy universities help young students receive huge loans to pursue majors in fields where any career is highly unlikely, that is a scam.  The least the administration could do—short of cutting the fat out of a bloated budget—is to tell the kids the odds of the slot machine paying off.

If we think colleges are overly expensive—and they certainly are—just wait until they are free.

Oh, what do I know?  I’m just a “non-traditional” student wandering the campus taking classes for the fun of it.