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To the Royal Academy’s weirdly untrumpeted Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael exhibition. You can stand in the courtyard and not tell it is going on. Shame. In the last room, with god knows what trick of his pen, Leonardo, perhaps not even the best draughtsman of the three, gives a horse’s head as much inner life as Rembrandt might a human face.
Florence c1504 (which is also the tagline of the show) had as deep a treasury of artistic talent as one place has known at one time. And each of the eternal trio who worked there was an odd social fit. Raphael wasn’t from the Republic at all — or Rome or Venice — but from Urbino, on the other side of the Apennines. Leonardo was born out of wedlock. As for Michelangelo, even aside from the sex question, his neuroses about his déclassé family never stopped chewing him.
None of these obstacles debarred success, as poverty or racial difference or womanhood doubtless would have. Yet each might be enough to provide an artist with an original vision, and a certain impatience. In other words, the three men were disadvantaged to a useful extent.
The optimal position in life is that of the partial outsider. That is, someone handicapped enough in a given milieu to see things others might miss, but not so alien as to be unable to work the system. Not all partial outsiders leave a mark, no, but a disproportionate share of those who leave a mark qualify as partial outsiders.
Isn’t Donald Trump exhibit A? He is New York but not Manhattan, urban but not urbane, rich but from the construction game rather than from genteel finance. He grew up close enough to the elite to know its frailties, and far enough to itch with resentment at the little slights that are the lot of the not-quite-pukka. I once thought it would be the downfall of modern populism that its leaders were silver-spoon pretenders. Now I see that an authentic Everyperson, a Pierre Poujade type, wouldn’t know how to bend the establishment against itself. Boris Johnson (Etonian but never rich) and Nigel Farage (privately schooled but not a graduate) emphatically do.
Notice that both men, like Trump, are from their nation’s main metropolis, as is Marine Le Pen, despite populism setting its face against such places. Of course they are. Where would a rural outsider even begin? It takes the implausible gifts of a Napoleon or Lincoln to penetrate the citadel from wholly without. Right now, we live under people who long lurked inside but had a differentiating trait or two, such as the foreign birth of Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
I shouldn’t assume the causal relationship goes all one way. Does social detachment make people see the world differently? Or does seeing the world differently detach people? For three or four centuries, bar a Hegel here and a Rousseau there, few great philosophers got married: not Leibniz, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Locke, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche or Wittgenstein. In all likelihood, being in possession of blazing metaphysical insight led to their apartness, not the reverse.
Either way, there is such a thing as the optimal degree of alienation, and it isn’t zero. You want to see the world from an angle of about 45 degrees. Much more than that makes for a life full of tension. Much less, and the risk is innocuousness and complacency. David Cameron was one of those leaders — like Rosebery and Eden in Britain, and perhaps the elder Bush in the US — who were groomed to be great, and had the elements for it, but were just too at ease at the top. As well as originality of thought, the partial outsider has a kind of animal vigilance (“Where is the next humiliation coming from?”) that is priceless in high office.
These are cases from art and letters and affairs, but the pattern should hold all the way down to earthlier lines of work. You might recognise it in yours. I see it in mine: people too privileged for their own creative good or too disadvantaged to stand a chance. I imagine I had a thornier first 20 years of life than the average of my professional peers, but look, I’m not Sonny Liston. The experience was just testing enough. It can take until mid-life to understand what constitutes the Goldilocks upbringing.
Email Janan at [email protected]
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