Biography – Tattooed Professor

Mapplethorpe

By Patricia Morrisroe

Random House New York 1995 461 pages

I have always been a fan of photography and, in a marginal way, ever since college, Robert Mapplethorpe was on my radar. Somehow over the years his daring imagery made an impression and I was drawn to the macabre and fringes like the artist. I was interested to know more about him and a biography was just the thing. Yet, the more I read the less I liked the artist. I haven’t read many biographies, so I suppose I just presumed that, in the main, they highlighted the more lovable aspects of their subjects. This was a no-holes-barred type study that slowly but surely revealed a person I would never want to know. Mapplethorpe only cared about fame, period. Well, fame and fucking. Okay: fame, fucking and drugs…perhaps in that order. If those are the top three things you care about, imagine what you will do to get them. Mapplethorpe did them all. He used people in every way imaginable while being an asshole prick all the while. While reading the last half of the book I was audibly huffing and puffing every time he would make a dick move. Once, I was reading in bed while my husband was going through his pre-bed toilet and I said, “Man…this guy is just an asshole.” By the time my husband finished brushing his teeth I said, “He’s made five more dick moves since you’ve been in there.” It’s kind of a bummer when your gods are burned, but in this case he ended up burning himself. All his excess led to a slow death from AIDS.

Prologue

“Mapplethorpe’s artistic credo had always been to ‘see things like they’ve never been seen before’” (4). “…the fascination of the abomination” (7).

Part One: Dark Secrets

“Robert Michael Mapplethorpe was born on November 4, 1946” (13).

“What Robert liked best, however, was the freak displays, where ‘ape girls,’ bearded women, tattooed men, snake charmers, and dwarves were hidden away in dark booths. His older sister, Nancy, was terrified of them, but Robert always wanted to peek inside and was frustrated by his grandmother’s efforts to keep him away. ‘There’s nothing worse than wanting to see something and having someone stop you,’ he said. The freaks became symbols to him of all things strange and forbidden, and while he would not pursue them as vigilantly as Diane Arbus did in her photographs, they would crop up in different guises in Mapplethorpe’s pictures. By identifying the Catholic Church and Coney Island as the two most vivid memories of his childhood, he was touching upon the essential drama of his photographs–the push-pull between the sacred and the profane that was to give his work what he called an ‘edge’” (18).

“Up until now, Robert’s vision of art had been limited to the iconography of the Catholic Church–the madonnas and Christ figures to whom he directed his prayers. His trips to the museums added another dimension, and he began drawing Cubist madonnas, inspired by Picasso. ‘These were not beautiful Botticelli-type madonnas,’ said Cassidy, ‘but grotesque creatures with split profiles. I guess they were religious in that they were madonnas, but there was something disturbing about the way he had broken up their faces’” (21).

“His lunch hours were spent at Times Square, where, after a hot dog at Nathan’s, he would got to Hubert’s Freak Museum to feast his eyes on such human curiosities as Sealo the Seal Boy, whose hands grew out of his shoulders; a hermaphrodite named Alberto Alberta; and Congo the Jungle Creep, a Haitian in a fright wig who performed voodoo rituals. Diane Arbus found many of her subjects at Hubert’s, but Robert lost interest in the freaks after he spotted a gay pornographic magazine in a store on Forty-second Street” (26).

“They led the overwrought pledges into another room, where they had devised a variety of different tests, many of which evoked the rituals of gay sadomasochistic sex. The Pershing Rifles were regarded as an elite military unit, and their stylish uniforms played into the fantasy of the master-slave scenario. In this case the ‘masters’ stripped the pledges naked, blinded them with sanitary napkins, and commanded them to perform close-order drill with their bayonets. Subsequently they bound the pledges’ penises with one end of a rope, then attached bricks to the other end and ordered them to hurl the brick across the room. Next the pledges were ordered to crawl into a bathroom on their hands and knees; they were told to eat excrement from a toilet bowl–it turned out to be mashed bananas and chunky peanut butter. Mapplethorpe later confided to Patti Smith that someone had also inserted the tip of a rifle into his rectum” (31).

“He preferred the art of self-presentation to self-analysis…”

[Margin note: Not “writing what he knows”] “Mapplethorpe was aware of Warhol’s growing reputation as a pop provocateur, and he had already targeted the elusive artist as ‘someone who knew what he was doing.’ Mapplethorpe’s attraction both to Warhol and to the Pershing Rifles was an early indication of how he would later take a ‘cool’ approach to his militaristic S&M imagery, but at Pratt he was still too intimidated by his own instincts to allow his creativity free rein” (32).

[The monkey skull story] “Scratch’s brief and bizarre history encapsulated many of the major themes of Mapplethorpe’s adult life–his preoccupation with images of death and violence; his fascination with the devil; his desire to transform the ugly, or freakish, into works of beauty. It also pointed to a darker side of his nature, which would later emerge in his sexual relationships with other men–a need to break all the rules and transgress taboos.”

“…his LSD flowers have more in common with Walt Disney’s Fantasia, but his benign, giddy view of nature was perhaps reflective of his belief that LSD had provided him with the ability to lose himself in a guilt-free sensory experience. And since he felt guilty about so many aspects of his life, drugs temporarily solved his moral dilemma.

“For the next twenty years Mapplethorpe would use drugs almost daily–marijuana, amphetamines, Quaaludes, acid, MDA, cocaine, and amyl nitrite; they became an integral part of his sexual experimentation, for they helped blur the distinction between pleasure and pain and allowed him to silence his internal censors. He found that drugs enhanced his creativity, too, and from that time on, he would never put pencil to paper–or later take a picture–without first getting stoned.

“Timothy Leary’s Psychedelic Reader became Mapplethorpe’s new bible, and instead of going to church he attended Leary’s “Celebrations” of the League for Spiritual Discovery (LSD) at the Village Theater on Second Avenue in Manhattan, which featured multimedia light shows and guest speakers such as LeRoi Jones and Allen Ginsberg.

“From living at home, to sharing an apartment with two army men and a studio with a monkey, Mapplethorpe settled into a brownstone on St. James Place, with was described by one occupant as a ‘psychedelic Animal House.’ The parquet floors were strewn with mattresses and drug paraphernalia, and hanging from the top of the mahogany staircase was an upside-down Christmas tree decorated with rubber chickens. ‘Everybody was doing so many drugs that the place had a real hallucinatory quality,’ said Claude Alverson, an interior-design major who lived on the top floor. The tenant devised a grotesque game called ‘Creative Kill,’ for which they were obliged to record on a kitchen clipboard the dates and ‘creative’ ways they exterminated the resident cockroaches. Visitors recalled seeing bugs impaled on safety pins and dangling from tiny nooses made of dental floss.

“Acid-inspired art was becoming so common at Pratt that teachers could often tell the exact moment a student had discovered drugs. Mapplethorpe’s drawings, for example, became more obsessive and detailed, and after taking LSD he would retreat to the brownstone’s garden, where he would spend five or six hours drawing a single leaf, or covering a piece of paper with his signature or thousands of colored dots. He shared a bedroom with Harry McCue, and although McCue refrained from taking drugs, he, too, was enthusiastic about the idea of being a psychedelic artist’. They searched for inspiration in the dreamlike eroticism of Hieronymus Bosch and Egon Schiele, and in photographs by the German surrealist Hans Bellmer, know for his unnerving images of dismembered dolls. They came to the conclusion that they would never be able to produce such graphically disturbing work unless they rid themselves of their traditional Catholic morality and embraced life at its most extreme.

