Another GRE practice essay — please forgive inadvertent errors and personal flourishes.

At the culmination of a survey class that spanned the history of art from its very origins in the Venus of Willendorf to the High Renaissance and through to the postmodern age we live in, I could not but wonder: we stand on the shoulders of giants. While the Academy in Florence would not let me climb onto the shoulders of Michelangelo’s David, the influence of giants –– on the pioneers and the paradigm-setting geniuses of any field –– is visible to those invested in its study. It is this that I hope to argue, with the aid of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, Thomas Hobbes and Nicolo Machiavelli, and William Shakespeare: that even those figures we may think to be geniuses in their field actually stand on the shoulders of the giants of their fields.

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling in the Vatican draws from themes in the first book of the Old Testament, the Genesis. When it was first finished in the early years of the 16th century, it was heralded as fresh and vital, not to mention original. But upon closer examination, what was so unique about the ceiling? In terms of form, the ceiling is an articulation in painting of what the sculpture Laocoon was in stone –– a sculpture Michelangelo saw not many steps away in the Vatican Gardens following its purchase by his most prominent patron, Pope Julius II Della Rovere. The same can be said for Apollo Belvedere and the many broken fragments of Greco-Roman sculpture that found its way to his attention in the Medici gardens, where he first trained as a sculptor, and then throughout this career in Rome, working for classically-minded humanistic popes. In the figure of God and man, one sees the old man of the Laocoon, a sculpture from antiquity that was so remarkable that it found mention in Pliny’s natural history [Book XXXV], and the Apollo Belvedere, with its slight shift in the hips –– Michelangelo drew heavily from its ‘contraposto’. One cannot deny the artistic genius of Michelangelo, but a cursory examination of the Vatican collections shows his debt to the geniuses of the Greek and Roman past that he drew so heavily upon.

While Michelangelo was up on his parapet, lying on his back and famously painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling without much rest, not too far from his home in Florence, Casa Bounarotti, there were massive changes taking place, courtesy of a man who many recognise solely by the adjective that his name now forms: Nicolo Machiavelli. A former Florentine civil servant, following the return of the Medici to Florence and the loss of his post he wrote a book that is more infamous than most others the average individual knows of: The Prince. It was a book that exposed the raw functionings of power and shifted political thought away from the ancient pursuit of virtue and excellence, of the highest common good and human flourishing, to the modern paradigm of the pursuit of power. Similarly, a century later, Thomas Hobbes followed with his Leviathan in England, a book that granted the sovereign any such rights to exercise power as may be required to keep the peace: a recipe for despotic tyrannies, not commonwealths. Although both might seem like aberrations, they drew heavily on an essential part of antiquity that had been long lost for centuries and had survived in a monastery in Germany by a stroke of luck: Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, a work that expounds the philosophical system of the Greek thinker Epicurus, who lived in the centuries before Christ. It was a system that valued the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of all pain. For both Hobbes and Machiavelli attempted to remove from any discussion of politics essential questions of virtue and excellence and human flourishing, and their attack on virtue could only be made possible by the revival of this ancient debate that played out as much in the House of the Fawn in Pompeii as it does today. There is no doubt that Machiaveli’s ‘imperia ma non e gloria’ maxim and Hobbes’ ‘bellum omnium contra omnes’ are both remarkably original, but the structural framework they both consciously appropriate is one of a philosophy that was laid out more than a millennium before they wrote. They, too, stood on the shoulders of giants.

If I am to borrow from Hamlet, the question I must ask is, “to be or not be, to study or not to study?” But William Shakespeare himself knew the answer to this question far too well, and despite the attempts of later poets and critics to cast Shakespeare as a wholly original figure, one can see the careful and intentional imprints of classical culture upon him: this is the argument put forth meticulously by the cultural historian Jonathan Bate. Shakespeare owed more than a passing debt to John Dryden, whose translations of the Homeric epics and most importantly Plutarch’s Parallel Lives. While Shakespeare does lift certain speeches from characters and puts them in others’ mouths, it is important to note that the more significant appropriation happens in subject matter: these sources are what Shakespeare based his own classical lives on, most famously Coriolanus and Caesar. This is not say that Shakespeare, inventor of countless worlds and father of many words, and perhaps the greatest playwright of the English language, was not a genius: but there is little question that he,too, stood on the shoulders of giant and was not shy about alluding to it for the classically inclined reader and viewers.

Although innovation is important, one can innovate best and push the boundaries of knowledge in a more systematic and rigorous manner if one knows the work done in the tradition. It is like a circle of knowledge that must be expanded –– but the expansion presupposes the existence and importance of the circle. Michelangelo, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Shakespeare were innovative people who made paradigm-setting contributions to their fields –– painting, sculpture, political philosophy, poetry, and drama –– but they knew the past before hailing a new future.