Word: barbieri
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Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a former Crimson associate editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays...
Pierpaolo Barbieri ’09, a former Crimson associate editorial chair, is a history concentrator in Eliot House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays...
...reproduction of a handprint left by its maker on a ceramic brick, taken from an unearthed Han tomb wall. It's a hauntingly visceral exercise, like shaking hands with a dead man, but precisely the type of immanent encounter with a past typically coffined in museum display cases that Barbieri-Low hopes to inspire. "Understanding these lives," he says, "will allow us to humanize the material remains of the past...
...Free craftsmen, not convicts, sculpted the celebrated terracotta warriors and horses guarding Qin Shihuangdi's vast underground necropolis. But as Barbieri-Low debunks, they were not the master artists they are sometimes trumpeted to be. Many were just journeymen, working on component parts upon which they inscribed their names not as Monet-like signatures but as part of quality-control procedures. The names worked as premodern barcodes. Shoddy platters, censers, stone carvings and so on could be traced back to the workshop that produced them, and the artisans could be punished accordingly. The inscriptions also worked as brands, and forgeries...
...Mass-production of goods is Barbieri-Low's dominant leitmotif. Long before China was factory to the world, he suggests, it was factory to itself. The artisans were indispensable cogs in the Qin and Han imperial machinery. Barbieri-Low splendidly reanimates their lost lives, and gives them due credit for greasing the wheels of China's first empires. It's the same sort of credit due to those shunned migrant workers now constructing Olympic stadiums in Beijing, anonymously propping up the superpower of tomorrow...