“Mapplethorpe picked Andy Warhol to be his role model; the artist had created an antichurch within the Factory, his silver-walled studio on West Forty-seventh Street, where his followers–many of who, like Warhol, had been raised Catholic–were involved in exploitative sexual games that hinged on a need to confess their sins and seek absolution for them. Their outlandish and pathetic antics had recently been documented in Warhol’s Chelsea Girls, which Mapplethorpe had found ‘terrifying’ in the way its stars willingly descended into drug-induced paranoia and self-hatred. Clearly, Warhol was more Satan than saint, and after seeing the movie Mapplethorpe was further convinced that exploring the dark side would incite his imagination. He vowed that when he moved to Manhattan after graduation he would find Warhol, and perhaps befriend him.

“‘We wanted the power of Satan,’ McCue said, ‘so we tried to seek out people and situations through which we could get in touch with him.’ Some of their efforts were almost laughably juvenile, as in the time they bought a goat’s head from a butcher’s shop and, encircling it with candles, attempted to raise the devil himself. They targeted blacks and homosexuals as two groups with intimate ties to Satan, and they made a concerted effort to socialize with Bioletta and Rosita Cruz, whom Mapplethorpe was convinced knew voodoo witchcraft; they also visited Greenwich Village for the purpose of staring at homosexuals in order to bask in their malevolent aura.

“On one occasion McCue purchased a pirat’s shirt from a shop that catered to gay men, and although Mapplethorpe teased him about looking like a homosexual, he bought the same shirt the following week. It was all done in the spirit of ‘exploring the weird,’ as McCue described it, but given Mapplethorpe’s attraction to men, his motivations seem far more complicated. As with the Columbian Squires jacket and the Pershing Rifles uniform, he used clothing to forge an identity for himself, and with the pirate shirt he could play at being gay–for art’s sake.

“Mapplethorpe’s wardrobe at the time revealed a psychologically divided man; switching back and forth between a magician’s cape, a ‘homosexual’ shirt, and an ROTC uniform, he was still at war eith himself. That spring, the growing tension between Pratt’s art students and the engineers–’North Prattnam versus South Prattnam,’ as the school’s newspaper described them–would force Mapplethorpe to choose between the two uniforms.

“The engineering students largely comprised ROTC, and as the antiwar sentiment grew at Pratt, the army–and the engineers–were targeted as the enemy.” [margin note: turning point] “On April 15, 1967, fifty students from ‘Pratt Action for Peace’ joined 125,000 protesters in Central Park, and roused by the demonstration, they staged a sit-down four days later, to denounce the presence of a visiting army colonel on campus. Trapped inside the athletic hall along with the ROTC cadets, the colonel eventually escaped through the back entrance, leaving Robert and his regiment to face the 150 demonstrators who waved signs that read WAR IS HELL and USE YOUR BRAINS NOT YOUR GUNS. Mapplethorpe was booed and hissed by members of his own art department, and soon afterward he began soliciting advice from friends on how to fail his upcoming army physical. They suggested everything from puncturing an eardrum to mangling a leg, but Mapplethoorpe eventually opted to swallow a tab of acid before traveling to the army’s induction center on Whitehall Street. By the time he submitted to his physical, he appeared so psychotic the doctor deemed him unfit to serve.

“Escaping the army was Mapplethorpe’s last hurdle to freedom. No longer obligated to keep his hair clipped short, he let it grow past his collarbone. He had always toned down his outfits before he visited Floral Park, but he could not hide his hair; when his father saw it, he flew into a rage. Fathers across America were engaged in similar battles with their long-haired sons, but in this case Harry’s contempt was fueled by his growing suspicion that Robert was homosexual. Why else, Harry wondered, would his son have been rejected from the army? ‘You look like a girl,’ he shouted. ‘You make me sick.’

“In addition, Harry was infuriated by Robert’s latest revelation that he would not be graduating with the class of ‘67, for, having switched majors, he was now a semester behind. Harry had warned his son that he would pay for only four years of college, and true to his word, he refused to give Robert an extra penny. It was not a totally unreasonable position; Harry still had three children to educate on his modest salary. But Robert had failed to make any contingency plans, and he drifted through the rest of the semester in a druggy haze. Same Alexander, who had taught Robert typographic design several years earlier, recalled that Mapplethorpe stumbled into one of Alexander’s evening workshop classes and passed out on the floor. ‘He wasn’t even enrolled in the class,’ Alexander said, ‘but he stood there by the door, then he just fell. I caught him and put him in a chair. He was totally blotto’” (42-6).

Gothic crow

“‘When I work, and in my art, I hold hands with God,’ he once scribbled in Smith’s notebook. She sparked his interest in the occult, and he often accompanied her to Samuel Weiser’s bookstore on Astor Place to buy manuals on witchcraft and astrology. She read the books while he studied the pictures, and he began to fashion an aesthetic that combined Catholic and occult symbols. His favorite motif was the pentagram, a five-pointed ‘magical’ star that would reappear again and again in his sculptures and photographs” (53).

“‘Nineteen sixty-eight had the vibrations of an earthquake about it,’ reported Time magazine. ‘America shuddered. History cracked open: bats came flapping out, dark surprises’” (56).

“‘Robert and Patti had gotten into a fight,’ Michels explained, and ‘Robert had hung the wolf.’ The next time Michels visited Smith, she sat in a corner muttering an incantation, and as her voice grew louder and the words more jumbled, a strange black cat pounced on the windowsill and entered the room. ‘It was like a death cat from Hell,’ Michels said. ‘I totally freaked.’ Michels made a swift retreat from Smith, and their relationship ended on that bizarre note.

Part Two: Patron Saints

“Mapplethorpe’s exposure to the Dionysian atmosphere of Max’s had made him even more determined to use gay pornography in his art, and he began searching through Times Squarre bookstores for old copies of gay magazines in order to understand the conventions of homosexual erotica. In the late forties, muscle and fitness publications such as Grecian Guild Pictorial and Physique Pictorial had begun to include photographs and drawings aimed at a growing gay readership, and the models, posed in bathing suits and loincloths, personified the idealized man. George Quaintance, an American illustrator and painter, contributed to Physique Pictorial, and before his death in 1957 he produced a series of pictures os naked cowboys and sailors who projected the all-American athleticism of Johnny Weissmuller. It was the Finnish-born artist Tom of Finland, however, who pointed to a new homoeroticism that was more overtly sexual. Aroused by this memories of German soldiers during World War II, he created drawings of men in black leather jackets, motorcycle caps, and knee-high leather boots that centered on the ‘butch’ male. It was an image that would become more and more visible as the growing gay rights movement helped erase the prevailing ‘camp’ behvioral style, by which some men adopted feminine mannerisms. Instead, gay activist advanced the notion that a man could be both gay and virile, which served to focus attention on the previously hidden S&M subculture, where men in leather bars enacted complicated master-slave scenarios that tested one’s masculinity” (72-3).

