Axis 10 of twelve · TEC
Command of the medium: prose, structure, editing, arrangement, camera, harmony, line. Craft is not what makes a work great, which is why this axis does not gate the summit. Its absence disqualifies, which is why it floors. At the highest marks the making is load-bearing.
Floored at 7.0. Necessary and not sufficient — the rubric’s clearest statement that skill is not achievement.
1754 works · floor · the rubric
Dante Alighieri · Literature
9.7 · Tier V
Judged on Dante’s Italian. The making is load-bearing at every scale. The terza rima runs unbroken through 4,811 rhyme groups, each tercet opening a rhyme the next one closes, each canto shutting its last on a single line; all but three of the 14,233 lines resolve to eleven syllables under a scripted count, and those three are unresolved, not shown wrong. The line compresses: “Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona”
“Love, that exempts no one beloved from loving” (Inf. V.103). It coins: “Trasumanar significar per verba”
“To represent transhumanise in words” (Par. I.70). The strain shows in a few places, where an article is split from its noun for the rhyme (Purg. XVII.55, Par. XI.13). Sound and stress are beyond this reading and are not scored.
James Joyce · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on Joyce’s own English. The command starts at the word: 29,785 distinct words, 16,240 of them used once; compounds that compress a perception, “The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea.” (Telemachus, 1); cadence, “A cloud began to cover the sun slowly, wholly. Grey. Far.” (Calypso, 4). It extends to the whole: each episode’s sentence length and vocabulary are set where its matter needs them, from a mean of 5.5 words to 24.8. Oxen walks English prose from Old English alliteration, “Some man that wayfaring was stood by housedoor at night’s oncoming” (Oxen of the Sun, 14), to Bunyan, Sterne, Dickens and Carlyle. Short of the ceiling only where the controlled failures of Eumaeus and the densest pastiche fail on the reader too.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Judged as command of oil glazes on oak panel at the scale of a polyptych. The making is load-bearing everywhere: reflections in jewels and armour; brocade, fur, the brass basin, and stone that reads as stone in the grisailles; the meadow of the Adoration, plant by plant; Adam and Eve, observed and foreshortened from below; a range from near life-size figures to faces a few millimetres high, in one technique. The making carries the meaning: the theology of the particular exists only because the hand can render it. The costs are small: the registers are at different scales, a fault of conception more than of craft. The replacement Judges are neither credited nor debited.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Judged as command of oil on a single canvas over three metres high. The making is the subject, and it is load-bearing. The air between the figures is painted, not drawn: the intervals between the foreground group, the pair in shadow, the mirror and the door are given by the falloff of light and the softening of edges. Three sources of light are held in one room, the near window, the far window and the door behind Nieto, each distinct and all in agreement. The infanta’s sleeves, the jar, the ribbons and the painter’s hand are a few strokes that become objects only at a distance. The mirror is painted as a reflection, not a small portrait. The cost is small: the guardadamas, whom the shadow takes too far.
Homer · Literature
9.6 · Tier V
Judged on the Greek, as command of its medium, the formulaic hexameter. The stock is plain: 13.3 per cent of lines recur whole, and more than half end on a two-word close found elsewhere. The command is in what the poem makes the stock do. Inherited lines are placed so that they bind (16.856–857, 22.362–363); omitted so that the omission is answered (9.160, 9.392); negated so that the negation carries the plot, enchos d’ ouch helet’, “the spear ... he took not” (16.140); moved so that Hector’s epithet lands on his killer’s hands (24.479). The costs: an epithet idles, Aphrodite wounded and answering as “laughter-loving” (5.375), and Book VIII reuses a quarter of its lines. The sound of the verse is credited nothing.
Sophocles · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on Sophocles’ Greek, where the command shows in placement. The proclamation turns on its maker: ōthein d’ ap’ oikōn, ‘to drive from the houses’ (241), returns word for word when Oedipus applies it to himself (819), and again, in other words, in his sentence on himself (1381–1382). One word carries two senses: homosporon, Jocasta as the ‘common-sown’ wife (260), returns in Tiresias’ homosporos of the father (460). The verse breaks under the action, in fifteen lines split between speakers at the quarrel, the herdsman’s last answers and the close. The messenger holds the death and the blinding in 49 lines (1237–1284). Held a step from the top by the flatter rhetoric of Creon’s defence (583–615).
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.5 · Tier V
Command of the medium: buon fresco on a curved surface twenty metres up, by a painter who learned its chemistry on the job, as the early mould on the Flood records. The making is load-bearing everywhere: Jonah’s foreshortening, a figure leaning back on a surface that leans forward, which Vasari singled out; the cangiante colour, where a fold turns to another hue instead of darkening, shown by the cleaning to be a system; the lunettes, with a freedom of brush the narrative fields do not need. The costs: the first scenes misjudge the viewing distance, and an assistant’s hand in the first bays is contested. A secco shading possibly lost in the cleaning is neither credited nor debited.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: five-voice counterpoint from the first Kyrie’s fugue to the Et expecto; the stile antico as a living style in the second Kyrie, the Gratias and the Confiteor, where the chant runs in canon and in long notes; the Credo’s seven real parts over a bass in steady crotchets; six and eight real voices in the Sanctus and the Osanna; scoring without parallel, a horn and two bassoons under a bass voice; the Confiteor’s enharmonic Adagio; and parody that refits German cantata music to Latin so that the fit is often closer the second time. The costs are specific: the Benedictus’s obbligato has no named instrument, the Credo fascicle carries a failing hand and corrections in another’s, and a few parodies show the seam.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Command of masonry structure, and the making is load-bearing at every point. The courses lie on curved beds, so that each ring of brick closes on itself as it rises and the unfinished dome stands without support. Bricks set on end in herringbone lock each course to the next. Twenty-four ribs, chains of sandstone and iron and one of chestnut, and two shells divide the work of weight, spread and weather. Hoisting machines of his own design lifted the loads to the working edge for sixteen years. The lantern is a closing weight, its buttresses continuing the ribs. The costs: whether some of the cracking is the structure’s own, under its spread, is still argued; and the lantern’s detail was executed by others after his death.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: the fugue’s four-voice counterpoint, built from its subject alone; the variation set, where the theme passes between the violins and the variations change texture, tempo and metre while keeping its outline; the Presto’s control of silence, in the “molto poco adagio” halts, and of colour, in the sul ponticello passage; the joins, where one movement’s close becomes the next movement’s key; and writing for four equal players, with no voice reduced to filling. The costs are small: the finale’s octave writing is plainer than the rest, the variation coda runs on, and with no pause the players have no point to retune. Unlike the Ninth, this score has not been retouched.
Michelangelo · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of carving at the limit of the medium. The control of polish, from the near-translucent finish of the dead torso to the rougher stone of the base. The undercutting of the folds, deep enough to open shadow in solid marble without weakening the block. The anatomy, exact to the veins and tendons of the hanging arm and the slack of the dead hand. And the concealed enlargement of the mother, so that an impossible proportion reads as natural. The making is load-bearing: the meaning, dead weight held in composure, exists only because the stone is carved this well. The one charge is that the drapery’s virtuosity is in places more than the subject asks, a polish that edges toward display.
Rogier van der Weyden · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on oak at life size, against the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing. The tears are painted as transparent beads with highlight and shadow, distinct on each face. The fabrics differ by touch: Nicodemus’s gold brocade, the Magdalene’s sleeve, the Virgin’s blue. The flesh of the dead Christ is cooler and paler than every living face, and the Virgin’s is nearly as pale, so the colour carries the compassio. The figures are modelled as fully as carvings and as softly as flesh, and the gilt tracery is painted as gilt tracery, a sculpture in paint. Ten figures are placed across the frieze without crowding. Held a tenth below Las Meninas (9.8) only because the shallow box spares it the painting of air and distance.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Nine canons at nine intervals each sound like a character piece, not an exercise, and eight carry a free bass that obeys the Aria’s harmony; the canon at the fifth in contrary motion is also a lament. The Ouverture sets a French overture on a sarabande’s bass. The Quodlibet fits two popular tunes into counterpoint over that bass without strain. The chromatic harmony of Var. 25 is as advanced as anything Bach wrote, and the hand-crossing variations use two manuals as a medium, not a convenience. No passage falls short of its intention. A tenth or two below the ceiling, because some free variations are, by Bach’s standard, routine figuration.
Anonymous · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on the Hebrew. The medium is the two-part line, 946 of 990 verses of poetry, mostly in half-lines of three words, and the command shows in what the book does with words across its length. One word, ḥinnam, “for nought”, is said by the Satan (1:9), by God (2:3), by Job, who heard neither (9:17), and by Eliphaz against him (22:6). The verb of blessing stands for cursing (1:11, 2:9) beside “blessed be the name of the LORD” (1:21). Eliphaz’s threat (22:11) returns as God’s question (38:34); “full of trouble” (14:1) ends as “full of days” (42:17). Held from the top by Elihu, the least various voice, and by the confused third cycle. Sound and metre are not scored.
Virgil · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on the Latin, as command of the literary hexameter, made line by line rather than from stock. The making is load-bearing. With one line in a hundred recurring, a return is an event: the hero’s terror at the storm becomes Turnus’ death (1.92, 12.951); the failed embrace is spoken of Creusa and of Anchises (2.792–794, 6.700–702). Single words are placed: immolo, sacrifice, three times, always of Aeneas’ killing (10.519, 10.541, 12.949); pietatis imago from the Sibyl’s plea (6.405) to Ascanius (9.294) to Aeneas over the boy he has killed (10.824). The costs: the kill-lists of IX–XII, where the making thins to names and wounds, and four lines given verbatim to two speakers (1.530–533, 3.163–166). The sound of the verse is credited nothing.
Homer · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on the Greek, on what can be seen and counted, not on the sound of the hexameter. The formula system is whole, and made into structure. One line marks the recognitions by son, nurse, herdsmen and father (XVI.206, XIX.484, XXI.208, XXIV.322); another closes all three recognitions by told sign (XIX.250, XXIII.206, XXIV.346); the shipwrecked man’s thicket is drawn in the lines of the boar’s (V.478–483, XIX.440–443). The scar digression is held between egnō and gnō (XIX.392, 468). Similes run at half the Iliad’s rate, placed and often reversed. The costs are in the joins: the dropped plan for the arms (XVI.295–298), Aegisthus given the epithet of praise (I.29), the second descent to the dead joined awkwardly (XXIV.1–14).
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on Shakespeare’s English, with no translation between. The range of registers is as wide as any in drama: Claudius balancing opposites, “With mirth in funeral, and with dirge in marriage” (1.2); a first line that is a pun, “A little more than kin, and less than kind!” (1.2); the Pyrrhus speech in an older, heavier style, “Now is he total gules; horridly trick’d” (2.2); the Mousetrap’s couplets, Ophelia’s ballads, the gravedigger’s “argal”; Osric mocked in his own idiom, “to divide him inventorially would dizzy the arithmetic of memory” (5.2). Held below the top by construction: the pirates, a signet that happens to be in Hamlet’s purse, a rising reported, a drowning narrated.
John Milton · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on Milton’s own English, and the making is load-bearing. In the 1667 text read, verse paragraphs average 29 lines and sentences 51 words, the longest 332. The syntax enacts its matter: “Him the Almighty Power / Hurled headlong flaming from th’ ethereal sky” (I.44–45) falls across the line; “Rocks, caves, lakes, fens, bogs, dens, and shades of death” (II.621) is ten monosyllables; “she plucked, she eat” (IX.781) is the Fall in four words. The costs are real: Latinate knots, “Nor did they not perceive the evil plight” (I.335); the puns of the war’s second day (VI.609–627); God’s syllogisms (III.80–134); the slack summary of XII.111–269. The line itself does not fail.
Aeschylus · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on Aeschylus’ Greek. The lyric is built. The entrance song turns on a refrain, “ailinon ailinon eipe, to d’ eu nikatō”
“Sing the song of woe, the song of woe, but may the good prevail!” (Ag. 121, 139, 159). In the persuasion the Furies sing the same strophe twice, letter for letter (Eum. 778–792, 808–822). The compounds fold a phrase into a word: ekdrakontōtheis, “turned serpent” (Cho. 549), makes Orestes the snake of his mother’s dream. Staging is written into the words: the purple path, the cries behind the door, the knock (Cho. 653), the trumpet, the torches. Held below the top by the trial’s question-and-answer (Eum. 585–608) and Agamemnon’s entrance speech (Ag. 810–854), which carry argument more than life.
Marcel Proust · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Judged on Proust’s French, which is not in hand; its sound is neither credited nor charged. What survives translation is load-bearing. Every register is placed: Françoise’s, Cottard’s hunger for figures of speech, Legrandin’s prose-poems, Bloch’s mock-Homeric, Odette’s “Our little bit; that’s all we need.” (Un amour de Swann). So is every scene: the profanation seen through a window by a boy who cannot leave, and the lighted window that is not Odette’s, “Two old gentlemen stood facing him, in the window” (Un amour de Swann). Refrains return with the names changed. The long period holds across 350 sentences of a hundred words or more in the English of one volume. Charged for restatement and editorial seams in the last three volumes, and for maxims sometimes laid on rather than earned.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Judged as command of buon fresco on a single wall some fourteen metres high, with no frame, no architecture and no ground to hold the figures. The making is load-bearing. The foreshortening works in every orientation: bodies rising, falling, upside down, seen from below and above, with no ground plane to anchor them. The fall on the right is felt as weight and the ascent on the left as effort, and fresco has no means for this but drawing. The ultramarine, laid over the whole, holds the bodies without a horizon. The cost is the upper ring, which repeats one heavy anatomy: the charge made from Aretino on, that the bodies are one body, has force there. The repainted Catherine and Blaise are not credited; the draperies are not debited.
Iktinos and Kallikrates · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Command of the medium, structure included; the making is load-bearing everywhere. The marble is laid dry, without mortar, with iron clamps and dowels set in lead and the joint faces worked by anathyrosis; the column drums were centred on wooden empolia and ground in place. Because the platform curves and the columns lean, block after block had to be cut to its own geometry, a system of controlled deviation over the whole building in which few blocks are true rectangles. The drapery reads as transparent over the body; the horses overlap in shallow relief. The naos was dedicated nine years after the start, the pediments finished in fifteen. The costs: the structure is the conservative trabeation of its type, with no daring of span, and the south metopes show uneven hands.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: the opening chorus, two choirs in dialogue and a chorale above, over one 12/8 pulse; the Evangelist’s recitative, setting Luther’s German so that stress, pitch and harmony carry the sense, and rising to a long melisma on “weinete bitterlich”; the crowd choruses, from “Barrabam!” on one chord to the canon-like violence of “Laß ihn kreuzigen!”; obbligato writing matched to each aria, the violin in “Erbarme dich”, the gamba in “Komm, süßes Kreuz”, flute and oboes da caccia without bass in “Aus Liebe”; the Passion Chorale harmonised five times, never alike. The cost is in the words. Picander’s verse is serviceable, often fine, sometimes conventional, and it is part of the work. The making is load-bearing everywhere; the verse is not.
Michelangelo · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Judged as command of marble, and the command is load-bearing everywhere. The block: shallow, already cut, taken to a full figure in the round with almost nothing to spare. The surface: the tendons of the neck, the veins of the right hand and forearm, the drilled pupils, the turn of the head carved against the frontal plane. The balance: a marble figure well over four metres high carried on one leg and a stump, the free leg forward. The proportions, set by the usual account for distance: a judgment, not a fault. The costs are in the block, and the work owns them: the profile is thin for a figure meant to be walked round, the back is summary, and the stump is a visible concession.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The making is load-bearing: the command of the sentence is the book’s argument. Flaubert’s prose is the byword for craft in the novel, and the particulars carry the reputation. The sentence is built for rhythm and weight, tested aloud, often in three members, the paragraph turning on a short last clause. The imperfect tense becomes a medium of consciousness, habit and boredom given duration in the grammar. The transitions are the craft at its finest: the show’s cross-cutting; the cab ride told as an itinerary; a scene falling into one flat sentence, “C’est la faute de la fatalité!” Detail is chosen to bear meaning: the cap, the plaster curé, the burnt bouquet. Judged on the French as far as it can be heard here; sound beyond the sentences known is neither credited nor charged. Held below the top only by the overwrought cap and the dropped frame.
Du Fu · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Judged on Du Fu’s Chinese. He commands every resource of the regulated poem: tonal pattern, rhyme, the matched categories of the parallel couplets, number against number, colour against colour, the empty word against the full, the placing of the eye character, the turn in the third couplet and the closure in the fourth. “Writing My Feelings Travelling at Night” is a lesson in it: a small foreground of fine grass and a lone mast at night, the immense middle of stars, plain, moon and river, a bitter third couplet on a name made by writing and an office lost to age and sickness, the gull at the end. The binomes of “Climbing High” make sound do the work of scale. He commands the plain ballad too. The tonal music is neither credited nor charged.
Ancient Egyptian, under Khufu · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Structure and engineering included, the making is load-bearing in every part. The setting-out: four sides within some 20 cm in 230 m, to the cardinal points within about four minutes of arc by the surveys. The seked, held for 146 m so that four planes met at one point. Granite beams of fifty to eighty tonnes, by estimates that vary, quarried 800 km upstream and raised to 60 m and over. The flat roof with five compartments and a gable to turn the weight above; the Gallery’s seven corbels closing 2.1 m to 1 m over 47 m; casing joints of about half a millimetre by Petrie’s account. The costs: the chamber roof cracked under building and was plastered, the compartments are overbuilt if the gable alone serves, and one chamber was left rough in the rock.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Command of masonry structure and finish, at the pitch of the tradition. The octagon: a dome of about thirty-one metres brought down through eight arches of about twelve to eight piers set close to the walls, the thrust taken by the corner semidomes, the galleries and the outer arcades, and held down by the turrets over the piers; no visible distress in 451 years. The piers, fluted so that masses of this load read as shafts. The minarets, slender and far above the dome, two of them with three stairs wound inside one shaft. The finish: Iznik tile of the 1570s at its height, the minbar’s pierced marble, the two-coloured voussoirs. The costs are small: the court’s arcade is routine work, and the join of court to hall is the tradition’s.
Alban Berg · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The orchestra runs from full forces to the chamber orchestra of the Largo in Act II, with stage bands, the tavern’s out-of-tune upright piano and a snoring chorus. The absolute forms are carried out in full while the drama moves at the pace of speech. The vocal writing grades speech, Sprechstimme and song, so that the degree of singing measures the character’s state. The interludes carry the drama between scenes, the two crescendos on B above all and a web of leitmotifs binds fifteen short scenes. Held off the top by the second tavern scene, where the deliberate crudity of the material leaves the writing thinner than elsewhere, and by the demands the score makes, which few houses can meet in full.
Virgil · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on the Latin, and at the summit of the language. The hexameter is Virgil’s most finished: the weight of the spondee where the ox labours, the golden line, the ending held over the line-break. The repetitions are worked: “sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus”
“but meanwhile time flies, flies beyond recall” (3.284); and the name Eurydice three times across three lines as the Orpheus ends (4.525 to 527). The precepts are made poetry without ceasing to be precepts, and the shifts of register, calendar, hymn, satire of luxury, elegy and epyllion, are made without a seam. What holds it a tenth from the top is a few technical stretches that are versified lore rather than poetry remade. The verse is judged as a reader of Latin judges it, not as a native ear, and nothing is charged to the poem for that.
Jean Racine · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Racine’s French. The command is of the alexandrine and of a restricted vocabulary made to do everything: a few hundred words of the noble register, feux, flamme, gloire, jour, sang, placed so that the literal returns inside the figure. “Que ces vains ornements, que ces voiles me pèsent !”
“How these vain ornaments, these veils weigh on me!” (I.3) gives the body’s sickness in the plainest words. The sound bears weight: the line on Minos and Pasiphaé is famous for its music, and the music is the lineage. The construction is exact: each act turns on a reversal of information, and entrances are timed to the line. The dialogue cuts as finely as the speeches rise. Charged only for the récit’s ornament and the stock gallant phrasing of II.2.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium at the height of its century. The ensembles keep four, six and seven voices distinct in rhythm and register while the harmony moves at speed. The orchestra, with its pairs of clarinets and the wind writing of “Porgi, amor” and the letter duet, comments on the action. The setting of Da Ponte’s lines catches comic timing to the quaver, from “Se vuol ballare” (“If he wants to dance”), where the minuet Figaro sings is the Count’s own dance turned into a threat, to the patter of the Act II finale. The secco recitative moves a complex plot clearly, and the libretto is one of the great adaptations of a play for music. Held off the top by Act IV’s run of arias, well made but slack after the Act III finale, and by recitative left to convention.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. The scoring: no upper strings, the doubled third of the opening chord, the woodwind fugue, trumpets and pianos driving the Allegro, harp, pianos and timpani under the coda. The double fugue: two subjects worked together, the instrumental fugue continuing against the choral one. The coda’s ostinato: a four-note figure set against the metre and held for minutes without monotony. The text-setting: syllabic and spaced, every syllable placed. The economy: no doubling for weight, no filler line. The costs are small. Some of the Allegro’s block writing is mechanical by Stravinsky’s own best standard, and the Latin accentuation, though deliberate, is a cost a hearer can hear.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a small wooden panel, read to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The face is modelled without a single line, in glazes so thin that the passage from light to shadow cannot be located; the flesh at the forehead and the breast holds light from within. The hands, the most finished passage, are drawn in the round by shadow alone. The veil is a near-nothing over the hair and the land. The land is in aerial perspective, warm in front and blue in the far ranges, at a depth no Italian painting before it reached. The cost: the passages left summary, the chair and the lower sleeve, and a land whose two halves, by the usual description, do not join. Held a step below Las Meninas at 9.8 because the range of what is commanded is narrower: one figure, one light.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a small oak panel, against the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The mirror: the whole room and its four people bent onto a convex disc, with ten roundels of the Passion painted round it at the scale of miniatures, consistent in curvature and light. The chandelier: brass shown as cast metal in daylight. Textures given by glaze over glaze: the fur lining of the man’s tabard, the green wool of the woman’s gown, the dog’s coat hair by hair, the floorboards, the red of the bed. One window gives the light, and every object takes it. The costs are small and real: the figures are slightly stiff against the room, the space is assembled rather than constructed from one point, and the figures’ scale against the bed is uncertain.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the burin on copper; the making is load-bearing, for the meaning is carried by the contrast of cuts. Every surface is its own system of line: swelling and tapering parallels for the steel, curved cross-hatching for the horse’s musculature, flicked and broken strokes for Death’s rot and the Devil’s hide, dense tonal fields for the gorge so that the knight stands out in light against them. The horse is built to a studied proportion. This is the summit of the medium as it stood. Held a step from the top by a slight crowding of the lower field and a stiffness in the set profile that reads as heraldic.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at the summit, and load-bearing. The counterpoint is the standard against which fugal writing is still taught: invertible counterpoint, stretto and the learned devices of the old style; five voices kept distinct in C sharp minor and B flat minor; a chromatic subject made to work in tonal harmony in B minor; the strict economy of the C major fugue. The keyboard writing is idiomatic in every key, the remote keys as natural under the fingers as the near. The preludes command a dozen textures. The costs are small and real: a few preludes are figuration studies on one pattern, the C major, the C minor and the D major, though each is shaped, and the two-voice E minor fugue is slighter than its neighbours.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, bearing weight throughout: the first movement built from one interval chain, in invertible counterpoint and canon to the coda; the Andante’s horn call in a church mode turned into E major, its themes returning in new orchestration; thirty variations over an eight-bar ground with a sonata outline drawn through them, the pace halved for the E major group, the ground passed between bass, treble and inner voices; the trombones held back three movements for the finale’s first chords and its chorale; orchestration of unusual clarity for Brahms, the flute solo and the horn writing especially. No passage falls short of its intention. Held a tenth below the top by tutti doublings that can thicken, in the first movement’s development above all.
Sultan Muhammad · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of opaque watercolour, gold and ink on paper at its highest reach, and the making is load-bearing: the painting’s claim is plenitude, and only this degree of control makes plenitude legible rather than noisy. Each face in the arc is drawn as a person. The rocks are built of graded, layered colour that reads as stone and as living form at once. The leopard-skin spotting, the fur of the beasts and the foliage are distinct textures at a scale of millimetres. The gold sky and the colours of the mountain are pitched so that the king stays the brightest point in a crowded field, and a spiral of figures climbing to the apex holds everything on one centre. Held a step below the top where the density outruns legibility and the outer figures thin toward pattern.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of marble carving, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the work’s meaning is its making. Leaves cut so thin they are translucent; fingers carved free with nothing behind them; hair in single locks; bark roughened and grooved against skin polished to the warmth of flesh; toes going into roots with the growth of a plant. Apollo’s weight is carried by one foot and the drapery, and the whole runs on a diagonal that balances a group in motion on a small base. Every surface is made according to what it is, and the light does the rest. Whatever share the shop had in the carving is credited to the work. The costs: Apollo’s figure is a quotation, correct and cool, and the drapery is a support doing the work of a sign. A summit of the medium, narrowly below the top.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, judged against the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The map is paper creased and slightly buckled, a printed image painted as a thing in light, with its border of towns and its lettering at the scale of the room. The chandelier is brass modelled by reflection alone, each arm turned, the eagle legible. The tapestry is a heavy weave given in small points and broken colour, near and soft against a sharp distance. One window lights every surface consistently, the shadows cool and transparent. The painter’s black and white doublet holds its pattern flat without losing its fold, and the begun canvas, pale ground and wreath laid on in blue, has a handling of its own. The costs are slight: a painter a little stiff, a still life a little crowded.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. The finale’s coda combines five themes in invertible counterpoint, so that any of them can lie at the bottom, and it sounds like celebration, not calculation: the highest command of the medium. The finale’s body uses fugato and stretto inside sonata form without a seam. The first movement turns a comic tune into matter for development. The Andante’s scoring, muted violins with flute and bassoons, is exact, and its chromatic voice leading is as fine as anything in Mozart’s orchestral music. The wind writing without clarinets is balanced, not deprived. A tenth or two below the ceiling: some tutti passages of the first movement are ceremonial filler by Mozart’s own standard, and the Menuetto’s chromatic descent is graceful and conventional in its treatment.
Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of six-voice unaccompanied polyphony, and the making bears weight throughout. Every line is singable, stepwise, balanced by leap and return. Every dissonance is prepared and resolved within the rules this style later taught. Six voices, three of them low, never thicken into mud, because the spacing is managed chord by chord. The groups in the Gloria and Credo are chosen so that each new phrase changes colour, and the declamation sets Latin stress with exactness. The seventh voice of the last Agnus is added without strain. The medium is commanded so fully that the style became the textbook. Held a tenth or two below the ceiling because the means are narrow by choice, with no chromatic or harmonic adventure, and some imitation in the Kyrie and Sanctus is fine routine for its maker.
Frédéric Chopin · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the piano, and the making bears weight throughout. The figure of No. 1 divided between the hands; the voice-leading of No. 4, one voice of the chord moving at a time; the melody of No. 8 threaded through a right-hand figuration of demisemiquavers; the chromatic hand-crossing of No. 12 at Presto; the bass of No. 16 under an unbroken right-hand torrent; the wide leaps of No. 19; the left hand of No. 24 spanning two octaves in each figure under the melody; the single note of No. 15 carried through changing harmony. Each prelude solves one problem of the instrument without residue. A tenth below the Goldberg Variations, because the counterpoint of the whole is lighter and Nos. 3, 5 and 23 are elegant figuration.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on Shakespeare’s English, with no translation between. The range of command is wide: the ceremonial verse of the love-test, “more than words can wield the matter” (1.1), against “Nothing”; Lear’s syntax breaking under its own threat (2.4); the Fool’s jingles; Edgar’s four registers, from Tom’s catalogue prose to the Somerset of “Chill not let go, zir” (4.6) and the knight’s challenge; Kent’s “three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave” (2.2); the monosyllables at the end. Repetition is 0.14 per cent, all of it deliberate. Held below the top band by construction: the letter plot, deaths reported from offstage, and the king forgotten in his own last scene, “Great thing of us forgot!” (5.3).
Richard Wagner · Music
9.5 · Tier V
Command of the orchestral medium is at the height of the art: one chord made to move for four minutes and more; eighteen anvils in a precise rhythm for a slave-city; the tubas’ dark chord for Valhalla and for Hunding; the forest murmurs’ divided strings; the sword motive’s C major trumpet; a funeral march built from the motives of the Wälsungs and the hero’s life; the immolation’s motive upon motive. Motives worked across four evenings, often in counterpoint, are a feat no earlier composer attempted, and the vocal writing is hard and mostly idiomatic. Off the top: the verse. The Stabreim is at its best in Walküre and stiff elsewhere, some of the Wanderer’s and Mime’s exchanges clot, and the backward making leaves joins the music must cover.
Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus · Architecture
9.4 · Tier V
Judged as command of building, engineering included; the making is load-bearing throughout. The dome’s thrust passes through the pendentives to four piers, and east and west into a cascade of semidomes and exedrae, each braced by the next. The forty windows sit at the springing, where a dome is weakest, and the weakness is made the source of its effect. The finish is made at the pitch of the structure: book-matched marble, deeply drilled capitals, gold on the vaults. And a structure of this size was begun and dedicated in under six years. The cost is in the fabric: the columns of the galleries lean visibly, a lean usually traced to the piers spreading as the building rose on its thick mortar beds.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.4 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: a voice-leading that moves by semitone through four hours; an orchestration that saves its colours, the horns receding off stage until Isolde hears them as leaves and a brook, the cor anglais alone over an empty stage; a motivic economy by which two bars become four hours; a long-range plan from an A minor never confirmed to the B major of the last page; voice writing that is punishing and singable. The costs are in the poem. The Day and Night dispute heaps antithesis on abstraction until the words resist setting; the expository verse is stiff; the alliteration can turn mannered; and the Act III Tristan sits at the limit of what a voice can do over this orchestra. On the music alone, three tenths higher.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Judged on Goethe’s German. As verse the command is at the ceiling of the language, and its range is wide: the Knittelvers rattle of the opening; Mephisto’s epigrams (1335–1336); the folk-song economy of the spinning wheel, ten quatrains of two-stress lines (3374–3413); the Greek gravity of the trimeter; the rhyme lesson made action; and the last eight lines, where three rhyme sounds (“-liche” four times, “Gleichnis” with “Ereignis”, “getan” with “hinan”) carry the whole metaphysics in twenty-one words. As construction it falls short of the verse. Part One’s ellipses earn themselves. Part Two is barely a play: the masquerade and the Classical Walpurgis Night are processions, Act IV is the weakest act, and the late style can clot into allegorical density.
Ovid · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Judged on the Latin, as command of the hexameter. It is the lightest of the great hexameter epics, eliding at under half Virgil’s rate by the same count, and one line in 11,927 recurs (4.795, 9.10), against a hundred and one in the Aeneid: the formula is given up for variation. The making does work. Echo’s scene makes the line’s end the event (3.380 to 392); Narcissus’ grammar folds on itself, “Se cupit imprudens et qui probat, ipse probatur” (3.425); the old couple are joined by chiasmus as they turn to trees (8.714 to 715); a single line catches flesh in the ivory (10.289). The costs: a wit that does not always know when to stop, nimium amator ingenii sui in Quintilian’s phrase (Institutio 10.1.88), the lead pipe (4.121 to 124), and mechanical transitions. Nothing is credited for sound.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. A sphere was set out and poured at forty-three metres with no precedent to copy, on formwork of which nothing survives. The coffers lighten and order the shell, five rings of twenty-eight diminishing toward the crown. The recesses hollow the drum where the wall needs no weight. By the engineers’ account, argued in its detail, stepped rings load the haunches where the dome would spread, and the concrete is graded from heavy stone below to light volcanic stone above. The porch is sixteen granite monoliths, quarried, shipped and raised. The costs are in the joints: the block and its second pediment, and coffers that miss the order below.
Cao Xueqin · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Judged on Cao’s Chinese, so far as it can be judged from knowledge. Each voice is its own. Xifeng is heard before she is seen: “我来迟了，不曾迎接远客！”
“I’m late, and missed welcoming our guest from afar!” (ch. 3). Baochai turns the sad theme of the willow catkin upward, “好风凭借力，送我上青云”
“a good wind, lend me your strength, to send me up to the blue clouds” (ch. 70), and Xue Pan’s song is meant to be gross, and is. A Beijing vernacular moves into the classical register for the frame and the elegy without a seam; hundreds of persons are kept distinct, and threads are laid chapters ahead. Charged a tenth: the eighty stand unrevised in places, ch. 22 unfinished and seams left at Qin Keqing’s death. The tonal music of the verse is neither credited nor charged.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Judged on the original as far as a translation carries it; the Russian sentence, unheard here, is neither credited nor charged. The construction is Tolstoy’s most finished: 239 chapters of even length, alternated in blocks, the two strands timed so that births, deaths and seasons answer across them. The scene: Stiva waking on the study sofa and feeling for his morocco slippers, the race, the opera, the hospital at Vozdvizhenskoe, “This is not a lying-in home, but a hospital for the sick” (VI.20). The detail that carries a character: Karenin’s ears and cracking fingers, Vronsky’s even teeth, aching at the last “like rows of ivory in his mouth” (VIII.5), the red bag. The dialogue, near a third of the book, lets its subtext show. Charged: the argued chapters, and the essay voice of VIII.15–16.
Franz Schubert · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout. The piano’s figures are each an image and a structure: the walking quavers of no. 1, the spinning vane of no. 2, the rustle of no. 5, the keyless off-beats of no. 16, the chorale of no. 21, the drone of no. 24. Modal mixture is grammar: the major is illusion, and the turn to it is always the most painful bar. The declamation sets German stress without a wasted note, and strophic variation changes meaning without changing the tune. The cost is in the words. Müller’s verse is plain and often exact, sometimes merely serviceable or, in “Mut”, blustering; it is part of the work. The borrowed tune of no. 19 is charged a little. The music alone would support 9.7.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The making bears weight at the highest level. Motivic economy: a triad and a chromatic step generate the whole of the first movement. Rhythmic command: hemiolas and syncopations set 3/4 against itself in the development, and the scherzo breaks into sudden bars of two. Counterpoint bears structure in three places, the march’s fugato and the finale’s two fugatos. The horns are given a new role, three of them in the trio and one alone at the false recapitulation. The charge is small and specific: some of the finale’s transitions are formulaic, the wind writing sometimes doubles where a later Beethoven would have voiced, and the balance of brass and strings in the tuttis has needed conductors’ attention since Wagner. Level with Winterreise; below the Goldberg’s contrapuntal command.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout. Character is drawn by style: Elvira’s Handelian dotted rhythms in “Ah fuggi il traditor”, Anna’s seria coloratura in “Non mi dir”, Zerlina’s plain tune over solo cello in “Batti, batti”. Colour is saved: trombones for the statue, mandolin for the serenade, a wind band at supper. The overture’s slow introduction is the statue scene, and its open end runs into an Introduzione that is a through-composed action of patter, chase, duel and death trio. Da Ponte’s verse is supple and made to be sung. Held below the top by construction: the Act II disguise plot is a chain of entrances and escapes, and the scena ultima follows Bertati’s plan.
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: a first movement in which a hundred players are used as a chamber ensemble and the full orchestra is spent only at the catastrophe; the Rondo’s counterpoint, real counterpoint made to sound like mockery; the Adagio’s string writing, the divided strings on the hymn, two-part episodes across four octaves, a coda held pianissimo and below for pages without losing line; orchestration by subtraction, down to piccolo and contrabassoon at the end of the Ländler. The costs are in the record. Mahler never heard the work and never gave it the retouching he gave every other symphony, so conductors adjust its balances; and the Ländler’s coarseness is a risk that can succeed as dullness.
Raphael · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Judged as command of buon fresco on a lunette, with an architecture built on wet plaster. The architecture: a crossing, three vaults and a pavement ruled and incised into the intonaco at the scale of a wall, carrying a crowd without crowding it. The groups, each a different problem solved: four pupils in four stages of understanding; the cynic thrown across the steps. The drawing: no pose repeated, and the whole crowd composed in the cartoon before a stroke was painted. Colour keyed at the centre and graded away. The costs: the added figure is drawn in another painter’s manner, heavier than its neighbours, and the join shows; the viewpoint sits above the standing eye; the figures at the back are small for their setting.
Claude Debussy · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: a prosody that sets French to pitch syllable by syllable at the pace of speech, with the orchestra always under the voice; an orchestration of divided strings, the oboe for Mélisande, two harps for the hair, with its effects got at piano, so that the one fortissimo lands like a blow; a harmony modal, whole-tone and parallel, the Wagnerian dominant all but banished, held by a frame from D to C♯; motifs transformed rather than announced; four scenes cut and nothing rewritten. The costs are in the text and at its edge: repetitions that can turn to mannerism, “Je ne suis pas heureuse”
“I am not happy” across two acts; a near-monotone in the voice; a baryton-Martin each age supplies rarely; interludes that are, in origin, carpentry. On the music alone, two tenths higher.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
9.1 · Tier V
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Unsworth’s photography in a large format that makes scale the subject; the effects — front projection, models shot over long exposures for depth of field, slit-scan; the centrifuge, round which Poole jogs a full loop with the camera following; the sound, silence in the vacuum, breath in the suit, the hum of the ship; Lovejoy’s editing, above all the match cut; the music laid against the image as structure. The costs are small and visible. The hominids are convincing in face, through Freeborn’s masks, less so in body. The leopard’s eyes flare. And the flat line readings of the Floyd section, though intended, cost the scenes life: acting is what the film commands least.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
9.1 · Tier V
Command of the medium, and in 1610 the medium was every idiom at once. The chant runs as cantus firmus under every texture from one voice to ten, never abandoned. Falsobordone is made a form, recitation breaking into flourish at the verse-ends of Dixit Dominus. Nisi Dominus holds ten real voices with the chant overlapping itself, and Lauda Jerusalem seven around a fixed tenor. The ornaments of the solo numbers are written out, so the singer’s art is composed. The echo is structural in Audi coelum and the Magnificat’s Deposuit, and the instrumental writing, the toccata, the Sonata’s eight parts, the Quia respexit’s pairs over a chanting tenor, has no sacred precedent at this scale. The costs are specific: instrumentation partly left to the performer, two numbers in clefs whose pitch is still argued, and psalm verses that are declamation between inventions.
Matthias Grünewald · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Judged as command of oil on panel, with the carving weighed in. The making is load-bearing: colour as light, in the Resurrection’s shroud passing from blue through red to yellow, the aureole and the luminous Concert, handled as nothing else in German painting of the period; the Crucifixion’s skin, painted as surface and as decay, and the Virgin’s white against the night; the hands, Christ’s spread against the dark, the Magdalene’s knotted, the Baptist’s finger drawn out to carry his sentence; the Temptation’s monsters, each an anatomy of its own; Niclaus’s seated Anthony, grave and exact. The costs: the Annunciation’s architecture is uncertain in its space, the tabernacle is fussy, and the shrine does not reach the painting’s level. Glazes that may be a restorer’s judgment are neither credited nor charged.
John Milton · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Milton’s English. The command is of sound and placement: the clotted, harsh opening, “I come to pluck your berries harsh and crude, / And with forced fingers rude”, enacting a song forced before its season; the open vowels of the sea; the hard monosyllables of Peter, “Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw”; the hush of “Weep no more, woeful shepherds, weep no more”, where the repetition does the consoling. The irregular rhyme is controlled to the line. The short lines are placed for weight: “And slits the thin-spun life”. The verse paragraph is managed like a period of music, the sentence carried across a dozen lines to its fall, and the closing ottava rima is exact. Johnson heard the harshness as a fault; it is design. Held a step off the top for the few lines of learned geography by the guarded mount, where allusion clogs the movement.
Richard Wagner · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium at the height of Wagner’s art. The orchestra, written for the covered pit at Bayreuth, is the most refined he made: doublings that blend timbres until no single instrument is heard, divided strings for the Prelude’s halo, the low brass and the bells of the transformations, the Good Friday oboe over muted strings. The harmonic command spans the plainest diatonic writing in his output and the densest chromaticism. Motivic transformation is complete: the Communion theme, the Grail’s motif, the Faith motif, Kundry’s falling figure and the Wound motif are turned through every state the drama needs. The cost is in the words: the poem leaves the Ring’s alliterative verse for a looser line, often exact and sometimes stilted, and Gurnemanz’s narrations are set with craft but not with necessity. Level with Otello’s 9.5; the music alone would support more.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium, the making bears weight throughout. One interval generates every movement without sounding schematic: the first movement’s exposition moves to G major, a third below, and every return obeys. The Adagio’s texture is as varied as any Beethoven wrote for the instrument: a long cantabile, then the melody embellished in figuration that keeps the line, una corda shading, the coda’s thinning. The fugue holds its subject in augmentation, in retrograde, in inversion, and combines it with a new subject in the D major episode; its licences are command, not lapse. The cost: the keyboard writing is in places against the hand, thick in the bass and congested in the fugue at tempo. Below the Goldberg’s 9.7 for that.
Hafez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Persian. The economy is of every word doing two things: the iham of “peymāne”, cup and covenant at once when the angels cast Adam’s clay into it; the grammar of the radif “zadand”, “they struck”, carried through the Adam ghazal with a new verb sense at each return, knocked at the door, cast into the cup, cast the lot, took the road of fable; the code-switch of the opening line, an Arabic hemistich answered by a Persian one; and the placing of the pen-name, which turns the last couplet into the poet’s judgment on himself. The music of the metres and the consonance across a whole ghazal, which Persian readers place above any other poet’s, are not scored here. The 9.5 rests on what the words show.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Pushkin’s Russian, and this is the axis on which the book is surest. The stanza is his own invention and is held through the whole book without monotony; its variety inside the fixed scheme is the craft: syntax runs across the quatrains or stops dead at them, now one sentence through fourteen lines, now broken into dialogue, now a list, and the couplet can be epigram, sigh or shrug. The opening, “Мой дядя самых честных правил”
(My uncle, of most honest principles), puts the voice, the hero and the irony in one line. The aphorism lands in the couplet: “Привычка свыше нам дана: / Замена счастию она”
(Habit is given us from above in place of happiness). The registers are many and each exact: Lensky’s elegy, “Куда, куда вы удалились, / Весны моей златые дни?”
(Whither, whither have you gone, golden days of my spring?), parodied and mourned in one; the nurse’s peasant speech; the society’s French; and Tatiana’s letter, in which a girl who writes Russian badly writes Russian’s most famous letter. The language set the standard of literary Russian. What holds it a step from the top is the making beyond the verse: the plot leans on coincidence, Onegin returning to find, at the one ball, the one woman; the hero is a sketch for seven chapters; and the Journey is a fragment appended. Judged on the passages known in the Russian, not on every stanza; nothing in them is slack.
Andrei Rublev · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of egg tempera on a panel, and the making is load-bearing. The circle is drawn by contour alone, with no construction line visible, by the long curves of shoulders, wings and backs. The proportions are elongated, the heads small to the body, so that the seated figures read as weightless. The colour is laid in transparent layers, so that the blues and the soft greens and pinks hold light even with the gold gone. The faces are modelled with the least possible contrast. Losses are not charged here; they belong to The Imperishable. What holds the axis a little below the very top is that the evidence of the surface is partial: the hand is legible in the faces and contours, and must be inferred in the abraded garments.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at the height of Verdi’s output. The orchestra: the storm’s organ cluster and woodwind lightning; divided cellos for the love duet; the cor anglais of Act IV; the double basses alone for Otello’s entry; mandolins, guitars and bagpipes for the homage chorus. The ensembles: the Act II quartet keeps four characters distinct, Desdemona’s long lines above, Iago and Emilia struggling for the handkerchief in quick parlando below; the Act III terzetto sets Iago’s banter against Otello’s hidden asides. Boito’s verse is metrically virtuosic, from the drinking song’s tongue-twisters to the hendecasyllables of “E tu m’amavi per le mie sventure / ed io t’amavo per la tua pietà”
“And you loved me for my misfortunes, and I loved you for your pity”. Held off the top by the Act III concertato, whose dramatic purpose blurs under its weight.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the French as far as it can be followed here; the sound of the sentence is credited where it is known and not inferred elsewhere. This is among the most finished prose in the novel’s history. The opening sentence fixes the date, the hour, the boat and the smoke in one period. The paragraph of travel moves in threes, four nouns of melancholy closed by two words, “Il revint”. The command extends to crowd scenes, the Tuileries sacked in February; to the dinner table with a dozen voices; and to objects that carry character, the casket bought at the auction and Pellerin’s portrait of Rosanette’s dead child. Charged lightly for the evenness in the second part that some readers call monotony, which is partly design. The structural command is known from the whole; the sentence-level case rests on the passages certain.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the joined media, and in the group it is as great as marble carving has reached. Four textures in one stone: the cloud left rough, the habit cut in deep shadowed folds, the angel’s drapery taken to translucent edges, the flesh polished. Some tonnes of marble appear to rest on nothing. Across media the design is exact: the light’s path from window to rays to marble, the stucco crossing the vault’s frame. The costs lie in execution beyond the group. The vault’s painting is of a lower order than the marble, and the workshop’s share in the reliefs cannot be settled. Collaboration is not charged, but the whole is judged, and it is not all at the group’s level.
Guo Xi · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of ink and light colour on silk at monumental scale, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the mountain is made by the handling. Graded ink wash, laid in layers from pale grey to near black, builds mass and dissolves it into mist without a single hard edge where the two meet. The rolling cloud texture strokes model rock as if it were vapour. The crab-claw branches of the bare trees are drawn with a fluent, hooked brush that holds both structure and season. Recession is managed by tone, not line, across three distances in one field, and the figures and roofs are drawn with economy at the scale of the whole. The cost is small: in places the middle ridges read as manner repeated rather than observation renewed.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the burin; the making is load-bearing. Dürer builds tone by line alone: parallel, crossed and curved hatching that follows form, and flicks and dots that turn bare paper into light. The face is cut so densely that it reads as shadow without losing its modelling. The dog’s ribs, the child’s curls, the grain of the wood, the feathers of the wings and the planes of the solid each take a distinct texture from the one tool. The sky, with the comet’s rays and the rainbow, is made by leaving and grading white. Held a step from the top by the crowding of objects at the lower left, which slightly loosens the space.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium: camera, light, design, editing, sound and music, and the direction of actors. The making carries weight throughout. Gianni Di Venanzo’s light sets the spa in overexposed white, the farmhouse in firelight, the steam baths in vapour, the tower in floodlit night. Piero Gherardi’s design makes the spa a theatre of hats and capes. The camera moves crowds in choreography and passes from present to memory within one movement. Nino Rota’s score and the borrowed Wagner turn the spa into a parade and the ending into a circus. Mastroianni plays a man absent from his own life without becoming absent from the screen. The costs are small: some post-synchronised dialogue sits loose on the lips, and a few hotel scenes are staged by habit.
John Keats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Keats’s English. The command is of sound and line, and it is load-bearing. The vowels of “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, / Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun” are the ripeness they name; “Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours” slows the line to the pace of the cyder-press. “Darkling I listen” carries Milton into a garden in Hampstead in three words. The Urn holds its paradoxes in exact syntax: “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter”. Melancholy’s “strenuous tongue” that can “burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine” is sensation made thought, and the stanza itself is a made instrument. Charged for Psyche’s luxuriance where it cloys, Indolence’s slackness, the excess of “glut thy sorrow on a morning rose”, and the Urn’s final couplet, the one place where the verse states rather than shows.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the French, with the music of the sentence heard only as far as a reader of French prose hears it; the limit is the reader’s. The prose is as finished as any in the language: the rhythm of the paragraph, the placing of the concrete detail, the imperfect for a life’s habits and the past historic for its breaks, and clauses that close on a fact. The economy of “Un cœur simple” gives Félicité her love story in one sentence that refuses to make her exceptional. The last sentence of “Hérodias” carries the head of the Precursor to Galilee by turns, because it is heavy. Charged: in “Hérodias” the density of names, factions and artefacts sometimes clogs the narration. Elsewhere the making is load-bearing throughout.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel at life size. The making is load-bearing: the skull is a constructed projection, worked out so that one position gives a true form, and painted with the same finish as the satin. The textures are told apart as by few painters of any period: fur against satin against damask, the pile of the carpet over the shelf’s edge, the brass of the instruments, the paper of the open books. The lute is foreshortened exactly, and the globes are drawn so that they read as maps. The faces are exact without flattery and modelled with the least means. What holds it below the very top is that the making is additive: each surface perfected, the air between them drawn more than painted, the room a shallow stage before a curtain.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Michael Chapman’s photography holds the deep greys of the flats and the hot white of the ring under flashbulbs. Thelma Schoonmaker cuts each fight to its own rhythm, so that no two are the same experience, and cuts the home movies against captioned stills of bouts. The sound removes the crowd, lands a single flashbulb like a shot and builds the blows from sources that are not fists. De Niro uses his whole body as an instrument, lean at the start and swollen at the end; Pesci is his equal in every scene they share; Cathy Moriarty, in her first film, holds the camera without effort. The costs are small: some domestic scenes run loose, and Miami is shot with less invention.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil and tempera on panel, against the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the construction. The hall, its coffered ceiling, its floor of inlaid squares and roundels and its columns at measured intervals, is exact enough to be reconstructed as a ground plan, and that exactness is what makes the distance real. Light is placed with a geometer’s precision, the source inside the hall over Christ against the daylight outside, each consistent. The colour is pale, cool and resonant: the youth’s red, the blue brocade, the marble whites. The costs: the figures are stiff, the faces somewhat masklike, and the scourging is enacted with little physical urgency, partly the style’s choice and charged lightly.
Claude Debussy · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, harmony, line and orchestration, and the making bears weight throughout: the divided cellos of the first sketch, a texture that is at once harmony and colour; a harmony that moves by planes, whole-tone, pentatonic and modal, without losing its direction toward the close in D flat; the scoring of Jeux de vagues, where glockenspiel, harps, cymbals touched with a stick and string harmonics make a texture that changes every few bars without fraying; a storm built from scraps in the low strings, timpani and brass; a balance that holds in the hall, with little retouching in the tradition. The cost is small and on record: the revision of 1909, the fanfares cut and scoring adjusted, and one passage of the finale still argued over. On orchestration alone, two tenths higher.
Béla Bartók · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight: the fugue’s counterpoint, with entries in a fixed plan, metres that change from bar to bar, muted strings and a climax that arrives where the fan says it must; the scoring of percussion and keyboards, each instrument chosen for one function and used sparingly, the celesta saved for the close of the fugue and the Adagio; the Adagio’s colours, timpani glissandi, the xylophone’s figure, string glissandi and harmonics; the antiphonal writing of the second movement; and the finale’s command of asymmetric dance metres driving a whole orchestra. The cost is small. The second movement’s development and the finale’s episodes are less finely made than the fugue and the Adagio, and the finale’s apotheosis is managed more than discovered. It stands level with Winterreise (9.2), below the Goldberg Variations (8.9) and Op. 131 (9.1).
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a metre of canvas, and the making is load-bearing. The shadow band: the near town is in shadow for the width of the picture and never goes dead, modelled in colour, not in brown; keeping a shadow luminous across a metre is the hardest thing in the painting. The beads of light on the boats and the Rotterdam Gate stand for light without describing anything. The sky: a dark mass, lit cumulus and open blue in one continuous air, over a horizon set low enough that the sky carries the composition. The town set parallel to the canvas, so the eye travels one horizontal and is stopped once, by the tower. The costs: the means are narrower than Las Meninas’s, with no figure at scale, and the gate’s texture can read as a trick close to.
Horace · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Horace’s Latin. The command is of the line, the stanza and the position of each word, and it is load-bearing: much of what the odes mean is where the words stand. The Aeolic metres are handled with an exactness Latin had not reached in lyric, the Alcaic and Sapphic stanzas given rules Horace largely set. “Aequam memento rebus in arduis / servare mentem”
“remember to keep an even mind in hard times” (2.3) states a whole ethic in a stanza’s opening and then earns it with concrete things: the pine and the poplar, the stream, the wine, the estate the heir will inherit. The doubled name of 2.14 and the turn of 1.37 are exact. Held a step below the summit only for the slighter occasional odes and the courtly panegyric of Book 4, which are made but not pressed.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout: the five-part texture, in which each player is necessary and the second cello opens a register the quartet lacks; the Adagio’s layering, a melody in the middle voices with ornament above and pizzicato below, sustained without strain; the harmonic control by which third and semitone relations carry a long movement without loss of direction; open strings and doubled stops for sonority in the Scherzo. The charges are small but real: the first movement’s transitions and the Finale lean on sequence and restatement, and some figuration in the outer movements is routine by the standard of the Adagio. Level with Winterreise; two tenths below Op. 131 and the Goldberg, both at 9.7, for those.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears load throughout. John Alcott’s photography, Ken Adam’s design and the costumes of Ulla-Britt Söderlund and Milena Canonero hold every frame to one standard: rooms lit by candles alone are composed as exactly as the daylit exteriors. What the lenses invented is credited under The Swerve; here the credit is for what was made with them. The music is chosen and edited rather than scored, the Sarabande re-orchestrated for each return, the Schubert cut to the length of a silent seduction. Restraint is directed: O’Neal’s blankness, Vitali’s rigid misery and Berenson’s near silence are used, not suffered. The cost runs through the film: restraint sometimes leaves a scene inert where the design is fuller than the drama, as Tristan und Isolde, at the same figure, carries a poem stiffer than its music.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at the highest mark, load-bearing throughout: Roger Deakins’s photography, dawn desert and motel corridors lit by a single lamp; Skip Lievsay’s sound, the receiver’s chirp, the bolt pistol’s cough, the wind, and the silence where a score would be; Carter Burwell’s score reduced to a few sustained tones few viewers notice; the editing under the Coens’ pseudonym, which cuts the motel pursuit to the rhythm of footsteps and gives Ed Tom his lateness; Jess Gonchor’s motels and offices; Javier Bardem’s Chigurh, a stillness with a voice, and Tommy Lee Jones’s face doing the film’s thinking; Josh Brolin and Kelly Macdonald, whose Texas is exact. The costs are small: the Wells thread is told at genre pace, and the dog in the river is visibly handled. Nothing is wasted.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the brush. Three reds are held apart, the hanging, the chair and the silk, with the light laid on the mozzetta in a few broad strokes that resolve only at distance. The white rochet is a passage of extraordinary economy, lace made of dragged and flicked paint. The face is built more closely, the flesh warm and mottled against the red, the eyes placed with a precision the robes do not need. The hands are summary and right. If anything is charged, it is that the lower drapery is broader and less worked than the head: a choice of emphasis, not a failure.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Counterpoint stays clear in textures of up to twelve parts, and the nine equal strings of No. 3 never thicken. Each instrument is written at the edge of its means: the trumpet’s high register in No. 2, the violin of No. 4, the harpsichord’s cadenza in No. 5. Ritornello form is handled six ways, never the same. Balance is solved by scoring: in No. 2’s Andante the trumpet stops so that the recorder can be heard, and in No. 6’s Adagio the gambas stop. The costs are two: in the outer movements of No. 2 the recorder set against the trumpet is hard to hear in any performance, and No. 1’s dances are skilled but routine beside the rest.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Motivic economy: No. 2 drawn from four notes of falling fifths, and the first movement of No. 4 from its rising line. Counterpoint: the octave canon of No. 2 made to sound like a stamping dance, and the fugal close of the variations that open No. 6. Voice writing: the Emperor variations give each instrument the tune in its own register, with the others’ counterpoint fitted around it, and the cello leads where earlier quartets gave it the bass. Harmony: the Fantasia’s journey and the Largo’s F sharp major are as advanced as anything of the 1790s. The cost is small: the first violin still dominates some outer movements, and some minuet trios are routine.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a small canvas, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is the care with which the picture is made. The light falls from one window and every surface answers it in its own way: matte plaster, coarse bread, glazed earthenware, brass, linen and wool. The wall alone is a passage of graded whites and greys, with nails, holes and the shadow of a nail, that few painters could hold without its going dead. The crust of the bread breaks into points of light. The blue of the apron and the yellow of the bodice sit at full strength without breaking the quiet of the room. The costs are small: her forearms are broadly generalised, and the command spans one corner; below Las Meninas at 9.8.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Judged on the original as far as a close translation carries it; the Russian sentence, unheard here, is neither credited nor charged. The making that comes through is load-bearing. Point of view crosses in one sentence: at the opera, “Natasha no longer thought this strange” (VIII.IX). The perceiving body comes before the name: “What have they taken a baby in there for?” (IV.IX). A fact is withheld for a page: “This wounded man was Prince Andrew Bolkonski” (XI.XIV). An object carries the feeling: Anatole’s leg “with the boot still on” (X.XXXVII). Charged, for construction and care, because they lie in the structure in any language: two families keeping dates a year apart through Book VIII; tags kept past their use; explanation after showing; the Second Epilogue’s numbered lists; a last chapter that stops rather than closes.
Murasaki Shikibu · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Judged on the Japanese, so far as it can be judged without hearing it. The command is of a medium the work largely made: a kana prose in long, suspended sentences that carry thought as it forms; an honorific system used so exactly that the agent is known without a name; and hundreds of poems written in voices distinct by character. The Kiritsubo consort’s dying poem turns on one word, ikamahoshiki, “wish to go” and “wish to live” at once (ch. 1). Yūgao’s first poem puns on Genji’s light (ch. 4). Suetsumuhana’s poems are bad on purpose, and the badness is characterisation (ch. 6). The narrator’s irony is placed in the grammar. Held from the top by the slack the book permits itself: the ceremonial inventories of the first part and of Wakana, and the thinner prose of the bridge chapters. Sound and calligraphy are neither credited nor charged.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.3 · Tier V
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing: a vault of about 37 metres over a span of about 16, carried on flyers designed with the elevation; alternating piers that give the nave its rhythm and carry the vault shafts to the floor; medallion windows that read at height, in a colour, the blue above all, that holds programme and light together; column-figures made for their columns. Command of a medium includes the first achievement of a system at scale, and the glass and the Royal Portal stand at the head of their media, refined by no one after. The costs: the structure is massive, overbuilt beside Reims and Amiens, which refined it; the triforium is plain; and glass and sculpture are uneven across many workshops, some windows crude beside the best.
Giotto di Bondone · Visual art
9.3 · Tier V
Judged as command of buon fresco at the scale of a chapel. Weight: volume modelled by one light within each scene, so that a robe hangs from a shoulder and the Lamentation is a mass of figures bowed round a mass. The frame: the Ascension’s Christ cut off by the border. Colour: a pale, chalky harmony across thirty-eight fields, the blue one continuous ground, the dado kept to stone. Illusion: coretti and marble that still fool the eye. The costs: haloes that blot the faces of apostles seen from behind at the Last Supper, buildings smaller than their users, a cruder Hell, and a blue laid a secco, the only way to that colour and the least durable thing in it.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Command of dramatic verse at its most compressed. Diction is set against itself: “multitudinous seas incarnadine” answered by “Making the green one red” (2.2), the Latinate and the plain in one sentence. Antithesis runs through the play’s speech, from “Fair is foul” to “nothing is / But what is not” (1.3). The half-lines and broken exchanges of 2.2 carry panic in the metre itself; prose is kept for the Porter and for the sleepwalking, where a mind’s disorder breaks the verse; the witches’ trochaic tetrameter, “Double, double toil and trouble” (4.1), sets them apart from human speech. The construction is a dramatist’s: the knocking timed to the washing of hands, the feast staged around an occupied stool. Charged: Hecate’s tetrameters in 3.5, thinner than the witches’ own; the second scene’s report of the battle, whose metre and sense are uneven in the text as it stands; and the quick scenes of the fifth act, which are functional.
Igor Stravinsky · Music
9.2 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: the orchestration, from the bassoon’s high solo and the woodwind thicket of the Introduction to the eight horns’ accents and the antique cymbals of Part II; rhythmic control, with ostinatos layered at different lengths and accents displaced against a steady pulse in the Augurs; a harmony that holds polychords and folk-derived cells in one sonority; and the long accelerating span of each part, from slow introduction to cut-off dance. The costs are in the notation. Stravinsky rebarred the Danse sacrale more than once, decades after the premiere, and the 1947 edition changed doublings and balance. The barring changes the players’ reading, not the sound intended, so the charge is small.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
The command is of register, and the range is the widest in Shakespeare before Hamlet. Hotspur’s verse runs headlong, impatient of its own metre, mocking the “certain lord, neat, and trimly dressed” (1 Henry IV, 1.3) and answering Glendower’s “I can call spirits from the vasty deep” with “But will they come when you do call for them?” (3.1). Falstaff’s prose is built of antithesis, mock-sermon and parody of euphuism: “I am not only witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men” (2 Henry IV, 1.2). Each low voice is distinct: the drawer Francis’s “Anon, anon, sir”, the Hostess’s tumbling malapropisms, Pistol’s rant patched from the playhouse’s own heroics, Shallow’s “Jesu, the days that we have seen!” (3.2). The King’s verse is grave and closed. Charged a little: the rebels’ councils in the second part are dutiful verse, and Pistol runs long.
Byzantine · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Judged as command of wall mosaic at the scale of a sanctuary. Light: the gold of the conch set at angles, so that the figures stand in a field lit from the windows rather than against a flat one. Faces: Theodora’s, Justinian’s and Maximian’s, built of small stone tesserae with glass in the shadows, the finest portrait heads in mosaic that survive from the century. Material: the pearls, the purple graded through several tones, the sealed scroll. Range: narrative lunettes and the flat gold of the panels, in one technique. The costs: feet laid flat on a green strip, a fountain whose perspective is a diagram, soldiers’ heads by formula, stiff anatomy at Sinai, and bodies far coarser than the faces they carry.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
The making is load-bearing. Plato writes seven prose styles and keeps them apart: Pausanias’ sophistic balance, mocked in the narrator’s own jingle, “Pausaniou de pausamenou”
“Pausanias having paused” (185c); Eryximachus’ technical pedantry; Aristophanes’ comic fable, bodies cut like fruit; Agathon’s Gorgianic parallelisms piled to the point of parody; Socrates’ plain question and answer; Diotima’s hieratic register, in the words of the mysteries; Alcibiades’ drunken, broken, candid speech, with Homer turned to a joke, “chrusea chalkeiōn”
“gold for bronze” (219a). Stage business is managed with economy: the late arrival, the hiccups, the crowning, the second band of revellers. Judged on the command of register and structure; the music of the Attic prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on the English, with the French beside it. The command is of a medium narrowed and then mastered: stichomythia timed like a music-hall double act; the pause and the silence written as part of the line; five registers, the tramps’ cross-talk, Pozzo’s rhetoric souring into “Up pig!”, Lucky’s torrent, the Boy’s “Yes Sir”, the lyric duets. Lucky’s speech is the virtuoso piece, a theological sentence, “a personal God quaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaqua outside time without extension” (I), breaking down into its own repetitions. The self-translation is itself craft: “Rien à faire.”
“Nothing to be done.” The English is wider than the French idiom and opens the play on a sentence about action. Held a step down for range: the instrument is narrow by design, and some routines in the first act hang fire.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.1 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout. Economy is the method: from four notes a whole sonata movement, and a development that shrinks its material to one chord passed between choirs. The orchestration is structural: the horn call that opens the second group; the oboe’s cadenza; the basses’ rising arpeggio and the trio’s fugato in the low strings, which tests the double basses as no symphony had; the pizzicato return; the timpani pedal; the trombones withheld for three movements and spent at the arrival. Rhythm is a constructive force across all four movements. The costs are in the score: the recapitulation’s horn call given to bassoons, which natural horns could not play there; the Andante’s routine figuration; the coda’s repeated cadences.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the ear and of the cut. The opening’s participles, falling at the line-ends, set a rhythm of reluctant life in four lines. The lady’s chamber is a single long sentence of baroque pastiche that collapses into nerves; the pub monologue catches a voice exactly and lets “HURRY UP PLEASE ITS TIME” fall across it like a bell; the typist’s scene is in pentameter quatrains whose decorum is the scene’s indecency; “What the Thunder Said” builds an incantation out of the absence of water. The juxtapositions are placed with a precision that makes the gaps speak. Held below the top on two charges: a few joins rely on allusion the verse does not carry alone, and the satire of the clerk and the typist slips into sneer, which is a lapse of control as well as of sympathy.
William Shakespeare · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on the Folio as the fuller text, with the Quarto’s oaths noted as the better reading where they occur. Three idioms are commanded and set against one another: Othello’s periodic verse, with its exotic names and its “anthropophagi” (1.3); Iago’s prose and clipped verse, thick with beasts; and the plain speech of Emilia. The making is load-bearing, because the contagion of idioms is the plot. In 4.1 Othello speaks Iago’s language, breaks into prose and falls in a fit, and later cries “Goats and monkeys!” In 3.3, in one continuous movement, a man goes from love to a vow of murder, kneeling with his tempter. The handkerchief passes through four hands in two scenes without strain. Charged: the Clown, and Iago’s luck, which brings Cassio and Bianca on when they are needed.
James Joyce · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Joyce’s English, which carries its other languages inside it. The making is load-bearing. The cadence of I.8’s last page, where the sentences shorten and thicken into monosyllables as night falls. The ballad of Persse O’Reilly (I.2), set as a street song with its chorus. The forms parodied exactly: the inquest, the quiz, the schoolbook, the broadcast and the racing commentary, the fables. Ten thunderwords, 1,001 letters in all. The pun controlled on several levels at once: “The war is in words and the wood is the world.” (I.4). Charged: in stretches of II.3 and III.3 the density defeats itself, the splicing becomes a manner, and some of the opacity is noise, not music.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. The sentence rises and falls with the mind, parenthesis inside clause inside parenthesis, and passes from one consciousness to another inside a paragraph without a seam. The dinner orchestrates a dozen minds over one table without losing any of them. The middle part drops the human centre and holds an impersonal prose for its length. Detail carries meaning: the reddish-brown stocking measured against James’s leg, the boar’s skull wrapped in the shawl, the boeuf en daube, the alphabet of thought in which Mr Ramsay has reached Q and cannot reach R. The opening, “Yes, of course, if it’s fine tomorrow,” drops the reader into an answer before the question. Charged: the manner hardens at times into mannerism, rhetorical questions and clauses opened with “for” recurring in the last part; Tansley and Mrs McNab are drawn with a condescension the book does not examine; the boat’s dialogue is thin.
Caravaggio · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Command of oil on a large canvas, and the making is load-bearing. One source at one angle lights seven figures consistently and models each face to a different depth of shadow, so the order of attention is the order of light. Christ’s hand, held in the gap and foreshortened slightly toward the table, carries the picture in a few square inches. Velvet, feathers, slashed sleeves, spectacles and coins are painted from life, and the field of seven is laid in directly, with no drawings, by a painter new to this scale. The costs are his: the space is shallow and cannot be measured, Peter crowds Christ and is awkwardly placed, and the figures stand in a frieze more than a room. The darkening is not charged.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on the Russian, and the command is of register within one metre. Church Slavonic and the high ode stand beside the plain prose of a clerk’s hopes and the bare report of his burial: “Красуйся, град Петров, и стой / Неколебимо, как Россия”
(Be splendid, city of Peter, and stand / unshakable as Russia). Sound is load-bearing: in the chase, “тяжело-звонкое скаканье / По потрясенной мостовой”
(heavy-ringing galloping / over the shaken pavement), the heavy compound and the ringing vowels do what they name; the flood’s verbs pile in short clauses; the half-line of the threat breaks the metre at the one moment of revolt. Enjambment is controlled across the unstanzaic paragraph, so that the verse speeds and stops with the action, and the symmetry of the parts is exact without being shown. The surface is judged on the passages known closely in the Russian; nothing in them is slack, and the axis stands a step from the top only for the music of the whole, which cannot be argued line by line without the text in hand.
Orson Welles · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium, the making load-bearing throughout. Toland’s deep focus holds the boy in the window while his mother signs at the table; his low angles put muslin ceilings in frame; his long takes let the breakfast table age by cuts. Welles’s sound overlaps talk and bridges years in a phrase. Robert Wise’s editing makes the newsreel and the montages. Herrmann’s score runs to a whole false opera. Linwood Dunn’s optical printing joins what was never in one shot. Perry Ferguson’s design builds a palace from a few sets and darkness. Welles ages fifty years; Dorothy Comingore gives Susan the only open pain; Cotten, Sloane, Moorehead and Coulouris are exact. The costs are few: the ageing make-up at Xanadu is visible, and the reporter kept in silhouette leaves the frame’s centre empty.
James Joyce · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Joyce’s English. The prose is load-bearing, and its plainness is a method: sentences of ordinary length, a median of thirteen words, common words, and a narration that takes the colour of whoever it follows, Lily’s “literally”, Maria’s “very nice”, Mr Duffy’s habit of a sentence about himself “containing a subject in the third person and a predicate in the past tense”. Dialogue carries whole stories: “Ivy Day in the Committee Room” is 53 per cent speech, a political comedy of rumour, stout bottles opened on the hob and an elegy. The detail is chosen to carry a person: Corley’s head “large, globular and oily”, Mr Alleyne’s “like a large egg reposing on the papers”, the “cold white grease” on Mr Duffy’s plate. The last paragraph turns plainness into music by repetition and inversion. Charged: the overwritten prose of “After the Race”, “the machinery of human nerves”, and the ironies of “A Little Cloud”, which press harder than they need.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Judged as command of building, structure included; the making is load-bearing because the geometry is the building. The plan: sixteen columns set out from triangles and circles, so that an irregular lot yields a figure oval, cross and octagon at once. The entablature: one continuous cornice turning concave and convex and never breaking. The section: arches and pendentives that convert an undulating plan into a smooth oval ring, so that the dome can be regular. The dome: coffers diminishing toward the lantern, lit from windows hidden at its base, so that a low vault reads as high. The costs: the spans are small and the engineering modest, so the structure makes no claim of its own; the stucco has needed renewal; the upper façade was finished by another hand; and some find the cherubs and garlands crowded in so small a room.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Robert Burks’s photography, the green haze on the hotel room and the profile at Ernie’s; Herrmann’s score, its rising and falling figures for the vertigo and its long lines for the following; Saul Bass’s titles; George Tomasini’s editing of the following, cut on point of view; the track-out, zoom-in shot; Kim Novak’s double performance, the cool Madeleine and the coarser, warmer Judy, each showing through the other; James Stewart moving from comedy to cruelty without a break. The costs are visible and are weighed in full: rear projection in the cars, the dummy falling from the tower, the animated nightmare, a lapse in a style otherwise seamless, and a script that leaves the hotel vanishing unaccounted for.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The prose is load-bearing. The long sentence, clause on clause joined by “and”, carries the book’s indifference: every event enters on equal terms. Against it stand the short declaratives of the dialogue and the present-tense address of the opening, “See the child.” The diction draws on scripture, on the archaic, and on the exact names of saddlery, firearms, rock and plant, so that the vision rests on a material world precisely kept. The judge’s speeches are an instrument of their own: Latinate, periodic, courteous, monstrous. The Spanish is left untranslated, and the reader stands where the kid stands. Charged: the mannerism the style’s critics name, a rare word set where a plain one would serve and a cadence that repeats itself in the middle of the book, the charge B. R. Myers made best known in “A Reader’s Manifesto” (The Atlantic, 2001).
Gustav Mahler · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium at the height of Mahler’s output. The orchestration bears weight throughout: woodwind and mandolin in the porcelain pavilion; the muted strings of the second song; the flute and oboe obbligatos of the last, which make the instruments the voice’s companions; the low C and tam-tam; the celesta and harps of the close. The motivic economy is close: a pentatonic cell, the falling A, G, E of the first song’s horn call, returns in the last, and heterophony is controlled, not effect. The costs are in the score. The tenor in the first song is notoriously hard to hear over the orchestra, and Mahler, who revised in rehearsal, never heard it. Bethge’s verse is part of the work, and often merely decorative.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on the English, with the French beside it. Command of the medium at the highest level, and load-bearing. The dialogue is built in short exchanges whose rhythm is musical, the written pause a measured unit of the line. The comic timing is music-hall exact: Hamm’s centring of the chair and Clov’s ladder routine can be played as pure clowning. Hamm’s long speeches, the chronicle above all, move among three registers, the storyteller’s, the commentator’s on his own story, and the man’s in the chair, with total control. The making in two languages counts here: Beckett remade the play in English rather than translating it, keeping its moves and finding English music for them: “Mean something! You and I, mean something!” Held below the very top only because some of the business is prescribed so exactly that part of its craft lies with the performer.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of oil on an oak panel a little over a metre and a half wide, to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. Architecture: hundreds of arches drawn in perspective round a curved mass, the courses of stone and the openings consistent from base to cloud, so that the lean reads as a fault in the building and not as a slip of the hand. Scale: figures a few millimetres high, each doing a recognisable task, beside a mountain-sized mass set in air. Atmosphere: the tower turns from warm stone in light to bluish shadow, and the distance at the left runs out in graded blues. Machinery observed exactly: treadwheel cranes, scaffolds, rafts. The cost is the foreground group, stiffer than the rest and the most conventional passage on the panel.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Nabokov’s English, the original, with no translation between. The prose is among the most commanded in the English novel, and load-bearing. “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth.” is phonetics as seduction, and the reader is made to perform it. The register runs from “My very photogenic mother died in a freak accident (picnic, lightning) when I was three”, a childhood in a parenthesis, to “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury”, and on to farce, catalogue, elegy and pastiche. The patterning is exact: Quilty’s motel-register pseudonyms are puns and literary jokes, and the chronology is engineered. The ornament is the narrator’s, and the book knows it: “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Ustad Ahmad Lahauri · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, and the making is load-bearing at every scale: coloured stones inlaid in marble with joints that cannot be seen at arm’s length; flowering plants carved in low relief on the dados; screens cut from single slabs into lattice; Qur’anic text in black marble set into white; a proportion held across gateway, garden and tomb so that the tomb grows as one approaches; and a river terrace that has carried the plinth beside a moving river for 373 years. The cost is structure. The dome rises over a modest chamber on a brick core, and nothing in the engineering is daring beside Hagia Sophia or the Pantheon. The command is of finish, proportion and durability rather than of span.
Arnold Schoenberg · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The making bears weight. The passacaglia of Nacht and the backward canons of Der Mondfleck, set against a fugue in the piano, are strict devices made audible as image, the moths and the spot. The scoring finds a new combination number by number, and the colour is never decoration: the flute alone against the dying moon, the bass clarinet’s dark, the piccolo’s glitter in Der Dandy. The rhythm of the voice carries the stress and wit of German speech through a notation without song, and numbers of a minute or two are built from very little. The costs: the notation does not say unambiguously what it asks, and a century of disagreement is in part its failure; Colombine and Valse de Chopin are fine work below the rest.
Giovanni Bellini · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on panel at the level of the medium’s masters. Light is laid over every surface with one direction and one temperature; the rock is built in layers and fractures that read as geology; the foliage, the donkey’s coat, the heron’s feathers, the town’s walls and the clouds are each given their own texture without the panel breaking into a sampler. The making bears the meaning: the meaning is in the light, and the light is a technical achievement. The costs: the figure is modest in its modelling beside the landscape, the hands and face drawn clearly but without virtuosity, and the panel does not make painting itself a subject, as Las Meninas does at 9.8 on this axis.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing, and it is the painter at his last and freest. The wheel’s spokes are a few transparent strokes that dissolve into a disc, and the eye supplies the motion. The young spinner’s blouse is laid in thick loaded whites over thin darks and holds as linen and light at once; her neck and shoulder are among his finest flesh. The air of the alcove is painted as a substance, warm, dusty and luminous, through which the ladies are seen as through a veil, and the tapestry and the figures before it are fused by handling alone. Costs: the alcove figures are summary by design, and the canvas’s condition obscures parts of the darks.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. The command is total, and load-bearing: the plain style of the projector, the measured periodic sentence of the man of reason, the arithmetic set out with the bland precision of a report, and above all the tonal control that admits no word of indignation into the voice, so that all the indignation is the reader’s. The diction does the work, in the mothers reckoned as breeders and the landlords’ title to the children. The pacing is exact: the proposal is delayed until the reader has assented to the arithmetic, and the six advantages are set out in the numbered order of a projector’s case. The last sentence, ending “the youngest being nine years old, and my wife past child-bearing”, lands as precisely as any close in English prose. Held below the top only for the narrow range of instruments one voice in a short work can show.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on panel at the scale of an end wall, judged for a viewing distance across most of a church. The making is load-bearing. The apostles are massed in shadow against the sky, their silhouettes doing the work that drawing would do at close range. The reds are placed so that the Virgin’s dress is answered below, and the eye is carried upward by colour. The gold is built as light, not leaf: dense near God, thinning toward the cloud, with further angels emerging from it. The Virgin is the hinge of the whole, turning in space as she rises, her draperies taking the wind. The costs: God the Father, foreshortened head first, is the stiffest passage; the child angels are a formula; and the frame, whoever designed it, is good work of its kind and no more.
Simone Martini · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of tempera and gold on panel, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing at the highest level. The line: Gabriel’s profile, the Virgin’s contour twisting from shoulder to hem, the hand at her collar, drawn with a control few painters of any century have matched. The goldsmith’s work of the ground: tooled haloes, punched borders, the brocade of Gabriel’s robe, the words raised in gesso and gilded, legible and integral. The colour: ultramarine against gold, the patterned mantle flying in the air, the grey and gold of the wings. The placing: two figures balanced across a wide field with the vase at the exact hinge. What holds it below the very top is the side panels, competent and stiffer, and their drapery, which does not reach the central scene.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of oil at altarpiece scale, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the picture’s knowledge is its handling. Shadow carries the modelling of faces and flesh, edges lost without a drawn line; the Virgin’s and the angel’s heads are among the most refined in Quattrocento painting. The foreshortened hand above the Child is a problem of drawing solved in tone. The children’s bodies are plump and weighted, infants and not small adults. The plants grow from the right ground, painted with a naturalist’s knowledge; the rock is rendered as strata, fissured and weathered. The light is placed from one source with control. The costs: the darker passages are heavy, some rock and foliage is less resolved than the heads, the drapery is of a lesser order, and the angel’s arm is awkwardly placed across the group. Below Las Meninas at 9.8 and its painted air.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a large canvas, judged to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The body is painted in a cool, pale flesh modelled with little halftone against the dark, its weight given by the sag of the shoulders, the strain in John’s arm and Nicodemus’s grip; the hanging arm is drawn with an anatomy both dead and exact. The light is single and raking, from the upper left, and it composes: it chooses the torso, the slab’s edge, Nicodemus’s calves and face, the Virgin’s hand. The stone is a mass with an edge, its corner made to come forward. The faces differ in age and grief with economy. The charge is slight: Mary of Cleophas is flatter in modelling than the group below, and the dark is a ground rather than a space.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, and the making is load-bearing to a degree rare in painting. The sleeve is laid in ridges of ochre, yellow and white so thick that it catches real light, and it reads at a distance as brocade and gold without one stroke of drawing. The red dress is scraped and glazed so that the colour seems lit from within. The hands are painted thin and soft in deliberate contrast, so that flesh is the gentlest thing in the picture. The faces are modelled with the economy of the late self portraits, each a few planes of warm light. The costs are charged: the background is summary, the woman’s lower body and the right side less resolved. The command is complete where the meaning lies.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Thelma Schoonmaker’s editing, the freeze-frames, the years dropped between cuts, the last day cut to the drug; Michael Ballhaus’s camera, the Copa Steadicam, the push-in on Jimmy at the bar, the diner shot; the placement of the songs, the Crystals at the Copa, the Layla coda, Sid Vicious at the end; Joe Pesci’s Tommy, funny and lethal in the same breath; Robert De Niro’s Jimmy, his pleasure in a well-worked job and his cold decision at the bar; Ray Liotta’s Henry, a narrator who is all appetite and no reflection; Lorraine Bracco’s Karen, who makes the wife’s complicity sexual and plain. Costs are weighed: the ageing of the principals across thirty years is carried by hair and costume and does not always hold.
Lorenzo Ghiberti · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of cast, chased and gilded bronze at monumental scale, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and it is the highest of the twelve. The making bears load: each panel was cast, by all accounts, as a single plate with its relief, an exceptional feat of the founder’s art, then worked by hand for years, so that hair, foliage, drapery, stone and water are distinguished in metal. The relief is graded across many planes in a few centimetres of depth, and the perspective of the loggia in Jacob and Esau and of the hall of Solomon holds. Fire gilding over the whole field unifies the surface. The figures carry weight, turn and move, and the frame’s small heads are portraits. The costs: in the earlier panels the episodes are scattered and the space less unified; in the later, crowds are stacked rather than placed. Above Donatello’s David at 9.3; below Las Meninas at 9.8, whose making is its subject.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil glazes on panel, and the making is load-bearing: the inscription names the painter’s own colours as the means. Each hair of the ringlets is drawn singly and the curls turn in the light. The fur at the collar is laid hair by hair with a fine brush until it reads as a soft mass. The hand, with its tendons and the pull of skin over the knuckle, is the work of the best draughtsman of his generation. The surface is enamel-smooth. The costs are charged: the face has a sculpted, masklike fixity, partly intended and partly the cost of the scheme, and the coat below the hand is thin in modelling now, whether by making or by age.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: John Alcott’s photography, wide lenses and a handheld camera in long takes; John Barry’s production design, the milk bar’s furniture, the Cat Lady’s paintings, Alex’s room; Wendy Carlos’s electronic realisations of Purcell and Beethoven, and the placing of Rossini and Elgar; Bill Butler’s cutting, the sped-up threesome and the intercut Ludovico films; Malcolm McDowell’s performance, in the body and in the voice-over, carrying the invented slang as if born to it, charming and vile without a seam; Patrick Magee’s writer, Michael Bates’s guard, Aubrey Morris’s Deltoid, each a precise grotesque. The making is load-bearing: the complicity is produced by lens, pace and music. Held a step below the top by the second half, where the prison and hospital scenes are staged in a conventional comic grammar the first forty minutes never use, and by the Cat Lady fight, cut on past its point.
Jan van Eyck · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of oil on panel, read to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The brocade of the Virgin’s mantle and Rolin’s gold-figured robe, the fur at his collar, the crystal orb with its reflected light, the stones of the crown, the tiles and the capitals: each is given its substance by layered glazes that make light behave as it does on that material. The distance is the summit of the craft: a city of tiny, legible things, then hills, then mountains going blue and pale by degrees, the air itself painted. Rolin’s face, heavy and exact, is portraiture of the first rank. The costs are charged: the floor and loggia do not converge on one point, the Virgin’s figure under its mantle has the inherited stiffness of the type, and the angel is slight beside the principals.
Josquin des Prez · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. The counterpoint is the century’s model: points of imitation in which each voice enters with the chant’s phrase and becomes an independent line without a crowded bar; voice-pairing, two voices answered by the other two, for clarity and for scale; declamation that lets the Latin be heard, the Credo’s text carried at speed without losing the counterpoint. The Phrygian mode, whose cadences are awkward, is handled so that its colour is a resource, not a problem. Reduced scorings vary the texture without loss of law. The last Agnus is a feat of disposition, the hymn in the top voice and the other three still in imitation around it. Held off the ceiling on load: the making is flawless more than strained, and the middle stretches of the Gloria and Credo are, by Josquin’s standard, fluent routine.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas some four and a half metres wide, holding a crowd in depth, and the making is load-bearing. The captain’s hand is foreshortened toward the viewer, its shadow laid across the lieutenant’s coat: two figures joined by one stroke of light. The girl, a small figure in the middle ground, is made the brightest point in the field without leaving its space. The company is held from the front step back into the arch’s shadow without a file. The costs are in the rear: some faces are summary, and the ranking light sometimes leaves a sitter illegible. Those choices are the painter’s; the repairs and retouching are not.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, and the making is load-bearing, in places the subject. The face is constructed in layered, worked impasto, the light modelled by thickness as much as by tone, so that the flesh catches real light on its ridges; the shadowed side is thin and warm. The cap is a few broad, loaded strokes. The tools are a passage of rapid, unresolved marks that hold the place of hand, palette and brushes without describing them, and still read correctly at a distance. The circles are drawn with a sure, unruled line. Light, value and temperature are held in one key across thick and thin, from built flesh to bare ground to drawn line.
Johann Sebastian Bach · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The command of one instrument is near the highest the medium shows. The line implies its harmony: a bass note struck on one beat governs the bars after it, and the ear holds it. The first Prelude makes harmony from arpeggiation alone; the fifth suite’s fugue keeps two voices audible on one line crossing the strings; its Sarabande writes a melody that implies its own bass by contour. The retuning of the fifth suite is not a trick: it makes chords possible that standard tuning would refuse, and darkens the resonance. The sixth uses its fifth string for chords and a high register. A tenth or two below the ceiling, because in the galanteries the craft is fluent rather than load-bearing.
Giacomo Puccini · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is close to complete, and it is the work’s strongest axis. The orchestration: the garret’s cold in thin textures, the snow at the customs barrier, the stage band of the Latin Quarter, the hush under the death. The conversational writing: dialogue at speaking pace, melody released at the point of feeling and withdrawn. The ensembles: Act II’s simultaneous crowd, children, vendors and principals, with Musetta’s waltz built into an ensemble while Alcindoro is sent away; Act III’s quartet, two couples in opposed moods kept distinct and joined. Illica and Giacosa’s libretto is a model of compression. Held a tenth below Otello by a narrower range of means, and by climaxes that lean on doubling the voice in the orchestra.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. Five black coats and five black hats are told apart by touch and light alone, so that black is a range and never a blank. The red carpet is built in thick, worked strokes of red, gold and brown, its pattern given as glow rather than drawn, and it is the light of the lower half. The faces are modelled in the late, broad, loaded manner, each sure and none overworked, the eyes under the brims held in a shadow that still looks out. The white collars are a rhythm across the frieze. The costs are charged lightly: the panelling is summary, and the servant has less presence than the board. A tenth below the summit of the medium.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of carved marble, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is in the cut. The fingers sinking into the thigh, the skin rising between them; the tears on Proserpina’s cheek; her hair lifting free of the block; Pluto’s beard and curls drilled deep; Cerberus’s fur and three distinct heads; the drapery carried as a thin, spinning sheet across both bodies; and surfaces told apart by polish and texture, skin against hair against cloth against fur, so that one white stone yields several substances. The undercutting is extreme and holds. The costs are charged: Pluto’s anatomy is pressed toward display, his face is more formula than person beside hers, and the less favoured views are less resolved than the front. A summit of the medium, below the very top.
Herman Melville · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Judged on Melville’s English. The range is very wide: farce, “I turned in, and never slept better in my life” (ch. 3); the sermon; the 467-word sentence that opens the whiteness chapter, turning on “yet for all these accumulated associations” (ch. 42); technical prose made premise, “All men live enveloped in whale-lines” (ch. 60); action exact enough to stage, “he did clear it; but the flying turn caught him round the neck” (ch. 135). Held at 9.3 by construction and care, in slips that are Melville’s own: Pip is a “Poor Alabama boy!” (ch. 27) and a native of Tolland County in Connecticut (ch. 93); Kokovoko becomes Rokovoko; a stepmother becomes a mother within a sentence (ch. 4); New Zealand Jack becomes Tom (ch. 45).
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.3 · Tier V
The making bears weight throughout: the first movement developed from one cell; the scherzo’s fugato and its timpani in octave Fs; the Adagio’s double variations, the Andante returning in D major and then G major; the double fugue joining the joy theme, in 6/4, with the “Seid umschlungen” theme; colour held back with purpose, piccolo, contrabassoon and percussion saved for the finale. The costs are in the score. The choral writing holds the sopranos high and loud for long stretches, and has been called unvocal since 1824. The natural horns and trumpets leave gaps in the brass lines, which Wagner, Mahler and others retouched. A medium commanded to the full does not usually need correcting.
Sophocles · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Judged on the Greek, with the metres of the lyric neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact. The ironies are timed: the “man” of the chorus’s Ode is a woman, and Creon’s guess at bribery meets the Guard’s bewildered honesty. The reversal is placed with cruelty. Creon, yielding to Teiresias, goes first to bury Polyneices and only then to free Antigone, and the Messenger’s speech lets the time he lost be counted. The stichomythia is cut to the line. The Guard, garrulous, frightened and comic, speaks in a register no Aeschylean messenger has. Eurydice’s exit without a word, and the chorus’s unease at the silence, is the craft of omission. Charged: the obscurity of the double burial; Eurydice brought in so late that she exists only to die; and the clumsy logic of 904 to 920, if they are Sophocles’.
Euripides · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Judged on Euripides’ Greek. The dialogue is supple and dangerous: in the interrogation the god answers every question with a truth the king cannot hear, and in the temptation a single cry, a, turns Pentheus from command to desire and the play on its hinge. The two messenger speeches are among the finest in tragedy, the first moving from idyll to violence, the second from the bent fir to the dismembering with a terrible plainness. The lyric range is wide: ionics for the cult’s sway, trochaic tetrameters after the miracle, dochmiacs for the fourth stasimon’s cry for vengeance and for Agave’s madness. Held from the top by the stiff closing distribution of fates and the slacker second stasimon. The music is lost, and neither credited nor charged.
Ferdowsi · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Ferdowsi’s Persian; its sound is beyond this reading, neither credited nor charged. One metre is held for some 50,000 couplets with the clarity the Persian tradition calls sahl-e momtane’, “the easy that cannot be done”: plain words in plain order, never obscure. The diction keeps to Persian’s own stock, and the poem became a reserve of the language. The preface is an instrument: before Sohrab’s death the poet speaks in his own voice of the wind that throws down the unripe citron. Rostam’s answer to Esfandiyar, everything offered but the chains, is a negotiation whose courtesy is the tragedy. Charged for battle and dawn rendered by recurring means that sometimes idle, and for counsel in which the verse is correct and not alive.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. Benjy’s section is an instrument built from nothing: a syntax of perception without causes, in which golf is seen without the word for it, “Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”, and in which a sister is a sense: “Caddy smelled like trees.” Quentin’s prose holds a mind coming apart, the father’s voice returning in it (“clocks slay time”) until punctuation and capitals go. Jason’s monologue, “Once a bitch always a bitch, what I say.”, is a comic voice of grievance with few equals in the American novel of its time. The fourth section’s set prose builds Dilsey before she speaks. Charged: Quentin’s section is at moments overwrought, the father’s aphorisms mannered; and the eye-dialect given to the Black characters, a convention of its time, works against the dignity the last section gives them.
George Eliot · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Command of the medium is near complete. The construction times four strands of very different matter to one another across three years and places the joins where they bear weight: Raffles reading the paper Bulstrode wrapped his flask in; Lydgate called to Stone Court on the night Raffles dies. The sentence is periodic and exact, capable of comedy and of analysis in one clause, as in the first sentence of the first chapter, “Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress” (ch. 1). One image carries a whole marriage: Lydgate’s name for Rosamond, “his basil plant” (Finale), a plant that flourished on a murdered man’s brains. Mr Brooke’s half-sentences, Mrs Cadwallader’s wit and Mary Garth’s dryness are each a voice. Charged: Ladislaw, drawn from outside and too fondly; commentary that says once more what the scene said; and the epigraphs in Eliot’s own verse, the weakest writing in the book.
Michelangelo · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Judged as command of building, structure included; the making is load-bearing. The dome is a double shell of brick on sixteen ribs, about forty-two metres across, vaulted in 1588–1590. The drum’s sixteen buttresses are faced with paired columns, so that its stiffening is its order. On the core one giant order commands walls of unequal function. The interior is finished in coloured marble, mosaic, gilded stucco and bronze at a scale no other church attempted. The costs are in the fabric: the dome cracked under its thrust; the façade’s foundations would not bear its towers; and the uniform enlargement of the interior is a calculation that misfires, craft at a scale that defeats the eye it was made for.
Friedrich Hölderlin · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The case against is that the late syntax can harden into mannerism, the inversions forced and the drafts unrevised, and that Goethe commanded more registers of German verse. Judged on the German, the making of the finished poems is load-bearing and of the first order. The distichs of “Brod und Wein” and the hexameters of “Der Archipelagus” hold long periodic sentences across the line without loss of sound. The free rhythms of “Der Rhein” and “Patmos” are measured by ear and by an architecture of triads. “Andenken” moves from “Der Nordost wehet”
(The northeast wind is blowing) through the gardens of Bordeaux to its last line in plain words placed exactly. The drafts are charged where their unfinish bears, on The Inevitable, The Inner Law and The Imperishable, not here.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium, load-bearing throughout. The screenplay, by Puzo and Coppola, compresses a long novel into a line of scenes each of which sets up another. Gordon Willis photographs in top-light and amber, the wedding blown out in sun against the study’s dark. Dean Tavoularis’s rooms make 1945 without display. Nino Rota’s waltz and love theme carry the film’s grief. The editing holds the baptism against five killings. Brando plays Vito from the jaw and the hands, in Dick Smith’s make-up on a man of forty-seven; Pacino plays Michael by stillness, and the stillness changes meaning without changing; Caan, Duvall, Cazale, Castellano and Keaton are each exact. The costs: the rear projection in Sicily, a Hollywood episode staged broadly, and Kay underwritten until the last shot.
Fan Kuan · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Command of ink on silk. The mountain is built from thousands of short dotted strokes over graded washes, so the wall has mass and grain without a contour doing the work. The summit trees are a mat of dots that reads as scrub at a distance and as marks up close. The waterfall and the mist are silk left bare, so the two brightest things in the picture are an absence of ink. One stroke grammar holds over two square metres at two scales of attention, and the making carries the meaning: the mountain’s weight is the density of the stroke. The means are narrow, with no figure at scale, little colour and one view.
Ludwig van Beethoven · Music
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium at Beethoven’s late height. The fugues: In gloria Dei patris in the Gloria and the double fugue on Et vitam venturi saeculi in the Credo, the second a summit of choral counterpoint after Bach and Handel. The orchestra: the dark Praeludium of low strings and winds, the solo violin’s descent, trumpets and drums heard as from a distance, trombones for judgment. The modal harmony of the Et incarnatus, set inside a tonal language without sounding pasted on. The cost is in the vocal writing: the choral sopranos are held high for long spans, the text is sometimes declaimed at speeds that defeat diction, and the four soloists serve more as an extension of the chorus than as voices. The Ninth stands level here, on the same charge.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. Command of the medium is near complete, and the making bears weight. The sentence is long and semicoloned, gathering clauses as the mind gathers them, turning in a breath from a flower shop to Bourton thirty years before; and short when it must be: “Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” The transitions carry the book: the motor car in Bond Street passes from mind to mind along the street; the aeroplane’s letters are read by a dozen people, each differently; the clock strikes and the narrative crosses London on the sound, and Big Ben’s sentence returns, varied, so that the reader hears the day pass. Detail carries meaning: Rezia’s hat, Peter’s pocket-knife, Richard’s roses, Clarissa mending her green dress. Charged: the portraits of Kilman and Bradshaw slip into the narrator’s own contempt, and the prose there loses its tact; and some phrases, the plunge among them, are repeated until they wear.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the French, with Beckett’s English beside it. The prose is a deliberately plain French of short clauses, joined by commas and continuing past every stopping point. Its command shows in rhythm and timing held across a paragraph the length of a book: the deflation in mid-clause, the turn of a self-correction, the joke left unremarked, the quickening of the last sentence. The Mahood stories show narrative command in small, a family dying in the rotunda told in the voice’s offhand register. The making carries the weight, because the retracting syntax is the argument. The English, a second making rather than a copy, shows how much the French construction holds. Held below the top because the deliberate monotony costs in the middle, and at times the mechanism of retraction hardens into a tic.
William Shakespeare · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing at almost every level. The late verse is supple and compressed, its sense running across line ends and between speakers, so that dialogue in 1.2 and 5.1 moves at the speed of thought. Each order of being on the island has its own idiom: Ariel’s songs, light and exact; Caliban’s verse, physical and particular, the richest sensory language in the play given to the lowest figure; the clowns’ prose; the masque’s couplets; the Epilogue’s short lines. The stagecraft is of the first order: the storm on a bare stage in seamen’s prose, the vanishing banquet, the lovers discovered at chess, “Sweet lord, you play me false” (5.1). Charged: the knotted syntax of the 1.2 exposition and of Antonio’s temptation in 2.1.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The command is of the sentence and the adjective: the first sentence of “El Aleph”, “La candente mañana de febrero en que Beatriz Viterbo murió”, sets heat, date, name and death in one breath and tilts at once into irony. The prose is compressed and exact, with an archaic gravity in the Oriental and classical tales and a dry Argentine plainness in the gaucho ones, and Borges moves between them without a seam. The enumeration of the Aleph is a set piece of controlled excess. The construction is the other half of the craft: endings that reverse the whole (“La casa de Asterión”, “Los teólogos”, “La espera”), plots built as proofs (“Emma Zunz”), false documents with plausible scholarly apparatus. Held below the top because the devices repeat across seventeen pieces, the mirror, the labyrinth, the doubled man, the revealing last sentence, and in the weaker pieces they show as manner.
Emily Dickinson · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on her English, and at its height the making is load-bearing and exact to the syllable. The quatrain is handled with exact control of stress and pause: “Because I could not stop for Death”, then “He kindly stopped for me” (J712), the turn on the adverb, courtesy and terror held in one gesture, and later the whole poem turning on one word, “surmised”. The word is chosen against expectation and is right: “a formal feeling”, “Heavenly Hurt”, “Zero at the Bone”, “I could not see to see”. The comma set against grammar, “And then a Plank in Reason, broke”, makes the break audible. The rhyme is withheld so that the ear hangs; the line is cut short at the point of meaning. Charged: the range is narrow, one family of measures and no long breath; the compression sometimes fails to construe; capitals and dashes turn to mannerism in the weaker poems. But the test is command of the medium, and in the hundreds of poems that count she commands hers to the limit.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the French, with the English made with the author beside it. The French is written by a foreigner in absolute command of its cadence: a plain diction pressed into sentences that swing between the clipped and the endless, with self-correction as a rhythm of thought. The comic timing is exact, from the policeman to the arithmetic of the stones, which is built as a set of permutations and carried through. Moran’s prose is a pastiche of a precise, pious, self-satisfied voice, held for a hundred pages while it slowly loosens: a second instrument mastered as fully as the first. The two openings, and a paragraph that keeps its reader for eighty pages without a rest, are technical feats. Held below the highest marks because the long paragraph’s evenness at times slackens into repetition that is meant but not always earned.
Giacomo Leopardi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Italian. At its height the making is load-bearing and among the finest in the language. The blank hendecasyllable of L’infinito runs across the line so that the sentence itself founders into its last. “Dolce e chiara è la notte e senza vento”
“Sweet and clear is the night and without wind” is made of plain words in an order no other would improve. A Silvia works by echo, “rimembri ancora”, do you still remember, its rhymes returning at the stanza ends like a bell. “D’in su la vetta della torre antica”
“From the top of the ancient tower” fixes the bird, the tower and the evening of Il passero solitario in a line, and La ginestra holds a long argumentative syntax over three hundred lines without losing the music. Held at 9.3 by what the book also carries: the stiff Latinate inversions of the first canzoni, the slackness of the Palinodia, the conventional diction of Consalvo.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Rilke’s German. The craft is load-bearing, and it is the craft of syntax set against the line. In the opening question the genitive “der Engel” ends the line and its noun, “Ordnungen”, waits at the head of the next, so that the break holds the reader suspended over the angels’ order. The Ninth’s nouns are placed so that each stands alone; the Tenth’s last lines descend in short phrases to the final verb, “fällt”. The long line ranges from the grand address to the bitter catalogue of the Fifth’s fairground, the inwardness of the Third and the plain speech of the Ninth, and compounds such as “Hiersein” are made to bear meaning. Charged: a preciosity in places, as in some of the Fifth’s satire; repetition that slackens the Seventh; invocation where an image would have served.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Yeats’s English. The command is of syntax run against stanza: a single sentence carried across the eight lines of ottava rima with the rhyme falling on plain words, and the voice still that of a man speaking. “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick, unless / Soul clap its hands and sing”: the enjambment holds the condition open until “unless”. The sound is placed: “Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long” is the summer’s abundance in a line. The sonnet of “Leda” opens in mid-act with a noun phrase and a colon, “A sudden blow:”, and its broken line is placed exactly. What holds it a step off the top is the unevenness: “The Three Monuments” and “Wisdom” are flat, the third part of “The Tower” loose and declamatory, and at moments the system’s vocabulary sits in the verse as jargon and the syntax of “All Souls’ Night” knots past clarity.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. Command of the medium is complete, and it bears the load. The six share one idiom and are still told apart, by their recurring images, Louis’s chained beast stamping on the shore, Rhoda’s petals sailing in a basin, Susan’s fields, Jinny’s dance, Neville’s precision, Bernard’s phrases, and by the shapes of their sentences. The interludes are among the most exacting prose in English: each advances the sun, the light on the waves, the birds and the objects in the house by exact degrees, so that the reader feels the hour without being told it. The opening speeches are one designed movement, each child seeing one thing: “I see a ring,” said Bernard. The summing up sustains a single voice across the whole last section without slack. Charged a step from the top for the uniform pitch, which at times muffles the differences it means to keep, and for stretches in the middle where the images repeat more than they deepen.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. The low camera and its compositions: doorways, corridors and rooms in depth, figures placed in the same spot of the frame from shot to shot. The cutting, frontal shot answered by frontal shot, with still lifes between scenes that keep time moving. Yūharu Atsuta’s photography of interiors by day and the harbour at dawn. The script’s repetitions and its two registers of speech, Onomichi against Tokyo. The performances: Chishū Ryū’s stillness and old man’s gait at forty-nine, Chieko Higashiyama’s slowness, Haruko Sugimura’s briskness, which is the film’s comedy, and Setsuko Hara’s smile, held until the last scene breaks it. The sound: trains, boats, singing through the inn’s walls. The costs: Kojun Saitō’s score is conventional, and sentimental where the images are not; Ryū’s age-acting shows once or twice.
F. Scott Fitzgerald · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Fitzgerald’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence: the cadence of the opening, “In my younger and more vulnerable years” (chapter 1), and of the close; the exact, displaced adjective, “yellow cocktail music” (chapter 3); the ironic turn inside a clause. The scenes are composed: the Buchanans’ room with its curtains and the two women in white on the couch; the reunion; the Plaza in the heat. The construction rhymes across nine chapters: the green light that ends the first and the last, the eyes, the car, the shirts, the hottest day. The dialogue fixes a person in a phrase: Tom’s “Civilization’s going to pieces”, Daisy’s “a beautiful little fool” (chapter 1). Charged: Wolfshiem drawn in a stereotype of its decade, the impossible witness of chapter 8, and moments where the lyric overreaches.
Insular · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of Insular illumination and script on vellum, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. The ornament: spirals, trumpet patterns, knotwork and the interlace of beasts, laid out on grid and compass and drawn freehand at a scale that rewards a lens, with no thread lost. The colour: a broad palette laid in layers for depth. The script: Insular majuscule at its most formal, with initials that grow out of the line. And text and ornament composed as one surface. The costs are real: the figure drawing is schematic beside the ornament, and the Arrest weaker than the Chi-Rho; the hands differ in quality; some decoration is unfinished; and the text carries errors a scriptorium charged with the Word should not have left.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, and the making is load-bearing: without the control of light there is no sign of heaven. Saul is foreshortened toward the viewer and the horse set in near profile, both packed into an upright field. The light models the horse’s flank, the groom’s brow and the open hands, and leaves the rest in a dark that still holds volume. Armour, bridle and hide are painted as material without fuss, and the whole is built to read from an angle. The costs are at the right, where the groom’s legs and the horse’s hindquarters do not resolve, and in a darkness that is at times absence rather than air. Las Meninas, at 9.8, is clear of both.
