15 Pinnacles

Putting a more positive spin on it, let us say a Golden Age is the coming together of the forces of culture, climate and fortune which produce, for an historic blink of the eye, a thrust of creativity that measures and influences man’s accomplishments henceforth. It is an intense flowering of civilization in the visual and performing arts, literature, philosophy, religion, science, exploration, industry, this and that.

While all animals are engaged in the pursuit of food, clothing and shelter, man does more: he heats his house, landscapes his garden, clads his body in woven threads. But even these advances are not commensurate with his improved brain and prehensile thumb. Man is of a higher order, because he has the ability to give expression to human experience. He creates works of art.

From the beginning of time, these works have been crafted, sculpted, incised, whittled, drafted, hammered, leaded, inlaid, choreographed, scribed, composed and manufactured. But unlike the Seven Wonders of the World, Golden Ages have never been classified, annotated or codified. Hence, there is room for disagreement as to which achievements deserve the grant title of Golden Age.

It is an undeniable pretension for any one to determine which historical times constitute a Golden Age. To quantify the undertaking and control subjectivity (while indemnifying myself against claims of ignorance and prejudice), I propose the following conditions:

There must be a coming together of historic events which create the environment under which man is free to perform at his best. The easy assumption that this requires a democratic ambience is misleading. The Romans governed an autocratic state yet encouraged free thinking in the design of their buildings and cities.

There must be a sustainable period both in time and talent. One soul in one lifetime is not enough. As great as he was, Phidias could not, by himself, have made fifth century B.C. a Golden Age. Particularity also will not do. For a period to truly flower there must be more than the fine petal of the daisy but also the stamen, pistil, leaf and stem of the lotus. Thus the achievements of medieval France had a universality which impressionist France lacked.

It is tempting to simplify our task by establishing a minimum time period, say 100 years, for a Golden Age – that is the span it took to build a gothic cathedral. Less than 100 years hardly constitutes an age of any kind. Factored into this time frame, however, would be important modulations such as Baroque city planning, a playful extension of the renaissance.

A certain degree of anonymity provides a Golden Age with evidence that it really was unique and not just a period of celebrity. Inspired medieval structures were designed by unknowns; accordingly the significance of these buildings cannot be attributed to the color and renown of a few individuals.

There must be physical remains – buildings, manuscripts, canvasses, sculpture, musical scores, stained glass, scientific treatises. The materials of creation would have been chosen carefully. Leonardo experimented with colors in the interest of longevity and ironically gave us a fresco, The Last Super, which faded to near invisibility.

The public state of mind must be receptive to free inquiry or ideas will be stifled. Galileo was forced to recant what he knew to be scientific truths, because the church objected to his questioning of long accepted concepts – Aristotle’s for instance.

Time is the best yardstick in determining the value of a creative period. After hundreds of years, works still held in high esteem for their beauty and order become lodged in the cumulative public mind. (An accomplished modern architect cannot draft a line that is unguided in part by the ancient Greek sense of scale). Time separates style from fad, and the lack of it explains why it is difficult to know if any corner of the globe is experiencing such a moment today.