“Throughout the summer Smith had been giving impromptu poetry readings at the Chelsea, and using her raspy voice to accentuate the rhythm of the words, she was unconsciously edging her way toward a career in music. Certainly she could not have failed to notice the sudden prominence of rock and roll at Max’s Kansas City, where the Velvet Underground performed five nights a week, thereby paving the way for the emergence of a local New York band scene. Encouraged by the success of the Velvet Underground, Mickey Ruskin opened a cabaret on the second floor and helped launch the careers of Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. Eventually the musicians began to outnumber the artists, as Max’s evolved from an art scene to a music scene” (90-1).

Colta [what a cool name]

Part Three: Sex and Magic

“At the beginning, though, punk didn’t have such an extreme connotation; in fact, when Patti Smith and her band played an eight-week engagement at CBGB in the spring of 1975, the term ‘punk rock’ wasn’t even being used to define the emerging sound. ‘I think all the groups had one similarity in that we wanted to elevate the idea of rock while still trying to keep it simple,’ Smith said. ‘It was a real reaction against disco music and the glitter-rock thing. Our lyrics were much more sophisticated, and we weren’t into artifice at all. The whole punk phenomenon in England was much more reactionary and more ‘high style.’ We didn’t comb our hair not because we were making a political statement, but because we just didn’t comb our hair.’ Smith has often been credited with initiating the trend for ripped or shredded clothing, as she mutilated her T-shirts because she often felt ‘claustrophobic’ in them. Other performers embellished the ‘ripped’ style by piecing their clothing together again with safety pins, and later borrowing the accessories of the S&M subculture, to which punk owed a debt in its outlaw mentality and fascination with extremes. Such was the connection between music and sex that malcolm McLaren even owned a shop in London called SEX, which sold leather and bondage gear to both hardcore enthusiasts and artists alike. The shop was co-owned by fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, who summed up the prevailing ethos: ‘We’re totally committed to what we’re doing and our message is simple. We want you to live out your wildest fantasies to the hilt’” (154-5).

“Years later, when Rolling Stone composed a list of “The 100 Greatest Album Covers of All Time,” Horses ranked twenty-sixth. The stark black-and-white imagery provided a dramatic contrast to the psychedelic palette of most seventies rock albums, and Smith’s swaggering unisex pose radically altered the prevailing feminine stereotype of ‘girl singers.’ ‘I saw Horses in a record store in Australia,’ said art critic Paul Taylor, who died of AIDS in 1992, ‘and immediately fell in love with the picture. I didn’t know anything about Patti Smith or about punk, but I bought the album on the strength of the photograph. It was elegant and totally modern, and I remember looking at the photo credit and wondering, ‘Who is Robert Mapplethorp?’”

“But Studio 54 was more for socializing…[whereas] Mineshaft, [was] a hardcore ‘leather environment’” (189). “‘The scene at the Mineshaft was not about conversation.’”

“Nick…menacing demeanor of a pit bull, and his swarthy face, with its dark brows and black eyes, was made even more ominous by the flaming skull tattoo on his forehead” (190-1).

“Do it for Satan” (192).

“Arthur Fellig, better known as Weegee, who, during the thirties and forties, documented the seamy underside of New York’s nightlife” (204).

“Mapplethorpe was loath to be labeled a ‘gay artist,’ yet his rise to prominence paralleled the acceptance and assimilation of a gay aesthetic into the cultural mainstream. Frank Rich, in a 1987 essay for Esquire entitled ‘The Gay Decades,’ delineated nine episodes in ‘the homosexualization of America.’ These included Mart Crowley’s Boys in the Band; the rise of Bette Midler and her campy bathhouse sensibility; rock music’s ‘merchandizing of androgyny’; the American Psychiatric Association’s 1973 resolution that homosexuality should no longer be classified as a psychiatric disorder; and Studio 54’s institutionalization of gay chic. The gay rights and women’s movements helped liberate the male nude; women could now look at photographs of naked men in magazines such as Playgirl, thereby blurring the lines between ‘the sex that looks,’ as art scholar Margaret Walters defined the traditional male voyeuristic pose, and ‘the sex that is looked at.’ George Stambolian, who taught a course in the male nude at Wellesley College, explained: ‘For years the male nude was repressed, and when one spoke about ‘the nude,’ one usually meant the female nude. But in the late seventies, all that began to change. The Marcuse Pfeiffer Gallery did a major survey on the male nude that included works by both male and female photographers, and that inspired a lot of debate about the sexist notions we held about male nudes versus female ones–mean having to project a powerful image, women passive and powerless.’”

“In contrast, Mapplethorpe was working at a time when many gay photographers were using their pictures to express both their public and private selves. Both Arthur Tress and Duane Michals analyzed their homosexuality through dreamlike images that borrowed from surrealism and Jungian psychology; Robert Giard took pictures of nude models in ordinary domestic settings, such as in the bathtub or reading the newspaper; Jimmy DeSana photographed S&M scenes in a crude, confrontational way that was the exact opposite of Robert’s cool classicism; and Peter Jujar expressed his melancholy vision of the world through moody pictures of friends and lovers” (216).

“…framing had always been an integral part of his art” (218).

“STill, she might not have removed herself so quickly from the ‘vicious game’ had she not become involved with a man who roused her fantasies of unconditional love like no other boyfriend before him. Fred (Sonic) Smith had been the rhythm guitarist for the MC5, the Detroit-based group managed by White Panther leader John Sinclair. The ‘Five,’ as they were known, were expected to take his convoluted message of rock, dope, and armed self-defense to the airwaves. Sinclair had established a commune in Ann Arbor–’Trans-Love Energies’–where the band lived in an eighteen-room house with a group of women who, according to Rolling Stone, provided the ‘domestic energies’ by cooking, cleaning, and sewing their clothing. ‘It was an astonishing thing,’ said Danny Fields, who had once promoted the MC5, ‘because here was this band preaching liberation of all aspects of humanity, of the races, of the sexes, of everything. Then the men would come back from a concert, and they’d sit at a table chomping on spareribs, and the women would be in the kitchen scurrying around. The women didn’t eat with the men, except for John Sinclair’s wife, who had gone to school and was tough. But the others were these little pansy types in flowered hippie dresses just cooking and serving their men. I don’t know if Fred was married then, but they all had ‘women.’ You couldn’t tell one from the other. They were like nonpeople’” (221).

Part Four: Blacks and Whites

[margin note: racism]

“Photographic images of the black male nude, however, were relatively rare. Of the 134 images in Constance Sullivan’s Nude: Photographs 1850-1980, the black male is not represented at all. Given the taboo against male nudity in general, white heterosexuals were not inclined to celebrate the erotic properties of the black male body. And since blacks rarely had the financial resources to become art photographers, it was left to gay white men to present their vision of the black male nude” (237).