Donatello · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of bronze in the round, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load. The modelling of an adolescent body, neither athletic nor antique in proportion, with the soft belly, the thin arms and the weight thrown into one hip, is anatomically specific in a way no figure of its century matches. The finish is graded to meaning: the skin polished smooth; hair, wreath and beard chased and textured; the feather drawn out thin along the leg; the boots tooled. The cast is ambitious, a slender figure with an extended arm and a long blade. The charges: the boots and the wreath at the base are worked with less attention than the body, and the relief on the helmet is fine and illegible. The body is the summit of its century; the secondary parts hold the axis below the top.
Sappho · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is at the highest level in every poem that survives whole enough to judge. The diction is plain and exact, with compounds that carry a poem: “poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita”
“immortal Aphrodite of the intricate throne” (one tradition reads “of the intricate mind”), and Eros “lysimelēs”
“limb-loosening”. The handling of the stanza is supple: sense runs over line and stanza ends in the hymn and in fragment 31 and comes to rest on the adonic when the thought does. Fragment 31’s construction, observation, symptom, extremity, then “alla pan tolmaton”
“but all must be endured” as the turn, is the making carrying the meaning. The range runs from hymn and symptom poem to the narrative of fragment 44 and the jesting wedding songs. The lost music is neither charged nor credited.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is the poem’s most certain strength, and the making is load-bearing. Rhyme royal, three rhymes in seven lines, is hard in English, and Chaucer holds it for more than a thousand stanzas without visible strain, moving inside the stanza from lyric to rapid dialogue split between speakers, to argument, to narrative summary. The conversational verse has no equal in English before Shakespeare: Criseyde’s “Who yaf me drynke?” (II.651)
“who gave me drink?”, said to herself as Troilus rides past, turns a convention into a mind. Apostrophe, sententia and proverb are used and mocked at once. The care is on the surface: “So prey I God that non myswrite the” (V.1795). Charged a little for Pandarus’s proverb-heaps and the longueurs of Book II.
Rashtrakuta, under Krishna I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included, and here the making is the work. A temple with a two-storeyed hall, a separate shrine, bridges and free-standing pillars was set out inside a hill and released from it from the top down, so that every proportion had to be fixed before any of it could be seen whole, and nothing could be added back. The bridges and overhangs are spans of uncut rock, left where they could carry themselves. The sculpture at its best is of a high order: the Ravana recess, the gallery panels, narrative friezes kept legible in long registers. The costs: much of the articulation reproduces a masonry grammar rather than rethinking it; the carving is uneven across hands; and the structural problem, though unforgiving, is not one of spanning or thrust.
W. B. Yeats · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Yeats’s English, and at the height of his command. The syntax of “Byzantium” runs one sentence across lines of very different length without losing its hold, and its full rhymes and off-rhymes are placed with complete control. The ottava rima of “Coole Park and Ballylee, 1931” turns from the river under the tower to the house’s last romantics with no strain at the joins. The songs show the opposite skill: plain diction, monosyllables, refrains used as hammers, and the high poem has the same plainness at need, “A blind man battering blind men”. “Swift’s Epitaph” makes a translation into an English poem of six lines with its own weight. The making bears the meaning: the affirmation of the “Dialogue” would not hold without the rhythm that carries it. What holds it a step off the top is that some lesser pieces are perfunctory and a few of the songs mannered.
Kalidasa · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as it can be weighed; the metres are known here by name and pattern, not by ear, and the Prakrit passages are not read in the original, a limit of this reading and not charged to the play. The making is load-bearing. The stanzas compress an image and a feeling into one figure: the deer, the lotus lovely though wound with moss, the bee the king envies. The tradition’s own saying gives Kālidāsa the simile: “upamā kālidāsasya”
“the simile is Kālidāsa’s”. The prose is quick and social: the friends’ teasing, the jester’s complaints about the hunt, the policemen and the fisherman squabbling over the ring, where the low comedy is as finished as the lament. The dramaturgy is exact: the curse placed in an interlude so that the audience hears it and Shakuntala does not; the friends’ choice to keep it from her; the ring lost offstage and reported; the stage manager carried off by a song as the king will be by a deer.
Miles Davis · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing throughout. Davis places every note and counts the silences as phrasing; Coltrane crowds the scale with runs and keeps to its frame; Adderley’s blues phrasing ties the record to the ground. Evans’s voicings carry it, above all the two-chord reply of “So What”, built in fourths, which became a standard voicing. Chambers and Cobb hold time so lightly that the space seems to open by itself, and the 30th Street room keeps each instrument clear and present. All of it was done at first sight of the frames, so the craft is part of the meaning. The costs are small: “Freddie Freeloader” is routine as composition, and a few passages in the longer solos mark time.
Caravaggio · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a canvas over five metres wide, and the making is load-bearing. The light from the upper left is the drawing of the picture: it isolates the executioner’s back and arm, the old woman’s sleeve and hands, the girl’s bent neck, the Baptist’s shoulders and the red cloth under him, and leaves the rest in a falling half dark that holds the wall’s depth. The executioner’s anatomy is exact and economical. The paint is thin and fast, the ground used as the dark, the blood and the signature one gesture. The costs: the prisoners and parts of the wall are thinly realised, and the speed shows where it carries no meaning. Las Meninas, at 9.8, is clear of both.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of masonry domed construction at the summit of its tradition. A great dome set high on four piers, its thrust resolved through semidomes and through buttresses drawn into the walls, so that the outside reads as an ordered stepped mass rather than a building propped; cut stone of high quality throughout; tie rods and lead roofs; a structure that stands as built after four and a half centuries. The arts within, the Iznik tile of the qibla wall, the carved marble mihrab and minbar, the calligraphy and the window glass, are of the first rank. The making is load-bearing: the light, the unity of the room and the cascade are structural results. Short of the Pantheon’s 9.5, whose concrete dome had no successor for thirteen centuries.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is complete and load-bearing. Sven Nykvist’s light is the argument made visible: candle and lamp in the Ekdahl rooms, northern daylight blanched in the bishop’s house, the blue dark of the nursery where the lantern throws its picture. Anna Asp’s design and Marik Vos’s costumes build two worlds felt apart before they are stated. The ensemble is among the finest in cinema: Allan Edwall’s tired Oscar, Gunn Wållgren’s Helena talking to her dead son, Jan Malmsjö’s bishop, whose courtesy frightens more than his cane, Jarl Kulle’s Gustav Adolf, Erland Josephson’s Isak. The children are directed without sentiment. The impossible is handled by the plainest means and shows no seam. Some passages run at the length of life, by choice, and mostly earn it.
Pierre Choderlos de Laclos · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Laclos’s French. The command is of voice and of timing. The voices are distinct to the sentence: Cécile’s convent-girl breathlessness and misspelt eagerness; Tourvel’s grave, scrupulous piety, its resistance audible in its syntax; Valmont’s military swagger and his metaphors of campaign and siege; Merteuil’s classical lucidity, the most controlled prose in the book. Each correspondent writes to a different reader in a different key, and Valmont to Merteuil and Valmont to Tourvel are two men. The timing is a soldier’s: letters cross, arrive late, are kept back, and the irony lies in the dates. The epigrams carry the analysis without stopping the action. Held below the top only by the ending: the duel, the smallpox and the lawsuit come in a few short letters by minor hands, functional rather than load-bearing.
Hugo van der Goes · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel at monumental scale, to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The still life is among the highest achievements of the medium in its century: the glazed majolica jar, the clear glass with its water and stems, the petals and the sheaf, each a different substance under one light. The shepherds’ heads and hands are painted with an anatomy of labour, skin, stubble and knuckle, that carries the picture’s meaning. The brocades and jewelled copes of the angels, the cold air of the wings and the feigned stone of the grisaille are each fully commanded, and the disjunctions of scale are a decision carried out with complete control. Held half a point below Las Meninas (9.8): some hovering angels are less surely drawn, and the building and ground plane are looser than Van Eyck’s.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Rilke’s German, and the command of the line is at its height. The sound bears load: in I.1 the line runs from “Baum” to “Ohr” and ends on the organ the poem is about. The last tercet of II.29 sets “Ich rinne” against “Ich bin” (“I flow”, “I am”), two short clauses that rhyme in sense and not in sound and close the book on the two states it has praised. The compounds and the nominalised verbs make the sonnet do work English has no equipment for, and the range of metre across fifty-five poems, each kept to fourteen lines, is itself a feat. Charged: speed shows in a few sonnets, in near-miss rhymes without purpose and in exclamation used as filler. The music of the German is partly beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Sven Nykvist’s light is flat and white by the sea and sculpts the faces in the night scenes. Two faces framed in one shot, in depth and in profile, are the film’s main grammar. The doubled monologue is cut so the same words land first on one face, then the other, and the composite face falls exactly at the end of the speech. Bibi Andersson holds the beach monologue almost entirely on her face; Liv Ullmann carries the lead without words. Werle’s sparse score and the projector’s sound make one design. The costs: the prologue’s montage is looser than the drama it frames, the hospital transitions are functional, and the means are narrow by choice, two faces and a few rooms.
Huang Gongwang · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of ink and brush on paper, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing, because the scroll’s claim is that the stroke is the mind. The hemp-fibre texture strokes are long, dry, slightly rounded and laid in layers, pale ink first and darker later, so that the hills have weight without wash. The moss dots and the trees, in several kinds of foliage, pine, bare branch and dotted leaf, are made with a precision that never stiffens; the far shore is set down in two or three strokes of the palest ink. The tonal range of monochrome is fully used, from dense black accents on the near trees to ink so pale it is almost paper. The costs are slight: the figures and buildings are summary beside the hills, and some passages in the long middle repeat their stroke.
Raphael · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at altar scale, to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the vision convinces because it is painted with weight. The Virgin’s mantle swings out in one arc, her step forward given by the drapery over the leading leg; the child’s body has a real heaviness in her arms; the faces are modelled without line; the cherubs in the light are painted so thinly that they emerge only as one looks. The tiara, the embroidered cope and Sixtus’s hand are given with an exactness that grounds the cloud. Charged: Barbara’s face and turn are sweetness where the Virgin’s are gravity, the cloud under the saints is summary, and the putti are drawn with ease rather than with the authority of the centre. Below Las Meninas at 9.8 and the Mona Lisa at 9.6, the peaks of their kinds.
Franz Liszt · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at its height in one respect, the piano writing. The opening’s bare octaves and silences; the hammered bass at the bottom of the keyboard; the Grandioso’s chords spread across the instrument; the Andante’s singing line and its hymn texture; a fugato in three voices written for the hands, not merely on paper; one motif turned into another by rhythm and harmony while its notes stay audible. The costs are the ones Liszt’s critics named and the score shows: sequences restated rather than developed, octave passagework that fills a harmony, recitative links that pause the argument. In Op. 131 and the Goldberg Variations the making carries weight in every bar; here, in most.
Richard Strauss · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at the height of its age. The orchestra of about a hundred and five players: the heckelphone among the woodwind; the double bass’s pinched note at the execution; celesta and harmonium for the court’s glitter; the opening clarinet run, which sets an unstable tonal field in one gesture; the wings Herodes alone hears, in fluttering winds and strings; a texture thinned to chamber detail at will. The harmony sets keys against one another as drama, not effect. The German prose is declaimed fluently, without the stiffness of setting unrhymed lines, and the quintet is real five-part counterpoint in comic dress. The costs are in the score: a title role that must ride the full orchestra and seem sixteen, a balance problem since 1905, and a Dance routine by Strauss’s standard. Held below Otello’s 9.5 on those counts.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of oil on oak panel, at a size far larger than the calendar miniatures the subject descends from, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. The silhouette drawing: hunters, dogs and trees realised as contour against white, with an economy that lets a skater far down on the ice read as falling. The tonal command: four or five colours held in one key, the greens of ice and sky tuned to the whites so that the cold has a colour. The recession: from the trunks to the far peaks by a continuous lessening of contrast, with no break between near and far. The paint laid thin over a pale ground, so the light comes through. Held below the highest marks because the mastery is complete within a manner rather than inventing one.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: John Toll’s photography, the camera low in the grass, the light shot upward through the canopy; Hans Zimmer’s score, its single rising figure for the climb, with Ives’s The Unanswered Question and a Melanesian choir set against it; the sound, in which birdsong and wind are given the weight of gunfire; Jack Fisk’s design; Nick Nolte’s Tall, Sean Penn’s Welsh, and Jim Caviezel’s Witt, who carries the film by stillness. The costs lie in the department the film depends on most, and run through it, which holds the figure: the editing by Billy Weber, Leslie Jones and Saar Klein made a reverie out of hours of material, but the structure shows where it was cut, and voices the viewer cannot place recur to the end. Symphony No. 9, its costs running through its score, stands at the same figure.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
The surfaces are broken into planes that hold and release light; anatomy is driven to the edge of possibility without losing weight: the Ugolino group, the Shades’ impossible necks, the hands. The command of scale on one object, from heads a few centimetres high to The Thinker, and the passage from relief to the round, are load-bearing, and the modelling stands with the finest carving in marble. The Rudier casts are faithful and fine. What holds the axis below the top is composition, not command of the surface: some figures on the leaves are repeated by casting rather than modelled for their place, legibility fails at six metres, and the frame is competent rather than inspired.
Agesander, Athenodoros and Polydorus of Rhodes (attributed) · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of marble at the scale of the body, and the making is load-bearing. The torso is anatomy in action, each muscle shown at the strain the coil and the effort put on it; the passage of skin over rib and abdomen is carved, not schematised. The serpents are carved free across and between the bodies, their coils undercut so that the marble reads as weight crossing flesh. The father’s face holds an extreme expression in a symmetrical frame without caricature. The costs are charged: the sons’ bodies as reduced adults, the elder son’s slacker finish against the father, and the back and sides left summary because the group is built for one face. The highest of the twelve; the composition, not the chisel, limits it.
Robert Schumann · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. The piano writing is an image and a structure in each song: the suspended arpeggios of no. 1, the archaic dotted bass of no. 6, the repeated chords of no. 7, the whirling dance of no. 9, the dry chords and silences of no. 13. The declamation sets Heine’s stress closely. The postludes are composed as conclusions, not codas. Heine’s verse is part of the work and is the better poetry of the two great cycles: compressed, musical, and armed with irony in its last lines. The costs: where the music sets an ironic turn sincerely, a meaning the words had is lost, and the voice writing of the miniatures is plain. Held below Winterreise (9.5) and the Goldberg Variations (9.7) on the range of means a twenty-eight-minute cycle commands.
Titian · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas at the highest level of its decade, and the colour is the load-bearing craft. Ultramarine is laid at full strength across a large sky and in Ariadne’s drapery without deadening; the vermilion and the realgar orange are keyed so that the eye crosses the picture on them; the warm flesh of the god is set against the cool of Ariadne’s back. Figures in violent motion, the leap, the twisting snake satyr, Ariadne’s contrapposto in reverse, are drawn surely at life size, and the sea and hills at the left dissolve into blue in the Venetian handling of air. The meaning is carried by the colour division. The cost is small: some passages of the crowd at the right are workmanlike beside the leap and Ariadne.
Franz Schubert · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. The trill is placed deep in the bass under a sustained chord, so that the instrument’s own resonance makes it ominous; the even accompaniment keeps the first theme’s pulse alive at a slow tempo; in the Andante the left hand crosses over to keep a rhythm and a bass in one hand while the melody sings in the middle. The moves by a third are made with complete control, a single common tone carrying the music from one light to another. The costs are small and real: the finale’s figuration is at times routine and its returns mechanical, and the first movement’s development leans on sequence where Beethoven would have worked the material. The work’s highest axis, held a step below the Goldberg Variations at 9.7.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of ground mineral and flint on a cave wall by lamplight, figures larger than the circle of light. The 5.2 m aurochs is in proportion, drawn by someone who could not see it whole. Convention is rule: horns turned toward the viewer on a profile head, the far legs separated from the near by a reserved gap of bare wall. The Crossed Bison show true overlap. Paint on the hard calcite, engraving where the wall is soft. Blown pigment gives the dotted outlines and haloes of the Chinese Horses. The costs: the Shaft’s man is schematic beside an exact bison, the Apse is a tangle, and the means are narrow, one colour family and no human body drawn.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas. The making carries the meaning: the force the picture argues is made by the brush. The late manner is at full stretch: flesh built in warm, translucent layers over a light ground, the body of Venus turning in the light at the centre; armour and drapery in broken, rapid strokes; a dozen interlocked figures held in one diagonal, so that the eye is carried right as Mars is carried. Colour carries the narrative, warm at the hinge, cooling into the dark of the Fury and the monsters, black for Europe. Few painters have commanded the moving body at this scale with this ease. The costs: the right side is crowded, some lower figures are summary, and the extent of studio hands cannot be verified.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a small walnut panel, judged to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The face is modelled by graded shadow without line, the light falling from the upper left across the forehead and the nearer cheek into transparent shadow under the jaw and at the throat: Leonardo early in his command of the soft transition. The hand is drawn with an anatomist’s knowledge, knuckle, tendon and nail, foreshortened over the animal’s back. The ermine’s fur, head, eye and claws are painted with a naturalist’s exactness that never breaks the scale of the whole. The veil is transparent paint over skin; each bead is lit. The costs: the hand is long beyond nature and its lower fingers may be retouched; the animal’s size is unnatural; the costume’s lower edge and the sleeve are flatter than the head. Held below Las Meninas at 9.8 and its painted air.
Paul Valéry · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Valéry’s French, command of the medium is at its height. The decasyllable of “Le Cimetière marin” is handled with a control of caesura, vowel and consonant that very few poems in the language match: “Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, / Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes” holds its alliteration and its echoing “entre” without strain. The short lines of “Palme” carry argument in metre as nimbly as conversation. “Les Grenades” is a sonnet of exact building in which the split fruit becomes the brow of the mind. The syntax stays lucid where the thought is hard. A tenth or two is withheld for the slight pieces and a preciosity of vocabulary in a few, “L’Insinuant” among them.
Thutmose (attributed) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of painted sculpture in stone and stucco, and the making is load-bearing. A limestone core was carved, then refined with stucco built up in layers of varying thickness, so the final face is modelled twice, once in stone and once in plaster. The symmetry is exact where it is wanted, in the brows, the lips and the crown, and relaxed where life needs it, in the tendons of the neck and the hollows under the cheekbones. The skin is as smooth as the painted crown is crisp. The inlaid eye is set at the depth that makes the gaze. Held below the top: the virtuosity works within an established court practice, and the single eye leaves the object short of its own complete state.
Hellenistic · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of marble at its limit. Two weights of cloth are made to differ in one stone: the thin chiton pulled taut over belly and breasts, its ripples shallow as water, and the heavier himation rolled at the hips and gathered in deep, drilled channels between the legs. The wind is carved as direction, every fold on the front lying back along the line of the gust. The wings were carved apart and set into the back, and the figure is built of blocks whose joins the drapery hides; its weight is balanced over a body pitched forward on one advanced foot, with the wings projecting behind. Held below the top by the hull, whose detail is formula. The plaster and fills are not weighed here, and the lost face and hands cannot be judged.
Greek (Classical) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of large hollow-cast bronze, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and it is of the highest order. The making bears load: the figures are alive because of how they are cast and finished. The bodies were built in sections and joined, and the joins do not show as joins. Anatomy is given as tension, not catalogue: the crest of the pelvis over the weight-bearing hip, the swelling of the calf on the released leg, the veins over the backs of the hands, the tendons of the feet. A’s hair and beard are worked in deep separate curls that hold light, and the features are set with a precision that keeps mouth and eyes from reading as applied. B shows a second hand of comparable command, or the same hand later. Held below the top for the more schematic finish in parts of B.
Albrecht Dürer · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of watercolour and bodycolour on paper, to the same anchors as every medium; the making is load-bearing, since the work is its making. Broad transparent washes lay in the warm brown and grey of the coat; over them, with a very fine brush, opaque strokes give individual hairs in shifting directions, following the turn of the body over shoulder, flank and haunch. The whiskers are drawn in single sure strokes, some light on dark, some dark on light; the eye is wet, deep and reflecting; the ears are translucent at their edges. The light holds across thousands of decisions. Few sheets in any century show such control of so small a medium. Charged: the hind quarters and the lower edge are summarised more than the head, and the range is narrow by design, one animal and one light.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.5 · Tier V
Judged on the making of the original. Dostoevsky’s sentence, register and rhythm cannot be read through a translation, and are neither charged nor credited. The making that comes through is load-bearing: Grushenka holds Katerina Ivanovna’s hand “for two or three minutes near her lips” (Pt. I, Bk. III, ch. 10) before refusing to kiss it; the captain’s trampling of the notes turns within lines into “What should I say to my boy if I took money from you for our shame?” (Pt. II, Bk. IV, ch. 7); Ivan’s collapse comes before the speeches, so both orators argue over evidence the reader has watched corrupted. Charged, because they lie in the structure in any language: matter told twice; a signal system given as a lecture; speeches promised “in full” (Pt. IV, Bk. XII, ch. 2) and then summarised; a serial’s hinges. The slips of age, name and hour in the English are not charged.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
9.4 · Tier V
Judged on Cervantes’s Spanish. The making is load-bearing. Registers stand under one hand: the archaic fabla, the Basque’s broken Castilian, the galley cant, Sancho’s proverbs and his “baciyelmo” (I.XLIV). Dialogue is cut to the bone: “¿Qué gigantes?”
“What giants?” (I.VIII). Syntax deflates: “dio su espíritu: quiero decir que se murió”
“yielded up his spirit, that is to say died” (II.LXXIV). Charged for construction and care: the ass that vanishes unnarrated in Part I, Sancho’s wife named Juana and Mari Gutiérrez within ten lines, Part II’s broken dates and day-counts, a Gregorio renamed, strands left open, stock joints, and verse the book itself calls its author’s lesser gift: “más versado en desdichas que en versos” (I.VI).
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Judged on the Russian, so far as it can be judged without hearing it. The command is of construction and voice. The plot is made with a watchmaker’s care: the latch shaking while he stands behind the door with the axe (I.7), the bell he rings again on his return to the flat (II.6), Mikolka’s false confession timed into the second interview (IV.5, IV.6), Svidrigaïlov behind the partition (V.4, VI.5). The voices are distinct to the particle: Porfiry’s deferential -с, Marmeladov’s Slavonicisms (“Behold the man!”, I.2), Luzhin’s officialese, Katerina Ivanovna’s genteel French. Charged: a prose hurried and repetitive in ways the serial deadline explains and only partly justifies; coincidence driving three turns (I.5, I.6, V.4); a slip in the time of day (VI.8); and the slur at VI.6. Sound is neither credited nor charged.
Plato · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Command of the medium is of the first rank. The opening is a plain sentence of narration that sets a festival, a torch race on horseback and a house in a few lines. The characters are made in speech: Cephalus’s serene old age, Polemarchus’s maxim borrowed from Simonides, Thrasymachus coming on like a wild beast and his blush (350d), Glaucon’s eagerness and Adeimantus’s gravity. The images are built step by step, the line in proportions, the cave in stages, each answer moving the picture. Er gives the cosmic machinery as a seen object. Held below the top by the assent machinery, by analogies the making does not test (the craft analogy, the city and the soul), and by the nuptial number. The music of the Attic prose is beyond this reckoning and is neither credited nor charged.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Judged on the Latin, as far as a reader of it can carry the judgment. The command is a professional rhetor’s, turned to prayer: antithesis and chiasmus, “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo”
“give me chastity and continence, but not yet” (VIII.7.17); wordplay that thinks, “nondum amabam, et amare amabam”
“I did not yet love, and I loved to love” (III.1.1); the Psalms set into the sentences so that his voice and scripture’s cannot always be told apart. The scene is made with a novelist’s economy: Ambrose reading with his eyes only, voice and tongue at rest (VI.3.3); Alypius opening his eyes at the games against his will (VI.8.13). Charged: stretches of the exegesis where the rhetoric repeats itself, and a habit of amplification that sometimes says a thing three times.
Leonardo da Vinci · Visual art
9.2 · Tier V
Judged as command of tempera and oil on the dry plaster of a refectory wall. What the drawing and the design achieve is at the top: perspective that builds a room on the wall and centres it on one head; twelve figures in four groups and one rhythm, with no figure lost; hands that carry speech, from Thomas’s forefinger to Philip’s palms; one light from the left on all. The charge is the technique. Leonardo chose dry plaster to work slowly and revise, and the method did not bind to the wall: it was failing in his lifetime. That is a failure of command of the medium, not a later accident, and it is charged. Later losses are not charged; lost modelling is not credited from the copies.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on the French. The command of the line is at its highest in the great poems: the weight of the alexandrine and the placing of its caesura, rhyme used as argument, the sonnet’s turn, the long syntax that runs through the quatrains of “Le Cygne”, the varied measure and refrain of “L’Invitation au voyage”, “Mon enfant, ma sœur, / Songe à la douceur”
“My child, my sister, / think of the sweetness”. The making carries weight: the impeccability is what lets the matter shock rather than merely offend. The command is not even across 126 poems. Some lean on capitalised abstractions, stock apostrophe and the exclamation mark, and some rhymes are forced. The finest gradations of the French metre are not judged here past what can be heard with certainty, and nothing is charged for that.
Plato · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on the Greek as far as it can be judged: a long argumentative dialogue built inside a narrated frame without losing either; the frame’s two interruptions timed to the points of greatest doubt; character drawn in a stroke, Xanthippe’s cry and departure (60a), Apollodorus weeping without restraint, Crito fussing about the burial (115c to e), the servant of the Eleven (116c to d); the slow handling of the poison, with its plain verbs and physical detail; and the last sentence’s triad, “aristou kai allōs phronimōtatou kai dikaiotatou”
“the best, and also the wisest and most just” (118a). Charged: the refutation of attunement and the cyclical argument are made with less economy than the scenes, and the last argument’s prose grows technical and dense. The music of the Attic prose is heard only in part and is neither credited nor charged.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. The prose is among the most exactly controlled in the language: plain, numerical, unhurried, and ironic without ever signalling the irony. The skill is in the sentence that reports an atrocity in the tone of an inventory, as when the Lilliputian court proposes, as an act of lenity, only to put out Gulliver’s eyes. The scenes are made with a surgeon’s precision: the pockets, the fire, the farmer exhibiting Gulliver at fairs, the Houyhnhnm master’s patient incomprehension of lying, which he can only call “the thing which was not”. The proportions are calculated and kept. Charged: the third part, which strings episodes, and its satire of projectors, funny and thin; and Gulliver’s voice, sometimes a mouthpiece rather than a man.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Tolstoy’s Russian; the sound of it, sentence by sentence, is beyond this reading and neither credited nor charged. The command is complete within a register held deliberately plain. The comedy of chapter I is exact: the colleagues’ calculations, the pouffe, the widow’s question about the grant, the friend’s urge to get to his whist. The summary prose of II and III catches the life’s own idiom, its pleasant and decorous, and repeats it until the repetition is the judgment. The prose of the body is precise without display: the taste in the mouth, the side, the doctors’ “блуждающая почка” and “слепая кишка”, floating kidney and blind gut, named and renamed as the diagnosis shifts. Held below the top by construction: the narrator of II and III explains what the scenes show, and the middle chapters return more than once to the same recognition.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The command is of the sentence and of the design. The sentence is classical, short and exact against the ornate tradition it inherits, with the unexpected adjective doing a paragraph’s work: “Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche” (no one saw him come ashore in the unanimous night). The first sentence of “Tlön”, “Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar”, sets a whole method in one line. The design is exact: each story’s last paragraph turns the whole, the false erudition is consistent down to the footnote, and real and invented names are mixed so that the seam cannot be found. Held below the top on two charges: the manner hardens into tics across a whole book, the paired adjectives, the acaso, the vertigo and the infinite named too often; and the characters, Funes and Dahlmann apart, are seldom made to live.
Giovanni Boccaccio · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Boccaccio’s Florentine, the making is load-bearing. The prose builds long Latinate periods, the verb held to the end, and lays them over low matter and high alike, so that the style is itself the comedy when it gravely narrates a trick. Beside the periods run quick dialogue, the speech of servants and friars and the mimicry of other cities: the Venetian of Frate Alberto’s tale, the Neapolitan streets of Andreuccio’s night. The narrative craft is exact: the misdirections of Ciappelletto’s confession, the single falcon of Federigo’s poverty, Chichibio’s crane with one leg, Cipolla’s improvised relic. The costs: the periodic manner grows heavy in the frame and the graver tales, and the ballate are competent and no more. The music of the original prose is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas nearly two metres wide. The making is load-bearing. The whites are the proof: half a dozen of them, warm and cool, opaque and thin, each holding its object against its neighbour with no shadow to separate them. The body is modelled by contour and a narrow band of half-tones under frontal light, and stays round. The black ribbon at the throat, a single stroke, is the darkest accent and the hinge of the composition. The bouquet is painted loose, a few touches of pink, blue and white that become flowers at a distance. The costs are real: the servant’s face and the cat lie near the value of the ground, the cat legible chiefly by its eyes and tail; some contemporaries found the drawing of the body hard and the far arm uncertain, and there is a stiffness there. Command at the top, with a small part of the field under-realised.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Dante’s Italian; the music of the verse is heard only as far as this reading hears it, and is neither credited nor charged beyond that. Tanto gentile turns on “pare” and “par” (seems) in both quatrains and the last tercet, so that the poem is about seeming and showing, and it ends on its one imperative: “Che va dicendo all’anima: sospira.” (that goes saying to the soul: sigh). Donne ch’avete is a canzone whose whole matter is praise; Donna pietosa is a canzone that narrates. The prose, built on “onde”, “conciossiacosa che” and “avvegna che”, latinate and slow, holds the street, the dream and the gloss in one sentence. Charged: the early sonnets in Cavalcanti’s manner, the double sonnets of VII and VIII with their “d’ogni torto tortoso” (VIII), and the formula of the divisions.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be judged without the whole in hand; the sound of the whole is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The construction of the five visits is exact: each house is its owner, each meal and each bargain varies the one transaction, and the dialogue of the bargaining is comedy of the first order, Korobochka afraid of selling too cheap, Sobakevich praising his dead as craftsmen. The narrator’s sentence, with its digressions inside digressions and its catalogues, is controlled even when it pretends to lose itself. Nozdryov, “исторический человек”
(a historical man), because there was always an incident wherever he went, is made from speech alone. Charged: the town chapters lose some tension, the postmaster’s manner in the Kopeikin tale is long for its effect, and the biography in chapter 11 is late exposition.
Euripides · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Euripides’ Greek, the music neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact. The irony is timed: the servant prays to Aphrodite just after she has announced the deaths, and the garland for Artemis is offered as they begin. The exchange of single lines draws out the secret by naming Phaedra’s mother and sister, the two women of her house ruined by love, until the Nurse says the son’s name. The Nurse’s second thoughts turn on a line that sounds like wisdom and is ruin, “hai deuterai pōs phrontides sophōterai”
“second thoughts are somehow wiser” (436). Phaedra’s long speech is grave and reasoned, the messenger’s narrative is one of the great set pieces of the theatre, and the last scene keeps the god’s voice cool and the man’s voice broken. The oath, the door, the tablet and the epiphany are machines fitted exactly. The charges are the exposition, where the prologue speaks to the audience and tells the plot, and the length of the tirade and of the dispute of father and son.
Juan Rulfo · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Rulfo’s Spanish, known in its manner and in some certain sentences rather than line by line. The prose is load-bearing and plain: short sentences, the vocabulary of the countryside, the turns of Jalisco speech, the diminutives and the regional words, almost no ornament. The first sentence shows the method: “un tal Pedro Páramo”
“a certain Pedro Páramo” names the father as a stranger names a stranger, and sets the whole book’s distance in two words. The same plainness carries the lyric of memory and the dread of the night; the difference is in rhythm and in what is left out. The joins are exact: a voice breaks off, white space, another begins, and the reader is never told who speaks yet can always learn it. Charged slightly: in the second half some transitions among the dead are harder to follow than the design requires.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Spanish. The sentence is the instrument: long, cumulative, clause on clause, in a past tense that holds the habitual, the remembered and the foretold at once, with the conditional “había de recordar”
“was to remember” as the book’s signature tense. The deadpan is sustained across the whole book without a lapse into wonder or apology: Father Nicanor rises a few inches off the ground after a cup of chocolate, and the voice moves on. The exact number set against the impossible makes the marvel factual and the fact marvellous: thirty-two uprisings, seventeen sons, four years, eleven months and two days. The similes are physical and exact, the river stones “blancas y enormes como huevos prehistóricos”
“white and enormous like prehistoric eggs”. The management of a century across twenty chapters, with deaths announced long before they come and still landing, is construction of a high order, and the detail carries character: the colonel’s little gold fishes, made and melted down and made again; Amaranta’s black bandage and her shroud; Rebeca eating earth and whitewash. Charged: one voice for seven generations flattens the people into a register; dialogue is scarce; the devices recur in the later generations as manner more than discovery; and the genealogy defeats a reader without a family tree.
Raphael · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large panel, to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The figure drawing is the painter’s at its height: the apostles’ heads and hands, studied separately in drawings of great force, each a different reaction to the same failure; the boy’s body, arms locked at different angles, eyes rolled up; the father’s hold; the kneeling woman’s twist, a contrapposto turned away from us that anchors the whole lower front. The upper light is made from within the figure of Christ, the white garments painted as radiance rather than cloth. The lower light is one strong raking source held across a crowd without loss of legibility. Charged: the lower right group is harder and more metallic in modelling than the rest, the deacon saints are perfunctory, and the dark has darkened.
James Joyce · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Joyce’s English. The prose is among the most exact in the language, and the making is load-bearing. The scene: the Christmas dinner, built from dialogue alone until the table breaks; the corridor to the rector’s room; Cork, where the boy finds “Foetus” cut into a desk and his father’s past turns to ash. The sermon is a pastiche of Jesuit pulpit rhetoric so complete that it works on the reader as the real thing. The rhythm of the prose turns with the scene: “A day of dappled seaborne clouds.” is a sentence Stephen savours and the narration builds. The construction is exact: five movements, each closing on a height, each opening low, with motifs placed across the whole. Charged: the villanelle, which may be meant as a young man’s poem and is, either way, the weakest writing in the book; and the long dialogue of the last chapter, where argument outruns scene.
Jacques-Louis David · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas of about life size, painted within a few months. The flesh is modelled with academic exactness and kept firm, without the softness of sleep. The light comes from one source at the upper left, falls across the shoulder and the sheet, and stops. The wall is the passage of most command: a thin, mottled scumble with its brushwork visible, reading as air and as surface at once, the freest painting David had yet made. The grain of the crate, the letters and the paper are exact without becoming a trick. The costs are small: the drapery of the sheet is more studio than tub. The idealised anatomy, set against the record of Marat’s skin, is a choice of the icon and is not charged. The making is load-bearing in the wall and the arm.
John Coltrane · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing. The quartet plays at the limit of a language it had refined for four years: Coltrane’s tone, from the fanfare’s breadth to the overblown cries of Pursuance; Jones’s polyrhythm, which in Acknowledgement lays a second meter under the bass figure and in Psalm turns timpani into a congregation; Tyner’s chords in fourths, which give the harmony its open floor; Garrison’s figure, simple and unbroken. The key cycle, the chant and the recitation of Psalm are executed things, not concepts, and each would fail on a weaker hand. Van Gelder’s recording holds the four distinct. The faults are real and small: a one-day session leaves rough edges, the bass is thin in the mix, and Garrison’s long solo sags.
Johannes Brahms · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, bearing weight throughout: the fugue of the third movement, in several voices over a held tonic, its harmony moving against an unmoving bass; the colour of the first, where taking away the violins makes the darkness and the harps make the comfort; choral writing chorale-like and contrapuntal by turns; Luther’s German set with its stresses kept, its long prose lines phrased as music. The costs are in the score. The pedal fugue is hard to balance, as Vienna showed in 1867; the tuttis are thick; the chorus sopranos sit high and loud in the fugues of the second and sixth movements; and the sixth movement’s fugue is the most academic page.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. Command of the medium is load-bearing, and the measure is the range of verse forms inside one voice: the accentual meditative line, slowed to the pace of thought; the octosyllabic couplets of East Coker II; the five rhymed stanzas of the wounded surgeon, “The wounded surgeon plies the steel”; the six-line stanzas of The Dry Salvages II, keeping their rhyme sounds throughout; and above all the unrhymed terza rima of Little Gidding II, with its alternating masculine and feminine endings, carrying a whole Dantean encounter in plain modern diction, “the ash on an old man’s sleeve”. The sound is exact: “Quick now, here, now, always” (Burnt Norton V). Held off the top because some flatness exceeds its formal use, in the abstract chains of The Dry Salvages and the phrasing of “the moment” repeated across poems, and a few lines are prose the design permits but does not require.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between, and the making bears weight at every level. The poem is a real poem: 999 lines in a Popean couplet loosened by a plainness like Frost’s, with passages of high finish (the waxwing, Hazel’s evening, the fountain) and one life told coherently in four movements. The commentary is a second voice wholly unlike the first: florid, wounded, snobbish, lyrical, paranoid, its self-betrayals placed with exact timing, so that the reader learns from what Kinbote cannot help saying. Interleaving the assassin’s journey with the dates of composition is a structural feat, and the index is comedy and evidence at once. Charged: the poem is uneven by design and also by result, with flat stretches in the first and fourth cantos; puns and private games sometimes clog the commentary; and the Zemblan language is whimsy at length.
The Beatles · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, wide and exact across many idioms. Martin’s octet for “Eleanor Rigby” in short, hard strokes with no romantic wash; the harmonic turn in the bridge of “Here, There and Everywhere”; the descending bass and horn solo of “For No One”; the metre changes of “She Said She Said”; the brass of “Got to Get You into My Life”; McCartney’s bass and Starr’s close-miked, compressed pattern on the closer; the loops prepared at home and mixed live. The costs are real: “I Want to Tell You” is shapely but loose, and three or four tracks of the second side are made brilliantly in the house style and carry no weight. Care this exact, charged where the making only decorates, stands level with Crime and Punishment.
Sophocles · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Sophocles at full command. The first line sets the play’s situation in five words: “teknon typhlou gerontos Antigonē”
“child of a blind old man, Antigone” (1): who he is, who guides him, what he has become. The sung entry is a lyric dialogue in which the chorus learn his name against his will. The entrances are timed so that each arrival is announced, seen and argued: Ismene on a Sicilian colt, Creon with his men, Polynices weeping. The rhetoric is fitted to the speaker, in Creon’s plausible piety, Polynices’ appeal and Oedipus’ curse. The messenger’s speech is a masterpiece of what it does not tell. Charged: the Creon debate repeats; the battle ode is conventional; some stretches of the first episode are exposition, not drama.
Robert de Luzarches, Thomas and Renaud de Cormont · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first. A vault of about 42 metres over a span of about 14.6, on cantoned piers slender for their load, the thrust taken by flyers in two tiers; the main body raised in about fifty years, the nave in under twenty. The making is load-bearing throughout: one bay module governs nave, transept and choir; the shafts run unbroken from base to springing; in the upper choir tracery joins triforium and clerestory into one glazed field, and the flyers are pierced as tracery. The sculpture is of the first rank in parts: the Beau Dieu, the Vierge Dorée. Distress at the crossing is weighed under survival, not here. The costs: the upper west front is resolved less surely than the interior, its stages piled rather than composed, and the portal sculpture is uneven across many hands.
Chola bronze casters · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of lost-wax bronze, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the dance stands because the casting holds it. The whole weight rests on one bent leg on the dwarf’s back, and the figure balances, a mass of metal in a pose a dancer can hold only for an instant. The torso is modelled smooth and alive, the waist narrow, the shoulders broad, the planes of the chest given by light rather than by line. The flying locks, separate strands set out level and joined at their tips to the ring, are a triumph of casting, thin metal held in the air. The four hands are articulate in four gestures, and the ring is true. The costs: ornament and flames chased to a canon and repeated; the face idealised to the type; a measure that constrains the maker as much as it guides him.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and it bears weight across more than three hours. Gordon Willis lights the strands as two worlds, warm and close in the father’s, cold and spacious at Tahoe, faces falling into darkness at the moments of decision. The editing holds two strands to the end and intercuts the last deaths with the lake. Pacino plays Michael by withdrawal; De Niro plays Vito almost wholly in Sicilian; Cazale makes the boathouse the film’s one open wound. The costs run through the son’s strand rather than falling in single shots, and they hold the figure: the plot’s machinery is clotted, Kay is underwritten until her last scene, and the hearings, a central sequence, are staged flat. Costs of construction of that kind hold The Brothers Karamazov at the same figure.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Gogol’s Russian, so far as it can be heard; its sound beyond that is neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: a single line from birth to coat to theft to death to ghost, with the economy of a fable, carried by a voice that seems to wander and never loses the line. The comic devices are load-bearing: the list of rejected saints’ names; the name Akaky Akakievich itself, with its repeated syllables; the tailor’s snuffbox, whose general has had his face poked through and pasted over; the qualifying “even” that makes the narrator’s attention ridiculous. The modulation from comedy to the humane paragraph and back is managed within a page, and the inventory of the dead man’s effects is a model of pathos by plain listing. Held below the top because the digressive tics sometimes run on for their own pleasure, and the party is slacker than the rest.
Li Bai · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the Chinese as far as this reading can judge it; the Tang sound, unheard as a Tang reader heard it, is neither credited nor charged. Command shows in the control of parallelism, “浮雲遊子意，落日故人情”
(drifting cloud, the traveller’s mind; setting sun, an old friend’s feeling), from “Seeing a Friend Off”, a regulated poem; in quatrains with no character spent twice; in the timing of the long songs, which move between lines of three, five, seven and more characters and land the refrain where the breath fails; and in the art that hides art, “抽刀斷水水更流，舉杯銷愁愁更愁”
(draw a sword to cut the water and it flows the more; raise a cup to dissolve sorrow and sorrow is the more), where the doubled characters do the work of the image. The making is load-bearing in the best poems. Charged: carelessness and repetition across the body, and a regulated verse less exact than Du Fu’s or Wang Wei’s, by the tradition’s own account.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Racine’s French. The vocabulary is small by design, the couplet unvaried in form, and some of the gallant diction is formula; but the command of the alexandrine is one few poets in any language have had of any line. The syntax runs through the caesura and the rhyme without strain, the speeches are built as arguments that turn on a single word, and the music never decorates. “Je t’aimais inconstant, qu’aurais-je fait fidèle ?”
“I loved you faithless; what would I have done had you been true?” (IV.5) holds a history of feeling in twelve syllables balanced on the caesura. The dramaturgy is as exact: each act ends on a reversal the next act pays for, and the fifth passes the stage from Hermione to Oreste to his madness without a slack scene.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas more than two and a half metres high, and the making is load-bearing where it counts. The father’s hands and face are built of loaded, broken paint that holds light like warmth; the red of his cloak is laid in thick and scraped strokes that glow against the dark; the son’s rags and shaved skull are modelled in dragged, dry paint, the texture of poverty; the sole of the foot is a few strokes and the most exact thing in the picture. The light is managed as meaning, highest on the father’s face and the son’s back, held on the elder son, failing on the rest. The costs are charged: the seated man and the faces behind are weakly realised, and the floor between the groups is barely stated.
David Lynch · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Peter Deming’s photography, the gold of Betty’s arrival and the brown murk of Diane’s kitchen; Angelo Badalamenti’s score, its low held strings under empty scenes; Lynch’s own sound design, the room tone that rises until it becomes dread; Jack Fisk’s courtyard apartments and the red curtain of Silencio; Mary Sweeney’s editing, which keeps the pilot’s threads moving so their abandonment is felt as unease, not error; Naomi Watts’s double performance, the bright girl played a shade too brightly so the real woman can show through, then the ruined one; Laura Harring’s stillness. The costs are weighed in full: the digital stretching of the old couple reads as a device of its moment, and the hitman sequence is paced as a series would pace it.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Rahman I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building; the making is load-bearing. Reused shafts of uneven height are levelled and turned into a two-tier structure that carries the roofs and their gutters on walls set above the arches. Stone and red brick alternate in the voussoirs, so that the structure is its own ornament. The ribbed domes carry a vault over a square bay on intersecting arches, the open centre lit, a structural idea and a figure at once. At the mihrab and the maqsura the marble is carved in panels, the mosaic laid in gold and colour, and the lobed arches cut into screens. The cost is the module’s limits: the hall is low and timber-roofed, its structure, the domes apart, carries modest loads, and the last campaign keeps the system more thinly.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Beckett’s English, with no translation between. The command is of three instruments at once. The stage directions are a score, timed to the pause and the gesture: the keys, the drawers, the bananas, the march into the dark and back with the sound of a cork. The young voice has a prose of its own, pompous and florid, with Latinate words held up for inspection, “viduity”, which the old man must look up, and then without warning, in the punt, plain and exact. The old voice is coarse, short, broken. The comic timing of “Spool!” is exact, and the ledger is a small art of its own, a life in headings. Held off the top because the medium is narrowed by choice, and because the mime asks more of the actor’s invention than the text secures.
Isaac Babel · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the sentence is the book’s most evident and least disputed quality. Babel’s Russian is compressed to the edge of breakage, its tropes violent and exact, its paragraphing a matter of rhythm. The book opens in the voice of a dispatch, “Начдив шесть донес о том, что Новоград-Волынск взят сегодня на рассвете”
(The commander of the Sixth Division reported that Novograd-Volynsk was taken today at dawn), and within a page the prose is burning. The skaz is as commanding as the ornament: the letter-writers of “A Letter” and “Salt” are given their own syntax and self-justification without a wink. The best sentences are load-bearing; the last line of “My First Goose” carries the moral of the whole. Now and then the ornament overreaches in the lesser pieces, and that keeps the figure from the top.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The making carries the film at every point. Alexander Knyazhinsky’s camera: slow movements that reframe without cutting, the dolly over the water, static frames in which nothing moves for long seconds and the viewer begins to search them. Tarkovsky’s Zone of real ruin, water, moss, tile and wire, without one built effect. The sound, half the film: dripping, trains, distant calls, the trolley’s wheels turning into Eduard Artemyev’s score, electronic, eastern in colour and never sentimental. Kaidanovsky’s shaved, trembling believer, and Freindlich’s speech to the camera held in one take. The costs: post-synchronised dialogue, speeches delivered as argument, a first part less finely made. Andrei Rublev (8.9) stands three tenths below, its lapses falling on more of the film.
Hector Berlioz · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, to the same anchors as every desk. In orchestration the command is near the ceiling and load-bearing: four timpani in chords for thunder; the cor anglais answered by an offstage oboe; harps in the waltz; the low brass of the march; the E flat clarinet’s parody; bells and col legno violins in the finale; the timing of the guillotine chord. The orchestra is the argument. The cost lies elsewhere. Berlioz’s harmony is personal and often powerful, but parts of the bass and voice-leading are awkward beside his German contemporaries, the first movement’s development is weakly argued, and the finale’s fugato is rough counterpoint. Against the Goldberg Variations (9.7) and Otello (9.5) a score this uneven stands lower. The orchestration alone would support 9.6.
The Beach Boys · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing on nearly every track. Wilson writes the arrangements, directs the session players section by section, cuts the backing in several studios and builds the vocals in stacked layers, so that the band’s harmonies are arranged as one more instrument. Doubled instruments make timbres no single instrument has: bass and guitar, organ and accordion. Bass lines move as counter-melodies. The mono mix places everything in one image and keeps the lead voice clear inside it. The round that closes God Only Knows is an arranger’s feat. The faults are real and small: Sloop John B’s arrangement belongs to an earlier, plainer session, the title instrumental is thin as a composition, and a few lead vocals are slight beside the harmonies.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Mozart in his last year at full command: the overture’s fugato, its theme of repeated notes driven into a sonata form; the Armed Men’s chorale over strict counterpoint; each group drawn by its own style and colour, trombones for the priests, the glockenspiel and a five-note panpipe scale for Papageno, coloratura for the Queen, a lightness of their own for the Three Boys; the long continuity of the finales; vocal writing at both extremes, the Queen’s high F and Sarastro’s low F. The libretto is part of the work and holds the axis down. Schikaneder’s verse is singable and often deft, in the comic songs and the trials, but the plot joins badly, and the dialogue is flat in the middle of Act II. Three tenths below Otello, where Boito’s verse is virtuosic.
Michelangelo · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The building meets a hard problem: a monumental library on an upper storey over walls not made for it, answered with light walls stiffened by a stone frame and, in the vestibule, columns carried in the thickness of the wall. The pietra serena is cut with great precision at every scale, from the profiles of the tabernacles to the consoles. The stair, three flights of differing tread resolving into one, its middle flight of convex steps, is a feat of setting out in stone, and Ammannati’s building of it from a model and letters is part of the making. Desks, ceiling and floor share one module with the walls. Held below the top by the vestibule’s long-delayed completion, whose seams remain.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Sophocles at his latest and most fluid. Three actors are handled so that the decisive scenes are two-handed with a third threatening; the Merchant’s scene plays to a double audience; Odysseus enters exactly as Neoptolemus is about to return the bow, and then again as he does. The metre is made to break under pressure: cries outside the line, the line split between speakers in the quarrels, lyric dialogue in place of formal choral odes, so that the chorus is drawn into the action as the young man’s sailors, complicit. Philoctetes’ account of his abandonment and his life with the bow is plain and exact. The music of the lyric is unheard here and neither credited nor charged. Held below the top: the oracle’s exposition is uneven, and Odysseus is thinner as a voice than the two he works on.
Francesco Borromini · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, and the making is load-bearing. The setting-out is of the first rank: a plan from two triangles, carried with exactness from floor to cornice and from cornice into the vault, where six lobes must diminish smoothly into a circle with no drum and no pendentive zone to ease the transition, a problem of stereotomy and stucco that the building solves in sight. The continuous entablature is held level and unbroken over convex, concave and straight runs. The structure is economical: a masonry dome on a small span, its thrust contained by the outer drum and buttressed by the stepped roof, and a spiral built to stand in the open for three centuries; brick and stucco read as one white body. The costs: the structural problem is modest in scale; the outer drum, skilfully composed, conceals the interior’s geometry rather than stating it; the lower front is a fitting to inherited arcades.
El Greco · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on a canvas that holds a row of men at life size, judged by the anchors every medium answers to. The making is load-bearing below: the black of the frieze is varied by a few touches into a row of distinct faces, each a portrait; the ruffs are laid in quick whites that read as linen only at a distance; the gold dalmatics carry painted scenes inside the painting; the armour holds reflections; the surplice at the right is painted transparent over the black beneath. The upper register is looser by design, its bodies drawn out and lit from within, and it commands that manner. The cost: the upper crowd is less resolved than the frieze, some heads are perfunctory, and the join of cloud to frieze is abrupt. The command is not equal across the whole field.
Titian · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas at near life size, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The inverted torso is modelled in a few warm and cool scumbles over a dark ground, so that the flesh glows without contour. Blood is laid in short red strokes that sit in the same register as the reds of cloth and cap. The faces of the kneeling flayer and of Midas are built of touches that read as absorption at a step back and as broken paint up close. The gold of the air is a glaze of light over everything. Colour is reduced to a small chord and made to do the work of light, drama and binding. The costs: the right group and the lower foreground are drawn summarily to the point of illegibility, and the crowding at the right edge is an inheritance not resolved.
Jean d'Orbais, Jean le Loup, Gaucher de Reims and Bernard de Soissons · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first. The buttresses are reduced to what the vault requires, their pinnacles weighted by tabernacles so that ornament does structural work; one elevation was held across four masters and many decades; and the vaults survived shelling and the burning of the roof above them, which is evidence of the making. The tracery is a new technique, commanded from its first windows. The sculpture is of the first rank in its best parts: the pairs of the Annunciation and the Visitation stand among the finest figures of the Middle Ages. The costs: the long campaign shows in a façade where workshops of very different manners stand side by side, in lesser hands among the many figures, and in upper stages less sure than the portals.
Machado de Assis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Machado’s Portuguese. Command of the prose is complete. The sentence is short, exact, ironic without strain; the chapter is a unit of timing, opened and closed like a joke or a blow; the narrator’s voice holds for one hundred and sixty chapters without a lapse of register. The opening joke, a dead author who is not an author who has died, turns on word order alone. The dedication to the worm is a perfect sentence, and the closing chapter is a ledger in prose that lands its last clause, on the children he never had, as a credit. The making is load-bearing. Held below the top only for a few typographic and digressive chapters that are cleverer than they are necessary.
Benjamin Britten · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. The setting of English is among the best of its century: Owen’s lines are declaimed at the pace of speech without losing their verse, and in “Strange Meeting” the tenor and baritone share a poem without becoming a duet. The orchestration keeps three bodies of sound distinct, and they remain audible in the full texture of the close. The tritone is used as harmony, as bell and as the pivot of the final cadence. The Offertorium fugue is built to be heard twice in two meanings; the ostinato of the Agnus Dei carries two texts at once. The costs: the Latin choral writing is in places conventional, and the fanfares and choral patterns of the Dies irae are repeated more than developed.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of masonry and structure, as the making stands, and the making is load-bearing: the vault, ribs laid as a frame and webs filled between, at a span and height the region had not vaulted; the concealed bracing, the thrust carried down under the gallery roof, out of sight; the cylinders, coursed drums whose incisions run continuous across the joints, spiral and lozenge set out true round a curved surface; the thick wall hollowed for its passage. The nave vault has stood for nearly nine centuries; the first choir vault’s failure is weighed with survival, not here. The cost is in the method: the walls are thick by the standard of what came after, the structure solved by mass as much as by system.
Radiohead · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing on every track. The production uses its rooms: much of the album was recorded away from a conventional studio, in a country house near Bath. Three guitars are arranged as separate parts, so that in the second track the sneer, the counter-line and the noise are distinct instruments. The fifth track’s arpeggios interlock; the opening track’s drums are played by hand and then cut apart and reassembled in the computer; the string writing of the ninth is true orchestration; the voice runs from lullaby falsetto to scream. The faults are small: a generic arrangement on the eighth track, and slurred diction that buries lines the record needs heard.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and in the childhood it bears weight in every department: Emmanuel Lubezki’s photography in natural light, the low sun through the trees, the moving wide-angle frame; Jack Fisk’s house and street, a period world that never looks dressed; Brad Pitt’s father, tyrant and wounded man at once, Jessica Chastain’s mother, held in look and gesture, and Hunter McCracken, a first-time child actor, carrying the centre; the cutting on movement and gesture, so that years pass inside a sequence; the Lacrimosa set against the creation as structure. A cost runs through the frame, and it holds the figure: the adult scenes are cut diffusely where the childhood is exact, and Sean Penn is given almost nothing to play. The dinosaurs are the one weak passage of craft. A German Requiem stands at the same figure for costs of that weight in its score.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of timber building on stone podia, structure included, and the making is load-bearing. The pagoda has stood through thirteen centuries in a country of earthquakes; the survival is the evidence, whatever account of its frame is given, and it is evidence of structure, not of finish alone. The eaves are deep, carried on cloud-shaped brackets found only in this family of buildings, and they keep the rain off the timber. The proportions hold: the pagoda’s roofs narrowing as they rise, the columns swelling in profile. The timber is hinoki, Japanese cypress, on which the survival of the fabric largely rests. What holds the axis: the Asuka bracket is a short cantilever without the hidden lever of later Japanese roofs, and the Kondō’s upper eaves needed props by the Edo period. The making is scored as it stands, props included.
Andrea Mantegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of tempera on canvas. The making is load-bearing. The foreshortening is calculated and then corrected against its own geometry, a choice only a master of perspective could make deliberately. The shroud is the summit of the handling: folds cut deep and hard, as if in stone, which give the body its weight and its sculptural silence. Flesh, cloth and veined stone are told apart within a near monochrome by touch and tone alone. The wounds are exact without becoming anatomical spectacle. The hands, turned to show their wounds, are foreshortened in their own planes with complete control. The costs: the mourners’ corner is cramped, the third figure barely a figure, and the faces of the Virgin and John are painted with a hardness that serves grief but sits apart from the subtle body.
Rainer Maria Rilke · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Rilke’s German, and the command of the line is among the highest of its century. Rhyme is constant and almost never forced; it falls on prepositions, articles and the ends of clauses broken across lines, so that the sonnet’s music is kept and its closure suspended. Vowel and consonant are worked to the subject: the slow, tired iambs of the Panther; the rising and spilling syntax of the fountain; the swift, spun movement of “Spanische Tänzerin”, where the dance catches like a match. The craft is load-bearing; the making is the poem’s claim. Charged: the virtuosity can show, some rhymes in the weaker poems are ingenious rather than necessary, and certain words recur as preciosity, “wunderlich” and the abstractions in “-heit”. The sound of the German is partly beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Samuel Beckett · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Beckett’s French, with his own English beside it. The command is of the plain sentence put to extreme work: short words, exact syntax, comic timing, and a sentence that qualifies and retracts itself as it goes, so that every statement carries its own doubt. The opening shows the instrument in small, “quand même” and “enfin” bracketing the death between defiance and relief. The registers are held apart and in one hand: the drab realism of the Saposcat and Lambert pages, the precise, obsessive inventory of the room, the black farce of the asylum, and the close, where syntax gives out on schedule. The tedium is controlled, which is harder than avoiding it. Held below the highest marks because the Lambert stretch tests the reader beyond what its effect needs, and some of the self-interrupting asides repeat their mechanism.
Gustave Eiffel · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making carries the work. Every part was drawn and made at the company’s works at Levallois-Perret to be riveted on site, and the structure rose from foundations begun in January 1887 to completion in March 1889. The legs spring inclined from masonry footings and meet at the first stage. The members are graded to their loads, so that a few thousand tonnes of iron stand three hundred metres high and move little in wind. Lifts were made to climb a curve. Costs: the ornament of the first stage, which the structure did not need and which later hands took off; lifts that proved troublesome and were replaced; and iron that must be painted for as long as it stands, a charge accepted with the material.
Sophocles · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the Greek; its metre and sound are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: the false report placed to fall after the agon, so that Clytemnestra’s relief is exposed; the news of the lock set against it; the recognition delayed and then given in a lyric duet; the killings timed so that the mother dies within while Electra keeps watch at the door, and Aegisthus dies by the device he rejoiced in. The messenger speech is a set piece of narrative energy, the crash at Delphi told to the last detail of a death that never happened. The single-line exchange of the recognition, the paired speeches of the agon and the lines split between speakers at the blows show command of every instrument the form had. Charged a little: the first episode’s argument is slower than the rest.
John A. Roebling and Washington Roebling · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. Two timber caissons were sunk under compressed air through the bed of the river, and at Manhattan Washington Roebling judged the sand firm enough to stop short of rock, a judgment the tower has borne out. The cables were spun in place, wire by wire across the river, then bound and wrapped. Stays, suspenders and stiffening truss share the load. The towers carry the cables in masonry of great mass and plain proportion. Costs: caisson disease disabled and killed men, and its remedy was not yet known; fraudulent wire went into the cables and was answered, not removed; and the deck, too light for what came after, was rebuilt.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the making, structure first, and the making carries the building. A five-aisled stepped section was set out at great height and vaulted on flying buttresses of notable slenderness, short and steep because the inner aisles do half the work. The very tall piers of the central arcade, ringed with shafts, carry the eye through without breaking the space. The sexpartite vault is handled with assurance over a wide span. The lower church solves the falling ground. The glass of the ambulatory stands among the finest of its decade. The costs: a clerestory in the central vessel squeezed by the section, and a west front that is assembled. The tower that fell is charged under The Imperishable, not here.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of tempera on a large panel. The making is load-bearing: the picture’s grace is its line, and the line is the most refined in Florentine painting of its decade. The Graces’ veils, transparent over flesh and over dark leaves at once, are a feat of the medium. Flora’s dress, the flowers of the meadow painted petal by petal, the gold touches in hair and fruit, the oranges lit against the dark grove and the passage from Zephyrus’s cold blue-grey to Chloris’s pale flesh are each exact and serve the whole. The costs are charged: bodies elongated and in places anatomically uncertain, feet that barely press the meadow, a grove whose space is not resolved. It stands between The Starry Night at 9.0 and Las Meninas at 9.8.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas about a metre high. The making is load-bearing where it counts. The still life at the left is among the summits of the medium: foil, the glass of the bottles, the orange of the fruit and the flowers in their glass, each a few loaded strokes that resolve at a step’s distance. The barmaid’s bodice, black against pale flesh; the face, flat, lit from the front and still. The crowd above in rapid notation, gloves, hats, opera glasses and faces, holding as a crowd in the reflected haze. The light of the globes doubled in glass, flat and white, with no single dominant source. The costs are charged here: the reflected man and her reflected back are summary, the drawing of the right side reads as an afterthought, and the space of the counter in the glass is unstable beyond what the argument needs.
Federico García Lorca · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the Spanish, on what can be shown without a native ear; the music of the octosyllable is weighed as far as this reading hears it. The command of the metre and the assonance is complete: the lines move with the speed of the old ballads and carry images of extreme compression without strain. The dialogue in two voices is placed and timed, as in the compadres’ bargain of Romance sonámbulo. The metaphors are exact rather than decorative in the best poems: the patent-leather souls, the cocks’ pickaxes. La casada infiel is a narrative given entirely in the voice of a boastful man, comic and sensual at once, and the voice never slips. Held below the very top because in the archangel poems the metaphor runs to filigree, and because the range of instruments is a ballad’s range.
Piero della Francesca · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of fresco and of the picture’s geometry, load-bearing throughout. The perspective of the tomb seen from below, and of the soldiers’ foreshortened bodies and helmets, is exact and unshowy. The body is modelled by light rather than line, the torso a column of pale flesh, the mantle laid in planes of rose. The colour, pale earths, rose, grey-green and blue, is held in one daylight; each soldier’s armour has its own colour and material, and the sleepers’ drapery folds like the hills. The head is the summit of the making: a few broad planes and two open eyes. The costs: some passages are dry and hard, the right-hand soldier and the trees, and parts are read through repair.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. The vocal writing gives four soloists and the chorus parts of distinct character, and keeps the soprano’s last pages at the edge of what a voice can sustain in pianissimo. The orchestration: the bass drum off the beat, the bassoons under the Quid sum miser, the trumpets placed apart, the string tremolo of the Lux aeterna, the near silence of the Mors stupebit. The counterpoint: the double-chorus fugue of the Sanctus and the closing fugue of the Libera me, handled with energy and clarity. The unaccompanied writing of the Te decet hymnus and the octaves of the Agnus Dei. The costs: the fugues are vigorous rather than deep, the last one driving more than it develops, and the Offertorio leans on cantilena.
Albrecht Altdorfer · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the picture’s claim depends on finish carried to the smallest unit across the whole field. Thousands of figures are individuated in armour, plume, harness and colour; the lances are drawn as one rhythmic mass and as particular shafts at once; the sun’s light is carried across water, cloud, armour and distant coast in one key; the passage from the warm, dense foreground to the cool blue distance is made without a break; the sky’s swirl is painted with a freedom that looks forward by centuries while the battle is painted like a miniature. The tablet’s lettering and cloth are exact. Costs are charged: horses and men are repetitive in type and stiff at close view, and the figure drawing is below Dürer’s. Held at 9.2 for that.
Anton Bruckner · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. The brass writing is the summit of its kind in its century: eight horns, four of them turning to Wagner tubas, chorales spaced so that the full orchestra sounds as an organ without blur. The counterpoint of the coda, where the themes sound at once and remain audible, is the hardest feat in the score. The Adagio’s long crescendo is paced over twenty minutes without losing tension, and the harps are used sparingly and exactly. The costs: the sequential building, a phrase rising a step at a time, is one procedure used throughout; the general pauses become a manner; and the strings in the Finale’s development carry figuration more than argument.
Anonymous (the Gawain poet) · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the Middle English. The command is of a hard instrument: an alliterative long line that carries its stresses on the alliteration, with a vocabulary drawn from Norse, French and regional English that few poets of the century could match, and over it a rhymed bob and wheel used for point. The making is load-bearing in the set pieces: the arming of Gawain, piece by piece to the shield; the green man’s dress and horse, down to the stitching; the castle rising; the breaking of the deer and the dressing of the boar, in exact hunting terms; the bedroom dialogues, where courtesy is a fencing match and every speech has a second sense; the Green Chapel, given through sound before sight. The timing of the third fitt’s alternation is as sure as any in medieval narrative. Held off the top by the explanatory speech of the fourth fitt. The sound of the line as first heard is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Radiohead · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
The making carries the meaning. Producer and band integrate sources that should not share a room: a synthesiser, an ondes Martenot, a string orchestra, a free-jazz brass section, pump organ and harp, and fragments of computer music sampled into the eighth track. Where the band could not play an idiom itself it hired players who could and directed them: the brass on the third track and the strings on the fourth work to the band’s arrangements. The mixes keep each element legible while the voice moves between foreground and buried, and the third track lets an ensemble come apart without the track coming apart. The programming is plain, and serves the songs.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is the exactness. The anatomy is drawn with a precision no contemporary north of the Alps surpassed: the stretched neck, the ribs, the lean belly, the knees, the feet stiffened in death. The flesh moves through greys, yellows and greens from a torso still nearly living to the darkened hands, face and feet, decay painted as a gradient, not a symbol. Hair, beard and teeth are rendered strand by strand without losing mass; the sheet’s softness is set against the stone; the niche, seen from below, is exact, and the hand over the edge breaches the picture plane by calculation. The costs: the colour is deliberately narrow, and the panel never asks for a crowd, a landscape or many lights.
Donatello · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of carved and painted wood at the scale of life, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load. The anatomy of the wasted body is exact without being anatomical display: tendons at ankles and wrists, the bones of the feet, the cords of the neck, the skin pulled over the collarbones. The face is cut with a precision that makes absence visible, the teeth gone, the lips drawn, the eyes deep in their orbits. The hair is the virtuoso passage, carved and built into long wet-looking strands that fall, twist and are belted, a texture unlike any other in the figure. The polychromy is part of the work: sallow flesh, darker hair, gold catching the light. The costs: the figure is frontal and somewhat columnar, and the lower hair is handled more summarily than the upper.
Limbourg brothers · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of illumination on vellum, against the same anchors as every medium. The making carries the meaning, for the meaning of the calendar is its precision. Architecture is drawn so exactly that castles can be identified and their lost parts reconstructed from the pages; figures a few millimetres high carry weight, gesture and dress; colour is laid in the purest pigments of the day, ultramarine and gold above all, with a control of tone that gives February its grey air and October its afternoon; space recedes deep behind the figures without the system of later perspective. The costs are charged: the courtly figures keep the elongated, doll-like canon of the International Gothic, scale between figure and building is inconsistent, ground planes tip, and the later hands, Colombe’s above all, are heavier and more crowded.
Bureau of Reclamation, with Gordon Kaufmann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, the making is load-bearing in the literal sense. The river was diverted through four tunnels in hard rock, two on each side; the dam was poured as interlocking columns in lifts, cooled by river water and then by refrigerated water run through embedded pipe, and grouted into one monolith, a mass that could not otherwise have cured in any human span; and the work was done ahead of the contract’s schedule. The architectural making is sure and spare: the profiles at the crest, the towers’ crowns, the plain powerhouse walls, True’s floors. The costs: lives lost to the pace of the work and to the heat, recorded here though they are a cost of the enterprise more than of the craft; and the architecture is a treatment of an engineering form, not a form an architect made.
Jean Racine · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Racine’s French, the axis on which the play stands highest. The alexandrine is handled with complete command: the confrontation of the third act, when the emperor surprises the lovers, threat against threat and line against line; the long architecture of Agrippine’s accounting, a hundred lines and more ordered at once as an indictment and a ledger; the two counsel scenes built as mirror images, Burrhus appealing to the emperor’s goodness and Narcisse to his pride and his fear of being ruled, to what Rome will say, each persuasive on its own terms. The dramaturgy of the hidden listener is exact in its timing. The costs are small: the exposition of the first act is long and talky, and Britannicus’s speeches are lesser verse than the rest. The making is load-bearing.
Otto Dix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at a very high level, and load-bearing. Dix rebuilt for himself the layered technique of the German painters of about 1500: a tempera underpainting, worked up in transparent oil glazes on prepared wooden panels, with a finish that holds detail at every distance. The command shows in the range of what it renders: mist that dissolves a column of men without blurring a single helmet; a sky of fire; flesh in every state from the living to the liquefied; mud, wire, cloth and bone, each with its own surface. The descent of the eye from the arch to the riddled legs, and the lighting of each wing as its time of day, are fully controlled. Held below the highest marks because the centre’s clutter sometimes defeats its own legibility, and the means, however masterly, are revived rather than extended.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing: a thin post-tensioned cycloid shell spanning the length of the room between corner columns, cut open at its crown yet held by struts across the slot, its edge beams carrying its weight to the columns; a reflector pierced so that some sky shows through and the shell is lit without glare; concrete cast to Kahn’s precision, its tie holes and joints placed as order; travertine set flush against it; thin arcs of glass where shell meets wall, declaring that the wall carries nothing. The costs: the vault is a beam in a vault’s shape, so the making disguises its own working; the reflector’s design was revised; and a shell this thin, under lead in Texas heat, asks for continuing care.
Assyrian court sculptors · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of low relief in alabaster, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: everything the cycle discloses is carried by the carving. The lions’ bodies are given through contour and shallow modelling of muscle under hide, the ribs and the strain of the shoulders shown as the animal turns, the paralysis of the lioness legible in the line of her spine and the slackness of her hind legs. The horses are carved with the same knowledge, their tension in the reins. The placing of figures on open stone is exact, and the rhythm of the long band is controlled over its length. Costs are charged: the human figures are formulae, stiff and repeated, the king’s face conventional, the soldiers’ ranks pattern, the quality uneven between hands. Below Las Meninas at 9.8, above The Starry Night at 9.0 on control.
John Fowler and Benjamin Baker · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing in every sense: tubes rolled and bent from plate on the shore and riveted in place some 360 feet above the tide; the cantilever arms built out from each tower in balance and joined by the suspended spans over open water; caisson foundations sunk in deep tidal water; Arrol’s works and plant on the shore, built for the job; a structure designed to a quantified wind and still carrying traffic it was never drawn for. The command is of the whole, from caisson to rivet. The costs: the bridge is heavy, its detailing massive rather than refined; and the making cost dozens of lives, charged to the making as practice, not to the structure.
Sergei Prokofiev · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Melody first: the love theme, Juliet’s three themes, the friar’s chorale, each memorable and each built to change. Harmony: diatonic lines turned by sudden side-steps to remote chords, so that a plain tune is made strange by one bar. Orchestration as drama: colour bound to persons and places, mandolins for the street, brass that weighs. And writing for dance: phrases a body can count that are still a symphonic texture. The costs are stated: the phrase structure is often square, built of four- and eight-bar units repeated; climaxes are sometimes reached by restatement at higher volume; some doubling is heavy. Below Otello at 9.5 and the Goldberg Variations at 9.7, where nothing falls short of its intention.
Mohammad Reza Isfahani, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The structure is assured but not daring: a square chamber, eight arches, a drum and a low dome of moderate span. The making that carries the building is the geometry and the tile. The zone of transition resolves square to octagon to drum to circle with a clarity the turquoise cable mouldings make visible; the dome’s net of medallions diminishes by exact geometric rule toward the crown; the mosaic faience, every piece cut to shape, is laid over walls and dome as one continuous field, the hardest and costliest technique of the tradition, at a scale and finish few buildings attempt. The bent passage handles the offset with skill, and the scrollwork of the dome’s exterior is drawn at the scale of the square. Held below the top because the structure is not the achievement; the making is load-bearing in surface and geometry.
David Lean · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Freddie Young’s photography holds a figure on the horizon in focus with the grain of the sand. Anne V. Coates’s cutting gives the match and the sunrise, and the long refusal to cut as Ali approaches. Jarre’s score carries the desert’s grandeur in one theme and its menace in percussion. John Box built Aqaba in Spain. The dialogue of Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson is spare and dry, in lines fit for a stage. O’Toole moves from vanity to rapture to a dead stare without a break in character; Rains and Hawkins make the British state genial and cold. None of this rests on the size of the frame. The costs: Arab leads played by Guinness and Quinn in make-up, Kennedy’s Bentley broad, studio-lit interiors that sit oddly against the desert, and exposition in Part Two stiff in places.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence, the exact visual noun and the long period that holds a scene still: the colored alphabet of chapter 2, set out letter by letter with its hues; the magic-lantern slides; the precise lepidopteral names; the cadence of the opening and of the father’s rise. The construction answers it: threads laid in one chapter and taken up chapters later (the matches, the pencils and shades of colour, the funnel), and transitions that turn on a word or an image. The faults are of excess: some sentences overwrought, some puns preening, and the narrator’s hauteur at times standing between the reader and the scene. Level with the best English prose of its century, and held a step below the summit by those excesses.
Radiohead · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing on every track, with the words weighed elsewhere. Selway’s drumming, played and programmed, holds three rhythmic worlds: the five of 15 Step, the driving four of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi and the stumbling figure of Videotape. Colin Greenwood’s bass carries the melody of Nude under the voice. Jonny Greenwood’s strings on Nude, Faust Arp and Reckoner avoid the romantic wash for close, moving voicings. Three guitar parts interlock in Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, and Godrich’s production keeps every instrument in its own space. The costs are specific: the command is held within one sound, no track standing in a different world, and two tracks fall below the rest, Bodysnatchers less finely made and Jigsaw Falling into Place shapely but conventional. That is the degree of A German Requiem, weight borne throughout with its costs in the score.
Peter Paul Rubens · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel at monumental scale. The making is load-bearing. The body is painted as dead weight, its pallor cool against the white of the sheet, and the sheet itself, a large field of white modulated without a break, is the hardest passage in the work and one of the boldest of its century. The figures are locked in one descending action without confusion; every grip is legible; colour is placed as structure, John’s red at the base to take the weight, the Virgin’s blue beside it, the Magdalene’s gold hair below the foot. The wings show a lighter, Venetian hand, the Visitation’s sunlit loggia and blond colour fluently made. The costs: the wings are less taut than the centre, and some heads in the Presentation are generic. Held below the very top for that.
Jane Austen · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Austen’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence and the scene, and it is load-bearing. The opening sentence makes a statement whose irony is the novel’s argument. The dialogue distinguishes every voice without a tag: Mrs Bennet’s nerves, Collins’s periodic self-regard, Lady Catherine’s command, Mr Bennet’s dry cruelty to Mary at the piano, “You have delighted us long enough” (18). Free indirect discourse is managed so finely that the narrator’s irony and Elizabeth’s misjudgment share sentences. Every thread is paid: the slight in chapter 3 returns in the first proposal, and Wickham’s story in 16 is answered by the letter in 35. Two charges stand: the convenience of Darcy’s arrival at Pemberley on the day of the visit, and a last volume whose decisive act is reported rather than staged. Austen herself thought the book “rather too light & bright & sparkling”, wanting shade.
Ife · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing and of the highest order in its kind. Lost-wax casting of hollow heads near life-size, with thin, even walls and without the flaws of thick or uneven casting, is difficult in any metal; casting copper nearly pure, as in the Obalufon mask, is harder still, because it flows poorly in the mould. The modelling is exact: the edge of the lip, the rim of the lid, the soft passage from cheek to jaw, the slight variation from head to head. The striations lie over the form like a texture of light without breaking its volume, and the perforations run in regular rows. What keeps the figure below the very top, below Las Meninas at 9.8, is range of means: the heads command one problem, the idealised human face, to perfection, not many.
Kamāl ud-Dīn Behzād · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of opaque watercolour on paper at the scale of a page, read to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The tile patterns are drawn with a precision that keeps every surface distinct at a few millimetres; the colour is placed so that adjacent planes separate and the building stays legible at its density; the stair turns in a space that reads as space though no single viewpoint holds it; the two figures, a few centimetres high, are drawn in motion, the pull and the turn legible in their bodies and drapery. Text and image are composed together, and the calligraphy of the inscriptions is part of the architecture. The costs: the figures are small, the faces tell little, and the expressive range is narrow by the nature of the art.
Wang Ximeng · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of ink and mineral colour on silk at handscroll length, judged to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The colour is built in layers, ink and ochre beneath, green and then blue above, graded so that the peaks are modelled by colour and the crowns read as light. A sustained palette is held across nearly twelve metres without a break in key. The detail at the smallest scale is exact: figures a few millimetres high, boats, nets, bridges, houses with courtyards, a long bridge with a pavilion at its centre, waterfalls threaded through ravines, water lined with fine ripple strokes over many metres. The costs are charged: the rocks and peaks are sometimes formulaic in their repeated forms, the ink structure is less various than Guo Xi’s or Fan Kuan’s, and some passages read as diligent rather than inspired.
Constantin Brâncuși · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of cast and finished bronze. The making is load-bearing and it is the sculptor’s own: he finished his casts by hand, filing and polishing over long periods to a surface without a flaw that would catch the eye. The profile is held to tolerances the eye reads as inevitability: the constriction over the foot as thin as the bronze will bear at that height, the swell so slight it is felt before it is seen, the oblique top cut cleanly. A form far taller than it is wide stands as if weightless on a small foot, a problem of balance solved without visible means. The marble versions show the same command in another material. The costs are of range rather than command: one form, one surface, one kind of problem, and the foundry’s part in the cast.
Liao builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. Two rings of columns, the inner a core and the outer a wall, are tied at every level. The hidden storeys, braced on the diagonal, act as stiff rings; the bracketed storeys between them flex; the bracket sets carry the eaves out over the platform and yield at their joints. The whole is assembled without nails, by joinery, to a modular system of timber sections that the Song building manual of 1103 would codify half a century later. The costs: a bracket repertory that sometimes shows its grammar beyond need, and the deformation of the lower storeys, weighed under The Imperishable and not here.
Robert Maillart · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is of the first rank, and it is load-bearing in the literal sense: the sections, the hinges and the profile are the work. The design spends little concrete for its span and won its competition on cost. It was built on the timber falsework of Richard Coray, the scaffold builder of Graubünden, itself an achievement of craft. The detailing of the hinges and of the junction of box and open arch is resolved. What holds the figure short of the highest on the desk is kind: this is engineering of the highest order in one kind, and a single-span bridge, however exact, is not credited above the dome of the Pantheon (9.3), which solved a harder problem for longer. The repairs of the 1990s show that the original cover of the concrete did not fully protect it, a small mark against the making.
Roman · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears load throughout. Blocks of several tonnes are laid dry, without mortar, to nearly forty-nine metres, and still stand after floods that have swept other bridges away. The arches of the lower tiers are built as rings side by side and not bonded, so that the structure can move without failing. The river arch spans about 24.5 metres. Projecting stones for centring and scaffolding were set in the design and left as the record of the making. The channel is held to a fall of centimetres across the crossing. The costs: the arch widths vary, the projecting stones were never dressed off, the channel’s lining could not keep out the deposits that ended its use, and the level belongs to the survey of the whole line, which is not credited here in full.
Correggio · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, judged to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning exists only in the handling. The flesh is modelled with a softness of transition that has few equals in its century, warm and continuous, lit from the left so that the back turns from light to shadow without a hard line. The cloud is a semi-transparent grey mass through which the face and the hand emerge by tone alone; the god’s presence is a matter of a few degrees of value. The foreshortened head and the twisting body are drawn with an authority the softness hides. The costs: the stag and the lower landscape are summary beside the figure, and the softness has, at its edges, a sweetness that brushes against the facile.
Oscar Wilde · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at the highest level English prose drama reaches. The sentence: each epigram is balanced to a hair and turned on its last word, “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” (Act I). The structure: three acts each closing on a reversal; the double arrival of the second act, Algernon as Ernest and Jack in mourning for Ernest, timed to the line; the third act’s chain of recognitions, Prism, the handbag, the Brighton line, the Army Lists, run at a speed that makes the absurdity feel like proof. Nine speaking parts are handled with economy, the servants given their own idiom. Held below the very top by the narrow range of instruments: one register, wit, played perfectly.
Maqsud Kashani (named in the inscription) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the knotted pile carpet. The making is load-bearing. The silk foundation lets the knots sit fine and even, and the density lets the drawing curve. The pendants, the cloud bands and the arabesque scroll are drawn as finely as on a book cover at the size of a room, without the distortion that creeps into a large carpet as the weavers lose the cartoon. The colour holds one key across ten metres: the indigo field, the yellow of the medallion, the reds and greens of the scroll. The lamps are drawn with weight, and hang. The costs are small: the scroll is uniform in places, and the making executes a cartoon whose invention lay with others.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the goldsmith’s and the lapidary’s medium, judged to the anchors every medium answers to. The making bears the meaning. The gold is beaten to a full sculptural volume at the scale of a head and burnished to a continuous surface, the lids, lips and cheeks modelled soft and exact. The inlay is cut and set into cells with a precision that keeps the many colours of the collar and the stripes of the nemes in regular rhythm across curved surfaces. The eyes are built of three materials, the cosmetic line drawn in lapis; the vulture and the cobra are small sculptures in their own right. The charges: glass stands in for stone in much of the colour; face and headdress meet at a seam the eye can find; and the craft is a workshop’s execution of a type, perfection rather than invention.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, and the making is load-bearing wherever it matters. The earring is a shape that is almost nothing but the reflection of the collar beneath it and a highlight above, so that the eye completes a pearl from two or three touches. The face is modelled without a contour, light passing into shadow along the cheek and nose by imperceptible degrees, the lips given two small points of light that make them wet. The turban’s blue is laid in broad planes, its folds set by value alone. The colour holds three notes, blue, yellow and flesh, against the dark, so that none dominates. The costs: the jacket is summary, its folds less searched than in the interiors, and the range of what is made, one head, cloth and a jewel, is narrow; below Las Meninas, at 9.8 on The Made, which commands a whole room.
Michel Virlogeux and Norman Foster · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, the making bears load in every sense. Piers up to about 245 metres were built in high-performance concrete, tapering and splitting to a geometry at once structural and expressive. A steel box deck 2.46 kilometres long was shaped against wind, fabricated in segments, and pushed out from both ends across temporary towers until the halves met over the river. The masts were carried out on the deck and raised into place. The whole was built in about three years. The costs: the stayed system itself is standard; the wind screens, a necessary addition, blur the deck’s edge and the crossing’s view; and the details at deck level are an excellent motorway’s, not more. The means were the state of the art, used supremely, not a new one.
Hans Holbein the Younger · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel at near life size, to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing: the picture is its surfaces. The red velvet of the sleeves is among the most celebrated passages of painted cloth in northern art, its nap and its folds given by tone alone. The fur, the gold links of the collar each separately lit, the Tudor rose, the stubble and the fine lines at the eyes are made with an evenness of attention that never shows effort, over a drawing carried to the panel by method. The costs are charged: the hands are placed with less life than the face, the curtain is a flat field of ornament, and the body under the robe is barely constructed. The command is of surface more than of space or air.
Anonymous (the Yahwist and the other sources) · Literature
9.3 · Tier V
Read on the Hebrew as the scholarship carries it, the narrative craft is of the first rank. The syntax is paratactic, clause joined to clause by and, which the King James keeps, and its economy can be terrible: “And Cain talked with Abel his brother: and it came to pass, when they were in the field, that Cain rose up against Abel his brother, and slew him” (4:8). Key words carry the argument: hineni, “Here am I”, three times in chapter 22; bekhorah and berakhah, birthright and blessing, a consonant apart. One line gives a character: “Hast thou but one blessing, my father?” (27:38). Held from the top by the seams: Joseph sold to Ishmaelites and to Midianites in one scene (37:25 to 28, 36), Esau’s wives named two ways (26:34, 36:2 to 3), begettings by formula.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.2 · Tier V
Judged on the work as the German sentences known with certainty and the translations of Mitchell and the Muirs carry it, and on construction, scene and detail, which translation carries well; the cadence and legal register of Kafka’s German sentence lie partly beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The command shows in the opening sentence, “Jemand mußte Josef K. verleumdet haben”, which delivers the whole premise as a reasonable inference; in the physical exactness of rooms and bodies, the warders eating K.’s breakfast, Leni’s webbed fingers, the identical heath landscapes Titorelli sells him; in the comic timing of the first hearing; and in the cathedral and the end, which are as finished as any prose of the decade. What holds it below the highest marks is that the book was never revised: the long speeches of Huld and Titorelli run on past their pressure, and the chapter on Fräulein Bürstner’s friend is a sketch.
Sailendra · Architecture
9.2 · Tier V
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included; the making is load-bearing in the carving and the planning and at fault in the ground. The carving: 1,460 narrative panels, low relief legible in Javanese light, and 504 Buddhas of which the best are among the finest in Asia. The planning: a scheme of gestures by direction and height carried without error; the 4:3:2 of the rings; the redented plan held through five terraces on a hill. The masonry: andesite dry-laid and locked with knobs, sockets and dovetails, so that it could be taken down and put back stone by stone. The costs are structural: the hill fill settled, the foot had to be encased before the work was done, and the drainage failed, so that water went into the fill and the terraces bulged. Two rebuildings in seventy-six years are charged here.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
9.1 · Tier V
Judged as command of oil on a canvas of mural size, in monochrome. The making is load-bearing. Every figure is reduced to a few contours that carry at seven metres: the horse’s head, the mother’s profile, the lamp-bearer’s arm. With no colour, the field is held by values alone, the white of the bodies against the blacks, and greys that make depth without perspective. The triangle and the frieze interlock, so that the eye neither rests nor escapes. The speed is credited only because the result holds: nine figures across the whole field, finished some six weeks after the bombing and revised through every state. The cost: the paint is laid flat and fast, and some passages, the right-hand architecture and the floor among them, are summary. The surface is a mural’s.
William Faulkner · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long periodic sentence, which can hold a scene, a judgment on it and a second scene in parentheses, and of a construction that releases one fact across nine chapters without a slip in the order of disclosure. The opening, a “long still hot weary dead September afternoon”, sets a cadence and a weight the book sustains to its end; Rosa’s fifth chapter, in italics, holds a voice at a single pitch of grievance; the eighth manages four people in two pairs without confusion of reference. Three charges hold it below the top: the narrators share one idiom, so that Rosa, Mr. Compson and Shreve, who should sound unlike, often sound like Faulkner; the vocabulary of intensity hardens into tics; and the appended Chronology and Genealogy, where they disagree with the narrative, do so at least partly through carelessness.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas. The making is load-bearing. One low source, the lantern, lights the whole picture, falling on the victims and leaving the squad dark. The white shirt is the most heavily worked passage, which makes the man the brightest thing on the canvas. The squad is one posture repeated down the row, a machine made by drawing and spacing alone. The man in white is larger than his kneeling allows — standing, he would tower over the soldiers — and the distortion works. The costs: the background and the back of the file are summary, the victims’ faces near caricature, the anatomy of the dead crude, and not all of it reads as chosen.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Chaucer’s Middle English as Skeat edits it, the making is load-bearing. The General Prologue’s portraits do in a line what estates satire took a stanza for: “And gladly wolde he lerne, and gladly teche” (A 308); “Housbondes at chirche-dore she hadde fyve” (A 460). The Miller’s Tale is timed to the line-break (A 3734 to 3735); the Wife’s couplets run on and digress as a voice does. The Nun’s Priest’s mock-epic, the Pardoner’s sermon and the deliberate badness of Sir Thopas show a poet who can write in any key, the wrong one on purpose included. The charge is the prose: Melibee and the Parson’s Tale are workmanlike translations, competent, not commanding, and a quarter of the words.
William Blake · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
The verse is in full command. The Tyger’s trochaic hammer, in rhymed couplets, and its one-word change in the last stanza, “Could” turned to “Dare”; London’s anaphora, “In every cry of every Man, / In every Infants cry of fear”; the eight lines of The Sick Rose; the closed couplets of A Poison Tree, “I was angry with my friend; / I told my wrath, my wrath did end”. Innocence’s plainness is a made plainness, the hymn stanza handled to sound artless. The second medium is load-bearing: the text written in reverse on the copper and bitten into relief, the designs grown through the lines, the colouring done by hand. Charged: some designs are slight or perfunctory, the early colouring is thin, and a few lines strain for the rhyme.
Charles Dickens · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. The command of register is as wide as any English novel of its century: the cosmic comedy of the fog; the officialese of Coodle and Doodle; Jo’s speech, “He wos wery good to me, he wos!”, set down without condescension; Vholes’s cold professional cadence; Skimpole’s charm, enjoyed before its cruelty is seen; Bucket’s affable menace. The construction carries a plot of great intricacy across nineteen parts, so that a paper Tulkinghorn sees leads by Hawdon’s handwriting, Krook’s papers, Guppy and Bucket to the gate of the burial ground, and a will found among Krook’s rubbish ends the suit. Esther’s modesty is an instrument, not a lapse. Charged: the tags overrun, the Woodcourt resolution is contrived, and some numbers are padded.
Chola, under Rajaraja I · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium, judged as granite construction: a tower of about 66 m, a height no builder in the tradition had attempted, standing for a thousand years. It diminishes by tier on a square plan over the double wall, and the crowning dome, however it was made and raised, sits true. The carving is in unforgiving stone: the doorkeepers cut with clarity at colossal size, the niche figures of Shiva on the tower’s walls holding their place against the mass, the paintings drawn with an assured line. The costs: the figure sculpture is by many hands and uneven, to many eyes stiffer than the Pallava work before it, and the ornament repeats a module by canon. The making is load-bearing in the structure, which is the work.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
The case against: the series is uneven as printmaking. Goya worked in wartime with poor materials; some plates are weakly bitten or have failed aquatint grounds; several were burnished and reworked with mixed success. Rembrandt’s etching, the summit of the medium, is more even. The answer: the best plates are among the most commanding prints made. The economy of plate 39, three bodies, a tree and the blank sheet; untouched paper as light and as nothing; the cropping that puts rifles and firing squads outside the frame; the speed of the needle in the scenes of flight. The making carries the meaning. The unevenness holds it below the anchors of painting.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of fresco at architectural scale. The making is load-bearing: a perspective construction carried out at this size on wet plaster, in daily sections, to stand true from the floor of the aisle; coffers foreshortened in a regular recession; figures modelled by one consistent light into volumes with weight, the Virgin’s mantle and the donors’ cloth given mass rather than pattern; the skeleton drawn with an anatomical plainness unusual for its date. The costs are stated: the faces are grave rather than searching, God the Father’s body is summarily given, and the figures inside the chapel are painted nearly frontally rather than from the low viewpoint the vault obeys. The making serves the argument at every point, without the full command of surface and touch the great oil painters later had.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as it can be carried; the sound of the Russian line is neither credited nor charged. The command of the medium is exact: fifteen voices with their own idiolects, Gaev’s billiard jargon, Pishchik returning again and again to his daughter Dashenka, Yepikhodov’s half-educated grandiloquence, Lopakhin’s merchant speech that knows its peasant root, Firs’s mumbling, each placed so that no two scenes sound alike. The motif web is fine and unobtrusive: the keys Varya flings down after the sale, the gold piece given to the Passer-by when the servants have nothing to eat, the string, the axe, the forgotten recipe. The string is written into the directions, not left to a director. Charged: Trofimov’s set speeches, stated more than dramatised, and the Passer-by, a device a shade too visible.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Scored on Brecht’s German. The language is his finest stage idiom: laconic, gestic, built from Luther’s Bible, the south German vernacular and the soldier’s talk, so that each line carries an attitude as well as a sense. Courage’s speech, with its proverbs, its haggling arithmetic and its swerves from piety to profit, is one of the great stage voices of the language. The construction is exact: the opening, where the sale of a buckle covers the recruiting of a son, is the whole play in miniature, and the bargaining over Swiss Cheese in the third scene times the comedy of money to the minute of his death. The songs are verse of real command, the Great Capitulation above all. Charged a little for the Chaplain’s and the Cook’s longer exchanges, where the dialogue turns to exposition of the thesis.
Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, gardens included, to the same anchors as every desk. The making is load-bearing in three places. Le Nôtre’s earthwork: a marshy, sandy plateau regraded into terraces, slopes and basins, lawns and waters proportioned for the eye from the terrace. The interiors: the Hall of Mirrors, built from small plates by a royal manufactory founded to break Venice’s hold on mirror glass, and Le Brun’s coordinated programme of marble, bronze, paint and stucco. The chapel, two storeys of white stone with a Corinthian colonnade at the royal level. The hydraulics were a feat. The costs: the water never sufficed, the Eure aqueduct was abandoned, the structure is ordinary masonry, and the house was cold and crowded for those it lodged.
Anonymous, under King Lalibela · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing in every unit. A building was conceived whole before it existed and then found inside the rock, with arcades, vaults, cornices, windows and doors cut true; the courts were taken down round it and drains cut so that the rain would leave. At Bete Giyorgis the precision is the work: a cross on a stepped plinth, its faces plumb, its roof crosses crisp, its upper windows open and its lower ones blind, all in one stone. At Medhane Alem the scale of a basilica is cut as one body. Held because the statics are the rock’s, so the daring of a vault built in courses is absent; the drains did not keep water out of the rock over centuries; and the finish varies from unit to unit.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Mann’s German, its architecture, registers and periods; the sound of every sentence is not argued here, and that limit is the reader’s, neither credited nor charged. The command is complete and load-bearing: the long, poised period that carries a narrator at once storyteller, essayist and confidant, irony, sympathy and erudition in one movement; registers from Frau Stöhr’s malapropisms and Behrens’s medical bluster to Settembrini’s rhetoric, Naphta’s scholastic edge and Peeperkorn’s grand broken fragments, a man of personality who never finishes a sentence; the carnival night written mostly in French; the leitmotif made a system across a thousand pages; and set pieces composed, the snow passing from comedy to terror to vision. The time structure is a feat of planning carried across twelve years and a war. Charged for the narrator who explains his jokes, for epithets that recur mechanically, and for disputations written to one even, elevated pitch, so that Naphta and Settembrini sound alike in sentence if not in matter.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the colour woodblock, in design, cutting and printing together. The design: one line, from the left edge up the wave’s face and over, carries the picture, and each foam finger along it is distinct at a glance while the crest reads as one. The cutting, in the early impressions: a key-block line fine enough to hold the cartouche frame and each finger, and some thirty figures legible at a few millimetres. The printing: two blues laid so the body of the wave is darker than its face, a graded sky, white left for foam and snow, all in register. The claw is the knife’s. The costs: stock rowers in a row, boats whose angles to the water do not all agree, and a fine key block that wore fast, so the design outran what the medium could sustain across its printing.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Faulkner’s English, with no translation between. Fifteen voices in one book, each distinguishable on the page without its heading: Cash’s carpenter’s plainness, which loosens and grows as the journey goes on; Vardaman’s child syntax, in which the fish and the coffin and the holes blur; Anse’s self-pity; Cora’s piety in the language of the hymn book; Darl’s lyric, the book’s richest prose; Addie’s furious abstraction. The first sentence sets the method: “Jewel and I come up from the field, following the path in single file.”, two brothers placed in space before either is explained. The last line is a whole ending in three words, “Meet Mrs Bundren”, which turns a burial into a wedding. Charged: Darl’s and Vardaman’s vocabulary run past what the boys could say, a convention the book uses without justifying, and the Jefferson sections are looser than the river and the fire.
Alessandro Manzoni · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Italian. The construction is close to faultless: a single date, 7 November 1628, starts a plot whose coincidences are concealed as consequences, and the night of chapter 8 runs three intrigues through one village in the dark with every exit timed. The portraits carry character in a gesture: Don Abbondio’s breviary closed on a finger at the sight of the bravi (ch. 1); Perpetua’s advice; the Conte zio’s “Sopire, troncare, padre molto reverendo: troncare, sopire” (ch. 19), a whole politics of the Church in four words. The narrator’s irony is the most finely tuned voice in Italian prose of its century, able to pass from farce to the death-cart within a page without a change of key, and the revised language is supple, spoken and exact. Charged: the essays of chapters 28, 31 and 32 are made well as history and less well as novel, and Lucia’s speech is kept thin by design.
Carl Theodor Dreyer · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Falconetti’s performance, her one great film role, is the making’s centre: exhaustion, terror, faith and a child’s bewilderment carried in the face without a gesture wasted. Maté’s camera works in close-up and in tilted and low framings, and its few movements, a slow track along the line of judges among them, each carry a meaning. Warm and Hugo’s white sets give the faces no ground. The assessors are cast by face: Silvain’s heavy patience as Cauchon, Artaud’s Massieu, the one judge whose face shows pity. The cutting builds a space no viewer can map and keeps it consistent in its disorientation. The costs: the intertitles are many and break the rhythm, some of the assessors are played as caricature, and the riot, cut fast, is the least controlled passage.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Tolstoy’s Russian as far as it is known here; the sound of the sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is of plain exactness: short declarative sentences, the physical particular set where it carries the meaning, the limp, the shaved head, the dead horses made a breastwork. The registers are wide for a short book and kept apart: the soldiers’ talk at the picket, the officers’ banter, the viceroy’s society, Nicholas’s inner voice of vanity, the Avar life in recital, the official dispatch. Construction is sure: the boy at Sado’s planted on the first night and paid in the raid, Avdeev’s death answered by his village, the frame closed in one sentence. Charged: Nicholas is drawn with a heavier hand than anyone else, the recited life is exposition the book does not dramatise, and the text never had its author’s last revision for the press.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Mann’s German, its architecture, registers and periods; the sound of every sentence is not argued here, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. The command is near total. Mann writes at least four Germans and keeps each: Zeitblom’s careful humanist periods; Adrian’s letters in Luther’s German, archaic and parodic; the devil’s shifting voices in chapter XXV, from pimp to intellectual to the idiom of Wittenberg; and the chapbook German of the last confession. The leitmotifs, the blue eyes and the black, the headaches, the cold, the cipher h e a e es, the laugh, are placed with a composer’s discipline. The descriptions of the Apocalipsis and the Lamentation make unheard music persuasive enough to have provoked the author of its true model. Collaboration within the making is part of the work, credited and charged to it. Charged for musical descriptions, partly Adorno’s, that run long and technical; for a comedy heavier than Mann’s best; and for Zeitblom’s style, a deliberate pastiche of the pedant, which the reader carries for some five hundred pages.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, at the summit where the film needs it most. The staging is in depth, a dozen people legible in one shot. Asakazu Nakai photographs weather: wind, smoke, fire and the rain of the last battle. The action is cut on movement and from several angles, and the geography stays clear through chaos. Takashi Shimura’s stillness is set against Toshirō Mifune’s violence. Two of the costs run through the film rather than falling in single scenes, and they hold the figure: the recorded sound is poor throughout, and Mifune is at times broad to the point of mugging. Beside them, some studio-lit interiors sit oddly against the location work, and the comic set pieces are staged more loosely than the battles. Messiah, at the summit in its choruses and with costs that recur, stands at the same figure.
George Frideric Handel · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The choral writing commands the medium at the summit of its century. The “Hallelujah” moves between unison, block chords and fugue, and sets “And he shall reign for ever and ever” as a subject the voices pile up in entries. “And with his stripes” is a fugue in the old church style. The Amen is a long fugue that stops on a silence before its last Adagio cadence. The orchestra is lean and used with purpose: trumpets held back for heaven, the Pifa’s drone. The English is set to be heard: “Every valley shall be exalted” climbs on “exalted” and lies flat on “plain”. The costs: borrowed melismas on unimportant syllables, as on “born”; stresses that fall wrong, as on “incorruptible”; routine recitatives; and in places the twenty-four days show.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The planning is the summit of the craft: a palace city laid true on one axis from its southern gate to its northern, every hall sized, roofed and coloured to its rank. The official timber frame is carried to its largest scale in the Hall of Supreme Harmony, eleven bays wide, on a forest of columns and bracket sets. The engineering under it is less seen and as fine: the marble terraces shed the rain through dragon-head spouts, and the Inner Golden Water River carries water through the palace. The costs are the medium’s. Timber burned, again and again, and the official manner is standardised production, not invention. Command of proportion, siting and system is load-bearing; structural daring is not.
Virgil · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin. The command is of the hexameter at small scale. The first line, “Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi”
“Tityrus, you, lying back beneath the spreading beech’s cover” (1.1), sets the book’s sound in its interlaced word order and its play of vowels. The refrain of the eighth poem and the matched quatrains of the seventh are engineering of a high order, and the tonal control that lets the first poem hold gratitude and grief without a judging voice is complete. The closes are exact: “claudite iam rivos, pueri; sat prata biberunt”
“shut the channels now, boys, the meadows have drunk enough” (3.111). Held at 9.1 because this is a first book: some imitation is close to paraphrase, and the frames of the sixth and eighth poems are loosely joined.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Kafka’s German as the sentences known with certainty carry it; the sound of the German beyond them is neither credited nor charged. The command is of the plain, lawyerly sentence carrying the impossible without a tremor: “Vor dem Gesetz steht ein Türhüter”, before the Law stands a doorkeeper, five words that set a world. The long sentence of the imperial message, clause on clause, is measured to the breath and turns at its end on the subject at his window. The title story’s paragraphs control a nightmare’s speed without losing clarity, and the children’s chorus is set as doggerel. The report sustains a voice of strained urbanity, comic and appalling at once. The making is load-bearing. Held below the top because the visit to a mine and Elf Söhne are exact without being pressed.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The verse is the touchstone by which Old English metre has been described, commanding the long line at every pace: the three comings of Grendel, each driving the line closer to the hall; the formal speech of the coast-guard and the door-ward; the flyting with Unferth, where Beowulf turns a charge of folly into an account of the Breca swim and ends with a cold indictment of Unferth’s kin-slaying. Compounds are made with a density and freshness found nowhere else in the language, hronrade, the whale-road, the best known. Litotes is a tool: Þæt wæs god cyning! returns with a weight that changes each time. Gnomic lines are set at the hinges. Held from the top by loose joins at transitions and by stretches of formulaic restatement.
Anna Akhmatova · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Akhmatova’s Russian, and the command is load-bearing. Each piece takes the measure and stanza its feeling needs, and the transitions are exact: the short folk lines of II, “Муж в могиле, сын в тюрьме, / Помолитесь обо мне”
(Husband in the grave, son in prison, pray for me); the hammered parallel of VII, “Надо, чтоб душа окаменела, / Надо снова научиться жить”
(The soul must turn to stone, I must learn to live again); the plain, nearly prosaic cry of V; the Preface’s prose, a single paragraph that turns on two words. Concreteness never fails: the parcel, the blue lips, the bronze eyelids. The full weight of the sound is judged on the passages known in the Russian. Held below the top because a few rhymes in the middle pieces come easily and VI and IX are slack beside the rest.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Mann’s German. The command is of the long periodic sentence, balanced and ironic, which holds judgement and sympathy in one clause; of the leitmotif, carried in physical detail, the red hair, the snub nose, the bared teeth, the straw hat, across figures who are never said to be one; and of register, from the dry biography of the second chapter to the near-hexameters of the fourth and the clinical plainness of the cholera report. The first sentence sets name, rank and date in one official cadence: “Gustav Aschenbach oder von Aschenbach, wie seit seinem fünfzigsten Geburtstag amtlich sein Name lautete …”
“Gustav Aschenbach, or von Aschenbach as he had officially been named since his fiftieth birthday …” (I). The last closes in the voice of the newspaper, on “eine respektvoll erschütterte Welt”
“a respectfully shaken world” (V). Charged for passages mannered beyond their need, where the irony blunts the scene. The making bears the load.
Olivier Messiaen · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
The making bears weight: the mechanism of the Liturgie, two cycles laid under two birds so that the texture sounds free; the clarinet writing of the Abîme, its whole range and its power to begin a note from nothing; the control of extreme slow tempo in the Louanges; the unison of the Danse, four unlike instruments made one sound; and the balancing of a combination that had no models. The costs: the piano’s chord cascades recur as a device and are formulaic by the seventh; balance in the Fouillis’s climaxes is a known difficulty; the Intermède’s writing is plain; and the metronome marks for the Louanges sit at the edge of the practicable, and whether they can be held is disputed.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Storaro’s photography: the coloured smoke, the flares at Do Lung, the compound lit by fires, Kurtz’s head emerging from black and returning to it. Murch’s sound: the rotor that becomes the fan, the layered night at the bridge, the silence before the tiger. Tavoularis’s design, from the beach to the temple, at a scale that could not be faked. The cutting of the assault, clear in every line of action across sea, sky and village. Sheen from the mirror to the water, and Duvall’s Kilgore, a whole man in a few scenes. The costs are weighed: Brando’s Kurtz, in shadow, improvised and slow, is the least shaped performance at the climax, and Hopper’s is a turn more than a part.
