Good morning. The director of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence says religious art in museums should be returned to churches: “Eike Schmidt, who has led the museum since 2015, told the Art Newspaper that ‘devotional art was not born as a work of art but for a religious purpose, usually in a religious setting.’ Schmidt cited a specific example from the Uffizi’s own collection, the Rucellai Madonna painted by the Sienese artist Duccio di Buoninsegna in the Middle Ages. The gold-ground panel of the Virgin and Child enthroned, the largest painting on wood from the 13th century known to date, was removed from the church of Santa Maria Novella in 1948. Viewing such a work in the context for which it was created, says Schmidt, is not just appropriate from an historical perspective, but could also connect the viewer with its spiritual significance.” What do you think?

In other news: Is “Imagine” the worst song ever written? Pretty much, Matthew Walther argues: “Where do you even begin? The droopy four-bar intro? The soporific nasal whine of Lennon’s voice? The mind-numbing facetiousness of ending the verses with ‘youuuuuuuu’ and then starting the chorus with the same word? The other lyrics that insult the intelligence with such ferocity that I’m pretty sure singing it violates the Geneva Convention? The part where the rock star who wrote this song in about an hour (it shows, by the way) in one of several luxury homes he owned encourages you maybe to consider having ‘no possessions,’ presumably including underwear and a toothbrush, and then passive-aggressively insists that you’re so attached to your stuff that you can’t even contemplate the idea?”

John Wilson reviews Chris Beha’s Index of Self-Destructive Acts: “With his title, Beha is doing two things at once. First, he is telling us bluntly what the novel is about, as Balzac did with Lost Illusions (one of the books that fed into Beha’s novel). I’m not giving anything away when I quote from page 497, on which one of the protagonists muses: ‘But why? . . . That is, why do we have to keep getting things wrong? If we really learned from our mistakes, shouldn’t we make fewer all the time? We weren’t just occasionally irrational. Something in us wanted to be irrational. Something wanted, perhaps, to be wrong.’ The course of the entire novel, in which all seven of the principal characters self-destruct to a greater or lesser degree, is apparent from the beginning. And yet at the same time, oddly enough, Beha’s title (given context by the first epigraph) is very funny, as is the story that unfolds from it. That phrase, ‘The Index of Self-Destructive Acts,’ is at once comical and uncannily diagnostic of our condition, inviting us to think of balks and wild pitches alongside what used to be called ‘original sin.’”

The monumental and practical Samuel Johnson: “Last year, without much fanfare, Yale University Press completed one of the longest-running literary projects in American publishing, bringing out the last of a 23-volume edition of the works of Samuel Johnson, the eighteenth-century Englishman renowned for his essays, poetry, and lexicography . . . . Started during the Eisenhower administration, the Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson spanned generations of scholars, requiring a literary leap of faith. Would Johnson (1709–1784) still have an audience when the definitive version of his writings finally came to fruition? Yale’s team needn’t have worried. More than half a century after the project’s launch, Johnson’s profile seems as high as ever . . . For the novice Johnsonian, Dr Johnson said . . . , a slender collection of his choice comments on everything from old age to books, idleness to insults, and fame to vanity, is a good place to start. Reading this pamphlet-sized compendium, totaling just under 40 pages, is like flipping through Johnson’s mental Rolodex, offering a cursory, convivial survey of his sizeable intellect. Here we meet Johnson as he was popularly known: the witty, self-made social commentator, famous for greeting big questions at street level. There’s a pungency to his pronouncements that invites comparisons to the wry sensibility of Benjamin Franklin, who showed a debt to Johnson in the proverbs he offered in Poor Richard’s Almanack. Both men, says Franklin biographer Walter Isaacson, were ‘more comfortable exploring practical thoughts and real-life situations than metaphysical abstractions or deductive proofs.’”

Alan F. Mordrick reviews Yukio Mishima’s Life for Sale: “Trying to understand a novel by scrutinizing the life of the novelist is considered poor form these days — and for good reason. (It’s fiction, after all.) But when you write a novel about suicide and then ritually disembowel yourself in public, certain exceptions must be made.”

Fascinating objects of fascism: “Roger Moorhouse shows it’s possible to treat modern history properly and in context.”

Surviving prison in China with the help of poetry: “A Tiananmen Massacre survivor and former political prisoner in China reflects on how poetry helped him endure captivity.”

Photo: Barebbbo

[Note: I’ll be out on Monday and Tuesday. Have a good weekend, everyone, and see you on Wednesday.]