“It was a dramatic reversal from the days of Max’s Kansas City, where famous artists had traded their work for a bar tab. But Max’s had been replaced as an artists’ hangout by the elegant Mr. Chow’s on the Upper East Side, and the art stars of the eighties were not reclusive intellectuals, but people such as Keith Haring, who would later open a shop that sold T-shirts, shoelaces, and wallpaper that featured his trademark doodle designs” (285).

“…a Warhol silkscreen portrait of Mapplethorpe himself” (297).

Part Five: the Perfect Moment

“…and certainly one of the most macabre images was the photograph he took of a human skull. It was, for him, the purest sculptural image of all; neither hair nor flesh spoiled its clean lines, and everything, literally , was stripped to the bone.

“He had been drawn to skull imagery from the time he first turned his pet monkey, Scratch, into a musical instrument, but never before had he used the death’s head symbol to make such a powerful statement about the terrifying process of bodily decay. He returned to the same theme in a more personal way with Self Portrait, 1988, one of his finest photographs, and certainly the most intimate. At first he had only intended to take a picture of one of his walking canes, which had a carved skull at the top, but while Ed Maxey and Brian English were busy setting up the shot, he suddenly disappeared into the bedroom and emerged, five minutes later, in a black turtleneck. He knew that by dressing in black the body could be made to appear almost invisible–he had used the same technique to great effect in his portraits of Doris Saatchi and Roy Cohn. Intuitively, Ed understood what Robert was trying to do, and as he photographed his brother, he focused the camera on the hand holding the skull cane, leaving Robert’s blurred face to drift into the darkness” (335).

Epilogue

Chronology of the “Perfect Moment” Controversy

“The AFA targeted a New York artist named Andres Serrano, whose Piss Christ, an image of a crucifix submerged in a yellow liquid, had been exhibited several months earlier at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem. (Serrano described Piss Christ as a protest against the commercialization of sacred imagery.)

[I had always mistakenly associated Piss Christ with Mapplethorpe]

The Best Bits of: Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster 2017

Vision without execution is hallucination (4).

[Disciple of Experience] Leonardo was mainly self-taught. He often seemed defensive about being an “unlettered man,” as he dubbed himself with some irony. But he also took pride that his lack of formal schooling led him to be a disciple of experience and experiment… His lack of reverence for authority and his willingness to challenge received wisdom would lead him to craft an empirical approach for understanding nature that foreshadowed the scientific method developed more than a cent later by Bacon and Galileo. His method was rooted in experiment, curiosity, and the ability to marvel at (17) phenomena that the rest of us rarely pause to ponder after we’ve outgrown our wonder years.

To that was added an intense desire and ability to observe the wonders of nature. He pushed himself to perceive shapes and shadows with wondrous precision. He was particularly good at apprehending movement, from the motions of a flapping wing to the emotions flickering across a face. On this foundation he built experiments, some conducted in his mind, others with drawings, and a few with physical objects. “First I shall do some experiments before I proceed further,” he announced, “because my intention is to consult experience first and then with reasoning show why such experience is bound to operate in such a way (18).

[Childhood Memories] And it does not take a Freud to understand that sexual drives can be sublimated into ambition and other passions. Leonardo said so himself. “Intellectual passion drives out sensuality,” he wrote in one of his notebooks (20).

[Education] One skill that was emphasized was how to draw analogies between cases, a method that Leonardo would use repeatedly in his later science. Analogies and spotting patterns became for him a rudimentary method of theorizing (31).

Being left-handed also affected Leonardo’s method of drawing. As with his writing, he drew from right to left so as not to smudge the lines with his hand. Most artists draw hatching strokes that slope upward to the right, like this: ////. But Leonardo’s hatching was distinctive because his lines started on the lower right and moved upward to the left, like this: \\. Today this style has an added advantage: the left-handed hatching in a drawing is evidence that it was made by Leonardo (32).

[Verrocchio] Piero gave the task to Leonardo, who decided to create a terrifying image of a dragon-like monster breathing fire and belching poison. To make it naturalistic, he assembled parts from real lizards, crickets, snakes, butterflies, grasshoppers, and bats. “He labored over it so long that the stench of the dead animals was past bearing, but Leonardo did not notice it, so great was the love that he bore towards art,” Vasari wrote. When Piero finally came to get it, he recoiled in shock from what in the dim light appeared at first to be a real monster. Piero decided to keep his son’s creation and buy another shield for the peasant. “Later, Ser Piero sold the buckler of Leonardo secretly to some merchants in Florence, for a hundred ducats; and in a short time it came into the hands of the Duke of Milan, having been sold to him by the merchants for three hundred ducats.”

The shield, perhaps Leonardo’s first recorded piece of art, displayed his lifelong talent for combining fantasy with observation. In the notes for his proposed treatise on painting, he would later write, “If you wish to make an imaginary animal invented by you appear natural, let us say a dragon, take for the head that of a mastiff or hound, for the eyes a cat, and for the ears a porcupine, and for the nose a greyhound, and the brows of a lion, the temple of an old cock, the neck of a terrapin” (39).

[Draperies, Chiaroscuro, and Sfumato] “The first intention of the painter,” Leonardo later wrote, “is to make a flat surface display a body as if modeled and separated from this plane, and he who surpass others in this skill deserves most praise. This accomplishment, with which the science of painting is crowned, arises from light and shade, or we may say chiaroscuro.” That statement could stand as his artistic manifesto, or at least a key element of it (40-1).

When mastering drapery drawings in Vercocchio’s studio, Leonardo also pioneered sfumato, the technique of blurring contours and edges. It is a way for artists to render objects as they appear to our eye rather than with sharp contours. This advance caused Vasari to proclaim Leonardo the inventor of the “modern manner” in painting, and the art historian Ernst Gombrich called sfumato “Leonardo’s famous invention, the blurred outline and mellowed colors that allow one form to merge with another and always leave something to our imagination.

The term sfumato derives from the Italian word for “smoke,” or more precisely the dissipation and gradual vanishing of smoke into the air. “Your shadows and lights should be blended without lines or borders in the manner of smoke losing itself in the air,” he wrote in a series of maxims for young painters. From the eyes of his angel in the Baptism of Christ to the smile of the Mona Lisa, the blurred and smoke-veiled edges allow a role for our own imagination. With no sharp lines, enigmatic glances and smiles can flicker mysteriously (41).

[The Arno Landscape] The glory of being an artist, he realized, was that reality should inform but not constrain (47).

…doing something different: depicting nature for its own sake. That makes his Arno Valley drawing a contender for the first such landscape in European art. The geological realism is striking: the craggy rock outcroppings eroded by the river reveal accurately rendered layers of stratified rock, a subject that was to fascinate Leonardo for the rest of his life. So, too, is the near-precision of linear perspective and the way the atmosphere blurs the distant horizon, an optical phenomenon that he would later call “aerial perspective.”

Even more arresting is the young artist’s ability to convey motion. The leaves of the trees and even their shadows are drawn with quick curved lines that make them seem to tremble in the breeze. The water falling into a pool is made vibrant with flutters of luck stokes. The result is a delightful display of the wart of observing movement (48).