Byzantine, under Bishop Ecclesius and Justinian · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, and of mosaic as the medium of its interior. The structure is intelligent rather than daring: a dome of interlocking clay tubes, light enough for a thin octagon, its thrust taken by the exedrae and the ambulatory vaults; walls of long thin brick; openwork capitals with pulvins that pass the load of the arch to a slender column. The mosaic is of the first rank and load-bearing: frontal figures that read across the presbytery, faces individualised within the court’s fixed order, acanthus covering curved vaults without losing its scale, gold and green set to the light of the windows. The costs: the engineering extends no limit, as Hagia Sophia, begun in 532, does; the exterior massing is unresolved brick; the narthex joins awkwardly; and the core’s height is reached by proportion more than by structure.
Kenji Mizoguchi · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Kazuo Miyagawa’s camera gives the crane and the long lateral move, the lake in mist, the homecoming take and the final rise from the grave. Kisaku Itō’s sets, the village, the market and the mansion, are built so that the camera can travel through them. Fumio Hayasaka’s score draws on drums, flute and chant from Noh and older music, joined to the image rather than laid over it. Machiko Kyō’s Wakasa has a face made like a Noh mask and a body that glides; Kinuyo Tanaka’s Miyagi is plain and exact; Masayuki Mori’s potter is possessed by a dream he half knows is one. The costs hold it from the top: Eitarō Ozawa’s Tōbei is broad comic playing, the business of the stolen head is perfunctory, and once or twice the score underlines a feeling the image has made.
Laurence Sterne · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Sterne’s English, with no translation between. The prose is a voice, and the control of it is complete: the sentence that stops, turns and resumes on the dash, a mark of many lengths that is the book’s signature; the address to Madam and to Sir; the timing of the interruption, which is itself the comedy. Gesture is written with a precision no novelist before Sterne attempted: Trim’s stance as he reads the sermon, the drop of the hat, Toby’s pipe, Walter’s hand reaching across his body for his handkerchief. The apparent chaos is constructed, and the devices land where the argument needs them. Charged: the bawdy innuendo is played on a few notes and repeated; the later volumes are thinner in invention than the first six; and some set pieces, Slawkenbergius above all, run on past their effect.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Rimbaud’s French. The command is of the sentence and its juxtapositions: long accumulative periods hung on semicolons, as in “Phrases”, set against blunt verbless notations, as in “Départ”; nouns piled without connectives so that the image does the work of syntax, as in “Barbare”; a vocabulary that runs from English words and technical terms to the liturgy. The rhythm of the prose is exact, and the free verse of “Marine” is measured so that its lines heave. Endings are placed with a lyric poet’s control: “Au réveil il était midi.”, on waking it was noon. The making is load-bearing in the strongest pieces. Held where it is because the pieces are uneven in finish, “Fête d’hiver” and “Ouvriers” slighter work, and because a few passages trade precision for glitter.
Chantal Akerman · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The command bears weight throughout and in every department. Mangolte’s photography fixes each room in one or two frontal set-ups, makes the kitchen’s tiles and the hall’s doors a grid, and holds the colour to the drab until the blue light from the street breaks it at the end. The cutting, from room to room by the light switches, keeps time without a clock. The sound is taps, footsteps, the bell and the traffic, and no music. Seyrig’s performance is the film’s instrument: every gesture repeated to the second, so that a hesitation on the second day registers as a break, and the face kept almost still for three hours. The costs: Jan Decorte’s son is flat in a way that thins the two scenes most in need of a second person, and the reading of the letter runs long.
Roman, under Vespasian and Titus · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing. It was raised in about a decade, on a ring foundation in the bed of a drained lake. The materials are graded by load: travertine in the outer ring and the main piers, tufa and brick-faced concrete in the radial and inner walls, concrete in the vaults. The circulation is engineered as exactly as the structure, corridors and stairs distributing a crowd to seventy-six numbered entrances. The drainage, the masts and ropes of the awning, the lifts and traps of the hypogeum are further feats, the last two reconstructed rather than known. Held below the top by the façade’s plain grammar and by orders applied to the structure rather than worked into it.
Sergei Eisenstein · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Eduard Tisse’s camera gives the harbour in fog, the deck from above, the hand-held passages on the steps and the faces in extreme close-up. The cutting, rhythmic, tonal and metric in Eisenstein’s own terms, governs the whole and reaches on the steps a control of time and scale that no film of its decade surpasses. The crowds are staged on the steps and the mole, and the yawls going out with food are followed in long pans. The plate and the lions are cutting made visible. The costs: casting by type gives broad performances, the officers and the doctor near pantomime; the first act’s exposition is slack beside what follows; and some of the titles are bombast. The making is load-bearing, and it has seams.
Nirvana · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, load-bearing on most tracks. Cobain’s melodies sit over simple power chords and turn on unexpected intervals, and “In Bloom”, “Lithium” and “On a Plain” are melodically as strong as any rock songs of their period. Grohl’s drumming is the engine, loud, exact and inventive, as in the fills that drive “Smells Like Teen Spirit” into its chorus; Novoselic’s bass carries “Lounge Act” and “Come as You Are”. Vig doubled the voice, and Wallace’s mix made the dynamic contrast audible on any radio. The crude guitar is a choice, and solos that double the vocal line are economy. Held from the top: three fast tracks are made to one pattern.
U2 · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing, with the lyrics weighed elsewhere. Lanois and Eno give each track its own room. The Edge’s delayed figures carry melody and atmosphere at once, and on With or Without You a sustaining device holds the guitar’s notes. Mullen drives the shifting pulse of the opening’s introduction, Clayton’s near-unchanging line holds the third track, and Bono’s voice runs from a murmur to the open cry. The slide of Bullet the Blue Sky and the looped drum of the closing track carry their songs. The faults are small: a generic arrangement on Trip Through Your Wires, and a chorus on Red Hill Mining Town that strains its setting.
Safavid, under Shah Abbas I · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, engineering included; the making is load-bearing. The double shell: an inner dome shaped to the chamber and, on a drum far above it, an outer shell shaped to the skyline, both in brick. The hinge: a change of axis resolved within a domed vestibule and short passages, so that the join is felt, not seen. The muqarnas of the portal and the iwans. The tile: mosaic in the portal, cut piece by piece; haft-rangi over the rest, a painter’s technique at the scale of a building, the pattern carried across the joints and scaled to its distance. Ali Reza Abbasi’s thuluth on the portal, legible from the ground. The costs: haft-rangi is the maker’s economy and it shows, in colour less saturated and drawing coarser than mosaic; and the span is within what Ilkhanid and Timurid builders had done. The engineering is assured, not daring.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. A crowd of small figures, each drawn with the authority of a draughtsman who had made designs for the Antwerp print market, each in an act, pulling, running, hiding, playing, falling, readable at a few centimetres’ height. The space is commanded: a high viewpoint held from the foreground to the sea horizon with aerial recession, so that the panorama reads as one land. The palette is restricted to browns, ochres, rust reds and smoke greys, with the few reds, the king’s mantle, the cardinal’s hat and the fires, placed as accents. The skeletons are drawn with knowledge of the body’s frame and gesture. The costs: a lower band crowded so that some passages compete, and a fixed figure scale.
Thomas Mann · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Mann’s German, in its registers and its irony; the sound of every sentence is not argued here, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. The command is complete for a first novel and nearly so for any. The opening table of 1835, Tony reciting the catechism, “Was ist das”
“What is that” (first part), places the whole family and its guests in a few pages. Dialect is used as character, Permaneder’s Bavarian against the Low German of the city and the Consul’s French. The leitmotif is managed across forty years without becoming a tic: Grünlich’s golden whiskers, Sesemi’s refrain, Tony’s echo of Morten’s phrases decades later. Scene after scene is built to a single detail: Thomas’s soiled gloves, the Pöppenrade harvest bought on the stalk and lost to hail. The school chapter and the typhus chapter show a range of method few first novels possess. Charged: the narrator’s irony sometimes condescends, and the middle parts lean on comic repetition. Two tenths below The Great Gatsby’s 9.3, which is the more compressed.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first, and the making that carries the building is the 1240s’. The upper chapel stands without flying buttresses: deep buttresses take the vault, the wall between them is glass, and iron built into the masonry holds the cage. The lower chapel carries the upper on slender columns. It was raised, with its glass, in a few years. The windows, medallions in deep blue and red, read as one field of colour from the floor and as scenes near at hand, and the goldsmith’s forms pass into stone without loss of structural clarity. The cost: many scenes are too small to read; the command is of the building and the programme more than of every panel.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Janusz Kamiński’s photography, from newsreel grain to the lit stillness of the Sabbath; the liquidation, staged and cut over a long sequence with a control few films match; Michael Kahn’s cut from candle smoke to train, and his triple cross-cut; Allan Starski’s Płaszów, rebuilt at scale; Ralph Fiennes’s Goeth, one of the finest performances of a perpetrator on film, Ben Kingsley’s held-back Stern, Liam Neeson’s charm with nothing behind it until there is. The costs are weighed in full, and they hold the figure here: the closing speech is the film’s worst-written and worst-pitched scene, the shower scene uses suspense the film elsewhere refuses, and the score underlines. A making that slips at its close and in its music stands below one that slips nowhere.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing, and twice it was first at its scale. A vault of about 33 metres on thin walls in the 1160s to 1180s, braced by flyers; then, at the chevet, flyers of about fifteen metres in a single span, among the boldest of the Middle Ages. The north rose, glazed above a glazed triforium so that the wall dissolves, on tracery that has stood nearly eight centuries. The Virgin’s portal of the first rank; the choir enclosure, a fourteenth-century narrative achievement; Viollet-le-Duc’s timber spire on the crossing piers. What holds the axis: the sexpartite vault and four storeys are less resolved than the High Gothic that followed, the remodelling is a correction, and the sculpture of the additions is accomplished but cold.
Georges Bizet · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, exact within a conventional frame. The orchestration is clear and economical, from the flute and harp of the Act III entr’acte to the bugles under the Act II duet. Rhythm is a resource of character: the Habanera’s dotted bass, the Seguidilla’s lilt, the Gypsy song accelerating to its end. The ensembles are made with comic precision: the quintet’s patter for five voices, the Card Trio’s bright frame around a solo. The melodic invention does not flag, and Meilhac and Halévy’s verse is supple and singable. Held off the top by two things: Micaëla’s music is fine Gounod, in another opera’s idiom, and the genre choruses work at a lower charge than the drama round them.
Seljuk and later builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first. The north dome is a master work of brick construction and geometry: squinch, arch and rib resolved in its zone of transition into one system whose lines carry from floor to crown. The south dome solves a bigger span over a wider square with massive squinches. The vaults of the hypostyle lay brick in a range of patterns no other building collects in one place. The Oljeitu mihrab is stucco carved in deep, layered relief at the height of that craft; the muqarnas of the south iwan and the court’s tile are of high, though not uniform, quality. Held for the uneven work of so many campaigns.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Kafka’s German, as far as its words are known with certainty; the translations are read for sense and nothing in them is charged to the story. The command is of the long, measured, almost legal sentence that carries absurdity with complete composure, qualifying and counter-qualifying (the watchers who suspect him, the watchers who are too lenient, his gratitude to the strict ones), so that the irony lives in the syntax. The comic timing is exact: the two ladies chosen to lead him from the cage, one of whom ends in tears under his weight. The middle movement compresses years into a paragraph without loss of tone. The closing dialogue is pared to a few lines, each of which turns, and the overseer’s order is followed at once by the panther, with no comment. Charged: the public’s change of taste is told more than made.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout the orchestration: the lament divided between two violin sections and heard as one line, which only an orchestra can do; the bassoon in its lowest register for the opening, and the descent to six p’s; the waltz trio over a pedal in timpani and basses, a heartbeat under the dance; the march orchestrated by accumulation, each section added in turn; the B major chorale over a falling pizzicato scale; the tam-tam, once, and soft. The cost lies in the composition of the long form. The first movement’s sections are joined in blocks, its development proceeds by sequence, and its fugato is effective but schematic; Brahms or Bruckner would have built the transitions from the material, where here they are bridged. Against Otello and Winterreise (9.5 each) the orchestration reaches the anchors and the construction does not.
David Lynch · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Frederick Elmes’s light gives the days a lacquered clarity and the nights deep blacks broken by single sources. Alan Splet’s sound design, the roar in the grass and the hum under the apartment, works as a second score. Badalamenti’s score is lush and slightly too much, as the film needs. The songs are placed, above all “In Dreams” at Ben’s. Hopper pitches Frank between infant and killer; Rossellini holds abjection and dignity at once. The slowed, saturated framing of the opening and the close makes the town a picture of itself. The costs: the stiff playing of the light world is chosen but sometimes merely stiff, in Mike and in some of the Williams scenes, and the climax’s mechanics are perfunctory.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Georgi Rerberg’s photography: the field and the wind, the barn fire held in a long shot through rain, interiors where light moves across walls and mirrors, the passage from colour to monochrome without strain. The long takes are paced to breathing. The sound is built: Eduard Artemyev’s electronic tones folded into rain, wind and clocks, so that the score is hardly heard as music, and Bach placed twice, each time where he carries most. The cutting holds three time levels without a title or a date. Terekhova’s two women are distinct in carriage and alike in face; Solonitsyn’s stranger lasts minutes and stays. The costs: post-synchronised dialogue that shows in places, the Spanish household staged stiffly, the Pushkin reading static where it means to be strange.
U2 · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing, with the words weighed elsewhere. Lanois, Eno and Flood build a dense, physical sound in which every part is placed, from the clatter of “Zoo Station” to the open room of “One”. The Edge remakes his instrument, from delayed chime to filtered and distorted parts, and his solo on “Love Is Blindness” serves its song. Clayton and Mullen learn groove, and Clayton’s bass figure carries “Mysterious Ways”. Bono’s voice runs from falsetto to the distorted voice of a persona. The faults are two: the album mix of “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses” is unresolved, and the band reworked it for the single; and “Tryin’” is loose.
Georges Seurat · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil over six square metres, in a method of the painter’s own making. Load-bearing: the drawing first, a tonal structure built in the conté studies, where Seurat was a master of value without line; light set against dark at every edge, so that each figure is set off by a halo of contrast; the touches laid by complementary across the whole surface, varied in size to the object; the border, which carries the colour logic to the frame and closes the field. The finish is complete as few paintings of its size are. The costs: the scale of the figures does not agree with the perspective of the bank, so that some read too large or too small for their place, by design or not; the touches lie unevenly over the first campaign; and some profiles are stiff past the point of the frieze. Command at the top; the system, at moments, stronger than the scene.
Claudio Monteverdi · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, to the same anchors as any desk. The recitative is flexible and pointed, nowhere more than in the Messenger’s narrative. “Possente spirto” is a feat of construction: strophic variation over a recurring bass, with the vocal ornament written out and the obbligato instruments changing strophe by strophe. The madrigal choruses draw on the craft of the five-voice books. The assignment of instruments by world is a making that bears weight, and the echo of Act V is exact. Striggio’s verse is serviceable and metrically varied, the strophic songs well shaped for setting, but it is not distinguished poetry, and words and music are scored together. Held off the top by the libretto, by the plainer choruses and by the thin carpentry of Act IV, where the craft does not build the crisis it has prepared.
Titian · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas in the Venetian manner, colour laid in layers over a coloured ground, and the making is load-bearing everywhere it matters. The flesh is modelled in warm half-tones with almost no cast shadow, against the cool whites of the sheet, themselves built of greys and blues. The chords of red, white and green are carried across the divide and bind the two fields. The room is laid in a lower key, so that it reads as distance and not as a second picture. The dog is asleep in a few strokes. The surface is the closed one of Titian’s middle years, right for a chamber picture seen close. The cost is small, a perspective serviceable rather than exact; the command is complete within a narrow task.
Henry James · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on James’s English, in the 1908 text. Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. The opening sentence, “Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”, sets the whole register: social, ironic, exact, with a shadow of ceremony. The dialogue is among the finest in the English novel: Madame Merle’s “What shall we call our ‘self’?” and her doctrine of the “envelope of circumstances”, set against Isabel’s refusal to be expressed by anything outside herself, state the book’s argument as character in a few lines. The control of irony at the narrator’s distance from Isabel, close and never merged, is complete. The revision heightens figure and sharpens the sexual charge of the ending; it is heavy in places, and that is weighed lightly. Held off the top by the slack in pacing.
Christopher Wren · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The dome is the great feat: a brick inner dome, a brick cone carrying a stone lantern and a timber outer dome, each shaped to its task, and the whole brought onto eight piers over a crossing as wide as nave and aisles. The Portland stone is cut exactly throughout, and the detailing of the west front, the towers and the transept porticoes is of the first order. The fittings raise the whole: Gibbons’s carving in the choir and Tijou’s ironwork are among the finest of their crafts in England. Held below the top because the screen walls answer a structural problem by concealing it, and the junction of nave and dome is resolved with skill rather than inevitability.
Henrik Ibsen · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as translation carries it; the grain of the Norwegian is neither credited nor charged. The construction is among the most exact in drama: every property planted and paid, every exit timed so that the right two people are left alone, the time compressed to under two days without strain. The dialogue carries character in idiom: Tesman’s fond exclamation, repeated until it is the man; Brack’s insinuating politeness; Hedda’s short lines and the silences around them. The exposition of the first act is done through the hat, the slippers and Aunt Julle’s chatter, without one speech of explanation. The ending is executed with complete economy. Charged a little: the dropped manuscript is a convenience of the well-made play, and Thea is drawn thinner than the others.
Pontormo · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on panel at altarpiece scale. The making is load-bearing. The drawing is among the finest of its century: the bearers’ bodies, bent under a weight they do not seem to feel, are drawn with an anatomist’s command made deliberately strange, elongated, with small heads and long limbs. The colour is the means: cangiante silks, pink turning to yellow and blue to white, laid with an enamel smoothness that makes body, cloth and sky one substance and one light. The composition locks some ten figures into the arched field without a foothold, a feat of design. The costs: some heads in the upper ring are summary, the scale relations, the Virgin above all, read to some eyes as unresolved, and the lower right is crowded. A tenth above The Starry Night (9.0) and well below Las Meninas (9.8).
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing throughout. Page’s production is the signature: Levee’s drums recorded at a distance in a stairwell so that the room is the instrument, the harmonica through a delay, the riff slowed and phased. Stairway is orchestrated in stages, recorders, acoustic and twelve-string guitars and the late entry of the drums, each layer timed to the climb, with a solo built as a composition. Bonham’s command of weight and time carries Levee and Black Dog; John Paul Jones’s mandolin, recorders and bass are the arranging intelligence of the record; Plant’s voice has range and power. The faults fall on a share: Plant’s mannerism in places, Four Sticks laboured, Misty Mountain Hop plain.
Duccio di Buoninsegna · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of tempera and gold on panel, judged to the anchors of every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The Virgin’s blue mantle, the gold hatching of the Child’s robe, the angels’ changing robes, the punched and tooled haloes and borders, the flesh laid over green underpaint to a softness not seen before in Tuscan panel painting; the narrative scenes small and exact, with architecture that holds the figures and colour that orders each scene, the red of the Entry’s crowd, the dark of the Garden. The carpentry of a double-sided altarpiece of this size was itself an achievement of the workshop. The costs: the rooms are assembled rather than constructed, the scenes share no one spatial law, some crowd figures are summary, and the workshop’s hand shows in parts.
Nasrid, under Yusuf I and Muhammad V · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing where the work lives: stucco carved and cast in layered relief, epigraphic bands knotted into vegetal and geometric fields, scaled to be read from the floor; the Hall of the Ambassadors’ domed ceiling of interlaced stars in wood; muqarnas, thousands of cells composed from a few prismatic units into one turning field; cut-tile dadoes in coloured glaze; and water, brought by canal from the Darro to a hilltop and carried by gravity to pools level at the brim and jets in every hall. The cost is structure: earth and brick walls, slight columns, hung domes. Water is the engineering.
Prince Hachijō Toshihito and Prince Toshitada · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of timber, paper and plaster, and of earth, stone and water, structure included. The carpentry sets slender posts on a proportional module, turns the stagger without a clumsy junction, and steps the roofs down the diagonal with the plan. The paving lays three registers of stone, cut, mixed and loose, so that the walker’s pace and attention change underfoot. The pond’s edge is by turns pebble beach, cut-stone embankment, planted bank and earthen bridge, each formed to its station. The detail is exact: the Katsura shelves, the Shōkintei’s checkered paper. Held below the top on structure and engineering: the spans are small, the timber frame is the inherited one, and nothing extends what building could physically do. The command is of proportion, joinery and siting.
Catullus · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin. The command of the medium runs across a range of metres no other Latin poet of the age shows in surviving work: the hendecasyllable made to sound like speech, as in the invitation of 13; the Sapphic stanza; choliambics; pure iambics in 4; the galliambic of 63, the one sustained Latin poem in that metre; the hexameter of 64, with its Alexandrian spondaic endings and slow ornament; and the elegiac couplet from the two-line epigram to the long periods of 68. Word order is made expressive: the first line of 101 travels through many peoples and over many seas before it arrives. Diminutives and colloquial idiom are used with exact control. Held below the top because some of the epigrams are rough in a way that reads as haste, not design, and the elegiacs are less fluent than the polymetrics.
Wallace Stevens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Stevens’s English, with no translation between. The ear is among the finest in the language. The blank verse of “Sunday Morning” stands at the level of Wordsworth’s and Keats’s, and its last stanza, where “casual flocks of pigeons make / Ambiguous undulations as they sink”, shows how a cadence can carry a meaning. The comic mode is mastered as fully: the internal rhyme and assonance of “Bantams in Pine-Woods”, the nonsense that is not nonsense of “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, the timed repetitions of “Domination of Black”. In the best poems the exotic vocabulary is precise rather than decorative, and the making bears the weight. Held from the top by “The Comedian as the Letter C”, where the diction becomes self-delighting and clotted, and by a strain of preciosity in the minor poems.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the patch, a short flat stroke of loaded colour laid in a set direction, is the unit of everything, and its handling is wide in range. In the plain, slanting and rectangular patches of green, ochre and violet build a distance of many miles without a single perspective line; in the mountain, blues and violets stack into mass; in the sky, greens and blues carry the same weight as the stone. Colour does the modelling, warm planes advancing and cool receding, and the picture holds depth and flat surface at once, the hardest balance in the late manner. The dense working is a command of reworking without muddying. The costs are the manner’s: some passages in the plain are summary to the point of opacity, and the near band is heavier than in the barer versions, where untouched canvas lets the light through.
Joseph Haydn · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The making is the late Haydn at full command. The harmony of the Chaos is controlled at every bar while seeming to lack control. The orchestration is the work’s instrument: three flutes, contrabassoon and three trombones used for meaning, not mass; the sunrise built from one rising line and a crescendo; each creature in Gleich öffnet sich drawn in a few bars. The choral fugues of nos. 10, 13, 28 and 34 are sure and festive, and the trios are balanced with a symphonist’s ear. The cost is in the words, which are part of the work. Van Swieten’s German verse is serviceable and often flat, its stretches of Milton paraphrase are wordy, the secco recitatives are conventional, and Part III’s duets fall into a galant manner beneath the rest. On the music alone the figure would stand higher.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Charles Rosher and Karl Struss photograph the marsh by moonlight and the lake by day and in storm. The travelling shots run on overhead rigs and tracks through sets built for them, and Rochus Gliese designs village and city alike as states of feeling. The superimpositions are precise and never decorative. George O’Brien is a heavy man made heavier by guilt, and Janet Gaynor’s face carries the café and the church without a title. The cutting is sparing because the shots carry. The costs: Margaret Livingston’s vamp is a type; the city’s comedy is broad, the pig chase broadest; some process work in the traffic and the fairground shows its means; the track sometimes underlines. Tokyo Story, more exact through its middle, stands at 9.3.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, to the same anchors as every desk. The command of spatial geometry is of the first rank and load-bearing: ovals and circles interlocking along one axis without residue, a vault geometry drawn independently of the plan and resolved over it, the inner arcade freed from the outer wall so that light enters from behind the structure. The integration of the arts within the campaign is complete: stucco, stucco marble, fresco and the Altar of Mercy were made to the space, the altar of the highest craft in its material. The costs: the structure extends nothing in span or height; the exterior massing does not answer the interior; and the command worked under constraint, credited as skill but not as freedom.
Jacques Tati · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing everywhere. The set is the instrument: a city of glass built to be filmed, so that the frame could be composed in depth to the inch. The staging of crowds, hundreds of extras each given a small action in a wide frame, is timed so that the eye is led without being forced. The colour runs grey and steel blue by day and warms through the night. The sound was built entire after shooting, every hiss of a cushion and click of a heel placed. The costs hold it below the top: the opening hour is slow even for its design; the non-professionals are sometimes stiff where a line must be spoken; the restaurant’s middle runs past its timing. Below Anna Karenina (9.5) and a step under Tokyo Story (9.3).
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in every department. Robert Elswit’s photography sets a man against land in wide frames and lights the derrick fire by night. Jack Fisk’s design builds the derricks, the church and the boom town rather than suggesting them. Jonny Greenwood’s score makes the drama audible as dread. Daniel Day-Lewis gives Plainview the voice, the walk on the broken leg and a manner in which every exchange is a deal. Two costs run beyond a single scene, and they hold the figure: Paul Dano’s Eli, the second principal, is pitched high and uneven against Day-Lewis, the doubled role a burden on him, and the Henry passage is slack. The last scene approaches caricature, by design. Messiah stands at the same figure for costs that recur in the same way.
Chandela builders · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure first. The structure is load-bearing art: a mass of sandstone commonly given as about 31 m high, laid dry and held by weight and joinery alone, the spire a corbelled shell of ever-diminishing courses, standing about a thousand years through heat and monsoon. The geometry is commanded: the projections of the plan carried up through base, wall and roof so that every offset reads from plinth to finial, and the spire’s replicas set out so the whole resolves into one rising figure. The sculpture is among the finest of medieval India, cut deep, turned in the tribhanga pose so the stone seems to move. The costs: corbelling keeps the interior close and dark, and the ornament’s density in places clogs the line.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read on structure, material, detail and execution. The making is load-bearing: the building’s meaning is its precision. The bronze sections, the tinted glass, the travertine, the granite carried from the plaza into the lobby, the blinds held to three positions, the corner where the sections turn and the frame’s depth is shown, and the night lighting were drawn and built to a finish no office tower of the decade approached, and the fabric has held for sixty-eight years without a failure of its making. Two limits: the structure is conventional for its date, not an invention, and the expressed frame is a representation of the frame. It is a representation executed perfectly, and the figure is the highest of the twelve.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Larry Smith’s light, built almost entirely from practical sources; the Steadicam through the party, the corridors of Somerton and the night streets; the design of Somerton, its masks, its circle and its procession; Pook’s backward liturgy and the single Ligeti notes; Nicole Kidman’s two monologues; Sydney Pollack’s Ziegler, genial and menacing in one scene. The first cost lies at the centre, and it holds the figure: Tom Cruise’s Bill is held deliberately blank, and the blankness flattens scenes the film needs alive. The stalker is broad, and in a film whose making is its design the street sets sometimes look only cheap. Guernica, load-bearing in its main figures with passages left summary, stands at the same figure.
David Fincher · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. Jeff Cronenweth’s underlit photography, graded toward sickly greens and yellows, makes every interior a basement or a hospital. The digital camera moves show states of mind: the flight out of the brain, the camera through the wall to the gas leak, the catalogue apartment with its floating prices. James Haygood’s editing carries the single-frame inserts, the reel-change joke and the revelation’s replay. The sound and the Dust Brothers’ score make one design with the voice. Norton’s exhausted voice, Pitt’s ease as a man who is only a projection, Bonham Carter’s Marla and Meat Loaf’s Bob hold it. A cost runs through the last act and holds the figure: its mechanics run loose. Some gags are sophomoric besides. Gravity’s Rainbow, charged with the same streak and with pages of slack, stands two tenths lower.
Polykleitos the Younger (attributed) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first. The cavea is set into the hillside and built up where needed in cut limestone, its seat blocks profiled for sitting and for the feet of the row above; the stairways, the walkway, the seats of honour, the orchestra ring and its drain are executed with precision across a structure some 120 metres wide. The geometry is the craft: curve and rake give near-uniform sightlines, and an unamplified voice is heard across the bowl, whatever the mechanism. The making is load-bearing: the building’s achievement is its making. Held where it is because the range of problems is narrower than a vaulted or domed interior sets, and part of the fabric seen is restoration.
Dominikus Zimmermann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The command is complete within its medium. The structure is light and assured: a ceiling carried on slender paired piers with an ambulatory behind, admitting light from an outer wall freed of the load. The stucco is of the first rank in its tradition, the rocaille handled with control so that it never clots, and the fresco’s perspective is resolved to the oval room and to the visitor’s path through it. The coordination of two crafts in two brothers’ hands, with the windows sized and placed for the fresco’s lighting, is the making’s highest achievement. What holds it below the top is the structure itself, which needed major repair within two and a half centuries.
Balthasar Neumann · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of building, painting and stucco, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is of the first rank and load-bearing. Neumann, trained as a founder and a military engineer, vaulted the stair hall in masonry without intermediate support, and the vault outlasted the burning of the roof above it in 1945, as did those of the white and imperial halls. The sequence is set out in section as exactly as in plan: low, high, pause, climax. Tiepolo painted the stair ceiling in true fresco in 1752 and 1753, its foreshortening tuned to a viewer who moves, and Bossi’s stucco passes into the painting without a seam. The costs: the long city front is correct more than commanding; the façade does not admit the Hofkirche behind it; and the many hands of the planning show at the exterior’s joins.
Reginald Ely, John Wastell and others · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The vessel stands on deep buttresses, the wall between them glass, and carries a stone vault, by usual account the largest fan vault ever built, run in one field the length of the building, its fans meeting at the crown with the jointing and coursing of a master in full command. Wastell built it in about three years. The glass composes large figure scenes across the lights, reading as one field from the floor and as painting near at hand. The screen’s carving is of the first quality. The cost: four reigns show in the fabric, the antechapel’s carving is heavy beside the vault, and many scenes in the glass are too small to read.
Henry Purcell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. Purcell’s setting of English is the making that bears the work: stress, length and pitch follow the language, and recitatives such as “Thy hand, Belinda” are speech raised into song without loss of either. The grounds are handled with complete freedom over strict repetition. The suspensions and chromatic harmony of the Lament and the final chorus are as expressive as any of the century, and the choruses are short and exactly placed. The costs: Tate’s verse, part of the work, is often plain and sometimes sing-song, worst in the witches’ rhymes; the string writing as transmitted is spare; the dances are serviceable. Level with The Creation; Otello stands at 9.5.
Andrea del Verrocchio · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of bronze sculpture at monumental scale, modelling and casting together, and it is the highest of its kind in its century, short of the very top. Load-bearing: the anatomy of the horse, veins and muscles at neck and chest; the weight carried over three legs with the fourth free, cast so that the balance holds without a prop; the armour modelled as articulated plates over a body visibly turning inside it; the hard, particular face, foreshortened for the view from below; the counter-movement composed so that the group reads from every side. The chasing is fine and the cast clean for its size and date. The charges: the harness and saddle are busy at close range, the pedestal handsome but conventional, and the finish not wholly the modeller’s.
Diego Velázquez · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The flesh is modelled with almost no shadow, warm against the cold grey, in thin, fused paint, so that the body seems lit from within; the satin is laid in broad loaded strokes that read as cloth from the room and as paint from close; the contour of the back is a single living line. The palette is reduced to a few fields, and the economy is the command: nothing is described that can be implied. The mirror’s reflection is painted out of focus on purpose, a technical decision that carries meaning. Charged: the Cupid is weaker in drawing and in life than the Venus, his face and wings summary, and the curtain is serviceable rather than seen.
Hasegawa Tōhaku · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of ink on paper at the scale of the screen, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the whole work is in the gradation of one material from near black to almost nothing. The near needles are struck in rapid, broad, slanting strokes, so wet and fast that the brush’s speed can be read. Farther trees are laid in pale wash while the paper is still receptive, and their edges are let go into it; the farthest are a tone barely above the paper’s own. Absorbent paper takes each stroke once, without correction. The costs: the paper is coarse in places and some joins are awkward. Whether these are the painter’s or the mounter’s is not certain, and the figure takes a small charge for them.
Three Kingdoms Korea · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of cast bronze, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load: the figure’s calm is a matter of control in the modelling and in the casting. A seated figure under a metre high, with an arm bridging from knee to cheek and fingers free of the face, cast as one with its stool, stands near the limit of the bronze casting of its time and region. The torso is modelled soft and continuous; the skirt’s folds fall over the stool in layered, rhythmic curves drawn with a draughtsman’s sureness; the face holds its smile in a few millimetres of relief. The charges: the back and the lower folds are more schematic than the front, and the hands, though fine, are drawn to a convention. Above The Starry Night’s 9.0, under Las Meninas’ 9.8.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing at the highest level. A steel roof about 64.8 metres square, cantilevered at its corners and carried on eight columns, was assembled on the ground and raised in one lift, and the precision of the steel (the girder grid, the column sections, the small bearings on which the plate sits on each column as on a point) is the content of the building and not its servant. The proportions of plate to hall, of the hall’s set-back to the roof’s overhang and of the podium’s module to the roof’s grid are exact; the granite joints, the column positions and the roof grid answer to one dimension. The charges: the single panes cracked from the start and the hall’s condensation and climate were long a failure, a fault of the detailing; and the lower floor is made with less concentration.
Hoysala builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is the building’s first claim. The carving in chloritic schist reaches a fineness of undercut, free-standing jewellery and pierced work rarely matched in stone anywhere. The turned pillars, each a different profile, apply a mastery of the lathe to stone columns, and the coffered ceilings are cut with the same exactness. The making is load-bearing in meaning: without it the wall’s argument does not exist. But The Made includes structure, and the structure is conventional: trabeated stone with corbelled ceilings, no structural risk, no span of note. That holds the figure below the top, where craft is joined to engineering. On the craft of the surface alone it would stand higher.
Itō Jakuchū · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of ink and colour on silk, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the work’s meaning, the equal glory of every creature, exists only in the degree of finish. Each feather of the phoenix is a pattern stated and still a feather; the cocks’ combs, wattles and hackles are laid in mineral colour with a control that keeps a crowd legible; the fish and shells hold their species and their sheen; the snow is a new invention of brush and pigment. The back-painting is used with a sophistication rare in its period, and across thirty scrolls and a decade the standard does not drop. The costs: some compositions are airless, crowded to the edge; some figures against flat grounds are stiff, as though collected rather than alive; the grandest scrolls approach the over-statement of a showpiece.
Ogata Kōrin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of mineral pigment on gold leaf on a folding screen. The making is load-bearing. The two blues are laid as flat fields of different depth, so that each flower has front and back without line or shading; the green leaves are long blades of one colour whose edges carry the whole drawing; the placement of each cluster against the gold is exact, and the intervals are the composition. The command of the screen as an object, its folds and its pair, is complete. The cost: repetition by template, if that is what it is, trades the variety of the hand for the regularity of the pattern, and some clusters read as stamped rather than observed. A chosen economy, and a real one, a step below the summit of the axis.
Li Chun · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. A segmental arch of about 37 metres in stone, at a rise near one fifth of its span, set on shallow abutments in soft ground, has stood some fourteen centuries; that alone states the command. The arch was built as 28 independent rings, so that each could be turned on a narrow centering and the bridge raised in stages; the rings were tied with iron cramps and bars; the opened spandrels reduce the dead load where the arch most needs relief; the stone is cut and fitted to a thin crown. Held from the top by one flaw in the method itself: independent rings tend to part sideways, and the outer rings did fall away.
Frank Sinatra · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and the singer’s craft is load-bearing: breath control that carries a line through its bar lines, diction that places every consonant, and a way with the microphone that sets the voice a few inches from the ear, near speech, without losing pitch or tone. “It Never Entered My Mind” and “Last Night When We Were Young” are lessons in sustained line. Riddle’s arrangements are spare and exact: strings, woodwind and piano set behind the voice, colour used sparingly, the orchestra answering rather than accompanying. The recording keeps the voice present and the band in depth. The costs: the orchestral palette is narrower and the charts more uniform than Riddle’s later Only the Lonely, and a few middle tracks are set by formula.
Tang builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing everywhere. A heavy tiled hipped roof is carried over a plan of seven bays by four on timber posts and beams joined without nails, by joinery and by bracket sets in which each piece is sized to a module and placed to carry the next. The double cantilever arms balance the load of the eaves against the load of the roof inside, so that the overhang is held by counterweight, not by the strength of a member alone. The corner rise and the inward lean stiffen the frame and lift the eave line. The visible frame and the hidden roof frame each do their own work. The proof is eleven centuries standing in a seismic region.
John Everett Millais · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil painting, to the same measure as any medium. The making is load-bearing at every point: species legible on the bank at a scale of a few millimetres; the water given as surface, reflection and depth in one passage, the flowers lying on it and the dress beneath it; the brocade of the dress buoyed, the cloth darkening where it drinks; the face translucent, with the parted lips that make the picture a song; the willow’s leaves against dark water; colour kept pure in small areas worked once. Long labour shows in a surface without fatigue. The costs are real: little recession, so that the bank presses forward and the space is shallow; and the figure’s light set against the bank’s.
Egyptian (Old Kingdom) · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of carved and painted stone and of inlay, and it is very high. The eyes, made of several materials, are among the most accomplished inlaid eyes known from antiquity, and the statue’s life depends on them. The modelling is supple where the tradition was blocky: the softness of breast and belly, the knuckles and nails of the hands, the tendons of the neck, the bones of the knees and shins under the skin, the slight forward lean of the head. The colour is laid with care, the red flesh against the white kilt controlled. The charges: the legs are less finely worked than the torso and hands, the face is broad and somewhat schematic about the mouth, and the head sits on the shoulders with the workshop’s frontality.
Antonio Canova · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of carving at the highest level, and load bearing. The wings are cut thin and wide in marble at a span that carries risk at every stroke, and they read as plumage in the light. Psyche’s arms are raised free of the mass and joined in a ring at the hands. The gap between the faces is cut clean in a block where one slip would close or break it. The flesh is finished to a soft polish that takes light as skin does, against the rasped rock and the crisper drapery, so that the surfaces are graded by what they represent. A pierced two figure group balanced on a low base, open on every side, is engineering as well as sculpture. Below the very top because the rock and the drapery at her hips are routine beside the figures.
Court of Benin · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of ivory carving, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The face is modelled with complete control of a hard, unforgiving material: the swell of the cheek, the full closed lips, the heavy lids drawn in sharp, even ridges, the passage from brow to nose without a false cut. The iron set into the ivory is exact and turns the face from mask to presence. The crown and the lower band are carved in openwork at a scale of a few millimetres, each small head given beard, hair and hat, each mudfish its whiskers, the openings cut clean through the wall of the tusk without breaking it. Little is charged: the repetition of units is a workshop’s means, and the face is idealised to a court norm, so individual character is not what the hand sought.
Maurice Ravel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the orchestra is near absolute, and the making is load-bearing: the work exists only as orchestration. The ninth statement is the clearest instance, the horn’s melody with celesta and two piccolos in parallel at the pitches of its overtones, a new instrument made of three. The high bassoon and the trombone’s high statement of the second half are written at the edge of each instrument’s character; saxophones are placed in a symphony orchestra and sound native; the crescendo is graded across eighteen steps without a misjudged one; the turn and the collapse are timed to the bar. Held below the Goldberg Variations at 9.7 and Winterreise at 9.5 because harmony, counterpoint, development and line are deliberately idle. Command shown within one dimension is supreme, but it is one dimension.
Emily Brontë · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. The chronology is exact across some thirty years and the law of property is right, as Sanger proved. The voices are distinct: Lockwood’s arch diary with its “significant provincial adjective” (ch. 1), Nelly’s plain and partisan telling, Joseph’s dialect, Isabella’s horror in her letter, Heathcliff’s savage eloquence, Catherine’s delirium. Scenes are built round the object at their centre: the date 1500 and “Hareton Earnshaw” over the door (ch. 1), the oak-panelled bed and the names scratched on its ledge, the window, the lock of hair in the locket, the primroses in the porridge. Charged: Nelly’s voice is at times too literary for her station, which the book half concedes; Lockwood’s opening manner runs to affectation a chapter longer than it needs; and the Linton chapters’ plot is handled with less tact than the rest.
Euripides · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium as the tragic stage of 431 knew it: iambic speech, lyric odes, stichomythia, the set speech, the messenger narrative, the cry from within. Euripides’ iambic diction is plainer and more argumentative than Aeschylus’, and here the plainness bears weight: Medea’s speech to the women and Jason’s reply are rhetoric of the law court, and the play needs them to be. The Messenger’s speech is a model of its form, exact in its sequence of horror. The lyric is strong, the first stasimon and the ode in praise of Athens among Euripides’ best. What holds it at 9.0: Aegeus’ entrance is mechanically weak, and the staging of the end, the chariot and the bodies above, rests on a device. The music is lost and neither credited nor charged.
Franz Kafka · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on the work as the German sentences known with certainty and the translations of Corngold and the Muirs carry it; the sound of Kafka’s German beyond those sentences is not scored for or against. The first sentence, “Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheueren Ungeziefer verwandelt”, is the work’s whole method: the impossible delivered in the syntax of a report. The command shows in the long sequence of Gregor trying to get out of bed, where comedy and horror are timed to the clock on the chest; in the chief clerk’s speech through the door, a parody of commercial reproach; in the precision of bodily detail, the many thin legs, the brown belly, the apple rotting in the back; and in the pacing of the three parts. Charged: the close, where the tram ride into the country tells more than the rest.
Hieronymus Bosch · Visual art
9.0 · Tier V
Command of oil on oak panel. The handling is thinner and quicker than the Eyckian tradition and attempts what it did not: the transparency of glass spheres, the luminous pastel of the centre’s fruit and flesh, the cold tonal range of the grisaille, and the Hell’s fire, lit from below and behind. Several hundred figures are arranged in legible zones: the pool, the ring of riders and the towers each form a register, locked to one horizon. The figure holds the axis at 9.0. The nudes are slender, small-headed and repeated, generic beside Memling’s or Gerard David’s. In the wings the making carries the meaning; in the centre it is skilled multiplication.
Khmer, under Suryavarman II · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The planning is the summit of the craft: an axis held true from the moat to the sanctuary, three nested enclosures, the towers composed to resolve from the causeway into five, and water engineered round the whole. The carving is of the highest order: the low relief of the third gallery, shallow enough to read in raking light, and the devatas, each distinct in dress and coiffure. The costs are structural. The corbel is a timid vault and keeps every gallery narrow. The sandstone was laid dry, its joints often stacked vertically, a known Khmer weakness behind many collapses, and the iron cramps let into it have rusted and split the stone. The plan and the carving are load-bearing; the structural system is conservative and partly flawed.
Anonymous · Architecture
9.0 · Tier V
Command of the medium, which here is carpentry, thatching and the making of the treasures, and the organisation of a rebuilding at every generation. The making is load-bearing. The cypress is chosen for straight grain and worked unpainted, so every surface is the cut and nothing covers it. The proportion holds: the steep thatch, the broad overhang, the ridge pillars standing clear of the wall. The joinery and the fittings are made to a standard that must be met again exactly twenty years later. The engineering is modest by choice: post and beam, no bracket sets, no tile, posts in the earth. The structure attempts nothing difficult, and that holds the axis. The decay of the posts is the design, answered by the rite, and is not charged.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Plato’s Attic. The command is of a plain style made a weapon. The first sentence, “hoti men humeis, ō andres Athēnaioi, peponthate hupo tōn emōn katēgorōn, ouk oida”
“how you, men of Athens, have been affected by my accusers, I do not know” (17a), opens with a profession of not knowing and so states the theme of the whole in its first clause; the disclaimer of eloquence is itself eloquence, and the work knows it. The voice holds one register through comedy, testimony, defiance and consolation, and a man is drawn complete by his manner of speech, never described. The turns are timed: the Prytaneum proposal follows the verdict without a pause, the farewell divides the two juries, and the last sentence balances “I to die” against “you to live” and ends on the god. Held at 9.0 because the making is uneven within the work: the cross-examination wins by trap rather than argument, the horses and their trainers and the mules of 27d to e among it; the round of the examinations (21b to 22e) is schematic; and the middle of the defence, from 31c to 35d, runs on in forensic routine.
Plato · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Command shown in range and in control. Plato writes three speeches in three manners: a pastiche of Lysias’s plain, repetitive, list-like argument, close enough that its authorship is still argued; a first speech that keeps tipping toward dithyramb, as Socrates notices (238d); and the hymnic periods of the palinode. Around them runs conversational Attic of great ease, Socrates’ irony and Phaedrus’ eagerness distinct in a few lines, and a setting drawn with unusual exactness, the height of the plane tree, the cool water at the feet. The architecture is exact: a ring from the walk out of the city to the prayer before the walk back, the second half returning to judge each speech of the first. What holds it there is the second half, functional prose whose exchanges are often perfunctory, and the catalogue passages. The sound of the Attic is beyond this reckoning and is neither credited nor charged.
Umayyad, under Abd al-Malik · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the making as it stands. The geometry is of the first rank and load-bearing: by Creswell’s analysis the plan is generated from a circle and interlaced squares, so that octagon, arcades and dome stand in one proportion. The surfaces are among the finest of their age: marble veneers laid to mirror their veining; gold-ground mosaic in which vegetation, vessels and jewels are worked with mother-of-pearl and glass; an inscription whose script runs evenly round the octagon on both faces. The alternation of piers and columns makes the interior permeable without weakening it. What holds it: a modest structure, a timber dome of moderate span that fell once and was rebuilt, and reused columns of uneven fit.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, engineering included. The command of composition is of the first rank and is load-bearing: the proportion, in which hall, rooms, loggias and stairs stand in simple ratios, so that the whole reads as one measure; the fit of circle to square, with four suites and four stairs resolved in the corners; the section, which stacks service, living and mezzanine under one dome and lights the centre from the top; the economy of brick and stucco made to read as stone, so that a churchman could afford a temple; and the approach and stairs, which make a modest house monumental. The engineering extends nothing: short spans, timber roofs, a dome of ordinary size. The stairs are mean for the rooms they serve. And the dome, the hardest problem of the design, was unresolved at the author’s death and built otherwise by another hand.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil in heavy impasto on a small canvas. The making is load-bearing to a degree rare in painting: the stroke is not the means of the image, it is the image. The current: short loaded strokes laid end to end, each a slightly different blue, white or yellow, so that colour and motion are one act. The halos: each star a system of rings in which the strokes turn, stars and spiral obeying one hand. The cypress: long strokes of near-black and green curling upward, a tree that reads as flame without ceasing to be a tree. Colour: cobalt and ultramarine against chrome yellow, the complementaries he had studied in Delacroix, at full pitch and held. The costs are real: the village is stiff, drawn in a shorthand of straight strokes that sits on the surface, its scale against the cypress uncertain; passages of the hills are thin. The command is complete in the sky and incomplete on the ground.
Arthur Rimbaud · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Rimbaud’s French. The command of the prose sentence is very great and of a new kind: the short declarative that turns, as when the Gaulish ancestors leave him the pale blue eye, the narrow brain and the clumsiness in combat; the sarcastic aside; the litany; the abrupt cut. The prologue holds an aesthetics in two sentences: “Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux”, one evening he sat Beauty on his knees, and “Et je l’ai trouvée amère”, he found her bitter. The revisions of the 1872 poems are made with exact care, and the verse is the work of a master of French song. The plaintive, self-abasing voice of the Vierge folle is a second register, perfectly held. Charged: some of the raggedness is fatigue rather than design, in parts of “Mauvais sang” and “L’Impossible”, where the prose repeats and slackens.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Faulkner’s command is at full stretch and in several instruments. The comic narrative of “Was”, the chase, the poker game, the hand of cards held face down, is as exact as anything he wrote. The turn in “Pantaloon in Black” from Rider’s consciousness to the deputy’s talk at supper is a single cut that carries the part. The opening of “Was” sets Isaac in one phrase: “uncle to half a county and father to no one”. The case against a higher mark is the fourth section of “The Bear”: periods deferred past what the argument earns, parenthesis nested in parenthesis, and prose that repeats the matter of the ledger it follows. The dialect is rendered with care, some of it broad. The making is load-bearing in the hunting sections, in “Pantaloon” and in “Delta Autumn”.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Morrison’s English, with no translation between. The command is of compression and of voice. The first sentence, “124 was spiteful.”, makes a house a character in three words; the narration moves among Sethe, Paul D, Denver, Stamp Paid and Ella without signposts and without confusion; the vernacular is rendered without condescension, in syntax more than spelling. The construction releases the central act at the right pace across the first part. The monologues of the second part are a feat of control at the edge of incoherence. Charged: some lyric passages are overwritten and lean on repetition for force; Paul D’s courtship and the carnival are slackly made beside the rest; and the plotting of the third part, Bodwin’s arrival and Sethe’s attack with the ice pick, is hurried and depends on a coincidence of timing.
Giuseppe Verdi · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, with the making load-bearing in many places: the divided violins of the prelude; the offstage band of Act I, which sets the waltz behind the duet so that intimacy is heard inside noise; the voice from outside in “Sempre libera”; the long duet with Germont, where melodic sections and declamation follow the argument; the letter spoken over solo violins; vocal writing that changes with the heroine’s state. Piave’s verse is plain and theatrical, often apt, as in “croce e delizia”, sometimes stock. The costs are real. Much of the accompaniment is the guitar-like figuration of the period, which serves and does no more; Germont’s cabaletta and Flora’s choruses are routine; the Act I introduction is busy rather than shaped. A score commanded this well at its centre, and routine at its edges, stands here.
William Blake · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of three crafts at once. The relief etching is load-bearing: a hundred plates lettered in reverse on copper and bitten into relief, text and design printed together, at a scale no one had attempted in the medium. Copy E’s watercolour and gold make each plate a painted page, and the designs at their best (plates 25, 76, 97, 99 and 100) are among Blake’s finest. The long line carries argument, catalogue and vision, and the lyrics are exact, as in the quatrain of plate 52 that makes a tear an act of the intellect. The costs: the etched text is small, dense and on many plates hard to read; some figures are stiff and repeated; the verse falls into formulas; the gouged gaps of plate 3 are a correction left showing.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between, and here under its strictest control. The opening sets the voice in a sentence, “So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip” (chapter 1): comic, plain and already guilty. The idiolects are exact and do work: Joe’s “ever the best of friends” and “what larks”, Jaggers’s cross-examining finger and “Take nothing on its looks; take everything on evidence” (chapter 40), Wemmick’s post-office mouth. Estella’s “He calls the knaves, Jacks, this boy!” (chapter 8) fixes the class wound in one line. The convict’s file, the leg-iron and Molly’s wrists are planted long before they are used. Charged: the coincidences that bind the plot, Orlick’s melodrama, and Herbert’s telling of Miss Havisham’s history (chapter 22), exposition in a coat.
François Rabelais · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Rabelais’s French, as far as a reading from knowledge can carry it; what lies beyond that is neither credited nor charged. The command of the sentence is among the greatest in any vernacular: coined words by the hundred; every register from the Limousin student’s Latinised gibberish to the drinkers’ talk; parody of law, scholastic disputation, medicine and the chronicle; a comic timing that holds over pages. Some scenes are perfect: the drinkers’ conversation, Friar John defending the abbey close, Dindenault’s sheep following their leader into the sea. Charged: a construction that is episodic and uneven, a giants’ scale that shifts with convenience, long lists that tire even an admiring reader, and the thinner prose of the Fifth Book.
Euripides · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Euripides’ Greek; the music of the lyrics is lost and is neither credited nor charged. The command shows in the range of means and their placing. The lyric: Hecuba’s monody rising from the ground; Cassandra’s wedding song in excited metres; the first ode’s narrative of the Horse, moving from festival to massacre within the song; the closing lament with its antiphonal cries. The rhetoric: the Helen debate, two set speeches of equal weight, Helen’s ingenious and Hecuba’s demolishing. The scene-making: the cart that brings Andromache with the spoils of Troy and Hector’s arms; the herald’s broken speech before he gives the order; the shield. Held below the top because the descent is paced with less variety than the Bacchae’s, and the long lament of the close repeats some of its motions.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Melville’s English. The command is of a voice: the lawyer’s urbane, Latinate, self-approving prose, which the story lets condemn him without ever stepping outside it. Bartleby on arrival is “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn”: three adverbs and three adjectives that place him exactly and show the narrator pleased with his phrase. The formula is placed with a dramatist’s timing, first as comedy, then as alarm, then as doom; the escalation of the preferences, not to examine, not to copy, not to leave, not to eat, is exactly measured; and the last paragraph turns from hearsay to lament in a few sentences. The portraits of Turkey and Nippers are comic set pieces of a high order. Held at 9.0 because the opening, for all its function, runs long in the magazine manner, and some of the narrator’s digressions are more discursive than what they show of him.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Goethe’s German. The command is of a prose that moves from the plainest notation, peas cooked in an inn’s kitchen or a child’s grimace, to a long periodic surge of feeling within a single letter, and back. The letters are varied in length and pitch with care, from a line or two to a set piece, and the dating is itself a rhythm: crowded in the weeks of rapture, sparse in the weeks of dullness. The scene-making is a dramatist’s: the ball, the storm, the bread, the pistols handed over by Lotte without a word, the open Emilia Galotti. The editor’s dry report is a second register mastered beside the first. Held at 9.0 by the exclamatory habit, the dashes, sighs and apostrophes that the subject licenses but does not always need, and by the Ossian passage, a translation inside the novel and at its length a different kind of making.
Pedro Calderón de la Barca · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Calderón’s Spanish verse, and load-bearing. The soliloquies are built as arguments in stanzas: in the first, each décima advances one comparison and closes on its turn, so that the structure of the verse is the structure of the reasoning; in the second, the series of clauses on dreaming, “Sueña el rey que es rey”
“The king dreams he is king” (II), builds the definition of life by anaphora and compresses it into the closing couplet. Rosaura’s entrance in silva, its run of conceits on the fallen horse, heightens the Gongorine manner deliberately for disorder. The costs: symmetry of conceit turned mechanical in some exchanges, the recognition by sword and the expository narratives done by convention, and court dialogue that is correct rather than alive.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium; what the film invented is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The command is complete where the form depends on it. Raoul Coutard’s handheld, available-light photography is grainy and quick, and tracks the Champs-Élysées among passers-by. The cutting is exact enough that the jump cut reads at once as rhythm, not error. The hotel room’s long takes hold two actors in a small space for minutes; the death run is framed down the length of the street. Elsewhere it is incomplete, and the costs run through the film: the sound is often loose against the image, some of the roughness is chosen and some is not, and the playing outside Belmondo and Seberg is thin. So it stands where The Starry Night stands, complete in the sky and incomplete on the ground.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Camus’s French. The plain sentence is exact and never inert: the opening’s two short sentences, with their doubt about the day, set the whole voice at once. Detail is concrete and physical, the coffee at the vigil, the screws of the coffin, the heat of the procession, the salt on Marie’s mouth, and the rhythm is controlled so that the flat run of the first part can bear the turn at the beach, where the prose takes on metaphor, repetition and cadence, and returns afterward to the plain sentence in the cell. The courtroom satire is made by flat report of the advocates’ rhetoric. The last page rises to a lyric cadence the book has withheld until then. Held off the top because the secondary figures, Marie above all, are drawn thinly, and the chaplain scene declaims more than it dramatises.
Henry David Thoreau · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The prose is the making. Sentences are built to turn on their last word, or on a pun that opens a second sense: “Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in”; “Our life is frittered away by detail”, followed at once by “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” (“Where I Lived, and What I Lived For”), the cure enacted by the sentence. The extravagance is controlled: concrete nouns and exact numbers carry the visionary passages, and the paragraph on the thaw is as precise as a naturalist’s note and as figured as a psalm. Charged: the control slips in places, in the crabbed and allusive stretches of “Economy”, in wordplay that sometimes stands in for argument, and in the overlength the accretion of drafts allowed.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
The command of the medium bears weight throughout. Kazuo Miyagawa’s photography gives the tracking through the forest, sun and leaf shadow on faces, and a distinct light for each of the three spaces. The courtyard staging sets each witness kneeling square to the lens, the others seated behind, so that every testimony confronts the viewer. The gate is a set on a scale that holds the rain. Machiko Kyō is a different woman in each account and convinces in all; Masayuki Mori’s stillness and Fumiko Honma’s medium bear weight. The costs hold it from the top: the score is a bolero on Ravel’s pattern, borrowed in design; Toshirō Mifune’s bandit is magnificent energy and, in his own account, overplayed; the frame dialogue is expository, and the priest is given little but grief.
Plato · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the Greek. The command is of character through style: Polus’ first speech in Gorgianic antithesis and assonance (448c); Gorgias’ courtesy and vanity; Callicles’ opening proverb of war and battle, with its sneer at coming too late for the feast (447a); his great speech, with Pindar’s nomos the king of all (484b) and the Zethus and Amphion of Euripides’ Antiope turned against Socrates (485e to 486c). The building is masterly: three conversations, each roughly double the last, each opened by the previous loser’s embarrassment; the prophecy of the trial placed in the enemy’s mouth and answered in the friend’s. Charged: the argument from the fine and the shameful is closer to sleight (474c to 475e), and the Polus section’s restatements are flat. Very high craft, not the highest.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read on the same terms as prose, film or painting, with script, page, drawing, colour and lettering as one making. Gibbons’s drawing is clear, dense and exact: every panel legible at a glance and full on a second look, the backgrounds alive with signs and objects that carry the plot, the figures acted with restraint, faces that hold a feeling without caricature, and transitions engineered so that a shape or a word at a panel’s edge hands the reader to the next scene. His lettering is uniform and quiet, with balloons of their own for Rorschach and for Manhattan. Higgins’s palette of secondaries, purples, greens and oranges, gives the book its night and its unease. Moore’s script commands a wide range of voice. Charges hold it at the bar: much dialogue is portentous, Veidt speaks in lectures, some back matter is pastiche rather than writing, and the creature is a lapse of design.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first, and the command is of building on a cone of granite. The crypts make a level platform for a church in the air; the Great Pillars carry the Flamboyant choir on columns of enormous girth. The Merveille sets six great rooms in two stacks of three against the slope, lightening as it rises: ribbed halls in the middle storey, and at the top a refectory whose wall is cut into a rhythm of tall narrow windows and a cloister whose two rows of slender colonnettes are staggered, so that the eye sees a moving screen under a light roof. The cost: the church is uneven, its nave plain beside its choir and its west front a classical patch.
Tintoretto · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas at the scale of a wall, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The drawing of bodies in action and in foreshortening, the men straining on the ropes, the man bent to the spade, the thief laid on the ground, is of the first order, and the painter’s reported practice of working from small figures and stage models shows in the conviction of the space across twelve metres. The light is placed with authority, quick white strokes over a dark ground that build form and atmosphere in one motion and carry the meaning. The composition holds a field more than twice as wide as high without a slack middle. The costs: the handling is fast, some outer figures are summary, some faces generic, some dark passages thin from the start.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Jean Bachelet’s photography holds focus through depth in interiors and in the open marsh, and the camera moves through rooms as a guest would and stops where a servant would. The hunt is cut with an exactness unlike the rest of the film, beaters, guns and falling animals assembled into a sequence of documentary force. The sound is direct and layered: the orchestrion, the piano, the shots, the guests’ talk overlapping. The ensemble is the other instrument: Dalio’s Robert, delighted and furtive; Carette’s Marceau; Modot’s Schumacher, whose rigidity turns lethal; Dubost’s Lisette. The costs: Nora Gregor’s Christine is stiff and her French halting at the centre of the love plot, Renoir’s own Octave is loose at moments, and the fête’s pursuit loses precision in places.
The Clash · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing on most tracks. The band plays eight idioms with conviction. Topper Headon is the key, moving from rockabilly to reggae to a jazz shuffle without strain; Paul Simonon’s bass carries the reggae and the title track; Mick Jones’s guitars and arrangements give the record its pop and its scale, and The Card Cheat’s doubled parts are an arrangement of real ambition. Bill Price’s engineering keeps a live band present and the horns and keys clear. The faults are several and fall on a share of the record: some playing is loose rather than live, Strummer’s voice commands in a narrow range and blurs words, the covers are played faithfully rather than remade, and the slighter songs are routine in arrangement.
Sophocles · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
The construction is masterly: the prologue’s three-way scene of god, enemy and madman; the tent opened on the slaughter; the pacing that lets the speech on time release the chorus into a dance of joy a moment before the Messenger arrives too late; the clearing of the stage for the death; the halves of the chorus searching. The iambic speeches are among the finest in the language: the speech of the cry and the name, the speech on time, the suicide speech, and Tecmessa’s plea, which turns Andromache’s words in the sixth book of the Iliad into a slave’s argument. The stichomythia is sharp in the quarrels. Charged: the rhetoric of Menelaus and Agamemnon is small by design, and in places merely small; the second half is competent where the first is incomparable.
The Beatles · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is high and often load-bearing. George Martin and Geoff Emerick built dense arrangements on four-track machines by bouncing tracks down, and the result stays legible: brass, strings, harp, harmonium, an Indian ensemble and a rock band each have a space. Martin’s clarinets for When I’m Sixty-Four and his setting of A Day in the Life, which frees the orchestra inside fixed bars, are true orchestration; Mike Leander’s strings and harp carry She’s Leaving Home with no band at all. McCartney’s bass is melodic throughout, and Starr’s drumming on the closer is a lead voice. The faults: generic arrangements on Lovely Rita and Good Morning Good Morning, and a balance in which the playing is often secondary to the effects.
Anonymous (Neolithic and Bronze Age) · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The making bears load, read to the same anchors as any building. Sarsen, one of the hardest stones in Britain, was pounded to shape with sarsen mauls, the inner faces more finely dressed than the outer. Mortise and tenon seat the lintels on the uprights; tongue and groove lock them end to end; the lintels are curved to the circle. Stones of some 25 tonnes were brought about 25 km, and smaller stones some 225 km, and raised with no wheel, pulley or metal tool attested. The costs are in the fabric: the dressing is unequal from stone to stone, some uprights stand in shallow sockets, and no span is wider than a lintel. The command is of the first rank for what was done, and narrower in what it reached than dome or vault.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Mozart’s command in what he wrote is supreme, and it is the substance of the work, the voices and the bass of nine numbers of fourteen: the Kyrie’s double fugue; the voice leading of the Confutatis, whose descent passes through key after key without a weak join; the canonic opening of the Recordare for basset horns; the economy of the Introit’s scoring. Scored as one work, the charge is real and falls on the surface. Süssmayr orchestrated everything after the Introit, often heavily, trombones and trumpets doubling where Mozart’s drafted lines suggest a lighter hand; his Hosanna is perfunctory; faults of part-writing in the completed numbers have long been noted. His Agnus Dei is well made, and the Communion’s fitting of the opening music to new words is skilful. That surface is what holds the axis.
Anonymous · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as close versions and a few known lines carry it. The construction is the most ambitious in the genre: some fifty years and several hundred named persons held by foreshadowing, so that each prophecy plants an ending and each ending is paid; two hero stories joined by Hallgerðr and by Njáll’s friendship with Gunnarr; the feud of the wives escalated by exact steps, a thrall, a freedman, a foster-father, a kinsman. The scene: Gunnarr’s leap in full armour, the slide on the ice, the silk cloak Njáll adds to the settlement and Flosi throws back. Spare dialogue carries what the narrative will not say, and the understatement is load-bearing. Charged: slips of chronology, repeated introductions, the Fifth Court set in Njáll’s lifetime, and verses judged later and weaker.
Ming, under the Yongle Emperor · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands. The hall is a feat of timber framing: a round structure of three tiers of eaves on twenty-eight columns in three rings, brackets passing the load from roof to column, a coffered ceiling closing over the four great central columns, glazed tile laid in rings on a curved roof. The marble of the altar is exact, its stones counted and set to the scheme, its balustrades carved; the round wall of the Vault is laid so true that a whisper carries along it. The raised way rises so gently that the climb is felt more than seen, and the whole precinct is drawn with a surveyor’s precision across a large site. The cost: the hall that stands is a rebuilding of the 1890s to a received form, the command of a perfected system more than of invented means.
Inca, under Pachacuti · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included; the command of site is of the first rank and load-bearing. The engineering: a spring led by canal on a gradient fine enough to run and not scour; sixteen fountains cut so that each falls into the next; terraces built as filters of soil over sand over chips that have held a wet slope for five centuries; drains under plaza and house, much of the making below ground. The masonry: the Torreón’s curve and the Principal Temple’s courses, granite fitted dry so closely that the joints read as lines, battered and interlocked against earthquake. The rock-cutting: outcrops shaped into stairs, altars, niches and the Intihuatana without a seam between the cut and the natural. The costs are the makers’: the Principal Temple’s corner settled on a bad footing, the houses are rough rubble in clay, spans are short, there is no vault, and the roofs were thatch on poles.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Three photographers are held to one design: Idziak’s filters and close-ups in Blue, Kłosiński’s grey and white Warsaw, Sobociński’s moving camera and reds in Red, with its long glides through the judge’s house. Preisner’s music is structure: the concerto Blue is about, the tango of White, the bolero of Red. Binoche holds her performance almost wholly in her face; Trintignant’s cynic softens without ever smiling much; Zamachowski plays the clown. The cutting of Blue breaks on the fades, that of Red on near misses across a street, and the sound carries the coffee, the pool, the storm and the telephone lines. The costs: White’s plot runs on convenience, its secondary playing is broad, and the music at times tells the viewer what to feel.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium at the highest level, and load-bearing. Each figure was modelled first nude, at full size, and then clothed in the heavy shirt, so that the drapery declares the body under it. The surfaces are broken into planes that take and shed light, so the bronze reads differently by the hour. The hands and feet are enlarged beyond true proportion so that the weight of body and will falls into them, and the distortion persuades rather than shows. The balance of six standing figures on one shallow base, weight and gaze pulling six ways, is a feat of composition in the round, and the casting is true to the modelled surface. Held at 9.0: the joins of the group, where figures stand close without relating in space as surely as in feeling, are less resolved from some angles, and the single figures were worked more than the whole.
Henry Fielding · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Fielding’s English. The construction is the height of the making: some two hundred chapters timed and laid so that nothing important is wasted, and the solution, when it comes in Book XVIII, was in view from Book I. The prose is the Augustan periodic sentence made a comic instrument, balanced and ironic, capable of the mock-heroic and of plain statement within a page; the bill of fare, “The provision, then, which we have here made is no other than Human Nature” (I.1), sets the tone. The voices are kept apart: Western’s dialect and halloos, Partridge’s misplaced Latin, Mrs Honour’s malapropisms, Lady Bellaston’s polish. The chapter headings are a second, ironic narrative. Charged: inner life is narrated rather than rendered, Sophia and Allworthy are drawn flatter than Western, and the London books run on intrigue at a lower pressure than the road.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing in every department. Christopher Doyle and Mark Lee Ping-bing’s photography: deep reds and greens, faces at the edges of frames, light through smoke and rain, a camera never at ease in the narrow rooms. William Chang Suk-ping’s design and editing: dresses that keep time, rooms that rhyme across the corridor, cuts that skip months between two shots of a stair. Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s restraint, a man who almost speaks, and Maggie Cheung’s carriage, a performance made of posture and walk. The music placed as a recurring event rather than a commentary. The costs: the seams of the assembly show in the Singapore section and in the coda’s change of scale; the borrowed theme returns so often that its later entries are automatic; and Ah Ping is played as relief.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Goethe’s late prose at its most controlled: measured periods, an even and ironic narrating voice that reports the night of the imagined double adultery and the drowning at the same temperature, and a placing of symbols so light that a reader often notices them only on return. The conversation on chemistry handles the exposition of a scientific theory as talk among people who are already, without knowing it, its terms. The diary maxims are exact. Judged on the German as far as long acquaintance with it allows; the cadence of the prose is beyond what this reading can measure, and is neither credited nor charged. Held at 9.0 because in the social chapters of the second part the evenness becomes stiffness, and some secondary figures, the English lord and the Count, are set pieces rather than persons.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as it can be carried; the sound of the Russian line is neither credited nor charged. The command of the medium is at the highest level for its kind. The ensemble dialogue is orchestrated like a score: the name-day lunch of the first act carries a dozen voices at once, each with its tic, Solyony’s scent and his Lermontov pose, Kulygin’s school and his “Omnia mea mecum porto” (all that is mine I carry with me), Chebutykin’s newspaper, and every voice is a character and an argument. Exits and entrances are timed to the turn: Tuzenbach’s last words to Irina before the duel are about coffee he has not drunk. Sound is structural: the fire alarm, the band, the guitar, the humming. Charged: Andrei’s set speeches of self-justification and Vershinin’s philosophising are plain exposition.
Sylvia Plath · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Plath’s English. The command of sound and line is of the first order: the assonance and single rhyme of “Daddy”; the turns of “Lady Lazarus”, timed like a routine; the enjambed acceleration of “Ariel”; metaphor that lands exactly, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”, “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious”; the cold diction of “Edge”; the echoing axes of “Words”, “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings”. Tone is held between comedy and horror without slipping, which is the hardest thing the book does. The charges: the manner can harden into mannerism, a stock of images (red and white, the moon, hooks, blood, the faceless) returning; some poems are shrill, and a few late pieces are less finished than the October poems.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The concrete carries the work: poured in place and left as finish, its formwork joints and tie holes set out as a deliberate order, its colour and surface of a quality few concrete buildings of the century reach, so that the material records its own making as stone records the mason’s. The structure is load-bearing in the full sense: the deep floor structure spans the laboratories clear and is itself the service floor, so engineering and plan are one decision. The junctions of concrete, teak and travertine are exact, the study window walls finely made. The costs: the teak needed restoration within about fifty years, and the outer elevations have less care than the court.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The command bears weight throughout. Cloquet’s grey, even light lies over fields, kitchens and the mill; the framing cuts bodies at the waist and finds the act in the hands; the editing makes a single fragment carry a scene, the oil poured on the road, the burning tail, the hand in the car; sound is placed with precision, off screen as often as on, the bray used as a structural note. The direction of the models is exact on its own terms: Wiazemsky’s stillness is the film’s human centre and is never played, and the donkey is directed without a trick. The costs count against it: the exposition of the middle fails outright in places, so that the gendarme’s death and Arnold’s guilt stay unclear on any viewing; the gang scenes are thin; Wiener’s dance music is serviceable and no more.
Béla Tarr · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Gábor Medvigy’s black and white holds the grey of rain and mud without monotony, and the long takes are choreographed to the step: the camera moves with figures, leaves them and finds them again. The sound is as made as the image: rain on every surface, bells, wind, footsteps in mud, the accordion, Mihály Víg’s few repeated themes. Ágnes Hranitzky’s editing lies in the placing of very few cuts. Víg’s Irimiás, gaunt and plausible, carries the film; Erika Bók’s Estike is a performance of almost no movement. The costs: some of the non-professional playing is stiff, the Doctor’s voice-over carries what the image already carries, and some takes are held by will rather than by necessity.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Nietzsche’s German, where it can be checked. The command is plain: the dialectical period that turns on itself in a “perhaps”; the italics and parentheses that make a printed page speak; the one-line saying built so that its second clause undoes the first, as in §146, or §68, where memory gives way to pride; the essay section, §188 or §230, that runs a page and lands on a single word. The prose is load-bearing: the argument cannot be paraphrased without losing its rank, which is the book’s own claim. Held at 9.0 because the poem is weaker than the prose, the interlude has slack sallies, and the manner, its dashes, exclamations and “we free spirits”, sometimes insists where it should show. The sound of the German beyond what is checked here is neither credited nor charged.
John Donne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Donne’s English, with no translation between. The command is of syntax across a made stanza: a sentence that runs, doubles back and lands on the short line, as in “The Sun Rising”: “Love, all alike, no season knows, nor clime, / Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.” The openings are a master’s: “Busy old fool, unruly sun”; “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved?”; “I long to talk with some old lover’s ghost”. The conceit is managed through a whole poem, the compasses held for three stanzas without slackening. The roughness of the metre is mostly the speaking voice set against the beat, and is the making, not its lack. Charged: Jonson’s complaint holds in places, where the stress is wrenched past what the voice can bear; “The Ecstasy” in its middle and the “Valediction: of the Book” overextend the argument; and the tail is facile.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of modelling at monumental scale, and load-bearing. The head is built in deep hollows and ridges that hold shadow and read at a distance, the eye sockets cut to make a gaze out of darkness. The robe is a few great planes and folds that run upward to the head, so that the eye is carried as the body seems to rise. The lean is judged so that the mass stands while seeming to fall back. The process is itself command: dozens of studies of head and body, a real gown soaked in plaster to find the drape, then a reworking that kept the cloth’s weight and dropped its detail. Charged: at close range the surface of the lower robe is summary, which is the method but costs legibility. Below The Gates of Hell at 9.3, whose modelling is the finer and the more various.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. The shower montage, built by Tomasini and Hitchcock from fragments into a killing the eye believes it has seen, is among the most studied pieces of editing in the medium. Herrmann’s score for strings alone is a feat of restriction, black-and-white music for a black-and-white film, from the driving prelude under Bass’s slicing bars to the stabbing glissandi. Russell’s photography gives the parlour its low angles and the owl its wings spread over Norman. Perkins holds a double life in plain sight. The costs are visible: rear projection in the driving scenes and, above all, under Arbogast’s backward fall, where the trick shows; and the static staging of the courthouse.
Giovanni Battista Piranesi · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of etching, to the same anchors as paint or prose. The making is load-bearing: the control of biting, from the open, scribbled first state to the deep and repeatedly re-bitten blacks of 1761 that still hold distinct planes; long ruled and freehand lines that carry recession across a large plate without a stopped edge; masonry, rustication and timber given weight by hatching alone; light managed down the piers. Few etchers command plate size, tonal depth and architectural drawing together at this level. Charged: the figures are calligraphic marks with no anatomy and sometimes no clear action, a choice and also a limit, and in some reworked plates the added hatching muddies the space instead of deepening it.
William of Sens and William the Englishman; nave by Henry Yevele · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the making, structure first. William of Sens vaulted a high Gothic choir over and within walls not made for it, and Gervase records his machines for unloading ships and lifting stone. The Trinity Chapel is raised over the extension of the crypt, its paired columns and marble shafts finely judged and its glass of the first rank. The nave commands the Perpendicular at its height: piers and vault ribs in continuous lines, the wall made a frame for light. Bell Harry’s fan vault is fine late Gothic work, and the cloister vault with its bosses is careful to the end. The costs: the choir’s pinch and its junction with the older chapels show the compromise of reuse, and the junctions between campaigns, nave to choir above all, are managed rather than resolved.
Built for Fujiwara no Yorimichi · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The hall is timber, posts on stone bases, its roofs carried on bracket sets that let the eaves reach wide over the pent roof and the corridors; the wings are lifted on posts so that the ground runs under them and the water is seen through, a structure of great lightness for its date. The whole is made to be read at a distance and doubled in water. Inside, Jōchō’s Amida is joined from many hollowed blocks, so that a large image is light, stable and free of splitting; the canopy and the bodhisattvas show a workshop in full command. What holds the axis: the surface read today is partly renewed.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and at the gates the making bears the meaning. The carving is of the highest order for its time: relief cut to three or four planes, crowds managed without loss of legibility, animals closely observed, the yakshi brackets worked almost free of the block, and both faces of every architrave carved. Its precision is consistent with hands trained on small, fine material, and a record on the south gateway is read as the gift of the ivory carvers of Vidisha. What holds the axis is the building: a solid mound faced with dressed stone, with no vault, no span and no interior, and railings and gates that are timber carpentry rendered in stone, architraves tenoned into posts, structurally conservative. The fall of two gateways is weighed under The Imperishable, not here.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of steel, stone, glass, water and light, structure included, the execution of 1986 neither credited nor charged beyond its fidelity. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the travertine module setting every dimension in plan, and the ceiling set, by the usual account, by the one onyx block, two slabs high; the onyx and the green marble book-matched so that the stone’s figure is the only ornament; four glasses, each chosen for what it does to light; cruciform columns clad in chrome, reading as lines of light; a wall made of light; two pools, each set to reflect a different thing; a chair of flat chrome steel in two crossed curves under tufted leather, still made. The costs: the engineering is slight, short spans on eight columns; the original’s structure is doubted to have done what the form says; the building was improvised in months; and the fabric that shows the command now is the reconstructors’.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, judged to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing: the vortex is not drawn and then coloured but made by the paint’s movement, laid in sweeping strokes, dragged, scraped back and loaded in passages of white so that the light comes from the matter. The tonal control is the hardest part: a near monochrome of greys, umbers, greens and whites in which the dark hull still reads at the centre and the pale break still opens above, with no line to hold either. The signal, a few touches of warm colour, is placed with complete economy. The costs are charged: the hull and paddle box are summary to the point of illegibility at reading distance, some edges of the field are worked less than the centre, and the instability of the late materials is a weakness of the practice, not credited as command.
Zhang Zeduan · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing at every scale. The ruled-line drawing of the bridge renders the interlocking timber arch exactly enough that historians of engineering have studied its structure from the painting; the boats are rigged, steered and loaded as working vessels; carts, sedan chairs and shopfronts are built, not indicated. Figures a centimetre or two high are each caught in a distinct action, carrying, haggling, pulling, gaping, and the crowd is never a texture. The free brush handles willow, water and mist with equal command, and the passage to ruled line is seamless. Colour is held to a light wash so that line carries the work, and five metres are paced without a dead stretch. The mastery perfects an inherited idiom rather than transforming the medium.
John Milton · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The command is load-bearing. The blank verse of the dialogue is plainer than Paradise Lost’s, built for argument, and can turn to bitter wit, as in Dalila’s “Fame if not double-faced is double-mouthed”. The choral verse is the achievement: lines of two to twelve syllables, rhyme arriving and withdrawing, the rhythm following the thought, and a close in rhymed lines near a sonnet, from “All is best, though we oft doubt” to “With peace and consolation hath dismissed”. The management of the Messenger’s report, delayed by Manoa’s hopes and by the noise from offstage, is exact. Charged: some choral passages are crabbed and their syntax laboured, and the Harapha exchange is stiff.
The Cure · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium in one sound world, held across great length; the lyrics and the sequence are weighed elsewhere. Allen and Smith build a mix in which many keyboard, guitar and bass parts sound as one mass without turning to mud, and the mass carries meaning: it is the wall the voice arrives into. Boris Williams holds slow tempos without dragging. Simon Gallup’s bass carries the melody in “Lovesong” and “Fascination Street”. The costs are faults of arrangement and mix: several long tracks rest on one pattern for minutes, the voice is sometimes buried deeper than the song needs, and the instrument is narrow, one timbre from the first track to the last. First-rank command in a narrow instrument, with passages that thin over their length, stands level with Monet’s Water Lilies.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. The sentences carry tone and argument together: the irony that lets the narrator repeat the bishop and Professor von X in their own terms, the long periodic sentences of the October light set against the short flat ones of the beadle’s gesture, the transitions that let a meal become a theory and a cat a history. The pacing of the six chapters is a lecture’s and a novel’s at once, each ending on a turn. The invented passages, the life of Shakespeare’s sister in a paragraph and the opening of Mary Carmichael’s Life’s Adventure with its broken sequence, are made as fiction is made. Charged: an archness some readers find in the narrator’s asides, and the survey of the fourth chapter, which names more than it weighs.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of etching and aquatint on a small copper plate. The making is load-bearing, because the meaning is in the tonal scale. The aquatint is graded from near-black at the top through several tones to the light round the figure, the owls’ pale faces and bodies held out of the grain. The line is economical and exact: the lynx drawn crisply enough to be the one fully seen creature, the coat and the block given weight by firm hatching, the bats a flurry of quick bitten strokes that read as motion. Word, line and tone are one act. The costs: the bats at the upper left are a scribble that fills more than it builds, the anatomy under the coat is summary, and the plate’s beauty depends on the impression.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence and the cut: short declaratives, repetition used as rhythm, dialogue pared until the subject is in what is not said, as in “Cat in the Rain” and “The End of Something”, where the whole end of a love is held in “It isn’t fun any more.” The paragraphs of “Big Two-Hearted River” make a reader feel the weight of the pack and the cold of the river by inventory alone. The interchapters are some of the most exact short prose of the century: “Everybody was drunk” opens a war in three words. Three charges hold it here: “My Old Man” works a vernacular Hemingway does not own; “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot” is thin and its mockery coarse; and at moments the method hardens into mannerism, the repetition reached for rather than earned. At its height the making is load-bearing, and the height is frequent.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing: the meaning lives in what the prose withholds. The command is of the plain declarative sentence and its rhythm, of repetition that builds pressure, and above all of dialogue, which carries the relation of Jake and Brett almost unaided. The opening sentence, “Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton”, sets in one flat line the narrator’s irony and the book’s measure of men. Mike’s account of how he went bankrupt, “Gradually and then suddenly”, shows the comic exactness. The bullfight writing is precise to the point of instruction without losing the scene. Four charges hold it here: the register is narrow; the drink talk sometimes repeats past its work; Cohn and Frances are drawn with less craft than the rest, nearer caricature; and the first book is slower and looser in construction than the second.
Nikolai Gogol · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be heard here; the comic music of Gogol’s sentence is known in its famous lines, not in every speech, and what cannot be heard is neither credited nor charged. The construction is near faultless: exposition in one sentence; the double misunderstanding of the second act, where the Mayor and Khlestakov each take the other’s terror for menace; the lying; the bribes; the betrothal; the letter; the gendarme. Each voice is distinct: the Mayor’s coarse cunning and his sudden piety, Anna Andreevna’s provincial grandeur, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky quarrelling over who said “Э!”
(Eh!) first, the Judge’s freethinking on the strength of five or six books, Osip’s peasant shrewdness, Khlestakov’s breathless wandering. The names are jokes that bite: Lyapkin-Tyapkin, Derzhimorda, Zemlyanika. Held off the top because the comic machinery of the fourth act is mechanical by intent and runs long, and its scenes with the women are thinner than its scenes with the men.
Apuleius · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin; its sound at length is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The range: the prologue’s mock apology, Plautine dialogue, legal pleading at the Festival of Laughter, epic battle in the robbers’ tales, the fairy tale’s plain opening, the hymn of Lucius’s prayer to the Regina caeli (“Queen of Heaven”) and the goddess’s litany of her names. It works by rhyme and assonance, paired clauses, archaism, diminutive and coinage, the furthest-reaching prose style in Latin. The construction is exact where it matters: Cupid and Psyche at the centre, the Actaeon group before the fall, roses promised in the third book and eaten in the eleventh, a Festival of Laughter in the third answered by the festival of Isis in the eleventh. Charged: an overloading that sometimes becomes display for its own sake, and the loose joins of the ninth and tenth books.
Willem de Kooning · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil painting with the brush, to the anchors every medium answers to. The making is load-bearing. The drawing survives inside the violence, in the set of the shoulders, the turn of the head, the hands blocked in with a few strokes: the work of a draughtsman of the first rank. The paint is laid wet into wet, dragged, scraped and reloaded, with a loaded brush that makes a contour and a plane in one stroke. Pinks, yellows, blue-greens and greys stay clean under heavy working, which is hard, and in most passages the flesh is luminous, not muddy. The figure holds frontal at every distance. The costs: passages around the lower body and at the right have gone thick and closed from overworking, and the method spent two years reaching a state it could not plan.
Guarino Guarini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. The dome is a feat of stereotomy and setting out: eight intersecting arches whose crossings must meet in three dimensions, carried in masonry over an open centre and pierced between, by a builder who wrote on geometry and conic sections and could construct what he could calculate. The transitions from the bowed octagon through the pendentive zone and drum to star and lantern are resolved in one controlled section. The marble, the columned screens and the light from hidden sources are of the first rank. Held at 9.0: the lower church is overworked in places, the junction with the presbytery is complex rather than lucid, and how far the ribs carry their load unaided is not established.
Erwin von Steinbach and others; spire by Johannes Hültz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first. The spire is a masterpiece of late Gothic engineering in stone: an open octagon carrying an open pyramid of tracery to 142 m, four stair turrets built into it, standing in sandstone for nearly six centuries. The rods of the front are stone stood free before a wall across a façade of that height, a technical wager as much as an aesthetic one. The glazed triforium of the nave and the carving of the Angel Pillar are of the first order, and the cutting of the front is fine throughout. Against this, the north tower’s foundation, laid by the first builders, proved unequal to its load, and the joins between campaigns, the belfry stage above all, are adequate rather than inspired. The making is load-bearing at the west; elsewhere it is excellent.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in every department. Alcott lights the hotel from its own fixtures and ceilings, so the dread sits in full light. Brown’s Steadicam holds the tricycle at a child’s height through long, unbroken takes. Walker’s interiors were built at Elstree as one continuous hotel, the Gold Room, the red bathroom and the maze among them. Lovejoy’s cutting lands the title cards and holds the twins’ bodies to a few frames. The sound is exact: wheels on wood and carpet, the typewriter, the dance band through the ballroom. Danny Lloyd is natural, and Crothers is warm and exact in little time. The costs are real and hold the figure: Nicholson plays the end before the beginning and tips into burlesque, Duvall’s long hysteria strains, and the lobby skeletons are a lapse of taste in an exact film. Chinatown and The Third Man stand at the same figure.
Dziga Vertov · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing throughout; invention is credited elsewhere. Kaufman’s camera holds steady under extreme conditions, from the rail bed beneath a passing train, from moving cars, rooftops and the mine, and returns composed images from each. The matching of eyelids, blinds and shutters across cuts is exact. Svilova’s cutting carries the work: the rhythmic acceleration of the last reel, the intercutting of the birth and the funeral, the freeze-and-strip passage that joins image and material without a seam. The composites, the split Bolshoi and the giant cameraman, are clean for their date. The costs: some trick shots are demonstration more than necessity, the slow-motion sport runs long, and a few images, the woman waking among them, are plainly arranged, against the film’s own claim to catch life unawares.
John Milton · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Milton’s command of blank verse is complete here, and differently used. The verse is plainer and more argumentative than in Paradise Lost, with fewer extended similes, short periods in the Son’s replies and long periodic sentences given to Satan: the difference between the two speakers is itself the craft. The making is load-bearing at the pinnacle, where the half-line “he said and stood” (IV) lands the whole action in four words and the similes of Satan’s fall answer it. The opening takes up the first epic in its first line, “I who erewhile the happy garden sung” (I), and announces the reversal in exact parallel. The cost is where plainness reads as flatness, and in the catalogues of Book III.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making is load-bearing throughout. Lee Ha-jun’s house is built for the camera, its stair, glass and garden designed as the film’s argument. Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography sets the cool daylight of the upper house against the sodium and fluorescence below, and the flood is shot in a tank of the built street. The cutting of “The Belt of Faith”, where the housekeeper’s removal is a montage of peach fuzz, a coached phone call and a staged cough set to Jung Jae-il’s Baroque pastiche, is as exact as anything in the decade’s cinema. Song Kang-ho tightens slowly across the film; Lee Jung-eun changes at the doorbell. The costs: the rain and the sale of the house are mechanics showing, and the party is staged more for impact than clarity.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout: De Niro’s Travis, from the shy smile at the concession stand to the mirror, a man assembling himself in front of the camera; Michael Chapman’s wet night streets in saturated colour, the cab as a cell; Herrmann’s last score, setting the two halves of Travis against each other; the jump cuts of the gun sale, the training in fragments, slow motion used as perception; the corridor at the telephone and the overhead shot, each a camera movement with a moral. The costs are weighed: Shepherd’s Betsy is played as an idea more than a person, and the scene in which she quotes a song to Travis is stiff; the Palantine scenes are flat; the desaturated climax is a compromise made before release, though it serves the scene.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of composition is of the first rank and load-bearing: one giant order governs nave, tribune and screen, so that three spaces of different shapes read as one building; light is managed through thermal windows high in the vaults, even in the nave and gathered at the crossing; the screen is placed so that the choir’s light completes the vista; and the front resolves high nave and low chapels in one composition of two temple fronts, half-pediments and attic, in stone. Building on piles in lagoon ground, with vaults and a dome that have stood for over four centuries, is sound making. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, the spans are moderate and the dome of ordinary size, the flanks are plain, and the completion after 1580 was by another hand whose share is not certain.
Roman Polanski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Towne’s screenplay, whose clues and lines carry character and theme at once; Alonzo’s sunlit compositions, his camera at Gittes’s shoulder; Richard Sylbert’s Los Angeles of bungalows, dry riverbeds and offices with Venetian blinds, built from the period rather than dressed in it; Goldsmith’s score, spare, late and exact; Nicholson’s Gittes, vain, funny and out of his depth; Dunaway’s Evelyn, whose evasions are legible on a second viewing; Huston’s Cross, genial and monstrous at lunch over a fish served with its head. The charges fall on small shares: the land-fraud exposition is dense, Dunaway’s mannerism shows in places, and the Chinese characters are props, a choice of the screenplay that costs the frame.
Henry of Reyns and successors; Henry VII Chapel by Robert and William Vertue (attributed); west towers by Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The thirteenth-century fabric is made at the first rank: Purbeck shafts detached against the piers, a high vault raised on flying buttresses, bar tracery, carved diaper, the angels of the transept spandrels, Cosmati work brought from Rome. The nave’s continuation is a feat of control, one design held across a century and a half. The Lady Chapel carries the most complex vault in England, pendants that seem to hang from transverse arches hidden above, a structure that reads as fabric; Torrigiano’s tomb brings the Italian Renaissance into the same room. The costs: the east arm is a French system scaled down rather than extended; the joins between campaigns show; the towers mix classical detail with a Gothic profile; and the monuments run from the first rank to the indifferent.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at mural scale, in panels made to be joined into continuous curved walls. The making is load-bearing. The layering lays lilies over water over reflected sky, three depths in one plane, so that the eye reads the surface as transparent. Colour is held across length: a key sustained and modulated without a break across compositions many metres long, made on separate panels in the studio and assembled on curved walls. The touch runs from long horizontal drags of reflected light to dense knots of lily pad, water at a distance and marks near. The willow trunks are the one vertical, and pace the walls. The costs: passages overworked and clotted, others thin, and joins between panels that show in places.
Charles Mingus · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Eleven players are voiced to sound like an orchestra: the tuba and the baritone saxophone give the bottom a weight a big band of sixteen seldom has, and the brass is voiced in close, growling clusters in the Ellington manner. Richmond controls the accelerations and slowings that drive side two; Byard ranges from stride to the impressionist; Jay Berliner’s classical guitar is placed for contrast. Mariano’s alto, and the placing of it over the ensemble, is command of the recorded medium. The costs are stated: the ensemble is at times rough in attack and intonation, some passages are congested, the joins of the tape can be heard, and the record never reaches the clarity of the best large-ensemble recording of its decade. Some of the roughness is chosen; not all of it.
Mamluk, under Sultan an-Nasir Hasan · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. Ashlar walls of great height carry vaults of a span rare in medieval stone, and the qibla iwan’s single pointed vault, the building’s structural claim, stands. The portal’s muqarnas hood is cut in stone at a height and depth few Cairene portals reach, and the unfinished panels show the carvers’ method stage by stage. The polychrome marble of the mihrab and the dado, the stucco bands, the stone minbar and the dikka are of the first rank of their period, and the packing of four madrasas with storeys of cells into an irregular plot is planning of great skill. Held at 9.0 because its daring is of scale within known means, not a new structure.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of painting on canvas, scaled to one room. The making is load-bearing, and it is calibration. The thin, layered dark is laid so that the maroon breathes through the black and the single fields hold a depth. The edge of the black forms is hard but not ruled flat, and the maroon border is set so the black reads as a field within a field, not a hole. Scale and hang meet the body at its height and distance. The two kinds and their slight variations are legible only once the eye adjusts, and are meant to be. The cost: the grounds are reported to have been laid in largely by assistants under his direction, so the command credited is of decisions more than of hand.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of a recorded medium its makers remade, load-bearing on every track. The glide is held and timed across whole performances; feedback is sampled, pitched and played; the voices sit inside the guitars at exactly the level where they are felt and not parsed; the drums are placed so the pulse survives the wash. The mixes keep a melody audible under a mass that should bury it, the hardest thing the record does. The costs are charged as costs, not excused as the price of a style: a narrow palette of guitars, voices, samplers and drums; drums plain in places, as on What You Want; a bass barely present. First-rank control at the moment of release, in a narrow instrument, stands level with Pollock’s Autumn Rhythm.
Achaemenid, under Darius I and Xerxes · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of terrace building, masonry and carving, and the making is load-bearing. The terrace is of great blocks fitted without mortar. The columns are fluted drums set true at a height and slenderness no earlier hall had reached, their capitals carved to take the beams in the saddle between paired animal foreparts. The reliefs are cut crisp and shallow in hard limestone, hundreds of figures without a slack passage, each gift distinct. The Tachara’s frames are single blocks polished to a dark sheen. What holds it is the system: the walls were mud brick and the roofs timber, so the structure the stone served was perishable, and it burned. The stone was made to last; the building was not built to last as a whole.
Pink Floyd · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing on most tracks. Alan Parsons’s engineering keeps a dense record legible: the clocks of Time, the till of Money cut into a loop in seven, the footsteps and engines of On the Run placed so that the panic moves. Richard Wright’s voicings carry Us and Them and the Great Gig; David Gilmour has one tone for the slide of Breathe and another for the solo of Time; Nick Mason’s roto-toms make Time’s introduction a clock of drums. The faults are more than one: a generic saxophone, a jam held in place by its production, lead vocals that serve more than command, plain drumming elsewhere. A rung below OK Computer and Revolver at 9.2.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the making, structure first, and the making is of the highest order in its tradition. The nave’s tierceron vault is a structural and visual solution carried through every bay; the chapter house vault from one pier is masterly; the Purbeck shafting, detached and banded, gives the walls a depth of line few churches match. The carving, stiff-leaf at its best and the angels of the Angel Choir, is fitted to the structure, and the Angel Choir’s tracery is mature Gothic design. The building is read as craft. Not higher: the crossing tower fell in the 1230s, a failure of the makers; the west front’s joining of Norman and Gothic is a handsome expedient rather than the best making in the building; and the crazy vault’s handling of the bay is debated as awkward as well as daring.
Eugenio Montale · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the Italian, and the making is load-bearing. The endecasillabo is handled with a freedom that never loses its count; lines stretch to fourteen or sixteen syllables and are pulled back. The rhyme is Dante’s rime aspre relearned, “muraglia” on “bottiglia”, and “stramazzato” closes the first quatrain of “Spesso il male di vivere” like a fall. “Meriggiare” is built almost wholly of infinitives, so that no subject appears until the close turns on the whole of life: a decision of syntax that is the poem’s meaning. The lexicon is precise and rare without preciosity: “schiocchi di merli, frusci di serpi” (cracks of blackbirds, rustlings of snakes). The charges: the weaker “Movimenti” pieces are competent and derivative, and “Mediterraneo” is at times rhetorical.
Jules Hardouin-Mansart · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The section is a feat of composition and engineering together: a masonry lower cupola opened at its centre, a painted second shell lit from windows set in the gap above the first, and a tall timber outer dome bearing a stone lantern and spire, each shell sized to its own task. The exterior is of the first rank: two orders on the front, a drum of paired columns that read as buttresses and are, an attic that turns square to circle, ribs and trophies that carry the eye to the lantern; the proportion holds from the esplanade and from close at hand. Stonework, marble pavement and the joinery of the outer frame are the royal works’ best, and Visconti’s crypt is finished to the same standard. The cost: the outer dome is scenery as much as building, and the ornament is dense where the frame is clear.
Samuel Johnson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Joint highest of the twelve, judged on Johnson’s English. The making is uneven: the minor lives are often perfunctory compilations, there are slips of fact and of dating, and a taste for general statement sometimes flattens a poem into a verdict. But the prose of the great lives is Johnson at his ripest, plainer and quicker than the Rambler, its antithesis an instrument of judgment, not ornament: Addison’s prose is “familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious”; of Paradise Lost, “None ever wished it longer than it is”. The definition of metaphysical wit in the Cowley is criticism as exact as any in the language, and the parallel of Dryden and Pope is built clause against clause until the judgment is in the syntax. The Savage tells a squalid life with unbroken dignity. The unevenness elsewhere is what holds the axis at 9.0.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight: Vilmos Zsigmond’s flashed photography, which gave the lamplit interiors and the snow their fog and their brown; the multi-track dialogue recording and mix, in which a dozen voices are placed in one room; the ensemble, Rene Auberjonois’s Sheehan, Shelley Duvall’s Ida, Keith Carradine’s cowboy, each given a face and a habit; Julie Christie’s Mrs. Miller, hard, hungry and far-seeing; Warren Beatty’s McCabe, a man performing confidence to himself; the town itself, built by the crew in British Columbia as the shooting went on; and the last movement, in which a fire, a bucket line, a steam pump and four men in snow are cut together without a lapse. Held below the top where the middle hour is less made than allowed.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Eliot’s English. The making is load-bearing and at a high command. The music of the third section, the long rising line of the fourth, and the sound of the sixth, “the lost heart stiffens and rejoices / In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices” (VI), are among the finest verse sound of the century; the play of free line against rhyme in the first, the long opening line set against the short rhymed lines that follow, is exact. The liturgical insets are joined without a seam. Charged: the fifth section’s play on word, Word and world is mechanical in places; some of the fourth section’s imagery tilts toward the ornamental; and “Why should the agèd eagle stretch its wings?” (I) was read in 1930 as self-parody and is hard to hear otherwise still.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears the load throughout. Jack Cardiff’s Technicolor is controlled to the point of meaning: the skin, the red, the Riviera light, the blue of the final night. Hein Heckroth’s design for the ballet, painted and built, is the ballet. Brian Easdale’s score holds the whole ballet without a word, played under Beecham. Reginald Mills cuts from stage to vision and back, and the run to the balcony, exactly. Anton Walbrook’s Lermontov, held, ironic and cold, is one of the great performances of its decade; Moira Shearer dances as the role requires and acts well enough. The costs: Marius Goring’s Julian is stiff, the frame story’s dialogue is stage English, and the love scenes are staged by convention.
Alain Resnais · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is complete and load-bearing. Sacha Vierny’s photography: long tracking shots through corridors and salons, framed in the wide format with mirrors and ceilings, and light that turns from grey to blown white as the emotion breaks. The editing joins times on gesture and position, so that discontinuity reads as a single motion. Francis Seyrig’s organ score and the sound, with its sudden silences, are placed as the film’s memory. Delphine Seyrig, poised, sculptural and frightened, carries its one inner life; Sacha Pitoëff’s M is a precise menace. The costs: Giorgio Albertazzi’s X is flat beyond what the design requires, the guests’ stiffness tips at moments into mannerism, and the repetitions of the middle stretch are assembled with less tension than the opening and the end.
Tawaraya Sōtatsu · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of ink and colour on gold leaf in a pair of screens. The making is load-bearing. The clouds are painted in pooled, wet ink in which the tones settle into one another, giving weight and turbulence without line. The figures are drawn with a sure, elastic contour, colour laid flat, the bodies foreshortened in motion; the scarves are pulled through the air in a few long sweeps. The placement is exact: each god cut by the edge at the point where his arrival is most felt, the two gazes meeting across the gold. Level with The Starry Night on this axis, below the total command of Las Meninas (9.8), and held from higher because the range of technique is deliberately narrow.
Carol Reed · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Robert Krasker lights wet cobbles from low and behind and tilts the frame to a degree that varies with the moral weather. Reed directs a mixed cast across several languages with a thriller’s timing at every turn. Greene’s script is economical and dry, with lines that have passed into common speech; Welles’s few minutes take the film without unbalancing it; Oswald Hafenrichter cuts the sewer chase; Karas’s zither carries a whole film alone. The costs: the comic set pieces are broad and slack, Cotten is sometimes stiff where Holly needs to be foolish, and a few tilted frames are mannered.
David Bowie · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing. Visconti’s treatment of the drums is the record’s signature, a sound that is the content. The rhythm section of Dennis Davis, George Murray and Carlos Alomar plays tight, dry and close, and its funk sits against synthesisers without either swallowing the other. The mix places the voice low and the drums high, a reversal that carries the argument. Side two is made in the studio as composition: layered synthesisers, piano and saxophone in Subterraneans, the slow build of Warszawa, a narrow palette used exactly. The voice runs from the deadpan of Be My Wife to the incantation of Warszawa. The faults: What in the World is cluttered, Weeping Wall’s palette is thin, and some synthesiser timbres are generic for their year.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included; the structure is credited to the work. The making is load-bearing. Tsuboi’s semi-rigid system, steel hangers between the main cables and the stands rather than a slack net, gave a hung roof the stiffness a monumental form needs without losing the line of the hanging curve; cables, anchors and masts carry the whole as one readable path of force from ridge to ground; the concrete of the stands, curved in plan and section, takes the ring’s compression and shares the roof’s sweep. Masts, ridge light and the meeting of steel and concrete are controlled at large scale, on an immovable date. What holds it at 9.0: a roof bound to continual maintenance, a sweep at tips and anchors partly sculpted for effect, and interiors as fitted less exact than the structure.
Carlo Scarpa · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and few buildings of its century reach it. In situ concrete is made to do what it had seldom been asked to: stepped profiles cast in board formwork with exact arrises, mosaic inlaid flush with the concrete, joints between concrete and brass, counterweighted and pivoting doors, bronze and steel hinges designed as small machines, water held, channelled and dropped in measured falls. The arcosolium’s thin arched shell spans the sarcophagi with a lightness that is structural as well as visual. The making is load-bearing; it is the building’s argument. What holds it short of the highest marks is that part of the trouble with the fabric was a craft judgment: water against exposed concrete.
Pierre Chareau and Bernard Bijvoet · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. To build a steel-framed house beneath an inhabited storey, wall it in glass block and fit it with working mechanisms required command of structure, of industrial materials and of joinery in metal at once. The detail is consistent throughout: riveted columns, bolted stair treads, perforated screens, pivots, rails and cranks, each resolved, the hand of a master metalworker and the drawings of the architects meeting at the joint. At this height the making must be load-bearing, and here it is: the house is its making. Held where it is because the comfort of the glass-block envelope in heat and cold, and the upkeep its mechanisms demand, are not established and may carry a charge.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the Spanish. The making bears weight from the first line: “El día en que lo iban a matar, Santiago Nasar se levantó a las 5.30 de la mañana para esperar el buque en que llegaba el obispo”
“On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on”. The death, the name, the hour and the bishop who will not land are given in one plain sentence. Time is handled with a precision few novels attempt: dozens of witnesses’ clocks are reconciled around a single hour, and the narrative returns to the same minutes from new angles without confusion. The reportorial voice holds the uncanny and the grotesque at one temperature. The release of information is exact: the autopsy before the killing, Angela’s letters before the knives, the door barred before the reader sees it barred. The last pages are paced to the step. Charged: the voice is narrow in range by design, and some lists of testimony run long; the making stands at the threshold of the summit, not above it.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing on most tracks. Richards’s open-tuned rhythm parts and Taylor’s lyrical lead give the record two guitar voices that interlock without crowding, and Charlie Watts swings the hard rock rather than pounding it. The arranging is exact where it matters: horns that punch Brown Sugar and Bitch, strings entering Moonlight Mile late and lifting it, a slide guitar placed under Sister Morphine as a second voice. Mick Jagger’s singing is a command of persona, sly, pleading and, on Moonlight Mile, nearly still. The faults are real and fall on a share: Jimmy Miller’s mixes are murky on Sway, two tracks are competent idiom rather than command, and the coda runs past its shape.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, load-bearing throughout. Tim Friese-Greene and the engineer Phill Brown recorded acoustic instruments in a large room and kept the quietest sounds audible beside the loudest. Lee Harris’s drumming is restraint made into a technique: the kit barely touched for minutes, then struck in full. Guest players were directed toward fragments rather than parts, so that a harmonica, a trumpet line or a violin enters once and leaves. The edit is the record’s hidden craft: no join is audible. Mark Hollis’s voice runs from murmur to cry, and the choir is placed with precision. The faults are few: Inheritance’s arrangement is less distinct than the rest, and the voice is at times so withdrawn that words the record needs are lost.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Pynchon’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice no one had sustained at this length: an eighteenth-century English, capitalised, periodic and digressive, held across the whole of a very long novel without collapsing into costume, and able to carry farce, astronomy, landscape, grief and terror in one register. The two men are distinguished in it, Mason’s melancholy and Dixon’s Durham warmth; the frame’s voices, the children, the uncle, the lawyer, keep their own pitch; the set pieces of instrument and observation are exact. The pastiche is load-bearing, since the book’s argument about history as telling is made by it. Charges hold it below the top: the songs are uneven; many puns and comic routines are laboured; the knowing anachronisms sometimes break the spell more than they serve it; and the density at times obstructs the narrative it carries.
Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout, and much of it is the timing and position of a body in a frame. Keaton holds his face still while the body does everything: the running, the leap from tender to cars, the tie thrown from the cowcatcher. The staging is in depth along the line of track, so that pursuer and pursued, armies and obstacles, are read at once, and the trains and the country are photographed wide and clear. The gags are engineered, the cannon, the uncoupled car, the bridge, each built so the physics is true. The costs: Marion Mack’s Annabelle is a serviceable foil with broad business; the battle is staged with less precision than the chase; the prologue’s titles are perfunctory. Sunrise, its contemporary, stands at 9.1 for a wider range: light, design and interiority are not this film’s field.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, the making bearing weight in every department. The battles are shot with several cameras on long lenses, so that masses and colours compose like painted screens. Emi Wada’s costumes give the three houses and Hidetora’s descent from armour to white robes. The castles and the burned keep are built to be seen whole. Takemitsu’s score is held back for long stretches and then becomes the whole sound of the siege. Nakadai is mask and man at once; Harada’s Kaede is the most exact performance in the film, the dagger at Jiro’s throat played as a dance. The costs recur and hold the figure: Peter’s Kyoami is shrill and mannered in several scenes, Terao and Nezu are stiff where the sons need inner life, and the score leans on a Mahlerian idiom that tells the images what they already show.
Dmitri Shostakovich · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in many places: the Largo’s orchestration, strings divided more finely than anywhere else in the work, the brass withheld, harps and celesta held for the close; the first movement’s canon and its return in augmentation at full orchestra; piano and low brass turning the lyric line into a march; the celesta’s chromatic scale over held D; an economy of material, few themes worked hard. The costs are in the score. The finale’s first march is built of plain, repeated material, and its accelerating tutti relies on volume and doubling more than on line. The scherzo is skilful pastiche of Mahler. The coda is blunt by design, and design does not make it subtle. Against the Goldberg Variations (9.7) and Otello (9.5) the making bears weight in fewer places.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of poured paint. The making is load-bearing, because the poured line is the whole image. Command shows in viscosity, the paint thinned to fly in a thread or held thick to pool; in the variation of weight within a single skein, which only a controlled speed of the arm gives; in the layering, so that the top lines do not drown the lower ones; and above all in the evenness of density across a field over five metres long, with no slack corner and no clot that stops the eye. The costs: a narrow range of mark by design, passages where the web thickens toward mud, and puddled enamel that wrinkled as it dried, which the hand did not govern.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of poured enamel at a scale beyond the arm’s reach: control at the moment of release. Viscosity: each colour thinned to the behaviour wanted, the black fluid enough to run a metre unbroken, the white fine enough to spray, the brown heavier so that it pools, and no colour dead into another. Line: arcs continuous and even along their length, which takes a steady speed of hand and walk; thin lines that taper where the throw ended. Density: five metres graded into a rhythm with no dead passage and no focal collapse, the margins held clear, by a man who saw the whole only from the floor’s edge. Order: black under everything, so the armature reads; white on top, so the finest web lifts the darks. The costs: the range of marks is narrow, and in the heaviest pools the line is lost into blot. The measure is internal to a medium he made; the imitations supply the external one, and fail.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The prose is among the most finished of its century: the adjective chosen against expectation; the enumeration that ends on the anomaly, as the encyclopedia’s list runs on to the animals “que acaban de romper el jarrón” (that have just broken the vase); the irony that never raises its voice; the paragraph closed on a sentence that turns the essay. The citations are deployed with a precision that makes them part of the music. Construction at the scale of the essay is exact: the delayed thesis of “Kafka y sus precursores”, the reversals of “La muralla y los libros”. Held at this figure because the occasional pieces show the same hand at lower pressure, and because the manner repeats, the “quizá”, the paired formulas, the closing conjecture, in a way that a book of forty pieces makes visible.
W. H. Auden · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Auden’s English. The command of verse is at the top of the century’s range and is shown in more forms than almost any one book of the period holds: the ballad’s narrative economy in “Miss Gee” and “Victor”, the blues refrain, the sonnet’s turn in “The Novelist” and “A. E. Housman”, the short-lined stanza of “September 1, 1939” carrying argument at speed (“I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid”), the tetrameter of the lullaby, the trochaic quatrain of “Earth, receive an honoured guest”. The diction moves from the clinical to the colloquial without a seam, and in “Musée” the casual syntax enacts the indifference it describes. Charged with facility: the light verse sometimes runs on its own ease, and abstractions like “the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade” can tip into formula.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a small canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing at every point. Colour does the modelling: the coats turn by shifts of warm and cool, not by shadow, so that volume and colour are one act. The stroke, short, parallel and directional, carries form across faces, cloth, wood and wall alike. The balance: two masses tilted toward each other, held by the bottle’s vertical and the table’s horizontal, the weight adjusted by tone so that the darker left figure does not overpower the right. The bottle’s highlight is a few touches that become glass. The costs are real and partly chosen: drawing that bends hands and table edges to the composition, which some read as awkwardness, and thin, summary passages in the background where the command slackens.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas in a medium of interval and colour, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at every point. Colour: four hues and a white calibrated so that no unit dominates, the yellow light enough to read as line, the red and blue weighted so the small units balance across the field, the grey a rest. Interval: the placing of the units along the lines, irregular and never random, is the rhythm, and was searched for by moving tapes and repainting. Edge: painted, not masked in the final surface, straight and exact without the deadness of a ruled line. Surface: the whites worked, the colour planes built up. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, and visible repainting in places shows a search not always resolved.
João Gilberto · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Read to the elder anchors. Gilberto’s command of voice and guitar is load-bearing and nearly complete: intonation exact at very low volume, every syllable placed against a beat that never wavers, the guitar voicing each chord change with its bass note and holding the rhythm in one hand while the voice moves freely. The craft is the meaning, since the restraint would be nothing without the precision under it. Jobim’s arrangements are economical and exact, the flute and string phrases entering only where the voice breathes, and the balance of the record, voice and guitar level, close and dry, is part of its sound. The costs keep it from the top: strings that are at times the routine studio strings of their year, a few padded arrangements, and a recording good rather than exceptional. Below Kind of Blue (9.3) and Winterreise (9.5).
Edith Wharton · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Wharton’s English, in the 1920 text. Command of the medium is close to complete and bears weight. The sentence is balanced, ironic and exact, and the irony works by placement rather than comment, so that a description of a drawing room or a dinner service passes judgment without a judging word. The construction is architectural: each book ends on a turn, Book I on the telegram from May that moves the wedding forward, and the set pieces, the opera, the van der Luyden dinner, the archery at Newport, the museum and the farewell dinner, are built as scenes in which what is said and what is meant run apart. The dialogue is spare and full of what it does not say. Charged against it: some expository weight in Book I, where the families are introduced in blocks, and a habit of explaining what a scene has already done.
Stevie Wonder · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Wonder’s harmony is the foundation: the chromatic turns of “As”, the changes of “Knocks Me Off My Feet” and “Summer Soft”, the voicings of “Love’s in Need of Love Today”. The arranging is exact: the unison horn line of “Sir Duke”, the bass figure and keyboard interlock of “I Wish”, the synthesiser made into a string section for the two social songs. He plays much of it himself, and the band plays it tight. The voice is among the great instruments of the recorded medium, from the falsetto of “If It’s Magic” to the gospel climb of “As”. The costs fall across a share: under-edited vamps, crowded mixes, some generic timbres, and two routine tracks on the extra disc.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the cruciform columns in their chrome casings, the junctions of glass and floor, the onyx set as a free plane, the ebony curve, the travertine, the curtains of silk and velvet, the furniture drawn for the room. The making is the work, and the room’s calm is the precision of its joints. The engineering was advanced for a house: panes of great size lowered by motor into the floor, and plant below to heat and move the air of a glazed room. Lilly Reich’s command of textile and furnishing is part of the same making. The costs are small: the frame itself is ordinary steel engineering, the upper floor’s making is plain beside the living floor, and the glazed room needed machinery to be lived in.
George Miller · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Margaret Sixel’s cutting holds two hours of near continuous action in one line, never losing the geography or who is where on the rig; John Seale’s camera holds the centre of the frame through the chaos and finds the blue of the night crossing; Colin Gibson’s vehicles are characters, each built from the wreck of a world; Jenny Beavan’s costumes and the makeup make a society legible without a word; the stunt and second-unit work is exact at a scale rarely attempted; the sound makes engines, drums and guitar one score. Charlize Theron’s Furiosa carries grief in her stance. The costs: Tom Hardy’s Max is thin by design and sometimes merely thin, and the composited storm shows on return.
Vakataka · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of glue-bound paint on a dry lime skin over an earthen ground, on rough rock, in poor light. The making bears load. The line: one continuous, swelling contour carries weight, turn and softness, as in Padmapani’s shoulders, and the pliant hands make gesture a vocabulary. The modelling: graded shading, with highlights on brow, nose and chin, gives relief without a single source of light, so a body keeps its volume in a field with no single viewpoint. The composition: crowded walls without frames stay legible, architecture opening on interiors, rocks and trees dividing episodes, the protagonist recurring across a wall. The costs: quality is uneven across hands and caves, some passages are workshop routine, and the secco medium made the surface fragile.
Aristophanes · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium of the highest order. Aristophanes writes in many metres and registers at once: colloquial iambic dialogue, the initiates’ hymns, the frogs’ onomatopoeic chorus, “brekekekex koax koax”, and a pastiche of two tragic styles so exact that scholars, ancient and modern, use it as evidence for those styles. The Aeschylean compound, the Euripidean prologue with its genealogy, the monody with its stretched syllables: each is caught and exaggerated. At the moment of choice the play turns Euripides’ own line from Hippolytus against him: “hē glōtt’ omōmok’”
“my tongue swore”. A long contest is paced by changing its instrument at each stage: argument, prologues, lyrics, scales, politics. What is credited is what the text shows; the music of the metres is not credited beyond it.
Ovid · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin. The elegiac couplet in Ovid’s hands is as fluent and controlled as in any Latin poet: the sense closed within the couplet, the pentameter used to turn, cap or undercut the hexameter, antithesis and paradox set at the line’s end. The openings are made with care: Penelope’s two lines, and Dido’s swan, which declares the letter a dying song. Within the shared repertory the rhetoric is varied by character: Medea’s cold catalogue of what she did for Jason, Phaedra’s sophistical persuasion of Hippolytus, Helen’s reply that refuses and concedes in one sentence, Deianira’s refrain turning a letter into a lament. Held from the top on two charges: figures and arguments recur from letter to letter, and the wit is at times its own end where the situation asks for more. The finer sound of the verse is beyond this reading.
Antoine Watteau · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at easel scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the meaning lives in touch. Silk is laid in small broken flickers of rose and gold over dark grounds; the figures, drawn from the painter’s life studies in chalk, have a turn of the head, a hand at a waist, a bent knee, given with exact economy; the distance is painted in thin golden glazes that dissolve the far shore into light, so that the sequence ends in air. The arabesque of the procession, curving over the rise and down to the water, is drawn for the whole canvas. The costs: the putti and the boat are summary beside the couples, and the crowd at the left is less individually drawn.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
The command is broad and exact. Metal leaf, the least forgiving material in the picture, is laid and worked across a large field so that it reads as a substance, with variations of tone and fleck that keep the gold from going flat. The ornament on the robes is drawn with precision and kept distinct, rectangles and circles each holding their sign at every scale, and the faces, hands and feet are modelled in oil with a delicacy that makes them the picture’s flesh against its metal. The joining of three manners, leaf, flat pattern and modelled paint, in one form without a seam is the load-bearing achievement. The costs: the bodies under the robes are anatomically unresolved, her kneeling and his stance unreadable as bodies; the meadow is repetitive; the lower third of the square is weak.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and the making bears load. The structural idea, eight masts and five tiers of two-storey suspension trusses carrying hung floors, was engineered with Arup to a precision of fabrication and assembly then rare in building: steel, cladding and modules made abroad and fitted on a constricted island site to tight tolerances. The sunscoop is an exact optical device. The flanking cores carry lifts, stairs and services in prefabricated units. Every joint is designed and shown. Judged on the precision and soundness of the making, not on the novelty of its means, it stands with the best engineered architecture of its century. What holds the axis: craft of this order buys exactness more than a fusion of structure and meaning.
Bill Evans Trio · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, load-bearing throughout. Evans’s touch and voicing are of the first rank: the chords left open for the bass, the weight of “My Man’s Gone Now” held without forcing. LaFaro’s command of the instrument is extraordinary for 1961, fast and in tune in the upper register, and it serves the line, not display. Motian keeps time while seeming not to. The three listen at a speed that is itself craft. The balance lets the bass be heard as a voice, which the record’s purpose requires. Held below the 9.7 of the Goldberg Variations and the 9.5 of Winterreise, where every bar is composed: here only two short pieces are the trio’s own, the long performances have passages of searching. It stands level with the 9.0 of Low.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The command is exceptional and load-bearing. The dialogue catches American speech in its evasions, interruptions and self-pity, and lets each voice identify itself without a tag: Paul’s grievance and jargon, the callers’ sales talk, McCandless’s learned contempt, Elizabeth’s unfinished sentences. The descriptive passages are a different instrument, long, periodic, precise and patient, and the passing of days and the turn of the season are given only through what the windows show, without a single conventional transition. To hold so many threads in a short book of talk, with nothing explained, is a feat of construction. Charged a little: the deliberate monotony of Paul’s speech is sometimes monotony in fact, and the clues to the Africa plot are at times set too obscurely to be fair.
Steely Dan · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing throughout, and it is the record’s first fact. The arrangements are exact: every part placed and voiced so that dense harmony stays clear, the horn charts of Deacon Blues and Home at Last as finished as any in pop. The players are used as an orchestrator uses instruments: Purdie’s shuffle is the gait of Home at Last, Gadd’s drumming the architecture of the title track’s close, Shorter’s solo placed as the summit of the piece and not as decoration. The recorded sound is of the highest command for its time, each instrument present, the low end firm, the whole spacious and unforced. The costs are narrow: Fagen’s voice is a limited instrument, I Got the News is busy rather than built, and a polish with no roughness at times flattens the contrast between songs.
Steve Reich · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. The scoring is exact: four pianos and the mallets make a field of pulse dense enough to hold the voices and winds, and the metallophone’s cue cuts through it without breaking it. The resultant patterns are found in the composite of interlocked parts, not invented by hand, and then doubled by voice or clarinet with a precision of placement that makes a hidden line audible; the build-ups, beats put in place of rests one at a time, are timed to the ear. The pulse writing turns a limit of the instrument, the breath, into the phrase. The demand on players is real, an hour of steady pulse cued by ear. Held below Goldberg’s 9.7 and Winterreise’s 9.5 by a palette narrow by choice: harmony moves by a cycle of chords, not by voice leading, and canon is of one pattern with itself.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at about one and a half metres wide, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing, since the meaning is the line and the surface. The contour of the back is drawn with absolute authority; the flesh is modelled so close in value that the body seems lit from everywhere and nowhere; the silks, the fur, the pearls, the gauze of the turban and the feathers of the fan are each given their substance with a precision that never becomes mere inventory; the brush is invisible. The costs are charged: the distortions are willed but not all resolved. The fold of the left leg is hard to read as a limb, the right arm is very long, and the joint of head and shoulder strains belief. Command at the top; resolution a little short of it.
Inca, under Pachacuti and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing in every stone. Blocks of irregular outline, some among the largest ever set in a wall, were shaped so that each meets its neighbours along many-sided, often curved seams, without mortar, the joints tight across their depth and not only at the face. The batter and the interlock let the wall shed earthquake motion that brought down mortared colonial walls in the city below. This was done with stone hammers, bronze and abrasion, with hauling, ramps and levers. Held at 9.0, not higher, because the structure is a gravity retaining wall, with no span, vault or interior to resolve: the command is of fitting and mass, one problem carried to its limit rather than many resolved at once, as the Pantheon (9.3) resolves its span, sphere and graded structure together.
Claude Lorrain · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, near the summit and load-bearing. The sun is painted as a source without a hard disc; the sky is graded from white heat to cool blue; the light on the water is carried in broken touches that read as glitter at a distance. Few matched this before Turner. The aerial perspective is exact, and the architecture is drawn in secure perspective, catching the light plane by plane. The charge is the figures. Here they are small, stiff and summary, and the making that bears the picture’s weight is in the light, not in the life. The weakness is charged by a tenth or two; the light, sky and water are the made work’s load, and they stand near the top of the medium.
Félix Candela · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing in the strictest sense. The geometry was chosen so that the surface is ruled and could be formed on straight timber boards: the means of building chosen together with the form. The shell is a few centimetres thick across the whole room, in proportion thinner than an eggshell; the load is gathered into the groins, thickened just where the stress requires; and the free edges, cut obliquely to the surface, stand without beams, at once the hardest decision and the most beautiful. Few buildings anywhere carry their making so completely. The costs: the enclosure, glazing and fitting of the room are ordinary and later altered, and the craft is the shell’s more than the building’s.
Ovid · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin, as command of the elegiac couplet, and the command is as complete as anything in Latin: the end-stopped couplet, the pentameter’s closing disyllable, antithesis balanced inside the line, the epigram that turns a lesson into a proverb, at a speed and lightness no earlier elegist reaches. The transitions are a skill in themselves, from instruction to myth to aside to the next instruction with a conjunction and a wink. The balance carries meaning: soft water hollows hard stone; to be loved, be lovable. Charged: facility. The tricks recur, the reversal in the second half-line, the catalogue, the “you too” turn, until in Book 3 they show. The sound of the verse is credited only as far as it can be heard on the page.
Francisco de Zurbarán · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at cabinet scale, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing. The fleece is the argument made in paint: each curl built up in thick, creamy lights over cooler half tones, so that the coat has weight, density and softness at once, and the light from the left turns across the body without losing the single lock. The head on the ledge is drawn with an exact sense of the skull under the wool. The hooves and the cord are painted with a hard precision set against the softness of the coat, so that the binding is felt. The ledge’s edge is one clean horizontal; the dark is quietly modulated. The cost is range: one figure, one light, and the placing of the figure the only problem of composition.
Dante Alighieri · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Dante’s Italian; the music of the verse is heard only as far as this reading hears it. The command is the highest in the medieval Italian lyric. Così nel mio parlar manages rare and rough rhymes without losing syntax or drive; Al poco giorno keeps six end words in strict rotation with no sense of filling the slot; Amor, tu vedi ben sustains five words through stanza after stanza, a feat no one before had tried in Italian. The doctrinal canzoni build long stanzas divided by the rules Dante set out in De vulgari eloquentia, the fronte, the sirma and the key line, with an argument moving through them. The sonnets range from early sweetness to the slashing diction of the tenzone, each register fully held. Held at 9.0 because the floor of the corpus is competent convention, not the summit.
George Stubbs · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas at life scale, read to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the picture has nothing to stand on but its craft. The anatomy is exact without being diagrammatic: the musculature of the neck and shoulder, the veins over the belly and the face, the tendons of the hind legs carrying the whole weight, all known from dissection and laid under a living skin. The chestnut coat is painted with a fine, enamel-smooth handling that takes the light along the body and darkens into the shadowed flank; the mane and tail are drawn in strands; the eye and nostril are a few exact touches. Costs charged: the head has been called slightly small, the folded forelegs read a little set, and the ground asks nothing of the hand.
Canaletto · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil over a large canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The perspective is exact without being mechanical. The light is consistent across a large field: the long shadow is cast with conviction, and the sunlit stone of the far bank is modelled in a few strokes. The handling of the foreground, rough timber, cut stone and worn plaster, is varied and tactile, with a freedom and weight of paint his later work often lacks. The small figures are drawn with economy and placed exactly. The tonal arrangement, dark to light to sky, is controlled across about two square metres. Level with The Starry Night at 9.0 and a tenth above The Swing; below Las Meninas at 9.8, whose making is of another order of difficulty and invention.
Johannes Vermeer · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at cabinet scale, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing, because the picture’s meaning is its surface. The brick is built from small strokes of reds and browns with the mortar laid in lighter lines, mortar and brick told apart in places by texture as well as colour. The whitewash of the lower walls is a cool, thick, scumbled layer whose flaking and staining are painted as matter. Shutters, window leading and door frame are placed with a draughtsman’s exactness and without stiffness. One cool, overcast light holds across every surface. The figures are summary, a few strokes each, rightly at their size. The costs: the sky is plainer than the rest, and the right-hand building is handled with less intensity.
Walt Whitman · Literature
9.1 · Tier V
Judged on Whitman’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the line and its pacing: anaphora that builds and releases, the catalogue varied in length and rhythm so that it breathes, the short line placed after a run of long ones, “Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars” (“When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”), and endings landed with authority, “I stop somewhere waiting for you”. “Out of the Cradle” and “Lilacs” are as finished as anything in the century’s verse, and the “Drum-Taps” vignettes, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford” among them, show an exact, painterly economy. Charged on three counts: the monotony of the long line where the catalogue becomes inventory; an inflated diction and borrowed words that sit uneasily; and the late revisions and annexes, where the old poet’s verse is often slack. “O Captain! My Captain!” shows a hand less sure in metre than out of it.
Teotihuacano · Architecture
9.1 · Tier V
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and planning above all: an axis kept straight over two kilometres with changes of level; a grid over some 20 km²; a river turned to the grid; the Sun’s mass raised, its core of adobe and rubble bound by stone retaining walls; lime plaster in quantities that imply an industry; the murals, true fresco on lime, in mineral reds; the Feathered Serpent’s heads, carved in the round. The talud-tablero is a structural grammar as much as a style: the batter holds the fill, the framed panel takes the sculpture and the paint. The costs are the medium’s. The fabric is surface over mass: strip the plaster, as Batres did, and the core runs in the rain. There is no vault and no span beyond a timber roof. Planning and painting are load-bearing; refinement of the member is not what this craft was for.
Lucretius · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on the Latin. The command is great and of its own kind: an archaising hexameter, heavy in spondees, alliteration and assonance, Ennian in its weight before Virgil smoothed the line, and a rhetoric of proof that marshals analogy, reduction to absurdity, the vivid instance and the mocking question. The motes in a sunbeam are a picture of atoms in motion; the analogies are the proofs, and the making is load-bearing. Single lines strike with legal finality: “vitaque mancipio nulli datur, omnibus usu”
“and life is given to no one to own, to all to use” (3.971). Held at 8.9 by the unrevised state: doublets, rough joins and stretches of flat demonstration that a last pass would have tightened. The finer music of the Republican line is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as its structure and a known translation carry it. The command is of a voice deliberately ugly and never out of control: the ellipses and retractions of the first lines, the repetitions that are the mind circling, the abrupt address to the gentlemen, the joke that turns into a wound in the same sentence. The scene-making of the second part is exact and comic: the narrator pacing the length of the room for three hours while the dinner guests ignore him (II.4), the slap and the challenge he rehearses and never delivers, Apollon’s lisping contempt and the wages held back to break him. The turns are placed precisely, the wet snow of the title falling on the night of the brothel and again on the last page. Charged: the middle chapters of the first part are looser than the rest, and the book carries marks of journal haste. The making bears the load; it is not finished to the last seam.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Akkadian as far as it can be; its metre and sound are not heard here, and they are neither credited nor charged. The construction is the clearest evidence, and what can be judged is in command of its means: the prologue’s address to the reader, at once a tour of a city and an instruction to read; the dreams that foreshadow the friend and the forest; the double-hours under the mountain counted line by line; the stale loaves beside the sleeping king that prove the sleep. The Flood is the best-made passage in the work: the boat built and caulked, the storm, the birds sent out one by one. Repetition is used with control, not slackness, and changes the meaning of what it repeats: the same lines return to the same man in three mouths, the worm returns in his telling, and the wall returns in the prologue’s words. What holds the figure there: the epithets, repeated messages and parallel lines are the common stock of Akkadian narrative; the seams of the redaction show where older poems were joined; the five dreams on the road to the forest are heavy for their yield; Tablet XII is carried over from a Sumerian poem with little adaptation; and the broken text leaves much of the making unjudgeable.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Faulkner’s command in this book is at its most various. The scene: Lena at the roadside and her “a fur piece”; the toothpaste in the dietitian’s closet and the child waiting to be whipped; McEachern with the catechism and the boy refusing it in the barn; the manhunt and the bloodhounds; the birth in the cabin. The voices are distinct: Byron’s careful decency, the rural chorus of the wagon and the mill, the furniture dealer’s comic idiom. The prose carries the book’s thought in its compounded nouns and its long periodic rhythm. Charged: rhetoric that runs ahead of its matter in parts of chapters 19 and 20; a habit of abstraction, “something”, “somehow”, “immemorial” and their kin, that becomes a manner; and expository blocks, as in chapter 11, where the scene gives way to recital.
Fernando Pessoa · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Pessoa’s Portuguese, the command is real and load-bearing in three distinct manners. The ode of Reis is a feat of the language: Latin hyperbaton forced into Portuguese, the verb held back to the stanza’s end, the image closed, as in “Assim em cada lago a lua toda / Brilha, porque alta vive” (“So in each lake the whole moon / Shines, because it lives high”). Campos’s long line commands breath, acceleration and the noise of the machine odes; in “Tabacaria” it modulates from the grand, “Estou hoje vencido, como se soubesse a verdade” (“Today I am defeated, as if I knew the truth”), to a girl told to eat her chocolates. Caeiro’s plainness is made, not found. Charged on three counts: the futurist odes run on in long passages of accumulation; many Reis odes are exercises; and the body as edited carries drafts and alternative readings that a finished book would not.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Pynchon’s English, the original. The command of registers is wide: the long periodic sentence that carries a rocket’s trajectory, a chemistry lecture and a dream at once; sharp comic dialogue; the lyric pages on Pökler and his daughter; parody of film, comic book, music hall and scripture; the grammar of technical manuals turned into prose music. The first sentence sets sound, motion and dread in six words. The making is load-bearing: the shifting registers are the book’s account of a world in which every discourse is controlled by another. Charged: the command is not uniform. The puns can be sophomoric, the songs are uneven, the comic set pieces sometimes run past their point, and a hostile hand can find pages of slack, indulgences the form permits and the making does not need.
Anonymous · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Japanese as far as this reading can judge it; the music of the recitation is neither credited nor charged. The opening is a made thing: four clauses in strict parallel, the bell’s voice against the flower’s colour, the proud against the strong, each pair closing on an image, “tada haru no yo no yume no gotoshi”
(only like a dream on a spring night) and “kaze no mae no chiri”
(dust before the wind). The battle pieces are built with exactness: the arming catalogues, the naming of lineage before combat, the cut from the field to a single face. The range of register is wide and commanded, from Yoshinaka’s boorish dinner with the Cat Counsellor in Book 8 to the liturgical close. Charged: the formulae of an oral composite, armour and horse described to pattern, doublets and seams where versions were joined, and the procedural flats of the early books.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Melville’s English as the reading text establishes it; Weaver’s misreadings are not charged. The construction is exact: the stutter planted in the second chapter pays off in the cabin, and “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!” (ch. IX) carries Claggart’s motive in a proverb. The surgeon punctures the ascension: “Euthanasia, Mr. Purser, is something like your willpower” (ch. XXII). The late prose can reach a perfect image: “It was like a gift placed in the palm of an outstretched hand upon which the fingers do not close.” (ch. XXI). Charged: the unrevised surface of a draft left at death. Sentences open on “But” in long runs, more than seventy run past sixty words, the hedging (“it may be”, “perhaps”, “not improbably”) becomes a tic, and sermon sometimes stands where scene would serve.
Michel de Montaigne · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Montaigne’s French. The command is of the sentence: concrete, abrupt, governed by image rather than period, in his own words “un parler simple et naif, tel sur le papier qu’à la bouche” (I.26). It moves “à sauts et à gambades” (III.9) and lands its turns on the body: “si ne sommes assis que sus nostre cul” (III.13), said of the highest throne in the world. The metaphors are physical and exact; the transitions, apparently careless, are placed; the closes of III.2 and III.13 are made with full control. The charges: the arrangement of the whole is loose by design but sometimes merely loose; the early chapters are thin; the heaps of quotation in the later strata clot the line; the Apology sprawls.
Mark Twain · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Twain’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the vernacular sentence, and it is load-bearing: run-on, paratactic, exact in its concrete nouns, able to hold comedy and dread in one line. The “Explanatory” claims seven dialects kept apart with care, and the ear for voices is the finest of its century in American writing: pap’s tirade against the government (chapter 6), the king’s mangled Hamlet (chapter 21), Jim in the fog chapter, “trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren’s en makes ’em ashamed” (chapter 15). The comic timing is exact, and the set pieces, the Grangerford parlour and Emmeline’s poetry, the Royal Nonesuch, the Wilks funeral and its undertaker, are made to last. Charged: the seams of three campaigns of writing, the raft lost and Jim returned with little account (chapters 16 to 18); the coincidences of the last section; the evasion’s repetition.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Kafka’s German as the sentences known with certainty and the translations of Pasley and the Muirs carry it; the sound of the German beyond those sentences is neither credited nor charged. The command is of exactness. The apparatus is described so clearly that a reader could draw it; the officer’s syntax runs with an enthusiast’s rapid technical clarity; the narration never raises its voice. The first words set the whole register, the officer’s admiring “Es ist ein eigentümlicher Apparat”, it is a peculiar apparatus. The comedy is timed with great control: the officer’s two ladies’ handkerchiefs, the condemned man’s dog-like submissiveness, the soldier and the prisoner playing together while the officer dies, the traveller’s polite discomfort. Charged on the last pages, which are looser in execution than the rest, and on a few passages of the officer’s speech that go on past their work.
Built for Abbot Suger · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The Suger ambulatory is a feat: rib vaults over the trapezoidal bays of a double ambulatory, carried on monolithic columns of great slenderness, the outer wall opened into paired windows, raised in under four years and standing nine centuries later. The thirteenth-century builders kept Suger’s lower chevet and raised a thin, skeletal upper choir on it, a hard problem solved cleanly; the glazed triforium and continuous mullions bind the elevation into one tracery system; the transept roses are among the large roses of their decade. The making carries the meaning. Held below 9.0: the west front is heavier and less resolved than the chevet, the junctions between campaigns are visible, and the nave is a refined instance of its idiom rather than its masterpiece.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Rumi’s Persian, so far as this reading reaches it; where the figure depends on hearing the metres fully, the limit is the reading’s, not the work’s. Persian critics have long weighed his ghazal below Hafez’s in finish, and rightly: the Divan has slack lines, padded couplets, rhymes forced to complete a pattern, the marks of improvisation, and the same turn of phrase met many times over. A body taken down from the gathering is not polished like a lyric worked for years. Against this, the metrical command is extraordinary: a wide range of metres, among them fast, strongly stressed measures, used with an ear for stress, internal rhyme and the repeated word that makes sound carry sense. The best ghazals have an economy and a drive no polish could improve, and the macaronic and colloquial play is controlled. At the top the making is load bearing; across the whole it is uneven.
William Wordsworth · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Wordsworth’s English, with no translation between. At its height the blank verse is one of the great instruments in the language: Miltonic in weight but nearer speech, able to slow a moment to the speed of perception, “As if with voluntary power instinct”, and to carry abstraction without losing the thing seen. The enjambment carries thought across the line: “I grew up / Fostered alike by beauty and by fear”. The episodes are built with a narrator’s timing: the boat stolen, the cliff growing with each stroke, the flight back, the troubled days after. The paragraph that ends Book XIII, “what we have loved, / Others will love, and we will teach them how”, lands in full control. The charges are real: the flat, abstract and self-explaining stretches are many in Books III, VIII, IX and X, where perception turns to lecture and the verse can be felt marking time.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. The roof is a hollow concrete shell carried on hidden posts, so that a line of light can part it from the walls; the walls take the old chapel’s rubble into a modern construction and render it as one continuous surface; the south wall’s openings are cut at many depths and angles, so that the wall grades the light. The door and the painted glass are the architect’s own hand, and the command of light, the hardest material here, is complete. Two charges hold it below 9.0: that the south wall’s mass is in part scenographic, a framed construction made to look monolithic, so that structure and appearance part company; and that the craft lies in a few great decisions rather than an extended structural problem.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. To carry dozens of speakers through the whole length of the book with almost no tags, so that each is known by rhythm, cant and evasion (the schoolboy’s half-understood business jargon, the superintendent who is also a banker, the publicist’s pitch, the aunts’ circling talk, Gibbs’s learned bitterness), is a feat of the ear few novels attempt and fewer sustain. The bridging passages, long sentences that move the reader through space and weather from one scene to the next, are controlled prose of a different order from the dialogue. The plotting of the empire’s rise and fall, given only through the talk of those who half understand it, is exact. Three charges hold it below the top: the businessmen’s voices blur at moments; some running jokes are pressed past their use; and the women, Amy Joubert above all, are thinner than the men.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, exact in its decisions and uneven in its execution. Warren Ellis’s loops and pads lay each song’s floor at once, and the voice is placed dry and close against wide washes, so that the singer sounds alone in a large space, which is the subject. The arrangement is exact in its restraint: what the band no longer plays is as deliberate as what it does, and nothing is added to fill the room the drums have left. Two costs fall on the sound itself. The falsetto that carries the climaxes is fragile and at times strained, used more than commanded, and the melodic writing of the first part’s middle songs is thin. One register by design, a voice that strains at its heights and a slack stretch hold it level with White Noise.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of two media at once. The prose is the sharpest in English of its decade: the plate of contraries is a run of propositions with no wasted word, and the Proverbs are as finely made as any aphorisms in the language, the balanced pair (“Damn braces: Bless relaxes”), the shock of the extreme case (“Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires”), the three words (“Exuberance is Beauty”). The comic timing of the Fancies is exact. The making of the plates, word and design etched together, is load-bearing: it is the condition of the argument. Charged: the diction of A Song of Liberty is clotted, the spelling and pointing are erratic in ways that are not all design, and some of the interlinear designs are slight and roughly cut.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on plaster at the scale of a wall. The making is load-bearing. The flesh is built in a few greys and ochres, dragged and scraped, so the body seems to come out of the dark and to be eaten by it. The eyes are two whites and two dark points, placed so that the gaze misses the act. A few strokes sink the fingers into the victim’s back with pressure and weight. The red is rationed to where the act is. The costs: the lower body and legs are summary, in places unfinished rather than chosen; the ground is an undifferentiated black where other Black Paintings work theirs; and how much of the surface is Goya’s and how much the restorer’s cannot be separated.
Robert Browning · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the verse. Command is wide: the conversational blank verse of Lippo and Andrea, flexible enough to carry a joke, a scuffle and a meditation in one paragraph; the triplets of “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” with their mimicry of the toccata; the run of rhymes in “Childe Roland”, thirty-four stanzas on the one pattern, abbaab; the long-lined, dying-fall couplets of “Love Among the Ruins” set against short ones; the dimeter and trimeter of “A Grammarian’s Funeral”. Against it: the roughness is sometimes not dramatic but merely congested, syntax wrenched for rhyme, elliptical knots that cost the reader without paying back, in parts of “Bishop Blougram’s Apology”, in “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”, and in the riddling close of “Popularity”: “Who fished the murex up? / What porridge had John Keats?” Load-bearing at its best, clotted at its worst.
Romanesque builders; Obradoiro facade by Fernando de Casas Novoa · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first. The Romanesque structure is a closed system: a barrel vault buttressed by the half-vaults of the galleries on an aisled plan, built in granite and standing for nine centuries without the failures of bolder vaults; its cost, darkness, is accepted. The masonry is exact and consistent across a long campaign. Mateo’s carving is load-bearing in the literal sense, figures cut as columns and jambs, and of the first quality in its century. Casas Novoa built a façade of great height and openness in granite, which resists fine work, and kept the detail crisp at the scale of a plaza. High command in every campaign, but the vault is conservative: excellent rather than unprecedented.
George Gordon, Lord Byron · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the stanza unmatched in English comic verse: the double and triple rhymes, “lords of ladies intellectual” against “hen-peck’d you all” (I.22); sentences that run across stanzas without losing their syntax; shifts of register inside a single octave; and a pace of composition that keeps sixteen cantos conversationally alive. The set pieces are made with full control: the longboat’s lottery counted out stanza by stanza, the Haidée cantos holding a lyric pitch for hundreds of lines, Ismail moving from panorama to one child, Leila. “’Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle, / Should let itself be snuffed out by an article” (XI.60) is the comic couplet at its exact best. What holds it a step down: Byron wrote fast and revised little, and the poem has slack stanzas, forced rhymes, filler lines and repetitions of its own tricks, most in the ninth to twelfth cantos. Load-bearing at the stanza, loose at the canto.
Vittorio De Sica · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The direction of people who are not actors bears weight throughout: Maggiorani’s large, slow body and his face going from pride to panic to shame, and Staiola’s walk, two steps to his father’s one, are the film’s two instruments, played exactly. Montuori holds the streets in clear depth without picturesqueness; the crowds are staged with great control; at the stadium the decision to steal is made in the cut. The costs: Cicognini’s score is conventional and sentimental where the images are not, a reaction or two of Staiola’s is coached, and the trattoria underlines.
Flannery O'Connor · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on O’Connor’s English, with no translation between. The command is of three things. Dialogue: the speech of Georgia country people caught without condescension of ear, every cliché exact, and the Misfit’s courteous, terrible talk. Comic timing: the cat in the basket, the wooden leg in the hayloft, Mr. Shiftlet’s sermon on the human heart before he steals the car and abandons his wife at a diner. And the last line, placed with a poet’s control: the Misfit’s “It’s no real pleasure in life” closes the title story. The free indirect narration mocks and inhabits at once. Held below the top on two charges: a repertoire of symbolic machinery, the tree line, the sun, the sky, that recurs from story to story and can feel applied; and the two slighter stories, which are cleanly made but under less pressure.
Percy Bysshe Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is very great and uneven. The blank verse of Act I is the best dramatic verse of its decade: the Phantasm’s repetition of the curse, the Earth as the mother who must not speak it herself, Mercury’s courtesy and shame. The lyrics are of a range no English poet had brought into one work: short-lined choral songs, the tetrameter flow of Asia’s song, the interlaced stanzas of the Earth and the Moon, and Demogorgon’s close, whose last stanza of nine lines ends in a hexameter, “This is alone Life, Joy, Empire, and Victory!”. At its best the making bears the thought: “To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates / From its own wreck the thing it contemplates”, where the rhyme carries it. Charged: abstraction piled into lists, “Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom, and Endurance”; forced rhymes and loosened syntax in Act IV; descriptive passages in Act III that smear rather than see.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The making bears load in the great sequences. Vadim Yusov’s camera: crane shots over burning Vladimir and across the fields, long movements from a face to a crowd to a horizon. The raid and the bell, each with hundreds of people, animals and fire, held in continuous takes that keep the whole in one space. Rain in interiors, mud, snow and smoke used as matter, not effect. Solonitsyn’s watchfulness, Lapikov’s Kirill raw with envy, Burlyayev’s boy driving men by bluff, Ovchinnikov’s sparse score. The costs fall on a real share of the film: post-synchronised sound that floats free of the image, declamation in the Theophanes and Last Judgment episodes, stiff minor performances.
Masaccio · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of buon fresco on a wall about six metres wide. The making is load-bearing. The heads are modelled by light from one side in broad planes of warm and cool, without the bounding line of Masolino’s; the draperies fall as heavy cloth over bodies that stand, the weight carried to the feet; the shadows lie on the ground and agree with the light; the landscape recedes by colour as well as by size. A wall this large is made in daily sections without a seam in the light. The costs are charged: Peter at the left is cramped and awkwardly folded into the corner, several heads at the back of the ring are summary, the hands are less resolved than the heads, and the building is stiffly drawn against the ease of the figures.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first and the later hands with it. The structure is of the first rank and load-bearing: branching columns that carry the vaults with no external buttress, their sections geometrically generated and their stones matched to their loads; hyperboloid vaults that are shell and window at once; the method of hanging models translated into stone. The Nativity’s carving is dense and sure. The continuation commands its means: the computational reconstruction of ruled surfaces, stone cut by machine, vaults closed and towers raised in post-tensioned stone and concrete, which departs from Gaudí’s masonry and holds his geometry. The costs: the craft of the Passion sculpture is blunt and often criticised, some later finish reads machined and thin beside the Nativity’s, and the Nativity itself has needed repair.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas three metres wide, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing: the canvas holds a very high density of incident without collapsing into mud, which takes control of transparency and opacity, of thin washed grounds under thick struck notes and crisp black line laid over both. Colour is orchestrated across the whole, hot keyed against cold so that no area goes dead and the central ovoid stays the hottest point. Line has range, from heavy black bars to hairlines, hatching and soft contour. The order of making shows: a composition fixed through many studies, then painted at speed. The costs: toward the right incident piles on incident and some passages read as filling; and the command is of a vocabulary he largely invented, so the outside measure is thin.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as it can be carried; the music of the Russian is neither credited nor charged. The command is of orchestration: nine voices, each with its idiom, the professor’s lecture manner, Telegin’s fussy courtesy, Marina’s proverbs, Astrov’s bitter eloquence, timed against one another with pauses, sounds and objects: the watchman’s tapping, the guitar, the storm, the bells of the departing carriages, the cricket. Exactness in small things: “масла постного двадцать фунтов” (twenty pounds of lenten oil), read out at the accounts, carries a whole life in a phrase. The build of the third act, from the professor’s announcement to the shots, is a master’s piece of timing. Charged twice: Astrov’s forest speeches run as exposition, and Serebryakov is written thinner than the rest.
Baldassare Longhena · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, engineering included. To found a heavy domed rotunda on the lagoon bed at the mouth of the Grand Canal, and to keep it standing for three and a half centuries, is a feat of construction. The composition is of the first rank: the octagon resolved with ambulatory and chapels so that every altar is seen framed from the centre; the drum raised high enough to rule the basin and tied to the octagon by the scrolls; the two domes and the towers ordered so that they read as one silhouette from every quarter of the water; and the Istrian stone handled with a sculptor’s sense of light on a white mass. Held below the top: the junction of rotunda and sanctuary is managed rather than resolved, and the facades of the octagon’s sides are crowded with sculpture and ornament.
Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and engineering, judged to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing. A corbelled vault of about six metres was raised without mortar and has kept the chamber dry for more than five thousand years; the roof slabs were grooved to carry water off, and caulked. The roof-box was set so that, along a rising passage of about nineteen metres, the beam reaches the chamber floor at the solstice: an alignment held through the years of building. The kerb of ninety-seven stones runs unbroken round a mound some eighty metres across. The entrance stone is one composition, spirals and lozenges fitted to its shape, as fine as anything in megalithic art. The costs: corbelling is the inherited technique of the type, uprights in the passage lean, and much carving elsewhere is less resolved.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a mid-sized canvas. The making bears the load: the slabs are drawn with precision, each fracture face given its own plane of light, the lit faces in buff and ochre and the shadowed in a cold blue green, so that the stack reads as solid and the cold is seen in the colour. The surface is smooth and the stroke suppressed, built in thin layers, and the paint becomes the impersonality the subject requires. The whole is held in a narrow, cold range without going dead, and the sky is graded so that the apex cuts. The hull is drawn with a shipwright’s attention to plank and rib. The costs: the stacking can look constructed, parts of the foreground are dry and repetitive, and the distant bergs are summary.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing throughout. Aldo Scavarda’s black and white gives the island’s rock, the night storm, Noto’s stone in hard sun and the hotel’s grey dawn. The staging is in depth: figures split by walls and doorframes, a face at the extreme edge of the frame, people walking away from the camera into space. The takes are timed to the ends of gestures, not of lines. Monica Vitti’s Claudia, a face that registers guilt, joy and shame without a line to carry them, is the film’s instrument. The costs: dialogue post-synchronised in the Italian manner sits loosely on the image at times; Ferzetti is adequate rather than revealing; Fusco’s score is sometimes a conventional cue. Below Anna Karenina (9.5) and Tokyo Story (9.3).
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing, with the words weighed elsewhere. The title track stacks guitars, keyboards, glockenspiel, strings and saxophone into one wall without losing the line of the voice, and its breakdown and count-in are placed exactly. Roy Bittan’s piano carries Thunder Road and Jungleland as an orchestra would; Max Weinberg’s drums hold Jungleland’s movements together; Clarence Clemons’s solos are composed statements, not blowing. The arrangements use added players well: the horns of Tenth Avenue, the trumpet and acoustic bass of Meeting, the violin that opens Jungleland. The faults are real. The mix is dense to the point of mud in places, on Night most of all; the voice strains in the high passages; and the effort of the making sometimes shows.
Mexica · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of carving a block of basalt taller than a man with stone tools, to the same anchors as every medium. The making bears load: the symmetry is exact over the whole front, and in the round the figure holds its block without breaking it, so that mass carries the meaning. The scales of the skirt are worked as a regular net that still reads as living snakes; the two serpent profiles are resolved to read both as two and as one face; the necklace is cut deep enough to throw shadow at a distance and fine enough to read near. The underside relief has the same care as the visible faces. Charged: the back is less finished in invention than the front, and command of the figure in movement, which the medium allowed, is not attempted.
Venetian builders · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and decoration together. The mosaic craft is of the first rank: gold tesserae set at angles to catch the light, figures scaled to their distance from the eye, a programme run over curved surfaces without a break. The Pala d’Oro and the pavement are of the same order. The structure is sound and intelligent, five domes on hollowed piers on piled lagoon ground, standing for over nine centuries; but it applies a known system rather than advancing it, and the outer domes are carpentry over masonry. The later campaigns, worked from painters’ cartoons, are a lower order of making for the medium, and the spoil façade is set rather than made.
Pallava · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of relief carving in granite at the scale of a cliff, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears the load. The elephants are modelled in broad planes that keep the weight and slackness of hide, and the calves beneath them are tucked in at the right proportion; the deer scratching its nose and the monkey grooming its mate are observed with a naturalist’s precision. The relief is graded across the face from near round to shallow, so that the composition reads from a distance and close at hand. The cleft and the two boulders are used, not fought. The costs are charged: the celestial couples are worked to a repeating type and some are summary, the human faces are generic, and the joins of register across the upper rock are loose. A master workshop, not one hand at every point.
Albert Camus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Camus’s French. The command is of a single speaking voice sustained across a whole book: courteous, ironic, aphoristic and insinuating, with the rhythm of a pleader who knows exactly where to pause, as in the opening offer, “Puis-je, monsieur, vous proposer mes services, sans risquer d’être importun?” The listener’s half of the dialogue is written in his absence, by implication, with great economy. The structure is exact: the turn from confession to accusation is prepared from the first page and delivered on the last, and the drowning, the central fact, is told late and briefly, after the reader has been made to want it. Charged on three counts: the aphoristic surface sometimes becomes manner, paradox multiplied where one would serve; the device of reported replies is at moments mechanical; and the range of instruments is narrow by design, one voice in one register, so the prose cannot show a command of many kinds.
David Bowie · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Mark Guiliana’s drumming carries the record, fast, broken patterns under slow songs that never clutter the voice; Tim Lefebvre’s bass holds the ground; Donny McCaslin’s saxophones and flute move from counterline to squall; Jason Lindner’s keyboards colour without crowding; Ben Monder’s guitar enters heavy and late in Lazarus and carries the end of the record. Visconti’s production keeps a busy band legible beneath a voice placed close and dry, and Bowie’s singing at sixty-eight is controlled, layered in the title track into a choir of himself. The faults are three: ’Tis a Pity is loud and cluttered, the voice sometimes strains at the top, and Sue sets its arrangement against the song.
Molière · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the French. The command is of conversation in verse: the alexandrine broken across speakers in quick exchange; the long speech of argument, Philinte’s moderation and Éliante’s catalogue of the lover’s blindness, adapted from Lucretius; and the set piece, in the portraits, each a miniature of a type, in the duel of Célimène and Arsinoé, two speeches in strict parallel, and in the sonnet scene, timed beat by beat. Alceste’s voice is made distinct by its oaths and its repetitions, so that his character lives in his rhythm. The construction is clean: one place, one day, the offstage verdicts arriving together at the end. The charges are old and French: the verse has its padding, rhymes forced in places, which Fénelon and La Bruyère charged against Molière’s style, and Du Bois’s scene is mechanical. They are kept small.
Alexander Pushkin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Pushkin’s Russian. The verse is his, and his command of the Russian line is the summit of the language: exact, unemphatic and memorable without strain, so that the lines quoted on this page are proverbs in Russian. The range of register is a feat of making. Pimen speaks a chronicle Slavonic; Boris the measured pentameter of a ruler, breaking into hallucination; Varlaam’s tavern prose is coarse and comic; the Polish court speaks in gallantry; Margeret and Rosen swear in French and German on the battlefield; the holy fool speaks in a child’s sing-song. Each voice is struck in a few lines. Grigory’s escape at the inn, with the guards misreading the warrant, is a perfectly turned comic scene. What holds it a step from the top is the stagecraft: some scenes are mere links, the Polish love scene is long for what it carries, and the play’s difficulty in the theatre is partly its own making.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Otello Martelli’s black and white uses the wide frame both ways, composing crowds across it at the press conference and the miracle and isolating figures in it at the dawns and on the beach. Piero Gherardi rebuilt the Via Veneto at Cinecittà so that the street could be shot as a stage, and dressed the film. The camera travels with the parties. Nino Rota’s themes are worn and returned like the nights themselves, against the popular music of bands and jukeboxes. Marcello Mastroianni carries three hours of watching with very little action, and Alain Cuny’s stillness makes Steiner. The costs: the cutting is slack in the long parties, and a few performances are types.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. The command is of cadence and rhyme. “Prufrock” moves between a long, almost prose line and a clipped one with full control; its rhymes are placed so that the comic and the desolate share a sound (“I grow old ... I grow old ... / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled”); its sound is exact, from the sibilance of “sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells” to the long vowels of the last stanza. “Preludes” opens on a dying fall: “The winter evening settles down / With smell of steaks in passageways. / Six o’clock.” “Rhapsody” sustains a free line against the clock. At the top the making is load-bearing. Charged: the juvenile Laforguian manner of “Conversation Galante” and “Hysteria”, which are clever exercises, and some slackness in the middle of “Portrait of a Lady”.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the whole as completed, rooms and roof. The roof’s making is load-bearing. In the spherical solution, shells of different shapes are all cut from one sphere, so that the ribs share a curvature and could be cast from common moulds. The ribs were precast in segments, raised and post-tensioned together in place, a free form prefabricated at large scale. The surface is precast lids of tile set in chevrons, made in a factory and alive in light. The costs: the form came before its structure, found at great expense of time; the podium was built before the roof was known; and the halls the building exists for fell short: the Concert Hall’s acoustics were not put right until 2022, and opera was given a cramped stage and pit.
Eugène Delacroix · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas over three metres wide. The making is load-bearing where it counts. The colour: the flag’s red, white and blue set at the apex and answered down through the field, in the wounded man’s smock and sash and in touches among the crowd, so that the eye is led by colour as much as by line. The light breaking through smoke behind Liberty, which makes her a silhouette and a source at once. The foreground bodies, the stripped corpse modelled in a cold, greyed flesh against the warm living. The drawing of the stride and the turned head, which carries motion into a static pyramid. The costs: the left flank is crowded and its figures less resolved; the relation of the barricade, the crowd behind and Notre-Dame is summary; some heads in the background are notations. Command near the top of the medium, with less finish and less spatial clarity than the summit canvases.
Donato Bramante · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium, structure included. The making is load-bearing in its control. One module governs the columns, the intercolumniations, the frieze and the drum; the triglyphs are set to the columns round a curve, which the Doric order makes hard; the pilasters of the cella answer the columns of the peristyle; the profiles and the carving are fine, and the granite shafts are set with a sure eye. What holds it from the highest marks: the structure asks little, a small dome on a thick cylinder; the interior is cramped and less resolved than the exterior; and the drum and dome have been thought to sit heavily on the slight colonnade, a proportion that later work may have altered, and the question is not settled.
Ivan Turgenev · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Turgenev’s Russian as far as it can be judged here; the sentence itself, unheard in this reading, is neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: a short book in which every station has its function, the visits paced so that each changes the hero, the two love plots timed against each other, the duel placed after the declaration and the death after the parting. The portrait is Turgenev’s instrument, used with economy: Pavel’s nails and English clothes in the country; Bazarov’s red hands and long naked face; Nikolai’s cello; Vasily Ivanovich’s anxious garrulity. The dialogue lets the argument be heard in two idioms at once, the son’s terse contempt and the uncle’s French-inflected Russian. Charged: the expository block of Pavel’s past; the caricature of Kukshina and Sitnikov, cruder than the rest; and the last chapter’s quick disposal of the survivors’ fates, before the grave restores the scale.
Marvin Gaye · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing. Gaye’s vocal production is the record’s signature: lead, harmony and counter-voice all his, stacked and set in dialogue, so that the singer is his own choir. The rhythm section plays light and fluid, the bass in long melodic lines under music that never settles on the one, and hand percussion carries the pulse that ties the suite together. David Van DePitte’s arrangements let strings and horns colour the groove without swamping it, and the segues are made with care. The faults fall on a share: Right On is loosely shaped, the strings thicken toward gloss in God Is Love and parts of Save the Children, and the dense mix sometimes blurs the voices it layers. Under Kind of Blue at 9.3; a tenth under Low at 9.0.
Alfred Tennyson · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Tennyson’s English. His ear is among the finest in the language, and here it is load-bearing. The heavy, flat vowels of VII’s close; the monosyllabic weight of “A hand that can be clasp’d no more” (VII); the slowed calm of XI; the movement of CXV, “Now fades the last long streak of snow”: in each the sound is the sense. The stanza is handled with a variety of syntax across its four lines that keeps it from going dead through most of 2,900 lines, and the craft of arrangement is exact, with echoes laid across a hundred sections: the doors, the yew, the Christmases. Held below 9 by what the length exacts: the tetrameter quatrain does produce monotony over this span, stanzas in the middle sections are padded, and the diction at times reaches for poetic periphrasis.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the exact noun and the joined clause. The first chapter is as finished as any opening in the century’s English: “In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains”, and then the dust, the leaves, the troops and the rain in a page of “and”. The retreat chapters are command of another order: logistics, mud, fear and murder in one level voice. The dialogue carries Italian in English cadence, Rinaldi’s banter and the priest’s quiet, without dialect spelling. Charged: the lovers’ talk, which repeats “darling” and “lovely” until the words empty out; Frederic’s occasional reach for a lyric generality the method elsewhere forbids; and the longueurs of the second book. The making is load-bearing in the first, third and fifth books.
Mikhail Lermontov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as a reading from knowledge carries it, the prose is the book’s first glory. Lermontov writes sentences of a lucidity and speed new to Russian narrative. The first sentence of “Taman” puts a whole tale’s tone into a line; “Princess Mary” begins with a plain “Вчера я приехал в Пятигорск” (Yesterday I arrived in Pyatigorsk) and then gives the town, the mountains and the morning air in a paragraph. Each narrator has his voice: Maksim Maksimych’s soldierly digressions and tenderness, the traveller’s observing irony, Pechorin’s epigrams. The plotting is sure, the duel sequence above all, with the unloaded pistol, the change of ground to the ledge and Werner’s discovery. Held below 9.0 because the plot leans on eavesdropping more often than craft should allow, in “Taman” and more than once in “Princess Mary”, and because Grushnitsky is drawn as a type to be shot rather than as a person.
William Faulkner · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Faulkner at full command of two instruments at once: Ratliff’s vernacular, dry, exact and funny, and the long elevated sentence of the narration, which can rise from a store gallery to Homeric extravagance in one paragraph. The auction is a set piece of timing; the Armstid trial is a perfectly managed comic scene that turns cold. The case against a higher mark lies in two places. The Ike chapters push the high style to deliberate excess, and whether the excess is wholly controlled is the one place the craft is fairly questioned; and the joins of the reworked stories leave some introductions repeated. Neither seriously dents a book made at this level, and the making is load-bearing at the auction and the trial.
Anton Chekhov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Chekhov’s Russian as far as it can be carried, and fully on its structure. The command is of economy and placement: the hospital’s decay is given in a few concrete items and never moralised; the comedy of the postmaster is exact and is never allowed to lighten the end; the dialogues let both men be eloquent and both be wrong. The main feat is modulation: chronicle, satire of a provincial town, philosophical debate and the account of a beating and a death, in one voice, with no change of key announced. The last chapter is a model of the short close: the stroke, the deer, the letter, a funeral attended by two. Charged: the dialogues are at times essayistic, set pieces whose making shows, and a minor figure such as Khobotov is given in outline.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas in the late manner, judged to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing. Thin glazes and scumbles of grey, gold and white over a light ground make rain and steam one substance, lit from within; the funnel and the front of the engine are set firm in dark paint against that ground, so that the one hard form is also the one fast one; touches of thick paint catch the light in the rain. The drawing of the whole holds: the bridge’s diagonal from corner to distance is exact and fixes the speed. The costs are in the particulars. The figures are summary, the ploughman barely stated and the hare scarcely legible; the carriages are a scribble; passages of the sky are worked more than resolved.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil over two metres wide, to the same anchors as every medium. Where the making is load-bearing: the red, laid as a field over an earlier state without going dead or flat, with enough variation of touch to read as air and not as enamel; the reserve lines, drawing made by restraint, the room’s geometry held true by what the painter did not cover, which allows no correction; the small depicted works, each recognisably itself in a few strokes and its own palette, holding its place without breaking the field; the composition, the clock on the axis and the works ringed round an empty centre, balanced without symmetry. The costs: the furniture is schematic by design and some objects at the right are slight; the depicted works are notational at this size; the table and chairs are drawn serviceably rather than exactly. Command high and economical, short of the great figure painters’.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout image and sound. Cronenweth’s light, shafts through smoke and blinds, backlight and moving searchlights in every interior, makes the world felt rather than explained. The miniatures and matte work of Douglas Trumbull, Richard Yuricich and David Dryer have not aged beside the digital work since. Lawrence G. Paull’s and Syd Mead’s design builds a city from layers. Vangelis’s score, synthesiser and saxophone, is the film’s emotional voice. Terry Rawlings’s cutting lets the long scenes hold. Hauer’s Batty, menace and play and grief, carries the last act; Sanderson’s Sebastian and James’s Leon are exact. The costs fall where the film needs strength: Ford’s Deckard is flat for long stretches; Young’s stiffness serves the part and limits it; the love scene is staged as coercion without the film appearing to know it; dialogue is often functional. The script and the leads bear less than Chinatown’s (8.6).
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of tempera on a large canvas. Load-bearing where it is achieved: the contour, the finest line in Florentine painting of its decade, carrying volume, motion and expression with almost no modelling; the hair, each strand drawn, moving as a pattern that is also wind; the winds’ crossed bodies and drapery, a knot of motion resolved without confusion; the attendant’s dress and cloak, folds as exact as the line elsewhere; and a pale, high key held across nearly five square metres in a medium that does not blend. The costs are charged here: the sea’s V-shaped waves are a formula, the landscape is thinly invented, and some of the bending of anatomy, the left arm and shoulder above all, is not resolved as choice. The gap to Las Meninas at 9.8 is the space and the air; in finish it stands above the unfinished Large Bathers at 8.8.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of oil paint at a high pitch, and load-bearing. The sky is built in layered, broken colour, and the sun and its cloud in heavy impasto that catches real light on the canvas; the hull is laid in thin, cool, translucent passages so that the ship glimmers rather than stands; the tug is fixed in dark, opaque paint with the fire of its funnel struck in hot accents; the river takes all of it in reflections that move from gold to blue to near black across the width of the picture. Each handling is chosen for what it must mean, and the transitions, cool to hot and thin to thick, hold without a seam. Held a tenth short of 9.0 because the foreground water and the margins are summary beside the sky and the ship.
J. M. W. Turner · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of oil at exhibition scale, and load-bearing. The sun and its reflection are built of thin glazes over a light ground, with scumbled and scraped passages, so that the light seems to come from inside the paint; the sea is made of loaded, dragged strokes that keep its weight and motion; the storm is laid in dark veils over warm underlayers, so that it closes without going dead; and colour is held at full pitch, hot yellow and red against blue grey, without collapse into mud. The costs are charged. The ship is summary even for distance; the foreground creatures and limbs are drawn with little authority, almost cartoon at the lower right, and the hostile press seized on them; some passages of the sea at the right are worked rather than achieved.
The Beatles · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, read to the same anchors as every other art, and load-bearing on most tracks. The bass carries “Come Together” and “Something” as countermelody. In “Because” three voices, each part sung three times, are tuned and blended so that nine voices sound as one instrument. Starr’s drumming makes the figure of “Come Together” the song and gives “The End” its one solo. The joins of the medley are engineered so that eight fragments run as one passage, with Martin’s strings and brass under “Golden Slumbers” and “Carry That Weight”. The faults: “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer” is slick work on thin material, “Octopus’s Garden” is plain, and the length of “I Want You” is held by its production as much as its playing. A tenth below The Dark Side of the Moon and Low at 9.0.
The Smiths · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Each part is chosen for what it must carry. Marr sets overdubbed guitars as an ensemble, from the wah and feedback of the title track to the chime of “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side”; Rourke’s bass on the title track is fast, melodic and structural; Joyce’s tom pattern carries six minutes without fills to lean on; the strings and flute of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” are written as countermelody; Morrissey’s phrasing bends lines across the bar. The surround is summary beside the parts: the production is at times thin, the strings are a sampler’s, and the idioms are few. Those costs hold it a tenth short of 9.0, as summary margins hold The Fighting Temeraire.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence and its cadence. The opening, “The station wagons arrived at noon, a long shining line that coursed through the west campus.”, turns a parade of parents’ cars and students’ goods into a procession, and the catalogue of possessions that follows reads as liturgy. The deadpan is exact; the litanies are placed like refrains; the comic dialogues, Heinrich refusing to grant his father that it is raining, are built on non sequitur and timed to the beat; Part II sustains dread across a whole chapter without a break. Three charges hold it below the top: nearly every character, the children included, speaks in the same aphoristic register, which is a design but flattens persons; some of the aphorisms are glib; and the approach to the motel in Part III is written in a fevered heightening that strains.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the composite wall of thin stone and concrete, made a structural system and not a veneer; the blocks carrying their own roof slabs, with the glazed joints between them making light a structural line; the section sunk into the slope; and a control of temperature, water, sound and light that makes each room a different instrument. The fittings, from the water spouts to the handrails, are made to the same pitch. The costs: the engineering extends little, short spans and slabs of ordinary reach; the plan’s freedom leaves some junctions and service blocks routine; and the whole depends on a level of maintenance that a wet stone building asks of its owners.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, complete and deliberately unshowy. The camera is plain and mobile, following the ensemble through rooms without drawing notice, so that each irruption lands in a neutral frame. The passages into and out of the dreams are cut to look exactly like the waking scenes, and the film’s central device depends wholly on that plainness. Rey, Seyrig, Audran, Frankeur, Cassel and Ogier play at one pitch of composure and never acknowledge the absurd. Sound is laid against speech, drowning an explanation the viewer wants, and the comic beats are timed exactly, as in the café’s successive shortages. Held from the top by range: the film needs no command of light, scale or montage, and shows none.
Norman builders, under William II · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first, and here the structure is the weakest part of the making: a timber roof over a basilica of reused columns, stable and sound but not ambitious beside the vaults of Romanesque Europe or the domes of Byzantium. What carries the axis is the revetment, and it carries it high. The mosaics are of the first rank of Byzantine work, scaled for a room of this size, the figures legible across the nave, the narrative compressed into strips without loss of clarity, laid at speed and with consistency over the whole interior. The exterior arcading in two stones, the opus sectile and marble dadoes, the two bronze doors and the cloister’s carving and inlaid colonnettes are each of a high order. Held below 9.0 because the structure does not bear the meaning, and the hands are several.
Diego Rivera · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of true fresco at mural scale. The making is load-bearing. Fresco allows no correction once the plaster sets, and the main panels hold a great crowd of figures and a plant’s worth of machinery in one coherent space, laid in daily sections over months, with assistants grinding pigment and preparing plaster as was Rivera’s practice. The drawing of machinery is exact and rhythmic: conveyors, presses and ducts read as structure and as pattern at once, the machine’s curves answered by the curves of bending bodies. The colour holds across the court, earth reds and ochres at the furnace, cool greys and greens on the stamping floor, and the grisaille predellas show the same command in monochrome. The costs: crowding that clouds the main panels in places, allegorical corner figures stiffer than the workers, and faces at the scale of the line that are types rather than persons.
J. M. Coetzee · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Level with the highest. Command of English prose at a high pitch of economy. The sentences are short, exact and cold, and the free indirect style carries Lurie’s irony, self-pity and learning in the same line without the narrator ever stepping out to judge. Dialogue is cut to the bone and does much of the work: in the exchanges with Lucy after the attack, each refusal of hers is a line of a few words, as hard as anything in the modern English novel. The structure is a series of hearings, each echoing the last, and the motifs, dogs, the opera, the banjo, the scapegoat, are placed with no wasted turn. The charge, and what holds it below 9: the economy is so sure that it becomes one instrument in one register, and some opera passages summarise what Lurie hears rather than make it.
Robert Bresson · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts, the making is load-bearing in the thefts and exact everywhere else. Léonce-Henri Burel’s photography is plain and grey and serves; the frames are composed to cut away the body and keep the hand. Raymond Lamy’s cutting of the Gare de Lyon and Longchamp sets rhythm by insert shot and off-screen sound, and Kassagi’s choreography of the thefts is precise enough to be real. The sound, footsteps, doors, the crowd at the course, the train, carries what the images withhold, and the direction of the models is consistent and intended. The costs: the voice-over is sometimes stiff, the scenes with Jacques and Jeanne in the middle are flat beyond what the method needs, and the Lully is laid on from outside a film whose sounds are otherwise all its own.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of film made for television, and the making bears weight. The camera changes hands across the cycle, so each film has its own look: V is filtered green, its corners darkened, over a city that looks poisoned; IX keeps to cool interiors. One composer holds the looks together, and Preisner’s music is sparse and returns. The direction of actors is the cycle’s strongest craft: Bardini’s consultant, Janda’s Dorota, Gajos’s father in IV, Baka’s Jacek, Szapołowska’s Magda, and Stuhr and Zamachowski as comic brothers. Objects are cut to carry argument: the ink bottle that cracks in I, the bee in II, the spilt milk in VI, the frame in VIII that will not hang straight. The costs: III’s middle sags, IV relies on dialogue, and some images show the limits of television production.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the made record, load-bearing on every track within one register; the words are weighed elsewhere. Hannett records the drums dry and close, then places them, and every other instrument, in a treated space of its own. Morris’s drumming, precise and patterned, leads “Atrocity Exhibition” and “Colony”. Hook’s bass carries the melody on “Passover” and “Heart and Soul”. Sumner treats the guitar as texture and noise and writes the keyboard line of “Decades”. Curtis’s baritone is placed low and steady. The costs are narrowness, and narrowness is charged even where it is made a style: a small harmonic vocabulary, a narrow vocal range, and delivery nearer declamation than song on “Colony”. Exact command of one register by design, which flattens as it focuses, stands level with White Noise.
W. G. Sebald · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the German as far as Bell’s English carries it; the music of the German sentence is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The command is of the long period and of the frame: three levels of telling held without confusion across the whole book, and a construction that delays Austerlitz’s discovery of his own name for a third of the book and the return to Prague for half, so that the reader’s ignorance matches his. The placing of images against the text is exact where it works. Three charges hold it below the top: every voice, Věra’s, Gerald’s, the narrator’s, speaks in one register, Sebald’s, which the method permits but which flattens persons; the archaic cadence hardens at times into manner; and some images are placed as illustration, adding nothing the text has not said.
Lewis Carroll · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is close to complete at this scale. The prose is plain, quick and exact, in a dry narrating voice that keeps its distance from Alice and from the creatures alike. The comic timing bears load: the Tea-Party runs on interruption, non sequitur and the question refused, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”, never answered (chapter VII); the trial runs on legal forms misapplied, down to the King’s “Begin at the beginning … and go on till you come to the end: then stop” (chapter XII). The parodies keep the metre and turn of their originals exactly, which is where their force lies: “Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! / How I wonder what you’re at!” (chapter VII). The Mouse’s tale is set on the page in the shape it puns on. Held a tenth below nine by the second half: the Mock Turtle and Gryphon chapters lean harder on the pun and run longer than their invention.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence, the repetition that builds pressure, and dialogue cut until what is not said is audible. “Hills” is the summit of the method: the girl’s plea that he stop talking, the word “please” run over and over, is the one break in a surface held flat for pages. “The Killers” times its comedy exactly, the gunmen’s banter against the counter. “The Undefeated” sustains a long action, the faena given move by move, without slackening. “In Another Country” opens with a cadence of cold and wind and game hung outside the shops that sets the whole story’s register. Charged for the slack pieces: “Banal Story” is a joke at the expense of another prose, “To-day Is Friday” a sketch in dialect, and in “A Pursuit Race” the manner comes close to mannerism.
Giorgione · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The command is in the light and the air: the lightning’s green cast on the town, the graded recession from the dark bank through the bridge to the walls, the soft passage of edges in the trees, and the woman’s body modelled in light against shadow. Oil handled in thin layers to give atmosphere rather than contour was a new command in Venice, and the medium’s history took it from this circle. What holds the axis below the top is the figures: the man is stiffly posed and not wholly in the air the landscape gives, the woman’s anatomy is soft at the joints, and a picture made by revision on the canvas shows it in places as uncertainty of placement. Small and fine; level with The Starry Night at 9.0 in command, in another key, and well below the making of Las Meninas at 9.8.
Robert Frost · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Frost’s English. The command is of blank verse as speech: lines that keep a strict count while their stresses fall where a speaker’s would, so that irritation, evasion and pleading are heard in the metre itself. “Home Burial” is the summit of it: the husband’s “Can’t a man speak of his own child he’s lost?”, a pentameter that is also a cry, against the scansion of the wife’s broken half-lines. The pacing of “The Death of the Hired Man”, where Mary’s quiet case for Silas turns Warren without his conceding, is exact. “After Apple-Picking” shows another command, irregular rhymed lines that drift as sleep drifts, the rhymes arriving late like returning sounds. The weaknesses are of slackness, not of skill: the dialogue of “The Generations of Men” and “A Hundred Collars” runs on, and plainness in a few places becomes merely plain. Held under 9.0 because the command, superb in its kind, holds fewer registers at once than the highest makers.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight. John F. Seitz lights the house as a tomb: dust in the projector’s beam, the body shot from below the water. Hans Dreier and John Meehan build its gilt, the organ and a bed like a gondola. Franz Waxman sets a Salome motif against dance-band Hollywood, and the cutting keeps voice-over and scene in exact time. Swanson plays silent gesture as the character itself, eyes and hands at a scale the sound film had abandoned, controlled to the last step; von Stroheim is still; Holden’s narration has a screenwriter’s economy. The lines carry character in a phrase, “We had faces”. The costs: Olson and Webb are pleasant and flat, and the Betty scenes are conventionally staged.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: the photography of the plains and the river, held wide in the light at the ends of the day; the burning house, staged and lit as a sequence of rooms; Jack Fisk’s design, which makes 1959 out of found places and a few right objects; Martin Sheen’s Kit, his ease and charm and the blankness under them; Sissy Spacek’s flat, exact voice, which carries the narration’s whole irony without once signalling it; Warren Oates, a father of few words in a few scenes; the music, chosen against the image. The costs count against it: three cinematographers are credited, and the look is not wholly of a piece; a few transitions are abrupt in the way of a low-budget production; the minor parts are unevenly played.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Gianni Di Venanzo’s photography is of the first order: the whites and greys of EUR in hard sun, the night scenes lit by streetlamps and wind, the Borsa as a crowd of hands and mouths, the faces of Vitti and Delon set in architecture without losing their particularity. The cutting of the coda, shot to shot across a crossing at dusk, is load-bearing, and the crash at the Borsa is cut with a command of chaos the film never needs again. Vitti plays in hesitation, Delon in speed and appetite; Fusco’s score is sparing and exactly placed. The costs: the Kenya masquerade is staged without the film’s usual tact, Verona is slack, and the courtship’s play at times looks directed rather than found. Below Tokyo Story (9.3) and Citizen Kane (9.4).
Luciano Laurana and Francesco di Giorgio Martini · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The courtyard’s arcades are proportioned and cut with a precision few contemporary works match, the inscriptions laid out in Roman capitals of exemplary form, the corner piers solving in stone what the column could not. The Torricini rise from the slope on substructures that carry a palace front over a drop, spiral stairs and loggias fitted together in a narrow depth. Francesco di Giorgio’s ramp is a feat of engineering for horse traffic. The carved frames and chimneypieces are fine decorative stonework, the intarsia perspective in wood of rare height. Held below 9.0 because the making is unequal: the piazza front raw, the junctions with older blocks visible.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Buñuel’s craft is economy, and here it is complete and load-bearing. Aguayo’s photography is plain and exact, and the film’s argument, that the sacred and the obscene are one order of fact, rests on that evenness. The Last Supper, the beggars ranged along the table and frozen for the photograph, is a feat of composition that looks like nothing. The Angelus montage argues by its cutting alone. The feast is edited from slow accumulation into chaos under the chorus, the music laid against the action with complete control. Fernando Rey makes Don Jaime tender and his desire monstrous, never caricature; Silvia Pinal holds Viridiana’s purity without sanctimony. Held from the top by a few functional transitions.
Fra Angelico · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of fresco of a high order. The colour is laid in pale, luminous fields that keep one key across the whole wall; the angel’s wings are banded in stripes of colour; the drapery of both figures is modelled in broad, quiet planes; the faces are drawn with economy. The architecture is built with a sure grasp of the new perspective, and the light is unified and without a source. At the highest marks the making is load-bearing, and here it is: the restraint is the craft, and a heavier hand would break the meaning. Held below 9.0 by what a strict reading of the drawing asks of it, and by the shop’s share in the painting, which is not certain; above it stand the greatest fresco painters of the century.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. The photography is its summit: Almendros’s and Wexler’s exteriors at the edge of dark, interiors lit from windows and lamps, the fields photographed as the dramatic scene. The sound is exact and is half the film: wind in the wheat, the threshing machines, insects, the fire, voices at a distance across fields. Morricone’s score is spare and placed. The editing makes a story of fragments and holds it to ninety-four minutes. Manz’s narration, flat, odd and unteachable, is one of the great voices in American film; Shepard’s farmer is laconic and exact; Adams is good. The costs fall on real shares: Gere’s Bill is thin and petulant where the triangle needs a man of force, the dramatic scenes are underwritten, and in the second half the binding by narration shows its seams.
Reed and Stem, and Warren and Wetmore · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and engineering included. The engineering is of the first rank and load-bearing: an electrified two-level yard with loop tracks, decked in steel to carry streets and buildings, excavated and built in stages while the old terminal kept running; the roadway threaded round the building; the ramps graded for crowds. The craft of the head house is in full command: the proportion of the south front and the Coutan group above it; the Guastavino vaults; the stone, brass and lighting of the concourse; the restoration of 1998 handled with care. The costs: the concourse vault is a ceiling hung from trusses, not a built vault, so the room's chief figure is scenery over steel; the ornament is applied in the manner of its school; and the corridors and lesser passages are handled less surely than the great room.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making is load-bearing throughout. Wilder and Chandler’s dialogue is clipped and exact, each exchange a contest. John F. Seitz lights the house through blinds, with dust in the shafts, and keeps the office a bright grid. Doane Harrison cuts the murder, the car and the train to the second. Miklós Rózsa’s score, hard and insistent, carries dread under the talk. Stanwyck plays falseness without tipping it, Robinson carries a whole moral world in fast talk and a cigar, and MacMurray’s ease turns to fear by degrees. The costs: Stanwyck’s wig, meant to look cheap, sometimes only looks wrong; the voice-over now and then states what we see; two young players are flat; some of the banter is pleased with itself. It sits a tenth below The Third Man and Chinatown.
Bernardo Bertolucci · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Read against the anchors every desk shares, near the top and below it. The making is load-bearing throughout. Storaro’s light divides the film: cold blue and grey in Rome, warmer and freer in Paris, the last colour drained to snow, and every scene has a lighting idea that serves the argument. Scarfiotti’s sets and the architecture found for them make the regime a space. Arcalli’s cutting carries the chronology, so that the drive and the past interleave without confusion. Delerue’s score gives the film the tenderness its hero lacks. Trintignant’s Marcello, stiff, watchful and rigid in his walk, is a performance of a man acting normal; Sanda’s Anna and Sandrelli’s Giulia are each exact in a different register. The costs fall on small shares: Giulia is played broad in her first scenes, the sound at times sits loose on the picture, and the asylum and the mother’s villa are design before drama.
Marilynne Robinson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Robinson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long sentence and its measure: periodic, cadenced, clause laid on clause in the manner of the King James, closing on a plain word. The opening paragraph, a run of custodians in order with each departure in a subordinate clause, is a comedy of syntax as much as a list of losses. The exactness is of things and habits: the great-aunts’ anxieties, Sylvie eating in the dark, the newspapers and tins kept in the parlour, the leaves blown into the rooms. Aphorism is pressed into the narration without breaking it: “Fact explains nothing”; “To crave and to have are as like as a thing and its shadow.” Charged: the dialogue is sparse and Lucille’s speech flatter than the narration around her; the late chapters carry plot in summary; and a few meditations reach for an elevation the plain passages earn better.
Artemisia Gentileschi · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil painting. The making bears load throughout: the flesh of three bodies under one light, the man’s slack weight and the women’s tension told apart; the head, upside down and foreshortened toward the viewer, drawn without error; the gold damask of the dress, its sheen painted against the blood; the white sheet with its stains; the jets of blood laid in fine arcs; the steel of the sword. The light is managed with complete control, falling on what the act needs and leaving the rest in the dark. The costs: Judith’s arms are long, and their straightness is more diagrammatic than anatomical, though it is also the pyramid’s instrument; and the dark ground is inert where the best Caravaggesque darkness is a space.
Yasunari Kawabata · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Kawabata’s Japanese as far as this reading can know it, and in agreement with the long consensus of Japanese readers that the prose is among the most admired in the modern language. The opening’s two short sentences, the second with its startling “bottom of the night”, place the reader in the world and in the book’s mode at once. The images are exact and never decorative. The dialogue is quick, oblique and full of things not said, and Komako’s speech has a life the narrative voice withholds from Shimamura. The making carries the meaning, in the placing of images and in the ellipses. Charged for the seams of serial composition: repetition in the autumn section, and the sudden acceleration of the ending, which some readers find hurried. That holds it below 9.
Octavio Paz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Paz’s Spanish, and on the movement of the line in the passages known closely. Command of the line is the poem’s first virtue: 584 hendecasyllables sustained without monotony, the accent moved within the line and the sentence run across it, so that the classical metre becomes a current; the anaphora of the opening, “un sauce de cristal, un chopo de agua”
“a willow of crystal, a poplar of water”, and its exact recurrence; the long syntax held without a full stop and without losing its grammatical thread, the hardest feat in the poem; and the plain statement of the Madrid lines set in the storm of images with no change of metre. The closing colon is the most economical ending in the poetry of its century. Against 9: the image-chains sometimes spend the line on the easy surrealist conjunction, water and fire, crystal and blood, and the abstractions of the late movements can thin the verse to statement.
Luchino Visconti · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Giuseppe Rotunno’s photography in Technirama gives the rooms their depth, the ball its candlelit warmth and the exteriors the heat of Sicily. Mario Garbuglia’s design, real palazzi and Piero Tosi’s costumes make the period a lived world rather than a dressed set. Rota’s score and a waltz by Verdi carry the ball. Burt Lancaster’s Prince, slow, ironic, physically heavy and then tired, is the film’s centre and one of its era’s great performances; Paolo Stoppa’s Don Calogero is comedy that turns into power. The staging of the ball, hundreds of figures moving through connected rooms around one man’s passage, is a feat of direction. The charges: the whole cast is post-synchronised and the leading voices are not the actors’; the Palermo battle is staged in the inherited manner; the middle at Donnafugata moves slowly in places.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. Delli Colli’s photography holds three periods in three palettes without announcing them, and the rebuilt streets of the Lower East Side and the framing of the bridge give the childhood a weight of place the later sequences lean on. Baragli’s cutting carries the film’s thought: transitions on a sound, a look or an object, the telephone carried across scenes, an old face matched to a young one. Morricone’s score is used sparingly and structurally. Leone’s patience with duration, the long looks and slow tracking, is technique, not indulgence, in most scenes. The costs: uneven ageing make-up in 1968, broad playing in some 1933 scenes, middle passages that run on their own momentum.
Edward Yang · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The command bears weight throughout. Yang Wei-han’s photography and Yang’s staging set figures in deep space, through doorways, in reflections and at a distance that keeps every person in a room with others; the night glass of office and hotel is the film’s signature. Chen Bo-wen’s cutting holds five strands in balance across three hours without signposts, and the parallel sequence in Tokyo and Taipei is exact. Wu Nien-jen’s tired decency, Issey Ogata’s gentle Ota, Elaine Jin’s collapse and Jonathan Chang’s stillness in the last scene are of a high order. Sound is placed with care, from Beethoven at the piano to traffic below a window. The costs: Kelly Lee and the actors of the Fatty strand are less sure, the killing is staged against the film’s method, and the business scenes are plainly shot.
Gabriel García Márquez · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the Spanish, the command is near the summit of the novel in that language in its century. The sentences are long, balanced and periodic, comic in their exactness and elegiac in their rhythm, and they move a whole life in a clause; the opening sentence sets the book’s key of fate, smell and irony at once. The management of time is masterly: fifty years compressed and dilated without confusion, gossip and interior life folded into one narration, and the set pieces, the death of Urbino, the funeral, the voyage, built with a dramatist’s control. The comedy is precise and never breaks the elegy. What holds the axis below the top is the uniformity of the manner across six hundred affairs and fifty years. Its smoothness sometimes glides where it should cut: the death of América Vicuña is told in the same supple cadence as a dinner party, which is the point, but also a cost; and the middle’s episodes are made with less tension than the frame. A step below Anna Karenina and Blood Meridian.
Ovid · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin, as a reader of Latin verse judges it, not with a native ear: the metre can be scanned, its music judged only in part. The command of the elegiac couplet is as fluent as anything in Latin: the antithesis balanced across the pentameter, the closing word placed as a turn, the wit kept alive in grief. 1.3 moves as narrative inside the couplet without strain; 3.10 makes ethnographic report into verse of exact physical detail; 4.10 compresses a life into a hundred and thirty-two lines with every date and name in place, the birthplace, Sulmo, named in its third line. The book claims its own decay (3.14.46) and the verse refutes the claim, which is part of the craft. The charges: facility, the couplet’s habit of saying a thing twice, and a sameness of cadence across the shorter poems.
Olmec · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and bears the work. Basalt is hard and brittle, and the carvers, working with harder stone hammers and abrasives, brought out of it faces whose surfaces swell and soften like flesh: full lips slightly parted, the fleshy pads of the cheeks, the lids over the eyes, the creases at the nose. The volumes are held as one mass, no part cut loose from the block, which is both the limit of the technique and its achievement. The helmets are cut in clean low relief and told apart head from head. The making includes the quarrying and the moving, which are part of what the work is. Held just below the nines because the craft is uneven: the San Lorenzo heads are the finest, the Tres Zapotes and La Cobata heads cruder and more schematic, and the body is scored as one.
Günter Behnisch and Frei Otto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing in the strictest sense. The form was found by physical model and then by computation, the net’s geometry fixed to the length of its cables; the mesh is standard, its crossings clamped by repeated fittings; the masts are pinned so that the net settles into its own equilibrium; the edge cables lead the forces to anchors set in the ground. The cover was a problem solved: rigid panels on a moving net, held on flexible points, with joints to let the net breathe. It was built in time for the Games. The costs: the cover was the weak point, a material that ages and leaks and has needed replacement; the structure covers one side of the stadium only; and the cost overran heavily, the price of a method invented under a deadline. The command is of the first rank, held below the summit by the cover.
Parmigianino · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of oil on panel at altarpiece scale, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load: the claim of the picture is made in the drawing. The Virgin’s contour runs as one long unbroken line from head to knee. The hands, the long fingers spread over the breast, are drawn with an authority few contemporaries matched. The flesh has an enamelled finish and the light is cold and exact; the silk over the belly is modelled so that the navel shows through it; the angel’s leg and the vessel are painted with a polish that makes surface an argument. The costs: the crowded heads at the left are less resolved and some formulaic, the right side is sketch, and the junction of the two spaces is not worked out.
Anonymous; Octagon by William Hurley and Alan of Walsingham · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on command of the medium, structure included. The Octagon is the achievement: eight stone piers carry a timber vault whose raking members lift the lantern on its eight great posts, an assembly of large oak timbers raised to a height and span English carpentry had not reached, standing since the fourteenth century with repair. The vault is timber made to look like stone, which may count against its candour but not its skill. The Lady Chapel spans a wide unaisled room in stone under a lierne vault and lines it with carving of great delicacy. Held below the top because the Norman fabric’s skill is of its kind, not exceptional.
Pérotin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight. Four voices, three of them in one range, are kept consonant at every strong beat of the mode across spans of minutes; voice exchange is used as structure, so that the same material passes between voices and the ear hears motion where the harmony stands still; phrase-ends are staggered so that the texture never stops at once; and the change from held tenor to measured discant is timed to the chant’s own melismas. Nothing falls short of its intention. Held below the Goldberg Variations (9.7) and Otello (9.5): the harmonic vocabulary is narrow, fifths and octaves over one held pitch, the same few sonorities for minutes, and the patterning in the upper voices is formulaic in places. Only the maker’s share of that narrowness is charged.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Eliot’s English, with nothing between. The command is of the short line and the incantatory repetition, and it is exact. The sound carries the meaning: the dry sibilants and hard stops of “rats’ feet over broken glass”; the chiastic doubling of “Shape without form, shade without colour”; the Shadow falling into its own margin; the slackening of “Life is very long” between the strict stanzas; the line “This is the way the world ends” said three times before the turn to “Not with a bang but a whimper”, which drops the rhythm on its last word. The allusions are worked in at the level of the line, not attached. Held below the top on two charges: the third and fourth parts are less pressed than the others, with images such as “this valley of dying stars” close to the stock of the period; and in so narrowed a poem the range of instruments is small.
Katsushika Hokusai · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the colour woodblock, in design, cutting and printing together. The design: the slope drawn in one long line, the cone’s profile exact, the snow set down the gullies in a few cuts, the forest as a texture of dots that becomes a forest at reading distance, the clouds in rows that recede by size. The cutting and printing, credited to the work: several blocks in register, colour graded by hand in the sky and on the cone, Prussian blue held flat and graded. The image is its making, which is what the highest marks ask. Held a tenth below The Starry Night and Broadway Boogie Woogie (9.0 each) because the range of command is narrow, a few shapes and a few colours, and the finest part of the making, the early colour, varies by hand from sheet to sheet.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The prose is his most compressed: adjectival, Latinate in its syntax, exact in its numbers and names, with the false erudition carried at the level of the clause, down to the capitals of a seventeenth century book, “Desmesurados Mapas”. The verse returns to fixed forms with command: the hendecasyllables and rhymed quatrains of “Poema de los dones”, whose refrain of ironies turns without strain; the two sonnets of “Ajedrez”; the unrhymed hendecasyllables of “Arte poética” and “Límites”. In the brief prose a single adjective or date carries the turn. Charged for a sameness of device across the prose, the mirror, the labyrinth, the inversion in the last line, and for occasional poems in which the craft is correct and idle. The sound of the verse beyond what is known with certainty is neither credited nor charged.
Utagawa Hiroshige · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the colour woodblock, judged as made by designer, carver and printer together. The making is load-bearing. The rain of Sudden Shower is cut as fine parallel lines across the whole sheet, at two angles, without a slip. The graded skies pass from deep blue or red to bare paper in a few centimetres and carry the hour. The snow at Kinryūzan and Susaki is paper left bare against grey and dark. The keyblock line is spare, so that colour carries the depth, and the near motif is designed to the edge of the sheet in full control of its weight against the small distance. Charged: the run is uneven, some middle sheets routine in drawing and figure, the last plates by or with another hand, and the printing uneven across the edition.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. At the scale of carving the making is among the finest in Greek marble: the braided capitals of the north porch, the anthemion bands, the north door with its rosettes, and the six korai, each varied, each carrying the load through drapery that falls like a column’s flutes and a neck thickened by hair to take the weight. The frieze set white figures on dark stone, an unusual and exacting technique. The jointing of the main block over the fall of the ground, the coffered marble ceiling of the north porch and the joining of four column heights and their entablatures are skilled work. Held below the top: the structure is ordinary trabeation, and the composition shows its joints, most at the west front. The making is load-bearing in detail, not in structure.
Joseph Wright of Derby · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the subject is light, and the light is managed with exceptional control. One hidden source models a whole company of heads at different distances, each falling off in its own degree, so that faces near the candle are lit warm from below and those at the edges sink to brown. The glass receiver is painted as glass, transparent, reflecting, catching the light at its rim; liquid in the vessel refracts the flame. The bird’s whiteness is the brightest note without breaking the dark, and the moon is a cool counter-light held in its own register. The costs are charged: some figures are posed as in a portrait group, the couple at the left are stiff, and the drapery is competent rather than inspired.
Aretha Franklin · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium. The voice is the load-bearing making: range, timing, power held in reserve and released, the control of pitch at the edge of the note, the placement of each phrase against the band. The piano is the record’s second instrument: the gospel chords that open “A Change Is Gonna Come” and set the feel of “Do Right Woman” are hers. The rhythm section plays with restraint, bass and drums in the pocket; the saxophone break in “Respect” is exact; the sisters’ voices are arranged as a choir in miniature; Dowd’s recording keeps the room clear and the voice forward. The costs: routine arrangements on “Good Times”, “Soul Serenade” and “Save Me”, some perfunctory horn charts, and fades that cut several performances off before they finish.
John Crowley · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Crowley’s English, and the command is high and load-bearing. The prose is the book’s chief instrument: long, cadenced, exact sentences that hold a comic domestic register and a visionary one in the same paragraph, and a voice that can speak of seasons and generations without losing the single afternoon. The construction is intricate: the cards, the genealogy, the orrery and the parallel of house and book are worked into the plot rather than laid on it, and the end gathers threads laid hundreds of pages before. The character work is fine in the women of the house, Daily Alice, Sophie, Aunt Cloud and Violet, and in Smoky. Charged: the Eigenblick and Hawksquill chapters are plotted with less finish, the City strand sags in Auberon’s long decline, and the pace of the middle books slows past what the design needs.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight throughout. The courtyard set, built whole on a Paramount stage with working apartments and lights cued to the hours, holds dozens of lives in one frame. Robert Burks’s colour moves the yard from glare to dusk to night; George Tomasini’s cutting between Jeff’s face and his view carries the film’s thinking; the sound is the yard’s own, a piano, radios, the street through the alley, a scream at night; Edith Head’s dresses tell Lisa’s story. Stewart acts mostly in reaction and from a chair, irritable, curious and afraid; Kelly gives Lisa wit and nerve; Ritter’s Stella is the film’s dry conscience. The costs keep it below the top: the flashbulbs and the fall show their process work, Corey’s Doyle is stiff and his scenes stall, and the long talk in the apartment is staged plainly between the brilliant views.
Unknown court painters (Heian period) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The tsukuri-e method, “made picture”, lays mineral colour in layers over an ink underdrawing and then draws the line again over the colour, and it builds figures of planes of robe, so that the body is a mass of patterned silk and the posture reads through the fall of the cloth. The geometry is exact: parallel diagonals of beam and veranda organise every room, and screens and curtains set at angles fix each figure in its isolation. Where colour survives, in the robes of Minori and the Azumaya interiors, it is calibrated and rich. The calligraphy, in varied hands on paper decorated with gold and silver, is a second craft of the first rank. The costs: the hands vary in quality, some placements are stiff, and the full surface can no longer be judged.
The Strokes · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the same anchors as every desk. The making is load-bearing, because the sound is the stance. The two guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. are arranged as parts of one machine: one holds a chopping rhythm, the other a melodic line, and they rarely double. Fabrizio Moretti’s drums keep a dry, unvarying time close to a drum machine’s; Nikolai Fraiture’s bass carries the title song’s melody. Gordon Raphael’s sound is dry, close and exact, the voice deliberately degraded, and the narrow palette is used with precision; Valensi’s short solos are written, not jammed. The faults: a palette so narrow that tracks blur, a filter that sometimes obscures more than it distances, and three songs made to a formula. The aim is narrow, and within it nearly faultless.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The sentence is the book’s great instrument: long periodic runs of concrete nouns, the King James parataxis of “and” upon “and”, rare words used exactly, and dialogue without marks that holds a dozen voices apart, the Black speech of the Flats, Harrogate’s country idiom, the lawyer’s prose of the father’s letter. The scenes are as exactly made: the drowned man raised from the river, the workhouse, the Reese camp, the hospital. The comic timing of Harrogate’s episodes is as exact as the elegy elsewhere. Charged: the vocabulary sometimes turns to display, a rare word chosen where a plain one would carry more; the descriptive set pieces repeat their effects; and the structure, a run of episodes, is less commanded than the sentence. At this height the making must bear the book, and here it largely does.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing. Chamberlin’s drumming is the record’s highest craft: the roll that opens Cherub Rock, the speed and swing of Geek U.S.A., a jazz player’s touch under rock’s weight. The orchestration of the guitars is a real command, many parts layered so that the wall stays legible, solos placed as climaxes, Soma’s flood exactly timed. Disarm’s arrangement for strings and bells is exact, and Vig’s production keeps the density clear. The faults fall across a share of the record: Corgan’s voice is a narrow instrument, nasal and close, which serves the dream but cannot carry the height the guitars reach; the guitar is near one tone for an hour; Silverfuck and Hummer extend past their writing; Sweet Sweet is unfinished.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Severe and nearly faultless. Not one raised dialogue attribution in forty-three thousand words, and a single adverb on a spoken line, “Stay there,” said quietly in a motel room to a woman lying awake with her face to the wall. The dialogue is the best of its kind on the bench: the brothers at the station, a telephone call heard from one end only, a brother at the kitchen table who can change a field. The log is a second register exactly pitched, its fields never once breaking into feeling, and the wood lot is made with the precision of a shop manual. The negation has been cut by more than half. The axis stops short of the top on a slip of continuity, fifteen years of silence against a brother last seen at a funeral ten years back, and on the occasions a prose this stripped still forgoes.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Johnnie Burn’s sound is the film’s second camera: shots, cries, dogs, trains and furnaces laid under the daylight, always present and never foregrounded. Łukasz Żal’s even photography from fixed positions makes the house a document with no visible hand. Mica Levi’s music is kept to the edges and is the more terrible for it. Sandra Hüller’s Hedwig, proprietary, vain, coarse and fierce for her home, makes not one appeal to the audience; Christian Friedel’s Höss is a functionary whose body betrays him only at the end. The costs: variety of performance and of image is given up by choice, and strain shows where the form underlines itself.
Massive Attack · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing, and the low end is its signature: bass placed so that it occupies the room without blurring what sits above it. Sampled and played parts are joined so that the seam disappears; the drums are dry and heavy; guitars are used as weather, entering as storm. Fraser’s voice in Teardrop and Group Four is the record’s highest single performance, Horace Andy’s falsetto its most human, and the mix keeps a dense, dark record legible through sixty-three minutes. The faults fall across a share of it: the whispered voices of Risingson, Inertia Creeps and the title track are narrow instruments, several loops are held long, and the second half’s arrangements are plainer than the first’s.
Voltaire · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is of the first order. The prose is the model of French ironic narration: clear, fast, deflationary, the sentence turning in its last clause, as when an admiral is shot now and then “pour encourager les autres”, to encourage the others (chapter 23). The control of tone across horror and farce never slips. The syphilis traced from Columbus to Paquette, the “métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologie” of the first chapter and Pangloss’s noses “faits pour porter des lunettes”, made to wear spectacles, show a comic precision that serves the argument, and the chapter titles keep a parody going through thirty heads. Held below 9.0 because the construction is loose by design and the looseness sometimes shows, in the grudges of chapter 22 and the stock reunions of the second half. The French is judged at the passages known; its sound beyond them is neither credited nor charged.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of oil on oak at a width of about a metre and a half, to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The drawing of the whole is the achievement: the diagonal locked against the door-tray, the crowd varied without confusion, each figure a clear, closed volume, legible at distance. Colour is placed as structure, the reds and whites and the green behind the bride distributed so that the eye is carried down the table and stopped at her. The handling is economical, thin and sure: faces stated in a few planes, cloth by its fall, the bowls and jugs given their weight. The costs are charged: the faces are types more than individuals, some of the far crowd is summary, and the paint has not the range of Velázquez or Titian.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of poured paint on a large field, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing everywhere. Viscosity: the line’s weight is governed by how thin the paint was and how fast the arm moved, from hair-thin threads to pooled skeins, and it is governed, not suffered, across three metres. Colour: the key holds edge to edge, the haze made by the eye mixing at a distance, with the aluminium as a cold counter-light. Density: even without monotony, the field neither clotting into a centre nor failing at the margins. The costs: the range of mark is narrower than a brush allows, and puddles in places sit as accident rather than decision. The command is complete within a method whose range is narrow by its nature.
Vladimir Nabokov · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Nabokov’s English, with no translation between. The command of the language is among the highest of any novelist of the century: the precision of description, orchids, butterflies, light on water; a syntax that carries wit and sorrow in one clause; the trilingual pun; and an architecture that times Lucette’s death and the last meeting at Mont Roux with a composer’s care. The opening inversion of Tolstoy announces a writer in total command of his means. Charged: the manner hardens into mannerism, the alliteration and wordplay are relentless, and many readers have found whole chapters airless and arch; the knowingness that serves Van’s character also tires the reader. The craft is load-bearing in the best chapters and decorative in the weakest, which sets it below Lolita and Pale Fire.
Auguste Rodin · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of modelling in clay for bronze, and it is very high. The back is a landscape of planes, each catching the light; the feet grip; the hand under the chin is pressed into the jaw so that the jaw shifts; the thick neck carries the head down with real weight. The whole is drawn so that from the front and the side the figure closes into a compact block and from three-quarters it opens into the twist. The surface, never smoothed, bears load. The charges: the enlargement was made mechanically by a professional enlarger, with Rodin reworking it, the standard practice; at the large size the musculature is inflated, some passages, the thighs and the shoulders, read as bulk rather than structure, and from the front the head is small against the body. Under The Large Bathers’ 8.8 in nothing; under Las Meninas’ 9.8 by the distance between a supreme figure and a supreme field.
Gandharan · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of carving in schist, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the anatomy and the anatomy by the chisel. The rib cage is cut deep and even without monotony, each rib a ridge with its shadow; the sternum and collarbones stand forward; the belly falls back into a cavity under the ribs, the hardest passage and the most convincing. The cords over the chest and arms run in low relief across the forms without breaking them. The face, with its sunk eyes and taut skin over the cheekbones, holds composure without softening the wasting. The charges: the drapery folds are the workshop’s regular pattern, competent and formulaic; the symmetry of the ribs is schematic as much as observed; halo and base are routine. A master’s figure set in a school’s frame, level with The Swing at 8.9.
Evelyn Waugh · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Waugh’s English is among the most exact of the century, and here it is at full command: dialogue that characterises in two lines, a single flat sentence of report timed after pages of chatter, a comic cadence held through grief. The structure is as finely made as the prose. The child’s death is deferred until the reader has been lulled; Tony’s expedition is cross-cut with London; the City is planted early and returns in the fever; and the last chapter closes the book at Hetton, on the inheritance and the memorial, in a page. Command of the medium is what the axis weighs, not ambition of means. The one charge is that the transitions in the forest chapters, and the ending taken from a story, show some seam to a close reader.
Bruce Graham and Fazlur Khan (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Techne includes structure and engineering, and here the making is load-bearing in the literal sense. The command of the structural medium is of the first rank: columns, diagonals and ties proportioned so that the whole face acts as one braced tube, meeting at nodes that carry the forces round the building, with a material economy that was the point of the design. The architectural command is of a piece with it: the taper resolved so that the diagonals stay true on faces that narrow as they rise, the black skin drawn tight over the frame so that it reads clean. The costs: the top and masts are resolved more roughly than the rest, the street level is detailed below the tower’s standard, and much of the interior is ordinary work.
Unknown (English or French) · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of egg tempera and gold on small panels, judged against the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The heaven of the right wing is made of its materials: ultramarine laid in quantity over the angels’ robes and the Virgin’s mantle, gold tooled and punched in patterns that change with the light, and the gold ground of the left wing worked with a pattern of its own. The drawing of the faces is fine and individual: the king’s profile, the saints’ grave heads, the angels’ tilted attention. The detail at minute scale, the hart badges, the broom pods, the brocade of the king’s robe, shows a command few painters of the decade matched. The costs: figures slender and boneless in the court manner, a shallow space on a strip of ground, and angels of one repeated type.
Alice Munro · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Munro’s English, with no translation between. The command is of structure and of the sentence together, and it is load-bearing. The leaps in time are placed so that the reader does not see the seam until it is crossed; information is withheld and released at the point where it revalues everything before; the endings land on a small concrete thing, a gesture, an object, an overheard line, that carries the story’s whole weight. The sentence is plain, exact and unhurried, and its register shifts without a mark between a girl’s spite, an old professor’s self-examination and a housekeeper’s practical thoughts. The title story’s management of the forged correspondence is a feat of plotting done without visible plot. Held below the top on three charges: the method is so consistent that its moves become predictable across nine stories; not every story is pressed as hard as the best; and the range of voice is narrower than the range of people.
Joseph Paxton · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Structure and engineering are the making, and the making is load-bearing. The command of the medium is exact: a module derived from a pane; a roof that drains, glazes and is maintained from its own gutters; columns that carry and drain; parts cast to pattern and checked on site; an erection planned as a sequence and completed, with the transept, in some five months; the galleries tested before opening. Owen Jones’s colour gave the iron a single reading, and the laminated timber vault of the transept is an elegant answer at its span. Held below the top because the iron details are workmanlike rather than refined; because timber gutters, sash bars and floors left the building combustible, a weakness in the making itself; and because at Sydenham the enlargement added grandeur more than precision.
