ROWDY RENAISSANCE

A Reuters photographer recently shot a photograph of a brawl in - of all places - the Ukrainian Parliament.

That, in itself, was not especially noteworthy. Sure, you don’t necessarily expect a country’s lawmakers to be duking it out in the midst of a legislative session, but this was Ukraine, after all. Besides, governmental civility has been on the decline in our own country for years. We might not have reached bottom yet, but who is to say that fistfights won’t be breaking out in the House of Representatives after the next election?

What was remarkable about the photograph was not so much its subject matter as its composition. Inadvertently, the image was an almost perfect exemplar of a beloved Renaissance compositional technique involving the use of the Golden Spiral. Caravaggio would have understood this photograph perfectly, although he might have wondered just what exactly a Parliament was supposed to be.


Art is where you find it: Ukrainian solons duke it out in a manner befitting Michelangelo or da Vinci.

(I tweaked the lighting a bit and “oilpainterized” the image before sticking it in this frame, in case you were wondering.)