[Baptism of Christ] An X-ray analysis of the painting confirms that the angel on the left and much of the background landscape and the body of Jesus were painted with multiple thin layers of oil paint, the pigments highly diluted, stroked on with great delicacy and sometimes dabbed and smoothed by fingertips, a style that Leonardo was developing in the 1470s. Oil painting had come to Italy from the Netherlands…(54).

This use of sfumato, the smokiness that blurs sharp contours, was by now a hallmark of Leonardo’s art. Alberti in his treatise on painting had advised that lines should be drawn to delineate edges, and Vercocchio did just that. Leonardo took care to observe the real world, and he noticed the opposite: when we look at three-dimensional objects, we don’t see sharp lines. “Paint so that a smoky finish can be seen, rather than contours and profiles that are distinct and crude,” he wrote. “When you paint shadows and their edges, which cannot be perceived except indistinctly, do not make them sharp or clearly defined, otherwise your work will have a wooden appearance.” Vercocchio’s angel has this wooden appearance. Leonardo’s does not (55).

In these acutely observed vortexes and scientifically accurate ripples, Leonardo delights in what will become his favorite pattern: nature’s spirals. The curls flowing down his angel’s neck look like cascades of water, as if the river had flowed over his head and transformed into hair (56).

[Motions of the Mind] Alberti, in On Painting…”Movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body” (87).

[Despair] From Dante’s Inferno: “Put off this sloth,” the master said, “for shame! Sitting on feather-pillows, lying reclined Beneath the blanket is no way to fame—Fame, without which man’s life wastes out of mind, Leaving on earth no more memorial Than foam in water or smoke upon the wind” (89).

[Plays and Pageants] The steed was followed by the horde of cavemen and savages. It was typical of Leonardo’s desire to indulge in the scary and exotic; he had an affinity for bizarre demons and dragons (115).

[Literary Amusements] Many of the prophecy-riddles select Leonardo’s love for animals. “Countless numbers will have their little children taken away and their throats shall be cut,” is one prophecy, as if describing a brutal act of war and genocide. But then Leonardo, who had become a vegetarian, reveals that this prophecy refers to the sheep and cows that humans eat. “Winged creatures will support people with their feathers,” he wrote in another example, and then revealed that he was not referring to flying machines but “the feathers used to stuff mattresses.” As they say in show business, you had to be there” (126).

[Outstanding Beauty and Infinite Grace] The horses brought him “much delight,” Vasari wrote, as did all animals. “Often when passing the places where birds were sold, he would take them with his own hand out of their cages, and having paid to those who sold them the price that was asked, he let them fly away into the air, restoring to them their lost liberty.”

Because of his love for animals, Leonardo was a vegetarian fo much of his life, although his shopping lists show that he often bought meat for others in his household. “He would not kill a flea for any reason whatsoever,” a friend wrote. “He preferred to dress in linen, so as not to war something dead.” A Florentine traveler to India recorded that the people there “do not feed on anything that has blood, nor will they allow anyone to hurt any living thing, like our Leonardo da Vinci.

In addition to his prophecy tales that include dire descriptions of the practice of slaying animals for food, Leonardo’s notebooks contain other literary passages assailing meant eating. “If you are, as you have described yourself, the king of the animals,” he wrote of humans, “why do you help other animals only so that they may be able to give you their young in order to gratify your palate?” He referred to a vegetable diet as “simple” food and urged its adoption. “Does not nature bring forth enough simple food things to satisfy your hunger? Or if you cannot content yourself with simple things can you not do so by blending these simple foods together to make an infinite number of compounds?”

His rationale for avoiding meat derived from a morality based on science. Unlike plants, animals could feel pain, Leonardo realized. Hi studies led him to believe that this was because animals had the ability to move their bodies. “Nature has given sensibility to pain to living organisms that have the power of movement, in order to preserve those parts which might be destroyed by movement,” he surmised. “Pain is not necessary in plants (130-1).

[Collaboration and Vitruvian Man] Ideas are often generated in physical gathering, places where people with diverse interests encounter one another serendipitously. That is why Steve Jobs liked his buildings to have a central atrium and why the young Benjamin Franklin founded a club where the most interesting people of Philadelphia would gather every Friday. At the court of Ludovico Sforza, Leonardo found friends who could spark new ideas by rubbing together their diverse passions (159).

[Love this chapter: Chapter 10; Scientist; Teaching Himself] Leonardo da Vinci liked to boast that, because he was not formally educated, he had to learn from his own experiences instead. It was around 1490 when he wrote his screed about being “a man without letters” and a “disciple of experience,” with its swipe against those who would cite ancient wisdom rather than make observations on their own. “Though I have no power to quote from authors as they have,” he proclaimed almost proudly, “I shall rely on a far more worthy thing—on experience.” Throughout his life, he would repeat this claim to prefer experience over received scholarship. “He who has access to the fountain does not go to the water-jar,” he wrote. This made him different from the archetypal Renaissance Man, who embraced the rebirth of wisdom that came from rediscovered works of classical antiquity (170).

A goldsmith from Gutenberg’s hometown of Mainz named Johannes de Spira (or Speyer) moved to Venice and started Italy’s first major commercial publishing house in 1469; it printed many of the classics, starting with Cicero’s letters and Pliny’s encyclopedic Natural History, which Leonardo bought. By 1471 there were printing shops also in Milan, Florence, Naples, Bologna, Ferrara, Padua, and Genoa. Venice became the center of Europe’s publishing industry, and by the time Leonardo visited in 1500, there were close to a hundred printing houses there, and two million volumes had come off their presses. Leonardo thus was able to become the first major European thinker to acquire a serious knowledge of science without being formally schooled in Latin or Greek” (172).

Thus Leonardo became a disciple of both experience and received wisdom. More important, he came to see that the progress of science came from a dialogue between the two. That in turn helped him realize that knowledge also came from a related dialogue: that between experiment and theory (173).

[Connecting Experiment to Theory] As with so many things, this empirical approach put him ahead of his time. Scholastic theologians of the Middle Ages had fused Aristotle’s science with Christianity to create an authorized creed that left little room for skeptical inquiry or experimentation. Even the humanists of the early Renaissance preferred to repeat the wisdom of classical texts rather than test it.

Leonardo broke with this tradition by basing his science primarily on observations, then discerning patterns, and then testing their validity through more observations and experiments. Dozens of times in his notebook he wrote some variation of the phrase “this can be proved by experiment” and then proceeded to describe a real-world demonstration of his thinking. Foreshadowing what would become the scientific method, he even prescribed how experiments must be repeated and varied to assure their validity: “Before you make a general rule of this case, test it two or three times and observe whether the tests produce the same effects” (174).

As a result, Leonardo became one of the major Western thinkers, more than a century before Galileo, to pursue in a persistent hands-on fashion the dialogue between experiment and theory that would lead to the modern Scientific Revolution. Aristotle had laid the foundations, in ancient Greece, for the method of partnering inductions and deductions: using observations to formulate general principles, then using these principles to predict outcomes. While Europe was mired in its dark years of medieval superstition, the work of combining theory and experiment was advanced primarily in the Islamic world. Muslim scientists often also worked as scientific instrument makers, which made them experts at measurements and applying theories (175).