The Smile · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing throughout. Greenwood’s guitar figures are exact and difficult, and his bass, where he plays it, locks with the drums. Skinner’s playing is the centre of the making, loose in feel and exact in placement, crossing meters without strain, so that the record’s unrest and its control are carried by one pair of hands. The string writing has a composer’s hand, entering under Pana-vision and Speech Bubbles without sweetening them. Godrich keeps the trio dry and present. Held from the top by faults that are real and spread: the voice is often set back and blurred, some tracks are sketches dressed as songs, and fifty-three minutes dilute the precision.
Ilya Repin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the meaning is in the individuation, and the individuation is drawing and painting. Each head is a portrait with its own bone, age and temper; each body leans into the strap at its own angle and with its own share of the weight, so that the load is distributed visibly along the file. The light is a plein-air light, white and dry, laid over the ochres and dun of the sand and the rags, with one accent of red at the boy’s shirt that brings the eye to the centre. The costs are charged: the arrangement is a studio construction from studies and shows a little in the evenness of the frieze; the sky and water are thin and serviceable; the group’s middle is crowded, its legs and bodies harder to read than its heads.
George Gilbert Scott and William Henry Barlow · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on command of building, structure first, on the whole as it stands. The shed’s making is load-bearing everywhere: a tied arch of 240 feet in wrought iron, its thrust contained by the deck, the deck carried on a grid that is also the warehouse below, the iron made and raised by one firm in a few years. Scott’s hotel is masonry command of the first rank: brick and stone in colour, shafts of polished granite, a long curving front held in one rhythm, the stair rising under its vault, every surface detailed. The work of 2007 is skilled, the reglazing and the cut deck above all, and the extension is sound and plain. The costs: where iron meets the back of the masonry there is a seam, not a joint; the hotel’s ornament is often applied surface; the extension’s craft is competent rather than load-bearing.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Daniel Day-Lewis builds Reynolds from small controls: the eyes over the teacup, the voice kept low until it breaks, a body precise until it is ill. Vicky Krieps holds her ground with a stillness that hides intention until the end; Lesley Manville’s Cyril governs the house with a single look. Greenwood’s score carries the romantic surface the plot undermines. Mark Bridges’s costumes are the House’s work made visible, plausible as great couture. The uncredited camera is quiet and exact, and Dylan Tichenor’s cutting keeps the long meals tense. The costs: the score’s near continuity flattens contrast in the middle stretch, and the clients and the doctor are sketched.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The ear for speech is exact: the sister’s brittle impatience, Lily’s Southern helplessness, the lawyers’ telephone shorthand, all unattributed and almost always identifiable. The pastiche of legal prose is not parody but mastery: the judge’s opinions are good law, in the right cadence and the right habit of citation, and read as the work of a real mind. The play is written badly in exactly the way Oscar would write it, a harder feat than writing it well. The structure moves several suits in parallel without a narrator and lands them. Charged: the method’s tics, the fragmentary dashes and interruptions in series, harden over the length, and Lily’s voice is held to one note far longer than its function needs.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between; the untranslated Spanish is part of that English. The command is high and load-bearing over most of the book. The first sentence, with “the image of the candleflame caught in the pierglass”, sets the register: a funeral seen as light and reflection, with the boy entering it. The horse-work is the summit of the making. The breaking of the wild horses is written with an exactness of tack, gesture and animal response that carries the book’s claim about the boy, and a sentence on what he loved in horses and in men, “the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them”, states it. The boys’ talk is laconic, exactly timed and often comic; Alfonsa’s monologue is another instrument, formal and periodic. Charged: the love scenes are written in a lyric that inflates as it thins; the rare word set where a plain one would serve recurs; and some long sentences reach for a scriptural cadence their matter does not need.
Bichitr · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of opaque watercolour and gold at miniature scale, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the argument is carried by finish. The faces are portraits of a precision few painters in any tradition reach at this size, the emperor’s profile modelled with a softness taken from European example and held inside a Mughal contour; the English king’s face is translated from its source into the Mughal manner without losing its likeness; textiles, jewels, fur and the gold of the halo are laid with a control that never thickens. The composition locks a diagonal of rank against the vertical of the throne. The costs: the putti are stiff and pasted, foreign quotations not fully absorbed, and the depth is staged as planes rather than built as space.
Han Gan · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of brush and ink is very high and load-bearing. The contour is continuous and tense where the body is taut, broken and quick in the mane, exact at the hooves; the wash is laid thin and graded to give round mass to chest and haunch without any colour; the eye and nostril, the hardest things to make alive, are made alive in a few touches. Nothing is overstated. The figure stops a little short of the top of the scale because the range of what the making commands is narrow: one animal, one post, no space, no light beyond modelling. Las Meninas (9.2) commands a whole room; this sheet commands one body, completely.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil with metal leaf and relief on canvas, to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing. The face and shoulders are modelled in a thin, cool, exact oil and set into the gold without a halo or a break. The hands, the hardest passage, are drawn into a single knot of fingers that is both gesture and pattern. The gold is laid in more than one tone, with silver, and the relief lets ornaments catch the light as raised objects; eyes, spirals and rectangles are executed with a goldsmith’s precision across a field 138 centimetres square. The transition from flesh to ornament at the neck and wrists is the whole technical problem, and it is solved. Held below 9.0 because the leaf does much of the work any gold ground does, and the gown’s patterning is a craftsman’s repertoire well applied more than a means invented for this picture.
Vladimir Shukhov · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included, and the making is load-bearing in the strictest sense. The geometry of each hyperboloid is set so that straight members of standard section, crossed and joined to rings, form a stiff curved surface; the sections are proportioned to a load that diminishes upward and to the wind that passes through them; and the whole was raised section by section through the one below, with winches and without scaffolding, a method of building that is itself part of the design. What holds it below the very top: the erection failed once in 1921, a sign of a method at its limit, which is weighed under The Imperishable; and the detailing has not kept out corrosion, which charges the making a little.
Buster Keaton · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. The screen-entry montage needs the actor placed to the inch across setups so that the cut changes the world and not the man, and it holds. The billiard shots, the dive through the window, the motorcycle ride and the fall from the train roof by the water tower are timed and framed so that the stunt is seen whole, in long shot and unbroken, which is the condition of their truth. Keaton’s performance is exact: a still face, an eloquent body, a gag built in three beats and resolved in one, and forty-five minutes paced near flawlessly. The costs: the waking courtship is lit and staged flatly, the supporting players are types, and the plot of the pearls is perfunctory.
Ansel Adams · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of black and white large-format photography, from exposure to print. The making bears the load at every stage. Exposure: without a meter, reckoned from the known luminance of the moon and placed on the scale so that the moon would hold detail and the lit crosses read white, done in the seconds the light allowed, on a single negative that held what the image needed. Printing: the sky burned down to near black while moon and clouds keep their separation; crosses and church held bright against a dark middle ground; the snow line luminous under the cloud; the whole scale used without blocking. Costs: an underexposed foreground that needed rescue, the range of one negative and one printing problem, and a late sky some judge too dark.
Jean-Siméon Chardin · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the handling. The ray’s interior is built in a dragged and loaded paint with glazes over it, so that the red, the rose and the nacre have depth and wetness; the oysters are a few touches of grey and white that are wet shell; the copper takes the light in a few placed strokes; the cloth’s white is modulated by the dark ground. The tonal control is fine, one dim kitchen light across a dozen materials. The costs are charged: the cat is drawn with less authority than the fish is painted, its body stiff and its pose staged; the ledge is crowded at the right; the space of the recess is summary. A young master in full command of matter, not yet of the economy he reached later.
John Singer Sargent · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a life-size canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the picture’s meaning is its handling. The flesh is modelled with almost no shadow, a pale, cool, continuous surface that reads as powder and as marble at once; the black satin is not black but a modulated field whose sheen turns at the hip and the bodice; the profile is drawn with an exactness that gives the head the clarity of relief; the arm’s twist is foreshortened without awkwardness. The economy is the painter’s at its most disciplined, the bravura held in. The costs are charged: the lower skirt and the table are summary, and the strap’s correction is a visible second thought.
Jean-Honoré Fragonard · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas at cabinet scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the wit is carried by the handling. The pink silk is painted in quick, broken, layered strokes that turn to light and froth; the foliage is a dense, churning mass of greens and browns laid with a loaded and fluent brush, dark enough to make her shine; the light is placed with a stage director’s control, falling on her and leaving the old man in shadow, so that light is the plot. The slipper is a few strokes in the air. The costs are charged: the figures are drawn with less authority than they are painted, the two men’s faces are summary, and some passages of foliage are bravura that fills rather than builds.
P. G. Wodehouse · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
The making is the book’s chief strength. Its command of the medium at the level of the sentence is near the top of English comic prose: the simile that is exact and absurd at once, the slang that is always precise, the mangled quotation whose half-memory is itself characterisation, the paragraph timed so that the joke lands on its last words. The construction matches it: four plots run at once and are brought down together, the orange juice is planted and doubled before it is paid off, and the prize-giving is built over pages with an escalation that never slackens. The making sits level with the best of the posted literature below the summit. Held short of the top because the command, though complete, is command of a narrow register: the prose never has to carry grief, landscape or argument, and the highest marks ask for making that bears more weight.
Frans Hals · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium, and this is the axis where the making is strongest. It is load-bearing: the picture’s claim is a living man in rich clothes, and both halves are achieved by two handlings held in one surface. The face is built with quick, sure touches that leave the expression unfixed, so that the smile seems to come and go. The lace collar is painted as light, its pattern given rather than counted. The sleeve is a tour de force of controlled detail, laid with a precision Hals rarely chose. The blacks carry form within near darkness. The costs are charged: the ground is flat, the hand at the hip summary, and the sleeve’s profusion shades toward display.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Ellison’s English, with no translation between. The command is of register, and the range is the widest of any American novel of its decade: the sermon and the folk tale, Trueblood’s dream told in his own voice; the political speech in its several kinds, the eviction and the funeral oration; the jive of the street, the institutional letter, the dream. The opening, “I am an invisible man.”, turns at once to Poe and Hollywood with a comic exactness. Set pieces are timed with precision: the battle royal, the paint factory’s “If It’s Optic White, It’s the Right White”, the hospital. Charged: the Brotherhood’s dialogue is at times wooden exposition, its figures more positions than people; the Sybil scene is crude; the rhetoric of the narrator’s reflection inflates; and at its length the prose is uneven.
Franz Kafka · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Kafka’s German. The sentence is the instrument: clear, exact, often long, built from qualifications that each seem to settle a point and each open another, with a dry comedy of gesture: the assistants, so alike that K. proposes to call both of them Artur; the mayor’s wife Mizzi rummaging the cupboard of files across the floor. The opening two sentences show the economy, arrival and setting and nothing else. Charged on the making as it stands: the manuscript was never revised; the late chapters loosen; the long speeches share one syntax, so that Olga, the landlady, Bürgel and Pepi reason in the same voice and are told apart by matter more than by speech; and a draft’s small inconsistencies of time and detail remain. The sentence is credited at full value; what holds the axis is the making of the whole, an unrevised draft, scored as it was left.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Conrad’s English, his own and no translation, though it was his third language after Polish and French. The command is great: the long periodic sentence that holds an image open, as in the Thames at dusk; the sudden flat sentence that delivers an outrage, “Exterminate all the brutes!”; the irony of the accountant’s collars and the manager’s uneasy smile; the delayed decoding of the attack in the fog; the pacing by which the heads are revealed. The dialogue is spare, and each voice is a person: the manager’s, the Russian’s, the brickmaker’s. Charged on three counts: the adjectival insistence that Leavis named in The Great Tradition (1948), fairly in part; a few constructions that sound carried over from French; and the scene with the Intended, whose rhetoric is heightened to the point of strain, by design or not.
Modest Mussorgsky · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
The prosody is the summit of the making: Russian set so that the music bends to the words’ stress and pitch, in Pimen’s steady narration, Shuisky’s sly courtesy, Varlaam’s drunken bawling and Boris’s broken speech in the clock scene. The harmony is exact for its ends: the bells, the modal chorus writing, the chromatic dread of the hallucination. The dark, spare orchestration, long called crude, is now heard as right for the work. The costs are real: the counterpoint is thin; the joins between tableaux are abrupt rather than made; the Polish dance and duet are conventional; the scoring is uneven in balance. Otello commands every element of its medium; this work commands the elements it needs.
Paul Cézanne · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas over two metres high, built in patches of colour. Load-bearing where it is achieved: modulation, warm ochres against blues doing the modelling with no chiaroscuro; one touch for bark, flesh, cloud and water; the drawing of the whole, the triangle locked to the frame and the bodies’ lean to the trunks’; the contour, blue, repeated, broken, carrying the edge without closing it. The costs are the painter’s own and are charged here. Faces are absent or sketched; the heads of the left group are unresolved; limbs are left as outline; the sky and water are thin washes over bare canvas; the still life and the dog are barely stated. Some of this is the method, which finished nothing, and some is time running out, and the axis cannot tell which. Command at the top; realisation partial.
Luigi Pirandello · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the Italian as far as translation carries it; the music of Pirandello’s prose dialogue is neither credited nor charged. The dramaturgy is masterly in its mechanics: the arrival of the Characters into a dull rehearsal, the Actors’ comedy and the Manager’s practical objections, the double interruption, the setting of Madama Pace’s shop from stock scenery, the scene played twice, first by the Characters and then by the Actors to the Characters’ derision, and the dissolving close, each placed with a sure sense of the stage’s time. The comic and the harrowing are kept in one instrument. Held below the nineties by the Father’s discursive manner, sentences that argue rather than act, and by the Mother’s near-silence, right for her but leaving a principal role played chiefly in gesture and a scream.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The Nashville players read an unfamiliar idiom by ear and made it their own: the drumming sits behind the beat on Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands and drives I Want You, and the organ and guitars weave around the voice rather than accompanying it. The harmonica is placed as a second voice. The melodies are well made: Just Like a Woman’s bridge, I Want You’s circling hook, the long unbroken line of Visions of Johanna. The production keeps the room live, and the playing is surer than the New York sessions of 1965. The faults: the blues numbers are generically arranged, the opener’s chaos is a single joke, and the band of the closing song waits for a climax that never comes.
Ambrogio Lorenzetti · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of fresco across three walls, judged to the anchors of every medium. The making is load-bearing on the east wall: a city of dozens of buildings in a coherent if not single perspective, roofs and loggias stacked and turned so the town reads as one body; figures at work drawn with exact observation, the builders on the scaffold, the woman with a basket on her head, the mule loaded with wool; the landscape modelled hill by hill under one light, with roads that recede. Peace is a figure of drapery and repose as fine as any of its century. The costs are charged: scale shifts between figures and buildings, the city’s space is assembled more than constructed, the allegorical figures are graded in size by rank and drawn with less life than the citizens, and repainting obscures some of the hand.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Wallace’s English, with no translation between. The command is of register, and the range is the widest of any American novel of its decade. The opening, “I am seated in an office, surrounded by heads and bodies.”, is precise, formal and cold; the Ennet House chapters take on Gately’s speech and the speech of the recovery rooms without condescension; the Marathe and Steeply dialogue is written as a translation, its idioms faintly wrong; the filmography of James Incandenza, an endnote, is a parody of an academic catalogue that becomes the portrait of a man. The long sentence, subordinate on subordinate, carries obsessive attention. Three charges hold it below the top: the tics recur and harden, the stacked qualifications, the coined abbreviations, the conjunctions in series; some sections are logorrhoeic, length without pressure; and the Wardine section, written in an imagined Black Boston dialect, is the book’s least controlled passage and has been justly charged with caricature.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Melville’s English. Command of the medium is high, and it bears the load in the central device: the prose reports with exactness what Delano sees, then tilts into his explanations in a periphrastic, qualifying syntax of likenesses, possibilities and doubled negatives, which is itself the texture of a mind talking itself out of knowledge. The scene-making is masterly: the shaving is paced like a piece for the stage, the knot is placed exactly, and the leap into the boat breaks the long slowness at once. The deposition is a pastiche of legal Spanish in English, flat and numbered, its flatness a made effect. Against this, the periphrasis that serves Delano’s mind sometimes thickens past use; his long reflections on the negro as a natural servant, essential to the design, are heavy going; and the documents are uneven in interest.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the whole as completed, the successors’ work included, structure and engineering with it. The command of mass, section and light is of the first rank and load-bearing: the layered walls, the openings scaled to the building, the ambulatory’s light, and the bands of marble inset in the concrete that order a vast surface. The structure carries spans and heights of real difficulty. By the common account the building was raised largely by hand, with simple means; where that holds, it is part of the command, not an excuse for it. The costs: the concrete’s finish is rougher and less consistent than at the Salk Institute; the climate has taken its toll on surfaces; and the chamber and some interiors are reported to work less well than the circulation.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The prologue is a sustained feat: a present-tense narration that opens on “He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” and moves among Cotter Martin, the broadcaster Russ Hodges, Hoover, Sinatra and Gleason, and the crowd, with the cadence of a long play-by-play, ending in a diminuendo. The command of the sentence is the author’s mature one, the deadpan dialogue, the aphorism and the litany, now joined to a lyric warmth in the Bronx sections of the last part and in Sister Edgar’s chapters. The structure, backward with a forward interlude, is handled without confusion across 827 pages. Three charges hold it below the top: many characters speak one stylised register, which flattens persons; Nick’s narration in the first part is deliberately flat and sometimes simply flat; and some set pieces run past their effect.
Roberto Bolaño · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Bolaño’s Spanish, with Wimmer’s close and plain English beside it for sense and nothing charged to it. The command is of register and of the long sentence. The critics’ part is written in a deadpan academic comedy, ironical without contempt; the Amalfitano part in the long associative sentence of a mind coming loose; the crimes part in a flat forensic Spanish of dates, positions of the body, causes of death and closed files, sustained for hundreds of pages without a slip into pathos; the Archimboldi part in the plain, almost fabular narration of a life. Dreams and monologues are told with the same calm. The book has a phrase for its own manner, “las grandes obras, imperfectas, torrenciales”, great works, imperfect, torrential. Charged: the unrevised state, with its repetitions, slack stretches and loose ends, above all in the Fate part.
Théodore Géricault · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas seven metres wide. Load-bearing where it counts. The drawing of the bodies is of the highest academic order: the torsions of the climbing figures, the foreshortened corpse at the lower right, the father’s slackened weight. A crowd of figures on a tilting surface is locked to the frame by two diagonals and two pyramids. The light, falling hard from the left onto bodies against a dark sea, does the modelling and the drama together. The sea and sky are painted with a breadth the academy did not teach. The costs are scored on the making as it stands, the darkening being charged elsewhere: the bodies are athletes’, not those of men thirteen days starving; the middle near the mast is crowded and in places mechanical; the palette is narrow and sometimes heavy.
Stanley Kubrick · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and the making bears weight in most departments. Gilbert Taylor lights the War Room almost from its ring of lamps alone, faces hard over a dark table, and shoots the battle at Burpelson grainy and handheld. Ken Adam’s War Room and bomber interior are among the most exact designs in the cinema. Anthony Harvey’s cutting keeps three settings in one tempo. Sellers’s Muffley, a decent man on the telephone to a drunk, is restraint at its finest; Scott’s Turgidson is all appetite and teeth; Hayden’s Ripper is deadpan under a cigar; Pickens plays Kong straight. The costs hold the figure: the effects shots of the bomber in flight are visibly composited and fall below the rest, and Strangelove himself is broad, with some of Sellers’s invention there running slack.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the Greek as far as it can be weighed; its metre and sound are not heard here as the first audience heard them, and that is not charged to the play. The construction is exact: four movements, each a stage nearer the truth and nearer the one responsible. The Messenger’s speech is a model of the form for every later tragedian: dawn, sound before sight, the paean heard before the fleet is seen, the confined strait turning numbers into weakness, the slaughter on Psyttaleia, then the retreat across Thessaly and the Strymon. The diction is Aeschylus’ own, compound epithets and dense images, heavy without being opaque. The lyric moves from dread to dirge across a wide metrical range, the ionic rhythm of the parodos carrying the Asian host. Charged: the two-actor dramaturgy is stiff by the standard of the Oresteia, the catalogues are a register the verse cannot always lift, and the closing lament is cry more than construction.
Anonymous · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The command is of a severe instrument: the decasyllable with its fixed caesura, one assonance to the laisse, the formula and the epithet, all under exact control. The first two lines set the whole war down: “Carles li reis, nostre emperere magnes, / Set anz tuz pleins ad estet en Espaigne”
“Charles the king, our great emperor, has been seven full years in Spain”. The timing of the first two thirds is masterly: each nomination answers another, the horn debate stands at the turn of the battle and the second horn scene at its end, and the peers die in a mounting order, Oliver, then Turpin, then Roland. Speech is spare and characterises: Ganelon’s flourish of the cloak, Roland’s laugh. Charged: the catalogues of pagan champions and divisions, and stretches of the Baligant battle where the formula runs without pressure. The assonance is not judged by ear and is neither credited nor charged.
Claude Lanzmann · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Ziva Postec’s editing, with Anna Ruiz, shapes the footage into a structure of returns that holds nine and a half hours without a narrator. The slow tracking shots over the Treblinka stones and through the Sobibór woods are timed against testimony. The interview craft draws out what generalities hide, with questions about distances, weights, temperatures and times, and the camera has the patience to stay on Bomba. The sound is trains, rivers and church bells, and silences left whole. The costs are counted: the photography is plain and often merely serviceable, the hidden-camera footage is poor by necessity, interviews are often statically framed, and landscape passages repeat without new timing.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. The prose is late Woolf at her most various: lyrical narration, pastiche of Elizabethan blank verse and of Restoration comedy, doggerel for the village chorus, Isa’s broken lyric and the overheard prose of the audience, all handled with control and moved between at speed. The pastiches are exact enough to be funny and loose enough to be the village’s. The orchestration of voices across the lawn is a technical feat, and the craft is load-bearing in the design. Charged because the text is a draft at its last stage: Woolf’s habit was to revise heavily, and some passages have not had that work, so repetitions and slack joints remain that she would likely have cut. The making is uneven in its finish.
John Ford · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making is load-bearing in the composition: Ford’s riders framed against the buttes, the doorways, the family placed at the evening meal, Winton C. Hoch’s VistaVision colour, the light before the raid. Wayne’s Ethan, hatred and tenderness in one face, is his most complex performance. The cutting is economical and exact at the raid, the river fight and the fort. The costs are real. Max Steiner’s score is heavy and presses where the images are clear; several night and snow scenes are visibly shot on stages against painted backings; Jeffrey Hunter is uneven, and the stock company’s comic playing, Ken Curtis’s accent above all, is broad. A command at the summit in the exteriors and in Wayne, partial in the settlement and the score.
Lu Xun · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Lu Xun’s Chinese. The command is of compression and irony: a story told in a few pages through one telling detail after another, Kong Yiji counting out his fennel beans and saying “多乎哉？不多也”
(Much? Not much), mangled from the Analects, and pleading “窃书不能算偷”
(stealing books cannot be counted as theft); the narrator of Ah Q aping the pedant’s gravity; the cold, exact close. The vernacular is new and made, mixing classical turns and Europeanised syntax, sometimes stiffly, and the mixture is part of the meaning in the madman’s diary. Against the top: “The Story of Hair” and “A Small Incident” are worked thinner, the Beijing sketches loosely, and Ah Q’s middle chapters run on satire’s momentum rather than its necessity.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, and the making bears load in its geometry: four rows of columns set out on radii so that from two points in the paving each colonnade reads as one row; a continuous entablature carried round the oval without a break in its order; corridors that rise with the ground while keeping their cornice to the eye; a trapezoid whose angles correct the façade. The scale is handled with a severe order, Tuscan columns in travertine, so that columns commonly counted at 284 read as one gesture and not as ornament. What holds the axis: the structure is trabeated and simple, and the engineering asked little; and the statues, made by many workshop hands over decades, are uneven, competent figures rather than Bernini’s own.
August Strindberg · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as it can be judged here; the Swedish sentence is neither credited nor charged. The construction is exact: the dance offstage at the start, so that Julie is reported before she enters; Kristin cooking a foul brew to rid Julie’s bitch Diana of the litter she got by the gatekeeper’s pug, an animal’s misalliance set on the stove before the human one; the beer Julie drinks and the wine Jean drinks, which turn their classes inside out in a sip; the boots, the bell, the speaking tube, the razor on the table. The dialogue is made to sound unmade, and scenes turn on a gesture, the cinder in his eye, the kiss on her shoe. Charged: the block of exposition about her mother, and a coarseness in the late abuse.
Fritz Lang · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight throughout. Peter Lorre’s Beckert is one of the defining performances of the sound film: the furtive walk, the grimace in the mirror, the bulging eyes, and the speech before the court, where a man speaks his compulsion and his terror of it. Fritz Arno Wagner’s photography gives overhead shots of a stairwell, a map with a compass, the attic, the shop window and its reflections, a city of shadows built for sound. The cutting joins places by gesture and sound; the sparse mixing makes every effect a clue. Gründgens’s Schränker, in leather coat and gloves, is a civil servant of crime. The costs: some dialogue scenes are staged statically, in the manner of the early talkie; Wernicke’s Lohmann is broad comedy at moments; and the coda is set flat.
Charles Baudelaire · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the French. The command is of the prose period and of the turn. The dedication’s long sentence on poetic prose is itself an instance of what it describes. “Enivrez-vous” is built on one imperative and its return, “Il faut être toujours ivre. Tout est là.”, “One must always be drunk. That is everything.”, and its list of wind, wave, star, bird and clock answering together is perfectly cadenced. The anecdotes are timed like a moralist’s: the coin revealed false in the last lines, the halo in the mud, the beating returned. “La Corde”, with the boy who hangs himself and the mother who comes for the rope to sell it, is told with a terrible flatness that is entirely controlled. Charges: the doublets are weaker than their verse originals, some pieces are prolix or unrevised, “Portraits de maîtresses” and parts of “Les Vocations” among them, and the allegories are stiffer than the parables.
Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola and Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. Vignola’s command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the proportion of nave to chapel; the wide vault carried on a thick wall hollowed by the chapels, so that the chapels are its buttresses; the lunettes cut into the vault for light; the crossing resolved without a projecting transept. The engineering extends nothing: the span is wide for its date but not new. The decoration is made at the height of its arts: Gaulli and Raggi’s fusion of painted and modelled figures, the vault’s perspective calculated for the nave, and the altar of Ignatius assembled of rare stone, metal and sculpture by many hands under Pozzo. The costs: della Porta’s front is crowded, its storeys not fully resolved into one plane, and the nineteenth-century revetment is accomplished but routine.
Juan Bautista de Toledo and Juan de Herrera · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing: granite of one grey cut to close joints across a block of this size; the flat vault under the choir, a famous piece of stone cutting that seems to hang without support; the dome raised on its drum and the towers carried in hard stone; a site run for twenty-one years with machines, lifting gear and a works organisation that by the record were Herrera’s own concern; one order and one material carried without a lapse from the kitchens to the cupola. The costs: the long fronts are proportioned by repetition more than by measure, and the palace and monastic ranges meet the basilica by adjacency more than by composition.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Conrad’s English, his third language, mastered for art; there is no translation between. The command is of one ironic voice held across a whole book, a harder thing than it looks: the narrator gives Verloc’s indolence, Heat’s professional vanity, Mr Vladimir’s wit and Karl Yundt’s toothless rage with one even, mocking exactness, and then, without changing register, renders the cab ride and the murder with a precision that makes the irony itself the vehicle of horror. The set pieces are made with great care: the embassy interview, the hospital table, the cab ride, the shop bell, the murder and the clock, the boat train. The handling of time is masterly, and the making bears the weight. Charged on three counts: an irony at times laboured and repeated, as in Verloc’s fatness and the comic Toodles; some stiff official dialogue; and a syntax that now and then thickens into adjectival weight.
James Baldwin · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the sentence and of a book’s architecture, judged on Baldwin’s English. The prose holds three registers at once, the plain narrative of the boy’s Saturday, the cadence of the King James Bible, the call and response of the service, and moves among them without a seam. The opening, “Everyone had always said that John would be a preacher when he grew up, just like his father”, sets in one line the expectation, the community that holds it and the false word “father” that the book will unmake. The making bears load in the timing of the prayers and in the threshing-floor’s dissolve of narrative into vision. Short of the top because a first novel shows in places: an overwritten passage, an adjective too many, and dialogue in the prayers that serves exposition.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. The dotting is controlled over more than six square metres, its density and spacing varied zone by zone so that grounds separate without outlines; the tracks keep their register across the whole field; the roundels are drawn with a sure hand; the fire’s white and dark break through the dotted order without disordering the picture. Clifford Possum was known first as a carver, and the precision shows. The restricted palette is made a discipline. Against a higher figure: the means are few, dot, line, circle and footprint, later desert canvases push surface and colour further, and some of the handling is even to the point of routine.
Natsume Sōseki · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Sōseki’s Japanese as far as this reading can know it: the mature plain style, the modern colloquial sentence of his last years, unhurried and exact. The construction is the craft. Seeds set in Part I are paid in Part III, the grave, the remark on money, the saying that love is a sin, Sensei’s coldness when the young man presses him, and the delay is held for more than half the book without a cheat. The two betrayals double each other. In the boarding-house chapters a small house and a few people are made to hold a tragedy with a screen, a door and a lamp. The letter’s voice is sustained across fifty-six instalments and is distinct from the young man’s. Charged: the letter is far too long to be a letter, and the book asks the reader to accept it; Part II’s family business is the least worked part; the women are drawn thinly, the wife and the widow almost wholly from outside.
Jean Renoir · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Renoir directs a mixed cast in three languages, from Gabin’s working-class ease to Stroheim’s carved stiffness, so that acting styles are themselves class markers. Matras’s camera moves through barracks and fortress rooms with a fluency rare in 1937, composing exits and entrances inside the frame. The ramparts are a lesson in lighting and sound: searchlights, the flute, the voices from below. The cutting is patient and almost invisible; Kosma’s score is used sparingly beside songs sung inside the story. Held below Citizen Kane at 9.4 and The Third Man at 9.0: some studio exteriors and the escape’s snow show their making, and the first movement’s pace loosens.
Gillo Pontecorvo · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Marcello Gatti’s photography, contrasty and grained to the look of news footage, holds both a face at a checkpoint and the mass of the Casbah’s roofs. The direction of crowds in their thousands, on the streets where the events took place, is exact; the non-professionals are cast for faces and bearing, and Brahim Hadjadj’s Ali is all presence. Jean Martin’s Mathieu is precise, dry and charming. The editing keeps three bombers in parallel without loss of clarity. The score by Ennio Morricone with Pontecorvo, a drumbeat for action and a lament for the dead of both sides, is among the most exact in film. The costs: the post-synchronised sound is loose in places, some readings are stiff, and the expository lines are on the nose.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing, and it is the core craft of the Japanese garden: setting stone. Each stone is chosen, buried to the depth that gives it weight, turned to show its face, and related to its group and to the field, so that heights, masses and spacings hold an asymmetric balance from every point on the veranda. The wall is built to weather into pattern, and the gravel is a surface that must be remade by hand with a rake, so the craft continues in use. What holds the axis: there is little structure in the engineering sense, and a garden cannot show command of load and span. On its own medium the command is complete, and the making is the work.
Gislebertus · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of carved relief in limestone across many blocks fitted in one field. The drapery is cut in fine parallel pleats with hooked hems that carry the movement of the elongated figures; the demons are cut thin and sharp so that they read against the smooth Christ; the hands on the head are cut with a clarity that holds at a distance of many metres; the joins of the blocks are managed so that the composition reads as one. The souls of the lintel are each individuated in posture at small scale. The stylisation is a command, not a lack: proportion is set by meaning and held consistently. The costs: the upper left registers repeat their units mechanically, and the relief is shallow where Moissac cuts deeper and more plastically, so that the making bears more weight in the right half than in the left.
John Soane · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of light, section and surface is of the first order. A deep, shut-in plot is daylit from above at several levels, so that room after room takes its light from a source the visitor cannot see. The canopy dome of the Breakfast Room carries its pendentives clear of the walls on four points. The Picture Room’s planes are hung so that the walls fold out and the display is multiplied without loss of order. Colour is governed through glass. All of it is load-bearing, since the house is its craft. What holds the axis: the structure is ordinary terrace brick and timber with plaster vaults, the lanterns and glazing have needed constant care, and there is no structural daring.
Yasujirō Ozu · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is complete where it bears weight. Yūharu Atsuta’s camera, low and fixed, frames rooms in depth and holds them, so that a person leaving a frame leaves a space behind. The cutting is exact: shots on the eyeline that turn two people toward the viewer, still shots placed as rests, and the vase cut, among the best-judged cuts in the cinema of its decade. Chishū Ryū’s stillness and Setsuko Hara’s smile, which the film uses as a mask and lets slip twice, are performances of the highest control, and Haruko Sugimura’s comedy is precise. The costs: Senji Itō’s score is a conventional studio score of light Western orchestral music, at times sweeter than the images and at odds with their restraint; the Noh is staged for record more than shaped; the inn speech is filmed as speech.
José Clemente Orozco · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of true fresco on a curved vault. The foreshortening from below is drawn over a doubly curved surface, the hardest drawing problem the medium has, and it reads from the floor. The flame is laid in broad, rapid strokes that are also the figure’s anatomy, so that the body is made of what consumes it: the making bears the load. The restricted palette is controlled, the fire holding against the greys without turning decorative. Orozco, who had lost his left hand in his youth and painted with the right, worked at a scale and on a support few painters of his century attempted; that is his life, not a measure of the fresco. Held at 8.8 because the handling is rough by design: transitions in the ring and the drawing of the surrounding figures are summary, and the command of light and interval in the works at 9.0 and above is not attempted.
David Fincher · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight throughout. Harris Savides’s photography, low in contrast, sodium and fluorescent, makes the 1970s a lit world rather than a filtered one. Angus Wall’s cutting keeps scenes of men reading documents taut over two and a half hours. The reconstruction of San Francisco across two decades is large, much of it invisible. The sound gives the attacks no score and the passing years their radio. The ensemble is the strongest of Fincher’s work: Mark Ruffalo’s Toschi, all small gestures and fatigue; Robert Downey Jr.’s Avery, funny and then ruined; John Carroll Lynch’s Allen, genial, plausible and frightening at once. The costs: Jake Gyllenhaal’s Graysmith is a sketch beside them, the women are written as obstacles, and the late montage hurries.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on McCarthy’s English and Spanish together, with no translation between. The command is of the long cumulative sentence joined by “and”, carrying physical work, setting a trap, shoeing a horse, dressing a wound, with exactness and without explanation; of landscape at every hour and season; and of the vernacular exchange, laconic in English and fuller in Spanish. The opening, “When they came south out of Grant County”, sets the scale of the slow arrival the book will keep. Each embedded tale is given a voice apart from the narrative’s: the priest’s argument, the blind man’s grievance, the gypsy’s sly parable. Charged: the high style overreaches in places into archaism and the repetition of its own effects; the tales’ speakers sometimes share one rhetoric, the author’s own; and the third part is written with less pressure than the rest. The Spanish is charged nothing: it is the original, and it enacts the book’s claim.
Nabataean · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing. Great facades are cut from the top down in one material with no correction possible, the orders true at that scale, the tholos of al-Khazneh carved free in its recess. Al-Khazneh handles the Hellenistic vocabulary with full fluency: proportion, the play of projection and recess, the broken pediment framing the tholos. The hydraulics run dams, a diversion tunnel, channels and pipes along the Siq at a controlled fall, and cisterns store a city’s water through a desert year. The costs: the figural sculpture is mostly coarse where it survives at all; ad-Deir simplifies to heavy masses; the interiors are rudimentary; and the quality across hundreds of facades is very uneven.
Alberto Giacometti · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Craft read to the same anchors as every medium: command of modelling in clay and plaster for bronze, at life size, of a figure that must stand on two thin legs. The making is load-bearing. The proportion is exact to its own law, head, trunk and limbs thinned in one ratio so that nothing reads as distortion and the figure reads as a man; the stride is balanced so that the figure leans forward and does not fall; the feet carry the mass the rest refuses. The surface is torn, pressed and scored, and its marks hold at every distance, a vibration across the room and a record of the hand close up; the foundry carried that touch into bronze. The costs: the arms and hands are summary, the head is barely more than a knot, and the bronze is a cast of a making rather than the making.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Goethe’s German. The command is of the late manner: a light, exact, often trochaic line that carries an epigram, a love song and a cosmogony with the same ease, rhyme that seems effortless, and a tone that moves between play and gravity inside a stanza. “Wiederfinden” and “Selige Sehnsucht” are made to the highest standard of German verse. The Hatem and Suleika exchanges handle the turn of reply with real wit, and “Einlass”, the poet arguing with the houri at the gate of paradise, is perfect light verse with weight beneath it. Held at 8.8 because the craft is uneven across the books: the Buch der Sprüche and some of the Unmut poems are competent rather than charged, the ghazal imitations are loose, and the Notes, the clear prose of a great prose writer, are discursive.
Knut Hamsun · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the Dano-Norwegian as far as its syntax, its tenses and a close translation carry it; its sound is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The prose bears the load. The short declarative sentences, the abrupt shifts of tense, the exclamations and the addresses to himself, the precision of physical sensation (the taste of the shavings, the weakness in the knees, the cold of the cell) make a style that sounds artless and is controlled throughout. The comic timing of the lies told to the old man and to the pawnbroker is exact; the dialogue is spare and right. What holds the axis below the nineties is the narrator’s exclamatory crisis, which by the fourth part has become a manner, and the slack building of the boarding-house episodes.
Jonathan Swift · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Swift’s English, with no translation between. The command is Swift’s plain style turned against itself: the modern hack’s voice sustained over a whole book, every sentence doing double duty as his and as the satirist’s, swollen where he swells and flat where the flatness kills. The flayed woman is the proof: twenty-one plain words of reportage carrying a moral horror the speaker does not feel. The Preface’s tub, the Introduction’s three wooden machines, Peter’s bread argued into mutton, the Aeolists’ belching liturgy: each conceit is built out exactly and turned at the right moment. The apparatus is made with the same care, the mock dates, the list of treatises by the same author, the gaps placed to break off a promise. Charged: the unevenness the impersonation licenses, the longueurs of Sections X and XI, jokes resting on knowledge the book cannot carry for its reader, and a coarseness in the Jack chapters that is repetition more than force.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of charcoal, ochre, engraving and wall, read to the same anchors as every medium. At its height the making is load-bearing: the horses’ heads modelled by smudged charcoal, the muzzles shaded and the open mouths drawn with one sure contour; the lions in a line as economical as any brush drawing, shoulder and head in a single stroke; the rhinoceros horns in repeated arcs; the ground prepared by scraping; the convexity of the rock used as volume. Against a figure at 9.0: the unit is a whole cave and the hands are uneven. Many figures are summary, partial or stiff, the red figures of the front chambers are simpler, and the command of the greatest passages is not carried through the field. Command at the top in the great panels, realisation uneven across the cave.
Robert Johnson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of a small medium. The guitar is master work: independent bass and treble, the walking boogie figure on the low strings, slide and fretted notes in one line, the turnaround as signature. The voice ranges from falsetto to growl, its rhythm placed against the guitar rather than on it. Johnson commands the three-minute side, shaping each song to it with an opening figure, verses and a close, and in “Hellhound on My Trail”, “Come On in My Kitchen” and “Crossroads Blues” the making is load-bearing. The charges: one accompaniment reused across several sides, some rough intonation, and field-grade sound from one microphone. His command of the record is in the shaping of the side, not its sound, which holds it below Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0.
Public Enemy · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making is load-bearing throughout. The Bomb Squad’s construction is exact where it sounds like chaos: in Rebel Without a Pause and Night of the Living Baseheads the layers are placed so the drums stay legible under the noise and the voice always has room, and Black Steel holds a slow groove for about six minutes without slack. Chuck D’s voice is among the great instruments of the form, a baritone of command whose diction cuts through any mix and rides tempos that would swamp a lesser voice. Terminator X places his cuts as punctuation; Flavor Flav’s interjections are timed as counterpoint. The faults fall on a share of the record: some mixes are crowded to mud, Cold Lampin’ and Show ’Em Whatcha Got are thin in construction, and parts of the drum sound belong to their year.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and bears load. The longitudinal oval is vaulted by a dome on a high drum, light entering through drum and lantern and, at the altar, from concealed sources, so that the stucco glory glows without a visible window. The two columns are built as hollow shafts with stairs, their spiral reliefs carried round them in continuous bands. Portico, columns and pavilions are proportioned so that the dome reads as the centre from the front; stonework, stucco and fresco are of the first rank of their decades, Rottmayr’s dome among the best in Vienna. Held below the summit because the junction of facade and body is managed rather than resolved, flanks and rear are plain, and the upper parts are by most accounts less taut than the rest.
Pirro Ligorio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the work as made, and the making here is above all hydraulic and terraced. A gravity-fed system over a fall of tens of metres distributes a river through basins, channels and pipes to many fountains, matching pressures to effects. The water organ sounds by air compressed by falling water, on the principle of the ancient hydraulis, and played to the astonishment of its century; birds sing by the same means. The walls and terraces, built into an unstable hillside, have held for centuries. The fountain architecture, rustication, the Organ’s frontispiece, the Oval’s exedra, is accomplished. What holds the figure below 9.0: the palace is competent rather than masterly, and the fountain architecture is antiquarian ornament more than structure of the first rank.
J. D. Salinger · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Salinger’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. The voice is a feat sustained across a whole novel: a private idiom with its own grammar of tics, “and all”, “if you want to know the truth”, “It killed me”, held without a lapse, comic in its timing and exact in its rhythm, through which grief leaks without the narrator ever naming it. The control of irony is the greater achievement: the reader is always a step ahead of the boy and never superior to him. The scenes of talk, Spencer’s sickroom, Stradlater in the bathroom, Sally Hayes at the rink, Phoebe in the dark, are cut precisely, and Allie and Jane are planted early to surface late. Charged on two counts: the tics are overused, a phrase or a turn in the middle repeating past the point where repetition characterises; and some comic set pieces, the Lavender Room and the taxi drivers, are written for their own pleasure.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of proportion, detail and making is of the first rank and load-bearing: the planes and their overhangs, so that a heavy steel frame reads as weightless; the columns welded to the faces of the fascia channels, the welds ground away, so that nothing shows how the planes are held; the travertine grid ruling floor and terrace; the primavera core, cabinetmaking at the scale of architecture; the two offset platforms, which make a static box into an approach. The steel was worked to a finish few buildings of the time attempted. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, a frame of eight columns on short spans; the height of the floor misjudged the river; the envelope could neither shed the summer’s heat nor keep the winter’s glass dry; and steel and glass need constant upkeep. Command of the form outran command of the building’s life.
Built for Qabus ibn Wushmgir · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Structure is the making. A tall shell of fired brick, tapering upward, its flanges laid true with the core so that the ten arrises run plumb the whole height, the cone closed in brick at the top: the work has stood a millennium in a region of earthquakes, and that is evidence of the making. The brick is laid with exactness, and the Kufic of the two bands is built in the brick itself, raised from the wall and legible from the ground. Command is high. Held below Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.1 and the Pantheon’s 9.5 because the range of means is narrow: one material, one system, no vault of note seen inside, no complex junction to resolve. The demand is limited.
Salian builders, under Conrad II and Henry IV · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on structure first, and the making is load-bearing. A nave built for a timber roof was vaulted at great height by thickening alternate piers and adding responds to take transverse arches, in a campaign carried out under a monarch at war with the papacy; and the vaults stood until fire and soldiers, not the vault, brought down the west. The crypt’s columns and groin vaults are cut and set with exactness, its banding of red and pale stone at once structure and ornament. The ashlar of the whole is fine. The cost: groin vaults domed up over square bays are heavy and conservative beside the ribbed solutions of the same decades, and the retrofit shows in the double rhythm of the nave.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every medium. The command is of the first rank and it is load-bearing. The long, thin brick and long copings draw the walls out as horizontal bands; the steel lets the roofs float in the cantilevers that are the building’s figure; the art glass screens the rooms from the street while admitting light, its angular pattern drawn from the house’s own geometry; furniture, lamps and fittings are designed as one with the structure; the section’s management of light, height and privacy is exact. The costs: the cantilevers sagged over the decades and needed structural rescue, and the house was hard to keep from the start. Command of the whole is high, not flawless.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Takashi Shimura’s Watanabe, stooped, voice failing, eyes wide with what he cannot say, carries both movements, the second in absence and recollection. Asakazu Nakai photographs the office as a wall of stacked paper and the night city in glare and smoke; the wake is staged in deep, crowded frames that hold a dozen men as they talk themselves round. The screenplay by Kurosawa, Hashimoto and Oguni builds the two movements to answer each other, and Hayasaka’s score and the found music, the bar piano, the dance band, the birthday song, are placed as events. The costs recur and hold the figure below the summit of the medium: the narrator’s commentary; Shimura’s stare held past its effect in places; the wake’s drunkenness broadly played; and music that underlines in the son’s scenes.
Seamus Heaney · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Heaney’s English, and his ear is at its most concentrated here. The consonantal weight of the quatrains, the half-rhymes, Anglo-Saxon and Irish word-roots set together (“word-hoard”, “bleb of the icicle”), and the line-break used as a turn of judgment: in “the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” the break holds “exact” alone before the admission. This is making that bears the meaning, and “Sunlight” is flawless in its slow domestic music. Part II’s slackness in “Whatever You Say Say Nothing” is deliberate and works. The charges: in places the sound clots and the poem becomes texture, as in “Viking Dublin” and “Bone Dreams”; the narrow stanza sometimes turns a sentence into a column of fragments without gain; and “Act of Union” overstates its conceit.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts, and the making bears weight in most departments. The backgrounds, under art directors who include Kazuo Oga, make the forest a place with light, damp and depth. The animation of animals carries weight and fury, the wolves’ run and the boars’ charge above all, and the curse is a technical invention made to look like a disease of matter. Joe Hisaishi’s score, with the title song, carries the film’s scale without pressing it. The cutting of the opening and of the headless god’s flood is exact. The costs: the human faces are the house’s, San and Ashitaka drawn from a repertoire rather than for this film; the voice work, Hisaya Morishige’s Okkoto and Akihiro Miwa’s Moro excepted, is plainer than the picture; and the middle sieges are staged with less invention than the opening.
Karl Friedrich Schinkel · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The front is among the most exact pieces of Neoclassical design in Europe: eighteen columns in an unbroken rhythm, an entablature with no ornament beyond what the order requires, the corner piers stopping the run with authority, the attic set back so that the block reads as one figure. The rotunda’s proportion, coffering and top light are handled with complete control. The building was raised on piles over a filled arm of the river, a real difficulty met without failure, and the fitting of Durand’s ideal to a real site is a demonstration of skill. What holds it below the top: the dome is a conventional structure hidden inside a box, the painting galleries needed screen walls to light their pictures, and the courts are serviceable rather than resolved. The making carries the building at the front and in the rotunda; elsewhere it is excellent and plain.
Andrea Palladio; scene by Vincenzo Scamozzi · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. Palladio fitted a theatre of Roman type into an awkward existing envelope and made the forced ellipse look chosen; the colonnade and balustrade close the cavea with a correct and lucid order; the frons’s two orders and attic are proportioned and articulated at full command, executed in brick, timber and stucco to read as stone. The roof spans the hall without supports intruding on the sightlines. Scamozzi’s perspectives are a feat of carpentry and optics: raked floors, diminishing façades and converging cornices calculated so that streets of a few metres read as long avenues. The costs: an ornament denser than Palladio’s best, an illusion that fails from the side seats, and materials chosen for economy rather than permanence.
Henri Labrouste · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first, is near the top. The iron arches are cast and assembled with exactness, their openwork both lightening them and drawing the eye along the lines of force. The slender columns, set on stone, carry the twin vaults with a lightness masonry could not give, and the junction of iron and stone is resolved, not merely made. The façade is proportioned with discipline: the long arcade, the panels of names, the plain ground storey, the whole held to one module. Light from high windows over the shelving is solved for reading, and fire was weighed: stacks below, iron and not timber. The cost: the iron is cast, with its limits, and structure and image are reconciled by separation, not fused.
Burgundian Romanesque builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands. The carving of the central tympanum and the best capitals is of the first rank in its century, the drapery cut in fine pleats, the figures given motion within the frame. The masonry of the striped arches, the cutting of the piers with their engaged shafts and the lighting of a clerestory under groin vaults are assured, and the nave as it stands is a lucid, well-proportioned structure. The Gothic choir is refined early Gothic, slender in its supports, its ambulatory and chapels light. The spreading of the nave walls is charged under The Imperishable; what holds this axis is that the first making’s daring outran its structural sufficiency.
Joni Mitchell · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in the voice and the writing. Mitchell’s voice moves over wide intervals, from the chest to a clear head voice, and her phrasing stretches and compresses the bar to follow the sense, so that speech shapes the melodic line. The harmonic writing is her own: open tunings on guitar and dulcimer give voicings no standard tuning offers, and the piano songs place suspended and unresolved chords with judgment. Henry Lewy’s recording is close and plain, so breath and string noise are part of the sound. The costs: her piano playing is functional more than fluent, the leaps and swoops become mannerism in All I Want and This Flight Tonight, and the band songs are plainer than the solo ones. It stands below Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0.
Prince · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing across most of the record. Prince arranges, plays most of the instruments, sings and produces, and the result keeps a distinct sound for each track: the empty space of the title track, the dense interlocking funk of Housequake, the slowed, pitched voice and close microphone of If I Was Your Girlfriend, the rhythm guitar and sharp arrangement of I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man and its long coda, and the stacked vocal choir of Adore, among the best-made vocal productions in its idiom. The guitar of The Cross and the live band’s control show range beyond the studio. The faults fall on a share: Hot Thing and It are thin, Play in the Sunshine is generically arranged, some home-made mixes are boxy, and the pitched processing at times sounds like its device.
Kate Bush · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is high and load-bearing. Bush’s production keeps dense arrangements legible: the drum pattern and Fairlight figure of Running Up That Hill, the strings and military snare of Cloudbusting, a fretless bass under Mother Stands for Comfort, Irish players set against the Fairlight in Jig of Life without either turning to pastiche. Her voice runs from whisper to cry to the multi-tracked chorus of The Big Sky, and the vocal treatment in Under Ice is made as composition. The segues of the suite and the collage of voices in Waking the Witch are exact. The faults are spread: The Big Sky is cluttered and overextended at its close, some timbres are generic for 1985, and Waking the Witch is so dense in places that its voices blur.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of concrete is of the first rank and load-bearing: concrete cast in place, smooth and even, so that a cheap material reads as precise; the altar wall divided into four panels by the cross, each carried by the roof slab and the side walls, so that the cut through the structure is the sign; the oblique wall, which makes the entry and the side light with one plane; and the control of darkness, by which light reads as a substance. The floor and pews of scaffold board are made to answer the concrete. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, a small box of ordinary span; the glass in the cross and its frame dull the edges of a cut the form was drawn to make sharp; and the command is of one room and one effect.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas from photographic sources. The making is load-bearing. The tonal range is held in grey from near black to near white with no hue, and every canvas keeps its photograph’s light. The blur is controlled, not a filter: the wet paint is dragged across with a broad brush or blade to a degree chosen for each canvas, so that the three canvases of Dead grade the vanishing step by step, and the figure in Hanged can almost disappear without the canvas going dead. The scale is managed from the crowd of Funeral, held as one surface, to the smallest head. The costs: the facture is one method throughout, its range narrow by choice, and in the Arrest pair the image loses legibility without gaining meaning.
Kendrick Lamar · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Lamar’s delivery is the instrument: a voice changed for each speaker and state, the drunk and breaking voice of u, the clipped fury of The Blacker the Berry, the patient narration of How Much a Dollar Cost, flows that bend across the beat. The horns and strings move from colour to structure, and the production keeps live players, samples and voices legible through seventy-nine minutes and many hands. The faults fall on a share of the record: some mixes are crowded, a few hooks are weak (Institutionalized, Hood Politics), the interludes are thin beside the songs, and the craft does not always justify the length. Its range of voices is the making’s summit.
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. Four welded plate girders carry a 120 foot span and a hung roof with nothing in the room below. Columns, girders and mullions are joined with a precision that makes the steel read as a single drawn line, the proportions of bay, mullion and partition are exact, and the grid that orders the glass orders the travertine of the platform too. This is command of the medium at a high level, and it is shown, not hidden. The charges are in performance. A vast envelope of single glazing made the room hard to heat and to cool, and one room for a whole school is acoustically hard. Command of the form outran command of the room's comfort.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts. The performance is the making, and at its height it is as exact as anything the medium holds: the boxing match, timed to the bell as a dance; the swallowed whistle; the stillness of the first meeting; the last close-up. Chaplin’s direction of the action, the timing of every gag to the cut and to the music, and his score, which carries the film without words, bear weight throughout. The costs are real, and they fall on the image. The camera is functional, set square to the action and seldom doing more than record it; Roland Totheroh’s photography is plain; the street is a studio set and looks it; and Virginia Cherrill’s performance is limited until the last scene, where it is exact. The score is at times sweeter than the images need. Held below the top because the command is concentrated in the body and the timing, not in every department.
Talk Talk · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, read to the elder desks’ anchors, and load-bearing throughout. Phill Brown’s engineering captures instruments in a room with unusual truth: the decay of a note, the space around a drum, the grain of a bowed string are the material. Tim Friese-Greene’s shaping of long takes into pieces is a composer’s craft in the medium of tape, and the edits are placed so that the music seems to breathe rather than to have been cut, except where the cut is the point, at the end of Ascension Day. Lee Harris’s drumming on New Grass is restraint made exact. Mark Hollis’s voice is an instrument of fragility, cracked and close. The faults are few: Taphead’s opening is underdetermined, and the indistinct voice sometimes withholds what the record could have given.
Hilary Mantel · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The prose is exact, quick and economical: dialogue that carries wit and menace in the same line, a narrator’s eye that renders a room by what it costs and who owes for it, a comic timing rare in historical fiction. Scene construction is masterly: interviews in which Cromwell reads a face and moves; the household at Austin Friars built of small exchanges; a vast cast handled through a single attention. The first sentence, “So now get up.”, sets the father’s voice over the fallen boy and the whole economy of injury and recovery in four words. Charged: the pronoun device sometimes obscures who speaks or acts, a defect a reader meets more than once, and the texture is at times thicker than the scenes need. Level with Infinite Jest and The Road at 8.8.
Louis Kahn · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing. The brick outer wall is real bearing masonry, its piers thinning floor by floor so that the structure is read in the façade, the flat arches over the openings carried with concrete; the concrete of the inner ring and the hall is finely formed, the circles cut clean through walls of great depth; the cross beams carry the roof of the hall and set its light. The materials are assigned by zone and by hand: brick to the weather, concrete to the books, wood where the reader touches, travertine on the stair. The carrels are joinery of the first rank. The costs: the engineering is modest in span and system, the beams exaggerated beyond their load, the stacks dimly lit, and the entrance has confused its users from the first.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Read to the elder arts’ anchors, the making bears weight throughout. Hoffman’s Dodd is jovial, needy and suddenly savage, roaring an obscenity at a follower who questions a change in the book; Phoenix’s Freddie, the twisted shoulders and the hands on the hips, is a man always about to bolt; Adams’s Peggy plays the power in the room as a pleasant wife. Mălaimare’s photography gives skin and water a density few films of its decade have. Greenwood’s score sets strings against percussion that will not settle, as Freddie will not. The Processing, held mostly in two faces, and the two cells, staged side by side in one frame, are directing of the first rank. The costs: the last third is joined more loosely than the form can claim, Phoenix’s mannerism tips at times into display, and the society episodes are staged conventionally.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The command is of cadence and of the exact noun. The first sentence opens “When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night” and sets the measure: short words bound by “and”, a liturgical rhythm without ornament. The catastrophe is given at its right size, a notation of time, “The clocks stopped at 1:17”, and a sentence of light and concussion. The vocabulary of lost crafts gives a bare world the texture of things once known and named. The dialogue, two voices without tags, is exactly pitched for a tired father and a frightened child, and the man’s fear is never stated where an action will carry it. Charged: the archaic and rare words sometimes ornament rather than name; the polysyndeton hardens toward mannerism over the length; and a few sentences in the man’s reveries reach for a grandeur the rest of the book earns by restraint.
Gerhard of Cologne and successors; completed by Ernst Friedrich Zwirner · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The choir is masonry of the first rank: a glazed elevation over 40 metres carried on slender piers and a double system of flyers, its tracery precise and its profiles disciplined, standing for seven centuries. The completion is a feat of nineteenth-century organisation: in under forty years a nave, transept, front and two towers of 157 metres raised to a medieval drawing, on an iron roof truss under an iron crossing turret, and a structure that took many bomb hits without the towers falling. The costs: the nineteenth-century detail is correct more than alive, carved and set to a system, and the stone chosen has weathered badly and needs perpetual repair.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The central command is dynamic architecture over twenty minutes: a large ensemble held at near silence and brought by stages to full force without the line breaking, at least four times. The drums and basses are arranged as weight, not doubling; the strings carry the long melodic lines that the guitars answer with tremolo and drone; the recorded voices are cut in with an ear for transition. The costs are not of detail, because they fall where the form arrives: the climaxes lose definition at their peaks, the tuning is loose in places, and the harmony keeps to a few modal progressions over long spans. Command at the top of the design with its realisation partial is the degree of The Large Bathers; the larger architecture keeps it above F♯ A♯ ∞.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The instrument holds one grain from the wood to the turnout. Sentences average under eight and a half words; sixteen of the eighteen stories run between thirteen and thirty-three words a paragraph; said and asked carry nearly all the speech; the similes can be counted on one hand. At its best the making is load-bearing: Niobe’s half of a telephone call reduced to “She spoke again,” so that a marriage ends in what is withheld; an executive chair catalogued part by part before it is lifted. What holds the mark is the register’s habit. “Did not” comes a hundred and forty-five times, densest in Palestra Vittoria and Nothing Ran at about ten to the thousand words; Caribou Rouge reads as play-by-play; and once, over the deer, the narration glosses its own proverb.
Miles Davis · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the editing credited here as making and its invention elsewhere. The playing is of the highest order. Davis’s trumpet is at its strongest, with a larger, harder sound than on any earlier record of his: long lines on “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down”, stabbing phrases on the title track. Shorter and Maupin colour the ensemble exactly, Holland and Brooks lock a two-bass foundation, and the drummers interlock without collapsing into each other. The editing is load-bearing: repeated passages and the rubato refrain give long jams a shape. The faults lie in the medium. Several edits are heard as joins rather than as form; the mix is muddy in the densest stretches, where keyboards blur into one wash; the soloing on “Spanish Key” is serviceable; and the inspired passages are spread thin. Under Low at 9.0, a tenth above Remain in Light.
Katsuhiro Otomo · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors shared across the arts, and the making is load-bearing through most of the film. Toshiharu Mizutani’s backgrounds make Neo-Tokyo a city of night light, with no frame left generic. Takashi Nakamura’s animation gives bodies weight and recoil, and the tail-light trails and the debris of each explosion are drawn as events, not effects. Mouths and faces act with the voices. Geinoh Yamashirogumi’s score is placed as event, the chanting and percussion entering with Tetsuo’s power, and Takeshi Seyama’s cutting of the chase and the stadium holds geography at speed. The charges fall on the writing, which is craft: the screenplay compresses its source into exposition, Kei, Ryu and the councillors speak as plot, and the middle hour loses its line among factions. Faces at rest are less individual than bodies in motion. The visual making stands with the best of the medium; the script does not.
Nicolas Poussin · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a cabinet canvas. The making bears the load in the drawing and the disposition: four figures given four distinct postures, leaning, kneeling, turning and standing, that read as one sentence; the arm of the kneeling shepherd placed so that its shadow lies across the letters; the woman’s drapery fallen in long antique folds, her profile set against the sky. Colour is placed as structure: the blues, golds and reds of the garments are distributed across the frieze so that no figure dominates, and the woman’s yellow and blue close the right side. The light is single, from the left, and gives the tomb its volume and the inscription its legibility. What holds the axis below the top: the landscape is summary and conventional, the faces are generalised, and the smooth handling does not carry meaning as the stroke does in Van Gogh or the air in Velázquez.
Thomas Eakins · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, and the making is load-bearing. The head of Gross is among the most authoritative painted heads of its century: the brow, the grey hair lifted by the light, the eyes in shadow, built on anatomical knowledge Eakins had from the dissecting room. The hands are painted with the same knowledge, the surgeon’s at rest with the scalpel, the assistants’ at work, the blood laid on the fingers with a restraint that makes it worse. The light is held across a dark field without losing the volume of the room. The costs are charged: the patient’s body, at the very centre, is a knot of foreshortening that generations of viewers have struggled to read; the woman is smaller and more rhetorical in gesture than the room’s scale allows, the weakest drawing in the group; the tiers are brushed broadly toward obscurity.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence joined by “and”, building a rhythm out of plain nouns and repetition, so that the length of the ordeal is felt in the length of the clauses. The opening sentence sets the man, the place, the trade and the trouble in one breath, and the second paragraph closes on a sail that looked like “the flag of permanent defeat”. The knowledge of the craft is exact and made into narrative: the lines at their depths, the coils and reserves, the way a fish is felt through the hand. The pacing of the sharks is a feat of control. Three charges hold it below the top: the mannerism hardens in places into self-imitation; the old man’s speech, Spanish rendered literally, can stiffen; and the scenes with the boy and the Passion figures of the end are pressed toward sentiment.
Christina Rossetti · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Her ear is among the surest of her century. The title poem’s irregularity is controlled to the syllable: “Morning and evening / Maids heard the goblins cry”, a falling opening that sets the whole poem’s pulse, and lines that lengthen suddenly where Laura’s craving or Lizzie’s endurance needs breath. “She sucked until her lips were sore” is eight monosyllables of plain intensity. The lyrics are exact in another way: “Haply I may remember, / And haply may forget”, the shortened last line of “Song” falling away as the speaker does; “Remember” holding its imperative through the octave and then letting it go. Diction is plain, rhyme rich without strain, repetition used as incantation. The charges: some ballads fall into stock diction, and the devotional pieces repeat a formula of weariness and longing, “I have no wit, no words, no tears”, until it reads as a manner.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and it bears weight throughout. The sound: the opening’s layers of voice, traffic and distortion; the mixing in the workshop, which the viewer follows as process; the hotel wall heard rather than seen. Hackman’s Harry is a great closed performance, a man whose every gesture withholds, whose plastic raincoat is a second wall, who goes soft only with the saxophone. Cazale’s Stan is aggrieved and alive, Garfield’s Moran a salesman’s menace, Ford’s Stett polite and cold. Shire’s solo piano is spare and exact; the framing works by long lenses, high angles and rooms seen from fixed points. The costs hold the figure: the dream is staged more loosely than the rest, some secondary performances are thin, the convention is slack, and the construction shows its seams.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The reinforced-concrete frame carries the narrow patient wing and the cantilevered terraces with a lightness unusual in the Finland of 1930, and the terraces are a structural statement built for use, not for show. The command runs without a break from the site plan to the section of the room, the colour of the stair, the shape of a basin and the lamination of a chair: total design that bears load, since the detail is where the purpose lives. The costs: the concrete and render of the period have needed much repair, a making of its moment rather than for centuries, and parts of the hub and service wings are competent rather than exceptional.
Eastern Ganga builders, under Narasimhadeva I · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and carving, judged on the making as it stands. The carving is at the top of its century anywhere: the wheels, the musicians at colossal scale on a roof, the horses and elephants, the chlorite Suryas, the dense small reliefs, held consistent across a vast surface by many hands. The construction set large dry-laid courses of stone in a corbelled pyramid and bound it with wrought iron in beams and clamps. The audience hall stands as it was built. The fall of the tower is weighed as survival, not here. But the making as it stands includes a hall that its custodians in 1903 would not trust unfilled, and parts of the carving are formulaic in the way of a large workshop.
Jakob Prandtauer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of massing and site is of the first rank and load-bearing: the long block built up on the rock, the staging of the courts, the gallery lowered to the height that lets the church front show over it from the river, towers and dome composed to read at every distance, from the water and from the terrace. The church is sure Baroque construction, a vaulted nave with chapels and a masonry dome on a drum over the crossing, and its interior joins fresco, stucco, marbling, gilding and altar design, each in command. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, the long south front repeats itself, and the church interior crowds its parts. Command of the whole figure outruns command of every part.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the anchors of the elder desks, and the making is load-bearing. Trent Reznor and Flood build sound rather than record it: guitars, drums and voices sampled and processed until the source is gone, layered so that a dense mix stays legible, the noise placed with exactness. The dynamic range is a craft of its own, the whisper of Hurt and the wall of March of the Pigs on one record without either failing. The acoustic passage of The Becoming and the piano of March of the Pigs show a command of contrast. The faults fall on a share: the voice is limited and its shouted register coarse; Big Man with a Gun is crude in making as in words; the middle repeats its textures; Reptile is overextended.
Otto Wagner · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and it is of the first order for its date and load-bearing in the work: the suspended double glass roof, the glass floor, the steel columns, the heating and ventilation built into the hall, the systematic use of aluminium inside and out, the thin cladding and its fixing, all executed with exactness, the detailing carried through to grilles, handles and fittings. The fronts age well, the slabs still true. What holds the axis in the high eights: the office block round the hall is good routine, the massing is conventional, and thin cladding of this kind is known to need care.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera, mostly handheld or rigged, holds the light flat and grey and keeps the world in focus behind the people; the long takes are blocked so that action, extras, vehicles and effects meet their marks over minutes. The design builds a London and a camp from present materials worn down. The sound mixes gunfire, ringing ears, music and John Tavener’s choral writing as one field. Clive Owen carries nearly every scene with a slack body that hardens into resolve; Clare-Hope Ashitey keeps Kee unsentimental. The costs fall on the writing: the Fishes and the politics are explained in plain speeches, Kee is given little interior, and Michael Caine’s Jasper is played as a turn more than as a man.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long, propulsive sentence and of voice, and it is load-bearing: the prose moves from obscene comedy to elegy to self-prosecution inside a paragraph, and the turns are exactly timed. The opening sentence begins in the middle of a negotiation and sets the book’s terms in nine words; the last three sentences close on the reversal of a whole life in two questions and an answer. The set pieces are built at length without slack: the brother’s box, the funeral, the scenes at the Cowans’. The comic timing is as precise as any in American prose of the decade. Held below the top on three charges: the riffs repeat their mechanism and run past their work; the women other than Drenka, Roseanna above all, are drawn as functions of Sabbath’s need; and the obscene register, sustained, narrows the instrument it is meant to widen.
Sandro Botticelli · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of painting on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in the line: the ring of angels is drawn as one continuous rhythm of limbs, drapery and branches; the embracing pairs are knotted by contour into single forms; the fluttering ends of drapery and scrolls are the picture’s breath. Colour is set in deliberate triads, the roof angels’ white, red and green repeated through the ring, against the gold and the dark rock. The archaism is a chosen idiom, not a failure of means: the painter of the Primavera knew what he set aside. The costs are charged: the middle register is crowded and less resolved, the faces are repeated types, and shed and rock are drawn as signs more than built as things.
Elias of Dereham and Nicholas of Ely (attributed); spire by Richard of Farleigh · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The church went up in one style in under forty years, with an evenness of masonry and detail across that span few medieval buildings match, and the dark Purbeck shafting used as line throughout, drawing the bays. The Trinity Chapel carries its vault on shafts whose thinness is itself the achievement; the chapter house hangs its vault on one central pier. The spire is the summit of the making: a masonry spire of about 123 metres, thin-walled toward the top, built with its scaffold left inside, on a crossing never meant to carry it, and held for seven centuries. The cost: the same spire bent its piers and called for strainer arches and iron, so its success is partly later builders’; and the body’s elevation is careful rather than inventive.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Johnson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence and its turn: a plain, almost slack clause, the speech of a man in a bar, which without a seam becomes an ecstatic one and then drops back. The comic timing is exact; the dialogue of “Steady Hands at Seattle General” is pared to two voices and nothing else; and the endings land with a poet’s control of the last line, as in “Car Crash While Hitchhiking” and “Beverly Home”. The breaks in time, the narrator stepping out of the scene to report what he knew then or learned later, are placed with care, never as a tic. Held below the top on three charges: the slighter middle stories are less pressed than the rest; the visionary register is at moments reached for, so that a transport is announced rather than made; and in so short a book the range of instruments is narrow.
Cistercian builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The masonry is of the first order: large ashlar laid with joints so fine that the walls read as single surfaces, the stone vaults true, the arches set without ornament to hide any error. The structure is plain and sound: the half barrels of the aisles take the thrust of the pointed nave vault, so the church needs no external buttressing beyond its walls. The cloister resolves an irregular site with stepped galleries and a consistent arcade; the chapter house turns to rib vaults without breaking the idiom. Held below the top: the structural means are the region’s, the masses sometimes heavy for their spans, the range of problems narrow.
Interpol · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the same anchors as every desk. The making is load-bearing in the arrangement. Daniel Kessler’s guitar figures, short and repeating, interlock with the second guitar so that the songs move by texture; Carlos Dengler’s bass carries melody, often the strongest line in the track; Sam Fogarino’s drums drive the fast songs and hold the slow ones without hurry. The production keeps a dense, reverberant sound legible, and the codas of PDA and The New are built with care, each layer entering where the release needs it. The faults fall on a share of the record: Paul Banks’s voice is narrow and level by design, and at moments flat in a way that serves less than it should; Roland and Say Hello to the Angels are made to a formula; Hands Away is a sketch.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of encaustic and collage at this scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The handling is exact where it must be and free where it can be: each star cleanly bounded and brushed as its own event, the stripes held to their edges while the strokes within them run, drip and overlap, the wax built up so that the newsprint shows through the whites and is drowned in the reds and the blue. Three colours are made to read as a field of many: no red is flat, no white is blank. The making is load-bearing, since without this surface the object is a flag. What holds it short of the highest command: the range is deliberately narrow, one design, three colours and one kind of stroke, and the drawing is given.
Roman, under Hadrian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the fabric as it stands, which shows the making the more plainly for its lost surface. Concrete is handled at every scale, from the great bath vaults to segmented domes, and the curves of the Maritime Theatre and the Piazza d’Oro pavilion, curve set against curve in plan and vault, are set out and built with exactness. Water is engineered across a whole estate: pools, fountains, the Canopus, the moat. The service network under a working palace is planning of a high order, and the terraces and the Cento Camerelle make level ground where the plateau gave none. The costs: much of the fabric is ordinary and quickly built, some joins between groups are awkward, and no single span is attempted.
Elvis Presley · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The voice is the most commanded instrument on the record and is load-bearing: the timing in “Money Honey”, the hiccup and dynamic swing of “I Got a Woman”, the falsetto and breath of “Blue Moon”, the climb of “Trying to Get to You”, each placed with precision by a singer of twenty or twenty-one. Scotty Moore’s guitar is economical and exact, Bill Black’s slap bass carries the Sun tracks, and Sam Phillips’s slapback room is used as an instrument; on the RCA tracks drums join the trio without loss of drive. The faults are real and weigh lightly against so much command: the New York tracks are recorded in a duller room, “Tutti Frutti” is played faster and stiffer than it is felt, two arrangements are routine, and piano and drums on several RCA tracks are generic.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice and timing. The sentences run on, interrupt themselves, break into capitals and into the remembered dialogue of scenes, and land the joke on the last word; the parents’ speech is caught in its syntax and rhythm, without condescension of spelling. “LET’S PUT THE ID BACK IN YID!” is the style in miniature: a slogan, a pun and a programme at once. The set pieces are built like routines, with setup, escalation and topper, and the turn from farce to grief, the father’s constipation becoming the father’s defeat, is made inside a single paragraph. The construction is cunning: the frame’s two ends, the slow approach to Israel, the analyst held silent until the last word. Charged: the tirade becomes a habit, the capitals and exclamations inflate in the middle sections, and the Monkey’s chapters are slacker in the making than the childhood.
Attributed to Domenico da Cortona, under Francis I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The double helix is a feat of setting out and of cut stone: two flights wound about one hollow core, each open to the other, carried through the floors to the lantern. The coffered stone barrel vaults of the upper halls, carved in tuffeau, are of the first rank. The keep’s plan is resolved without remainder: four lodgings fitted into the quadrants, the towers taking the closets and garde-robes, the cross kept clean on every floor. The roof carving and the slate inlay are fine craft at architectural scale. The costs: the elevations repeat a modest system of pilasters and string courses without a true classical order; the wings are plainer and less resolved; and the joining of keep to enclosure is additive rather than composed.
Francisco Goya · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the difference between how cloth is painted and how faces are painted. The costumes are laid in fast, loaded, broken strokes that turn to light at a distance, gold thread, gauze and silver, the diamonds and sashes flashing as touches of pure pigment: painting as free as any in Europe in 1800. The heads, worked from the Aranjuez sketches, are exact and individual without finish for its own sake. The costs are charged. The composition is a row with little depth, the figures stood rather than placed, the room barely built, its air shallow beside Las Meninas; some heads at the back are crowded in, the profile at the right above all; the painter in shadow is summary.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas, and the making is load-bearing. The granular crust, built in layers over two campaigns and the studio, is how the canvases make stone and light one thing. Colour is placed in small interlocking touches of complements, blue in the shadows of the portals against orange on the jambs, rose against green, that fuse at a distance into the glow of the hour. The Gothic detail is given without drawing: portals and rose emerge from paint at the right distance and vanish at the wrong one. Across the set each canvas holds one harmony throughout. The cost is visible: in some canvases reworking has made the surface turgid, the colour muddied and the hour lost, and the drawing falters where the paint is thickest.
Led Zeppelin · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, strong and in places load-bearing. Page as producer places the drums in a room and lets the room sound, giving Bonham a weight few records of 1969 have. The stereo field is used as space, most of all in the middle of Whole Lotta Love, with the theremin, the backward echo on the voice and the panning that Page mixed with Eddie Kramer. Jones’s bass and organ are exact and give Thank You its colour; Robert Plant’s voice is a powerful instrument at full stretch; Heartbreaker is built tight around a riff, with a solo of real invention. What holds it: The Lemon Song’s loose middle, Moby Dick’s display, and an unevenness of sound between tracks made on the road.
Orson Welles · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making bears weight throughout. Metty’s night photography, wide lenses and deep focus in real streets, is among the great camera work of the decade, and the crane and the long takes are executed as well as conceived. Welles’s Quinlan, swollen, intuitive and sentimental, is screen acting at its summit; Dietrich, Calleia and Tamiroff are exact; Mancini’s score, much of it source music from radios and clubs, is woven into the sound. The charges fall where they matter: Heston, in makeup, is stiff as a Mexican official; Leigh’s motel scenes are pitched broad; Weaver’s night man is a mannerism; the exposition of the plot is murky; and the scenes by another director, kept in the reconstruction, are flat beside the rest. The 1958 release carries the same charges more heavily.
Diogo de Boitaca and João de Castilho · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high in structure and carving alike. The hall vault on six slender columns, and the transept vault spanning without support, are bold engineering in stone, and their survival in 1755 is evidence for the making. The carving in lioz, on the portals, the column shafts and the cloister screens, is fine, crisp and consistent across a very large surface, the work of a well-organised shop over decades. In the church the making carries the building: the vault is the effect. Held below because the ornament, for all its finish, is more additive than structural, the cloister’s carving repeats itself in places, and the junction of the classical main chapel with the Manueline nave is a seam, not a resolution.
Eladio Dieste · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, and the making is load-bearing in the strictest sense. A ruled surface set out in brick course by course, each course following a straight generator while the top of the wall rolls; a vault of double curvature laid one brick thick with steel in the joints; a structure calculated by a man who wrote his own theory of reinforced brick to justify it; and all of it built by local masons with ordinary means. The precision is visible: the courses read the geometry, the junctions of wall and roof are clean, and the brick is honest on both faces. The command extends to the tower’s open brickwork and the lit room of the baptistery. The problem solved is smaller than the largest, and the front and the loft are less resolved than the shell.
Sergio Leone · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing at the summit passages. Tonino Delli Colli’s Techniscope frame holds a face and a distance in one composition; the camera at the bridge, the tracking with Tuco among the graves, and the cutting of the three-way duel, from wide to medium to eyes to hands, shortening to the beat of the score, are command of the medium of the first order. Morricone’s music, recorded in advance and played on set, is part of the cutting’s rhythm, not laid over it. The costs: post-synchronised dialogue that floats free of the mouths, the dubbed voices of the supporting cast, crash zooms of uneven tact, and the rope scam and camp passages directed with less exactness than the rest. The slack between the peaks counts.
Christopher Wren, with Hawksmoor and Vanbrugh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium. The Portland ashlar is fine throughout; the domes stand on drums ringed with paired columns, finely proportioned; the colonnades are measured and paced. The large decision is a feat of composition: twin halves, an earlier block by another architect and a long avenue held in one discipline, Webb’s block matched by its twin so that the older work is absorbed, not displaced. Within, the Painted Hall’s sequence of vestibule, lower hall, steps and upper hall is handled with skill in proportion and light. The making is load-bearing in the composition. Held below the top because the work of several hands over fifty-five years shows: the ranges vary in quality and finish, the south courts’ long sides are plain to dullness, and the domes are fine rather than masterly.
Adolf Loos · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command of space and material is of the first rank and load-bearing. The section, in which many levels interlock in one compact block without confusion of circulation, is a feat of three-dimensional planning that drawings struggle to show. The material craft is exceptional: the Cipollino marble set so that its veining reads across walls and columns, mahogany and light woods worked with a cabinetmaker’s precision, built-in furniture made part of the room, each room proportioned to its height. The reinforced-concrete frame, built by the client’s own firm, makes the free play of the section possible, though it is ordinary engineering for its date. The costs: the placing of the windows outside is awkward to many eyes, and the circulation, by its nature, is laborious.
Ridley Scott · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Derek Vanlint’s photography works almost entirely with practical light, lamps, strobes and steam, and keeps the frame dark without losing legibility. Terry Rawlings’s cutting of the meal, of Dallas in the ducts and of the countdown sets the measure for suspense editing in its genre. The sound bears weight: the ship’s hum, the motion tracker, the silence of the derelict, Mother’s voice. The production design is among the most complete of its period, and the creature work, Giger’s design, the facehugger, the chestburster, Ash’s interior, is joined to the photography rather than displayed. Held below 9.0 because the score was cut against Goldsmith’s design and the joins can be felt, some of the hunt’s middle is conventional in coverage, and the full figure at the end, a man in a suit, breaks the command the rest of the film keeps.
Arvo Pärt · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. The tintinnabuli rule must yield a texture that never sounds mechanical, and in Silentium it does not; the proportions of the canon bring every voice to its end at the right moment of the descent; the prepared piano gives a colour no unprepared instrument gives, and it is placed sparingly. The violin writing of Ludus is brilliant, and its general pauses are timed as structure. What holds the axis below the top of the desk, where the Goldberg Variations and the Quartet Op. 131 stand at 9.7, is the scale of the means: two triads and two scales by choice, and a craft of rigour and placement rather than of counterpoint and harmony at their widest. The cadenza is the plainest writing in the work.
Joseph Strauss, Charles Ellis, Leon Moisseiff and Irving Morrow · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. A suspension bridge is nothing but its making, and the making is load-bearing throughout: the south tower founded in open water at the ocean’s edge, inside a fender in tidal current; the cables spun in place across the strait; the towers raised in riveted steel cells, tapering in steps; a span of 4,200 feet held to Moisseiff’s theory and Ellis’s calculation; a safety net under the work that changed the expected toll of such a building; and Morrow’s architecture of the towers, the railings drawn open so that drivers keep the view, and the lamps, all in one hand. The costs: the deck moved in wind and had to be braced within two decades; the concrete deck failed in salt air and was replaced within fifty years; the flexible design stood, as Tacoma showed, near a limit not then understood. First-rank command, not complete.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of paint on canvas at mural scale, to the same anchors as any medium. The making bears load. Thin layers, laid one over another, give the dark its depth, so that the maroon reads as lit from within and the black opens rather than stops. The edges are feathered: the rectangle is not drawn but emerges, and its boundary breathes, which is how the threshold can be present and impassable at once. Value is held so close across canvases taller than a person that one misjudged layer would flatten the field, and none does. The canvases work in the low light the painter asked for. The costs: a deliberately narrow range of mark, and an evenness across a series of variations in which some canvases are less resolved than others. The fragility the technique leaves is charged to survival, not here. Below The Rothko Chapel (9.0).
Chaulukya, under Queen Udayamati · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, and of carving as part of the masonry. A cut some 27 m deep and 64 m long was made in river alluvium and lined in dressed stone, its retaining walls held apart at each level by pillared pavilion frames, and a deep cylindrical shaft was lined down to the water. The sculpture is of the first rank of Chaulukya work: figures deep cut and crisp, jewellery, drapery and gesture given with full sculptural command, and set into the divisions of pilaster, niche and band, so that carving and coursing are one system. The loss of the upper structure is weighed as survival, not here. What holds it below the top: the carving is consistent rather than everywhere exceptional, and much of it is workshop repetition.
Kanye West · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing in most tracks. The sample work is exact: King Crimson cut to a chant in Power, Bon Iver’s “Woods” built into an anthem in Lost in the World, Gil Scott-Heron set as the last voice. The arrangements keep dense forces legible: All of the Lights holds horns, piano, drums and a dozen voices clear, and Runaway moves from a single note to a full band to distorted voice without losing its line. The costs: the maker’s own rapping is uneven, slack beside Nicki Minaj on Monster or Pusha T on Runaway; two tracks are routine as construction; the mix is sometimes loud where it wants grandeur. Below Low (9.0), above Remain in Light (8.7).
Charles Rennie Mackintosh · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as built, structure and engineering included. The command of light, mass and section is of the first rank and load-bearing: windows sized to the studios and set in a stone wall without loss of its mass; a south elevation that turns a slope into a cliff; the library’s timber construction, posts and beams with the gallery held back from the columns, structure made the room’s figure; ironwork, brackets, railings and finials, that works and ornaments in one gesture; and an early mechanical system of ventilation and heating built into the fabric. The costs: the interior was a lattice of timber and voids that the fires found, a weakness weighed under The Imperishable; and some first-phase detail is decoration at a few points over a plain fabric.
Geoffrey Chaucer · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the stanza is high from the first line, “The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne” (1)
“the life so short, the craft so long to learn”, a chiasmus on art and love whose balance is the poem’s in little. The verse shifts register without strain: the Dantesque gate, the translated Boccaccio, the eagles’ high suits, the goose’s and the duck’s bluntness, Nature’s adjudication, the lyric roundel. The comic speech of the lower birds is metrically as exact as the courtly pleas. Held below 9.0 by the stretches of close adaptation and catalogue, where the making is competent rather than load-bearing. The sounding of the line as Chaucer spoke it, final -e and stress, is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the German distich at a level no German poet before Goethe had shown in this measure. The line moves easily; the syntax runs through the couplet and stops where the sense stops; the diction holds the colloquial, the tavern, the bed, the lamp, and the elevated, the Capitol and the gods, in one key. The first elegy’s double turn on Rome and love, and the movement from day to night and from book to body within a few couplets in the elegy of study, are making at a high level. The charge: German stress imitating classical quantity forces some lines; Goethe’s hexameters were faulted in his own time for laxness, and he revised the metre for the collected editions; and some of the allegorical pieces are merely deft. The faults are local. The command of movement and of mixed register is the substance of the axis, and it is high.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the French, as far as it can be heard here. The prose is Flaubert’s at full command: the sentence weighed by ear, the cadences built to close, the imperfect tense used to set a whole world in motion at once, the concrete noun placed where a lesser writer would put a feeling. The first chapter’s feast is a set piece of construction, hundreds of soldiers, dishes, peoples and quarrels governed by rhythm until Salammbô descends. The battles are handled with a clarity of movement unusual in the period, and the Défilé de la Hache is built in stages of starvation with a terrible patience. Charged to this book’s making, not to the hand: the vocabulary of archaeology, which in places makes the sentence a museum case; the speeches, often stiff and declamatory; and the middle chapters, where the command is sustained but the material repeats.
The Who · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and the making is load-bearing. Johns recorded the band with a clarity rare in hard rock of the time: Moon’s drums placed and huge without blur, Entwistle’s bass articulate under the guitar, Roger Daltrey’s voice at its fullest, from the restraint of Behind Blue Eyes to the scream. Townshend’s guitar and keyboard writing is exact: the acoustic and power chords of Bargain, the layered arrangement of Baba O’Riley, the long synthesiser passage of Won’t Get Fooled Again held without slack. The band playing against a fixed pulse is a feat of ensemble. The faults: Going Mobile’s treated guitar solo is more effect than construction, My Wife’s brass overdubs are thick, Love Ain’t for Keeping is slight, and two of the ballads are well made but conventional in arrangement.
Ilkhanid, under Öljaitü · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. A brick dome of about 25 m span, double-shelled, set on an octagon whose walls are hollowed into bays and galleries that reduce mass without weakening support, raised in roughly a decade and still standing after seven centuries in a region of earthquakes. The brickwork of the galleries and vaults, the carved and glazed brick, the tile mosaic and the carved and painted plaster of the second campaign are Ilkhanid craft of a high order. What holds it: the passage from octagon to dome is straightforward rather than a feat; the minarets did not survive, which leaves the making less complete to read; and the working of the two shells is not known closely enough to credit more.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included, and the making is load-bearing in the strictest sense: the skin is the structure. The form had to be built to tolerances that would let two legs, each climbing along its curve to 630 ft, rise separately and meet at the crown. The erection by creeper cranes climbing the legs themselves, the stabilising strut set between the legs in the upper stages, the jacking apart of the legs to admit the last section: each was devised for this building. The tram is a small mechanical invention fitted to the curve. The surface is finely made, the welds ground and the taper smooth. What holds it below the top is the interior, where the making is engineering without architecture, and the staining of the skin, which was not foreseen.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The Wilder and Diamond screenplay is close to faultless as comic construction: every setup is paid, often twice, the saxophone, the yacht, Spats’s spats, the bellhop, the bracelet Daphne earns, and the dialogue does its work in lines of a few words. Lemmon’s Daphne is comic invention of the highest order, sustained without a false note; Curtis carries three voices; Monroe gives the film its pathos in a song and two scenes. Lang’s black and white is clean and lit for faces; the tango and yacht crosscut is cut with exact timing; Orry-Kelly’s costumes bear on the plot. What holds it below the top: the camera is serviceable rather than load-bearing, and the Florida middle loosens.
Mimar Sinan · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The making is excellent at two levels. Sinan’s structure is assured: the octagon resolves the dome’s thrust into eight supports, freeing the side walls for galleries and windows, and the platform carries the whole above vaulted shops on a constrained site without visible strain. The tiles are among the finest the Iznik workshops produced: the bole red, hard to fire without bubbling or running, is laid thick and stable; the drawing of tulip and carnation is crisp; the panels are fitted to arches, spandrels and piers with skill. The building’s identity rests on its craft. Held below the top by the unevenness of the programme, its many designs not all of one quality, and a structure accomplished rather than daring.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Verna Fields’s cutting of the Kintner attack, the beach crowd glimpsed through passing bodies, each bather crossing the lens a wipe toward the yellow raft; Bill Butler’s camera at water level; Williams’s score, the motif, the hunting music in the manner of a shanty, and the silences where the motif is withheld; overlapping, half-improvised talk among three actors who make their men distinct in a few lines; Robert Shaw’s speech, held on his face with few cuts. The charges fall where a viewer feels them: the shark of the last act shows its seams, the day-for-night is uneven, the hoax and the docks are broad, and the exploding tank asks the viewer to accept physics the film has not prepared. Command, not mastery at every point: two tenths below The Third Man and Chinatown, at 9.0.
Josef Hoffmann · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of the making is of the first rank and load-bearing: the marble is cut and set so that each slab reads as a field, and the metal edging runs unbroken round corners, windows and bays, its junctions resolved, where two mouldings meet at a corner and double it, where the edge stops at the ground. Inside, the Werkstätte’s furniture, metalwork, lighting and textiles are made to a standard of finish few houses of any period reach, and the hall’s proportions are handled with assurance. What holds the axis from the top band is structure: no achievement is claimed for the house’s bearing. Its achievement is in surface, finish and proportion, and the massing of the street front is skilful more than masterly.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts; the making bears weight in every department. Sorkin’s screenplay is overlapping, rapid and exact, its scenes built as arguments, its lines carrying character and plot at once. Fincher holds a film made almost entirely of talk in tension by framing and cutting alone. Cronenweth’s low, warm light in the dormitories and cold light in the conference rooms divides the two times without a caption. Baxter and Wall intercut three times at conversational speed and never lose the viewer. The score is an event, not commentary. Eisenberg’s flat, fast, unblinking Mark; Garfield’s open Eduardo, whose hurt is the film’s warmth; Timberlake’s Parker, charm as a weapon; Hammer’s twins, one performance in two bodies. The costs: Sorkin’s voice makes almost everyone equally quick, the women other than Erica and Delpy are written thin, and some lines show the writer.
Antonín Dvořák · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making is load-bearing in colour and melody. The orchestration is masterly and economical: the cor anglais over muted strings, the chorale’s dark wind and brass, the finale’s brass over driving strings. The melodic invention is of the highest order, and the themes are built to combine, as the finale’s coda shows. No conductor retouches the scoring. The costs are in the motivic work. The first movement’s development is short and works by sequence and repetition more than by transformation; transitions in the outer movements are sometimes formulaic, joined by repeated figures and pedal points; the finale’s recalls are juxtaposed more than worked. In contrapuntal and developmental command it stands a clear step below the Beethoven Ninth.
Knights Hospitaller builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing. The masonry is fine dressed limestone, laid true at the scale of a mountain face. The talus is a structure in itself, its batter made to stand, to resist mining and to shed what falls. The ramp is a long vaulted passage carried up the slope and turned back on itself. Water is caught and stored, in the birka and the cisterns. The loggia and the south-west chamber show the masons in full command of French rib vaulting, set without loss into a military shell. The castle has stood through earthquakes since 1170. The cost: the junctions of the campaigns, Frankish to Mamluk, round to square, show.
Peter Zumthor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the room is what its making left. Concrete rammed in 24 lifts from local aggregate to a warm, even tone, the lifts left legible as the building’s record of days; a timber tent built to hold the concrete and then removed by a controlled fire, a procedure that had to be judged in its burning, cooling and extraction; tie holes turned from a necessity of formwork into the room’s constellation, each with a blown glass plug; a lead floor cast in place to receive water; one triangular steel door in a heavy frame. That this was done to such a finish with a farming family and local tradesmen is part of the command. Held below the top because the structure is a simple mass, with no span, vault or difficulty of load, and the work is small.
Ikeda Terumasa · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The keep is a timber frame of the first rank in its tradition: two great pillars rising through six floors and a basement carry a tall stacked structure on a hill in a country of earthquakes, and it has stood four centuries with repair. The stone walls are built dry, steep at the top and spread at the base on their concave curve, holding the hill and the weight above. The plaster is a technical system as much as a surface, fireproofing timber and joints. The composition of the keep group, masses stepping and gables layered into one figure from every side, is of high command. The costs: the advanced practice of its day rather than an extension of it; a west pillar that had to be replaced; gables applied as figure rather than built as structure.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in every department. Cuarón’s photography gives a grey scale of great depth and sharpness, every plane in focus, the lateral pan so steady that its rare departure, following Cleo into the sea, carries the climax. Crowds and space are staged in long takes without visible strain: the street seen from above, the earthquake in the nursery, the fire, the field of hundreds of men. The sound field, built without a score, places the city around the house. Yalitza Aparicio, untrained, carries the film in stillness and work; Marina de Tavira’s Sofía is exact. The costs: a uniform digital clarity that can be cold where memory would blur, comic set pieces staged for effect, and long takes that at times display command.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas. The making is load-bearing. Colour: the dark field and the warm ground are held in exact relation, the dark neither dead nor opaque, the ground hot enough to burn through without overpowering it. The edge: brushed and feathered, so that each block has no line but a zone, and the eye cannot find where colour ends. The surface: thin layers built up until light seems to issue from the paint; the means look simple and are not. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by choice, a few broad brushings and a few relations, so the command is shown in a small compass; and the media chosen for their effect are fragile, which is weighed under The Imperishable.
Victor Horta · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. Horta joins masonry and iron in one structure, uses iron’s capacity to span and to stand slender so that the vestibule can be opened, and gives each member a form that states its work: the column flares where it gathers load, the beams show their riveting on the street. The detail is controlled at every scale. Mosaic, painted wall, stair rail, glazing and fittings were drawn by one hand to one line, and the half-level section on a narrow plot is resolved with a lightness that hides its difficulty. What holds the axis: the means are not new as engineering, the structural ambition is a house’s, and some of the iron’s curvature is decoration rather than structure, a gap between seeming and doing that critics have pressed.
Georges de La Tour · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the meditation is carried by the handling of light. The flame and the glass vessel are among the most exacting passages in seventeenth-century painting, the light seen through glass and oil, its swelling and its reflection. The hand under the chin is lit from the side, the fingers translucent at the edge where the flame comes through. Volumes are simplified to smooth, continuous planes, shoulder, arm and skirt, so that the figure reads as solid in the dark with no detail to break the stillness. Colour is held to red, white, flesh and black, placed with complete control. The costs are charged: the simplification flattens some forms, the anatomy is schematic in places, and the touch lacks Velázquez’s range or Rembrandt’s.
Donald Judd · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the work is nothing if the joins are not exact, the planes not true, the surfaces not uniform, and the boxes are made to tolerances that let the eye read a small recess or a few degrees of slant across a hall. Judd designed every interior and the placement of every box on the bays of the building, and refitted the sheds, the glazing and the roof, so the command runs from the object to the architecture. The craft is of specification, fabrication to tolerance and placement, all directed by Judd, rather than of the hand; the anchors do not prefer the hand, but they ask for command across a range, and this range is deliberately narrow: one material, one volume, one finish.
Richard Serra · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as any medium: here steel plate, mass, balance, curvature and placement, and the making is load-bearing throughout. Each sculpture stands by its own geometry and weight, its plates curved to the precision the effects require: a lean of a few degrees more and the spiral oppresses, a few less and it is a corridor. The passages are measured to the single body, the patina is even, and the placement along the hall sets intervals that let each work be entered alone. That such plates could be rolled at all, and set so that they stand, is a command of industrial means few sculptors have had. The making shared with engineers and mills is not charged, as the medium allows. What holds the axis: the range of mark is one, the plate, and the surface carries little beyond its colour and weight.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a single canvas. The making is load-bearing: the meaning depends on the transfer of a photograph into paint so exact that the hand all but disappears, and on its not quite disappearing. The hair, drawn back in strands of light and shadow; the nape and the edge of the cheek, which carry the whole person in a few centimetres; the jacket’s pattern, held in the folds of the turning body without losing its flat ornament; the grey, laid so that it reads as depth and as a painted surface; the soft focus at the figure’s edges, which keeps the image from becoming either photograph or illustration. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, the composition is given by the photograph and not built, and one problem is commanded completely rather than many.
Gustave Caillebotte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil at the scale of history painting, and the making is load-bearing. The perspective is constructed with an architect’s control across a deep, wide field, its lines running to the prow of the wedge building. The grey is a unity held across nearly six square metres, modulated from the silvered sky through the façades to the wet cobbles, each stone given its own glint, among the finest passages of wet ground in the century’s painting. The couple are painted with authority: the dark wool, the fur, the veil, the umbrella’s ribs. The costs are charged: the far figures are summary, doll-like to some eyes; the perspective stretches toward the edges as a wide lens bends; and the couple’s faces are given less life than their clothes.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is of a very high order. The carpentry and the bracketing are exact; lacquer, gold leaf and polychrome are laid on a scale and to a finish that few wooden buildings anywhere approach; the carving on the Yōmeimon and the Karamon is deep, undercut and layered. The making is load-bearing for the effect: without it the splendour that is the shrine’s first register would not exist. What holds the axis below the top is the structure, the conventional timber frame of its period on stone bases. Nothing in what the building stands on or spans is an achievement of structure in itself; the summit of the making is in surface and joinery.
Pierre Bonnard · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium, and the making is load-bearing: the picture’s meaning is its colour, and the colour is built with a control few painters of the century matched. Hues are set in small broken touches that keep their own heat and still fuse at a distance; complementaries are pitched against each other, yellow against violet, so that the tiled walls vibrate while the body stays cool; warm and cool are placed so that the eye travels the surface without stopping. The drawing is subordinate by intention but holds where it must, in the rim of the tub and the run of the body. The costs are charged: passages where the touch, reworked over years, clots or goes fussy; an anatomy soft by design and in places by default; a brilliance that can read as evenness.
Ovid · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on the Latin. The command of the elegiac couplet is as complete as any in the language: the pentameter regularly closing on a disyllable, balance and antithesis set within and across the couplet, the clinching turn placed at the line’s end, and a speed and lightness that Propertius, for all his power, does not have. 1.5 is a model of narrative compression; 1.13 builds an argument of mounting accusation; 2.6 parodies the funeral lament and Catullus at once, with perfect tact; 3.9 holds the same instrument grave. Held below the top on three charges: the run of exempla, where cleverness carries a poem past its point; a sameness of procedure across the forty-nine; and the fluency itself, which at times makes the couplet a machine for antithesis, a fault Quintilian named in Ovid generally.
Built for Vimal Shah and Vastupala and Tejapala · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The carving is of the first rank and load-bearing for the work: the Luna Vasahi pendant cut so thin that it is said to pass light at its edges; figures standing almost free of the brackets in Vimal Vasahi; every bay a separate composition carried to the same finish over hundreds of bays and two campaigns two centuries apart; the marble hauled up a mountain and worked to this standard. The structure is sound and has stood nine centuries, but it is the ordinary structure of its tradition: post and lintel, corbelled rings, short spans, no structural risk. Pittalhar, partly unfinished, and Khartar Vasahi, coarser outside, are lesser makings. Supreme in the carver’s art, conventional in the builder’s; the figure holds both.
Alan Moore and J. H. Williams III · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as prose or film. Williams’s command is among the highest the medium has shown in English: a draughtsman who changes manner with conviction from sphere to sphere, and a page designer whose layouts carry meaning in their architecture. Gray’s inks and Cox’s colours hold the changes in one finish, and Klein’s lettering is built into the designs. Moore’s script is exact in construction, its issue-length forms, the Tarot procession and the posters, as finished as anything he wrote. The making is load-bearing. Charged: the dialogue, a tutorial in the ascent and leaning on the line’s in-jokes in the comic interludes; the comic relief of the first arc; and the last third, where the drawing is at times by other hands or lower in pitch and the pacing sags. Held below the nines for the words, not the pictures.
Sesshū Tōyō · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of ink on paper, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the image is its handling. The washes are laid wet enough to bleed and stopped before they drown; the pale mountain is a single breadth of diluted ink that knows where to vanish; the dark accents, struck with a loaded and then a dry brush, give the wash its ground and its scale, the near trees and the roofs in a few touches; the pole and banner, a line and a small rectangle, are drawn with a calligrapher’s certainty. The paper is used as a value. The costs: the middle ground is soft, some wash reads as chance not quite governed, and against Sesshū’s own constructed landscapes the drawing is necessarily summary.
A. M. Cassandre · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged to the same anchors as a painting, the command of the medium is very high and load-bearing. The graded tone of the hull, carried from the drawing through the lithographic stones without banding, makes the steel a lit volume against flat planes. The colours are few and exact. The drawing of the bow’s widening, its perspective forced to the edge of the plausible, is controlled so that the hull looms without toppling. The birds are placed with a precision that sets the scale of the whole, and the lettering is drawn to the image, not added to it. Every effect the poster has is made in the making. Held below the top because the means are narrow by design: one object, few colours, no figure, and no passage of colour or touch held over a large field.
Alexandros of Antioch (attributed) · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Command of marble carved in the round at over life size. The torso is the height of the making: flesh modelled in planes so slight that the skin seems to breathe, the passage from breast to ribs to the soft fold above the drapery unbroken. Against it the drapery is cut deep with the drill for shadow, and the knot below the navel holds its weight convincingly. The figure is built of separately carved parts, joined at the hips under the drapery’s edge, where the seam disappears. The head is crisp and controlled. The costs: the drapery is heavy in passages, more effect than structure, and the face is generic beside the body, a classicizing mask on a living torso.
Adrian Smith (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. Here the making is load-bearing as in few towers: the shape is the structure and the structure is the answer to the wind, so that form and engineering cannot be parted. The buttressed core is an elegant solution, simple in plan and repeatable in construction, and the concrete at that height, the raft in poor ground and the long climb of the core are command of the first rank. The spiral taper is handled with assurance: from the ground the tower reads as one tapering figure, not a stack of steps. The costs: the curtain wall is competent corporate glazing, refined in its fins and no more; the interiors are luxury fit-out; the spire is vanity well engineered; and the base meets the ground without much force.
Lucian Freud · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life size, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the claim of the picture is carried by the handling. The flesh is built in loaded, directional strokes that follow the form, the colour moving from warm pinks to cool greys and greens in the shadows, so that skin reads as living and heavy at once. The drawing of weight is exact: where flesh folds, where it presses on the cushion, how the arm lies on the sofa’s arm. The upholstery is painted in a flatter, more descriptive touch that sets off the body’s density. The costs are charged: passages where the build-up reads as labour more than as form, a certain sameness of touch across the large expanses of the body, and a background treated as fact rather than as space. High command, not the summit’s.
Muqi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of ink and brush on paper, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing at every point. Tone: the range from near-black to bare outline is controlled exactly, each fruit a distinct value, set in an order that reads as weight. Stroke: each body is laid in with a broad wet stroke, apparently in one pass, that gives roundness without modelling; the quick dark strokes of stems and calyxes give each fruit its turn and its life, and are where the hand shows most. Edge: the wash bleeds just enough into the paper to soften the contour, and stops. The fruit in outline is the hardest thing on the sheet. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, and the field very small.
Valmiki · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Valmiki’s Sanskrit as far as structure, figure and narrative economy can be read; the music of the line is beyond this reading, neither credited nor charged. The command of the śloka is clear and sustained: a lucid, flexible line that carries narrative at speed, rises to lament, and makes the simile and the extended description into instruments, in the Pampā lake in spring, the monsoon at Kiṣkindhā and Rāvaṇa’s palace at night seen through Hanumān’s search. The question to Nārada and the krauñca verses have a plain grandeur, and the Sundara is the most finished book. Charged for unevenness by stratum: formulaic half-lines and stock epithets far beyond the needs of oral composition, speeches that run long, battle books that repeat their means.
Attar · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as this reading reaches it. What can be judged is the making of the whole, and the frame is built with great economy: an assembly, a proposal, a run of excuses each in character, a crisis that thins the company, a graded road, an arrival, a single word that resolves it. The setting of Ṣanʿān, after the excuses and before the road, as the proof of what the road may cost, is a master’s stroke. The anecdotes are told plainly and briskly. Charged: the stacking of anecdotes in the answers, where the transitions turn formulaic, and a gloss that sometimes explains a story that had already done its work. The music of the Persian line as a native reader hears it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Imhotep, under Djoser · Architecture
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of a medium the makers were inventing as they went. The inward-leaning layers are a load-bearing structural idea, giving the stacked mass stability. The shaft, cut 28 m into rock and closed with a granite plug, and the galleries are serious works of excavation. The carving of the colonnade and chapels, the ribbed engaged shafts, the log ceilings, the stone hinges and open doors, is fine and exact, and the faience rooms show an assured command of surface. Held below the top: the blocks are small, close to the bricks they replaced; the masonry is not yet large close-jointed ashlar; the engaged columns cannot stand free; and the staged changes left irregularities.