Meanwhile, Aristotle’s science was being revived in Europe during the thirteenth century by scholars such as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon. The empirical method used by Bacon emphasized a cycle: observations should lead to a hypothesis, which should then be tested by precise experiments, which would then be used to refine the original hypothesis. Bacon also recorded and reported his experiments in precise detail so that others could independently replicate and verify them.

[Patterns and Analogies] …he was able to see patterns in nature, and he theorized by making analogies…discerned recurring themes…based on similarities and analogies (176-7).

[Curiosity and Observation] Kenneth Clark referred to Leonardo’s “inhumanly sharp eye.” It’s a nice phrase, but misleading. Leonardo was human. The acuteness of his observational skill was not some superpower he possessed. Instead, it was a product of his own effort. That’s important, because it means that we can, if we wish, not just marvel at him but try to learn from him by pushing ourselves to look at things more curiously and intensely (179).

[Bird-Watching] He not only got the basic principles of fluid dynamics correct, but he was able to turn his insights into rudimentary theories that foreshadowed those of Newton, Galileo, and Bernoulli (184).

[The Skull Drawings] “The originality of the skull drawings of 1489 is so fundamentally different and superior to all other extant illustrations of the time that they are completely out of character with the age,” according to Francis Wells, a surgeon and an expert on the anatomical drawings. …as far as is now known, he became the first person in history to describe fully the human dental elements, including a depiction of the roots that is almost perfect (216). …it was not until 1739 that this pithing experiment would again be illustrated and described correctly (218).

[Head of a Young Woman] The angel, like the one he painted for Vercocchio’s Baptism of Christ, is an example of Leonardo’s proclivity for gender fluidity. Some nineteenth-century critics saw it as a mark of his homosexuality, especially since the positioning and outward gaze of the disturbingly alluring angel make him seem a proxy for the artist (233).

[Fantasia and Reality] Take, for example, his advice about looking at a wall that is “spotted with stains or has a mix of stones.” Leonardo could stare at such a wall and observe with precision the striations of each stone and other factual details. But he also knew how to use the wall as a springboard for his imagination and as a “way to stimulate and arouse the mind to various inventions.” He wrote in his advice for young artists: “You may discover in the patterns on the wall a resemblance to various landscapes, adorned with mountains, rivers, rocks, trees, plains, wide valleys and hills in varied arrangement; or again you may see battles and figures in action; or strange faces and costumes, and an endless variety of objects, which you could turn int complete and well-drawn forms. The effect produced by these mottled walls is like that of the sound of bells, in which you may recognize any name or word you choose to imagine…It should not be hard for you to look at stains on walls, or the ashes of a fire, or the clouds, or mud, and if you consider them well you will find marvelous new ideas, because the mind is stimulated to new inventions by obscure things” (263-4).

[Shapes Without Lines] Nothing in nature, he realized, has precise mathematical lines or boundaries or borders. “Lines are not part of any quantity of an object’s surface, not are they part of the air which surrounds this surface,” he wrote. He realized that points and lines are mathematical constructs. They do not have a physical presence. They are infinitely small. “The line has in itself neither matter nor substance and may rather be called an imaginary idea than a real object; and this being its nature it occupies no space” (269). Leonardo’s insistence that all boundaries, both in nature and in art, are blurred led him to become the pioneer of sfumato, the technique of using hazy and smoky outlines such as those so notable in the Mona Lisa. Sfumato is not merely a technique for modeling reality more accurately in a painting. It is an analogy for the blurry distinction between the known and the mysterious, one of the core themes of Leonardo’s life. Just as he blurred the boundaries between art and science, he did so to the boundaries between reality and fantasy, between experience and mystery, between objects and their surroundings (269-70).

[The Return] When Leonardo reached Florence in late March 1500, he found a city that had just lived through a reactionary spasm that threatened to destroy its role in the vanguard of Renaissance culture. In 1494 a radical friar named Girolamo Savonarola had led a religious rebellion against the ruling Medici and instituted a fundamentalist regime that imposed strict new laws against homosexuality, sodomy, and adultery. Some transgressions were punished by stoning and burning. A militia of young boys was organized to patrol the streets and enforce morals. On Mardi Gras of 1497 Savonarola led what became known as the “Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which books, art, clothing, and cosmetics were set aflame. The following year, popular opinion turned on him, and he was hanged and burned in the central square of Florence. By Leonardo’s return, the city had again become a republic that celebrated the classics and art, but its confidence was shaken, its exuberance dampened, and the finances of its government and guilds drained (300).

[Diverting the Arno] Milan’s waterworks had existed for centuries, even before the Romans built their famed aqueducts in the Po Valley around 200 BC (347). Just before Pisa broke away, a major world event made Florence even more eager to control a sea outlet. In March 1493 Christopher Columbus returned safely from his first voyage across the Atlantic Ocean, and the report of his discoveries quickly spread throughout Europe. This was soon followed by a flurry of other accounts of amazing explorations. America Vespucci, whose cousin Agostina worked with Machiavelli in the Florentine chancery, helped puppy Columbus’s third voyage in 1498, and the following year he made his own voyage across the Atlantic, landing in what is now Brazil. Unlike Columbus, who thought he was finding a route to India, Vespucci correctly reported to his Florentine patrons that he had “arrived at a new land which for many reasons…we observed to be a continent.” His correct surmise led to its being named America, after him. The excitement over what portended to be a new age of exploration made Florence’s desire to regain Pisa more urgent. [verruca means “wart”] (348). This would require moving a million tons of earth, and Leonardo calculated the man-hours necessary by doing a detailed time-and-motion study, one of the first in history. He figured out everything from the weight of one shovel-load of dirt (twenty-five pounds) to how many shovel-loads would fill a wheelbarrow (twenty). His answer: it would take approximately 1.3 million man-hours, or 540 men working 100 days, to dig the Arno diversion ditch (349).

[Draining the Piombino Marshes] This inability to ground his fantasies in reality has generally been regarded as one of Leonardo’s major failings. Yet in order to be a true visionary, one has to be willing to overreach and to fail some of the time. Innovation requires a reality distortion field. The things he envisioned for the future often came to pass, even if it took a few centuries. Scuba gear, flying machines, and helicopters now exist. Suction pumps now drain swamps. Along the route of the canal that Leonardo drew there is now a major highway. Sometimes fantasies are paths to reality (353-4).

[Analogies] “Though human ingenuity may make various inventions,” he wrote, “it will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple, more direct than does Nature; because in her inventions nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous” (403).

[Floods and Fossils] Leonardo thus became a pioneer of ichnology, the study of fossil traces, a field that did not come into full existence for another three hundred years (440).

[The End] [The final words written by Leonardo de Vinci:] “perche la minestra si fredda,” he writes. Because the soup is getting cold.

Augustine 354-430 B.C.

Born between antiquity and the medieval millennium, his autobiography, Confessions, draws on Roman orators such as Cicero, yet reaches forward to explore how the word of God had been lodged within his soul all along.