Jalal al-Din Rumi · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Rumi’s Persian, so far as this reading reaches it. The command is of the spoken line and the told tale. The ramal runs fast and close to speech; a couplet catches a grocer, a Sufi, a judge or a lion; the register cuts from the bazaar to the throne of God; the Sufis who sell a traveller’s donkey make a set piece of their refrain. In the opening couplet the reed is set speaking in two words, bishnaw, “listen”, and az juda’iha, “of separations”, and the Song is as finished as anything in Persian. Against this, Persian criticism has long held the diction rougher than Sa’di’s or Hafez’s: easy and repeated rhymes, hemistichs padded to the metre, transitions that only call the reader back to the tale. The poet says he thinks of rhyme and the beloved tells him to think of nothing but his face, a defence and a fact about the making.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Tolkien’s English. The command of structure is of the first order: two strands timed against each other day by day across four books, and a geography that holds over a thousand miles of walking. The command of register is wide: the Gaffer’s talk, Sam’s speech, Gandalf’s dry authority, the archaic syntax of Théoden, the alliterative verse of Rohan, the Elvish lyric. The landscape is exact and the weather felt, and the last chapter finds a sentence of perfect plainness, “and the evening meal was ready, and he was expected” (Book VI, “The Grey Havens”). Charged: the high style can stiffen into pastiche, the speech of kings and Elves is often declamatory, adjectives and formulas recur, and the first book’s prose is slack, still half in the register of The Hobbit.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil at life size, to the same anchors as every medium. Where the making is load-bearing: the drawing of the whole, five figures locked into a nearly square field by the diagonal of the curtains and the wedge of the ledge; the contour, raw and angular, carrying the body without modelling it; the colour, flesh pinks and ochres against a cold blue that breaks between the figures like a shattered pane; the hatched strokes of the right-hand heads, laid fast and parallel, a modelling that is also a mark. The costs are real: the three systems of the faces are not reconciled; the left figure is flatter and more schematic than the rest; passages of drapery are summary; feet and hands are barely resolved. Some of this is a method that refuses finish, some a picture left at a turn. Command high, realisation uneven.
Victor Hugo · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Hugo’s French as far as this reading carries it; the rhythm of the French sentence beyond the passages known here is neither credited nor charged. The command is of rhetoric and of the set piece: antithesis, the long enumeration, the chapter built to a single closing line, the opening that comes down from the bishop’s title to his household. The great sequences are built with mastery: the trial at Arras, held back while Valjean’s night of decision is told; the night pursuit through Paris to the convent wall (II.5); the barricade’s two days. The registers range from the bishop’s sermon to Thénardier’s cant, the student wit of the ABC and the argot of Patron-Minette. Charged: coincidences that serve the plot past belief, Marius lodging next door to the Jondrettes (III.8); declamation that sometimes replaces dialogue; and the slack of the fourth part’s idyll.
Stendhal · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the French as a reader of it hears it, not line by line. The command is real and particular: a rapid, exact, unornamented sentence; irony carried by placement; scenes built from a single decisive gesture, the hand, the shot, the ladder, the portrait of Napoleon that must be got out of the mattress before M. de Rênal finds it. The comic set pieces, the King’s visit to Verrières with its guard of honour and the bishop of Agde practising his benedictions before a mirror, have a lightness the period’s novel rarely had. Charged on its own evidence: the book was written fast and shows it, in loose chronology, in the abrupt compression of the end, which reads as haste as well as design, and in the repetitive letter chapters. Command with visible haste stands in the upper Tier IV, not at the summit.
William Gaddis · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The command is of two instruments. The first is the dialogue: the parties carry dozens of voices, often unattributed, and the ear for cant, the art critic’s, the analyst’s, the poet’s, the publicist’s, is exact enough that a speaker is known by a phrase. The second is the narrative prose: long, learned, ironic sentences that move between New England theology, Flemish technique and Manhattan squalor without losing register. The control of a very large cast and a plot of coincidence over nearly a thousand pages is a feat. Three charges hold it below the top: the prose is at moments overwrought, the learning laid on as display; the satire of the Village is sometimes broad and repeats its targets; and the women, Esther and Esme above all, are seen less fully than the men.
Joseph Conrad · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Conrad’s English, his third language. The construction is a feat: dozens of named persons, three generations of history and a geography held exactly (the gulf, the Isabels, the harbour, the campo, the mountain, the mine, the railway), with a time-scheme that moves backward and forward without losing the reader who attends. Scenes are built with great authority: the riot and Ribiera’s flight, the lighter in the dark, Hirsch’s interrogation, Monygham’s deception of Sotillo, Teresa’s death. Charged on the sentence: the English here is often heavy with abstraction and with the triadic adjective; the dialogue, especially Antonia’s and that of the Avellanos circle, can be stiff; the narrative voice sometimes says what the scene has shown. The last part’s handling of the Giselle plot is hasty beside the care elsewhere. The making is load-bearing in the structure, less so in the prose line.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Four sustained instruments across two hundred and fifty-seven thousand words: the baroque day-register, the night-register’s field headers, the cetology’s taxonomic prose and the blazon’s anatomy, each held under control, and a fifth, the plain declarative prose of the six interludes, which is the best writing in the book. The dialogue is exact and often funny: a damaged friend relaying a telephone call word by word, a widow at her sink, a sister at eight metres. The charges are real. The first volume over-explains its uncanny beats, the irrational impression that dissolves and lingers, again and again; the fourth gives each new arrival an inventory of height, cloth and barber before a line of speech; and its narration in the register’s idiom, Dennis received, runs past the point of yield.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, through limits chosen and kept. Cale’s viola parts turn a drone into structure; the single-pitched guitar and Tucker’s pattern give songs that need pulse no decoration; the tempo changes of “Heroin” are held without a click by a band moving as one; the piano of “I’m Waiting for the Man” never changes pace; Reed’s songwriting works as music, from the folk-pop line of “Sunday Morning” to the two chords of “Heroin”. A conventional band could not have played “Heroin” this way. Narrowness chosen is still narrowness, with fewer idioms than the year’s studio records, and within it the execution slips: loose ensemble in places, Nico’s wavering pitch, some muddiness that was not chosen. Exact where the limit is chosen and loose where it is not, it stands level with Matisse’s Dance.
James Boswell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Boswell’s prose is plain, lucid and controlled, with a Latinate formality learned partly from Johnson and sometimes stiff. His great craft is dramatic: he sets a scene in a few lines, times the entrance of a speaker, and lets Johnson’s sentence fall with its full weight: “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs.” The Wilkes dinner is a comic structure of the first order, built from preparation, approach, alarm and release; the meeting in Davies’s shop is told with a novelist’s timing. Against that, the management of the whole is uneven, documents are often inserted rather than shaped, and the late volumes slacken into notes. The making carries the scenes and is only competent in the compilation.
Nathaniel Hawthorne · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Hawthorne’s English, with no translation between. The construction is masterly: the scaffolds placed at the second, twelfth and twenty-third chapters; the letter’s meanings advanced chapter by chapter; Pearl’s half-wild speech used to press the question no adult will ask; the holiday chapters (XXI to XXIII) bringing every thread into one crowded square, with a ship’s captain carrying the news that the physician has taken passage too. The prose is balanced, periodic and exact, and it can turn a phrase into an emblem: the prison as “the black flower of civilized society” (I). The sketch shows another command, a comic, self-mocking essayist’s voice. Charged: the narrator’s hedging and moralising, which sometimes says twice what the scene has said once; dialogue stiffened by an archaic “thee” and “thou” beyond what the period needs; and Chillingworth’s turn to fiend, drawn in Gothic colours cruder than the rest.
Søren Kierkegaard · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The command of register is wide and exact. The Exordium’s grave, nearly biblical paratactic prose; the Eulogy’s rhetorical climbs in the manner of the classical encomium; the Preface’s urbane comic irony on an age holding a clearance sale of ideas; the Expectoration’s sharp, colloquial portrait of the tax collector who looks like nothing at all; the fairy tale voice of the merman. Danish readers rank the prose among the language’s finest, and Kierkegaard is a founder of modern Danish prose; the sound of the Danish sentence is reported, not judged here, and nothing is charged to the book for that. What holds the axis: the dialectic is repetitive by design, its formulas recurring until the reader feels the drum, and Problema III’s digressions are less finely joined than the opening. The making is load-bearing in the Exordium and the sketches of the knights, ordinary in parts of the Problemata.
Louis-Ferdinand Céline · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Céline’s French. The command is real and load-bearing: the oral sentence is a made thing, with its displaced subjects, its doubled pronouns and its abrupt colloquial drops, timed for comedy and for horror alike. “Moi, j’avais jamais rien dit. Rien.” (Me, I’d never said anything. Nothing.) The set pieces are built: the shelling on the road, the passengers of the Amiral Bragueton turning on Bardamu at sea, the quarantine on Ellis Island, the Ford shop floor, the mummies. The aphorisms land with the force of proverb. Charged because the construction is weaker than the sentence. The second half’s sequence of Rancy cases, the Henrouille intrigue and the Vigny asylum is managed as chronicle, its timing loose, its figures, Parapine and Baryton among them, more sketch than scene; and the rant, the book’s great instrument, is also its crutch.
Mikhail Bulgakov · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the novel in Bulgakov’s Russian, as far as close translation and the Russian known with certainty reach it; the music of the Russian sentence lies beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. The command is of two styles held in one book. The chapters in Yershalaim are written in a sculpted, rhythmic, almost liturgical prose, with refrains, the fourteenth of Nisan, the rose oil Pilate hates, the white cloak with the blood-red lining, placed like columns. The Moscow chapters use a feuilletonist’s narrator, gossiping and digressive, with comic timing as exact as Gogol’s: Woland lectures the buffet manager that freshness comes in one degree only, the first, which is also the last. The set pieces, the séance, the Ball, the flight, are built at scale. Charged: the text is unrevised in places, with loose joins and repetitions in the Moscow chapters, and the epilogue explains more than it needs to.
Robert Frank · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of 35mm black and white photography and of the sequenced book. The making bears the load: framing at speed in available light; the off centre composition in which the meaning sits at the edge, the faces cut by the window frames at Hoboken and the flag between them; grain, blur and dim interiors used as tone; the timing of glance and gesture in a crowd; and the sequencing, perhaps the highest skill in the book, in which pictures from different states are made to answer each other across pages. Held below the top because the single print is often less fully commanded than the elder masters of the medium commanded theirs: some pictures are near misses of exposure and focus that the book’s manner absorbs rather than requires, and the range of means is narrow by choice. The charge of sloppiness was wrong about the method and right about some plates.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Gunnar Fischer photographs the shore in flat grey light, the faces close against the sky, the church in hard shadow and the closing dance in silhouette. The confession is staged with almost nothing, a grille and the turn of a cowl. Max von Sydow’s stillness carries the knight, Gunnar Björnstrand’s Jöns is the finest playing in the film, and Bengt Ekerot’s Death is courteous, weary and exact. Erik Nordgren sets a chorus over the opening and gives the players a plain song. The costs are visible: the forest and the inn are studio sets and look it, the night scenes are lit as stage, Plog and Lisa are played broad, and much of the blocking serves speech rather than the camera.
Elia Kazan · Film
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Brando’s performance is among the most fully commanded in the medium: the gum, the glove, the half-finished sentences, the taxi played as a man pushing grief away. Steiger, Cobb, Malden and Saint are held to one register. Kaufman’s photography of Hoboken in winter, breath and smoke and grey water, the rooftops above the harbour, is exact; Schulberg’s script is economical and its idiom right; Gene Milford’s cutting is clean. The costs: Bernstein’s score, brilliant in itself and superb in the opening horn and percussion, often overstates and at times swamps the dialogue; Malden’s sermons are played at the pitch of a stage; the final fight and walk are staged rather than seen.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Craft is read to the same anchors as any book, with script, page design, drawing and lettering as one text. Moore’s script is exact: the voices are kept apart across classes, Gull’s periodic lecture, Netley’s cockney, the women’s talk and the policemen’s, and the pages are composed so that silence carries the worst of the book. Campbell’s drawing is load-bearing. The rough, hatched, sometimes deliberately unfinished line gives the city its fog and its dirt, keeps the violence ugly rather than spectacular, and in the tenth chapter holds a long sequence on small panels with almost no words. The charge is real: in the crowded chapters the figures are hard to tell apart, men of one class in the same coats; some pages are muddy in reproduction; and the lettering is plain to a fault. The craft is high and willed; it is not, page by page, at the summit.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil at nearly seven metres. Load-bearing where achieved: the blacks, which are the picture’s main colour, modulated across the whole crowd so that cloth, felt, wool and shadow are told apart; the heads, each a portrait, observed without flattery and with great variety; the whites of the headdresses, the surplices and the pall, laid in broad loaded strokes; the knife and heavy brush that give the surface its weight; the grave and the earth. The costs are real and are charged here: the space is compressed and the depth between ranks unclear; the procession at the left and the women at the right do not sit in one convincing ground plane; the drawing of some bodies under the clothing is summary. Some of this is the method, a chosen flatness; some is not, and the axis cannot credit as decided what it cannot tell was decided.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention weighed elsewhere. The guitar is commanded at a level few recordings in any idiom reach: the control of feedback and sustain in Third Stone and I Don’t Live Today, the phrasing of the Red House solo, and rhythm playing, chords and fills in one hand, under every song. Mitch Mitchell’s drumming is load-bearing, jazz phrasing that keeps the trio from sounding thin, above all in Manic Depression. The backward tapes of the title track are made exactly. Against that, Noel Redding’s bass is plain and sometimes buried, Chas Chandler’s production is quick and some mixes cramped, the singing serves more than it commands, and Can You See Me and Remember are routine. A peak above Low and The Dark Side of the Moon at 9.0, a whole a little below them.
Ancient Egyptian · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and at its best the making is load-bearing. Hatshepsut’s obelisk is a single shaft of granite, quarried at Aswan, shipped downstream and raised. The hall’s columns were built up in drums and, as usually reconstructed, carved after erection, with ramps and fill. Seti I’s raised relief is among the finest of the New Kingdom, and the canonical figure holds across two millennia. The costs belong to the making, not the ruin: shallow foundations of small reused blocks, which is why water could bring the columns down; pylon cores of rubble; Ramesses II’s coarser, quicker sunk relief; the First Pylon left unfinished. The quality is uneven across the reigns, as an accreted work’s must be.
Ivan Goncharov · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Goncharov’s Russian as far as this reading carries it; the music of the Russian sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is the plastic, painterly rendering of a world in its objects and gestures: the dust and cobwebs in the flat, the dressing gown, the slipper Oblomov feels for with his foot, Agafya’s bare elbows moving at work. The comedy with Zakhar, whose quarrel over being compared to “others” is one of the great scenes of master and servant, is exact in rhythm and in social nuance. The Dream’s long sentences are the prose of heat and sleep. Charged: the narrator tells what he could show, chiefly with Stolz; Olga’s development in Part Four is analysed more than dramatised; the swindle runs on coincidence and on villains of one note.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and uneven. The comic dialogue of the Dodson sisters is among the finest in English: each aunt has her idiom, her property and her grievance, Mrs Glegg her two kinds of front and her money, Mrs Pullet her bonnet and her medicines, with Uncle Pullet and his lozenges beside her, and the comedy is exact sociology. Tulliver’s puzzled speech is a voice given without condescension. The narrator’s essayistic prose joins argument to scene, as when Book Sixth takes up Novalis’s saying that character is destiny and qualifies it: not the whole of our destiny. Charged: the third volume is hurried, Stephen is drawn from outside, the drift chapters lean on summary at their crisis, and the flood is told at a speed the book has not used before.
Salman Rushdie · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The prose is a commanded instrument: long sentences that run on a Hindi and English rhythm and break into lists; chapter openings that strike like a teller’s hook; leitmotifs, the perforated sheet, the spittoon, the nose, the knees, snakes and ladders, placed and returned with exact timing; comic set pieces built with stage precision, the Methwold estate sold with its contents, the washing chest in which the boy first hears the voices. The making is load-bearing: the voice is the argument. Charged on the same anchors as any medium: the manner is mannered, and its devices, the anticipations, the apostrophes to Padma, the hyphenated compounds, are used past freshness; and Book Three, after the Sundarbans, loosens into summary and allegory where Book One was close-worked scene.
Toni Morrison · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Morrison’s English, with no translation between. The prose is commanding. The first sentence, “The North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent promised to fly from Mercy to the other side of Lake Superior at three o’clock.”, sets the book’s tone in one move, comic, grave and plainly told. The naming of Not Doctor Street, told as civic history, is a comic set piece with an argument under it. The dialogue in the barbershop, at Pilate’s house and in Shalimar catches several registers of Black speech exactly. A large cast is managed across fifty years and two regions without confusion, and details planted early, the earring, the bones, the song, pay out hundreds of pages later. Charged: in places the narrative tells what the scene has shown, above all in Milkman’s reflections in the second part; Guitar’s exposition of the Seven Days runs as debate; and the summary of Milkman’s twenties drags. A long way from thin, and short of the top.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command of section, light and proportion is of the first rank and load-bearing: the level top and the pilotis meeting the slope; the church’s light taken nearly away and returned through slots, the crypt’s through cannons whose colours carry into the room; the ondulatoires, a glazing system that is also a measure; the cell fitted to the body by the Modulor. It was made for very little money, and the roughness of the concrete is part choice and part economy. The costs are real: the fabric let in water and needed early repair; bare concrete and single glass kept out neither cold nor noise; finishes were left raw where the budget ran out. The frame is ordinary engineering: the command is of space and light more than of building.
Ornette Coleman · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and the making bears weight in places. The unison heads are tight and exact, which is harder without a piano to fix the pitch. Higgins’s drumming is supple and inventive throughout, and on “Lonely Woman” holds the fast tempo under the slow theme without either giving. Haden’s bass, choosing its pitches by ear from the line, is the record’s harmonic intelligence. Coleman’s alto is fluent and vocal, its intonation deliberate. The costs are charged. Cherry’s execution is uneven, with phrases that do not land; the vocal pitch is a choice, but here and there it is not fully controlled; and the recording, clean as it is, is plain. A figure at the level of Kind of Blue’s 9.3 would claim a polish this record does not seek and does not have.
Walker Evans · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of photography, of printing and of sequence. A large-format camera set square to its subject, so that facades read as planes and verticals stay vertical; light chosen to be even and full, holding detail in the shadows and in the white of clapboard; framing that takes in the whole sign or shopfront without crop or tilt; the people held at rest. The editing is itself a craft of the highest kind here, choosing from years of work and placing what was chosen, and the design, rectos and blanks, is the maker’s decision. What holds the axis is range of hand: a few early plates, made with smaller cameras, are slighter and lean on the modernist angle Evans later gave up, and the plain style, once grasped, asks a narrower range of the hand than the densest painting.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of oil on canvas at mural scale is here command of colour and contour, and it is load-bearing. The three colours are pitched so that none can win: the vermilion hot enough to advance, the blue deep enough to hold it, the green a ground between them. Each body is drawn with one contour that does the work of anatomy and motion at once, bending limbs beyond the possible so that the ring accelerates. The paint is laid broadly, with the brushwork visible and adjustments left in, rougher than in the canvas of 1909 and more alive for it: the opposite of finish, not of control. The charge is that the instrument is narrow by choice, with no modelling, no texture and no detail.
Pablo Neruda · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Neruda’s Spanish. The command of the line is great: the long free-verse period that breathes in waves and lands on a concrete noun is Neruda’s invention and his instrument, and in “Sólo la muerte” and “Entrada a la madera” the ear is exact, the vowel music and the stress on the closing word as controlled as in any rhymed verse. The images, however strange, are made from hard particulars: celery, wet clothes, coffins, dentists, the hair of a widower’s beloved. The craft is uneven. Some poems of the first volume are slack, their enumerations padded and their similes interchangeable; “Desespediente” and some shorter pieces of the second volume manage less; and the opacity is at times not a meaning but a fog, in lines where the method writes the poem.
Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, landscape and structure together. The command of landscape is of the first rank and load-bearing. The grading of the open slope reads as untouched ground; the stairs of the Meditation Grove are set so that the climb grows harder as it nears the top; the edge of the forest is held exactly where the composition needs it; stone, grass and pine are handled with economy. The Woodland Chapel sets a domed plaster room inside a shingled pyramid, so that the outside is forest shelter and the inside a heaven. The crematorium resolves three funerals, the movement of coffins and the needs of cremation in one plan. The engineering extends nothing: spans are modest and the means ordinary, and the making lies in proportion, detail and siting rather than in structure.
Tibetan, under the Fifth Dalai Lama · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in its tradition and load-bearing at scale: a mass of earth, stone and timber raised on uneven rock at about 3,700 m, in a seismic valley, its walls battered to carry their own weight and to read as the hill, standing for more than three centuries. The Red Palace, by its dates, was raised in about four years. The crafts are in command throughout: the murals, the gilt copper roofs, the metalwork and stone setting of the stupas, the frieze, the carved and painted capitals and brackets. The costs: the structural system is the inherited one, massive walls and a short-span timber grid, with no structural invention; the interior repeats the grid; and the fabric needed heavy repair by the late twentieth century.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long paragraph and the voice. The opening, which begins “The Swede.”, builds a neighbourhood’s worship of one boy out of one cumulative, conversational sentence after another, and the book sustains that pressure across its length. Roth’s ear keeps a gallery of voices apart: Lou Levov’s rapid, aggrieved monologue, Jerry’s surgical savagery on the telephone, the Swede’s halting decency, Merry’s stutter set down on the page, Rita Cohen’s cant. The exposition of glove-making is a feat of exact knowledge made into narrative. Charges hold it below the top: the ruminative paragraph repeats itself in the Swede’s long anguish; the rhetoric of Zuckerman and of Jerry inflates; women, Dawn above all, are seen narrowly and largely through the men’s eyes; and the satire of the last part’s guests is broad.
R.E.M. · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and load-bearing in the songs that carry the record. Scott Litt’s production is warm and lucid; every instrument is legible. The band traded instruments to find the sound, Peter Buck’s mandolin and acoustic guitars and Mike Mills’s piano, organ and accordion among them, and John Paul Jones’s string arrangements are scored for gravity rather than sweetness. Michael Stipe’s voice, at its most exposed and exact, carries Everybody Hurts and Nightswimming on breath and diction. Drive withholds the band until its distorted break. The faults: Ignoreland’s buried vocal and generic rock arrangement, Star Me Kitten’s deliberate murk that reads as slack, and the light setting of The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite.
The masons under Ismaila Traoré · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the anchors of every medium. The command of earthen building is of the first rank and is load-bearing: walls battered and stiffened by pilasters to stand in mud at height; a plaster of fermented mud and organic matter that sheds rain for a season; spouts and vents that manage water and air; toron that make maintenance part of the structure; and an eastern wall where towers, pilasters and pinnacles set a rhythm that holds across its length. The costs are the medium’s, and the building admits them. The spans are short and the hall is crowded with piers, more pier than space; the engineering extends nothing; and the fabric, left a few seasons, fails. The command is of composition, material and climate more than of structure.
Venetian · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. A heavy wall and a hall of very wide span were carried on two open storeys over soft lagoon ground, on piles, and the loggia’s tracery is not only ornament: the quatrefoil roundels stiffen the arcade and spread the load of the wall above. The masonry and the lozenge facing are precise; the corner groups and the capitals are among the best Gothic carving in Italy; the Porta della Carta is late Gothic work of the first order, and Rizzo’s stair is finely wrought. The rebuilding after 1577 roofed the great hall again and kept the fronts standing. The costs: the ground storey reads short and heavy, the windows of the Molo front sit unevenly, and the joins between campaigns and manners show in the courtyard.
Zora Neale Hurston · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. The narrator’s sentences are figured, aphoristic and sure: “The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.” The dialogue is a sustained transcription of a speech community, its lies, insults and courtship in exact cadence. The hurricane is controlled at length, from the animals moving east to the lake’s rising to the walk over the water. The shift of the narration toward the idiom is a technical achievement of its own. Charged: written in about seven weeks, the book shows its speed in the last third, where the muck chapters run as episodes rather than build, the Turner material is thin and the trial is a summary; and the narrator’s glosses sometimes explain a figure already made.
George Orwell · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a plain style held without a lapse: short declarative sentences, a narrator who reports without comment, and a deadpan that makes horror the more exact for being understated. The comic timing is precise, as when the animals find Squealer sprawled beside a broken ladder under the wall with a pot of paint, and do not understand it (chapter VIII). The alterations of the commandments are spaced across the book so that each lands as a small shock and the last as the sum of them. The parodies are exact: Squealer’s statistics, Minimus’s poem to Napoleon, the sheep’s slogan revised. Charged on range: the instrument is a single plain register, chosen well; characters other than Boxer and Clover are drawn in one stroke; and chapter X tells in summary what the earlier chapters showed.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first, on the whole as built. The making bears load in the nave. A barrel vault of Roman breadth was raised in brick and held by the chapels set across it as buttresses, the thrust taken into the mass of the walls without flying supports: a system recovered from ruins and made to work in an economical material. The composition is of the first rank: one unit carried at three scales without strain, the giant pilasters fitting temple and arch into one front, brick and stucco made to read as Roman masonry. Juvarra’s dome is accomplished engineering of its own century. The costs: the front does not meet the nave cleanly, and the ombrellone is the mend; and the designer was absent, the execution left to others over three centuries.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Stevenson’s command of the English sentence is exact and economical, and the making bears weight in the opening chapters above all. The portrait of Utterson that opens the book, “lean, long, dusty, dreary and yet somehow lovable”, sets a voice of dry, comic precision that carries horror without raising its pitch. The setting is drawn in few strokes: the by-street with its bright shopfronts, the sinister block with its blistered door, the fog over Soho. Dialogue is spare and characterising, in Poole the butler and in Mr Guest the clerk. The two documents are differentiated: Lanyon’s dry and appalled, Jekyll’s elaborate, self-justifying and in its last pages broken. The cost is in the statement, where the periodic, moralising prose runs to abstraction and to the stresses of a Victorian confession; it is fitting to Jekyll, and it still thins the texture. The making stands high, below the summit.
Luis Cernuda · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the Spanish, with the limit stated: the music of the verse is weighed from knowledge of its manner, not by a native ear. The command is wide: the strict short stanza of the first book with Guillén’s precision; the eclogue and ode with a Renaissance finish; the long breathing line of the surrealist books; and above all the late line, unrhymed, keeping the hendecasyllable and heptasyllable as an undercurrent while sounding like considered speech, with the pause and the plain word as its weapons: “¿Volver? Vuelva el que tenga”
(Return? Let him return who has). The diction is exact and unornamented by choice. Held below 9.0 on three charges: the apprentice work of the first two sections; the late stretches where plainness becomes flatness and the argument outruns the verse; and the self-justification that costs some poems their shape.
William Makepeace Thackeray · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
The prose is among the most supple of its century: conversational, quick, exact in social register, able to turn in a clause from comedy to death, as at Waterloo, and to carry irony without strain for hundreds of pages. The comic scenes are fully made: Becky flinging Johnson’s Dictionary out of the coach window at Chiswick Mall in the first chapter; Jos and the rack punch at Vauxhall; Sir Pitt in his gaiters at Great Gaunt Street; the auction of the Sedleys’ goods. The dialogue is precise in class, and the author’s own plates and initials add a second voice. Charged: the sermonising repeats; the sentiment around Amelia and little Georgy is laid on in the way the book elsewhere mocks; and the serial slack shows in the middle numbers. Level with the best English novels of its decade, below the summit of the form.
John Milton · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Milton’s English. The command is of the long periodic sentence in a Latinate English, built clause on clause and released into figure. “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties” climbs through three infinitives to its absolute; in “Let her and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?” a plain verb carries the whole argument. The irony of the catalogue of what a licenser would need to license is exact and funny, and “opinion in good men is but knowledge in the making” is as compressed as English prose gets. Held below the top on three charges: syntax that at times loses its governing clause, a first head heavy with precedent, and a mistaken example from Spenser.
Virginia Woolf · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Woolf’s English, with no translation between. The command is in the long comic sentence that can turn to lyric within a clause, and in a pastiche of period prose that moves with the centuries. The Great Frost is as fine as any set piece in her work. The biographer’s voice, pompous, plaintive and sly, is held throughout and carries the most delicate turns, the change of sex among them, without strain. The last chapter’s handling of time, the clock striking the present and the selves called up one by one, looks forward to The Waves. One sentence gives the book’s poetics: “Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another.” Charged: haste shows in the middle, where the wits of Queen Anne’s London are sketched rather than made, the satire of the Victorian age leans on one device, and some jokes come twice.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Scored on Brecht’s German and on its dramaturgy. The prose is lean and gestic: speech built to be shown, with the attitude in the syntax. The scenes of argument are superb in their making: the fourth scene’s refusal to look, conducted in the court philosophers’ Latin while a child fights over a model; the eighth scene’s exchange with the little monk, where each side’s best case is put; the twelfth scene’s robing, an argument made of costume and silence; the thirteenth scene’s bell. The captions are compact and exact. Charged for the fourteenth scene’s self-indictment, a speech delivered to the audience over Andrea’s head; for the carnival of the tenth, loosely made; and for comic business at court and curia that is sometimes broad.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. In the room the command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the roof set on four piers so that the walls can be closed and the light can come only from above; the piers made hollow to hold the stairs and the air; the galleries placed so that a congregation of hundreds sits near one voice; the light controlled by two layers of glass, the coffers and the clerestory, so that no glare reaches the floor; the proportion of a small room made to read as tall. The concrete was poured in place and left exposed, its aggregate washed. The costs are the maker’s: the roofs leaked, the concrete cracked and spalled, the junctions of slab and wall let in water and the reinforcement corroded. The exterior ornament is cast more than built. Command of the room outran command of the weather.
Louis Le Vau and André Le Nôtre · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, engineering included. Le Vau’s plan resolves the double pile, the central oval and the corner pavilions into a compact block in which reception, private suites and services all work, and it was built in about three years. The grading of the valley, the moats, the canalising of the river and the hydraulics that fed basins and cascades were a large work of earth and water. Le Nôtre’s control of perspective, in the spacing of basins and the falls of ground that slow or hide the view, is load-bearing. Le Brun brought painters, stuccoists and weavers into one scheme. Charged: the exterior has been faulted as crowded, the dome heavy and the roofs many, and the speed shows in places.
Andrea Palladio · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command is of the first rank in the orders and the light. Two orders are resolved through one interior, the half-columns and pilasters stepping in depth so that the nave reads as layered planes; the thermal windows light the vault evenly; the screen is proportioned so that the choir reads as one further space; and the finish of stone and plaster has great economy and precision. A large vaulted and domed church stands on piles in the lagoon. The costs: the front, built after Palladio by others, joins its two orders less cleanly than the Redentore’s; the giant pedestals are an expedient; the junction of the two scales at the corners is awkward; and the structure is the received vaulting of its age, not an advance.
Charles Laughton · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in most of the film. Stanley Cortez’s light carves faces and spaces out of black: the bedroom, the cellar, the river at night. Robert Mitchum’s Powell is charm, menace and farce in one body, and the comedy never lets the threat down. Lillian Gish carries the second half with a stillness that matches him. Walter Schumann’s score, with the children’s songs and the hymn, is built into the action rather than laid over it. The charges fall where they matter: Sally Jane Bruce’s Pearl is stiff and much of Billy Chapin’s playing is of one note; Shelley Winters is given a woman more of function than of life; the Spoons are played broadly; some painted backdrops and models show more than the style needs.
William Kentridge · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of drawing and of the animated film. The drawing is a master’s: charcoal handled for mass and tone as much as for line, the mine dumps, pylons and flat veld of the East Rand given weight and light with the side of the stick and a rag, Soho and Felix sure in a few marks. The making of the films bears load: the eraser’s trace is controlled so that a ghost stays exactly as strong as the scene needs, the camera’s rate varies so that change comes slowly or abruptly as the feeling requires, and the blue and red pastel are rationed to the water and the wound, and therefore carry. The costs: the earliest films are rougher in timing and in the cut, some caricature is broad, and the visible hand can cover moments less exactly built than the surface suggests.
Max Beckmann · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil painting on a large scale, to the anchors used for any medium. Load-bearing where achieved: the black contour, heavy and continuous, binding colour into hard forms and making the wings’ crowding legible; the colour, hot reds, ochres and greens in the rooms against the ultramarine of the centre, so that the release is first of all chromatic; the compression of space, figures stacked in shallow depth like a relief, inverted and cut without loss of clarity; three fields designed to one height, read across and back. The costs are charged: some drawing is summary, hands and faces simplified to stiffness in places; the centre’s figures are monumental but wooden; the wings’ surfaces are less worked than the strongest of the painter’s later single canvases.
Van Morrison · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing at the centre. Richard Davis’s bass is the record’s second voice, answering and anticipating Morrison phrase by phrase, and it carries the form. Morrison’s singing is command of a rare kind: the voice moves from croon to stammer to cry, bends words, and places its repetitions so that they build. Jay Berliner’s guitar, John Payne’s flute on “Sweet Thing” and “Beside You”, and Connie Kay’s light time are all placed with restraint. The faults fall across the record: Larry Fallon’s overdubbed strings are sometimes conventional and sit apart from the band, the mix is rough in places, “The Way Young Lovers Do” is a stock arrangement, and two tracks end on fades. It stands below Low at 9.0 and Kind of Blue at 9.3, which command the medium throughout.
Ancient Egyptian, under Ramesses II · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of building, by subtraction. The Great Temple was set out inside a hill so that a line from the horizon on two mornings of the year reaches the statues at its back wall, and seated figures twenty metres high were carved in place with no means of correction: that the axis holds is a command of setting out that few buildings of any age match. The pillars and Osiris figures are left from the rock in true order; the Kadesh relief marshals a whole campaign across a wall with real narrative skill. The costs: there is no engineering of span or thrust, since the hill bears itself; the sandstone was not sound everywhere, as the fallen colossus shows; and much of the relief is quick work. The engineering of the rescue is not the makers’ and is not scored here.
Senenmut (attributed), under Hatshepsut · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read on what survives of the making. The first rank is in two places. One is the siting and proportion of the whole, horizontals spaced against the cliff so that the terraces read as strata of the mountain. The other is the low relief: the Punt walls, with ships under sail, houses on stilts and the fish of the Red Sea, and the divine birth are among the finest carving of the dynasty. The polygonal columns are cut with a clarity later eyes have admired, and the sanctuary is cleanly worked in the rock. Below the first rank: post and lintel on modest spans, terracing and retaining walls rather than an engineering feat, and porticoes repeating a single bay. Superb in proportion and relief, conservative in structure.
George Bähr · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
The command of the medium is high. A stone dome of sandstone on a central plan, built by a man trained as a carpenter, is an act of great daring, and the geometry that brings the square body, the canted corners, the towers and the bell into one continuous profile is masterly. The joinery of the galleries and the binding of altar, pulpit and organ into one wall show the same command. The piers cracked under the dome’s weight within the eighteenth century; that failure of the structure is weighed under survival, not here. What is held against the making is the design itself, which asked more of its statics than it had calculated: ambition outran calculation.
Adam Lock and others · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, and the making is load-bearing in several places. The stiff-leaf carving of the nave and transept capitals is among the finest in England, varied capital by capital. The chapter house vault, a tierceron palm on a single pier over an octagon, is masonry of the highest finish. The scissor arches are an engineering answer of rare boldness: set into a standing crossing, they braced the tower for good, and their form makes the bracing legible as design, not as prop. The eastern arm’s net vaults and the Lady Chapel’s star vault are early and accomplished. Held below the top because the nave’s craft is fine rather than daring; the misjudged heightening is charged to The Imperishable, not here.
Jean-François Millet · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas of under a square metre. The making is load-bearing where it counts. The three bodies are drawn down to mass and contour, so that each reads as a single weight bent to the ground, and the hands, the only articulated detail, do the work of faces. A warm light from the left models the figures, firm and sculptural without hardness. The far field recedes in a few tones of gold and grey, stacks and wagon reduced to shapes in haze, a distance gained by atmosphere rather than line; the pale, even sky lets the field carry the light. The costs: the surface is careful and somewhat dry, the touch subordinate, the colour harmonious rather than invented, and the middle distance summary. Command complete, invention modest.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The backgrounds are worked at every depth, and the bathhouse is a coherent building, legible as architecture from boiler to penthouse. Movement carries character: Chihiro’s awkwardness on the outside stair, Kamaji’s six arms at work, the soot sprites carrying their coal. The stink spirit sequence is a set piece of timing and of weight, the rope drawn by many hands. Hisaishi’s score knows when to stop, and Atsushi Okui’s digital compositing serves the drawn image and never shows. The costs fall on the telling: in the middle, characters explain the plot to one another, and the seal and Zeniba’s spell are hurried. The craft of the telling is not everywhere at the height of the craft of the image.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing. Thin titanium sheet, limestone and glass are fitted to doubly curved surfaces with a precision that the software and its link to fabrication made possible, in a city with no tradition of such work and with local fabricators. Command of the medium, taken as structure, fabrication, material and the management of light in the atrium together, is of the first order for its time. The charge is real and is weighed: the structure is an armature hidden behind a sculptural skin, and the surfaces do not show how they stand. That separates the building from structural invention of the order of a self-supporting dome or a ribbed shell, where the form is the structure.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in several parts, and load-bearing in them. The attic’s catenary arches in thin brick, each drawn to the curve of pure compression for its span, make a vault that is structure, form and roof in one. The pillar and iron frame frees the plan. The front’s stone was carved to a continuous surface across floors and round the corner, by masons working to models, a feat of cutting and setting. Jujol’s ironwork twists bar and sheet into forms no forge had made before; the roof’s figures are built in brick and faced in broken tile, stone and glass. The costs: the frame is ordinary engineering of its day, the iron ties of the front corroded, and the irregular rooms are drawn less surely than the attic and the roof.
Gustave Flaubert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the French as far as it can be heard here, which is in part; the cadence of the prose is credited from what is known of it, not from close study. The stage directions are Flaubert at his most exact: light, distance, colour and texture set down in the impersonal present, the noun weighed and the clause measured. The last sentence, from the golden clouds to the face in the sun’s disc to the prayer, is a model of his descending close. The speeches give each heresiarch and god a distinct register, archaic, doctrinal, oracular. A quarter century of revision shows in the compression of the 1874 text against the first version. Charged: the speeches of the processions run to recitation, and the erudition sometimes sits on the line rather than in it.
Charles Barry and Augustus Pugin · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of plan is of the first rank: a programme of hundreds of rooms resolved by two axes and a lobby, legible at its spine. The command of ornament is load-bearing in the principal rooms: Pugin’s Perpendicular carried without a lapse from the throne canopy to floor tile, wallpaper and door furniture, so that the House of Lords is a single made thing. The iron roofs met the danger that had destroyed the old palace. Denison’s clock set a standard for public timekeeping. The costs: the stone chosen by commission decayed within decades; Reid’s ventilation never worked as promised; the great bell cracked; the river front’s panelling is repetition, ornament applied by the yard. Command of the whole as design outran command of the building as a machine.
Built for Bishop Bernard de Castanet · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The craft is the command of brick at this scale, and it is load-bearing: a high vault carried over one wide span without flyers, its thrust taken by buttresses folded inside the wall and shown outside as half-round towers whose curve stiffens them and reads as defence. The brick is laid with a disciplined plainness that makes the mass legible: no applied ornament on the shell, the courses themselves the surface. The tower, carried up in stages over two centuries, keeps one profile. The stone of the choir and jubé is late Gothic work of the highest finish, and the porch, though it breaks the idiom, is skilfully made. Below the summit because the structure, bold in span, takes no risk of the order of the glass cages of the north.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a small upright canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing in the fog: thin, smooth layers in which grey, white, blue and pale violet pass into each other without a seam, so that the mist reads as moving and the distance recedes by tone alone, step by step to the sky. The figure is cut cleanly against it, dark on light, the coat a single dark green, the hair touched with light. The drawing of the near rock and of the spurs is exact. The costs: the near rock is dark and thinly described, a silhouette more than a substance; the figure is stiff, a lay figure posed; and the whole has the slight stillness of a picture assembled. The handling is controlled, not inventive: complete in the fog and adequate elsewhere.
Raymond Hood and the Associated Architects · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and the command is load-bearing. The site plan is the first craft: the dropping of the plaza, the narrowing of the channel, the tower set to close the axis at the right distance, the low pavilions placed to open the view; it is urban composition as exact as any of its century. The slab is a precise solution of structure, service and light. The cladding is consistent and finely judged, the limestone piers carried unbroken and the spandrels recessed so the verticals read. The Music Hall is a work of high theatre engineering and interior making. The service city below is quiet engineering that made the open ground possible. Held from the top band because the secondary slabs are competent rather than exceptional, the ornament is sometimes thin, and three firms show in a flatness of the lesser fronts.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian; the sound of the sentence, as a native reader hears it, is beyond this reading and neither credited nor charged. The command is of the voice and the scene. Pozdnyshev’s speech has its own physics: nervous interruptions, strange sounds, long periods that circle back to the same accusation, a sudden concrete detail breaking the abstraction. The scenes have Tolstoy’s full exactness: the honeymoon quarrel that arrives from nothing, the violinist’s manner at the piano, the walk down the corridor in stockings at night, the corset that resists the dagger, the wife’s face afterwards. The frame is handled with economy. Held below the top on one charge: the argumentative passages are flatter than the scenes and repeat their terms, and there the art serves the doctrine at a cost to the making.
Anthony Burgess · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Burgess’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. Nadsat is built with a linguist’s and a composer’s control: Russian roots bent to English inflection, “horrorshow” from the Russian for good, schoolboy slang, rhyming slang and a mock-biblical second person set in one voice, kept consistent across the book and learnable from context, so that by Part Two the reader has the vocabulary without a glossary. The rhythm is musical, and the question that opens each part, “What’s it going to be then, eh?”, is used as a composer uses a returning theme, its meaning changing as Alex changes. The narrator’s tone, confiding, vain and comic, never slips. Charged: Part Three’s plotting is mechanical and its coincidences visible; F. Alexander and the conspirators are mouthpieces; and the Minister is caricature.
Willa Cather · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Cather’s English, with nothing between. The command is of the plain sentence and the placed image: the first night on the wagon in the dark, the red grass, the snow, the plough on the sun, rendered with a clarity that seems artless and is not. The broken English of Mr Shimerda, of Ántonia’s early speech and of the Russian brothers is handled with tact and without condescension. The architecture is careful under its looseness: the snake and the wolves of Book I prepare the violence of the land; the Georgics of Book III name the epigraph; the crossroads grave returns in the roads of Book V. Charged: Book III sags and Lena’s scenes run on charm; Jim’s voice is sometimes too even, so that terror and comedy are told in one temper; and the narration announces some meanings, the “founders of early races” among them, that the scenes had already given.
Barnett Newman · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the anchors every medium answers to. The making bears load at the level of decision and calibration: the red laid across thirteen square metres without dead passages or visible seams, so that it reads as one field and still has a breathing surface; the five zips carried the full height; the intervals judged by eye across a width the painter could not see whole while working close. The costs are on the same anchors that credit Pollock and Rothko: the range of means is very narrow, one field, five lines, no drawing, no modelling, no variety of mark, and command shown in so few operations is command of a smaller part of the medium. The measure is real and internal. Held below the abstract paintings that command a wider range at equal profile.
Talking Heads · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Tina Weymouth’s bass and Chris Frantz’s drums hold patterns that never vary yet never go slack. The guitars of David Byrne and Jerry Harrison interlock in short repeating figures; the keyboards add colour without chords. Eno’s production keeps a dense polyrhythm legible, each part placed so the ear can follow any one and hear the whole, and the layered voices are arranged as a choir. The faults fall across a share of the record: Byrne’s narrow range and some thin patter; Seen and Not Seen a sketch; The Overload’s drone less achieved than its intent; the second side’s arrangements plainer than the first’s. Two tenths under Closer at 8.9.
Zhang Yimou · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Zhao Fei’s photography turns a Shanxi merchant compound into a set of stages and the red of the lanterns into the film’s light source and its drama. The design keeps each wife’s house in its own palette until the black covers. Zhao Jiping’s score of Peking-opera percussion and voice is both music and the sound of the house’s law, and the foot-hammers are a detail of sound that becomes a weapon. Gong Li moves Songlian from contempt through cunning to vacancy with little dialogue; He Saifei’s Meishan is sardonic and defiant. The costs: some supporting performances are broad, the Second Mistress’s smiling malice legible at once; the autumn slackens; and the frame’s distance sometimes leaves Songlian’s madness a composition rather than a state.
U2 · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Eno and Lanois treat the room as an instrument and hold a band built for stadiums at a whisper without losing its weight. The Edge’s guitar sets delay as structure rather than ornament, carrying melody and space at once. Mullen’s drumming drives A Sort of Homecoming and Pride, Clayton’s bass moves under the opening, and the strings of the title track are restrained and exact. The costs are real and fall unevenly: the vocal of Elvis Presley and America, over six minutes and the longest track, is an unfinished performance kept, Wire and Indian Summer Sky are arranged as riffs more than songs, and the voice strains at the top. Command of the first rank at its best and uneven across the work is the degree at which Karnak stands.
Gunnar Asplund · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. The proportioning of drum to block, of stair to vestibule and of clerestory to wall is exact, and the passage from dark to light depends on dimensions held to a few steps. The rough white plaster of the drum is a precise decision: it takes the light and diffuses it, so that the upper wall glows rather than shines. The detail runs down to door handles, shelving, lamps and furniture designed by the architect as one hand, with a restraint that never thins into poverty. The making is load-bearing: the effect is proportion and light, and both are made. Held below the top because the construction is conventional for its date, the structure dares nothing, and the window grid is correct more than inspired.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, against the same anchors as any picture: Las Meninas at 9.8, The Large Bathers at 8.8. The command is high and visible in every passage. The colour does the work: blue and yellow, complementaries, set against each other at full strength; the red-brown and green of the central path set a second pair into the first; black kept for the birds alone. The handling is varied within one idiom: short upright and slanting strokes in the wheat, long curving and dragged strokes in the sky, flatter and broader marks in the path. The making bears the meaning. The costs: the speed shows; the crows are summary to the point of being a device; the right side of the field is less resolved than the left. This is a great painter at the top of his manner in a hurry, not one building a picture over months.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Emmanuel Lubezki photographs by natural light, the camera at the height of the figures, light through leaves and on water at every hour. Jack Fisk’s fort and village look made by hand and weather. Wind, birds, water and a low murmur of voices are mixed so that the voice-overs sit inside the world. Q’orianka Kilcher, fourteen when it was shot, carries the film by movement and face; Christian Bale’s Rolfe is exact in restraint. The costs are weighed in full. Colin Farrell’s Smith is opaque where the film needs to see him choose, and his voice-overs are flat, at the centre of the first half; James Horner’s score is largely displaced by borrowed music, and what remains is conventional; the fighting is confused in space; the cutting loses cause and time in the middle.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice and sentence across an unusual range. The first sentence, “This was the year he rode the subway to the ends of the city, two hundred miles of track.”, sets a cadence that carries Oswald’s whole boyhood. Marguerite’s monologues are a feat of ventriloquism, aggrieved, self-pitying and magnificent; Ruby’s patter is exact; Oswald’s written words, in the diary the book gives him, carry their misspellings as character. The shooting and the death are controlled at the level of the single gesture. Three charges hold it below the top: the plotters sound alike, Everett, Parmenter and Mackey sharing one reflective idiom that is the author’s own; the operatives’ scenes are less pressed than the rest; and Ferrie’s speeches tip at moments into the author’s theory.
Prince and the Revolution · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing throughout. Prince’s command runs across guitar, keyboards, drum programming, arrangement and voice: the falsetto of The Beautiful Ones turning to a scream, the low murmur of Darling Nikki, the guitar of Let’s Go Crazy and of the title song, one frantic and one patient. When Doves Cry holds a stacked keyboard figure, a drum machine and layered voices with nothing wasted. The band plays tight on Computer Blue and broad on the live tracks. The faults fall on a share: the arrangement of Take Me with U is generic, Baby I’m a Star is loose, the live tracks are smoothed by overdubs, and some keyboard timbres are of the year rather than of the record.
Maya · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is of a high order and load-bearing, and the line is its instrument. Single, sure contours define bodies in profile, in three-quarter view and from behind; hands are drawn in exact gesture, the captive’s raised hand pleading, the ruler’s grip on his spear; the sprawled captive’s foreshortened body is drawing as ambitious as any in the ancient Americas. Colour is laid in broad fields on Maya blue grounds, the reds and ochres of skin and costume held in one key; textiles, jaguar pelts and featherwork are rendered with economy, not inventory. Figures are fitted to registers that wrap corners and vaults without loss of scale. Charged against it: uneven hands across the rooms, summary handling in parts of the procession, and a space that remains largely a stacked plane.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of every art, and the making bears weight in most departments. Michael Bauman’s photography, largely in VistaVision, is deep and clean from the night raids to the desert in long lens. Andy Jurgensen’s cutting keeps about 161 minutes moving and leaves the hill chase in long, legible takes. Greenwood’s piano figure pushes the film like a pulse. Sean Penn’s Lockjaw is absurd and frightening at once; DiCaprio’s Bob is a comedy of a body run down; Teyana Taylor’s Perfidia is magnetic in a short time on screen; Chase Infiniti, in a first lead, holds the last hour. The costs hold the figure: the slack middle, a slippage between caricature and menace in the Adventurers, and exposition laid out rather than made. The Third Man and Chinatown stand at 9.0, makings in which nearly nothing is idle.
Edward FitzGerald, after Omar Khayyam · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on FitzGerald’s English, which is the work. The command is of the line and the quatrain: an easy, spoken pentameter with the finish of the Augustan closed couplet; alliteration used for weight, “Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer” (24); the turn of the unrhymed third line timed to the syllable; and endings that fall with finality, “Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it” (71). The capitals, the Persian names and the accents are part of the music and of the dress. Charged: archaism and filler where a rhyme forced it, “enow” and inversions weaker than the magnificent “where in I went”; a few quatrains in the fifth edition slack or merely clever; and revisions that lost a better first reading, the 1859 “Bowl of Night” against the more decorous opening of 1889.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of space, light and material is of the first rank and load-bearing in the detail: the columns, each grouping and binding worked to its place in the room; the ceiling of pine boards; the white plaster fireplace; the stair and its poles; the joinery and fittings, handles and rails made for the hand; the passage of the floor from tile to timber as the house moves from hall to living space. The plan holds a large household, service wing, studio, gallery, sauna and garden without strain. The costs: the structure is modest engineering, a mixed frame of its day; the exterior is less resolved than the interior, render and timber volumes meeting more by juxtaposition than by law; and some of the craft is applied finish rather than built form.
Rembrandt van Rijn · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, and the making is load-bearing in the corpse: dead flesh painted in a cool, greyish, faintly green light unlike every living face around it, the difference between dead and living carried by colour and temperature alone. The heads are individual portraits, each held under one light; the ruffs and dark coats are laid with control; the space between the leaning heads and the arm is clear. Tulp’s two hands, the forceps and the curled gesture, are the most exact passage. The costs are charged: the forearm’s anatomy is questionable whatever its cause; the corpse is foreshortened awkwardly and reads large against the heads; the group at the left is stacked rather than placed in depth, the topmost figure crowded; the handling is the tight, smooth early manner.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The writing is the first instrument: long scenes built of argument and digression that keep tension under talk, with lines that passed into common speech. Sally Menke’s editing carries the reordering and the timing of shock, the cut on the needle, the bathroom door, the gun on the counter. The performances are commanded throughout, Jackson above all, with Travolta, Thurman, Rhames and Keitel, and Walken in a single long monologue. The recordings are chosen and placed with exact effect. Andrzej Sekula’s photography is clean, saturated and functional, rarely the instrument of meaning. The costs are real: Tarantino’s own Jimmie is the weakest performance in a key scene, parts of the third section move slowly, and the craft’s gestures are sometimes visible as gestures. The making carries the form in fewer departments than that of Chinatown (8.6) or The Third Man (8.5).
Fritz Lang · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight wherever the film is great. The design is total and consistent. Freund’s and Hoffmann’s photography of the city and of the catacombs holds miniature, set and mass in one light. Lang moves crowds of hundreds as shapes, in the shift change, the flood and the Furioso. Brigitte Helm’s double performance is the finest in it: Maria still and inward, the machine with one eye half shut, a jerking gait and a smile that is wrong, so that the two can be told apart in one frame by the body alone. Huppertz’s score carries the movements. The costs: Gustav Fröhlich’s Freder is pitched to the last row, much of the supporting acting is broad even for 1927, and the cutting slackens in the middle movement and in the chase.
Mughal, under Akbar · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of the stone is of the first rank: brackets cut as if from timber, screens and columns carved to a finish that still reads after four centuries, the Diwan-i-Khas column carrying its platform on a corbelled capital of real daring and complete control, the Buland Darwaza raised on its steps to a height that stands without failure. The trabeated pavilions stand because they were designed to the capacity of the stone. The water system, by tank, lift and channel up a dry ridge, was a work of engineering in itself, now lost. The costs: the idiom limits span and keeps the rooms small; the Panch Mahal is more frame than structure; the joining of courts and levels is at times additive rather than resolved. Command of the parts outruns command of the whole.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in Chaplin’s own performance, a command of the body at its height: the twitch carried into the street, the roller skating, the spanner dance, the song, each timed to the frame. The gags are built exactly, and the sound design is economical and controlled: machines that speak, a stomach that gurgles beside the parson’s wife. Chaplin’s score carries the film’s feeling without words. The costs: the camera is plain and largely static, the cutting serves the gag but rarely makes meaning of its own, the undercranked chases show their method, and the girl’s scenes are directed in a register of melodrama that the rest of the film has outgrown. Paulette Goddard’s energy is real; the supporting playing is broad.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of poured paint at mural scale, to the same anchors as any medium, and the command is load-bearing. Line: thrown and poured paint controlled in weight and speed, so that a skein thins and thickens as the hand moves, without contour and without accident left as accident. Colour: orange, yellow, white, black and silver laid in an order that keeps the field from collapsing into brown, the blue of the poles held against the hottest colours on the canvas. Material: aluminium used for light, enamel for fluidity and pooling, glass and the body’s traces left in. Structure: the poles spaced and leaned to make a measure across nearly five metres, and sunk in the field where the pour crosses them. The costs: the surface is more congested than the classic pours of 1950, and some passages are overworked to a dull density that shows a search not always resolved. Narrower in range of mark than the painted figure, by design.
Michelangelo Antonioni · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Carlo Di Palma’s colour is designed throughout: whites, purples and blacks in the studio, the greens of the park, the single sign at night. The enlargement sequence is a masterpiece of editing and sound, stills, a moving eye and silence, and a story found in them. The park’s sound, wind and leaves, does more than any score. David Hemmings carries the film’s cold restlessness from first scene to last. The costs fall on real shares of it: the English dialogue is often flat and the supporting performances mannered, Vanessa Redgrave’s Jane above all; the party and the girls’ romp are loosely made; the Yardbirds scene pays its thematic debt but is stiffly staged. Load-bearing at the centre, serviceable at the edges, and below Chinatown and The Third Man (9.0).
Built for King Kashyapa I · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Structure and engineering included. The water system is the outstanding making: moats, pools and fountains fed by gravity through conduits, with the large tank to the south and the summit cistern cut to hold rain. The gallery is built on a sheer face, brick walls set on cut ledges, and the Mirror Wall’s lime plaster was polished to a reflective surface, a finish that has outlasted almost everything else of the palace. The boulder gardens show a craft of adapting, not imposing: grooves cut in the rock for walls and footings, shelters enlarged, cisterns sunk. Raising material and water up such a rock is a feat of organisation. Held where it is because the palace and the lion are lost, and the command they showed cannot be judged.
Thelonious Monk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium; invention is credited elsewhere. The writing is the record’s highest craft: the head of “Brilliant Corners”, voiced for two saxophones over Monk’s chords, is exact and strange, and the harmony of “Pannonica” is fully made. Monk’s piano, in ensemble and alone, places every dissonance and every silence. Rollins is commanding throughout, and Roach holds the tempo changes and colours “Bemsha Swing” with the timpani. The splice is craft of the medium, Keepnews’s, and part of the work. The costs are real: the ensemble heard through the splice is strained, with rough unisons and intonation in places; the bass is recessed and the sound plain for its year; the blues has uneven choruses.
Lluís Domènech i Montaner · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and carries the building. The structure is sound and ahead of its date: a frame that carries the hall and frees its walls on a site with no room to spare. The marshalling of crafts is extraordinary: brick laid as ornament, ceramic and trencadís, stained glass at a scale few buildings attempted, mosaic joined to relief in the muses so that the figures emerge from the wall’s own surface. The skylight is a feat of making and of light. Against this: the noise of a glass-walled hall on a dense street was charged against it, circulation on the site was cramped until the extension relieved it, and at points the density of applied work crowds the architecture.
Jørn Utzon · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The vault is a thin, curved shell of concrete cast in place, to a profile that had to be built, shuttered and supported over the church room, and its white finish catches and diffuses the light evenly. The precast panels, tiles and glazing are assembled to a strict module and jointed with precision, and the light is calculated so that its source vanishes. The fittings, the altar screen of white glazed brick, the pale wood and the tile, are made to the same exacting standard and from the same family of materials. The making is load-bearing: the light exists only because the section was drawn and built so exactly. It is high command in a modest building, without structural invention on a great scale.
Hans Puchsbaum and others · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first. The south tower is a masterpiece of stone construction: its stages concealed by gables drawn up the shaft, the octagon and spire carried on a square without a break in the figure, built in some seven decades and standing since 1433. The nave is a hall of great width vaulted in net and star vaults on slender piers under a roof of extreme pitch. The sculpture is of the first rank in its century: the pulpit, the organ foot, the tomb of Frederick III, the pier figures, the ducal portals. The costs: the junction of the Romanesque front and the Gothic body is a fit, not a design; the north tower is a stump; the interior is poorly lit for a hall of its size; and the command is a strong regional lodge’s at its best, not a structure without precedent.
Wang Xianchen; Wen Zhengming (attributed design) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium: water, stone, planting and timber made into one fabric. The water is handled with mastery. Its edges are irregular stone, its reaches are made to seem longer than they are, and it is carried under bridges and galleries so that its end is never seen. The rockwork, mounding earth and stone into mountains that carry trees and pavilions, is skilled. The timber halls show the full Suzhou repertory: lattice windows and doors that open whole sides, the double hall of the western part with its two halves for two seasons, the gallery over water. The making is load-bearing for the knowledge. It is held below the top because there is no structural feat, the timber is later work to a common standard, and some later rockwork is lesser.
The White Stripes · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. Jack White’s riffs are exact and economical, the guitar tone is controlled at the edge of breakup, and the voice runs from a yelp to the hush of the Bacharach cover. The production keeps a loud, dry room clear, and the overdubbed choir of There’s No Home for You Here is arranged with care. The spaces are made as exactly as the sounds: each stop is placed, and each return lands. The limits fall on a share of the record. Meg White’s drumming serves the songs by design and commands little, its plainness a choice and also a ceiling; Ball and Biscuit’s solos repeat themselves; and the second half’s songs are thinner in writing and arrangement.
John Updike · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Updike’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence that renders sensation exactly, and of a present tense sustained across a full novel without monotony. The first sentence, “Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it.”, sets a scene and a social world in fourteen words, and the prose follows the ball, the light on a windshield, the texture of Ruth’s skin and the smell of a kitchen with a precision few American writers of the decade matched. The shift into Janice’s drunken consciousness, its syntax breaking as the bath fills, is a technical feat of the first order. The dialogue keeps Brewer’s speech and the ministers’ two idioms apart. Charged: the lyricism at times decorates where it should press; some of Rabbit’s perceptions come in a vocabulary that is Updike’s rather than his; and some sexual passages are rendered with more relish than knowledge.
Björk · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is high and in places load-bearing. The voice is the record’s first instrument: its range from the near-whisper of Unravel to the scream of Pluto, its control of breath and attack on Jóga and Bachelorette, its placing close and dry over the strings. The string writing is idiomatic and economical, long chords in Jóga, rhythmic and dramatic in Bachelorette, and the octet sounds an octet, not a pad. Bell’s programming is exact, the beats set under the strings without swallowing them; the low end of Jóga is the record’s signature, a sound that is the content. Read against the elder records, not above them: Immature is thinly made, Alarm Call generic in its bright production, and Pluto’s distortion is effect more than construction. Below Low’s 9.0, level with Remain in Light’s 8.7.
Portishead · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing throughout. Beth Gibbons’s voice is among the most exact instruments of its time: pitch held at the edge of breaking, vibrato used as distress, the register thinning or hardening by design. Adrian Utley’s guitar runs from the fingerpicking of The Rip to the scouring of Hunter and Silence. Geoff Barrow’s drums and programming make rhythm the record’s argument, and the production keeps a harsh record legible: the voice is never buried, and each analogue tone is placed so it can be followed. The faults fall on a share of the record: Magic Doors and Nylon Smile are thinner in arrangement, Small’s middle runs past what its material carries, and the abrasion is sometimes laid on rather than shaped.
David Fincher · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight. Khondji’s photography works the darkness to the edge of what can be seen and lights it by flashlight, so that every find is a discovery inside the frame. Arthur Max’s sets, the victims’ rooms and the killer’s apartment of notebooks, are built arguments. Richard Francis-Bruce’s cutting holds the desert sequence in an unbearable rhythm, and Howard Shore’s score lies over the city’s sound. Freeman’s Somerset is the performance of the film, a man whose weariness is a moral position; Kevin Spacey’s killer, calm and polite, is exact in his short time on screen. The costs: Brad Pitt’s Mills is played at one pitch until the last minutes, Tracy is written as a sacrifice, and the FBI device and the tenement chase are mechanism.
Michael Jackson · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing on most tracks. Quincy Jones’s production and Bruce Swedien’s engineering give every part its own space, and the record became a standard of pop sound. Michael Jackson’s voice is used across its range as instrument as much as speech: the hiccups and vocal percussion of Billie Jean, the falsetto of Human Nature, the shouted urgency of Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’, the layered self-harmonies everywhere. Billie Jean’s arrangement, bass line, hi-hat and strings entering late, is a model of economy; the horn arrangements are precise; Eddie Van Halen’s solo is placed as a shock. The faults fall on a share: The Girl Is Mine is saccharine, Baby Be Mine generic, and some synthesiser timbres are of the year.
Sebastião Salgado · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of black and white photography. The making is load-bearing. Composition in chaos: in a scene of thousands moving at once, the wide views find the position at which the ladders become verticals, the terraces horizontals and the mass a structure; that is position, timing and lens chosen in the mud, not luck. Tone: the printing holds the full scale from the black of wet shadow to the white of the sky, with mud and skin kept apart by a few values, so that bodies stand out of a ground of the same matter; the prints were made with printers under his direction. Light: the hard tropical light is used, not suffered, to carve the single figures. The costs: a manner that can tip into the dramatic, with heavy burning of skies and edges in some prints, a recurring heroic frame, and a range of means narrow by choice.
Jean-Pierre Melville · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight throughout: Decaë’s colour pressed toward grey without becoming black and white, a room, a garage and a Métro that seem lit by the same exhausted day; Melville’s timing of procedure, a long take held exactly as long as the act; the sound, where the bird, footsteps, a car door and the Métro carry what speech would; de Roubaix’s score, sparse and placed; Delon’s performance, made of carriage and stillness; Périer’s superintendent, dry and patient. The costs fall on smaller shares: the police plot is loosely engineered, the bridge ambush is staged with less care than the rest, Nathalie Delon’s Jane is thin, and the lit Métro map is a device of exposition more than of image.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in the battles. Janusz Kamiński’s photography; Michael Kahn’s cutting, which keeps the beach legible as experience without making it legible as a map; Gary Rydstrom’s sound, perhaps the film’s greatest single department, from the hiss of rounds into water to the concussed silence. The design of the beach and of the ruined town at Ramelle is exact. Tom Hanks’s Miller holds authority and exhaustion in one face; Jeremy Davies makes Upham’s fear specific; Barry Pepper and Giovanni Ribisi are exact in small space. What holds the figure from the top is the script, efficient but often explanatory, its men drawn by type and their talk on the road given to setting up themes, and John Williams’s score, restrained in the battles, which swells in the frame and the Washington scenes to tell the audience what to feel.
Jonathan Demme · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight through most of the film: Fujimoto’s frontal close-ups and the cool institutional light of hospitals, offices and morgues; Craig McKay’s cutting of the doorbell and of the cellar in darkness; Kristi Zea’s design, from the dungeon under the hospital to Gumb’s house of moths and sewing; Shore’s score, sparing and grave. Foster plays fear and resolve in one face, with the West Virginia accent held as a wound; Anthony Hopkins makes stillness and precision terrifying in few minutes; Ted Levine’s Gumb is exact. Tally compresses the novel cleanly. The charges fall on real shares: Chilton is broad, the briefings in Crawford’s office are exposition, Gumb’s mirror dance to “Goodbye Horses” is mannered against the rest, and the coda plays as a comic button.
Charles Garnier · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of planning is of the first rank and load-bearing: a vast programme ordered on one axis and two cross-axes; the movement of sovereign, subscribers, public, artists and staff kept apart and each led to its place; the stair resolving several levels and routes in one space; the work of dozens of painters and sculptors brought into one scheme under one hand; a substructure that has carried the stage over its reservoir for a century and a half. The costs: the structure is concealed rather than expressed, a choice and not charged, but the engineering extends little; the hall’s sightlines are poor from many boxes; and the ornament is often handled by accumulation. Command of the plan outruns command of the whole.
Krzysztof Kieślowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making is load-bearing. Idziak’s photography carries the film: amber and green filters, a world seen as through warm glass, faces lit from below and from within, the inverted landscape in the ball. Preisner’s score does more than accompany: the concert piece is the instrument of Weronika’s death, and the same music returns as the thread Véronique follows, so that music carries the plot as a story element. Jacob distinguishes two women by small means, a quickness in one and a guardedness in the other, without a device. The editing gives each half its own tempo, swift in Poland and suspended in France. The sound is exact: the cassette of station noise is sound design made a clue. The costs: at times the filters and the soft light tip into prettiness; Volter’s Alexandre is thinly written and acted to a shade; and the clue-trail is staged with less tension than its length asks.
Paolo Uccello · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
The command of the medium is great and particular. The perspective construction of the London panel is exact where it chooses to be: the lances and the fallen body are laid on the system, and the horses are built as solids from studies of volume. The tempera is handled with a decorator’s finish across very large surfaces; the patterning of the damask headdress, the harness and the orange hedge, and the gilding and silvering, now dimmed, show complete control of a costly technique. The design of the three long fields, with their massing of dark and light and the rhythm of shafts, is assured. Against the top band, the drawing of horses and men is stiff, and some of it is limit rather than choice: the horses’ anatomy, the scale between foreground and background figures, the faces. The craft is load-bearing in the system and uneven in the figure.
Luigi Vanvitelli · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The making is of a high order and in places load-bearing. The vaulting of the staircase and the octagonal vestibules, the management of light through them, and the control of a vast regular plan so that the crossing reads from every court are the work of a master. The court theatre is a model of its type. The hydraulics of the park, a long water course falling in stages to basins and fountains, fed by an aqueduct from the mountains, are engineering of the first rank in their century. Carlo Vanvitelli’s completion keeps the standard. The charges are named: the long fronts are correct and dry, their one central accent too weak for their extent, and some of the later interior decoration is competent rather than commanding.
George Saunders · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Saunders’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice, and it is very high. In “Victory Lap” the prose moves between the girl’s theatrical self-narration and the boy’s self-censored, rule-bound inner speech, then into the abductor’s, each in its own diction and rhythm, without a seam. The diarist’s clipped entries, articles dropped and aspirations exposed, are sustained across a long story without faltering. The endings are set with care: the voice of “Escape from Spiderhead” continuing after death, the last turns of “Puppy” and “Tenth of December”. Held below the top on three charges: the coinages, the drug names, the products and the euphemisms, recur across stories as a manner and sometimes as a tic; the registers belong to one family of debased American idiom, so the range is narrower than it first appears; and the sentiment is at moments pressed, the tender turn reached for where it should arrive.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Amis’s English, with no translation between. The making is load-bearing. To write a whole novel in reverse, keeping the physical world consistent in every gesture while the narrator’s thought runs forward, is a feat of control few writers could have sustained, and Amis sustains it. The reversed dialogue is built so that each exchange makes sense backward as one exchange and forward as another, and the reader can do both. The narrator’s voice, innocent, curious and easily moved, is held throughout and is unlike Amis’s usual voices. At the camp the prose drops its comedy and keeps its exactness. Charged: the backward jokes repeat their mechanism and go on after they have done their work; at moments the Amis manner, the knowing phrase and the comic aside, enters where the narrator’s innocence should keep it out; and some of the women of Tod’s later life are drawn as types.
Master Enrique and Juan Pérez · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The making is load-bearing: a skeleton reduced to the minimum that would stand, carrying vaults over walls of glass, and a glazing campaign of great extent and, in its medieval parts, of high quality in drawing and colour. The masters commanded the Rayonnant idiom fully: the glazed triforium, the tracery, glass and stone joined into one membrane. Held below 9.0 for three reasons. The making as first built did not hold, and the choice of a skeleton too thin for its stone is a matter of craft as well as of survival. The design is a reduction of Reims rather than a structure solved afresh. And much of what one sees of the fabric is nineteenth-century execution.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of oil is high and load-bearing. The drawing of the woman’s slack posture and her feet; the man’s head in profile under the hat; the cloudy glass, the one point of luminous colour; the soft doubling in the mirror; the marble tops laid in thin greys that read as stone and as void together. The palette is held to a narrow, exact range without going dead: drabness here is exactness. Judged against the desk’s highest anchors, the handling is less virtuosic across the whole field. The empty lower left is deliberately thin, which is right for the picture, and it leaves much of the canvas doing structural rather than painterly work.
Greek colonists of Poseidonia · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first. Stone post and lintel at this scale, set without mortar, has stood about two and a half millennia through the earthquakes of Campania, and the entablature still spans its intercolumniations. The two-storey interior colonnade is solved with assurance, its upper columns diminishing in sequence with the lower and standing on the lower architrave. Every member, from the platform to the gable, is cut to the one module and set to answer the member beneath it. The stone itself is coarse and was meant to be stuccoed: the finesse of mainland marble is not the aim. Held below the top: the making bears load, but in a received system executed superbly rather than a structure that extended the medium.
Toyo Ito · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and here the craft is load-bearing. The plates, steel sandwiches stiffened by ribs, span between irregularly placed tubes and are thin for their spans. The tubes are welded lattices of steel pipe, each different, built with an accuracy that shipyard methods supplied; the larger act as braced towers against earthquake load, and the frame came through 2011 standing. Sasaki’s engineering and Ito’s drawing are one making, and the double skin of the south face is precise and serves the lit section. Held below the top by the fit of the interiors, uneven from floor to floor, and by detailing that has weathered and dated in places; the ceilings that fell in 2011 were among the lighter fittings, not the frame.
Shreve, Lamb and Harmon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing: the achievement is in how the tower was built. A riveted steel frame raised at a pace rarely matched for a building of this height; materials delivered and placed on a schedule that ran the site like a factory; a cladding designed so that stone, steel strip, aluminium spandrel and window could be set fast without close fitting; a frame that took the impact of a bomber in 1945 and stood. Lamb’s massing is subtle in its proportions: the setbacks of the upper third ease the shaft into the mast, so that the tower reads as one tapering figure from any side. The costs: the frame is the established technology of its day, pushed, not reinvented; detail is thin beyond the lobby; the mast is handled less surely than the shaft, and the antenna coarsens the tip.
Lauryn Hill · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and the voice is its first instrument, in two crafts. As a rapper Hill’s breath, internal rhyme and placement in Lost Ones and Final Hour (“like my thesis”) are of the first rank of the decade; as a singer she carries Ex-Factor and To Zion with grain and control, and builds her own stacked harmonies into a choir. The arrangements are load-bearing: Santana’s guitar against nylon-string and choir in To Zion, doo-wop harmonies and horns over a hip hop beat in Doo Wop, strings and piano in Everything Is Everything. The sound is warm and each part placed. The faults fall on a share of the record: several mid-tempo love songs share one arrangement and one tempo, Nothing Even Matters is soft at the edges, the voice strains at the top of some sustained lines, and the interludes are uneven.
John Milton · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Milton’s English. The blank verse is the young Milton’s most varied before Paradise Lost: Comus’s speech on Nature runs in long periods of accumulation, “With such a full and unwithdrawing hand”, that mime the plenty they argue, while the Lady’s verse is plainer and firmer, and the difference between them is craft. The octosyllabics of the rout and of the epilogue are light and quick. The songs, “Sweet Echo” and “Sabrina fair”, are among the finest lyrics for music in English. The charges are on construction: the drama is static, the Brothers stand and talk while their sister is in danger, the Spirit narrates what has been seen, the stagecraft is a scene painter’s minimum, and the rescue turns on the uncaptured wand, a failure the text explains briefly.
John Ruskin · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The prose is Ruskin’s late, plain style: shorter periods than Modern Painters, a conversational pressure, exact visual description, comic timing and a cadence that rises without strain into the great passages. The first sentence shows the timing, “I am, and my father was before me, a violent Tory of the old school”, and the old school turns at once into Scott’s and Homer’s. Kenneth Clark and many since have taken it as the best of his prose. Against it, the digressions run uncontrolled, the footnotes and cross references to his own works break the surface, and some sentences go slack with garrulity. The command of the sentence is near the top of Victorian prose; the making of the whole, proportion and the shape of chapters, is lower.
James Gibbs · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The command is of the first rank in proportion and transition. The rusticated lower storey, broken into bays, gives a heavy base that steps the eye from the paving of the square to the round. The paired Corinthian columns carry the rhythm round the drum without a front, so that no view dominates; the balustrade and urns mark the step to the dome, which sits on a base high enough to be read from the square below; the ribs and the lantern finish the vertical cleanly. Inside, arcade, gallery and dome are fitted to give a high room without crushing it, and the stucco is fine. A masonry drum carries a dome over a vaulted undercroft, sound for 277 years. What holds it below the summit is the library’s practical fitting, cases, light at the desk and an idle ground floor, commanded less well than its image.
Billy Wilder · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight throughout. The Wilder and Diamond script is among the most exactly built in the American cinema: every line of setup is paid, and its catchphrases, “cookie-wise” among them, carry character. LaShelle’s black-and-white widescreen holds both the vast floor and the cramped flat; Trauner’s sets, with small figures and false perspective at the back of the office, are a design argument. Lemmon plays comedy and despair in one body, a tennis racket for a strainer, a face at the bar; MacLaine gives Fran humour and damage at once; MacMurray’s ease is the menace. Mandell’s cutting keeps the comic rhythm and drops it when it must. The costs: the borrowing executives are broad types, Lemmon’s mugging is at times too much, and the score underlines.
Peder Vilhelm Jensen-Klint; completed by Kaare Klint · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is the building’s clearest strength. A Gothic structure of nave, aisles and rib vaults is carried in brick alone, every rib, pier, step and moulding made from the standard unit, at a height that demanded structural judgment and a discipline of coursing and detail that few buildings of any period sustain at this scale. The masonry is even; the joint and the module govern the whole; the edges of the pleated front are cut sharp from a material that resists sharpness. The light is managed without coloured glass, keeping the room even and pale. Without the craft the idea would not exist. Held at 8.7 because the structural system is inherited Gothic rather than newly solved, and the evenness of the interior tips at moments toward the mechanical.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Johnson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence that turns. The opening, “In the summer of 1917”, sets the register: a chronicle’s date and then, at once, an attempt on a man’s life, given flatly. Across the book the prose moves between summary and scene without a seam, presses years into a clause, and carries a dry, deadpan comedy in the talk of loggers and old men beside a lyric lift that comes without warning in the night passages and at the close. The control of tone is very high: grief, guilt, comedy and the uncanny are kept in one voice. Held below the top on three charges: the deadpan sometimes flattens what it should hold; the anecdotal stations of the middle share a sameness of shape; and a few lyric breaks reach for an effect the plainness elsewhere earns.
Antonio da Sangallo the Younger; Michelangelo; Giacomo della Porta · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. Sangallo’s command of the Roman orders is of the first rank: the court’s Doric and Ionic are archaeologically correct and proportioned to each other; the vestibule’s coffered vault on granite shafts is a Roman hall built anew; the brick front is laid with a care that makes a plain material read as dignity. Michelangelo’s cornice is a structural act, a projection of great weight carried on a wall, which Vasari tells was judged at full size by a timber model raised on the front before it was built. His upper court shows command of licence. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, the long front relies on repetition, and the junction of hands shows in the court.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of colour and edge in cut and pasted gouache at mural scale, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at every point. Colour: each plane is set against its neighbours so that both intensify, hot and cold alternating round the turn, the heavier planes placed where the rotation needs weight, the green held small at the centre so the eye starts there. Edge: the cut is decisive and unsmoothed, and the tears and ragged corners keep the planes alive against the straight strips of the border. Interval: the white between the planes is calibrated so the spiral reads as growth and not as a pinwheel. The costs are charged: the range of means is narrow by design, the painting of the sheets may not have been his hand, and some planes are inert shapes alive only by colour.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making bears load at every point, because the canvas has nothing but its making. The layering: colour thinned and laid in successive veils, so that the rust is read through and over what lies beneath it, and the surface glows rather than shines. The edge: brushed and feathered, never masked, so that each rectangle is bounded and unbounded at once, the hand invisible at a distance and present close to. The calibration: two colours held at a pitch where neither absorbs the other, and a margin of ground measured so that the stack floats. The costs: a range of mark narrow by design, and a lean, unvarnished surface whose fragility is weighed under survival rather than here.
The Cure · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. The building of mass is the craft: in Alone the drums, six-string bass, keyboards and several guitars enter in turn and are balanced so that the swell grows without blurring, and the voice, set forward and dry against it, is placed so that its arrival carries the meaning. I Can Never Say Goodbye is the best-made track, piano and keyboards laid with restraint, and a voice in its sixties sung with a control and range that serve the grief. Endsong’s prelude sustains its long build without going slack. The costs are faults of master and mix: the master is loud and dense, in Warsong and Drone:Nodrone the mass turns to congestion and the drums flatten, and A Fragile Thing is plainly arranged.
Algernon Charles Swinburne · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The command of metre, rhyme and sound is among the greatest in English, and the making bears load where it matters. “The Garden of Proserpine” is flawless in its kind; the feminine rhymes of “Itylus” turn without strain; the “Sapphics” and “Hendecasyllabics” make classical metres sing in English; the long line of the “Hymn” never collapses. The charge is as plain: a verbal glut, alliteration that runs on its own momentum, adjectives used for colour rather than sense, a diction of lips, fire, foam, flowers and blood that recurs until it becomes a manner. The signature of the book, “the lilies and languors of virtue / For the raptures and roses of vice”, is also its fault. Command includes restraint, and this is a master who too often lets the instrument play itself.
Gustav Holst · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The command of the orchestra is the highest part of the making and bears weight: the col legno strings, harps and timpani of the ostinato in Mars; the high, luminous Venus, flutes, celesta and solo violin; the cross-rhythms of Mercury; the procession in the low instruments of Saturn; the timpani under Uranus and the organ’s sudden glissando; the placing of chorus and celesta in Neptune, where the fade is written into the orchestration itself. Every movement is exactly heard. The costs are in the composition rather than the scoring. Development gives way to ostinato and repetition; Jupiter’s sections are joined by transitions that serve rather than compel; Uranus leans on sequence. The counterpoint and the large-scale harmonic thinking are plainly lesser than the scoring.
Edward Weston · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of large-format black and white photography and the contact print. The making is exact and load-bearing throughout: the funnel chosen as a ground that both isolates the form and throws light back into its shadows; the window light, soft and directional, that models every ridge; the very small aperture and long exposure that hold sharpness through the whole depth of the pepper; a negative that keeps detail in the near black ground and in the highlights at once; and a print whose tonal scale, from the glossy lights to the deep surround, is the picture’s substance. Every decision is the maker’s and visible in the result. What holds the axis below 9 is range: one object, one light, one operation, narrow by design.
Woody Allen · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and here the making is load-bearing. Willis’s photography is among the finest black and white work of the colour era: exposures held at the edge of darkness, the anamorphic frame used for architecture and emptiness, interiors lit so that faces fall into shadow without loss of line. Susan E. Morse’s cutting of the overture to the Rhapsody is exact; elsewhere the editing trusts long takes. The dialogue is economical and funny, and the cast’s comic timing is precise; Keaton and Streep make small parts full. The limit: the dramatic carpentry of the middle is ordinary, and Michael Murphy and Mariel Hemingway are serviceable rather than commanding. The making stands below Chinatown (8.6) and The Third Man (8.5), whose craft carries the knowledge, and above Shadow of a Doubt (7.6).
John Constable · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a six-foot canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing in the sky and the light. The clouds are built in layered greys and whites with the warm ground felt through, so that they have weight and move. The far meadow is laid in yellow-green under sun against blue-green shade, and the passage of cloud shadow across it is painted, not described. The water under the cart carries reflection, ripple and the dark of depth in one surface. The white flecks over leaf and water make light a texture, and that touch was new to exhibition painting. The costs are real: the figures are summary and small, the dog generic, the trees at the right heavy, and against the full-size sketch the finished canvas is tighter and drier in places, a finish made for the Academy.
Decimus Burton and Richard Turner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Structure and engineering are the making here, and the making is load-bearing. The frame is light to the limit of the material of its day: ribs of wrought iron curved to a profile that is at once structural arch and optical surface, cast iron kept to the columns, gallery and stairs, wrought iron to the ribs and beams, as the materials required. The curve is resolved at every change, from wing to transept and from upright to roof, with no flat panel and no awkward junction, and the apsidal ends close the body without a break. The service is concealed below ground and the smoke sent away. One count of command holds it below the top: the detailing did not keep water and condensation from the iron, so that the frame’s survival depended on repeated rescue.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight almost continuously. Michael Kahn’s cutting of the basket chase and the truck chase keeps geography exact at speed, and the film’s comedy lives in its cuts, the swordsman, the monkey’s salute. Douglas Slocombe lights the Map Room’s beam, the torchlit pit and the island at night with real beauty. Williams’s march and the Ark theme carry identity and awe; Ben Burtt’s sound, the whip, the boulder, the Ark’s hum, is part of the meaning. Harrison Ford plays fear, pain and competence in one face, and Karen Allen gives Marion weight. The charges fall in visible places: rear projection and model work that show in the fight at the flying wing and on the sea, the slack passage by ship and submarine, and Belloq and Toht drawn thinly. Command, not mastery at every point: a tenth below Jaws, at 8.8.
Mary Cassatt · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The child’s body is drawn with a firmness and an observation few painters of the period gave a child: the weight of the leg, the plump foot, the slack hand, the belly, the turn of the head, unidealised and exact. The woman’s hands are working hands, one gripping, the other washing. The stripes are drawn to follow the form beneath them, so that pattern becomes modelling. Modelled figures and flat, patterned surroundings are fused without a seam. The costs are charged: the woman’s face is summary and somewhat hard, and the surroundings are handled more broadly and with less care than the figures. A command near the top of the period’s figure painting, not at it.
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas at about a metre and a quarter, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the drawing is the picture. The line is among the surest of its generation, in the profiles at the table, each a few decisive contours; in the silhouette of the painter and his cousin, a whole relation in two shapes; in the rail, one stroke of dark that organises the floor. The colour is placed with nerve, orange hair and green face set as the picture’s two poles, and artificial light is painted as light without modelling. The costs are charged: paint thin and dry in passages, hatched and diluted, the middle distance summary, and the join of the strip legible where the painting crosses it.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank and bears load. The diagrid carries gravity and wind together at the perimeter, freeing the floors of perimeter columns. A doubly curved surface is built from flat glass and straight steel, by modelling that fixed every node and pane. The rotation of the floors, the triangular lightwells and the diagonal grid were made to agree exactly, so that the spiral reads clean on the skin; the lens room is a dome of steel and glass closing to a point. The costs: the base meets the plaza with a low, closed lobby less surely than the tower meets the sky, and the environmental system is a making whose performance in use is disputed.
Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout. Kelly’s choreography and the dancers’ command, O’Connor’s above all, in a comic solo of falls, wall-runs and collisions in continuous shots; the three-person tap of “Good Morning”; Rosson’s Technicolor, lighting a soundstage street at night so that the rain shows; Comden and Green’s script, which turns each technical problem of 1927 into a joke and then into a plot step; Fazan’s cutting, which holds the dances in long shots and lets the preview’s slipping sound play; Hagen’s Lina, a voice made into a character, the best comic performance in the film. Held below the top by costs on whole sequences: Reynolds outmatched as a dancer, the ballet’s dream passage drifting in tempo, plain exteriors and back projection, the montage as filler.
Roman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The making bears load everywhere. Granite was cut to blocks that bear on one another without mortar or clamps, and has stood near thirty metres for nineteen centuries through frost, earthquake and traffic: the stability lies in the cut and the weight alone. The piers are proportioned to taper as their load declines, and the arcade is laid out to carry a channel on a steady fall across uneven ground and through its bend, a feat of surveying as well as masonry. The courses are true and the arches regular over hundreds of metres. The costs: the work repeats one well-known system rather than solving new problems, and its detailing is plain. Its foundations and the fall of its channel are not credited here in detail. The command of a mature type at its best.
Queen · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is the record’s strongest claim, and on the second side it is load-bearing. The stacked voices of Mercury, May and Taylor are placed with exactness: the opening harmony of Bohemian Rhapsody, the answering choirs of its mock opera, the delayed canon of The Prophet’s Song. May’s guitar is orchestrated in layered lines, and in Good Company is made to sound as a trad-jazz band, clarinet and trombone. Mercury’s piano carries Love of My Life and the Rhapsody’s ballad and coda, and Roy Thomas Baker keeps the density legible. The faults weigh on a share of the record: Sweet Lady and I’m in Love with My Car are routine hard rock, the stacking is at times glassy, and some pastiche is exercise. Below Low, at 9.0 here, where the making is the content throughout.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, structure included, and the making bears load. The triangular geometry is carried without a lapse through plan, section, coffered ceilings, stairs, paving and skylight. The marble panels are set with joints so fine that the walls read as solid stone, and the knife edge is resolved to a sharp arris. The concrete within was cast to the colour of the marble against formwork precise enough to carry the same lines, and the space frame lights the court evenly. Few buildings of its decade were made to this tolerance. What holds the axis short of the summit of the art: the cladding’s anchors failed within about three decades, which bears on whether the making was fully mastered, and the galleries’ triangular corners are a craft problem the building never solves.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on a canvas about 1.3 by 1.76 metres, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in places. The still life is a virtuoso passage: glass, wine, fruit and white cloth made of separate touches that resolve at a distance. Light through a striped awning is held consistently across the whole company. Flesh is modelled in warm and cool colour without dark shadow. The groups interlock so that glances carry across the table. Two handlings are reconciled in one surface, the firmer drawing of the near heads and the feathered foliage and river. The costs are charged. The tabletop tilts up and the right side of the balcony is hard to stand in; the back right is crowded into a pile of heads; some faces settle into the painter’s sweet type rather than portraits. Command is high, realisation uneven at the back.
George Orwell · Literature
9.0 · Tier V
Judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence and the exact physical fact. The first sentence sets the measure: “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” An ordinary clause, then the one wrong number. The texture of deprivation is exact and continuous: the gin with its oily smell, the lift that never works, the grime of the canteen, the varicose ulcer above Winston’s ankle. The construction is sure: motifs planted in Part One are called in during Part Three, the rhyme, the dream of darkness, the rat, the chestnut tree; and the interrogations by O’Brien are dialogue that is argument and torture at once. Charged: exposition by tract and by lecture; Julia and the minor figures drawn in outline; prose that is clear rather than load-bearing at the level of the sentence across long stretches; and a middle in Part Two whose love scenes are flat.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Greek. The trimeter is clean, strict and lucid, and the speeches are built with an orator’s control: the gifts speech is a catalogue that becomes an argument, and the line-for-line exchange with Hermes cuts. The dramaturgy is bold: the binding as spectacle, entries by air, a cataclysm for an ending. The charges are on the lyric, which is short, simple in metre and rarely dense in image, so that the chorus is a sympathetic presence more than a voice of the protagonist’s order; on the Io scene, where the verse becomes geography; and on the Oceanus scene, whose tone wobbles between comedy and argument. The music and dance, lost with the performance, are beyond this reading and neither credited nor charged. The making carries the play but is not everywhere load-bearing.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.9 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium: voice, band, arrangement and recording. The vocal performance is load-bearing. It phrases against the beat, and changes the meaning of a line by where it lands. Mike Bloomfield plays lead guitar, Charlie McCoy the second acoustic guitar of “Desolation Row”, and on “Like a Rolling Stone” the organ part was improvised by Al Kooper, who was not an organist; in Kooper’s own account, Dylan had it pushed up in the mix over the producer’s doubt. The costs are in the making: plain composition, fluffed changes, a muddy mix on “Tombstone Blues”, a band learning the songs on tape. Some of the roughness is the point. Some is roughness, and a full command would not need the luck.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as a close translation carries it. The command of the scene is the highest of its kind: the drawing-room scandal of Part One, timed so that Marya Timofeevna, Lebyadkin, Stavrogin, Shatov and Dasha arrive in sequence and the blow lands last; Kirillov and Pyotr in the dark room; the night of the birth; the murder in the park, each of the five acting by his nature. The voices are distinct and comic: Lebyadkin’s verses, Stepan Trofimovich’s French, Karmazinov’s preciosity. Charged: the prose is hurried, as Dostoevsky’s often is under serial deadlines, with repetition and loose syntax; the narrator’s frame is managed carelessly; the minor conspirators are thinly drawn; and some chapters of Part Two carry exposition the book could have dramatised. A making that bears the load in its scenes and is loose between them.
Friedrich Nietzsche · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the German as far as it can be held from knowledge; the sound of the whole German line is neither credited nor charged. Nietzsche is one of the masters of German prose, and the book shows it at its best: the short sentence turned like a proverb, “Man muss noch Chaos in sich haben, um einen tanzenden Stern gebären zu können”, one must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star; the wordplay that translation loses, in Übermensch, untergehen and Untergang, overcoming and going under; the rhythm of the songs; the comedy of the fourth part’s voices. Charged: the pastiche is uniform for long stretches, the apostrophes, the exclamations and the archaisms recur until they become a manner, and the coined compounds are sometimes strained. Nietzsche wrote leaner and sharper in the books on either side of it.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be judged without hearing it; Dostoevsky’s sentence is hasty, repetitive and abrupt, and that is charged only where it costs the work. The dialogue is a command of the first order: voices that interrupt themselves, confessions that turn into attacks, Lebedev’s buffoonery and Ippolit’s fevered argument each wholly distinct. The great scenes are built with complete control of crowd and timing: the end of the first part, the vase, the meeting of the two women, the vigil. Charged: the construction between those scenes, written to the month; the narrator’s explanatory summaries; the repetition of stock gestures, laughter, pallor, trembling lips; the haste of the close. A making with heights of genius and visible seams.
Chinua Achebe · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as any prose. The sentences are lucid, rhythmic and exact, and the proverb is a working part of the sentence, not an ornament: the speech of the elders runs on it and the narration reasons with it. The opening sets the method, “Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond” (ch. 1), a reputation stated as the clan would state it. Scene construction is strong where it matters most: Ikemefuna’s walk with the men, his mind on whether his mother is still alive; Chielo’s night. The narrator’s irony, which never comments, is the book’s finest craft. Charged: Part Three, where months pass in a paragraph; the schematic pairing of Mr. Brown and the Reverend James Smith; flat passages of custom in Part One.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.7 · Tier IV
The command is of a reduced means, and where it matters it is complete. The bands of the sky are laid in long strokes of tempera that keep their colour without muddying, red, orange and yellow against the blue-black of the fjord, a harmony pitched to maximum tension and held. Line is the main instrument and it is sure: one rhythm carries from the sky through the shoreline into the body, and the railing cuts it cleanly. The rawness is chosen and load-bearing. The costs: passages of the fjord and the shore are thin and summary, and not more expressive for being thin; the walkers are drawn in shorthand; and the medium is used at the edge of its endurance, which is part of the meaning but not a demonstration of command over it. The surface is known from reproduction, and the figure is held loosely.
Charlotte Brontë · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Brontë’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice: urgent, exact in physical detail, able to move from the child behind the curtain with Bewick’s History of British Birds (ch. 1) to the orchard proposal and the night on the heath without loss of pressure. The opening, “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day” (ch. 1), is a sentence of confinement, and the book runs on such sentences. The scene-making is strong: the red-room, Helen’s death, the fire, the stopped wedding. Charged: the dialogue of the gentry, Blanche Ingram and her mother above all, is stiff and caricatured; Rochester’s speech is sometimes declamation; the plotting leans on coincidence and on a supernatural voice; and the style in places reaches past the scene. A first novel’s unevenness, in a voice of the first order.
Émile Zola · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Zola’s French as far as this reading carries it; the music of the long periodic sentence is neither credited nor charged beyond what can be heard here. The construction is the book’s strongest craft: seven parts timed to the season; the strike’s economics, the new payment for timbering that starts it, the provident fund, the credit at Maigrat’s, accurate and dramatic; crowd scenes managed with a command few novelists have matched; the cross-cutting of the march with the Grégoires and the Hennebeaus’ dinner exact. Charged: the leitmotif becomes a tic at times; some of the melodrama is machinery, Chaval’s return in the flooded gallery and the timing of the rescue; minor characters are typed rather than drawn, the Grégoires’ complacency, Pierronne’s coquetry; and adjectives of the bestial and the enormous sometimes do the work the scene should.
Hans Scharoun · Architecture
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high and it bears load: a hall of about 2,400 seats in which no seat is far from the platform; a concave tent roof and a convex ceiling with reflectors that, with Cremer, made a surround room work acoustically when none had been proved; a concrete structure that carries tilted terraces with a foyer threaded beneath them; and an asymmetry controlled in every block. The sound is widely praised for clarity and presence. The costs: the sound in the seats behind and beside the platform is a point the record does not settle, and the acoustic fittings have been adjusted over the years; the detailing is rough in places, the foyer is hard to find one’s way in, and the exterior’s junctions and roofs are awkward in finish and upkeep. This is a command of conception and of the room more than of finish.
Vasily Grossman · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as a close translation carries it; the music of the Russian sentence is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The construction is sure: dozens of strands kept in rotation across three parts and timed so that the encirclement, Shtrum’s discovery and his fall, and Krymov’s arrest answer one another, the whole held in a plain voice earned at Stalingrad itself. The scene is Grossman’s strength: the interrogation, the gas chamber, the telephone call from Stalin that changes the institute in an hour, the German dugouts. Characters are made by a habit or a phrase and then deepened. Charged: a prose that by the report of Russian readers is clear more than distinguished; many secondary figures drawn thin; and the essays, which break the made surface. The making bears the load in the great chapters and serves elsewhere.
John Bunyan · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The prose is the craft, and it is very good: short, concrete and rhythmic, made of the English Bible and the speech of the shop and the road. The first sentence, “As I walked through the wilderness of this world, I lighted on a certain place where was a Den”, sets the cadence of the whole. Christian running from his family with his fingers in his ears, “crying, Life! life! eternal life!”, shows the economy of gesture. The naming is a craft of its own: By-ends of Fair-speech, his kin Lord Turn-about, Lord Time-server and Mr Facing-both-ways, the parson Mr Two-tongues, each name a character sketch. Charged: the verse interludes are weak, the doctrinal conversations go slack and repeat, the dreamer reports what he could not have seen, and the joins are often a bare “Now I saw in my dream”.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The section is a feat of three-dimensional planning, two kinds of duplex locking round one corridor so that each runs through the block, and it is the building’s making, load-bearing. The rack and its separate, insulated dwellings are an engineering idea carried through at scale with ATBAT. The pilotis carry the whole slab and its services onto a few points. And the béton brut turned the shortages of 1947, of skilled labour and finished materials, into an expression: the marks of the boards and the imprecision of the casting became the surface. The costs: the imprecision is real, and the concrete has needed much repair; the prefabrication of the dwellings was less complete and less exact than its idea; the interior streets are dark by the section’s own logic.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of space and light is of the first rank and load-bearing: the section, in which ramp, void and dome are one figure and the ramp’s widening gives the outer wall its lean; the light from the dome carried down the whole height. A continuous concrete helix that is at once floor and structure, cantilevered round an open well, was an achievement of form and of construction. The costs are real and charged to the work: the concrete cracked and needed major repair within fifty years; the shallow, sloping bays light and hang painting poorly; the fit of art to building was never solved within Wright’s form. The tower of 1992 is competent and plain. Command of the idea is complete; command of the building as instrument is not.
Charles Dickens · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Dickens’s English, with no translation between. At its best the making is load-bearing and of the first order. The comic speech is a command few English writers have had, each voice its own instrument: Micawber’s periodic sentence collapsing into a shrug, Heep’s ’umbleness, the Peggottys’ Yarmouth, Betsey’s command, Barkis’s single message. The early chapters carry perception at a child’s height in an adult’s syntax, and the storm is built with total control of tempo. Charged: the serial’s padding; the sentimental prose gathered round Agnes, Emily and Martha, in which the language goes general and the rhythm goes to the pulpit; melodrama in Rosa Dartle’s speeches and Emily’s rescue; and a second half resolved by coincidence and by Micawber’s sudden competence.
Caspar David Friedrich · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at a middle scale. The making bears the load in the sky: a gradation from near black at the horizon through misted grey to a pale opening above, built in thin layered glazes so that the air reads as depth without a single drawn form. The transitions are the picture. The sea band is held at the edge of darkness without going dead, and the figure is laid in with economy, its placement exact. The craft is careful, slow and glaze-built, not virtuoso: no passage of drawing or touch carries the work as the stroke carries a Van Gogh sky. The costs: the surface, worked and reworked over two years, carries the marks of that labour; the dune and shore are summary; the darkening of the glazes is partly the technique’s own.
George Eliot · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The prose of the Gwendolen chapters is Eliot at her best: the analysis of motive moving inside a sentence from narrator to character and back; the comedy of Mrs Davilow’s household and the Gascoignes; the dialogue of Gwendolen and Grandcourt, where nothing is said and all is done. The first line, “Was she beautiful or not beautiful?” (ch. 1), puts the book’s question of judging and being judged at the first word, and the first epigraph states its method. The handling of time across the first books is masterly. Charged: Mordecai’s speech is often stiff and long; Mirah is drawn without the play of light Eliot gives her other figures; the late books lean on coincidence; and in the Deronda strand the narrator’s commentary presses where it should show.
Gustave Courbet · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas six metres wide. Where achieved, the making is load-bearing and among the best of its century: the landscape on the easel, a small painting within the painting, laid with Courbet’s knife and loaded brush; the nude, weighted and real against the convention of the academic body; the white sheet; the woman on the floor with her child; the portrait heads of Champfleury and Baudelaire, each solid in a few planes. The costs are charged: the space of the room is unresolved and the floor tilts; figures from separate sources sit at uneven scales and in unrelated light; the left group is partly sketched and partly lost in the dark; the upper half is undescribed; the haste of the campaign shows. Command high, realisation uneven across a surface this large.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The making is load-bearing in the parasol, a sequence of concrete vaults raised clear of the courts on its own supports, and in the hyperboloid, a thin shell rising through the roof. The concrete was cast in board shuttering by labour with little machinery, and its roughness is made a register rather than hidden; the Modulor holds the masses in proportion across very different scales; colour, enamel and tapestry are made one with the concrete. The costs are the maker’s: the concrete is uneven in finish and has weathered unevenly; the High Court’s brise-soleil did not keep heat and glare from the rooms behind it to their users’ satisfaction, and they altered it; and the plain was given no shade, surface or path for crossing. Command of the figures outran command of the climate the design claimed.
Le Corbusier · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command of space, proportion and light is of the first rank, and it is load-bearing: the section, where ramp, light and terrace interlock so that the house is read in motion; the proportion of block, window band and shadowed base, by which a heavy box seems to float; the plan, a square that holds a route, a car’s turning circle, servants, family and an outdoor room without strain at the ground; the details of the bathroom, the solarium screens, the junction of glass and terrace. The costs are the makers’: the roof and terraces leaked from the first winters, the heating could not warm the glazed volume, the render cracked. The frame is modest engineering. Command of the idea outran command of the building.
Ernest Hemingway · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Hemingway’s English, with the invented idiom part of the making. The command at its best is as great as anything in his work. Pilar’s tale is one of the great sustained narratives in American prose, its long run-on sentences carrying the mob’s rhythm. Sordo’s hill is cut with total control, the point of view moving from the hilltop to the officers below and to Berrendo after. The bridge is exact in its mechanics: the wiring, the stolen exploder replaced by grenades, the timing to the bombing. The landscape is rendered without a wasted word. Charged: the idiom can become a mannerism, “thee” in the love talk above all; “obscenity” for oaths reads as coy; the love dialogue falls flat for long stretches; Jordan’s interior voice slackens into self-address. The making is load-bearing in the set pieces and not everywhere.
Maya · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium, structure included. The making is load-bearing in its exactness. A great mass was raised on a core of rubble faced with cut limestone and held at a steep slope by its terracing. The counts are built to the programme, and the orientation, the stepped corner and the north balustrade stand in the one relation that lays the serpent of light down the stair, a command of geometry and sightline at a large scale. The serpent heads and columns are carved with force. What holds it: the means are the region’s tradition of rubble core, veneer and corbel vault, which keeps the temple to narrow rooms; the stair counts are argued to fall short of exact; and nothing in the structure is daring as a span or a vault is daring.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the elder anchors. The writing is the first craft: dialogue that sounds overheard and is built, with themes laid in the first minutes of each film and paid out at its end; the second and third scripts written by Linklater with Delpy and Hawke. The performances are the second: Hawke and Delpy sustain takes of many minutes without seams, and Delpy in the third film’s hotel room, moving from tenderness to cruelty and back within one scene, is the height. Lee Daniel’s camera in Vienna and Paris and Christos Voudouris’s in Greece hold long takes on the street without fuss, and Sandra Adair keeps three films’ rhythms. The costs: a plain image that seldom makes meaning of its own, a slight score, uneven supporting players in the first film.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command of siting, material, section and light is of the first rank, and it is load-bearing: the house set on the ledges so that its levels and the rock’s coincide, its trays reading from downstream as strata; rough sandstone against smooth ochre concrete, glass let into the stone without frames, the red steel sash, the walnut built-ins fitted to the casements; the living room’s low ceiling and broad glazing, the hatch, the stair hung over the water; the casements on an upper floor that open until the corner is gone. The costs are the maker’s. The cantilevers were under-reinforced for what they carried, began to sag when the formwork came out and kept sagging, and the house leaked and grew mould. Command of the image outran command of the structure.
José Saramago · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Saramago’s Portuguese, whose structural means Pontiero’s close English carries whole. The command is of the long sentence: clause on clause joined by commas, speech, thought and narration in one current, the narrator turning in mid-sentence to a proverb, a correction or a question to the reader. It is load-bearing: the reader must hold the thread as the blind hold a rope. The dialogue without marks is managed so that voices are almost always told apart by manner alone. The set scenes are built with restraint, above all the women’s night, where the sentence refuses spectacle without refusing the facts. Three charges hold it below the top: a sententiousness of proverbs and ironic asides that over-explain; a uniform register, in which the doctor, the thief and the old man sound alike; and the return of sight, hurried after so much patience. The sound of the Portuguese is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the same anchors as every desk. The arrangements are the craft, and they are load-bearing: strings set against guitars and accordion so that each track can swell from a few instruments to the whole room, the voices massed as a choir of amateurs. Rebellion (Lies) holds its pulse with plain, exact bass and drums; Tunnels and Wake Up are built as long crescendos and placed with care, each arrival timed to the sequence. The faults are more than one and fall on a share of the record: the mix is muddy at the crests, where parts that matter are lost in the roar; Win Butler’s voice strains and wavers in ways that serve fervour more than command; the drumming is plain; and the crescendo becomes a formula.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Goethe’s German. The prose is a model of classical German narrative: lucid, even, periodic without heaviness, capable of an irony that never quite breaks into mockery, and able to pass from the troupe’s quarrels and Philine’s slipper to the cool solemnity of the exequies without strain. The dialogues on Hamlet are criticism done in fiction and still among the best readings of the play. The songs are lyric of the first order, each placed where the prose cannot go. The craft falls in the construction: the middle books are overlong, characters are dropped and recovered by convenience, and the last books bring in Lothario, Therese, Jarno and the Abbé with more exposition than scene. The making is load-bearing in the prose and the songs, not throughout the architecture.