Life and Times

Augustine was born in North Africa during a time of war along with cultural and religious transitions. Mystery and cult religions were popular. Augustine was able to travel over Northern Africa and into Italy. His interest was captured by Manicheanism, a dualistic religion that resembled early Christianity: life of the mind, spiritual purity. Augustine became a teacher of grammar and established a school of rhetoric. In Italy he became the Chair of rhetoric and wrote speeches that were used at court. He then became interested in Neoplatonism: a philosophy and a quasi-religious form of mysticism, yet he slowly became increasingly drawn to Christianity. Bishop Ambrose and his mother, Monica, teamed up to bring Augustine in to the Christian faith, which he did when he was 32. Both his mother and son died. He returned to Africa alone, surrounded himself with other Christians and turned his home into a monastery. Augustine gained a reputation as a spiritual leader and later became an ordained priest.

Work

Augustine probably began his autobiography around age 43. Writing Confessions opened up the floodgates; he went on to write tons of stuff. Augustine began the autobiographical genre. He wants Confessions to turn his reader inward and contemplate the journey toward the divine. Augustine had one girlfriend for years with whom he had a son, Adeodatus. His mother arranged a marriage to another woman, but Augustine’s relationship with God took over his life. His journey was his search for the self. By revealing his deepest self and his struggles, others began to seek out his works.

Sophocles

496-406 B.C.

The seven remaining plays of Sophocles are considered the height of ancient Athens’ achievements with themes of army, city, family, the human race and independence within and without family. Acceptance of place or rejection? What does it mean to be an outsider? What should we do when forced to choose?

Life and Times

Sophocles had a long, successful, productive and happy life. He was fairly wealthy and well educated. He lived in Athens during the golden or classical age. Pericles, an important political figure, was a personal friend of Sophocles. After age 60, the city of Athens began to experience turmoil. He worked in Athenian theater all his life and introduced scene painting, increasing the chorus members from twelve to fifteen, and bringing in a third actor (a “tritagonist”) which allowed three-way dialogue and deeper relationship explorations. Sophocles’s plays seem more modern because he de-centered the chorus to focus more on the characters. He created realistic characters who explored issues such as when is it appropriate to compromise? Should I be a hero or take the course of moderation? He won first prize at the Great Dionysia while still younger than thirty. He composed over one hundred and twenty plays. He had so much charm of character that he was loved everywhere, by everyone. Sophocles’s participation in public life suggests that he was seen as a trustworthy and wise member of the community. He was married and had five sons, one of whom became involved in the theater. He lived past the age of ninety.

Iron Maiden: Run to the Hills: The Official Biography by Mick Wall

I have been a fan of Iron Maiden, especially the old stuff, for years, but never really knew anything about them. I’m not sure how this book came to my shelf, but it is a pretty hefty read at 348 pages. The book is not a critique; more like a love letter. We do get the true creation story from everyone’s point of view. First person conversations run throughout the book. Any time the music is mentioned it is always with glowing terms. In the foreword, Steve Harris, founding member of Iron Maiden, writes “This book was written by Mick Wall, someone respected enough by the band for us to want him to take on the task. A fan and friend of Maiden for many years, Mick decided to approach not just the current members but also past members of the band, plus management, agents, and past and present members of the crew for the material for this book. It makes interesting reading, even for me, because everybody has a different view of how things have happened over the years!” Here are some interesting bits and quotes.

“…Iron Maiden begins and ends with the dreams and ambitions of one man: Steve Harris [bassist, lead writer and head honcho]. He it was who can up with the name, came up with the songs, the idea, and the attitude…’Arry, as the band affectionately know him…” (16).

Harris is a huge soccer fan, especially of Ham United. Study some of their album covers closely and you may find soccer references.

“Steve came up with the name of the new band, Iron Maiden–a medieval torture device that could be described as a coffin lined with long, sharp spikes–simply, he says, because ‘it just sounded right for the music. I was sitting around at my mum’s place, talking about names for the band and that was the name that was bandied about, and I said, Yeah, that’s great. I like that. I don’t remember if I thought of it or my mum did, or someone else in my family, I can’t remember. But I do remember saying it to my mum and she went, Oh, that’s good. I think I had a short-list of four or five names and she said, Oh yeah, that’s the best one’” (29).

[Can you imagine being in high school, starting a heavy metal band, and your mom going “Iron Maiden…now, that’s a name!”]

Harris had been in cover bands, but he wanted his own band in order to perform the originals he’d been writing. “Even then, the Harris penchant for an unexpected time-change which would become the hallmark of all Iron Maiden’s most respected work, was already much in evidence” (32-3).

“But with the arrival of Wilcock came the news of a guitarist mate, of Den’s that, he said, would blow them away. His name was Dave Murray. I said, ‘Well, if he’s that good get him down here!’ recalls Steve. ‘So he did. And that’s when everything really changed…’” (34).

Maiden was seen as part of the “new British rock scene.” Sounds journalist Geoff Barton “had a name for it; he called it the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM). The phrase New Wave Of British Heavy Metal was this slightly tongue-in-cheek thing that first cropped up in a sub-heading and we just expanded it a bit to give the feature some sort of slant” (94).

[I’ve included a large section on the creation of Iron Maiden’s mascot, Eddie, because I’ve always been fascinated with the image. I used to draw him in doodles during high school. I’ve named various objects “Edward” in homage to him across the course of my life, and he was even the inspiration for a teenage poem entitled “Spoon.” I’ll share it later if I can find it.]

“The other most striking feature of Maiden’s first single was the introduction into the scheme of things of one of the most important characters in the entire Maiden story–Eddie, the cartoon creation of self-styled English eccentric and former art-school drop-out, Derek Riggs” (142).

“…the one thing that never changes is the thrill that runs through an Iron Maiden audience the moment Eddie bursts forth onto the stage at the climax of every show. If you’ve never seen Iron Maiden live, you won’t know what is so palpably obvious to those of us who have been there to see it for ourselves: that Eddie is the immortal soul of Iron Maiden; the defining symbol of the eternally youthful, blissfully uncompromising spirit of the band’s music. No matter what your age (and after nearly three decades there are plenty of Maiden fans whose memories are now longer than our hair), Eddie stands for the part of us that will never stop loving loud, live, over the top rock music; that will never shrink or hide from adversity; and never give up hope that there are still better times to be had…somwhere. Which is why Eddie no longer belongs either to Derek Riggs, Rod Smallwood or Steve Hrris. He belongs to us all” (143).

Rod Smallwood explains that the band did not have a defining feature; “they didn’t have that one figure who utterly stamped his presence and image on the band in a way that was obvious enough to make a good album cover. There wasn’t anything extra to give the image that continuity. So I went looking for someone, something…an image, that would look good on the record sleeve and say something more about this band than just another photograph of them on stage.’