Alejo Carpentier · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Carpentier’s Spanish. The command is of a compressed baroque: exact and abundant nouns from architecture, dress, music, plants and the trades; the sentence that lists and builds to an image; a vocabulary drawn from the French colonial and Creole world and from the inventories of Europe. The scenes are cut with a painter’s eye and a musician’s sense of tempo, and the miraculous is stated in the same calm syntax as the documented. The compression is a feat: seventy years and three regimes in a short book, with the great scenes given room. Charged: the people are seen in costume and gesture more than from within, and the dialogue is scant; the cataloguing at times becomes display; and the last paragraph is the one place where the prose explains.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of mixed-media painting at the scale of architecture. The making is load-bearing. The perspective of the vault is drawn steep and true across the width of the canvas, and it holds; the black is built up in layers of matter so that masonry, vault and floor stay legible through the burning; the far light is kept small and warm against the whole field, and it carries the picture. Matter is chosen for meaning and placed with intent. The costs: the medium is one of crust, drip and accident, and much of the surface is the material’s doing rather than the hand’s, so the command credited is of decisions more than of touch; and in passages the encrustation muddies the reading of the architecture.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas over two and a half metres wide. Where it is strongest the making is load-bearing: the still life is as good as anything painted in its decade, blue cloth, straw and fruit laid in with economy and exact value; the body is set in pale flat planes against the men’s blacks, a value structure learned from Velázquez and Hals and handled with authority; the heads, the woman’s above all, are drawn with speed and likeness. The charges stand whatever their intent: the landscape is thin and scenic, with little air; the bather is out of scale and loosely related to the space; the seated group’s relation to the ground under it is uncertain; the reclining man’s legs and the second man’s position are awkward. What the wager credits elsewhere is a cost here.
Umayyad, under al-Walid I · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and craft, on what stands. The mosaics are of the highest command of their medium: gold ground, glass tesserae set at angles to the light, landscapes of depth and scale without a single figure, on walls tens of metres long. The geometric marble grilles are fine. The planning is masterly: an existing Roman enclosure of awkward proportion turned into a coherent mosque, the hall laid along its long wall and the transept set at its centre. The structure is not daring: arcades on reused columns of mixed source and size, timber gabled roofs, a dome of moderate span, nothing that pushes engineering. Much of the visible making in the hall is Ottoman rebuilding after 1893, sound but not of the first builders’ quality. The making bears the load in the mosaic and the plan.
The Doors · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Rothchild and Botnick’s recording is clean, close and live in feel, the band captured largely as a band, and its restraint lets four players sound like a larger thing. Densmore’s drumming is the most exact craft on it: the dynamics of The End, the bossa beat hardened on Break On Through, the brushes and space on End of the Night. Krieger’s tuned tremolo and slide and his modal solo on Light My Fire are distinctive and right. Manzarek’s organ carries the harmony and the bass, a structural solution that is also the sound, and there the making is load-bearing. The voice runs from croon to scream. The faults are small against this: the low end is thin, two short songs are routinely arranged, Back Door Man is more performance than construction, and the vocal is at times pushed past control.
The Beatles · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, read to the same anchors as every other art, and uneven by design and by circumstance. At its height the making is load-bearing: the slow build of “Dear Prudence”; the sections of “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, their changes of metre held together by the playing; one guitar and a tapping foot in “Blackbird”; McCartney’s voice torn open on “Helter Skelter”; Martin’s orchestral arrangement for “Good Night”; the tape assembly of “Revolution 9”, made with exact control of its materials. Lennon’s vocal on “Julia” and Harrison’s on “Long, Long, Long” are among the finest close recordings of the decade. The faults are many: two tracks are sketches, “Don’t Pass Me By” is clumsy, and the separation of members on many tracks thins the ensemble.
Paul Celan · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Celan’s German. At the top the command is complete: in “Todesfuge” the long dactylic line, the refrains varied by one word or by their order, the compressed syntax with no stop and the closing pair of half lines are made with a composer’s control. “Corona” turns on the colon of its first line, “Herbst frißt mir aus der Hand sein Blatt: wir sind Freunde”, “Autumn eats its leaf from my hand: we are friends”, and on a chiastic close. “Espenbaum” keeps a folk song’s plainness; “Zähle die Mandeln” makes counting its music. Against this, the genitive metaphor, the mills of death and the sand of the urns, recurs until it becomes a tic, and some of the dream lyrics are loose, in a manner Celan himself pared away in the books that followed.
Graham Greene · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Greene’s English. The command is of a prose exact, cool and dense with images, which sets its world from the opening, in “the blazing Mexican sun and the bleaching dust”, and of a point of view that moves among Tench, the priest, the lieutenant, Coral and the mother without a seam. The dialogue between the priest and the lieutenant on the last night is a feat: an argument between two faiths made into talk between two tired men. The thriller’s craft bears weight: the mestizo’s shadowing, the pressure of the hostages, the trap across the border. Charged: the simile habit becomes mannered, “like” after “like” binding the physical to the abstract; the authorial voice at moments states a theology the scene had already carried; and the American gangster Calver, whose picture hangs beside the priest’s at the police station, is a device more than a man.
Hart Crane · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Crane’s English. At its height the command is complete and load-bearing. The Proem’s quatrains are among the most finished in American verse, their pentameter weighted with Elizabethan stress. Atlantis sustains a rhymed octave with an orchestral sound, “Whispers antiphonal in azure swing”, and “Through the bound cable strands, the arching path / Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings”. The Dance moves in short quatrains of driven rhythm, and The River’s shift from the train’s talk of advertising to the long slow blank verse of the Mississippi is a master’s modulation. But the making is uneven. Cape Hatteras swells into apostrophe, “O Walt!”, and into catalogues the verse does not hold; Indiana’s ballad sentiment is flat; and the logic of metaphor at times yields lines whose sense must be supplied from outside the poem.
Naguib Mahfouz · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Mahfouz’s Arabic; the sound of it is not argued here, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. Command of the medium is sure and sustained across three volumes: the household’s daily life rendered in exact detail; the father’s two faces held in one character without strain; the coffee hour, the wedding night and the news of Fahmy’s death managed with patience and timing. The decision to write dialogue in classical Arabic rather than the Cairene vernacular is considered, and gives the whole book one register; it is generally judged to work. Charged: the third volume’s compression into summary; the speeches in which ideas are argued rather than enacted; a certain evenness of sentence, which the English makes flatter. The making is assured and largely load-bearing, below Anna Karenina at 9.5.
Margaret Atwood · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Atwood’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the exact, ironic sentence and of the word turned over. The first sentence, “We slept in what had once been the gymnasium” (Part I, Night), sets the method: the old world visible under the new, given flat. The prose works by inventory and pun; the regime’s liturgy, “Blessed be the fruit”, “May the Lord open”, is caught exactly, and Offred’s attention to words is the book’s mind at work. The imagery is held across the length, red, the eye, the tulips of Serena Joy’s garden, mirrors and windows, and present and past are interleaved cleanly. Charged: Moira’s story and some of the Commander’s explanations deliver exposition as talk; the fragmented sentence, effective early, hardens toward mannerism; and the satire of the Notes is broad, a lecture whose jokes fall on the reader as much as on Pieixoto.
Philip Glass and Robert Wilson · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Invention is credited elsewhere; this axis weighs command, and the command is real and load-bearing. Glass’s additive processes are exact over hours; the writing asks great stamina and precision of the performers, the chorus counting in shifting groups from memory and the violin in perpetual figuration; the cadence cycles are timed so that a change of one chord registers as an event. Wilson’s lighting and slow transformations, the bar of light and the train’s approach, are exactly controlled, and Childs’s choreography is rigorous geometry. Held well below the repertory summits: the harmony is narrow by choice and the voice-leading inside a cycle simple; the amplified organs have a limited range of colour beside the orchestral command of Otello (9.5) or the counterpoint of the Goldberg Variations (9.7); and the texts, as made things, are uneven by design.
Robert Altman · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in two places: the management of twenty-four principals across five days without a lost thread, and the sound, whose mixing of many live voices makes the film’s way of knowing possible. Paul Lohmann’s camera, with Altman’s zooms and slow drifts across crowds, finds faces inside masses; the editing of Sidney Levin and Dennis M. Hill moves from thread to thread on rhyme and sound rather than plot. The performances are many and exact: Henry Gibson’s Haven, vain and brave; Ronee Blakley’s Barbara Jean, whose breakdown on stage is among the best-acted scenes of the decade; Lily Tomlin’s Linnea, whose stillness at the Exit Inn carries the film’s one love. The charges are real: Geraldine Chaplin’s Opal is caricature, the zoom is sometimes reflex, and looseness, the method, costs exactness in places.
Pagan builders, under King Kyansittha · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The brick is laid in large vaults on true radial arches, a Bagan practice rare in Southeast Asia, where corbelling was usual, carrying a terraced tower over a solid core and two concentric corridors at a scale Pagan had not reached. The concealed lighting is engineered: openings set and angled so that light lands on the faces of colossal images and is not seen from where the worshipper stands. The glazed plaques are made in series and set in order on the terraces; the images are carved and gilded at colossal scale. The cost: the brick mass is heavy rather than economical, massive rather than subtle.
Frank Lloyd Wright · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The tapering column is making of the first rank: thin-walled reinforced concrete, hollow in the stem, widening to a pad, proved by test far beyond its load and by eighty years of standing. The tower’s core and cantilevered floors are a confident structure; the brick, the curve and the tube are detailed consistently throughout; the furniture is made to the same law. Against this the making is counted as it stands: the tubing leaked from the first, the roof needed repair, the first chairs tipped, and the tower’s one stair told against its use. Those are failures of craft in a building whose craft was meant to be load-bearing, though they lie in the envelope and the fittings, not in the structure that carries the work.
Maya, under K'inich Janaab' Pakal and his son · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium, structure included. Palenque’s builders commanded a lighter corbel vault than their contemporaries, with thinner walls, two parallel galleries carrying a mansard roof that eased the load on the vaults, and wide openings between piers, and the temple shows that command. The crypt is the harder feat: a high corbel vault over a chamber deep in the fill, built to stand under a pyramid raised after it, and a stair corbelled through the fill, the sarcophagus and lid set before the chamber closed. The carving of the lid and panels is of the first rank in the Maya world, the stucco fine. What holds it below the Pantheon’s 9.5: the structural means serve the programme rather than are it.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Pynchon’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long, comic, swerving sentence and of register. The opening, in which Oedipa learns she has been “named executor, or she supposed executrix”, compresses a social world and a mind into one sentence; the pastiche of The Courier’s Tragedy imitates Jacobean blank verse with a real ear and turns on one line ending “tryst with Trystero”; the night walk sustains a long lyrical paragraph without slackening. The invented names, songs and acronyms are dense and exact in their function, and “Shall I project a world?” states the book’s question as a question. Charges hold it below the top: the names and the slapstick sometimes thin the characters to devices; some passages overwrite; and the comedy at moments strains, as with Hilarius at the window with a rifle.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Nine registers sustained, which is the corpus’s most difficult technical feat: the monstrous first person, the fable’s plainness, the affair’s close realism, the car thief’s night, the childhood’s warmth, a removed man’s counted present, a widower’s broken account, and the stripped administrative narration of the close. The broccoli scene, the garden tour, a Salvation Army office where a strip of bedsheet is cut from a trolley axle while a man asks for an address written bigger, and a restaurant bill Heloise insists on splitting are command of the highest order. The text is clean; no quotation mark is turned the wrong way. Three charges hold it below the top band: the opening grotesque runs more energetically than it is governed; the fable carries glosses that state what its scenes have shown (“Hunger felt like confirmation that he was doing things correctly”); and the withholding chiasmus of the later parts (“The room asked nothing and received everything”) recurs until it reads as a tic.
Gérard de Nerval · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
At the highest marks in the sonnets: rhyme and alexandrine strict, the names set as hard points of sound, Lusignan, Biron, Pausilippe, and the pauses of “El Desdichado” pacing the line. “Sylvie” is written in a limpid prose of eighteenth century plainness that hides great control of tense and transition; it opens “Je sortais d’un théâtre où tous les soirs je paraissais aux avant-scènes en grande tenue de soupirant”, “I was coming out of a theatre where every evening I appeared in the stage box dressed as a suitor”. “Angélique” is deliberately loose, digressive in the manner of Sterne and Diderot, and the looseness is partly made and partly the feuilleton’s. The remaining pieces are competent and conventional, in part others’ craft, and the book is charged for them.
Mirak Mirza Ghiyas, under Bega Begum and Akbar · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included, and the command is high and load-bearing in the geometry: one module governs garden, plinth and tomb, the chamfered square resolves into octagonal corner rooms, and the four faces are proportioned so that the mass reads as one body from every axis. The double dome is resolved, the outer shell carried high on its drum and the inner set low over the chamber. The facing is precise, red stone panelled and outlined in white with geometric inlay that reads at a distance and near at hand; the plinth’s arcades repeat without fatigue; the screens are fine. The costs: the engineering extends nothing, the spans moderate and the double dome already known; the drum stands somewhat apart from the body; dome and kiosks are joined by juxtaposition more than fusion; the interiors are plain.
Bertolt Brecht · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Brecht’s German. The verse of the songs is the command: the balladeer’s diction of the Moritat, the plain ruthless rhyme of the Cannon Song, the refrains that turn on one word, and the borrowings from K. L. Ammer’s German Villon and from Kipling made over into a German street voice that is Brecht’s own. The second finale’s question and answer, sung by Macheath and Jenny, is as well made as political verse gets. The spoken dialogue is quick, dry and aphoristic, and Peachum’s speeches are sharp. What holds the axis below the high band is the dramaturgy: the scenes are perfunctory joinery between numbers, the third act’s machinery (the coronation procession, the beggars’ threat, Jenny’s second betrayal) is mechanical, and the persons are drawn in a single line. The making is load-bearing in the songs and serviceable elsewhere.
Henri Matisse · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and uneven by intention, and is still judged against the anchors. The line is the great instrument: long, continuous contours that close a body in one movement, at the reclining woman, the dancers and the leaning trunks, drawn with an authority few painters of the time had. The colour is placed in large flat fields that hold together at a distance without modelling, a hard thing at this size. Against this, the surface is thin and scrubbed in places, some figures, the garlanders and the couple, are drawn more weakly than the central nude, and the passage from zone to zone is not always resolved. In places the canvas reads as a large sketch carried to completion by will.
Ralph Waldo Emerson · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Emerson’s own English. The command is of the sentence, and at that scale it is among the greatest in American prose: compressed, concrete in its metaphors, exact in its rhythm, built to be remembered. “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.” “Envy is ignorance; imitation is suicide.” “Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo” (Friendship). “God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose” (Intellect). The list, and the turn of a paragraph onto an aphorism, are handled with a preacher’s timing. What holds the axis below the top is the larger making: paragraphs follow one another without transition and sometimes without order, essays end where the material runs out rather than where the argument arrives, and the weaker essays fall into abstraction and repetition. The making bears weight in the sentence and is slack in the structure.
August Sander · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of large-format portrait photography and of the series. The making is exact and load-bearing: the sitter placed in the frame, often at full length, so that clothes, hands and stance carry as much as the face; daylight handled so that the modelling is full and no shadow falls theatrical; sharpness from edge to edge, so that a cuff and a crease are evidence; long exposures that require the sitter’s stillness and give the pictures their deliberate gravity; the gelatin silver print in a full tonal range. The Pastry Cook, round in white before the dark of his kitchen, and the Young Farmers, three figures caught turning without a blur, show command at the highest level. What holds the axis is range: the method is held constant by design, and many pictures are sound professional portraits.
Buscheto and Rainaldo · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and visible. Monolithic columns raised by the dozen, many reused and of differing heights, made to run in even arcades on a soil that has defeated other Pisan buildings; banded marble laid so that the courses run unbroken round arches, piers and façade; lozenges and rosettes cut and inlaid; four galleries of slender colonnettes that have stood for eight centuries. The making is load-bearing, since the banded coursing is the wall. Held below 9.0 for the structure: the nave and transepts are roofed in timber, not vaulted, in the century of Speyer Cathedral (8.5) and Durham Cathedral (8.8); the dome over the crossing is small and irregular, a solution reached rather than mastered; and the building has settled.
Matthias of Arras and Peter Parler; completed by later hands · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first. Parler’s command is of the first rank and load-bearing: the net vault set out over a wide high choir; the flyers doubled and their piers faced with tracery; the Old Sacristy’s pendant boss hanging from flying ribs; the south porch’s three arches opening on a diagonal with free ribs over them; the triforium and clerestory joined into one glazed screen. Matthias’s lower work is sound French practice. The Wenceslas Chapel’s incrustation of stones is a goldsmith’s craft taken to the scale of a wall. The completion is careful and competent, close enough to the choir’s system that the interior reads as one, but its detail is drier and its west front correct rather than commanded.
Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers with Gianfranco Franchini · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The structural making is load-bearing and of the first rank: the gerberette, a cast-steel rocker that takes the girder on one arm and the tie on the other, so that the frame works by balance and the columns carry nearly pure compression; long lattice girders delivering a clear floor; cast steel, an industrial material long abandoned in building, brought back as a crafted, almost hand-made joint, which Rice argued was the point. The long faces, frame, bracing and the escalator’s diagonal, are ordered and legible. The costs are the makers’: an envelope and external services that decayed fast in weather, the thermal performance of a glass box with its ducts outside, ordinary interiors under low ducted ceilings, and the flexibility never delivered as a working system. Command of the frame outran command of the enclosure.
Akkadian · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of carved relief in stone, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The diagonal is built with a surveyor’s control, the ranks stepped up the slope at a constant angle, so that the movement is felt before it is read. The falling defeated are carved in turning, foreshortened poses that the register tradition had no use for. The tree and the slope are economical and exact. The costs: the soldiers are repetitive in pose and type; the spatial logic of the slope is not consistent across the field, since figures do not diminish and the ground is a series of stepped bands more than a continuous terrain; and much of the surface detail is read through weathering, so the credit rests chiefly on the composition’s control.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read on structure, material, detail and execution. The structure is the achievement: sixteen equal columns of curved section, slender at the waist where they meet the ring and spreading below and above, carrying the crown with no other support, Cardozo’s engineering making Niemeyer’s figure stand with a lightness that seems to deny the weight of the concrete. The descent and the nave are cleanly made, and the making carries the work’s meaning, since the figure is the structure. The limits are of execution and detail: finished over twelve years in a capital built at speed, the building needed its glazing, waterproofing and concrete renewed within decades, and the junctions of glass and column are not drawn with the precision of the frame.
Agnès Varda · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making is fine and load-bearing in places. Jean Rabier’s black and white carries both registers, the studio-lit interiors of the first half and the handheld, hidden-camera street of the second, without a seam. Michel Legrand’s score and the staging of “Sans toi”, one movement in and the set dropped to black, are the film’s best making. The cutting keeps the clock honest and the chapter hand-offs clean. Corinne Marchand’s performance moves from mannered to open in step with the film, which is the point, though the early vanity is played broad. The costs: some secondary playing, José and the café extras, is thin, and the Dorothée stretch loses tension in its staging. It is not the total command of the medium the top of the axis requires.
Kraftwerk · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is exact and load-bearing on side two. The pulse of the title track is set low and steady and never smears; the metallic percussion of Metal on Metal is placed, spaced and weighted with precision; the melodies are few and set clean against the rhythm; the mix is dry, clear and uncrowded, every element audible. The voices are deliberately flat and limited, and the vocoder is used sparingly. What holds the figure is range and finish against the elder anchors: the harmonic means are simple, a few chords over long pedal points; the flat voices are a design that also marks a limit of what the singers could do; and some timbres are thin beside the richest records of the decade. This is fine, economical craft.
Almohad builders; cathedral by Gothic masters · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, as it stands. The tower is of the first rank: brick laid to carry a shaft of some fifty metres and more on a modest square, the ramps vaulted between core and wall, the lattice panels cut and set so that the surface is both ornament and lightening, and the belfry joined to it in exact proportion so that four centuries read as one tower. The church commands its size, vaults over five aisles on clustered piers and late Gothic star and net vaults round the crossing. The costs: Gothic detail largely conventional and dry for its date, an exterior of buttresses and pinnacles without a governing elevation, and a scale reached by repeating a bay.
Middle Byzantine builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and decoration together. The making is fine at every level. The squinch zone is resolved cleanly, the passage from square to octagon to circle carried in masonry without awkwardness; the walls of cut stone framed in brick are laid with care; the marble revetment and the opus sectile floors are of high quality; the mosaics, provincial beside the capital’s, are confident and suited to their curved fields. The smaller church’s brickwork and pseudo-kufic ornament are among the best of their kind. The cost: this is command, not daring. The spans are small, and the structure strains none of the means of its day. It stands level with the best making of its region and below the engineering of the great vessels.
Sienese builders; facade by Giovanni Pisano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure first. The striped marble is coursed with great control across piers, walls and campanile, so that construction and pattern are one act. Giovanni Pisano’s carving is of the first rank, the figures conceived for their height and for their view from the square. The floor is a technical achievement without equal of its kind: figures and histories drawn in inlaid and engraved marble over a whole church, Domenico Beccafumi’s panels under the dome a painter’s command in stone. The choir carried over the slope, with a church built in its substructure, is ingenious. Against this: the irregular crossing and its dome are not resolved with the clarity of the best domed work of the period, the joins between campaigns show, and the builders of the Duomo Nuovo failed structurally where they built.
Kyivan Rus builders, under Yaroslav the Wise · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the making, structure first. Thirteen domes stand on piers over five aisles, a system of vaults more intricate than its Constantinopolitan models attempted, and it has stood near a millennium through sack, decay and the shocks of war: the making bears load in the literal sense. The walls are opus mixtum, stone with thin brick in the recessed-brick technique, set in a pink lime mortar with crushed brick, a refined masonry. The mosaics are of the first rank, Constantinopolitan work at a high level in the Orant’s drapery, the rhythm of the Communion and the varied setting of the gold. The Baroque gables and stucco are accomplished but provincial beside them. Held below the top because the structure extends a known system rather than mastering it at the limit, and the piers crowd the spaces.
Claire Denis · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Agnès Godard’s photography is load-bearing: bodies in hard light against black rock and white salt, framed as sculpture and never as pin-ups, and the sea shot from within it. Nelly Quettier’s cutting makes fragments into rhythm, drill against drill, past against present. Denis Lavant’s Galoup is a performance of the body, the clenched walk, a face held almost without expression, then the dance, a physical feat. Britten’s choruses, Legion songs and the club’s pop make one sound design. The costs are several and not small: the voice-over is often flat and says less than the image; Grégoire Colin’s Sentain is so far a blank that the duel has one living side; the town scenes are loosely made.
Anonymous · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, on the making as it stands; the failures are weighed under The Imperishable. The command is of a high order and load-bearing: a vessel of about forty-eight metres in stone, glazed almost to the springing of its vaults, raised in the thirteenth century without precedent at that height; flyers of two spans on uprights thinned to the limit; iron worked into the masonry as part of the system; a hemicycle standing since the thirteenth century. The fourteenth-century rebuilding made the vessel stand and has held since. Chambiges’s transept is fine Flamboyant masonry, matching a choir three centuries older in height and module. The costs: a structure that needs iron and now timber and steel to stand, and inserted piers that are a remedy and look it. Command outruns margin.
Japanese, under Emperor Shōmu · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of building and casting, structure included. The eighth-century casting of a seated figure many times a man’s height, in bronze, in successive lifts, then gilded, stood at the limit of what any workshop of its time could do, and part of it stands still. Chōgen’s campaign brought the Song caster Chen Heqing to recast the head, and built the Great South Gate, whose tie-beams run through the columns and whose tiers of inserted bracket arms carry the roof with the structure shown, nothing hidden: making that is load-bearing in the literal sense. Unkei’s workshop carved the guardians in joined wood at speed. The hall of 1709 is great carpentry under want of timber; its roof sagged and needed steel within two centuries, a shortfall of the making as it stands.
Clint Eastwood · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Jack N. Green lights the interiors to near darkness, faces lit from lamps and windows, and sets the plains wide and cold; the rain of the last act is part of the drama. Joel Cox’s cutting keeps the long middle patient and the canyon unhurried, so that the slow death is felt. Henry Bumstead’s Big Whiskey is raw lumber, mud and a half-built house. Gene Hackman’s Little Bill, folksy and appalling, is the performance of the film; Morgan Freeman’s Ned carries the conscience Munny cannot speak; Harris is exact in a short part. The costs: the Kid is played broad, the deputies thinly, the town scenes are covered functionally, and the scoring outside the theme is sparse to the point of absence.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in several departments. Henri Alekan, then nearly eighty and the photographer of Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête (1946), gives the black and white a silvered softness and the camera an unhurried, floating authority, and the passages into colour are exact. Bruno Ganz carries Damiel’s attention, then his delight, with very little; Otto Sander’s Cassiel is grief held in a fixed face; Curt Bois, in Berlin films since childhood, makes Homer’s search sorrowful without pathos. Peter Przygodda’s cutting weaves the voices into a texture, not a list. Jürgen Knieper’s choral score is apt and at times over-insistent. The costs: Solveig Dommartin, near a novice, is stiff in the long monologues in French-accented German, the second movement slackens, and some scenes are held longer than their content.
Philip Roth · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Roth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long argumentative sentence, built in qualifications and rising to its point, and of voice: the narrator’s, Coleman’s furious one, Les Farley’s interior speech, a mind wrecked by a war, and Ernestine’s measured talk at the funeral. The boxing chapters are exact. The structure is managed with skill, the secret placed where it turns the book and the close held at the right length. Three charges hold it below the top: the arias on the impeachment run on, the voice’s habits of repetition and exclamation growing loud; Delphine Roux is a satirical type drawn with less patience than anyone else in the book; and the narrator’s reflections sometimes do the work the scene has already done.
English embroiderers (probably Canterbury) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of embroidery at monumental length, read to the same anchors as paint or stone. With two stitches and a handful of colours the makers draw motion: horses rear, fall and gallop; ships heel; men row, fell trees, carry casks and swing axes. Colour is used structurally, not naturally: horses blue or yellow, the far legs in another colour from the near, giving depth with no modelling. Trees and buildings divide the scenes and pace the strip; the inscriptions are laid in without crowding; the joins are made so well that the strip reads as one. The making is load-bearing, because the strip’s momentum is its argument. The costs: the drawing is schematic, faces are formula, proportions vary, and the quality is uneven along the length, some stretches stiff and crowded beside others fluent and inventive. High command of a narrow means.
Luis Barragán · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every desk. The command of light, proportion, colour and material is of the first rank and load-bearing: the placing and scale of each opening, so that light is always reflected or framed and never simply admitted; the proportion of the living room’s window to its wall; the cantilevered stair, at once a feat of plain carpentry and the house’s most exact gesture; the planes of the roof, each sized against the sky. The engineering is modest and sought nothing more: masonry walls and timber beams. Held below the top because the making is narrow in range, and because some of the house’s effects depend on paint renewed over decades and on objects placed rather than on building.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium; invention is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The command is high and load-bearing. Raoul Coutard’s black and white is grave and exact: faces in clean grey light, Karina’s profile in the credits, the street in plain daylight. The long takes with lateral pans, the camera swinging between two speakers or holding on a back, are controlled to the frame, and the cuts are fewer and sharper than in Breathless. The cutting between Falconetti and Karina in the cinema is right in where it falls and how long it holds. Karina’s playing, given mostly in stillness, posture and the eyes, carries a film that denies her inner speech. Michel Legrand’s music is used as a stopped fragment rather than an accompaniment. The costs: the catechism is static in its making as in its matter, some tableaux are sketched, and the roughness of a few compositions is not everywhere distinguishable from haste.
Michael Cimino · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight across the bookends. Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography gives the mill its fire and the mountain its cold light, and moves through the wedding crowd as if it belonged there. Peter Zinner’s cutting holds the reception in long rhythms and breaks it with one cut to war; the sound makes the cage a space of slaps, water and shouting. The ensemble is exact: De Niro’s Michael held in, his feeling legible in the hands; Walken’s Nick, whose face empties across the film; Streep’s Linda in a part the script gives little; Cazale’s Stan, small and vain. The costs fall where the film puts its weight: crude staging of the Vietnamese, loosely joined Saigon scenes, mountains plainly not Pennsylvania’s, Steven’s fate staged in fragments.
Metallica · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing for most of the record. Hetfield’s rhythm guitar is the engine, downpicked at speed with a precision that makes the riffs sound machined, and the riffs are built with care, with counter-figures and shifts of accent. The arrangements are worked out section by section; the harmonised guitars of the title track’s middle and of Orion are cleanly voiced; Rasmussen’s production keeps a dense, fast record legible. Burton’s bass in Orion is the finest playing on the record. The faults fall on a share: the bass is buried elsewhere, Ulrich’s drumming serves without commanding, several solos run on stock figures, and the voice is a bark of narrow range.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. The dialogue makes regional speech carry character and comedy at once: Jerry’s evasive bargaining, Marge’s polite persistence, Carl’s talk set against Gaear’s silence. Deakins photographs a landscape of near-white with exactness and restraint, and finds the overhead car park and the opening emergence from snow. Burwell’s score lends gravity without irony. The performances are of the highest command: Macy’s Jerry, whose face shows every lie arriving too late; McDormand’s Marge, comic and formidable in one; Buscemi and Stormare as a comic pair whose comedy turns lethal. The cutting is lean. The costs fall on small shares: the escorts and Shep Proudfoot are written thin and played for type, the accents are pressed for laughs in places, and the kidnappers’ road flags between set pieces.
Hilma af Klint · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of tempera on paper at a scale beyond the reach of the arm, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing in three ways. Ground: flat, even fields of colour across nearly eight square metres a panel, without streak or visible seam, which is hard in a water-based medium on paper. Contour: the forms are drawn in a confident, unbroken line at large size, curves held without wavering over a metre. Colour: each age is keyed to a ground and a palette, and the shifts are calibrated, so that the cooling of old age reads as a change of state rather than of mood. The costs: the handling is flat and illustrative, nearer a decorative designer’s than a painter’s; the script is diagrammatic; the range of mark is narrow.
Chen Kaige · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Gu Changwei’s photography carries the film: the amber of the old Beiping lanes, the smoke of the theatre, the blue-white of the school courtyard in snow, the reds of the bonfire, the painted faces in close-up. The opera is staged with real command. Leslie Cheung’s Dieyi, a performance carried in gesture, the hands and eyes of a dan actor off stage as on, is the film’s chief achievement of craft; Zhang Fengyi is solid and plain as the man who is a king only in paint; Gong Li gives Juxian force in a role written thinner; the child actors of the training sequence are exact. The costs: Zhao Jiping’s score underlines, the historical markers are staged as tableaux, some time jumps are carried by titles rather than the cutting, and the trial is written broad.
Kazuo Ishiguro · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Ishiguro’s English. The command is of the voice, and it is load-bearing: a plain, conversational, slightly formal English, a woman talking to someone she assumes shares her world, whose evenness carries the horror without once naming it. The withholding is engineered with great precision: information arrives in the right order and at the right distance, so that the reader is always a little ahead of Kathy and never sure. The small scenes are exactly made: the Exchanges, the pencil case, the tape lost and found, the art Tommy hides. Three charges hold the axis below the top: the evenness becomes monotony in parts of the Cottages; the habit of deferring what will be told is used past its use; and Miss Emily’s long explanation in the third part, necessary to the plot, is an exposition delivered as a lecture, in a manner the rest of the book avoids.
Frank Capra · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in the performance above all. Stewart carries a man from boyish appetite to rage and terror, and the bar, the living room and the bridge are among the best film acting of the decade. Donna Reed and Lionel Barrymore are exact; Thomas Mitchell’s Uncle Billy is comic and pitiful at once. The telephone scene is directed and played as one rising pressure. Joseph Walker’s photography lights a warm town and turns it, in Pottersville, to wet neon and shadow, and William Hornbeck’s cutting keeps a long chronicle moving. The costs fall where they matter: the heavenly frame is crude, talking lights in the sky; some broad comedy is slack; Tiomkin’s score swells where the image already carries the feeling; and the closing crowd is staged for sentiment more than with precision.
Mexica · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of relief carving in basalt at monumental scale, with stone tools and abrasives, to the same anchors as every medium. The making bears load: a disc of some 3.6 metres laid out in true concentric rings, with a symmetry that holds across the whole face; the day signs each drawn in the clear Mexica glyphic line; the serpents’ segmented bodies kept regular round the circumference; the central face carved with more depth and plasticity than the rings. The control of a hard, vesicular stone at this size and precision is great. The costs are charged: the relief is shallow and largely graphic, the carving of the rings is to some extent repetitive, even mechanical, beside the volume of the Coatlicue, and the stone may be unfinished. Set against the ladder of every medium, it sits under the Bust of Nefertiti.
Television · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in the guitars. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd play parts that are exact and composed to interlock, and solos that are built rather than run: Lloyd’s compact and melodic, Verlaine’s long and climbing, the title track’s climb placed stage by stage. Billy Ficca drums with a jazz looseness that pushes the climbs; Fred Smith’s bass holds the ground plainly. Andy Johns’s production keeps each guitar separate and clear across the stereo field, which the interplay requires. The faults are real and fall on a share of the record: Verlaine’s voice is thin and strained, and it carries every song; the sound is dry and light in the low end, which serves the guitars and starves the whole; the bass and some arrangements are plain. A command of the highest order in one element, strong elsewhere, weak in the voice.
Dorothea Lange · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the photograph. The approach: closing in on a family frame by frame and arriving at the one that holds everything. The framing: vertical and tight, the figures filling it, the place cut away. The timing of the hand. The light, even and soft, which gives the face full modelling without a harsh shadow. The focus held on the face and the hand, and a tonal range from the dark of the tent to the light of the skin that the large negative gives. The making bears the load; the later retouch is not credited here. Held below the top because the frame relies on what was found as much as on what was made, and its edges, the infant’s partly lost head and the soft lower corners, are not resolved with the exactness of the centre.
Leo Tolstoy · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Tolstoy’s Russian, in the late manner; the sound of the sentence as a native reader hears it is beyond this reading, and is neither credited nor charged. The opening is a single long sentence of spring forcing up through the paving stones of a city people have tried to ruin, “Как ни старались люди”, however hard people tried, a nature passage that is already a moral argument, and it is masterly. The trial chapters handle a dozen consciousnesses, jurors, judges, prosecutor and counsel, each fixed by the habitual detail Tolstoy reuses as a signature, as Maslova’s slightly squinting black eyes return at every meeting. The irony is cold and exact. Held below the top: the late plainness hardens at times into schema, the officials caricatures of one thing; the narrator repeats what the scene has shown; the Petersburg chapters are written at a lower pressure than anything in the first part; and the minor political prisoners are positions more than people.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil and poured paint on an upright canvas. The making is load-bearing. The pour is controlled: skeins of different weight laid at different speeds, fine white lines that stay fine across a full arm’s sweep, black that knots and pools where the hand slowed. The layering is managed so that the eye reads down through it, the dark ground held back and the light skeins forward, and the objects are set into the impasto so that they belong to the surface rather than sit on it. The costs are real: the ground is heavy and in places clotted, so that skeins sink into mud rather than float; colour is dense and close in value, and passages read as worked over rather than resolved; the control of interval and openness that the later large canvases show is not yet here. Command near complete in the pour, less so in the ground.
Romano-Egyptian painters · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of encaustic and tempera on panel, to the same anchors as every medium. At its best the making is load-bearing: flesh built in warm wax laid in short directional strokes that follow the planes of the face; shadow under the jaw and at the eye socket placed with economy; the highlight on the nose, the lip and the eye laid last, so that light seems to sit on the skin; hair rendered in a few dark strokes against a lighter ground; gold leaf for wreaths and jewellery. The best panels stand with the finest portrait heads of any age before the Renaissance. The costs are charged to the body: the quality is uneven, many panels are workshop production of a standard type, neck and shoulders are often summary, and the later tempera panels are flatter and harder.
William Blake · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the colour print finished by hand, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. The printed rock is the finest passage: a granular, reticulated surface of reds, ochres and greens that reads at once as stone, as coral and as living tissue, made by a process Blake controlled only in part and then drew into with the brush. The flesh is modelled in watercolour over the printed ground with a firm, sculptural light, and the contours are drawn with a sure pen. The costs are charged: the anatomy is Blake’s convention, the muscles schematised and the head small and stylised; the dark ground is in places dull and opaque rather than deep; the diagram and the scroll are summary.
John Huston · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in the performances and the photography. Walter Huston’s Howard, garrulous and nimble, is one of the great supporting performances in sound film, and the laugh at the end is pure command. Bogart charts Dobbs’s descent by degrees and never plays the end before the middle. Tim Holt is plain and sound. Ted McCord’s photography makes dust, heat and the night fire tangible, Owen Marks’s cutting keeps a long picture moving without haste, and the script is lean and exact. The charges stand: Steiner’s score is heavy and often underlines what the image has already said; some studio night work and back projection show against the exteriors; the Indian village is played with a softness the rest avoids. Strong and load-bearing in places, not at the very top.
T. S. Eliot · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Eliot’s English, with no translation between. The command of verse for the voice is high and varied. Eliot writes at least four instruments and keeps them distinct: the Chorus’s long, accumulating lines, built for many voices; the Tempters’ clipped, rhymed stress lines; Thomas’s plain accentual line; and two kinds of prose, the sermon’s measured periods and the Knights’ committee English, which is exact pastiche. The hinge couplet on the right deed and the wrong reason is made to be remembered. A text for performance, and it plays. Held below 9 because the Priests’ verse is flat, some choral catalogues slacken into inventory, and Thomas’s speeches sometimes state where they should enact: the craft is a poet’s more than a dramatist’s.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium. Asakazu Nakai photographs fog so that the world is subtracted from the frame and the castle and its gate rise out of nothing; the deep blacks of the murder carry Asaji’s exit and return. Yoshirō Muraki’s castle is dark wood, low ceilings and a great gate, a space that encloses. Masaru Sato’s score is spare flute and drum, silence is used as an instrument, and the sound is exact: the silk, the horses, the birds, the arrows. Isuzu Yamada’s performance is the finest making, nearly motionless, every turn of the head a decision. The costs recur and hold the figure: Toshirō Mifune plays fear at a pitch that coarsens into grimace and shouting at the banquet and in the last sequence, the fog rides and the messengers are held a beat long, and the spirit’s makeup reads as makeup in close view.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium. Buñuel’s plain, economical direction, the camera at eye level and rarely moving for show, is load-bearing: its evenness makes the unmarked fantasy possible. Sacha Vierny keeps the colour cool and soft, the flat and the house lit alike. The sound is a precise instrument: no score, bells for the landau, cats for the fantasy, a hum for the box. Deneuve’s stillness is a performance of withholding; Geneviève Page’s madam is brisk and maternal, Michel Piccoli’s Husson amused and predatory, Pierre Clémenti’s Marcel, with steel teeth and a swordstick, all appetite. The costs weigh: Jean Sorel’s Pierre is a blank the role asks for and the film does not fill, the street shooting and the police kill are staged perfunctorily, and some of the comedy at the house is broad.
Édouard Manet · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil at the scale of history. The making is load-bearing: the coolness is done with the brush. The squad is a row of near-black tunics against grey, the white belts and gaiters a cadence of bright marks across the dark; the smoke is laid in a few broad passages of white that sit on the surface; the sergeant, painted in profile with a bravura economy, is the canvas’s finest passage. The earth is a plain ochre, the wall a flat grey plane: modelling reduced to large values, learned from Velázquez and the Spanish, at full command. The costs are charged: the space is uncertain, the distance from squad to victims implausible on purpose and awkward in fact; the onlookers are drawn small and summarily; the half-hidden victims are thinly realised. The Boston and London canvases show a struggle that this one only partly resolves.
Hayao Miyazaki · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors of the elder arts. Kazuo Oga’s backgrounds are exact landscapes: the camphor tree, the paddies after rain, dusk over the fields. The animation of children is observed, not stylised: Mei’s gait, her running and stamping, Satsuki’s posture with her sister on her back. Water and wind, the rain at the bus stop above all, are finely made. Joe Hisaishi’s score is economical, and the sound, drops on the umbrella, frogs, wind in the grass, bears weight. The cutting holds each wait at the length a child sustains. The costs are those of a small production of its time: limited animation in places, rough joins between episodes, and a final rescue plainer in its making than the bus stop or the night growth.
Edgar Degas · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of modelled wax and assembled materials, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The pose is balanced on one leg with the torso pulled back against it, a difficult torque held in a small figure; the arms and clasped hands are modelled thin and tense; the face is built with real particularity, the low brow, the forward jaw, the lifted nose, the lids nearly closed, so that the critics could hate a person, not a type. The bodice is coated so that real fabric and wax become one surface, and the passage from wax skin to cloth is controlled. The costs are charged: the armature is improvised and the figure has needed repair; the legs and feet are worked rougher than the head; a painter learning a medium left the learning in the work.
Giuseppe Terragni · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The proportional control is exceptional: the half cube, the regulating lines through every front, the depth of the grid set so that the frame reads as a field of cells. The marble skin is drawn tight to the frame and jointed with precision; the glass block of the hall ceiling solves daylight in the middle of a deep square plan; the doors that open the front are a technical as well as a rhetorical device. The making is load-bearing: the building’s argument is made in the exactness of its details. Against it, the structure is a conventional concrete frame, not an advance in engineering, and the building’s scale asks little of it; the craft is of composition and finish more than of construction.
Michael Mann · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Dante Spinotti’s night photography and long-lens city; the editing of the bank battle, legible in space at every cut; the gunfire recorded on location and used in the mix; Goldenthal’s score with its source cues, among them Brian Eno, Terje Rypdal and Moby; De Niro’s held stillness and Kilmer’s physical command; an ensemble of some twenty speaking parts kept distinct; procedure made exact without exposition. The costs are in the writing and its playing. Pacino’s outbursts (“a great ass”) break into another register; several marital scenes are written as speeches; Waingro is a sketch; the women are given small parts of a large film. The script is less clean, line by line, than Chinatown (8.6).
Louise Bourgeois · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium: command of steel and cast bronze at architectural scale. It shows in three things. Proportion: the body’s mass carried so high, on legs so thin, that it reads as hovering, which is the work’s precariousness and a structural achievement that could not be faked. Surface: the legs are ribbed, knotted and wrought, as if each had been bent and worked by hand, so the industrial means do not show and the creature reads as made rather than manufactured; the joints are knuckles, not hinges. Contrast: the smooth marble eggs in their mesh against the rough legs. The costs: it was fabricated and cast by others under her direction, so the command credited is of decisions more than of hand, and the range of means is one creature’s anatomy.
Neil Young · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing where the songs need it. The melodies are the real command: Only Love Can Break Your Heart, Birds and the title song are built simply and exactly. The arrangement of After the Gold Rush, piano, voice and a short horn solo, is as spare as it can be and complete. Southern Man’s guitar duel is raw and controlled. The making serves the songs, and much of its looseness carries their meaning. The faults are real and fall on a large share: the high voice wavers off pitch, the piano playing is plain, the ensemble is loose on several tracks, the fragments are unfinished, and the production is thin beside the best of its year.
Jonathan Glazer · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Daniel Landin’s photography holds two regimes, low-light concealed capture in the van and the exact, lit abstraction of the void, and makes them one film. Mica Levi’s score, strings tuned and slid off the pitch and a three-note figure for the hunt, is the film’s nervous system. The sound design makes the street a roar and the void a silence. Scarlett Johansson gives a performance of attention without inner life that slowly acquires one, among non-actors who did not know they were in a scene, and Paul Watts cuts hours of hidden footage into a single line. The costs: some night footage is murky beyond what the method requires, and the Highland passages slacken in pace and composition.
Robert Smythson (attributed), for Bess of Hardwick · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure included. The composition is of the first rank: a block symmetrical on both axes, its towers stepping the fronts so that the glass is set in a frame of advancing and receding planes; windows graded in height up the house, so that the elevation reads the section; the stair contrived to climb through a compact plan with no court. The engineering is ambitious for English masonry of its date: walls opened to glass on a scale few houses had tried, made possible by drawing the flues into the internal walls. The stone, from the owner’s own quarry, is handled with economy. The costs: the classical detail is provincial and sparse; the symmetry is bought with windows that serve no room; and the glass, for all its daring, does not extend structure as the skeleton of the Sainte-Chapelle does.
Hildegard of Bingen · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight. The melodic writing is the work’s chief craft: wide-ranging lines, recurring formulas that bind the Virtues’ music into one idiom, melismas placed on the words the theology needs, and a Devil defined by having no line at all. The dramaturgy of voice is economical: one soloist against a chorus, groups against individuals, song against speech. The costs are real. The Latin, dictated and corrected by secretaries, is visionary, compressed and sometimes rough in syntax; it carries striking images, viriditas, greenness, the best known of her words, but it is not a poet’s command of the language. The Virtues’ declarations are cut to one pattern, and characterisation by melody is slight. Monophony is not charged; it is the medium, and within it the command is high.
Medang (Mataram) builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The stone is cut and laid dry with interlocking joints and no mortar, and raised to about 47 m in corbelled masonry with no true arch or vault, on a base wide enough to carry it; the profile of the tower, stepped and diminishing to the crowning ratna, is controlled throughout. The carving is among the finest of its tradition: the Ramayana panels compose crowded scenes with clarity, the Durga is commanding, and the kala heads over the doors, the lion niches and the balustrade ornament are crisp at every level. The fall in an earthquake is weighed on survival, not here. Held below 9 by the limit of the means: corbelled dry stone sets small dark chambers inside great mass.
Wim Wenders · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Robby Müller’s photography, natural light and neon, holds a man small in wide frames and, in the narrow booth, lays two faces over each other in one reflection. Ry Cooder’s score is sparse and placed. Harry Dean Stanton carries the first half almost without speech and the climax almost without movement; Nastassja Kinski listens behind the glass. Peter Przygodda’s cutting lets the monologues run. The costs: the Los Angeles movement is loosely shaped and its scenes run past their point; Walt and Anne are written as functions; Hunter Carson is natural, but the boy’s scenes with his father depend on charm; the last movement of the ending is slow. Below the films that bear weight in every department, The Third Man and Chinatown at 9.0.
Walter De Maria · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium: here siting, survey, measure and material, and the command is exact. The survey sets four hundred tips in one level plane over ground that rises and falls, so that each pole’s height is computed for its place. The spacing makes the mile and the kilometre meet on one rectangle. Polished stainless steel is thin enough to vanish at noon and bright enough to burn at sunset; the tips are pointed; the site is high, flat, open and prone to storms. The fabrication was by engineers and contractors under De Maria’s direction, as the medium allows. What the axis cannot credit is variety of means: the making is one decision executed four hundred times with great precision.
Michael Haneke · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. Christian Berger’s photography holds a flat, even light in which the tape image and the film image cannot be told apart, which the form requires. The long takes are timed exactly: the suicide frame is held past the act, the school steps held long enough that the eye has to choose to search. With no score, traffic, footsteps and the television news are the only weather. Daniel Auteuil plays a man whose decency is a performance he believes, and lets the irritation show before the guilt; Maurice Bénichou makes Majid’s grief in a few minutes, and his weeping alone in the visit tape is among the most exact things in the film. The costs: Binoche’s Anne is given more anger than interior, and the station and dinner scenes are exposition in conventional coverage.
Qutb ud-Din Aibak and Iltutmish; upper storeys by Firuz Shah Tughlaq · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
To raise a dressed-stone shaft some seventy metres, tapering continuously, with the flutes cut through the courses so that the pattern is structural and not applied, and to keep it standing through earthquakes for eight centuries, is command of the first rank in its time and place. The muqarnas brackets of the balconies are carved with assurance when the form was new in India. The inscription bands are cut crisp on dense, even grounds. The costs: the upper storeys are plainer in making as well as design; the shaft is a solid mass with a stair at its core; and much of the craft is ornament on a simple structural idea.
H. H. Richardson · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium includes structure, and here the structure carries weight in the strict sense: a granite tower of great mass set on tidal fill, borne on timber piles under granite pyramids, and standing for a century and a half. The masonry is of the first rank: rock-faced granite laid with a sense of weight and grain, bands and voussoirs of brownstone giving the mass its scale and colour, turrets and apse composed so that the tower gathers the whole. The interior is uneven. La Farge’s colour holds the room together, but the figure painting of a hurried team, done in months, is of mixed quality. His west window is a work of high craft in a new medium; the porch is competent and archaeological. The masonry and the foundation earn the figure; the interior keeps it from rising.
Hellenistic (Roman marble copy) · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of marble carving at life size, judged to the same anchors as every medium, and the making bears load: the meaning is in the modelling of a body under strain. The flesh is carved as flesh: the slackening belly, the skin creased at the flank, the shoulder lifted by the locked arm, the veins and tendons of the supporting limb. The hair is carved unlike everything else, stiff and clumped, so that the material itself distinguishes the people; the torque is precise. The face is drawn down with real control, the brow knotted and the mouth slack. The costs: the base is summary, the copyist’s finish is cooler than the bronze it renders must have been, and the restorations are not of the same hand. A first-rate copy of a first-rate original, which is not the original’s own surface.
Norwegian builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, carpentry and carving together. The portal is carving at the top of its art: animals of extreme slenderness drawn into long asymmetrical curves that cross and recross without losing their line, cut at two or more depths so that the field reads as layered, the great beast and the thin serpents told apart by weight and speed. The frame has stood nearly nine centuries in a wet climate, its joints and sills sound enough to keep the form whole, and that is load-bearing evidence of command. What holds the axis at 8.6: the building of about 1130 is modest in scale and in structural ambition beside the later stave churches with their tiered roofs, and the finest making in the work is reused from an earlier hand, the newer making plainer.
John Vanbrugh with Nicholas Hawksmoor · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included, to the same anchors as every desk. The command of massing is of the first rank and load-bearing: block, towers, colonnades and courts composed as one stepped mass that works at the distance of the bridge and at the foot of the portico; the handling of the skyline; the ashlar and the carving, Gibbons’s trophies among it; Hawksmoor’s control of detail and of the Long Library’s long room. The Grand Bridge was a bold span for an English bridge of its date. Against this: the plan serves the elevation and is inconvenient; the proportions are at times heavy and the junctions crowded, as the Palladian critics said; the bridge was overbuilt for its water until Brown supplied more; and the execution was broken by the halt and the change of hand, though Hawksmoor’s completion holds the whole together.
Muhammad ibn Mahmud Isfahani (attributed), under Timur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure included. The double dome is the engineering: a high outer shell on a drum, held off a lower inner shell, standing six centuries in an earthquake zone. The geometry carries the square to an octagon to a circle through squinch and muqarnas with no visible strain. The surfaces command several crafts at once: glazed brick laid in pattern on the drum, cut-tile mosaic on the ribs, carved and polished onyx in the dado, nephrite of a hardness few workshops could cut, painted and gilded relief within. The making is load-bearing where the dome stands as sign. What holds it: much of what is seen is restorers’ work, judged as it stands but not evidence of the first hand; and the junctions with the additions of the 1420s are competent rather than fine.
Winslow Homer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at exhibition scale. Homer’s command of water is the making: the weight and transparency of the swell, the light through its crest, the foam along the hull, the shark’s bulk half seen beneath the surface. The figure is drawn with a firm anatomy and laid in with economy; the sky and the spout are broader. The making is load-bearing where the water carries the danger. Held below the higher marks because the passages are uneven: the sharks have been found stiff, and the distant ship and the spout are schematic beside the near water. Homer’s oil handling, strong and direct, does not reach the command of the greatest painters of the medium.
John Ford · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and in places load-bearing. Toland’s photography is among the finest in studio cinema: the candle-lit house, faces in darkness, silhouettes on the road, the night farewell held almost black. Ford’s framing and restraint are mastery of proportion, economy and the thing withheld: the keepsakes scene played without a word, the camera held on Jane Darwell, the deaths given by a look rather than shown. Newman’s score, nearly silent and built on one tune, is used sparingly, and Henry Fonda and Darwell carry the film. Against these: rear projection on the road, sets that sometimes show, broad comic turns among the old people, and an ending that reads as a correction rather than a maker’s conclusion. Short of The Third Man and Chinatown, each at 9.0 on this axis.
Martin Amis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Amis’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice and of the sentence that carries it: the long comic period built of slang, brand names, coinages and sudden literary precision, the joke timed to the end of the clause, the riff that keeps rising past the point where another writer would stop. It is load-bearing: the argument about appetite lives in the sentence’s own appetite. The con is constructed with real skill, its clues placed where Self cannot read them and the reader can. Three charges hold the axis below the top: the voice is one voice for the whole long book, and its riffs repeat in shape; the women, Selina, Martina and the actresses, are drawn with less life than the men; and the scenes with Martina, meant as the book’s calm, are its slackest writing.
Roman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of marble a little over life size, judged to the anchors of every medium. The breastplate is the summit of the making: low relief carved across a curved surface that must read as metal over a body, the figures crisp and legible at close range, the plate modelled to the musculature beneath it, the canopy of the sky spread in a few planes. The head holds an individual likeness inside an ideal without loss to either. The contrapposto is managed with authority, and the Cupid is turned to use as the support. The costs are charged: the cloak’s mass about the hips is heavy and somewhat inert, and this is a workshop’s execution of a design probably made for bronze, the transposition showing in the support. Load-bearing making, by a high and disciplined workshop rather than by a singular hand.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The command of the grammar is high, and load-bearing for the effect: one order carried round the room at one height, the grey stone drawn as fine as a pen line, the coffered barrel vaults matched to the central dome, the ribbed dome on its pendentives lightened by its twelve windows, and the glazed terracotta fitted to the stone frame as if both were one material. The della Robbia roundels are of the first rank in their medium. The engineering extends nothing: a small ribbed dome of a known kind, short spans, walls doing the work. And the joins show: pilasters folded in the corners, bays that do not come out even, and a portico whose attic sits heavily on its columns and meets the chapel awkwardly in elevation and in section.
Mudéjar builders, under Peter of Castile, and later hands · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The ornament is commanded throughout: carved stucco in layered planes of epigraphy, vegetal scroll and geometric net; cut-tile dados in interlaced stars; carpentry of the first rank in the doors of the throne hall and its gilded cupola, a geometry of stars resolved over a square. The plan is commanded too: the bent entrance, the two axes, the throne hall at the joint. The structure is modest and sound, brick and timber, nothing staked on engineering. Later hands are uneven: the Renaissance gallery competent and foreign to the court, the nineteenth-century storeys careful pastiche. Held below Sainte-Chapelle (8.8) and the Pantheon, whose making is load-bearing in structure, and below the Alhambra, which carries the same crafts further in its muqarnas vaults.
The Rolling Stones · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and it is load-bearing at the top. Gimme Shelter is a production of the first rank: the tremolo guitar and the wordless voices set in space, the entrance of Charlie Watts and the piano, Clayton’s vocal pushed until it breaks and kept. You Can’t Always Get What You Want is an arrangement in stages, choir, horn, acoustic guitar, organ, band and choir again, built so that each entrance is heard. Keith Richards’s guitar parts interlock and carry the record, and Watts holds the slow middle of Midnight Rambler with real control. Against that, Country Honk is loose by intent, Live with Me and Monkey Man are thick and generic in their mix, and the lead vocal is mannered more than commanding. A tenth under Remain in Light at 8.7.
Brinkman and Van der Vlugt · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The structural decision, flat slabs on mushroom columns cantilevered beyond the outer row, frees the front, removes the beams that would block light and services, and is carried through blocks of different heights without compromise. The curtain wall, in slender steel frames over continuous parapet bands, was detailed for a working factory, not a showpiece, and held up through decades of use. The diagonal bridges, the glazed stair towers, the joining of the curved office to the straight range and the tearoom are resolved with the same economy. The making is visible and is the argument. Limits: some glazing proved demanding to maintain, and the craft is rigorous repetition more than invention at every point.
Radiohead · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing in the songs that matter most. John Leckie’s production keeps three guitars distinct in a dense mix: Jonny Greenwood’s tremolo and harmonics, Ed O’Brien’s sustained textures and Thom Yorke’s rhythm part are voiced against one another, not stacked. Yorke’s voice is a precise instrument, from near-whisper to full cry, with the break in it used as content. Strings and organ enter Fake Plastic Trees and (Nice Dream) exactly, and Phil Selway and Colin Greenwood play with taste. The faults fall on a share of the record: Bones and Black Star are conventionally arranged, the loud passages lean on stock distortion, Sulk is overwrought, and some mixes are ordinary rock records of their year.
Pierre Peysson and Jean de Louvres, under Benedict XII and Clement VI · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of masonry and structure is high, judged on the stone alone. The Grande Chapelle is vaulted in one span over the two-aisled Grande Audience, Jean de Louvres’s northern training carried to scale; the Audience’s vaults on their spine of piers are finely built. The outer walls are fine ashlar, very thick, and the machicolations carried on tall arches between buttresses solve defence and elevation in one device. The great stair and the tower chambers are of a high standard. The making is load-bearing in the chapel and the façade; elsewhere it is excellent and plain. It stands below the summit of medieval craft, the vaulters of the northern cathedrals and Sainte-Chapelle’s iron and glass.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high and load-bearing in the cases: curved ribs of laminated iroko held by steel ties and stainless fittings, built to stand tall on an exposed, cyclonic site; an outer skin of slats spaced to break the wind and an inner skin of louvres to regulate it, worked out with wind studies; the joining of timber and steel resolved as a visible system, detail by detail, in Piano’s manner. The detail serves the idea, so the craft is not applied but is the building. What holds the axis: the scale is modest, the cases are variations on one section, and the low range is careful rather than commanding. It does not reach the order of Sydney’s geometry or the Pantheon’s dome.
Gustav Klimt · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of a mixed mural medium: casein on plaster, gilding, applied pieces and a drawn line. Load-bearing where it is achieved: the contour, which draws the gaunt suppliants, the Gorgons’ hair and the coils of Typhoeus with one even pressure and makes the strip read across thirty metres; the placing of masses on the bare ground, so that the voids carry as much as the figures; the end wall’s dark patterned monster against pale flesh, a hard problem of value and density solved; the setting of gold and applied pieces so that they register at a distance and at the eye. The costs: passages read as drawing more than painting, the genii and the choir repeat one profile with little invention per figure, and the closing couple is less resolved than the monster wall.
Lee Chang-dong · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography carries the form: the dusk shot held in fading light, the reflected light of Namsan crossing a small room, the greenhouses at dawn in mist, the last fire in snow. The editing is patient and exact, cutting so that scenes end before they explain. Mowg’s score is sparse percussion and held tension, used rarely, and the Miles Davis cue is placed once. Steven Yeun makes Ben’s ease a menace without a single overt act; Yoo Ah-in’s slack-mouthed stillness hides the knife until it shows; Jeon Jong-seo, in a first role, gives Hae-mi both the performer and the person. The costs: the length shows in the search, Yoo’s opacity sometimes reads as blankness rather than pressure, and the ending is staged more conventionally than the film around it.
The National · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing. Peter Katis gives the band a close, warm, dry room where every part is legible. Bryan Devendorf’s drumming is the record’s engine and signature: busy, precise, often the lead voice, so that in Squalor Victoria and Mistaken for Strangers the drums do what a guitar riff would do elsewhere. The Dessners’ guitars and piano interlock in small repeating figures rather than chords, and the cross-beat piano of Fake Empire is the record’s best single idea. Strings and horns enter as colour and leave before they become sentiment, except in the first track’s coda, which earns it. The fault is sameness: the second half’s mid-tempo songs run together.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high across most departments. Rodrigo Prieto’s photography shifts its colour and grain by period without drawing attention to itself. Thelma Schoonmaker’s cutting holds three and a half hours, with comic timing in the anecdotes and patience at the end. The design and costume are exact across five decades. The performances bear weight: Joe Pesci’s quietness, unlike anything he had done before, is the film’s moral weather; Al Pacino’s Hoffa is the loud centre, his excess right for the man; Robert De Niro’s closed face is made to carry the end. Held below the top by a failure in the making itself. The de-ageing never wholly succeeds: the faces sit oddly on the bodies and around the eyes, and the film asks it to carry decades. In a work where the making is load-bearing, that seam is a real cost, local to faces and movement and most visible in a few scenes.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of encaustic on canvas and of assemblage, to the same anchors as any medium. The encaustic is the achievement: wax kept workable long enough to lay strokes that hold their separate shape, over strips of newsprint dipped in it, so that a flat emblem has a surface as dense and various as any painting of the decade. The rings are true without being ruled dead, and colour holds at full pitch across three hues. The casts are exact and anonymous, as they must be, and evenly tinted; the box is plain carpentry and is meant to be. What holds the figure: the range of command is narrow by design, a ring of colour and a cast; the casts and the box, which carry half the work, are competent rather than commanding; and one medium, wax, carries almost all the virtuosity.
Dashiell Hammett · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Hammett’s English. The command is of dialogue and surface. The talk is exact, and each voice is its own: Gutman’s ornate, delighted periods, Cairo’s precise and fussy speech, Wilmer’s threats, Spade’s mockery, “The cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter”. Scenes of five people in one room are kept clear without a word of interior. The opening portrait, “Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony”, builds him from a series of v’s to “a blond satan” and sets the method in a paragraph. The plot is tightly made, its reversals timed, its clues fair to anyone who reads faces. Charged: the inventory of clothes and gestures, the rolling of cigarettes described at length, is sometimes method and sometimes mannerism, and the prose has no range beyond its one register, so that the making is masterly in a narrow band. Below Jesus’ Son (8.8 here), whose sentences turn more finely; well above the run of its genre.
Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in the facade: the proportion of base to shaft to attic; the broad corner piers closing the field; the spandrels set back so that the piers read as continuous; the slab cornice projecting far enough to cast the frieze in shadow and stop the rise. Sullivan’s terra cotta bears load in the composition, marking the horizontals as recessive and the attic as the end, and as craft it is among the finest ornament in American building, each field drawn and modelled at full intent. Adler’s frame is sound and of its date, not advanced beyond it. The costs: the doubled piers, which serve the image against the structure; the plain back elevations; and the ground floor, the least resolved part of the front.
Henry Moore · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of carved stone, and the making bears the meaning: it lives in the cut. The volumes are full and taut, turning continuously so that the eye moves round them without a break. The voids are cut cleanly through a soft, veined stone without loss of the mass around them, a real risk in such a block. The surfaces show the stone, smooth enough to carry light along the forms and not polished into a skin, and the bedding is used rather than fought. The head is reduced to a small form that turns the whole figure toward the view. The charges: the handling is sure rather than astonishing, some surfaces are less resolved than the large rhythms, and the command is that of a carver at forty in mid career, short of the summits of carving in any age.
Raymond Chandler · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Chandler’s English, and it is among the most finished prose of its century in American English: the simile and the wisecrack timed with precision, dialogue that characterises in a line, a sentence rhythm that carries comedy and grief at once. Marlowe’s rendering of the French saying, “To say goodbye is to die a little”, and the passage that begins “Alcohol is like love” are made to that measure. The set pieces are commanded: the jail chapters, the Tijuana drive, Wade’s typed drunken pages in a voice not Marlowe’s, the last scene. Charged: a length the plot does not compel; joints that show, in the coincidence and the late summary of what happened; a manner that tips at times into self-imitation, a simile too many; and set speeches that stop the scene. A great stylist’s book, not a perfectly made one.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. Tone within one hue: lemon, chrome, ochre and orange set against each other so that heads, vase, table and wall separate without leaving yellow. Touch differentiated by object: the wall in short crossing strokes, the table more open, the petals laid as flicks, the seed discs piled in impasto that stands from the surface. Drawing: firm outlines, heads foreshortened convincingly at many angles, the hanging heads pulling the oval of the bouquet toward the corners, and the signature placed as a compositional mark. The costs: the speed shows in summary passages of the vase and table, some heads are less resolved than the best, and the outline in places sits on the colour rather than in it.
Cass Gilbert · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank and load-bearing in the structure: a riveted frame carried to bedrock on caissons and braced against wind for a slender tower of unprecedented height, standing for more than a century; elevators running the full height; the building’s own mechanical plant. The skin is detailed with real intelligence: the ornament enlarged as it rises, the colour placed high so that the crown reads from the park, piers and spandrels set so that the vertical holds over 57 floors. The lobby is a work of crafts in command, in marble, mosaic, glass, carved wood and stone. The costs: the terra cotta failed within seventy years, a weakness of the material as used; the ornament is applied to the frame, not made by it; and the base, behind its front, is a plain speculative block.
Master James of St George, under Edward I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The masonry is of the first rank for its time and place: banded walling laid true across a great length, polygonal towers turned with precision, mural passages and galleries cut through thick walls and lit by loops arranged so that one embrasure commands several lines of fire. The King’s Gate was designed as a defence in depth of a refinement few gates in Europe matched. All this was raised at speed in the first campaign by a workforce gathered from across England, a work of organisation as much as of craft, and the accounts show it. The axis holds below the summit band because the making was not carried through: the interior and the gate stand incomplete, and the craft is load-bearing in the walls alone.
Mike Nichols · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The making bears weight through the first half almost without a break. Robert Surtees’s widescreen compositions isolate Benjamin in space; Sam O’Steen’s cutting makes the match from pool to bed and carries sound across scenes; Richard Sylbert’s design gives the house its glass, its white walls and the aquarium; focus and lens length are statements of state. The performances are exact. Anne Bancroft makes Mrs. Robinson weary, contemptuous and wounded in one register; Dustin Hoffman’s stammer and stillness are timed to the frame. The costs: the Berkeley section is ordinarily made, the campus shot as backdrop; Katharine Ross is given little to play; some comic business, the landlord and the fraternity, is broad.
Norman Foster (Foster and Partners) · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering, to the same anchors as any medium. The command is of a high order and much of it bears load. The dome is a ribbed steel lattice, glazed and set over the chamber, carrying two helical ramps; the mirrored cone is at once a reflector of light and a stack for exhaust; the sunshade tracks the sun. The insertion into the old walls, cleared to the masonry and refitted with floors, courts and services, was carried out within a listed and fragile fabric, with its traces kept and framed. The costs: the dome as structure is conventional ribbed construction, not a new structural idea; the junction of the glass cupola with Wallot’s roof is abrupt; and the inserted floors are competent office making, not making that bears the building’s meaning.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas three metres wide, to the same anchors as any medium. The making bears load where it counts. Two opposite handlings are orchestrated in one field and each fully realised: the left built of soft, bled edges and close values, the right of sharp line and hard contrast. The range of mark, from thin washes and stains to dense patches to fine black hatching, is held under one hand; colour is sustained at high pitch across the width; and the diagonals make a field this crowded legible as two centres and a current. The costs are real. The density congests passages where forms overlap without clear priority, and the eye cannot tell intended ambiguity from crowding; line is in places quick to the point of slackness. Below Broadway Boogie Woogie and The Starry Night (9.0).
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at life scale, to the same anchors as any medium. The drawing is sure and economical, the contour carrying volume with little modelling. The paint is thin, dry and matte, close to fresco or tempera in effect, and gives the bodies their weightless quiet. The colour is held in a narrow key of rose, ochre, terracotta and blue across a large field without slackening, and the reworkings are absorbed into the surface. The limits: the ground is summary, nearly unpainted in places; the second boy and the jester’s face are less resolved than the Harlequin and the woman; and the command stops short of the full orchestration of light and space of Las Meninas, at 9.8.
Nina Simone · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing at its best. Simone’s piano in “Sinnerman” is the architecture: an ostinato held for minutes without slackening, a solo that builds by repetition and displacement, the drop to handclaps timed so that the return lands as force. In “Nobody Knows You” the piano carries a classical voice-leading under a blues. Her voice is exact in grain and placement, never more so than in “Strange Fruit”, where restraint is the craft, and “Be My Husband” is mastery by subtraction. The costs fall on the band and the production: guitar and rhythm section competent and sometimes routine, a recording serviceable rather than distinguished for 1965. Load-bearing in four places, sound elsewhere.
James McNeill Whistler · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of oil at life scale in a near-monochrome. Load-bearing where achieved: the tonal control is exact, the blacks of dress, curtain and frame told apart without colour; the greys of the wall laid thin so that the canvas breathes through; the profile drawn with great economy, head, cap and lace set against the wall with one decided edge; the hands and handkerchief, the only passage of fine description, placed where the eye needs them; every rectangle answering the frame. Charged on the anchors that hold in every medium: the modelling of the dress is flat to the point of losing the body under it, and the floor and wall meet uncertainly, footstool and chair barely stated. Some of this is the doctrine. Very high in tone and design, partial in volume.
Max Ernst · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing and of a high order. The decalcomania is controlled across a long canvas without its patches reading as repeats; the colour of the deposit is managed so that rust, sulphur and verdigris read as one terrain; and the fine brushwork that draws figures, eyes and armour out of the accident is precise, the passage from chance to drawn form often invisible. The sky is handled with a cool plainness that sets off the land. Against the highest anchors of command: the drawing of the figures is less assured than the land, and the composition across the long format is more additive than built, its left side weaker. A command of a method rather than of the whole medium.
Thai builders, under Rama II and Rama III · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The structure is solid brick masonry, conventional in kind, raised to a height without precedent in the type on soft alluvial ground; that it has stood for nearly two centuries is the proof of its making. The making that carries the building is the surface: porcelain fragments cut and set by the thousand into petals, rosettes and borders at the scale of the hand, across a tower seen from a river’s width, so that the detail reads at both distances; and the bearers and gods, modelled in stucco and clad the same way. The proportion is sure: the slim taper and the group of five read as one figure from every side. Held below the summit because the achievement is mass, not span or void, and much of the present surface is the restorers’.
Cormac McCarthy · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The command is exact and load-bearing. The procedural sentences of the chase, how a gun is cleaned, how a wound is dressed, how a motel vent is unscrewed, carry suspense by attention alone. The dialogue, without quotation marks and with the apostrophes dropped from “cant” and “dont”, moves at the speed of speech and keeps its menace. Chigurh’s speech is formal, unidiomatic and slightly wrong, and the wrongness is the character. Bell’s monologues hold one voice in its own grammar and idiom across thirteen sections without slipping into pastiche, and the structure is cut with a screenwriter’s economy. Charged: the stripped register forgoes the range the author had shown elsewhere, and a few of Bell’s sections thin into commonplace.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium includes the structure here. The roof, a catenary of cables carrying precast panels and then made continuous, is a demanding system built at a scale few had attempted, and the piers, each a leaning, tapered concrete form taking a moment at its base, are drawn so that the forces read in their profile. The junction of roof and pier, the glass walls set between the piers, and the control of the curve are resolved with the economy of the late Saarinen office. The extension of the 1990s matched the original fabric and module closely. The making is load-bearing in the literal sense: what is made is what stands. It is held below the top by the stake, smaller in technical risk than the shells of Sydney.
Vladimir-Suzdal builders, under Andrey Bogolyubsky · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The white limestone is cut and laid with precision. The carving is fine-grained and placed with judgment, concentrated at the zakomaras and the belt, so that ornament marks the structure’s divisions instead of covering them. The proportional control is the building’s achievement: a small four-pier plan stretched into a figure that reads as tall, by the height of drum and arches and the slimness of the half-columns. The siting is sound: a built mound and a building that has stood in the flood for eight centuries. Held below the top because the structure is a well-known type at small span, with no structural risk.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The making bears weight throughout. Roger Deakins’ light runs from the white glare of Arizona to the tunnel’s dusk silhouettes and the thermal and night-vision images, each chosen for what the viewer may know. Joe Walker cuts the convoy slow in the approach and exact in the eruption. Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score and the sound design carry the dread the dialogue withholds, and Patrice Vermette’s frontier is built and found. Benicio del Toro’s stillness lets the dinner work; Emily Blunt plays a competence held under pressure until it gives; Josh Brolin’s ease is the operation’s face. The costs: the writing is less exact than the image, and the handover of the last act is managed more by plot than by craft. Below Chinatown and The Third Man, whose screenplays bear as much as their images.
Piet Mondrian · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the balance is reached by hand and by adjustment, with no rule or module, and it holds. The red is laid in a single saturated key without a fault. The whites are brushed, layered and slightly various, so that they read as light and not as ground. The bands are painted, their edges true, their widths graded with care. What holds the axis below the top is range. The means are few by design, and command of few means, however exact, does not meet the anchors where the making carries many kinds of thing at once. Invention is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, not here.
Roman, under Caracalla · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering, on the making as it stands; later collapse and spoliation are charged to survival. The command is of the first rank: a block of some 214 metres built in about five years; the frigidarium’s three groin vaults carried on granite columns over a hall of a span few buildings matched for a millennium; a domed caldarium about 35 metres across over a heated floor; a raised platform hollowed by galleries wide enough for carts, furnaces and stores; a water system fed from its own aqueduct branch into a cistern block. The brick-faced concrete is of the best Severan standard, and walls still standing after centuries of quarrying prove it. Held below the top because the type was proven and the vaults cannot be read now.
Sei Shōnagon · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The command of the sentence is the book’s surest quality, judged on the Japanese as far as this reading can judge it. The opening is four judgments of two words each, with a few strokes of image apiece, and has served for centuries as a model of Japanese prose. The reminiscences are timed like comedy: the Xianglu Peak exchange turns on one unspoken allusion, and the banished dog Okinamaro is recognised at last by his tears. In the lists the judgment comes as the last word of an item, and the cruel aside lands without preparation. Charged: the axis includes arrangement, and the arrangement is loose and unsecured, and some name-lists show no making at all. The music of the kana prose is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.
Vijayanagara builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Craft read to the same anchors as every medium. Granite is hard and coarse, and the open hall’s piers are carved in it to a depth and fineness that is a command of material of the first order in its tradition: detached colonnettes, rearing beasts in deep relief, friezes along the plinth. The colonnettes that sound when struck, tuned deliberately or not, are load-bearing craft. The chariot’s joints are hidden in its carving. Structurally the temple is conventional: trabeated granite, short spans, slab roofs, nothing that extends what the system could do, and the brick superstructures were not made to last as the granite was. The hall’s damage and propping are weighed under The Imperishable, not here. The making is superb in the stone and ordinary in the structure.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The drawing is taken from the photograph, and the paint is then worked across while wet so that every edge softens. The flesh is modelled in warm tones against cooler surroundings, in transitions fine enough that the light seems to come from the skin; the stair and the ground are kept softer and cooler than the body, so that it advances. The blur is hard to do well: too much and it is fog, too little and it is a sharp figure with smudges. Here it is held level across a whole life-size field. The costs: the drawing is the camera’s and not the hand’s, so command of composition is ceded by design, and the range of mark is narrow, one procedure applied evenly. High command within a deliberately narrow means.
Built for Frederick II · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing and exact. Fine limestone ashlar is laid with tight joints across a geometry that tolerates no error: eight equal faces, eight equal towers, sixteen rooms under rib vaults whose springers and shafts are worked in red breccia. White limestone, red breccia and the lost marble made a designed contrast. The water system, carrying roof water into cisterns and serving latrines, is advanced for its date. The portal joins classical and Gothic syntax without awkwardness. What holds the axis is the structural problem, which is modest: two storeys of vaulted rooms of moderate span on a site without difficulty. This is a command of precision, not of daring structure, and it stands below Sainte-Chapelle’s engineering.
Georgia O'Keeffe · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at the centre: the gradation from pale grey-violet through purple to a black that keeps colour in it is controlled with exactness, the transitions smoothed until the brush disappears, so that the tone and not the mark carries the depth. The edges of the petals are crisp where they turn and soft where they fold, and the folds are modelled with very little contrast. The costs: the range of means is narrow by choice, one register of surface, no impasto, no drawing that shows; the pale upper passages are thinner in interest than the dark; and the smoothness, across the whole, edges toward the decorative the series was accused of.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high in every department, and the making bears weight. Lehman’s screenplay carries its exposition on wit and pays its plants. Tomasini’s cutting of the crop duster, long durations of nothing and then rapid action, is a lesson in rhythm, and the dining-car seduction is cut as exactly. Burks’s VistaVision gives the open frame its depth; Herrmann’s score knows when to stop; Boyle built the Vandamm house and the monument as sets that hold the eye; Grant’s comic panic is a precise instrument. The costs run through the film and weigh against all of this: rear projection in the drunk drive and at the monument, studio sky, and the Professor’s exposition scenes, flat in their staging.
Steven Spielberg · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout: Allen Daviau’s photography, lit from behind and through haze, so that light itself is the sign of the visitor; Carol Littleton’s cutting of the intercut sympathy scenes and of the chase; John Williams’s score, which carries the last fifteen minutes; Melissa Mathison’s script, plain and economical in children’s speech, with “penis breath” at the dinner table making the brothers real; Henry Thomas’s performance, which holds grief and command without a child actor’s stagecraft, and Drew Barrymore’s. The creature is a mechanical figure lit to hide its limits. The costs: the score at times underlines what the image has done, the creature’s walk shows its means in wide shot, and the agents of the last act are staged as action rather than threat.
Andrew Stanton · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in every department of the first movement. Burtt’s sound is the leads’ voice and inner life: the whir of WALL-E’s eyes, his treads, EVE’s rising tones, meaning carried wholly by pitch. Newman’s score moves between the show tunes and a wide orchestral line, and places the dance in space. The animation of WALL-E’s two eye lenses, which tilt and contract to show doubt, delight and hurt, is acting by mechanism. Layout and light, with Roger Deakins’s counsel, give the rubbish city depth, haze and weather. Stephen Schaffer’s cutting holds the silent passages to a comedy rhythm Keaton would know. The costs: the human figures are designed and animated more generically than the robots; the chases on the ship are staged to studio formula; the live-action Forthright and the animated humans meet uneasily; and the second half speaks its exposition where the first half showed.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of the crafts is of the first rank and often load-bearing: Montjuïc sandstone carved into continuous bone-like piers and a sinuous bay; cast-iron balcony fronts each made in one piece; a surface of broken glass and ceramic discs composed to hold colour at street distance; the graded tile and widening windows of the light well, where the making is the function; oak doors and frames shaped by hand to curves; catenary arches in the attic, structure drawn exactly to load; glazed scale tiles fitted over a curved back. Stone, metal, wood, glass, plaster and ceramic are integrated as in few houses of any age. The costs: the frame is the old house’s, the new front is carving and cladding on it, and the upper flats are ordinary work.
Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight throughout. Daniel Rezende’s editing holds three periods, a dozen principal figures and a narrator’s loops at speed without losing the line. César Charlone’s camera moves from the golden steadiness of the sixties to the handheld cold of the eighties, each period’s air exact. The direction of a largely non-professional cast is the film’s largest single achievement of craft: Leandro Firmino’s Zé and Douglas Silva’s Dadinho read as lives rather than turns. Bráulio Mantovani compresses a long novel into a clear chain. The costs fall on real shares: the cutting and the music push one rhythm too often, and some freeze frames and titles are effects for their own sake.
Nok · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of fired clay at figure scale, to the anchors every medium answers. The making is load-bearing. Coarse clay with large mineral inclusions is built hollow to near life size, its walls held even enough to survive open firing; the surface is then cut back with a sharp tool, so that the lids are clean geometric planes and the brow a single drawn ridge. Hair is rendered in incised strands and in modelled buns and crests; beads, collars and bracelets are built in relief with precision. The proportion of head to body is held as a rule across the corpus. The costs are charged: the bodies are often summary beside the heads, quality runs from the great heads to slight and rough figures, and on many survivors the surface is worn, so that the finish can only be inferred.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The transparency is painted, not physical: each overlap is a colour mixed and set to read as two colours seen through each other, and it reads so across the field. The corona of the black disc is graded into the ground with a softness found nowhere else on the canvas, so that one disc emits and the rest reflect. The ground is worked, clouded and uneven, a dark with depth rather than a fill. Edges are clean without the deadness of a compass line, and colour is weighed so that no small disc tips the balance of the large. The costs: some overlap colours are chosen rather than found, reading as a third disc more than a transparency, and the range of mark is narrow by design.
The Walkmen · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is high and load-bearing. Matt Barrick’s drumming is the record’s distinction: tom-heavy, rolling, played as a lead line, so that In the New Year and Dónde Está la Playa are driven as much by the drums as by the song. Paul Maroon’s guitar, washed in reverb and tremolo, and the organ and piano are placed so that the room becomes part of the sound, and the brass of Red Moon is arranged with restraint. Hamilton Leithauser’s voice is the most distinctive instrument, a hoarse croon with real range, used at full stretch at the peaks. The costs: a narrow palette, several slow songs arranged one way, and a mix that sometimes blurs where the reverb swallows detail.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of encaustic on canvas, and of a built support, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. Encaustic in the 1950s was an old medium all but given up, slow and difficult; here each stroke stays discrete, the colour holds a translucent depth, and the drips and ridges of the wax remain as a record of the act. The stripes are kept straight and the stars exact without a ruled deadness; the edges belong to the hand. The construction is exact, three supports stepped and joined so that the object reads as one thing. The colour is the flag’s, but its pitch in the wax is chosen: a warm red, a white that is not white. The costs: the range is narrow by design, one design, three colours and one touch, and the craft serves a single proposition.
Gu Kaizhi (attributed) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of ink and colour on silk at the scale of the hand, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the scroll’s restraint and its grace are the line’s. The stroke is fine, even and unbroken, with no swelling or pressure, and it holds the long sweep of a trailing ribbon and the small turn of a sleeve with the same tension. Faces are drawn with a few strokes and set with glances that carry the drama, above all in the bed and rejection scenes. Colour is sparing, chiefly red accents in ribbons and robes, placed to lead the eye along. The costs are charged: the mountain’s space and scale are archaic, the figures out of proportion to the slope; the family scene is crowded and flat; and the faces are of one type.
Egyptian (New Kingdom) · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of ink and pigment on papyrus at the scale of a roll, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The line is sure and even: figures drawn in a single controlled contour, the canon of proportion held without stiffness, faces and hands exact at small size. The colour is clear and well judged, the green flesh of Osiris, the white linen, the black of Anubis, the reds and yellows of furniture and shrine, laid flat inside the line. The cursive hieroglyphs are a fine scribal hand, and text and image sit inside ruled borders set with care. The making bears load: the judgment works because it is clear. Held at 8.6 because this is a superb workshop executing a standard programme, with less invention of means than at the top of the scale and some routine passages among the spells.
Tokugawa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and craft to the same anchors as every desk. The command of timber building is high and assured: six halls joined into one sequence without a jarring junction, the long spans of the Ōhiroma, floors stepped to the hierarchy, carved and painted transoms between rooms, gilt metal covers over the joints, the carving of the Karamon. The painting is of the first rank in its tradition and load-bearing, since the rooms are the paintings, delivered by one workshop under a single governing hand in a short campaign. The ramparts are fine dry stone. The costs: post and beam extended nowhere, a lavishness that at times repeats rather than intensifies, and too little plain timber.
Norman Rockwell · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil painting, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is exact and in places load-bearing. The stride is drawn with complete authority, eight legs in step and the child’s two in a shorter rhythm, the weight of each body on the forward foot; the white dress is modelled with very little, and the light on it is the light of the picture. The wall is a carefully varied plane of plaster, and the burst and run of the tomato are painted with a still-life painter’s precision. The costs are charged: an even, legible finish made for reproduction, a flat and summary pavement and ground, and a narrow key of colour that serves the print as much as the canvas.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the effect is the handling. Colour: five hues calibrated so that the warm fields glow without heat and the white reads as light, not as blank, with adjacent colours set close in value so that the edges vibrate. Surface: thin layers scumbled and stained one over another, so that underlayers show at the edges and the colour seems to come from behind the canvas. Edge: feathered and irregular, brushed, never taped, so that each field hovers. Proportion: bands and ground set so that the stack neither falls nor floats away. The cost: the range of means is narrow by design, one kind of mark and one compositional schema, and command is shown within it rather than across a wide range.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The leaf is a superb piece of making: a thin ferrocement section shaped by study of the sun’s path and of reflection, cast to a standard and joined to a ductile iron truss, the two together carrying the roof and governing the light, so that the structure is the lighting system and the lighting is the structure. Every joint between steel, iron, ferrocement, glass and cypress is drawn and resolved, and the veranda carries the same system out of doors without change. The interior is calm and exact, its walls, floors and courts proportioned to the light. The making is load-bearing. What holds the axis: the means are refined rather than vast, and the enclosure apart from the roof is plain by design.
U2 · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high, economical and load-bearing where the record turns. Eno and Lanois give the band a close, clear room in which each instrument is legible. The Edge’s playing is the craft signature: spare and rhythmic, withholding the chiming sound until it is needed, so that its arrival in Beautiful Day’s bridge and Walk On’s close is structure, not ornament. Bono’s singing is at its most controlled, in Stuck in a Moment above all. The faults: the second half is generic in arrangement, Wild Honey is light, and the polish smooths several tracks toward sameness. That sets it a tenth below The Unforgettable Fire at 8.7, bolder in its room and less even in its finish.
Talk Talk · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, load-bearing on most of the record. Tim Friese-Greene’s production places a large cast of players so that the record still sounds spare: a harmonica, an organ, a double bass each heard for what it does and then withdrawn. Lee Harris’s drumming is exact and patient, holding the long grooves of Happiness Is Easy and Time It’s Time without push; Paul Webb’s bass is melodic and sparing. Mark Hollis’s voice is the record’s instrument of feeling, a cracked, soaring tenor that whispers on April 5th and tears at the top of Living in Another World. The faults are more than one: two songs are conventionally made, the drum and piano of Life’s What You Make It are rigid, and the indistinct diction costs clarity the record does not repay.
Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren (OMA) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing. The perimeter tube carries the loop as one structure, and the diagrid is not a pattern applied but the result of analysis, its members thickening and multiplying where load is high and thinning where it is low, so that the skin is a diagram of the forces. The cantilever was built out from both towers and the halves joined in December 2008; the towers were built leaning, with settlement and deflection foreseen; all of it in a seismic zone and under review beyond the codes of the day. The costs are charged: a great quantity of steel spent to make a gesture stand, and dark glazing that makes the building heavy and opaque at close range.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Command of oil paint at the scale of a wall, in the method Richter had refined over three decades: the long blade drawn across wet layers, lifting some and laying others down, so that the lower layers break through the upper in seams and flecks. The making bears the load, since covering is the work’s act and the craft is the control of how much of each lower layer survives. The surfaces are held in a dark, closed key across four canvases without going dead, and the red and the green are rationed so that they read as what is under, not what is on. Held below the top because the method’s chance, which the painter accepts, limits his command of the particular passage, and because this is mastery applied rather than extended.
Louis Sullivan · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in the cast iron: ornament drawn to a scale and density seldom reached in metal, cast, assembled and fixed round plate glass without loss of crispness, in relief deep enough to hold shadow and fine enough to be read at a hand’s distance. The terra cotta skin is detailed with precision, the reveal round each window thin and exact, with a narrow band of ornament that sharpens the window rather than burying it. The proportion of the bays is held along the whole State Street front, the later extensions included: the system was clear enough to be carried on by other hands. The costs: a steel frame of the ordinary engineering of its day; a junction of corner and flanks good rather than inspired; no interior making of the same order.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Command of oil and stencil, read to the same anchors as any medium. The colour is orchestrated across a large field so that no region dominates, the hot hues held in balance by blues and whites. The strokes are of a measured size, laid in a controlled, broken hatching that reads as spontaneous and is not: a hand imitating gesture with exactness, which is itself part of what the work says. The lettering is varied in size, colour and position, cropped at the edges so that the field reads as continuing beyond the frame, and worked into the surface so that word and stroke interlock rather than one sitting on the other. The making is load-bearing: the impersonality of the stencil against the brushed ground is the argument. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, and in parts the field reads as filled rather than placed.
I. M. Pei · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank and is load-bearing in the pyramid. The frame is a lattice of slender steel members and tensioned cables, kept as light as the span allows so that the glass and the palace dominate it; the clear glass was developed for the project, so that the palace is not seen through a green cast; the nodes and joints are made with precision; and the whole is set out on the court so that its faces and axis answer the palace. Below, the spiral stair round the lift, the finely made concrete of the coffered ceilings and the pale limestone of walls and floors show an office that commanded finish. The costs: the frame is busier than the ideal of a clear glass solid, a web of cables seen from below; the glazed volume gains heat and glare; and the hall was sized below its use.
Fleetwood Mac · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, the words weighed elsewhere, is load-bearing in most places. The rhythm section of Mick Fleetwood and John McVie is exact and economical, and Dreams depends on it: a beat that never pushes, a bass that holds two notes. Buckingham’s arranging and guitar carry the detail, from the fingerpicked pattern of Never Going Back Again to the guitar that drives the end of Go Your Own Way. Three voices are placed with great care, singly and in harmony, and Caillat and Dashut keep every part clear. Songbird’s piano and voice in a large room are simple and right. The costs: Oh Daddy and You Make Loving Fun are routine, and the sheen at times flattens the songs into one surface. Below Low at 9.0; above Zooropa at 8.2.
Roman, under Augustus · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium is of the first rank in carving and proportion. The Corinthian capitals, the acanthus scroll of the frieze and the modillion cornice are cut with a precision and a life that place the workshop near the best metropolitan Augustan work, and the proportions are exact enough that Palladio and Jefferson could take them as a canon. The half-columns are set to continue the spacing of the porch so that the flank reads as one colonnade. The ashlar is fine, and the building has stood two thousand years without failure. What it lacks for the top marks is a making that bears load in the larger sense: the structure is a modest trabeated box under a timber roof, solving no problem the type had not solved. The craft is consummate within a narrow task.
Built for Tokugawa Iemitsu · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The making carries the building, structure first. A large hall stands on a grid of tall zelkova posts tied at several levels by penetrating tie-beams, a flexible frame that has stood through four centuries of earthquakes in Kyoto; the joinery is the structure, exposed and legible from the path below. Above it the carpentry is that of the best Edo temple work: deep bracketed eaves, the great bark roof laid in thin courses to a soft, exact curve, the wings set so that the stage reads as one platform with the hall. The building is sober in ornament, which fits. Held below 9.0 because the joinery and roofing are the high standard of a mature tradition rather than an advance within it.
Andrew Wyeth · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of egg tempera on panel, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is exacting and in most places load-bearing: the grass built from countless fine strokes that never become a pattern; the light, dry and even, holding the whole field in one hour; the pink of the dress set against the gold so the figure is found at once; the arms and hands drawn with an exactness that carries the meaning. The costs are charged. The evenness is also a limit, since everything is finished to one degree and the surface can read as airless; the sky is thin; the back and the arms do not read as one age, and where they join the seam is felt; and the buildings are described more than painted. High command of a narrow range.
Floating Points, Pharoah Sanders and the London Symphony Orchestra · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, and the recording itself is superb: Sanders’ tone is captured close and whole, breath and grain included, and the balance between harpsichord, saxophone and strings is exact. His playing at eighty is a master’s command of tone and pacing rather than of virtuosity, and it is load-bearing. The voicing of the keyboard figure across harpsichord, piano and celesta is skilful. The string writing is the limit: mostly sustained harmony, swells and slow counter-lines, effective rather than intricate, where an orchestral composer of the first rank would have more voices moving. Against Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0 the making is less various.
Peter Gabriel · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is high and in places load-bearing; the production is the record’s achievement. Players from many traditions, some recorded at different times and some sampled, are placed in one acoustic space so that each line is distinct and none is reduced to colour, and differences of pitch and tuning are used rather than corrected. The title track’s build, drones, percussion, the qawwali voice and the boy soprano entering in turn, is exact in pacing and balance. Zaar’s percussion is dense and legible. The faults: some synthesiser beds are generic for their year and thin beside the players, and Troubled, Disturbed and Open are made to the standard of good underscore, not of the summit pieces.
Nine Inch Nails · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is the record’s plainest strength. Trent Reznor and Alan Moulder build a sound of very many layers that stays legible: in The Day the World Went Away the choir, the held guitar and the voice each sit at their own depth; in Just Like You Imagined piano, drums and guitar mass without mud; in La Mer the quiet is as exactly made as the noise elsewhere. Dynamics run under control from near silence to full saturation, and the joins between tracks are made, not left. Held below Low, at 9.0, and near Remain in Light, at 8.7: the songwriting is uneven, several songs on Right rest on riffs and refrains the arrangement dresses more than develops, and the vocal writing is plainly below the making of sound.
Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in the room and in the means. The acoustics, praised from the opening, rest on the geometry of the room, the ceiling’s convex reflectors and the fir surfaces, a making that is load-bearing. The doubly curved surfaces of the envelope were drawn, rationalised and fabricated by digital means at large scale, the steel panels cut and placed to shapes no drawing board could fix; the fir interior is finely made, and the organ case is joinery and design at once. The costs: the exterior is cladding on a secondary frame, not structure expressed; the space between skin and room is residual; the foyers are tight; and the glare of the polished panels was an error of the making, corrected after the fact.
John Bradfield and Ralph Freeman (Dorman Long) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The erection is of the first rank: two half-arches cantilevered out from the shores by creeper cranes working along the upper chord, held back by cables through horseshoe tunnels in the rock, then lowered by letting out the cables until the halves met and the arch closed on its pins; then the deck hung, the whole load-tested and opened in under nine years from the start of works, with six million hot rivets. The arch’s profile is clean and the proportion of chord depth to span sound; the approach spans and pins are handled with plain competence. Held below the highest marks by the pylons, well cut but architecturally ordinary and structurally idle, and by a lattice heavy rather than refined.
David Hockney · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of acrylic on a large canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is exact and in most places load-bearing. The flat fields are laid with no visible stroke and hold as colour at a scale where any unevenness would show; the edges between them are straight and clean. The splash is the real test and is met: thrown water built from small strokes, lines and dots of white and pale blue, which reads at a distance as motion and close to as drawing. The yellow of the board is pitched against the blue so that the diagonal leads. The costs: the house, palms and chair are schematic, close to illustration, and the reflections in the glass are summary; the range of mark is narrow by design, and the command shows most in one passage, which keeps it below the full-field command of Broadway Boogie Woogie and The Starry Night.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing in the hall: a room of about 2,100 seats set high in a glass body, separated from the structure against the horns and engines of the port, lined in panels each milled to its place for diffusion, with a sound praised from the opening for its clarity. The glass envelope is a large feat of curved and printed glazing, the bent openings at the loggias made in glass, not in frame. The escalator, the Plaza’s vaulted soffits and the load set on a 1960s warehouse on the soft ground of the Elbe are carried with command. The costs are charged: a roof that had to be reworked in mid-construction; a hall whose acoustics have divided some performers and listeners; tight foyers and stairs; the brick shell kept as a face over garages; and hotel interiors that are ordinary work.
Egon Schiele · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on a small panel, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the picture’s wariness is carried by the line, and the line is among the surest of its decade, a contour that defines head, hair and shoulder in single hard runs and never wavers into description. The flesh is built in broken patches of red, ochre, green and white, a colour both anatomical and nervous, laid with control at small size. The pale ground is varied with brushing so that emptiness has texture, and the plant is placed and painted with a decorator’s precision. The costs are charged: the dark jacket is a flat mass, less articulate than the head, and the ground’s brushing is busy in places. The paint stands short of the line.
Vilhelm Hammershøi · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the picture is its tonal control. The greys are many and close, warm and cool, laid so that walls, doors, dress and floor read as one family and the light on the boards is the only note outside it. The light is painted not as brilliance but as a slightly warmer, slightly higher tone, and it reads as sun; the edges of the window’s shape on the floor are soft enough to be light and firm enough to be geometry. The costs are charged: the range of mark is narrow by choice, the figure is summary, a dark shape more than a body drawn, and the perspective of the room is plain rather than searched. A narrow command, nearly complete within its narrowness.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is the record’s strongest axis and load-bearing where it counts. Jonny Greenwood’s string writing is exact: the struck attack of Burn the Witch, the slow chords of Daydreaming, the climax of The Numbers, voiced so that strings and band are one instrument. Nigel Godrich’s production keeps a dense, quiet record legible and makes its blur a choice; the layered pianos of True Love Waits are recorded with a closeness that carries the song. The charges: the vocals are often buried past what the songs gain, Tinker Tailor and stretches of Ful Stop drift, some electronic textures are generic. Below The Dark Side of the Moon and Low at 9.0.
Samuel Barber · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of line, harmony and string writing, and the making bears weight. The melody moves almost wholly by step yet never stalls, because its phrases are of irregular length. Suspensions and passing dissonances in the inner parts keep the harmony moving under a slow pulse without a wasted chord. The scoring places the line where it sounds fullest in each section and builds the climax by register and density rather than by louder material, and the silence is placed exactly. The costs: the means are few; the climb leans on sequence, so the architecture is simple; and the arrangement thickens some lines by doubling rather than rewriting for the larger body. Assured and bounded, below the Goldberg Variations at 9.7.
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on panel at or near life size, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is of a high order and partly load-bearing. The flesh is modelled with a smooth, luminous finish, the two complexions distinguished, the child’s rosier and the mother’s cooler; the white gown is painted with assurance and economy, its folds turning in the light without fuss; the heads are drawn with real authority, the likeness held while the faces are idealised. The control of the light, from the left across both faces with the ground left dark, does much of the picture’s work. The costs are charged: the finish is uniform, so that flesh, cloth and hair are smoothed to one sweetness; the hands are drawn less firmly than the heads; and the handling never takes a risk.
Beach House · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is the record’s strongest suit. Scally’s arrangements stack guitar, organ, synthesiser and, on several tracks, live strings into textures that stay clear inside their haze. The self-production is assured: the low end restrained, the voice placed as one more instrument, the strings blended rather than laid on top. Legrand holds a low, even register with control. Superstar’s climbing line and the title track’s strings are built with care. Held from the top by faults of measure spread across the whole: one palette and a narrow band of tempos for eighty-four minutes, so that craft turns to sameness; programmed drums often plain; and the voice so far inside the mix that words are lost.
Alphonse Mucha · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of the colour lithograph at the scale of a hoarding. The contour is sure and even over a figure more than two metres tall; the drapery runs in long continuous folds that keep the column standing; the lettering is designed rather than set, and its built capitals have the weight of the architecture. The palette is held to a restricted range so that gold reads as gold without metallic ink, laid in flat areas with care. The making is load-bearing: the icon exists only through the line and the palette. The costs are charged at the foot, where the lower lettering and the mosaic are crowded, and in the face and hands, modelled more softly and less decisively than the robe.
Thomas Gainsborough · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on a life-size canvas, to the anchors used for every medium. The making is the picture’s chief claim and is load-bearing in the figure. The satin is built of long, broken, rapid strokes of several blues over warmer layers, with whites and greys flicked into the folds, and it resolves into cloth at the viewing distance; the slashed sleeves, the lace collar and the rosettes on the shoes are made with a minimum of marks. The face is modelled more closely, cool and delicate, and the passage from finished face to dissolving costume has no seam. The costs are real: the landscape is perfunctory, the stance stiffer in the legs than the cloth, the feet and hat summary.
Vyasa (attributed) · Literature
9.1 · Tier IV
Craft read to the same anchors as every work, and judged on the Sanskrit as far as structure, speech and narrative economy can be read. The verse is the plain śloka, fluent, formulaic and built for recitation, in an epic grammar the later grammarians would call irregular; it is not the dense ornamented verse of court poetry and does not try to be. Where it is load-bearing it is very fine: the Gītā’s verses, compressed to the edge of aphorism; Draupadī’s argument in the forest on whether dharma protects anyone; the Yakṣa’s riddling exchange; Gāndhārī’s lament; the nested narration handled with economy over a vast span. Against that, and what holds the axis at 8.5: epithet and formula repeated far beyond the needs of oral composition, battle narrative that runs by template, and didactic books that are versified instruction, compiled more than made, so that the line is uneven by stratum. The music of long passages is beyond this reading and neither credited nor charged.
Paul the Apostle · Literature
8.9 · Tier IV
Judged on Paul’s Greek; the sound of first century spoken Koine is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged, and the music of the King James English belongs to its translators. The Greek is often rough. Sentences break off, as in the anacolutha of Galatians 2:4 to 6; arguments are interrupted and resumed; metaphors are mixed, as in the olive tree of Romans 11 grafted against nature; the letters were dictated at speed, and an early reader within the canon calls them hard to understand (2 Peter 3:16). But the rhetorical command is great and often load-bearing: the diatribe of Romans; the antitheses of 1 Corinthians 1, “the foolishness of God is wiser than men” (1:25); the rising triads of 1 Corinthians 13; the hardship catalogues and their rhythm; the irony of the fool’s speech; the tact of Philemon. Command at its peaks, uneven in its run; below The Great Gatsby’s 9.3.
Samuel Richardson · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Richardson’s English. The command is of voices: Clarissa’s grave, scrupulous periods, tracing every motive; Anna Howe’s quick satire; Lovelace’s dazzling, self-delighting rhetoric, with its plays, Latin tags and coined words; Belford’s change of register as he converts; Leman’s misspellings; Lord M.’s proverbs; the uncles’ bluster. The construction is exact: the London trap is assembled piece by piece, and every device pays. The broken papers are typographical invention. Three charges hold the axis: the sentence is often slack, and the same reasoning is turned over again; the voices, distinct in manner, share the author’s taste for moral analysis, so that everyone argues at length; and the editor’s frame is heavy. A great maker of situations and voices, a lesser maker of sentences.
Honoré de Balzac · Literature
8.8 · Tier IV
Judged on Balzac’s French. The command is of construction and the scene: the three strands are timed so that Vautrin’s arrest, the Beauséant ball and Goriot’s dying fall within a few days of one another, each throwing the others into relief, and the set pieces, the arbour, the arrest, the deathbed, the ball, the cemetery, are built with a dramatist’s sense of the curtain. The portraits are exact and fixed in objects: Mme Vauquer, whose person explains the pension and the pension her person; Goriot’s decline told in his shirts, his silver and his hair powder. Vautrin’s speech is an aria of cynicism in an argot wholly his own. The charges are long recognised: haste, a prose that repeats and generalises, a narrator who explains, melodrama in the machinery, and laments that tip into rhetoric. The making bears the load in the structure more than in the sentence.
Edgar Allan Poe · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Poe’s English. At its best the making is load-bearing. The opening of “Usher”, “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year”, sets the tale’s sound in a run of slow stresses. “The Cask” opens on a sentence that states the whole plan, and every later line is dramatic irony exactly placed. “The Tell-Tale Heart” is built on repetition and the broken breath of the voice, so that the sound of the prose is the madness. The charges are real. The prose is often florid and mannered, with italics and exclamation marks doing the work the sentence should; the learning is sometimes spurious and the foreign tags decorative; the comic tales are laboured; and the arabesques repeat their rhythm from tale to tale. A making this uneven does not stand with the highest figures.
William Blake · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same standard as any book. The making of the object is of the highest order: relief etching of Blake’s own invention, colour printing and washes laid by hand, a page on which the line of verse and the line of design are one cut. The best verse is as commanding as any in the language: the Preface, the lark, “There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find”, Milton’s last speech casting off “the rotten rags of Memory”. The charges: the fourteener is often slack, stretched to carry a list; the catalogues are made by accumulation, not by art; the pointing and spelling, Blake’s own and so the work’s, sometimes cloud the sense. At the top the making is load-bearing; across the whole it is uneven.