“Rod was in John Darnley’s office at EMI one afternoon when–of all things–a poster on the wall for trad-jazz star Max Middleton caught his eye. ‘It’s not like I’m a big Max Middleton fan or anything,’ he says, ‘but the artwork on this poster was just so striking, you couldn’t miss it. Your eyes just went to it as soon as you walked in the room. So I immediately asked John, ‘Who did that for you?’ And it was this guy I’d never heard of called Derek Riggs. I asked to meet him so he could show me some more of his work, and in the middle of a load of drawings for what he thought would be good sic-fi book covers, there was the first album sleeve! It was this sort of cartoon of this mad-looking sort of punk monster, but as soon as I saw it, I knew. That was it! The only change we asked Derek to make was to make the hair a bit longer, so it was less obviously like a punk. Derek had been round all the record companies trying to sell it for a punk band–album or single, she didn’t mind. But I saw that and thought, ‘No, that’s for us, that’s exactly what we need.’ I remember taking his portfolio around to show the band. I just threw it on the table and said, ‘See if you can pick out your album sleeve,’ and it was the first one they picked out! It was just obvious to everybody from the word go–there was Eddie! It was like he’d been done just for the band.’

“‘People always ask if Eddie was inspired by Maiden’t music but I’d never even heard of Iron Maiden when I drew the first Eddie,’ Derek admits. ‘I’ve never really been into heavy metal. In fact, when I’m drawing, instead of listening to whatever Maiden are up to, I’m much more likely to spend most of my time listening to Beethoven, Stravinsky or even The Spice Girls. In those days, though, I was quite fond of punk and originally that’s what Eddie was supposed to be–this sort of brain-damaged punk. I was very influenced by the punk idea of wasted youth, this whole generation that had just been thrown in the bin–no future and all that. Which is funny, because I then included it with some other stuff I’d been sending around to various sort of science-fiction book publishers, to see if they could use any of it on one of their book covers or whatever. I didn’t really know what else to do with it. I’ve never even really been into art, not in the conventional sense. Not since they threw me out of art college, in Coventry, when I was nineteen.’

“‘But no-one was interested–I was pretty crap at book covers, actually. I discovered I could paint city streets really well, but that wasn’t much help when it came to ski-fi. Then, out of nowhere, Rod and Maiden picked up on this particular image, only they wanted me to make it a bit less like a punk and more like them. So I redrew him with pretty much the same face, the same body and clothes and everything, just with longer hair. It was still spiky but now it was long and would shoot out in all directions.’

“‘I liked the idea because it gave you great visual continuity.’ says Rod, ‘and it made the Maiden sleeves just stick out a bit more than the average sort of ‘could-be-anything’ sort of sleeves most rock bands used then. And it became a very important part of Maiden’t image, in that way. We’ve never done a lot of television, we’ve never really been on the radio, but because Eddie struck such a chord with the Maiden fans, we didn’t need to be. Wearing an Eddie T-shirt became like a statement: fuck radio, fuck TV, we’re not into that crap, we’re into Iron Maiden. And, of course, we’ve had a lot of fun wit Eddie over the years, trying to find new and ever-more outrageous things for him to be and do. Sometimes the ideas come from Derek, although usually they either come from me or one of the band. But it can be anybody or anything that inspires us. Like with Number Of The Beast, where we had Eddie in hell with the Devil as his puppet, only the Devil’s got a puppet Eddie, too, and it was like, well, who’s the really evil one here? Who’s manipulating who? The concept was very simple, but the way Derek executed it was fantastic. Originally, he came up with it for the sleeve of the ‘Purgatory’ single, but we said, ‘No, that’s much too good,’ so we kept it for the album. We had the artwork months before we had the music.’

“The idea of turning the original Eddie the ‘Ead that had adorned the backdrop of every Maiden gig for the last three years into the more recognizable face of Riggs’ Eddie was a fairly obvious one. Smoke would still billow from its mouth during the usual ‘Iron Maiden’ finale, only now the ghastly, staring mask had acquired not just long spiky hair but a long spiky personality to match. But the real masterstroke was when they eventually hit on the idea of having a three-dimensional Eddie that didn’t just stare from the back of the stage, but actually ran about it terrorizing both the band and the astonished audience. Rod credits former EMI managing director in the Eighties, Rupert Perry, for the original suggestion that Eddie might become more than just a useful merchandising icon;that he might somehow become an active part of the show.

“‘Rupert was at a show with us one night,’ says Rod, ‘and he just said, ‘Smallwood, why don’t you get this guy on stage?’ And I thought, ‘Yeah, he’s right, that would be great.’ At first, it was just me with an Eddie mask on. I’d just go bounding around the stage like a lunatic during the intro to get the audience worked up, and the place would go mad. So we started doing it every night. Once, in Detroit, a guy from the record company came up when I had the mask on and asked me if I’d seen Rod. I just growled! Then various tour managers did it. One tour manager we had, Tony Wiggins, absolutely refused to do it so he would always wear cord trousers to the show, because he knew we’d never let Eddie go on stage in cords! It had to be a leather jacket and jeans. So Tony never did Eddie.’”

“‘I can’t actually take all the credit,’ insists Rupert Perry. “It’s true that it was me who first said to Rod, ‘You know, what if the Eddie character could move?’ But I was thinking more along the lines of something that would happen at the start of the show, perhaps before the band even came on. But Rod, in his genius, took that and turned it into something much more exciting. And now, of course, Eddie is a very big and important part of every Iron Maiden show. It would be hard to imagine them without him. He’s become like the sixth member.’

“Originally, Eddie’s brief but blustery appearances took the form of a leather-jacketed man (as he admits, usually Rod, or one of their tour managers) in a specially-designed head-mask. But as the band’s international career took off around the world and the arenas they filled grew larger and larger, so, too, did Eddie. Bigger and more berserk with each new album that rolled around, by Powerslave, in 1984, he was over fourteen feet tall and able to launch thunderbolts with the wave of one giant, bandaged hand. Clearly, this was no mere man-in-a-fright-mask.

“Dave Lights remembers how the idea arose. ‘I had taken my family to see Jack And The Beanstalk in pantomime the previous Christmas,’ he says, ‘and I remember how impressed all the kids had been every time the giant walked on stage. It was basically a bloke on stilts but dressed up to look about ten feet tall. It was just such a simple, marvelous effect that I mentioned it to the band and said, ‘You know, maybe we could have Eddie as some sort of giant when he comes on stage.’ I think the first time we did it, on the Number Of The Beast world tour, the Eddie we had was about eight feet tall, but he ended up about fourteen feet in the end, I think. He just kept growing, getting bigger and more ridiculous with each tour we did. And it’s kind of become the best part of the show. It’s always right at the end, during ‘Iron Maiden’, and it’s just turned into this big, mad celebration. Just when you think you’ve seen all the effects there are, had all the best lights and heard all the best numbers, suddenly here comes Eddie and it just sends everybody right over the top.’”

“Dickie Bell, the band’s current tour manager, who has worked with Maiden since 1981, reckons, ‘The kids fucking love Eddie more than they love the band. And you can see why: it’s ‘cause he’s one of them. In their minds, he’s like the Maiden fan from hell! And when he gets up on stage, it’s like one of their own getting up there and doing it for them. It’s like Eddie is the ultimate headbanger” (144-147)! [End Eddie section.]

“With new Steve Harris-penned mini-epics like ‘Hallowed Be Thy Name’ (the dying note of a condemned man) and the track from which the album takes its title, ‘the Number Of The Beast’ (inspired by the film Omen II) Maiden had entered new creative territory.