Thomas Hardy · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
The command is uneven at the extremes, and both are real. At the top, the set pieces, among the best in English prose fiction: Prince’s death, the baptism, Angel carrying the milkmaids through the flooded lane (XXIII), the sleepwalk, the threshing machine, “the red tyrant” that the women serve (XLVII), Stonehenge. The landscape writing is load-bearing, and the eye for light, weather and labour is exact; the talk of the dairy folk and the Durbeyfields is alive. At the bottom: the Latinate abstraction and the awkward sentence every reader of Hardy knows, philosophical asides that thicken the prose, the visible hand in the coincidences, and Alec’s conversion and his speech, close to stage melodrama. The plotting is serial plotting, with its hooks. A craft at this level does not floor; it does not reach a sustained finish.
Anonymous · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The command is great at the scale of the scene and the strophe, and uneven below it. Scenes are staged with a dramatist’s precision: the bench, Rüdiger’s dilemma spoken in his own voice, Hagen at the river, the last exchange of the head and the hoard. The narrator’s management of foreknowledge holds across some nine and a half thousand long lines. Charged: a diction that leans on formula and filler, half-lines that assert truth or promise to tell, rhyme words that carry nothing; catalogues of clothing and gifts told by rote; and a time scheme that does not hold, so that on the poem’s own count Kriemhild is near fifty at the end. The sound of the verse is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged.
Joseph Heller · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The command of the comic sentence is complete and individual: the reversal, the definition that eats itself, the dialogue that turns a premise into its opposite in four lines and closes on “That’s some catch, that Catch-22,” and Doc Daneeka’s “It’s the best there is.” The management of the broken chronology across four hundred pages, so that Snowden’s death is approached, withheld and finally opened in the right chapter, is a structural achievement of a high order. The making is charged as well. The prose is often prolix; the same comic construction is used until the reader can finish the sentence; the middle sags; and the shift to the realist register of the late chapters, though deliberate, is not always made with the same control, as the final chapter’s hurried exit shows.
Spike Lee · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight across the whole: Ernest Dickerson’s saturated photography, which makes heat visible and turns the block into a stage without losing the street; Wynn Thomas’s design, the pizzeria and the Korean grocery built into an existing block so that the set reads as found; Barry Alexander Brown’s cutting of the mosaic, which keeps a dozen strands moving and accelerates without strain into the riot; the ensemble, Aiello’s Sal above all, with Turturro, Nunn, Davis, Dee and Esposito each exact in a few scenes. The riot is staged with command: the can, the fire, the hoses, the crowd held in one space. The charges fall on real shares: Lee’s own Mookie is thin as acting, some vignettes are broad, and the score underlines or softens where the image needs neither.
Daniel Libeskind · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making is load-bearing at the memorial points: the Tower’s proportion, door, slit and sound, where nothing is decorative and everything acts on the body; the Garden’s double tilt and grid, exact enough to unsettle balance; the voids carried through a twisting building as one straight figure, top to bottom, crossed by bridges; the Stair of Continuity with its crossing beams; the zinc skin, its slashes reading as wounds. That a drawing of lines was built at this scale in concrete, the voids intact, is a real command. The costs: the engineering extends little; the galleries are compromised as rooms, light and wall given to the idea before the object; and the matrix of addresses governs the fabric without being felt as construction.
John Steinbeck · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The general chapters show a command of prose that is wide and exact: the patter of the used car lot in chapter 7, the barter for the household goods in chapter 9, the litany of Highway 66 in chapter 12, the cadence of chapter 25. The dialogue has an ear for Oklahoma speech that is mostly right and rarely condescends, and the building of the three movements is sound. Charged against it: the narrative prose is plainer and sometimes slack; the biblical cadence is used too often and goes soft by repetition; characters are made to carry speeches, Casy, Ma and Tom at the end, rather than to speak; sentiment is laid on where the material already holds it; and Connie, Noah, Al and the Wilsons are drawn in a few strokes and left there. It sits below Light in August’s 8.9 and well below The Great Gatsby’s 9.3 in sentence by sentence command.
Paul Gauguin · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on coarse cloth across a canvas nearly four metres long. Load-bearing where it is achieved: the colour, laid in flat areas of blue, green, ochre and golden flesh, keyed so that the frieze holds as one surface from end to end; the drawing of the large figures, the fruit picker and the crouching old woman above all, in a closed contour that gives each the weight of a relief; the design of the whole, the two yellow corners, the dark band of trees, the light under the centre. The costs are charged: by the painter’s own account the picture was made fast, in about a month and in poor health, and it shows in thin passages, stiff animals and figures in the middle register drawn with less conviction than the ends; the space between groups is not always resolved; the paint is matte by choice, but in places simply scant. Command high, unevenly realised.
Salvador Dalí · Visual art
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil at miniature scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The command is high and visible. The soft watches are the test, and they pass: the dial bent over the branch with its numerals following the fold, the case sagging as metal cannot, all shaded as a solid object is. The far cliffs are painted with a jeweller’s precision in a warm light, the sea flat and still, the sky graded smoothly to the horizon; the ants on the orange watch are each made at the size of a grain. The dark foreground holds the near distance without dying. The costs are real: the creature is soft in drawing as well as in idea, the tree flat and diagrammatic, and the finish an illustrator’s, with little life at close range beyond its detail.
Odo of Metz, under Charlemagne · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first. The structure is sound and clear: the gallery vaults buttress the octagon, the thrust is taken round the ring to the outer wall, and the whole has stood twelve centuries, through the town fire of 1656. The bronze doors and railings, cast for the building, are a technical feat for their place and decade. But the making is heavy: rubble masonry faced, a cloister vault rather than a dome, piers massive beyond San Vitale’s, and much of the refinement borrowed as spolia rather than made. The Gothic choir hall, part of the work, is engineering of a far higher order, a skeleton of stone and glass, and it is credited to the work: it lifts the figure, and the Carolingian body holds it.
Kurt Vonnegut · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on Vonnegut’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain sentence and its timing: short declaratives, the comic deadpan, the paragraph that ends on a turn, and the refrain placed so that it never quite becomes automatic. The great technical feat is the transition: the book moves between 1944, 1967 and Tralfamadore on a single word, image or sensation, so that the cutting is invisible and the reader’s own sense of time comes loose. “Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” opens the story proper and is a model of compressed exposition, and the first chapter’s voice, conversational and wry, is a separate instrument kept apart from Billy’s. Charges hold it below the higher marks: the range of register is narrow by design; characters other than Billy are drawn in single strokes, Lazzaro, Weary, Valencia; some jokes repeat their mechanism; and the Montana Wildhack passages lapse into the pulp they mimic.
Joy Division · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The production is load-bearing: Hannett’s separation of the instruments, the delays that make rooms of silence, a drum sound that is part of the content, the voice placed close and dry. Morris plays with machine precision and real invention, She’s Lost Control’s taut pattern and hissing high hat among it; Hook’s high bass carries the melody on Disorder, Shadowplay and New Dawn Fades; Sumner’s guitar is used sparingly and exactly; Curtis’s baritone commands a narrow range and breaks at the right moment. The faults are more than one: the playing is limited in places, Candidate, Wilderness and Interzone are thinly made, the voice’s pitch wavers, and the zaps of Insight are generic for their year. A making load-bearing throughout with faults on a share stands level with CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.
PJ Harvey · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing. Harvey holds the high head voice on almost every song, a narrow instrument used exactly, and it carries the record’s argument of bright surface and dark matter; the autoharp gives each song a light frame. The production by Flood, Parish, Mick Harvey and Harvey keeps the sound dry and close, uses the church room, and places each borrowed sound, the bugle, the Cochran line, the reggae loop, so that it reads as citation rather than decoration. Brass and organ are used sparingly. The faults fall on a share of the record: the voice’s thinness sometimes strains toward the fey, the drumming is plain, the loop of Written on the Forehead is stiff, and the second half is less varied in arrangement than the first.
David Lynch and Mark Frost · Film
8.6 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. At its best the making bears weight as fully as any on the desk. The sound, Badalamenti’s synthesiser beds, the hum of lights, the Lodge’s reversed voices, carries meaning the dialogue does not. Sheryl Lee’s Laura in the film is one of the great screen performances of terror; Ray Wise’s Leland moves from grief to monstrousness in one face; Kyle MacLachlan plays three men in The Return, one of them almost without speech. Part 8 is controlled at every frame, and Frost’s plotting of the first season interlocks a large cast without strain. The costs are many hours: the second season’s middle is routine network making, with broad performances and loose plotting; some playing is stiff beyond the deliberate stiffness; The Return’s crude effects sometimes work and sometimes only look cheap.
Werner Herzog · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and it bears weight in the principal elements. Thomas Mauch’s handheld camera on the raft and in the water gives the film its body; the opening descent and the final circle are composed with complete assurance. Popol Vuh’s music, sparing and placed as an event, carries the sublime the image opens. Kinski’s Aguirre is a performance of posture: the lopsided walk, the tilted head, a stillness that threatens more than speech, the outbursts kept for few moments. The costs fall where they matter: much of the supporting cast is stiff, the post-synchronised sound is often flat and loose against the lips, the skirmishes are thinly staged, and the cutting of the middle third is approximate.
Thomas Malory · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of English prose narrative, at its best load-bearing. The plain sentence holds a calamity in a clause; the dialogue of the last books is spare and exact, and the speeches of Lancelot, Gawain and Arthur turn the war in a few lines; Ector’s lament builds a cadence of parallel clauses that English prose would not easily match for a century. The ordering of the last two tales, from the poisoned apple and Elaine of Astolat through the trap in the queen’s chamber to the war, is a construction of the first rank. The charges are real and are charged to the work: the combat formulas repeat for hundreds of pages, the Roman war sits awkwardly in time, and the book seldom renders a mind from inside.
Francis Bacon · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Craft read to the same anchors as every medium: command of oil on board at a small scale. Where it commands, it is load-bearing. The grey flesh is modelled soft and dry against a ground laid flat and saturated, so the figures seem to sit in front of the orange rather than in it; the open mouth at the right is drawn exactly, teeth and gums placed so the scream reads at a distance and at hand; the bound head in the centre is given volume with very little. The three are held in one key. The costs are real: the supports are crudely stated, the spaces around the figures barely constructed, and the left figure is muddier and less resolved than the other two. This is a self-taught painter at the start of his command.
Nayaka builders (and earlier) · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The gopurams are of the first rank in their idiom: granite base, then tiers of brick and lime stepping inward on a concave silhouette, every tier articulated as a storey of miniature pavilions, the figures modelled to read from the street. The granite carving is in command: piers with rearing yalis and riders, figures cut from the shaft of the column, composite pillars. The costs are real. The structure is post and lintel throughout, the granite spans short and the halls forests of columns; the engineering is ordinary for its tradition and nowhere load-bearing in the sense of a dome or a cage of glass. The stucco is renewable by design and uneven in quality, and the figure carving repeats across halls and towers by many workshops.
Built for Taira no Kiyomori · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The structural problem is real: timber buildings standing in the tidal zone of a sea that brings surge and typhoons, on posts set on stone footings, with floors laid with gaps that by the usual account let the surge pass through rather than lift them, and a gate of about sixteen metres in the seabed, its two main pillars braced by four auxiliary legs. These are intelligent answers, and the complex has stood on them, with care, for centuries. The carpentry is of a fine order: the cypress-bark roofs, the proportion of the corridors, vermilion and white held in one discipline. What holds the axis: no structure is daring in span or height, the halls are of received types, and survival rests more on renewal than on the making’s own endurance.
Nirvana · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Albini’s recording is load-bearing: the drums placed in the room so that Grohl’s playing, the pattern of Scentless Apprentice and the dynamics of Milk It, sounds as physical event; the guitar left harsh; the voice set close and dry. Grohl’s drumming is the record’s highest craft. Cobain’s voice runs from the near whisper of Dumb to the shredded cry of the Heart-Shaped Box chorus, controlled at both ends, and Novoselic’s bass holds the slow songs. The writing is economical, hooks placed and then attacked. The faults are several: the remixed singles do not match the record’s sound, the guitar solos are rudimentary by choice, Very Ape and tourette’s are slight, and Radio Friendly Unit Shifter is a sketch extended.
Edvard Munch · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
The face and pillow are painted with great sureness: a few tones of white, grey and pink hold a living profile, and the red hair, in loose strokes, is the one warm mass in the field, placed exactly. The scraping and scoring are controlled: the vertical scratches run with intent and stop where the face begins. The colour, green, ochre, white and the red of the hair, is restrained and tuned. Against that, the struggle shows. Parts of the right side and the lower left are overworked into mud, the hands are dissolved partly by design and partly by attrition, and the drawing of the woman’s bent body is summary. The making is load-bearing where it matters, in the face and the surface, but the command is uneven in a way that Las Meninas, at 9.8 on this axis, is not.
Sly and the Family Stone · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing in places. The bass and the machine interlock on Family Affair and on Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa; voices are set against the box with care; and the sustained density of parts layered by one hand is high craft. But the measure asks for command throughout, and the command is uneven. Vocals are at times unintelligible beyond what the design needs, Brave & Strong and Time sound unfinished, and the surface dullness is partly chosen and partly the cost of the method. The invention, the rhythm box and the one-man layering, is credited to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, not here. Low and Remain in Light are the more consistently exact makings.
Giulio Romano · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, engineering included. The command is high and load-bearing in two places. In the court, breaking the rules convincingly demands complete command of them, and every slipped stone is placed. In the room of the giants, the painted architecture, the erased corners and the perspective laid out from the centre of the floor make a room that seems to have no walls. The stucco, with Primaticcio among the hands, is of the first rank. But the building is cheaply made: brick rendered to feign stone, much of it raised quickly over existing fabric, the engineering extending nothing. The workshop’s execution of Giulio’s designs is uneven from room to room, and some walls are routine. Command of design at the top; command of building in its ordinary range.
The Beatles · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Song craft is the record’s strength and is load-bearing: the melodies of Michelle, Girl and In My Life; three voices in harmony on Nowhere Man and If I Needed Someone; Paul McCartney’s bass, melodic and forward on Drive My Car and The Word; George Harrison’s ringing twelve-string figure and his sitar line, a colour placed exactly where the song needs it. Martin’s sped-up solo on In My Life is a small, exact studio invention at the song’s centre. Four tracks, a few weeks, nothing wasted. The charges are several: Run for Your Life careless, What Goes On routine, You Won’t See Me draggy, some backing parts rough, and the production basic beside what the same studio did within a year.
Barma and Postnik Yakovlev (attributed) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. Command of brick at a scale and a complexity new to Moscow: nine vaulted and tented churches raised in about six years on one basement of white stone, the central tent carried in masonry over an octagon, the load of the cluster so distributed that the whole has stood for four and a half centuries. Brick is cut and laid as ornament as well as structure, in the tiers of kokoshniks, the corbelling, the pilasters and the patterned drums, so that in the exterior structure and ornament are one. The limits: the means are conservative, thick walls, small spans and small windows, and they cramp the interiors; the seventeenth-century painting is accomplished decoration, not further command of the building. Level with the Chrysler Building (8.5), a tenth below Villa Savoye.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Ballard’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a register, and it is load-bearing: a prose that joins the vocabulary of the medical textbook, the technical manual and the advertising brief into an erotic language, and holds it without a slip from first page to last. The opening sentence sets the whole method in one short line, the death stated as a routine item and “car-crash”, hyphenated, as a technical term. The sequencing is exact: each encounter raises the stakes one degree. Three charges hold it below the top. The register’s tics harden by repetition, its terms of geometry, stylisation and junction, its abstract nouns in series; the dialogue, when it comes, is stilted, and the people speak as functions; and Catherine and the women around Vaughan are drawn as instruments of the system more than as persons.
Workshops of Qin Shi Huang · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Read as command of fired clay at life size, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing and, as a system, extraordinary: hollow figures and horses built from moulded and coiled parts, fired whole, without collapse or cracking at a rate that let thousands stand; heads made in moulds and finished by hand so that faces, hair and expression vary; armour plates, belt hooks, the treads of shoes and the knots of hair rendered with exactness; the kneeling archer’s held tension. The cost is in the sculpture itself. The figures are frontal, the poses few, the bodies stiff below the costume and the anatomy summary under armour, and the variety of faces, though real, is drawn from a limited repertory of types. Command of a production is not command of a figure, and the best single figure here sits below the best figures of its century elsewhere.
Roman, under Diocletian · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on structure first. The walls and gates are large dressed limestone ashlar, laid with precision and raised within about a decade. The substructure vaults carry the residence over a sloping shore and have outlasted everything they carried. The mausoleum’s brick dome stands over an octagon that turns within to a circle with niches, and the vestibule’s dome stands open at the crown. The arches of the peristyle, sprung from the capitals, are a structural decision executed cleanly. Against this, the carved ornament is often coarser than earlier imperial work, its capitals, mouldings and friezes showing haste and simplification; some columns are spoils or imports of mismatched size; the residence’s finish is lost. Command is high in structure and masonry, middling in ornament.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in its central instrument, Vadim Yusov’s camera, whose slow lateral tracks and long held takes compose every room as a picture, and whose studies of the Bruegel and of the stream are among the finest passages of looking in cinema. Eduard Artemyev’s electronic score works at the edge of sound effect, with the Bach set against it. Natalya Bondarchuk’s Hari moves from blankness to terror to self-knowledge without a false step; Jüri Järvet’s Snaut is weary and ironic, Anatoly Solonitsyn’s Sartorius brittle. The costs are real and not small: the ocean and the station’s exterior are modestly achieved, the interiors cluttered without the precision of the Earth scenes, the commission staged flatly, and Donatas Banionis solid rather than revealing in a part that carries the film. Below Tokyo Story (8.9) and Chinatown (8.6) in finish across the whole.
Hou Hsiao-hsien · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Chen Huai-en’s photography sets interiors in depth, figures in doorways and back rooms, low light from lamps, and the hills and sea at Jiufen and Keelung in weather. Liao Ching-sung’s cutting leaps months between shots and refuses the reaction shot. The sound, recorded on location in five languages, is load-bearing. Tony Leung’s performance is made of eyes, hands and stillness, and older players, Li Tien-lu as the father among them, hold long takes without strain. What holds the axis is legibility. Faces and relations are hard to sort in the long shots, the time of events is often unclear, and a viewer can lose who is related to whom; some of that is design, and some is a making that does not carry its matter clearly.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors every desk shares, and the making bears weight in several departments. Wally Pfister’s IMAX photography gives the city a scale no studio set could. The stunts are practical, the overturned truck among them. Richard King’s sound and the score of Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, with its drones and its single note, make one design. Heath Ledger’s Joker, in voice, posture and timing, is the film’s centre; Aaron Eckhart makes Dent credible as the city’s hope; Gary Oldman’s Gordon is the one plain man. The charges fall where it counts: the geography of the truck chase and the Prewitt building is hard to follow, Bale’s rasping voice strains belief, the dialogue announces its theme, and Rachel is written as a prize between two men.
Henryk Górecki · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is load-bearing in places. The canon of the first movement is exact: one theme in many voices, each entry placed so that the texture thickens without blurring, the divided strings voiced from the bottom up so that the climb is heard as weight. The soprano’s line lies where the voice carries over sparse accompaniment, and the Polish is set to its stress. Orchestral colour is used sparingly and to point. The means are deliberately narrow, and narrowness is not charged as such; but command shows over a narrower range than in the Goldberg Variations at 9.7 or Winterreise at 9.5. Harmony is static by design, and in the second and third movements the static chords are sometimes repeated more than they are worked.
Pearl Jam · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the anchors of the elder desks. The voice is an instrument of real power: Vedder’s baritone carries the record, and his control from murmur to cry in Black is the best singing on it, load-bearing where the songs matter most. McCready’s solos, the coda of Alive above all, are fluent and expressive in a borrowed language; Jeff Ament’s bass and Stone Gossard’s riffs are solid, Dave Krusen’s drumming steady. The faults fall across a large share: the arrangements are conventional, verse, chorus, solo, coda; the mix is clouded with reverb, so that parts blur and the drums sit distant; several codas mark time; the second half’s songs are less distinctly made.
Ottoman builders, under Mehmed II and successors · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
The finish is of the highest order: İznik tile in the Circumcision Room and the Privy Room of Murad III at the height of the workshops’ art; the Baghdad Kiosk’s marble, tile, mother-of-pearl and inlaid wood; the painted and gilded domes of the Harem’s halls; the Library of Ahmed III’s fountain and book-presses. The kitchens show plain engineering command, a range of domed bays with chimneys laid for heat, smoke and the feeding of the household. But the structure is ordinary by the standard of its own city and century: small domes, porticoes, timber eaves, nothing to set beside the spans of the imperial mosques. The making is load-bearing in the pavilions and the siting, less in the structure and the Harem’s run fabric.
The Flaming Lips · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the anchors of the elder desks. The making is load-bearing in part. Steven Drozd’s arrangements build an orchestral record from a small band’s means: the piano figure and kit of Waitin’ for a Superman, the fanfare of Race for the Prize, the shifting sections of The Spark That Bled. Fridmann’s drum sound is a signature and carries the scale the record argues. The voice is placed exactly as fragile, which is the meaning. The faults fall across a real share of the record: the mastering clips and saturates, so that loud passages smear; Wayne Coyne’s pitch wanders beyond what the frailty requires; the swell is one device applied to most tracks; Buggin’ and The Observer are slight.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One forensic instrument sustained across nearly sixty-five thousand words: long accumulating clauses that close on a small object, dialogue withheld to the point of austerity, comedy and horror in the same grammar, and the chat and notebook pages set in lower case and unquoted, so nothing reads as pastiche. The command is highest in the basement and at the lake. Three charges hold it at 8.5. A tic: the negative broken by its own qualifier, he did not, on the walks, mention the pay reduction, recurs until it is audible, and the narration reaches often for the long-married generalisation. A sameness: the explicit encounters share one clinical voice and one cadence, she came first, he came after a long while, and then a tissue.
Kongo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of carved wood with assemblage. At its best the making is load-bearing. The Mangaaka heads are carved with a formal authority to stand with any in Central Africa: the broad brow, the set jaw, the open mouth with filed teeth, the headdress in crisp planes, the body swelling into the belly where the medicine sits. The setting of mirror and glass eyes in resin is exact and makes the figure look. The nails, though not one hand’s, were driven with a knowledge of what the figure required, the densest on the torso and the face left clear. Charged: the type varies widely, many figures are summarily carved below the head, the body made as a support for iron, and the accretion, which is the work’s genius, is not a matter of command at all.
Dionysus Flambouras · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Two instruments, each held cleanly, and the endings are placed with real control: a sole that makes no sound, the nearest dryer showing eleven minutes, an envelope shifting at the first turn, initials signed without looking up. The charges are local and can be counted. The second half leans on a small set of bodily verbs until they become a habit: some form of press appears about sixty-five times in its sixteen thousand words, steady nineteen, breathing through the mouth six. The laundromat’s opening catalogue gives each person the same length and the same syntax, and the therapy exchange in April Again is the most generic writing in the book. The first half’s flatness, though chosen, offers the prose few occasions to show difficulty.
Ptolemaic builders · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, judged structure first. The masonry is sandstone ashlar of high precision, coursed and dressed along the whole axis, with stone roof slabs spanning on architraves, drainage spouts in the form of lions, and a pylon raised to its full height with stairs and chambers inside it. The structure is post and lintel, sound and conservative: no span or thrust is attempted beyond what the tradition knew. Sunk and raised relief covers hundreds of wall surfaces, consistent in hand and canon across 180 years and fluent in execution, though the Ptolemaic figure is heavier and more mechanical than the best of the Old and New Kingdoms, and the sheer density can flatten. The making carries the sequence of light and level. Held at 8.5: command complete, daring absent.
William Thornton, Benjamin Latrobe, Charles Bulfinch and Thomas U. Walter · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the command is high in parts. Latrobe’s vaults, rebuilt in masonry after the fire, are the finest construction in the building: the half-dome of the Old Senate Chamber and the low vaults of the Old Supreme Court Chamber below it are sure and fireproof. The iron dome is a real engineering act: a double shell on iron trusses carried on the old masonry drum of the rotunda, the peristyle cantilevered beyond it, raised in wartime, each shell proportioned to its own view. Walter’s wings are competent and consistent, the marble carved with care. The costs: the iron is painted to pass for stone; the long fronts repeat one bay with little modulation; and the dome was too large for its front until later hands pushed the east front forward a century on.
François Truffaut · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The command is real and in places load-bearing. Henri Decaë’s anamorphic photography in real interiors and streets, the long tracking shot of the run, the high view of the gym class dispersing through the streets and the night of the police van are made with economy and exactness. Jean-Pierre Léaud’s performance, guided rather than scripted in the interview, is among the great child performances. Jean Constantin’s theme is spare and right, and Marie-Josèphe Yoyotte’s cutting keeps the episodes light and moves at a child’s pace. The costs: the post-synchronised sound is thin and sometimes detached from the image; some adult performances, the schoolmaster above all, are broad; the middle third’s set pieces are shot better than they are joined.
David Markson · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Markson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the single sentence and its placing. Each sentence is plain, and the comedy is in the timing: a fact stated, a doubt added, a correction offered a page or fifty pages later. The voice holds for the whole book without a slip into a register that is not Kate’s, and the deliberate errors are placed with a control only a writer sure of the facts could manage. The recurrences are ordered so that grief surfaces by degrees rather than by announcement, a craft of ordering more than of style. Charged: the device is monotone by design and the monotony is not always paid for; the voice’s tics, the hedge and the self-correction, harden over the length; and the range of instruments is narrow, one voice and one kind of sentence.
Italo Calvino · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Calvino’s Italian as far as Weaver carries it; the Italian sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is of exactness and of arrangement. Each city is a finished piece: a rule stated in the first sentences, an image that embodies it, a turn at the end. Fifty-five pieces in eleven series across nine chapters are arranged without a visible join, and the dialogues shift register from the courtly to the philosophical to the intimate. The chessboard passage, in which Polo reads the history of the wood from a single square, is precise description becoming thought, and “Without stones there is no arch” puts a poetics in five words. Charged, and held two tenths from the higher marks: the cities’ turn on a paradox becomes a formula in places, the elegance is sometimes ornament, and the women’s names serve as labels, not persons.
Nick Drake · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium. The guitar playing is of the first rank in its idiom: in open and altered tunings Drake plays independent bass and melody with a steadiness that never sounds effortful, and the figures of Things Behind the Sun, Road and Parasite are composition, not strumming. The voice is placed exactly, soft, close and unhurried, with a control of breath and intonation that the bare setting exposes and that survives the exposure. John Wood’s recording is plain and true, voice and guitar close and clear, without gloss. The making bears load because nothing covers it. Held by the narrowness of the means, one instrument, one register of voice, one texture, and by songs whose guitar parts lie close in manner: mastery of a small instrument, well below Winterreise at 9.5.
Alan Moore and David Lloyd · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Read as one craft of words and pictures. Lloyd’s drawing is load-bearing: brushwork in heavy black with little line, figures modelled by light, a mask that must act without moving, a London of rain and sodium lamps, all held across seven years. Moore’s scripting is dense and exact in structure: parallel cutting between characters, chapter rhythms, recurring images (the dominoes, the roses, the mirrors). Charged: the early chapters are stiffer in drawing and staging than the later; V’s speeches run to alliteration and quotation that become manner; the colour added in 1988, washed over art made for black and white, is muddy in places and flattens what the blacks did; and the change of hand in the chapters drawn by Tony Weare is visible. It sits with the craft of the novels on this desk, below the summit pages.
Alvar Aalto · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium. Brick is handled as mass and surface throughout, inside and out, so that the whole building reads as one material shaped; the court’s edges, the window reveals and the chamber’s walls are worked to that end, and on a small budget. The chamber’s timber trusses are the structural high point: a simple, legible spanning device made expressive without excess, load-bearing in both senses. The stairs are carefully made, the turf stair a delicate piece of landscape construction, and the light in the stair and the chamber is controlled precisely. What holds the axis where it is: this is very fine making that does not extend the engineering of its time. Its craft is fit and expressive, not structurally audacious.
Milan Kundera · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Kundera’s Czech as far as Heim’s English carries it; the Czech sentence is neither credited nor charged. The command is of composition and of the lucid sentence. The seven parts are built in a design of returns, two pairs of repeated titles and a coda, with short chapters that let the essay and the scene alternate at the pace of thought. The prose is clear and exact, and its images are few and made to carry: Sabina’s bowler hat, which means something different in each scene it enters; Tereza’s book under her arm; Beethoven’s “Es muss sein!”; Karenin’s smile. The narrator’s address to the reader is placed with control. Charged: the aphoristic manner hardens at times into the epigram and generalises where the scene would show more; the women are drawn largely through the erotic interest of the men and of the narrator, Tereza excepted; and Sabina’s American chapters are thin.
Roman · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of fresco at life size, judged to the anchors of every medium. The making bears load in the figures that carry the drama: the startled woman’s cloak, drawn as one arc of wind round a body in recoil; the winged figure’s spread wing and dark flesh against the red; the dancer’s turning back in full modelling; the heavy head of the Silenus; the bowed young woman’s bared back, the softest passage in the room. The red is laid with an evenness and depth that make it a field of its own, and the figures are set in it with a sure sense of interval. The costs are charged: faces often generic, some attendants stiff, proportions that vary from figure to figure as several hands do, drapery at times schematic. A high workshop idiom, not one hand at full stretch.
Herman Melville · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Melville’s English. Command of the medium is high and deliberately turned against ease. The chapter titles are a small art of their own, mock-ceremonious and self-cancelling. The prose is built of litotes, double negatives and qualified qualifications, so that every assertion is offered on credit and the reader must decide whether to accept it: the sentence enacts the subject. The dialogue is exact in its rhetorics, the herb-doctor’s patter, the employment agent’s analogies from boys to men, the cosmopolitan’s geniality, Winsome’s oracular coldness, and each persuasion is a model of its kind. The comic timing of the Pitch chapters is sure. Charged: the second half’s speeches run long and alike, the mannered negations become a tic, and some transitions between figures in the first half are abrupt in ways that read as haste more than design.
Marc Chagall · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas. The colour is the command: a saturated red set against the green face and the white head, complementaries held at full pitch across nearly three square metres without muddying, the planes cut cleanly and keyed so that the two heads stay dominant over a crowded field. The transparencies, the milkmaid inside the head and the planes that pass through objects, are managed with real control. The drawing is deliberately naive, and in the heads it is strong: the eye, the lip, the cap are set down with economy and authority. The costs: the small figures of the upper band are drawn summarily, some planes are decorative fill rather than structure, and the Cubist geometry is applied with less rigour than in its sources. Load-bearing in colour, less so in construction.
Aeschylus · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the Greek as far as it can be carried. The shield scene is a feat of construction: seven pairs varied in length and temper, the boasts built from the devices, the replies turning each device against its bearer, so that Tydeus’ night sky becomes his own night of death and Capaneus’ torch meets the fire of Zeus, and the sixth speech set apart by the absence of any device. The diction is Aeschylean: the compounds, the weight, the battle catalogue as music, and the parodos makes its sounds carry the siege. The ship of state at the opening returns in the city saved at the end. Charged: the static first movement, and the joinery of the close, which is not of the same hand or the same skill. Metre and music are neither credited nor charged.
George Orwell · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Orwell’s English, with no translation between. This is the plain style at a high pitch: concrete, unrhetorical, exact about the body and the material, able to carry fear, comedy and anger without a change of register. The front is made from things: the candles, the lice, the rifle that will not fire, the rats, the cold. The wound passage is a model of control. The comedy of the incompetent war is dry and well timed, and its ironies are never pressed. Charged: the political chapters are written as journalism and read as it, with lists of parties and quotations from the press; the narrative of the front repeats itself in places; and some transitions are those of a book written fast. Not the summit of English prose; a high command of one plain style, slightly uneven across the whole.
Umberto Boccioni · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of modelling, judged to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing: convex and concave planes alternate so that light runs along the flanges and the figure flickers as it is circled; the balance, leaning forward on two narrow points, is exact; the passage from smooth limb to drawn-out flare is handled as one surface, with no seam between body and motion. The profile is one of the most finished silhouettes in modern sculpture. The costs: Boccioni was a painter first and taught himself to model; the plinths are summary; and the final finish of the bronzes, on which much of the figure’s present beauty depends, is the founders’ and not his. A maker in command of the figure’s idea and its silhouette, held a step below the top by the thinness of the craft round them.
Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and in places bears weight. Bill Pope’s photography holds the colour law of the two worlds throughout and frames the action for legibility, which the decade’s action cinema often lacked. Zach Staenberg’s cutting gives the fights geography: every blow is placed, and the subway fight builds its rhythm to the train. Don Davis’s score and the sound design, the shells falling in the helicopter scene, the agents’ footsteps, the digital whine at each crossing of worlds, carry the shifts between them. The rig for bullet time was engineered for the film. The costs: much dialogue is functional and some stilted, the performances beyond Fishburne and Weaving are narrow, and some digital work has dated. The making is less complete through dialogue and performance than Chinatown (8.6) or The Third Man (8.5).
Jane Campion · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in most departments. Holly Hunter’s performance is made of carriage, hands and eyes, and she plays the piano herself, so that the playing is the character’s speech. Anna Paquin’s Flora, a child’s mimicry, temper and guile, is exact. Keitel plays tenderness under a rough surface without softening it; Neill makes a cold man pitiable. Stuart Dryburgh gives the bush and the beach their two climates, and the underwater ending has real weight. Nyman’s score, built for the instrument, is placed as Ada’s voice. The charges hold the axis at 8.5: the Māori scenes are staged as background and comedy, a failure of the making as well as of the seeing; Morag and Nessie are played broad; the voice-over is a device the film did not need twice; and the coda’s flat light and costume-drama blocking fall below the rest.
Antoni Gaudí · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the making is load-bearing. The columns of the viaducts are inclined along the lines of thrust, so that rough rubble carries a road on a hillside. The columns of the hall carry the terrace and drain it to the cistern. The trencadís of the bench was cut and set by hand on site, broken tile and glass worked into a continuous surface. The command of stone, of water and of ceramic surface is of a high order. Against it: much of the work is deliberately rough, the craft of the lodges is decorative rather than structural, and the extensive repair of the trencadís shows a surface that weathers poorly. Gaudí’s command of structure shows more fully in the Sagrada Família.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium. Vadim Yusov’s photography bears weight throughout: high-contrast black and white, the night swamp lit by flares, the birch wood in verticals, the well seen from below, the beach in overexposed light. The cutting of the dream transitions, each closed by a sound of war, is exact. Nikolai Burlyayev’s Ivan is fierce and brittle, with a child’s sudden collapses; Zubkov and Grinko give the officers weight. The sound is designed: water, a cuckoo, a bell, the radio. The costs: Ovchinnikov’s score is conventional in places and insists, some dugout scenes are staged and talky, Burlyayev at his most hysterical is pitched too high, and the birch wood is a little self-admiring. Below The Third Man and Chinatown (9.0), which carry no such charges.
Fela Kuti and Africa 70 · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and the band is the craft. The drummer holds a fast tempo with hi-hat and kick in constant, unhurried motion, and the whole record rests on him. The two guitars, one chopping and one picking a short cycling figure, interlock with the bass so that no part leads and none can be removed. The horn section is drilled as tightly as the soldiers it mocks, the riffs exact and the punctuation of the commands placed to the beat. The vocal arrangement, call and answer, is simple and perfectly timed. The costs: the saxophone solo is limited in line and invention, the recording is serviceable rather than fine, and side two’s arrangement is the house arrangement. It stands above Remain in Light in its playing and below it in its studio making.
Mughal court painters · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of opaque watercolour and gold on cloth at large scale. The best folios show great command: textiles and tilework rendered with a jeweller’s precision; architecture drawn in recession with balconies, screens and courtyards; trees observed leaf by leaf; animals with weight and life; figures massed in battle without losing their individual action; gold used to model and to glitter. The making is load-bearing, since the force of each episode is carried by draughtsmanship and colour, and the scale required a new technique of large painting on cloth. Charged: the quality is uneven, as a workshop of many hands over fifteen years makes it; some folios are crowded past legibility, some figures summary, some spatial systems awkwardly joined.
Aleijadinho · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The craft is read on the same anchors as every medium, structure included. The structure is modest: masonry walls, timber roofs and ceilings, nothing that strains or advances the means of building. The making carries weight in the stone. The soapstone of the portal and medallion is cut with a command of relief, depth and line that is the finest of its region; the pulpits are carved with the same authority; the junction of carved figure and dressed stone frame on the front is exact. Ataíde’s ceiling is accomplished illusionistic painting, carried over the timber vault in clear colour. The building is uneven by medium: superb in carving, sound in painting, ordinary in structure. Sainte-Chapelle’s 9.1 rests on structure; the Chrysler Building stands level at 8.5.
James Brown · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention weighed elsewhere. The performance craft is load-bearing: the band moves between songs and tempos without a gap, hits every stop on Brown’s signal, and holds the slow vamp of “Lost Someone” for some ten minutes without slackening; Brown’s voice moves from croon to scream with exact control of when to withhold. The medley, a run of songs passed through in about ten minutes, is a feat of ensemble. The recording itself is adequate rather than masterly: the balance favours the voice and the hall, and the horns and guitar are at times indistinct. The songs as written are conventional. Very high in performance and ordinary in the medium of record, the making stands between, well below Kind of Blue at 9.3.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Michael Ballhaus’s camera keeps Maria within frames and moves through the house with a restless grace. The sound mix carries the period’s radio and its building noise, hammering and drilling, under intimate scenes, and makes the history audible rather than spoken. Hanna Schygulla’s performance, cool, comic, imperious and opaque, is a surface that is the meaning; Ivan Desny’s Oswald is courteous and sick; Peer Raben’s score lends a borrowed grandeur. The opening and the ending are made to the highest standard. The costs fall in the middle: some supporting playing is broad by design and broad in effect, the economy of a fast shoot shows in some interiors, and the office scenes are staged more flatly than the house.
Can · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing, and it is in two hands. Liebezeit’s drumming on Halleluhwah holds one pattern with exact time and constant small variation for some eighteen minutes, a command of repetition few players of any tradition match. Czukay’s editing turns long takes into continuous tracks, and the splices are part of the music. Karoli’s guitar and Schmidt’s keyboards place themselves around the pulse without crowding it. The faults are real and spread across the record: the recording is rough and the sound often muddy, Suzuki’s voice is uneven in pitch and in where it sits, and Aumgn and Peking O hold long stretches where command gives way to accident, some of it intended and not all of it achieved. It stands below Low at 9.0 and Remain in Light at 8.7, whose sound is more fully commanded.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in most departments. Kim Hyung-koo’s photography holds the autumn fields in pale gold and the town in browns, and gives the rain a black depth; the first crime scene is staged as one crowded chaos of children, reporters and a tractor, the incompetence shown in the frame rather than said. Song Kang-ho carries Park from swagger to helplessness without a seam, and Kim Sang-kyung makes Seo’s breakdown arrive from inside his control. Kim Sun-min’s cutting sets laughter against dread without signalling the turn. The charges fall on real shares of the film: Kim Roe-ha’s Cho is played as a type, the score is insistent in places, the girlfriend and the women officers are thin, and the drill and the protests are stated more than staged.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. Robby Müller’s black and white is exact: the deep grey of the forest, the hard light on the street of Machine, the smoke of the village. Jay Rabinowitz’s cutting holds the long fades at a constant pulse, so the rhythm of the whole is governed. The casting is a feat of control, a run of single-scene performances by Robert Mitchum, John Hurt, Crispin Glover and Alfred Molina, each pitched to one deadpan key, and Gary Farmer’s Nobody carries the film with a gravity that never tips into the stereotype of the guide. Neil Young’s improvised score is right. The costs: loose staging in some comic scenes, a passivity in Depp that at times thins the centre, and gun violence shot flat that is sometimes only flat.
Built for Rao Jodha and successors · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in two things. The masonry of the walls, raised from irregular living rock to great height in dressed sandstone, battered and bastioned, has held five centuries of weather and at least one siege’s shot; the joining of wall to cliff is load-bearing craft, and the whole figure depends on it. And the carving of the palace fronts, the jali cut from single slabs into fine geometric lattice and the jharokhas bracketed out over the drop, is stonework of a very high order. The interiors of gilding, mirror and painted plaster are fine court craft. The costs: the palaces are built in the trabeated and arcuated manner of their region and age, without engineering daring of their own, and the latest rooms are decoration of uneven quality.
Michel Gondry · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Ellen Kuras’s handheld, available-light photography lets the camera find the actors inside sets that change around them. Gondry stages transitions in single takes: Carrey walks from one remembered room into another, a light fails on a live set, the furniture grows to a child’s scale. Valdís Óskarsdóttir cuts the two lines so that the clinic’s night and the inner journey answer each other without confusion, and lets the beach house hold. Brion’s score is spare and exact. Carrey holds his comic body almost entirely still; Winslet gives Clementine a temper and a fear under the colour of her hair. The costs: the outside line is loosely staged and broader in its comedy, Patrick is thinly drawn, and some dissolutions repeat once the grammar is learned.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, load-bearing where the record needs it most. The arrangement of the crescendo is the chief making: entries staggered across guitars, strings, basses and drums so that density, not harmony, carries the rise, and the drums lock rather than clutter. The tape is placed exactly: trains, preacher and the voice that opens Providence enter as structural events, and the monologue sits over the drone at the level of overheard speech. The western guitar of The Cowboy and the closing lament of the first movement are precisely voiced. The faults hold the figure, and the first falls where the record is built to arrive: loud passages murky enough to blur the climaxes, playing at times rough, and a few minor chords held long.
Miloš Forman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Miroslav Ondříček photographs interiors by candle and window light; Patrizia von Brandenstein’s design and Theodor Pištěk’s costumes make a whole city of the eighteenth century; the opera stagings in the Estates Theatre in Prague, where Don Giovanni had its premiere, are exact and alive. The cutting to music is the film’s mastery: the description of K. 361, the manuscripts scene and the dictation are edited to the score, so that the image follows the music’s logic. Abraham’s Salieri, old and young, is a performance of great range and control. What holds the figure: the comic scenes are often broad, some line readings are pitched for effect more than truth, some Viennese scenes run at the length of a stage scene without being cut for the screen, and the second hour sags in pace.
Guillermo del Toro · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making is excellent and much of it load-bearing. Navarro’s camera moves through walls and tree trunks to join the two worlds. Caballero’s design sets the mill in wood and iron against the tasks in root and stone. The prosthetic creatures are animated by Doug Jones’ body beneath them. Navarrete’s lullaby, a single melody, carries the mother, Mercedes and the ending, and the editing holds two lines without losing either. What keeps it from the top: the dialogue is functional and at times expository; Vidal is written and played in one register, so the actor’s craft is held to a single note; some war sequences are staged to genre convention; and the digital elements fall below the practical ones.
Barry Jenkins · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in most departments. James Laxton’s photography gives Black skin blue, violet and amber in light that is never neutral, circles the actors in the opening and the schoolyard, and holds still where the feeling holds. Nicholas Britell’s score, chamber strings slowed and pitched down in the manner of chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, makes the soundtrack the protagonist’s interior. The editing makes the chapter breaks and the withheld years. Mahershala Ali’s Juan lives in a handful of scenes, Naomie Harris’s Paula across three chapters, and Trevante Rhodes holds a decade of suppression until the diner. The costs weigh: the circling camera sometimes signals style more than it carries meaning, the Terrel plot is thinly written, and Janelle Monáe’s Teresa has little to do after the first chapter.
Robert Altman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and bears weight. Geraldine Peroni’s editing keeps some twenty-two characters legible over three hours, and the cuts between strands are timed on rhyme: a glass of milk, a phone ringing, a body in water. Walt Lloyd’s camera roams and zooms within scenes so that the frame finds the person not speaking. The sound mix layers dialogue so that the ear chooses, as the eye does. The performances are among the best ensemble work of the decade: Julianne Moore’s long confession, Lemmon’s monologue, Lily Tomlin and Tom Waits, Jennifer Jason Leigh’s bored professional voice. The charges: broad comic playing in the Weathers and Bush strands, a few crossings made by contrivance, and an ending whose staging is looser than its idea.
Teutonic Order builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. Brick is a hard material for refinement, and the Order’s builders took it far: walls of great mass laid with patterned and glazed brick; star and fan vaults of brick sprung from slender granite pillars across wide rooms; a palace whose river wall is pierced by tall windows and still stands; the dansker carried out on arches over the moat; a hot-air heating system for the refectories, and water supply and drainage built into the plan. The vault of the summer refectory on its one pillar is a structural feat of its century. Held below the top because the craft is uneven across so large a complex, and much of the High Castle as seen is restorers’ work, not credited to the builders.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of a medium of materials at architectural scale, to the same anchors as any medium. Credited: lead worked as if it were paper, sheets beaten and folded into folios that read as books at a distance and as metal close, their surfaces stained and oxidised into a range of greys; the iron case built to bear a load of tons and to look as if it barely does; the glass placed so that shards on the shelves read as caught in the fall and those on the floor as settled; the lettering, a hand’s mark on industrial matter. The making is load-bearing. The costs: the lettering is functional rather than drawn with the authority of Kiefer’s painting; the wires and joints are rough by intent but also simply rough; scale is reached by assembly more than by touch.
Christopher Nolan · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the anchors every desk shares, and the making bears weight throughout. Hoyte van Hoytema’s large-format camera goes into the cockpits, onto the water and below decks, the horizon held level as the ships go over. Lee Smith cuts three clocks into one rising line. The sound mix makes every gunshot and engine a physical event, and Hans Zimmer’s score, fused with it, holds one tension for an hour and three quarters. Ships, planes and crowds are practical. Mark Rylance makes Dawson the film’s one full person in a few lines; Fionn Whitehead carries the Mole almost without words. The costs fall where they count: the dialogue that exists is functional or stiff, most performances are bodies under stress, and the seams of the time scheme show.
Henry Bacon · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure included. The refinements are learned and well done: the inward lean of columns and walls, the entasis, the attic set back so that it does not crush the colonnade, a proportion that lets a flat-topped block read as a temple without a pediment. The stone is cut and laid to a very high standard. A heavy masonry building stands on filled river ground and has not failed. The charges: the translucent ceiling did not give the light it was meant to give, and the terrace settled. The making carries the approach and the profile: a refined academic tradition at its best, not a new command of the medium.
Jean-Luc Godard · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium; invention is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The command is real and bears weight in the principal parts: Coutard’s colour, the primaries in the décor and the costumes, the long lateral tracks by the sea, the night lights on the windscreen; Antoine Duhamel’s score, romantic and broken off mid-phrase as the cutting demands; Jean-Paul Belmondo and Karina, who hold the screen through every change of register, and Karina’s songs. Sound is cut as boldly as image. The costs: the roughness is partly method and partly haste; the gangster scenes are flatly staged; some inserts and tableaux, the playlet above all, are thin as making; continuity of action is waived beyond what the form needs. A master in command of his means, with uneven finish, not the even and total command the top of the axis requires.
Walter Pater · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of English prose is the book’s first claim, and it is high: the long periodic sentence balanced on its qualifications, the cadence that slows at the point of perception, the precise sensuous diction of a “hard, gem-like flame”, and the last paragraph of the Conclusion built to a single sentence and a final turn to the moments for their own sake. The making is load-bearing: the effect is the argument. The charges are three. The manner is uniform across subjects and at times precious; the qualifications multiply past need in the weaker studies; and the scholarship is careless by the standards of its own day, with Vasari taken on trust in the Leonardo and attributions in the Giorgione that were already disputed. Across the book the structure is that of a gathering, not a design.
William Van Alen · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in parts and load-bearing in the crown: the arches stepping inward so that the metal reads as rays; the triangular windows cut into them; the needle built inside and raised in one lift; stainless steel detailed to hold its face for a century. The lobby is a work of crafts in command, marble, metal, the mural and the inlaid elevator doors, each cab its own pattern. The costs: the steel frame is the ordinary engineering of its day; the shaft between base and crown is plain brick with ornament set at the setbacks, and its passage into the crown is handled less surely than the crown itself; the ornament is often applied rather than built. Command of the top outruns command of the whole.
Victor Fleming · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight throughout: Harold Rosson’s Technicolor, saturated and controlled under the light the process then demanded; A. Arnold Gillespie’s cyclone, a muslin funnel against a painted sky that still frightens; Cedric Gibbons’s sets and the painted vistas of road and city; Adrian’s costumes and Jack Dawn’s makeup, through which Bolger, Lahr and Haley act in straw, fur and tin; Arlen and Harburg’s songs, the best score written for an American film of the decade, threaded by Stothart’s underscore; Garland, sincere at the centre of a film of comics; Hamilton’s Witch. The costs: a film made by four directors shows its joins in tone; the painted backings read as such; Lahr plays to a theatre audience. It sits half a point below The Third Man and Chinatown.
Burnham and Root; south half by Holabird and Roche · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Craft includes structure and engineering. The north half is masonry at its limit: brick laid six feet thick at the base and tapered over sixteen storeys; curved surfaces at the base, the parapet, the corners and the bays made in moulded brick, so that a material of small rectangular units reads as one continuous sculpted surface; an iron interior frame married to bearing walls. The transitions, bay to wall, corner to shaft, wall to sidewalk, are exacting, and in a building without ornament the making carries everything: nothing hides a bad joint. The south half is competent frame construction of its date, well matched. Charged: the method itself, at this height, consumed ground floor area that a frame would have freed, a cost the craft could not overcome.
Sawai Jai Singh II · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and setting out. The achievement is masonry built to the tolerance an instrument demands: a gnomon of about 27 metres aligned to the pole, its quadrants set as true arcs; bowls whose curvature must hold to the sphere and whose segments are cut away for the observer without losing the figure; graduations in hours, minutes and degrees laid out at a scale where an error is visible. The making is load-bearing in the strict sense: if it fails, the instrument lies. The costs are real. Masonry settles and plaster cracks; the precision of the largest instruments is limited by the soft edge of the shadow, so scale bought less than it promised; and how much of the finish read today is the restorers’ rather than the makers’ cannot be said with certainty.
Built for Yajnavaraha · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Craft is read the same in every medium, and here it splits in two. The carving is among the finest stone carving of South-East Asia, and it is load-bearing in what the work is: undercut foliage, figures modelled almost in the round within the pediments, colonnettes turned with many fine rings. The setting-out and the jointing of the dry masonry were exact enough to make the anastylosis possible at all. The structure, by contrast, is modest: corbelled towers of small span, laterite enclosures and a single-storey plan pose no problem of note, and the scale was chosen partly so that nothing structural would be at risk. The Made includes structure and engineering, and so stands at 8.5, below what the carving alone would earn.
Emily Kame Kngwarreye · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and of a particular kind. Each dot is laid with a loaded round brush, a pressure and a lift, fast and unhesitating, by a painter past eighty working on the ground. Colour is managed across a very large field with no plan drawn in advance: warm and cool, dense and open, wet into nearly wet, so that dots merge in places and stand apart in others. The layering is controlled, and the design beneath is let through where it serves. The making is load-bearing, since the meaning of the work is in the laying of the dots. It is held below the higher anchors because the hand is consistent rather than searching at every point, as its speed implies, and some passages read as filled rather than resolved.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence: exact, cadenced, at once ironic and grave, able to turn a description of light on stone into an argument about attention, as on the first page. The book manages a feat of register at its close, a child’s prose with its misspellings that is neither condescended to nor made precious, and that lands; and it holds a large cast across many places without confusion. Three charges hold it below the top. The dialogue is stylised: the expatriates, the banker, the film-maker and the narrator all speak one clever, oblique idiom, so that persons blur into a manner. The middle is slack in pressure, the dinner talk sometimes going on past its yield. And Owen’s account of the cult, the plot’s centre, is told at a remove.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the writing is its first department: the dialogue’s rhythm of repetition, interruption and borrowed phrase is among the most exact in American film comedy, and it is played to the beat. Deakins holds the bowling alley in warm colour and the Pasadena mansion in cold, and the shot from the ball’s point of view down the lane is an invention used once. Jeff Bridges builds the Dude from posture and voice without a false note; John Goodman’s Walter moves from reason to fury inside one sentence; Steve Buscemi does much with a part that is one repeated interruption. The editing lets scenes run and cuts on the comic stress. Held below the top because the dreams, the most visibly crafted passages, bear the least load, some supporting turns are sketches, and the case plot is assembled with less exactness than the dialogue that carries it.
Brian Eno · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and the making is load-bearing: the loop lengths are the composition, and the placing of each phrase in the stereo field and the reverberant space is the music. The piano of 1/1, slowed and given a long decay, has a tone that is exact and was hard to get. The voices of 2/1 are recorded and layered so that individual singers dissolve into one chordal body without losing their breath. The palette is narrow and used exactly. Against the elder anchors, the Goldberg Variations at 9.7 and Winterreise at 9.5, the craft is of a smaller kind: no command of harmony, counterpoint or performance at that level, and one technique applied four times. 2/2 is the weakest made, its synthesiser tones generic for their year, and tape hiss and the edits of the fades are audible.
DJ Shadow · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing. The drum programming on Building Steam with a Grain of Salt and Stem/Long Stem is the record’s signature: breaks chopped and resequenced by hand on a sampler with seconds of memory, so that the patterns stutter and accelerate as if played. Sources from different decades and rooms are matched in key and tempo and set so each is heard, and Midnight in a Perfect World joins pieces never meant to meet into a single breath. The transitions in the long pieces show an editor of real skill. The limits fall on a share: some loops outrun their interest, the low end is thin in places, and the sketches show craft as display.
Ralph Ellison · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Ellison’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the long, poised sentence that holds irony and feeling together, of the anecdote placed as proof, and of tone: comic in “Living with Music”, controlled anger in “The World and the Jug”, a lecturer’s grace in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate”. The definition of the blues is a sentence a reader keeps for life. “Change the Joke” moves from Stanley Edgar Hyman’s thesis through Twain and the minstrel stage to American identity with no seam showing. Held below the top because the prose can thicken into the abstract, in “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity” and the essay on Crane; because the interviews were polished but are interviews; and because Ellison’s habitual moves, the qualifying “and yet”, the turn on “American”, recur across the book.
Ray Charles · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention weighed elsewhere. The voice is load-bearing throughout: Charles places each word against the beat, bends a syllable into a cry, drops to speech and rises out of it, and his piano fills behind the band with blues figures. The band charts are tight and well voiced, and the brass swings under Bye Bye Love and Hey, Good Lookin’ without crowding the singer. The string tracks are properly balanced, and You Don’t Know Me is arranged with restraint. The costs fall on a real share of the record: the mixed chorus is generic and heavy, singing the title of I Can’t Stop Loving You with a polish the voice must cut through; some string writing is stock pop sweetening; and two or three band tracks are routine.
Bob Marley and the Wailers · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in the rhythm section. Carlton Barrett’s drums and Aston Barrett’s bass hold the one-drop with an economy that is the record’s ground: the bass figure of Exodus carries more than seven minutes without the repetition going slack. The I Threes are arranged as a chorus and a congregation, answering rather than decorating. Marley’s voice moves from the hushed warning of Natural Mystic to the sweetness of Waiting in Vain with full control, and the London production is clean and spacious, each part placed. The faults: several arrangements are routine for the band, the title track leans on repetition more than build in its later minutes, and the polish smooths edges the Kingston records kept. It stands below Low at 9.0 and Remain in Light at 8.7, above Zooropa at 8.2.
Frederick William Stevens · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on command of building, on the whole as it stands. Command is high and visible on every surface. The masonry is precise and its polychromy controlled; the carving is of exceptional quality and density for its date and place, and the joining of a trained Indian workshop to a Victorian design is itself a feat of making. The ribbed dome is well engineered and well proportioned to the mass below, and the building has stood the monsoon for well over a century. What holds the axis: the making is ornamental more than load-bearing. The structure is conventional masonry, the sheds were iron of the ordinary kind, and the craft is in the dressing of a known type, not in a structure that carries the meaning.
Antonio Vivaldi · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
The making is masterly where it bears weight. The writing for the violin is idiomatic and brilliant: trills, bariolage, rapid string-crossing, double stops, the long cantabile of the Largos. The orchestra is used as colour with an invention rare in 1725: the viola’s dog, the muted sleepers, the pizzicato rain, the tremolo storms, the stacked dissonances of Winter. The ritornellos are clear and memorable, and every effect is in its place. The costs are measured against the same anchors as every desk. The harmony is plain beside Bach’s; inner parts are often thin or doubled; the sequences that carry the episodes are routine, and the counterpoint is slight. The making bears weight in the colour and the violin, not throughout.
Russian carpenters · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The command is of log carpentry at a scale few buildings in the medium reached: notched corners carrying three diminishing octagons and four stepped arms to some 37 metres with no frame, the arms bracing the core, the octagons passing their loads down through the tiers. The domes stand on drums over the gables, and their aspen shingles, each cut to a curved profile and laid to overlap, shed water and weather to one colour. The disposition of twenty-two domes into one converging pyramid from every side is a feat of setting-out. Held a step down: the interior carpentry is plain, and the craft is a mature tradition perfected rather than surpassed.
Eileen Gray and Jean Badovici · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. At the scale of the room and the hand the command is of the first rank, and it is load-bearing: the shutters and their tracks, the fitted cabinets and their hinged and swinging parts, the stair with its lantern, the planning of small spaces so that each holds several uses without crowding, the drawing of light and air through the section. Building on a steep slope with no road access was itself a feat. The frame is modest engineering, conventional for its date, and the fabric needed heavy repair later, though much of that was neglect rather than fault. Held below 9.0 because the command is of the interior more than of the whole building’s structure and mass.
Soundgarden · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and load-bearing in much of the record. Matt Cameron’s drumming carries the odd meters with such ease that they feel like swing rather than calculation, the precondition of the record’s lurching weight. Kim Thayil’s guitars and Cornell’s rhythm parts are voiced and layered with care: the sour, bending lead in Black Hole Sun, the massive yet clear low end of 4th of July, the clean-to-heavy dynamics of Fell on Black Days. Cornell’s voice, across a very wide range, is an instrument of extraordinary control, placed on top of the mix and never lost. The costs: at seventy minutes the palette tires, three tracks are generically arranged, and the compression flattens some dynamics.
Richard Rogers · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in parts, and load-bearing: a concrete frame whose columns stand outside the floor plate and carry the floors on precast brackets, legible joint by joint; lavatory pods made in a factory and craned into the towers; glass lifts on the outside; a glazed skin that works with the services to temper the air; stainless steel detailed to hold its face for decades; the atrium vault, a station shed made precise. Every part is drawn and every joint shown. The costs: the services outside the envelope weather and are costly to reach, which the design accepted rather than solved; the expression sometimes outruns the engineering; and the office floors are plain beside the frame that carries them.
Don DeLillo · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between, and argued from construction more than from sentences. The prologue is a feat of choral narration: the couples, the parents in the stands, the leader, the scale of the stadium, all carried in one long movement to its closing sentence, “The future belongs to crowds.” Bill’s voice, in his long talks with Brita and with Haddad, is intelligent and bitter and carries the argument, and the prose at its best is DeLillo’s mature instrument, compressed, rhythmic and exact about the surfaces of a culture. Three charges: the debates are speeches; Scott and Karen at times speak in Bill’s oracular register; and the second part moves between its strands more loosely than the prologue promised.
Mimar Hayruddin · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, on the making as it stands: the sixteenth century’s design and the rebuilders’ execution of it. The command is load-bearing everywhere. A ring of dressed limestone carries a road some twenty-nine metres over a gorge on a thin arch, seated on the rock of both banks, and it stood about four hundred and twenty-seven years, through floods, earthquakes and war, until artillery brought it down. The rebuilding met the same standard, cutting tenelija by hand and laying it to the old geometry, a fidelity that is a craft achievement of its own. What holds the axis: the making is of one element, with no interior, no spatial sequence and no second system.
John Huston · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in two places. The screenplay keeps Hammett’s dialogue and cuts the novel to a frame with no slack. The casting and playing are among the most exact of any studio film: Bogart’s Spade, quick, amused and dangerous, the face working through the last speech; Greenstreet’s laugh and his “By gad, sir” in a first screen role that seems a career; Lorre’s perfumed card and anxiety; Cook’s boy gunman; Astor’s Brigid, whose lies are played as lies the second time through. Edeson’s low camera is exact, and Thomas Richards’s cutting keeps pace through rooms of talk. The charges fall where they matter: the sets are visibly sets and the frame often stage-bound; Deutsch’s score is conventional and underlines; the police are flat; Iva is played broad.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium, and the making is load-bearing. The lines, arcs and circles are exact, laid as if with ruler and compass, and their crossings are calculated so that angles read sharp or open by design. The transparent circles change colour where they overlap, a considered mixture and not an accident, and the halo is graded so that the hardest mass in the field glows. The light ground is modulated, warm in places and cool in others, so the forms hang in an atmosphere rather than on a flat sheet, and the weights are spread across a wide field without symmetry. The costs: in places the drawing is diagrammatic, line laid as construction rather than worked, and the paint is thinner and less varied in touch than in the prewar canvases. The precision sometimes reads as the draughtsman’s rather than the painter’s.
Eero Saarinen · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. In the interior the command is of the first rank and load-bearing: four shells meeting with only bands of light between them; every surface, from vault to stair to counter to balustrade, held to one continuous curve and finished in one material language; light and section handled so that a heavy concrete roof seems to lift; the passage from hall into tube made without a break in the law. The form had no standard geometry and demanded unusual means. The costs: the shells are not efficient shells, thickened and heavily reinforced to hold a drawn shape, so that the engineering serves the figure rather than leading it; and the integration of every fitting is why the building could not absorb change. Command of the figure outran command of a working terminal.
Michael Curtiz · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making is of the highest studio order: a screenplay in which line after line carries character and plot at once; Arthur Edeson’s light, the slatted shadows, the searchlight crossing Rick’s rooms; Curtiz’s camera moving through the café at Rick’s introduction, giving a crowded room’s geography in one passage; Max Steiner’s score, setting the anthems against each other and working the song into every turn; Bogart, Bergman and Rains exact, and a supporting company without a weak face. The costs: the back projection of the Paris drive, the cut-out aircraft at the airport, Henreid’s Laszlo stiff where the script gives him only rectitude, and a flashback written below the rest. The command is continuous, and the image rarely carries what the words do not.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing in several departments. Greig Fraser’s photography: daylight bleached to bone, the infrared monochrome of the arena, faces lit by the blue of the spice eyes, figures framed small against rock. Joe Walker’s editing holds the worm ride and the council to long builds and cuts the assault for clarity at vast scale. The sound design is structure, the worm felt before it is seen; Zimmer’s score of voices and low drones gives the desert its register; Patrice Vermette’s design makes three cultures distinct by architecture alone. Ferguson’s Jessica moves from fear to zealotry, Butler’s Feyd is physical and strange, Zendaya carries the dissent in silences. The costs: a last hour told rather than made, inert scenes for the Emperor, flat dialogue in the romance, and a score pressed at times into feeling the image has not earned.
Jane Campion · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, in every department. Wegner’s photography holds both the wide land and the cramped house, with framings through windows and doorways that make the house a set of watches, and the light in the barn and at the pond is exact. Greenwood’s score is load-bearing, never commentary: strings and a plucked cello carry Phil’s threat and Peter’s coolness in one idiom. Benedict Cumberbatch builds Phil from the body, the walk, the whittling, the unwashed hands; Kodi Smit-McPhee’s stillness is the film’s secret and he never gives it away; Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst make a marriage of awkward tenderness in very few words. The costs: Rose’s decline is played in repeated beats, George thins to absence in the second half, and the piano scenes press their point.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is high and load-bearing. The recording keeps eight players legible at extreme density: in the climax of Mladic two drum kits, two basses, three guitars and a violin become one mass without turning to mud, and the riff keeps its contour through the distortion. In We Drift the interlocking guitar parts are arranged so that each figure is audible and their sum is a new pattern, the principle of a gamelan carried into rock. The costs are three, and they are real: a palette narrower than the band’s earlier records, with little colour beyond the ensemble; plateaus in We Drift held past their yield; and drones plainer in sound than their role asks.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas at wall scale, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The border is kept and lost by the brush, drawn as an edge in one passage and erased by a crossing stroke in the next, so that the map is always legible from the room and never secure up close. The three primaries, with white and grey, are managed across the whole width so that no region dominates. The stencilled names are set into the paint at varied pressure, some crisp, some dragged through wet colour, some overpainted, and where they fall reads as found rather than designed. The costs: the gestural vocabulary is borrowed by design and narrow by the painter’s own standard, some passages read as filled rather than worked, and the encaustic of the flags shows a finer hand.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel; completed by Hawkshaw and Barlow · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Structure is the making here, and the making is load-bearing. The survey and the siting, the anchorage tunnels cut into the rock, the masonry abutment raised from the gorge wall on the Leigh Woods side, the saddles on rollers on the tower tops, the chains of linked bars, the rods and the stiffened deck were executed so that a structure designed for horse traffic has carried motor traffic for over a century. Hawkshaw and Barlow’s revision is skilled and sober: the third chain, the girders, the reuse of tested iron. The command of line is fine, the dip of the chains in proportion to the span and the deck one thin level stroke. Held from the summit of the axis by the towers, competent masonry left without their designed finish and somewhat heavy for the delicacy of the ironwork; the joining of two campaigns shows there.
Apollodorus of Damascus (attributed) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure included. Brick-faced concrete at its Trajanic best. The Great Hall’s cross vaults spring from travertine corbels and are buttressed by arches thrown over the side galleries, a refined solution to carrying vaulted thrust over a multi-storey section, and the vaults have stood for nineteen centuries. The hemicycle is concrete laid against a cut hillside, retaining the slope while lightening itself by its rooms; the half-domed halls at its ends are vaulted with the same assurance. The brickwork is fine and exposed by design, pilasters, pediments and arches cut and laid as finish. The making is load-bearing: the building is its structure. What holds it below the summit of the art: no single structural feat of the Pantheon’s order, and an upper complex built with a competence ordinary for Rome.
George Saunders · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on Saunders’s English, with no translation between. The command is of voice, and it is load-bearing: the narrators’ sentences, built of jargon, hope and evasion, are exact enough that the book’s argument lives in their grammar, and the comic timing, the flat statement that lands a beat after the outrage, is precise. The compression is a craft of its own: a marriage, a debt, a crime, carried in a few pages by what a narrator lets slip. The endings are placed with skill. Three charges: the narrating voice is nearly one voice across the book, so that the narrators blur; some jokes are broad, and the near-future furniture is sometimes laid on as gag; and “Bounty” is uneven, its picaresque middle slack beside the stories’ tension. A making load-bearing throughout, with real faults that fall on a share of the book.
Alfonso Cuarón · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in several departments. Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera moves without a floor, and the light is designed so that faces in a box on a stage carry sunlight and earthlight matching a world built years before. The sound is a rule kept: silence in vacuum, vibration through contact, voices by radio, and the rule makes the station’s destruction more terrible than noise would. Sandra Bullock carries most of the film alone, much of it in a rig, and the breathing, the panic and the exhaustion on the shore hold. The costs fall on the script and the score: Kowalski’s banter is stock, the backstory and the radio monologue state what the image shows, Steven Price’s score sometimes drives where silence would serve, and the physics bend at Kowalski’s release.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The making is load-bearing: the film’s knowledge is carried by its craft more than by its script. Lubezki’s photography sustains natural light through cold and dark with a consistency few films attempt; the opening attack and the bear are staged as continuous action of great complexity, camera, performers, horses, water and effects joined so that the seams rarely show. Stephen Mirrione’s editing holds the long takes and paces the long middle with restraint. The sound, breath, water, wind and wood, and the sparse score of Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto shape feeling without melody. Leonardo DiCaprio’s largely wordless performance is a physical command. The charges: mannerisms, the breath on the lens, the repeated tilt up into the treetops, the visions’ borrowed look; and dialogue that is weak where the antagonist explains himself.
The National · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and load-bearing in places rather than throughout. Bryan Devendorf’s drumming carries much of the record: the rolling toms of Bloodbuzz Ohio and the insistent pattern of Afraid of Everyone are the songs’ engines, not their accompaniment. The Dessner brothers layer guitar and keyboard parts so that several figures move at once, and the brass and strings are worked into the band’s sound, not laid on it. Berninger’s baritone is placed close and low, a fixed point against moving music. The faults fall across a share of the record: the density muddies the mix, the band thought the opener rough enough to re-record, and several middle tracks share one palette. That holds it a tenth under Boxer, a making load-bearing throughout with one fault, the rung where Fallingwater stands.
Herzog and de Meuron, with Ai Weiwei and Li Xinggang · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high. A lattice of welded box sections, twisting in space, carried round a saddle roof in an earthquake zone, its members cut and joined to a geometry no drawing board could fix, the stairs folded inside the weave, the bowl set independent within it, and two membranes closing the roof against rain and sound: the making carries load in the literal sense. The making is also costly, and the axis charges it. The structure was sized for a retractable roof never built, the steel is very heavy for its span, a share of the members are there for the image, and the weave conceals its own hierarchy rather than expressing it, so that the structure performs randomness while being ordered. The bowl and the seating are competent, not distinguished.
Jasper Johns · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting with objects, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is skilled and in most places load-bearing. The grey brushwork that binds the long field is the painter’s own surface, worked and varied without loss of unity. The relation of painted letter to standing letter, and of letter to its own shadow, is exactly calculated: the shadow falls on paint that is itself about seeing. The brightest colour, placed against the greys, carries the eye across the width. The chair and cast are set with control enough to chill without becoming theatre. The costs: some passages read as samples set down rather than painted in, the newspaper above all, and in places the assembly has the evenness of a catalogue where the painter’s best has the density of one surface.
My Bloody Valentine · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high, and load-bearing where the guitar carries the meaning: the continuous bending of pitch, held while the strings are strummed, makes the instability of Who Sees You. Voices sit inside the mass at a depth that keeps them felt and unread, a choice of mixing, not a fault of it. The keyboard track holds still for five minutes without going slack, and the last third sets breakbeats against guitar mass so that neither swallows the other. The costs fall in every third, within a narrow palette: plain, sometimes boxy drums in the first, slight songwriting in the second, basic breakbeat programming in the last. That holds it below the rung where a making load-bearing throughout carries one fault, a tenth under Boxer and well under Loveless.
David Fincher · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Command of the medium is high and bears weight, since precision is the film’s subject. Erik Messerschmidt’s frame is exact and cold, with the steadiness the killer claims and does not have. Kirk Baxter’s cutting holds the long Paris wait in tension and breaks into fragments in the Florida dark. Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross keep a low electronic pulse under everything, and the split between the room and the earphones is the most expressive single device in the film. Michael Fassbender gives a performance of stillness that leaves the talking to the voice-over, and Swinton’s scene is the best acting in it. The costs are in the script: Walker’s dialogue serves the victims well and the killer barely, the supporting figures are functions, the narration is sometimes overwritten, and the Florida fight, shot dark and cut fast, is lucid but conventional.
Jun Xia (Gensler) · Architecture
7.4 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every medium. The command is of a high order and load-bearing. The tower stands at 632 m on the soft, wet soil of Pudong; the core, outriggers and mega-frame carry it; the twist and taper were tuned in the wind tunnel to reduce the load; the outer skin, a doubly curved and rotating envelope, is hung from each mechanical floor on rings of struts and allowed to move against the inner tower, a hard problem solved at a scale not attempted before. The costs: the skin is a secondary system standing off the building, not structure expressed; the gap it makes is partly residual space; the interiors are fitted to a commercial standard; and much of the achievement is the industry’s command of the type.
D. H. Lawrence · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Lawrence’s English, with no translation between. The command is great and uneven. The scene: the sisters in the window bay of the first sentence; Hermione bringing a ball of lapis lazuli down on Birkin’s head; the chair bought at the market and given away; the long dying of Gerald’s father. The dialogue is quick, with a sharpness the narration often lacks, above all in the sisters’ exchanges and in Ursula’s mockery of Birkin. Water, moonlight and snow are drawn as few English novelists draw them. Charged: repetition that becomes insistence; the vocabulary of the unconscious, “mindless”, “dark”, “potent”, “sensual”, used until it ceases to signify; chapters, “Excurse” among them, where the prose loses control of its incantation; and the satiric portraits of Halliday’s set, drawn with a heavier hand than the rest.
Sigmund Freud · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Freud’s German is among the clearest scientific prose of its language, and he was awarded the Goethe Prize in 1930. The analyses are narrated with tact, irony and a novelist’s eye for the telling detail: the butcher’s wife who wishes not to have her wish, the smoked salmon supper, the botanical monograph in a shop window. The argument is managed with skill: objections are anticipated and turned, as in the fourth chapter, where the unpleasant dream becomes the strongest evidence for the thesis it seemed to refute. The seventh chapter is speculative construction kept plain. Held at 8.4: the first chapter is dutiful prose, the sixth piles instance on instance, the later footnotes clog the page and break its first rhythm, and the book in the large is less finely made than its best sentences. The sound of the German beyond what is judged here is neither credited nor charged.
Fyodor Dostoevsky · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged on the Russian as far as it can be judged without hearing it; what this reading cannot hear in the sentence is not charged. The command is in the portrait and the scene: Akim Akimych’s punctilio; Gazin drunk and murderous and stopped; Petrov, who might kill the narrator over nothing and is fond of him; Isai Fomich at his Sabbath; Baklushin’s love story; the hospital ward at night with its chains; and above all Akulka’s Husband, a tale in a teller’s voice whose horror the teller cannot see, as finished as any story Dostoevsky wrote. Charged: the prose is calmer than in the novels and slack in places, with repetitions and generalising passages that run on; the frame is handled carelessly, the wife-murder vanishing and the nobleman held for parricide in the first chapter corrected in a later note as innocent; and the later chapters are hurried beside the first.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.6 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of the ensemble is high: proportion and rhythm across a long site; terraces that let the Lawn fall while keeping its horizontals; ten different fronts held together by common height, material and colonnade; the serpentine wall, one brick thick and stable by its curve, economical and fine; brick and timber detailing by craftsmen trained at Monticello. Against it: Jefferson was a gifted amateur, and the making shows it. The Rotunda is the Pantheon reduced and translated into brick and wood, the effect without the structure; the library’s fit was poor; the engineering extends nothing. The making is load-bearing in the plan and the ensemble, and ordinary in the structure.
Stanisław Lem · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Lem’s Polish as far as the close translation carries it; the grain of the Polish sentence is not argued here, and that limit is neither credited nor charged. The command is of two registers and their join. The descriptive register of the ocean chapters is a virtuoso’s: a prose of invented natural history, exact, coined and dense, that makes formations no one has seen visible and plausible in their mechanics. The scholarly register of the library parodies the review article with precision. The opening, Kelvin’s arrival at an empty station, Snaut’s fear, the bloodied footprints, is the work of a skilled maker of suspense. Charged: the people are thinly drawn except Harey and, in part, Snaut; Sartorius is a function; dialogue at times becomes exposition in turns; and the depiction of Gibarian’s visitor leans on a stereotype of its period. The making is load-bearing in the ocean chapters and serviceable elsewhere.
Ursula K. Le Guin · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Le Guin’s English. The command is of a plain, exact, cold prose and of an invented world carried without exposition. Kemmer, shifgrethor, somer, the Handdara’s untrained unlearning, the Foretellers, the hearths and Domains, the weather words: all are introduced in use and become clear by use. The voices are distinct: Ai’s slightly prim, self-justifying report; Estraven’s journal, terse and dry; the hearth tales in a rhythm of their own. The aphorisms are earned. The ice chapters have real control of dailiness, the rations, the miles, the sleep. Held here because the prose is often flat where it should rise, the dialogue in Erhenrang and Mishnory is sometimes stiff and expository, and the sentences rarely carry the weight of the highest pages on the desk.
Guru Arjan; rebuilt and gilded under Maharaja Ranjit Singh · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The finishes are of a high order: floral sprays of coloured stone inlaid in the marble of the lower storey; gilded copper plate worked in repoussé over the upper storeys and the dome; an interior of gold leaf, fresco (mohrakashi), gesso relief (gach) and inlay (jaratkari); the mirror work of the upper chamber. The siting is masterly: a small building made to hold a great space by being set in water, its proportions read at a distance and doubled. The structure is the brick and lime of its region and period, sound and unremarkable, and it posed no problem the building had to solve. The making carries the setting and the surface, not the structure, and near at hand the surface at times crowds rather than orders.
Lars von Trier · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk, and the making bears weight in its central departments. Watson’s performance carries the film: a body and face that hold joy, terror and faith with no protection, and look into the lens. Katrin Cartlidge’s Dodo is the film’s reason and its warmth; Stellan Skarsgård’s Jan a man whose love is real and whose request is monstrous. Robby Müller’s camera follows without composing and finds light in wet rooms; Anders Refn’s cutting across the axis keeps the viewer off balance. The charges fall on real shares: the handheld is loose where it does no work and the jump cuts harden into a manner; the drained image muddies whole scenes; the sailors are melodrama’s villains, Udo Kier’s a sketch; the doctor is underwritten; and the bells are an effect some viewers cannot cross.
Peter Jackson · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in several departments. Andrew Lesnie photographs New Zealand as a continent. The scale of hobbits beside men, made by forced perspective, doubles and digital work, is so complete it vanishes. The miniatures of Minas Tirith, Barad-dûr and Helm’s Deep hold; the design under Alan Lee and John Howe gives each people one material language; Shore’s score is the spine. Ian McKellen’s Gandalf, Serkis’s Gollum and Sean Astin’s Sam, who carries the last hour, are the performances it rests on, and the editing of the two intercut films holds three lines in tension for six hours. The costs: some effects show their years, Legolas fights as stunt rather than combat, Gimli’s comedy lowers the register, some dialogue is stiff, and the codas lack the economy of the rest. The Fellowship of the Ring is the best made of the three, The Return of the King the most uneven.
Robert Penn Warren · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Warren was a poet, and the prose shows it at both ends. At its best it is a controlled vernacular and metaphysical voice: the opening on Highway 58, whose first words are “Mason City.”; the picnic speech; the hospital-room scenes; the dialogue of Willie, Sugar-Boy and Sadie, which catches speech and comedy precisely; and the Cass Mastern journal, a feat of period pastiche held at the pitch of the King James. The construction of the ten chapters, with the Judge’s story laid down early and sprung late, is skilled. What holds the axis below the upper band: the prose is often overwritten, adjectival and heavy with simile, Jack repeats his effects, and the reflective passages explain what the scenes have already shown. Load-bearing in places, mannered in many.
Ming builders (and earlier dynasties) · Architecture
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. At its best the command is high and load-bearing: a brick and stone curtain set on crests where supply and scaffolding must have been a feat in every bay; walkways stepped where the slope is steepest; drainage carried through the parapet so the wall sheds its own rain; vaulted hollow towers whose masonry still stands; and an organisation of kilns, quarries and garrisons that stamped its bricks by unit and reign year and carried them up mountains. The western rammed earth, layered with reed and tamarisk, has stood in places for five centuries. The costs: the structure extends nothing, and quality falls from the late Jizhou work to the earth and rubble elsewhere.
Leos Carax · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and Lavant’s is the film’s load: eleven or more distinct bodies, each with its own gait, voice and weight, from the bent beggar to Merde’s lurching run to the father’s quiet cruelty in a parked car, and an accordion walk that is a dancer’s. Caroline Champetier’s digital photography makes Paris at night a lit interior and holds the entr’acte in one sweeping movement. The gutted Samaritaine and the limousine dressing room are made into places. Édith Scob is exact in very little; Nelly Quettier’s cutting keeps the appointments distinct. The costs are real: the warehouse killing is staged awkwardly and its prosthetic face-carving looks like what it is; Eva Mendes is given a pose rather than a role; the talking limousines are unevenly executed.
Arcade Fire · Music
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The arrangements serve: the title song’s piano bounce under an aching melody; the driving piano of We Used to Wait; the strings that thicken Empty Room and Suburban War; the synthesised pulse of Sprawl II, where Chassagne’s voice carries the record’s one lift. Markus Dravs and the band keep a large group plain and legible, and the restraint is a choice that serves the subject, a landscape of sameness heard in one gait. The faults fall across a share of the record: Win Butler’s voice is narrow and strains at the top; the mid-tempo middle runs in one sound for long stretches; Modern Man, Rococo and Deep Blue are plain in arrangement and slight in melody; and the mix is at times flat.
Chris Marker · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Marker’s photographs are composed for duration: faces close, the woman’s head on a pillow, the camp in grainy darkness, the museum’s glass and fur. Jean Ravel’s editing gives stills a pulse, dissolves timed to breath and narration, quickened in the experiments and slowed with the woman. The sound is built with care: Négroni’s even voice, the heartbeat, the whispers, Duncan’s strings, the choir under the ruins. The one moving shot is placed with complete judgement. The costs fall on real shares of a small instrument: the future people are costumed and lit crudely, stills of the camp and the experiments are rough beyond what the grain requires, and the score is partly library music and generic in places.
Arnolfo di Cambio (attributed) · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure first, and the first campaign’s command is high. The rusticated pietraforte is laid in courses that grow quieter as the wall rises; the corbelled gallery is a continuous structural crown; and the tower, carried forward so that its front wall rests on the corbels and the gallery’s outer arches, is a daring piece of masonry that has stood some seven hundred years. The later hands command their parts: Michelozzo’s courtyard, il Cronaca’s span over the Salone, Vasari’s raising of that roof. The costs: the plan is irregular, and behind the front the campaigns join unevenly, in rooms at differing levels and passages that betray the accretion, while the rear blocks lack the first block’s authority.
Abbas Kiarostami · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The making bears weight throughout. Homayun Payvar’s photography holds a hard ochre light, frames the hillside road so that the car is small and the voices near, and lights the night by lightning. The sound carries the machinery of the gravel works, the wind, and voices kept at one level over long distances. The non-professionals are directed to hold the frame: Homayoun Ershadi’s still, heavy face, which never explains itself, and Abdolrahman Bagheri’s ease. Kiarostami’s own cutting makes each conversation in the car play as one. The costs: the austerity is uniform, the first reel and the seminarian’s scene are flat in pacing rather than in design, and the coda’s deliberately poor video still costs the image. Beside Chinatown (9.0) and Tokyo Story (9.3) the command is narrower and the range smaller.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is mostly invisible by design, and it bears weight where the film turns. Gabriel Figueroa, whose photography for Emilio Fernández was painterly, holds the light here to an even grey, which makes the room ordinary and therefore frightening. The staging of the whole company on one set, so that the eye always knows who stands where, is a feat of blocking, and the ending depends on it. The repeated shots are cut exactly: the second entrance is felt before it is understood. Sound is spare, Blanca’s piano and the chant of the Te Deum carrying the weight. The limits are visible too. The budget was modest, the acting is uneven, and the guests’ physical decay is milder than the premise wants. The making is load-bearing at the joints and plain between them.
Martin Scorsese · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high and bears weight in places. Michael Ballhaus’s camera moves with authority on a small budget, and the desert light of Morocco gives the film a dry physicality no studio epic had. Thelma Schoonmaker’s cutting sets the hard rhythm of the Temple and the scourging and lets the temptation run long. Peter Gabriel’s score, built from Middle Eastern, North African and other voices and percussion, is load-bearing: it supplies the sacred register the dialogue refuses. Willem Dafoe carries a film whose argument lives in his face and body; Keitel, Hershey and Bowie are strong in their scenes. Against: the budget shows in the crowds and in visions whose effects are plain; several performances are uneven; the flat dialogue sometimes lands as merely flat; the ministry is staged with less invention than the beginning and the end. Accomplished, sometimes inspired, not seamless.
Apichatpong Weerasethakul · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The command is real and load-bearing in sound and light. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s night photography finds faces in near darkness and rock in torchlight without losing either, and the long takes are placed with exact patience. Akritchalerm Kalayanamitr’s sound is the film’s instrument: insects, wind, the hum of the dialysis, the forest as a room, a continuous field into which the ghosts arrive. The non-professional performances are flat by design and held flat, Jenjira Pongpas above all, with a plain warmth. Lee Chatametikool’s editing lets the episodes stand apart and still belong. The costs: the monkey suit and the princess’s artifice yield some shots that look merely cheap, and the finish varies, the hotel room flatter than the nights.
Tadao Ando · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The making is load-bearing: the precision of proportion on a plot a few metres wide; the section, which brings light to every room from the court alone; and the concrete itself, poured in place with a discipline of formwork and joint that made a cheap material the bearer of the whole effect. The costs: the structure is simple, bearing concrete walls and slabs over a short span, and calls on no engineering of distinction; and by its architect’s own later standard the concrete and detailing of this first house are less refined than those of the Church of the Light (8.5). Read to the same anchors as every medium, this is high command of a small means, not virtuosity.
Ancient Egyptian, under Amenhotep III and Ramesses II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of sandstone post and lintel at a large scale. The colonnade’s columns and architraves are raised to a height that taxes the system, and they have stood. The relief carving of Amenhotep III’s inner rooms is among the finest of its period, and the Opet reliefs of the colonnade are fluent narrative carving, a whole festival marshalled along two walls. The Ramesside work is rougher, quickly cut and in part recut. The making is load-bearing in the colonnade and the sun court and competent elsewhere. Against the desk’s anchors, the Pantheon (9.3) and Sainte-Chapelle (8.8), it is ambitious, sound and fine in its core, without the structural daring of either: the trabeated system is pushed upward, not reinvented.
Euripides · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the Greek as far as it can be followed, with metre and music unheard and neither credited nor charged. The construction is economical: three actors, ten persons, the heroine’s death and the guest’s arrival placed so that the second hides the first. The prologue’s stichomythia, Apollo and Death bargaining line by line, is quick and exact. The quarrel of father and son is matched speech for speech and is among the best set debates in Euripides. The deception of Heracles turns on wordplay both true and false: she is outside the family, and she is dead. The closing scene’s handling of the veil and the hand is stagecraft of a high order. Charged: Admetus’ long laments repeat, the chorus’s consolations are formulaic, and the turn at Heracles’ entrance is abrupt.
Filippo Brunelleschi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The loggia is made with a lightness its sources did not have: columns slender enough to need iron ties, carrying small domes on pendentives that turn each square bay into a covered room; the pietra serena exact and the articulation clean. The making is load-bearing where it most matters, in the measure. Against it: the departures of those who carried on the work, the architrave bent down at the end that Brunelleschi’s biographer records him objecting to, show a design not wholly commanded on site; the junctions where the loggia meets the hospital and where the front ends are less resolved than the run of bays; and the hospital behind is sound building, not exceptional. Its maker’s dome (9.1) and the Pazzi Chapel (8.2) both command more.
Miguel de Cervantes · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the Spanish, as far as a reader without a native ear can follow it; the rhythm of its sentences is neither credited nor charged. The dialogue is the making at its best: Monipodio’s court with its malapropisms and its mix of thieves’ cant and devotion; the dogs’ talk, where narrator and critic make a two-part prose that comments on itself as it goes; Vidriera’s sayings, a string of aphorisms each given its occasion. The scene: the turnstile and the wall in Carrizales’s house, the seducer working from outside inward through the household. The control of the frame in the Casamiento is exact. The charge is in the romances: long rhetorical speeches, recognitions by coincidence and token, plots on a chain of accidents the writing does not make inevitable.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure included, read to the same anchors as every medium. The command is in the masonry: rubble cores faced with coursed veneers, walls built thick at the base and stepped thinner as they rise to carry four storeys of stone in mud mortar, the banded veneers of the late campaigns laid with a precision their makers then plastered over. Floors and roofs rest on large primary beams and secondary poles of wood felled and carried from distant ranges, and the plan held to its geometry and orientation across generations, without metal tools, draught animals or the arch. The limit: post, beam and bearing wall repeated, no span or vault of the first order, and Threatening Rock long braced against rather than reckoned with.
Michelozzo · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
The command is high and load-bearing in the front: the rustication graded and cut so that the light catches each storey differently; the cornice, a projection of great size carried in stone over the street and balanced on the wall, an engineering feat for its day; the string courses with the windows seated on them; the proportion of the diminishing storeys; pietra forte of the first quality. The court is elegant and well built. The costs: at its corners a single column carries two arches, so the upper windows crowd and the rhythm breaks; the front’s openings follow the bay rather than a strict symmetry; and the Riccardi continuation executed a given design.
Wifredo Lam · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of gouache at mural scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing. Colour: the blues and greens are set against the warm ochres and oranges so that the field glows without a light source and no figure dominates, and the paper left showing gives breath to a dense surface. Line: the long verticals and the curves of buttocks, breasts and crescents set a rhythm across the field, and limb and stalk interlock at every junction so that the eye cannot separate figure from ground. To keep a water medium coherent across more than five square metres is a real feat. The costs: schematic, repeated drawing of the figures, passages of fill, little variety of touch.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making carries weight. Sjöström’s performance is the film’s instrument: a face that registers a lifetime of withheld feeling and its slow loosening, and the last close-up rests on it. Gunnar Fischer’s photography divides the orders: the overexposed, shadowless street of the first dream, the summer light of the strawberry patch, the forest of the second dream. The entrances into memory are made by staging and light rather than optical device, so that past and present share a frame. Thulin’s monologue in the car, Wifstrand’s mother and Andersson’s double role are exact, and the script’s design, each station a mirror, is a strong construction. The costs are several and visible, and they hold the making well below the summit of the medium: Nordgren’s score is conventional, the hitchhikers and the Almans are played broad, the car interiors are studio work, and the dialogue is often explanatory.
James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the plan and the section first: a difficult sloping site, a road, a garage, a right of way, an old building and a new gallery are resolved into one sequence of levels and turns, and the drum is set at the exact point where they meet. The detailing commands its argument: the stone laid in bands as a veneer with its edges and joints shown, the fallen blocks, the green steel against the stone, the rails at a scale the hand notices. The galleries are well proportioned and well lit by laylights. The costs: the structure is plain concrete under a skin and is not the making’s subject; some of the colour detailing is crude at close range by intention, and the intention does not always redeem it; the entrance hall is cramped beside the rooms above.
Bret Easton Ellis · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Ellis’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a register, and of its control over the length of a long book. The flat inventory sentence never slips into the irony that would let the reader out; the comic dialogue of the dinners, where no one hears what anyone says, is exactly timed; the scene of the business cards turns a few cards on a table into a duel of status and envy; the music chapters are exact pastiches of the record guide, earnest and banal. The recurring excuse, “I have to return some videotapes”, is placed like a refrain. Charged: the voice’s monotony is a design but also a ceiling, and the sentence, chosen to be anonymous, can do little besides list; and the killing chapters lose control of their own escalation and become catalogues of the unbearable whose effect diminishes with each.
Almohad builders, under Abd al-Mu'min and Yaqub al-Mansur · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on the making, structure first. A tower of some 69 m in rubble stone, standing for some eight centuries in a seismic region, its ramp climbing round six vaulted rooms that brace the shaft, is engineering of a high order for its time and place. The proportion is exact and calm. The ornament is set where the eye needs it: windows and arcading grow richer toward the top, the sebka panels are scaled to be read from the ground, and each face varies one scheme. In the hall the muqarnas vaults are among the early mature examples in the Maghreb, and the polylobed arches are cleanly carried. What holds it: the fabric is rubble behind its dressing, made to be rendered and now bare, and the execution of the hall is plain by intent.
Franz Marc · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the anchors used for any medium. The command is strong. The colour is managed at full saturation across a large field without turning to noise: reds, oranges and yellows against deep blues and greens, with the deer’s blue placed exactly where the reds converge. The faceting is drawn with conviction, the long diagonals holding the plane together, and the deer’s arched neck carries the painter’s long study of animal bodies into the new idiom without losing the creature. The costs are charged: at the left and right the facets crowd and the animals become hard to read, some passages are worked to a sameness, and the joining of rounded animal and crystalline plane is not everywhere solved.
Konstantin Melnikov · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The making is ingenious and economical: a brick lattice that carries the house and holds its windows, each cell glazed or filled; timber floors spanning the cylinders with no columns in the principal rooms; the intersection of two curved walls carried out in brick, with the stair in the joint. All of it was done with ordinary materials in a period of scarcity, and it has stood nearly a century. The making is load-bearing in the strict sense: the structure is the expression. Held below the first rank by execution and finish: the render and the detailing are plain, the interior joinery is modest, and the structure’s tolerance of ground movement has proved limited.
David Lynch · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in two departments and is seamed in others. The sound by Lynch and Alan Splet is laid with exact control, every room given its own hiss and the cry pitched to wear. The photography by Frederick Elmes and Herbert Cardwell commands black and white: deep blacks, faces cut out of darkness, a light that falls on Henry’s hair like a halo. Lynch’s small sets give a whole city with almost nothing, the child is a practical effect that still convinces, and Jack Nance’s stillness and stalled reaction carry the film. The costs are real and not slight: the planet and the head in the street are model work whose cheapness shows; some supporting playing is broad by intention and stiff in fact; and five years of shooting leave seams of pace, with the dinner and the pencil factory running longer than their work.
Thomas Cole · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at exhibition scale. The making bears the load: the meeting of storm and light along the diagonal is a matter of tonal control, and the light breaking from under the cloud onto the plain is managed so that the sunlit half reads as distance and calm while the dark half stays close and heavy. The far valley is painted in fine, legible detail, fields and farms at the scale of a map, without losing the atmosphere that sets it back; the distant rain is laid with restraint. The costs: the foreground trees and rocks are worked in a formula of the period, the broken tree is a stock device, the painter’s figure is summary, and beside the best of Turner or Constable the handling is careful rather than inventive.
Rainer Werner Fassbinder · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The command is real and lean. Jürgen Jürges’s camera holds its compositions with complete assurance; the framing through doors and rails is exact; colour is placed rather than recorded, the yellow of the beer garden and the red of the bar; the editing keeps each scene at the length its stare requires and no longer. Brigitte Mira’s Emmi is a great performance, comic, proud, frightened and small-minded in turn without a false beat, and in the tableaux the arrangement of bodies is the meaning. The costs: El Hedi ben Salem’s narrow range, which the film turns to account but cannot always hide; children and colleagues set at caricature; flat coverage of transitional scenes; and the doctor’s speech, which is exposition.
Mastodon · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Read to the elder anchors, the playing is of a high order and load-bearing. Dailor’s drumming carries melody and argument at once, his fills placed as phrases rather than ornament. Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher interlock in harmonised lines and contrary figures that a less exact band would blur, and Troy Sanders’s bass doubles and departs with purpose. The arrangement of Hearts Alive, sustained over thirteen minutes without loss of pressure, is the record’s best making, and Bayles gives the weight definition without polishing it away. Against that: the vocals are the weakest craft, shouted and barked with little command of line, and the mix, dense in the low middle, sometimes buries the guitars’ detail under the drums.
John Barth · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged on Barth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a pastiche sustained at great length without a lapse into the modern: the diction, syntax, oaths and invective of about 1700, chapter titles in the manner of Fielding and Smollett, Hudibrastic couplets bad in exactly the way the hero’s verse should be, and forged documents with their own spelling and voice. The opening sentence sets the tone in one turn of period syntax, sizing up its hero as “more ambitious than talented, and yet more talented than prudent”. The plot’s machinery is engineered to its last revelation, and the set pieces, the debates, the invectives and the journal installments, are built with precision. Three charges hold it below the top: prolixity, the joke extended past its life in many scenes; a tonal monotony, the same comic speed for a lost purse or a massacre; and persons who are mostly types, Joan and Anna drawn through the men’s need of them.
Qing builders, under the Qianlong Emperor; rebuilt under Cixi · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building and landscape, engineering included. The command at the scale of the whole is of the first rank: a lake dug and graded to serve as the capital’s reservoir and the garden’s mirror; a hill reshaped to carry an axis of stairs and terraces up to a tower on a high stone base; every major building placed to be seen across water. The timber framing, bracket sets, glazed roofs and painted beams are the court’s craft at full command, and the Long Corridor, of 273 bays painted and joined, is a feat of consistent making. The brick-vaulted Sea of Wisdom and the cast-bronze pavilion show command beyond timber. The costs: the rebuilding of the 1880s was made in haste and on a tighter purse, the building engineering extends nothing, and much painted work has been renewed many times.
Peter Behrens · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The making with Karl Bernhard is assured: three-hinged steel arches spanning the hall and carrying heavy crane runways, the stanchions shaped to their forces and resolved at the foot in visible pin bearings, the glazing set inclined between them in large clear panels, the roof’s facets producing the gable outline. The concrete corners are finely made, their horizontal steel bands giving the mass a rusticated skin, their batter matching the lean of the glass. The command is high and on the long side load-bearing. Against it, the gable’s constructional fiction, a skilled representation of a structure that is not there; and the hall is one well-solved type, not many problems resolved together.
Jackson Pollock · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil and casein on canvas at mural scale, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing: the rhythm is made, not found. The intervals between the uprights are irregular enough to live and regular enough to drive; the colour is held across six metres without a break of key; the curves are swung at the scale of arm and shoulder, so that the gesture is part of what is seen. The flung and thinned passages are placed, not scattered, and open the field where the uprights would wall it. The costs: passages thick and muddied where layers were worked over one another, colour sometimes arbitrary beside the uprights, a range of mark narrower than the poured canvases’ (Autumn Rhythm, 9.0). Command of energy, not yet of surface.
The Stooges · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing. Gallucci’s production keeps the band whole and stripped, and the sound is the content. Ron Asheton’s guitar, wah-pedalled and riff-bound, is narrow in vocabulary and exact in use; Scott Asheton’s drumming holds the vamps without slackening across seven minutes; Dave Alexander’s bass on Dirt is a model of restraint. Steve Mackay’s saxophone is placed to fight the guitar rather than decorate it. The voice ranges from the croon inside Dirt to the scream of T.V. Eye. The faults: the range of means is narrow, every track built on a riff and a vamp; the mix is dense and at points muddy, the bass sometimes lost; and the title track’s long stretches are held by energy more than arrangement.
Geoffrey Bawa · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium: massing, roof, section, and the joining of building to water. The composition of the roofs is masterly: hipped tiers of several sizes related in pitch and proportion, so that from every side they read as one family rising to the chamber, while the deep eaves and white columns give the copper mass its lightness. The section answers the climate. The siting is exact: the island, the level of the water against the base and the reflection are set so that the building floats. The construction, a concrete frame and copper-sheathed roofs raised in about two and a half years, was sound and has lasted. Held below the top: there is no structural invention to speak of, the frame conventional and the roof a cladding of a known form, and the chamber within is plainer than the exterior.
Frank Ocean · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing on the best tracks. Ocean’s voice is the instrument: a low, conversational baritone that turns to falsetto at the point of feeling, phrasing that runs behind the beat, and a control of breath that makes Bad Religion’s climb land. The production, chiefly Ocean and Malay, keeps the sound warm and close, with real organ, strings and guitar, and Pyramids’ transition and closing groove are arranged as composition. The guests are placed with care: Earl Sweatshirt’s dry verse, André 3000’s slowed inwardness, John Mayer’s guitar. The faults fall on a share of the record: the short pieces are thin, Monks is muddy, some songs rest on one texture throughout, and the voice’s mumble sometimes blurs where it should cut.
Sufjan Stevens · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The arranging is the strength and in places load-bearing: Chicago’s string ostinato and choir, the layered metre of Come On! Feel the Illinoise!, the minimalist piano and mallets of The Tallest Man, the Broadest Shoulders, the brass voicings of The Predatory Wasp, each placed so that a dense texture stays legible. Stevens plays much of it himself and multitracks it, and the voice, soft and narrow, is used exactly in the intimate songs, close and unadorned in Casimir Pulaski Day. The faults weigh on a share of the record: it was recorded at home, the drums are thin and sometimes boxy, the low end is light, the choirs sound small when the arrangement asks for mass, and the voice cannot carry the climaxes it writes. Below Low at 9.0 and Remain in Light at 8.7; a tenth under m b v at 8.5.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of mixed media at the scale of a wall, read to the same anchors as every medium. Credited: the ground built in layers, burnt, scraped and crusted until it reads as earth; the tiers of the pyramid given depth by perspective and value in a coarse, resistant material; the attached objects set into the field so that they read as found in the ground rather than glued to a picture; and the wire used as line, the one fine drawing in the work, placed so that its paths lead the eye to the apex. The making is load-bearing in the wires and the crust. The costs: the drawing of the pyramid is schematic, the hand is coarse by design, and the range of colour is narrow, earth, grey and black.
Chamberlin, Powell and Bon · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is long and even: one grade of bush-hammered concrete carried over two decades and a vast site, its texture the same from tower to parapet; towers founded over and beside an Underground line; a deck carrying courts, lakes and gardens over roads and parking; an arts centre built deep below grade, its fly tower wrapped in a glasshouse. The detail is of a high order: the vaulted roofs, the sawtooth balconies, the window frames and planters, the rhythm of the columns under the terraces, the fitted plans of the flats. The costs: the concert hall’s acoustics needed reworking more than once; the centre’s circulation had to be painted on the floor; the podium’s edges are crude beside the courts.
Mastodon · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium is high and load-bearing in the instruments. Dailor’s drumming is the record’s distinction: melodic, constantly varied, leading the riffs rather than following them, without losing the beat. Hinds’s and Kelliher’s guitars interlock in counterpoint, and the leads, in The Czar’s last part above all, are shaped rather than merely fast. O’Brien keeps a dense arrangement legible: every guitar part placed, the bass audible, the keyboards inside the mass without softening it. The long pieces are paced, and The Last Baron’s thirteen minutes hold. The costs are real. The singing, in three untrained voices, is often strained, the harmonies at the peaks are thin against the instruments, and the delivery buries the words the frame needs. It stands below Low at 9.0 and Kid A at 9.2.
Hadhrami builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, to the anchors of every medium. To raise unfired mud brick through many storeys requires walls battered from a thick base to a thin top, careful coursing, timber floors and lintels set to tie the box, and a skin of lime on the upper storeys and roofs to shed the rare violent rains; drainage spouts and the renewal of plaster are part of the building’s working life. The craft is held in the living practice of builders who know the material, not in drawings, and the command is real across hundreds of houses. Held where it is because the engineering is ingenious within narrow means and does not reach the integrated precision of the great stone structures, and the work’s weakness against water is part of the record of its making.
Leon Battista Alberti · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The composition of the front is exact: four columns on a single high base, the arches cut deep so that the wall reads as mass, the entablature carrying the inscription across the whole. The flank is one of the finest pieces of wall design of its century, its piers and arches of a gravity the Florentine builders had not reached, each arch the right size for a sarcophagus and the rhythm right for a street. The stone is finely worked. The chapel revetment is the highest craft of its kind in Italy in the 1450s, Agostino’s low relief, drapery cut in lines like water, made to the measure of the piers. Against this: the shell is a screen and extends no engineering, the dome was never attempted, the junction with the Gothic wall is managed by ignoring it, and the executant’s changes, against which Alberti wrote, show in the details.
Alfred Stieglitz · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the hand camera and of the photogravure. The making bears the load: the exposure caught at a moment when the straw hat, the gangway, the stair and the figures below fall into a structure; the vantage from the upper deck that sets the gangway on a diagonal and gives the picture its two worlds; the exposure holding the white of the walkway and the dark of the lower deck together. The gravure, made under Stieglitz’s eye, has a deep and velvety scale. What holds the axis is the found picture’s limits: figures cut awkwardly at the edges, the crowd at the lower left a dense mass that the tones do not fully separate, and a range of means narrower than a painter’s.
Harappan builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in the hydraulics. Fired brick made to one ratio across the city; walls laid in a bond; drains of brick with removable covers, corbelled where they pass under; wells lined with wedge-shaped brick so that the courses close into true circles; the Bath sealed by a layer of bitumen behind a skin of brick on edge in gypsum, and drained by a channel roofed in corbelling. These are exact, they worked, and the Bath still holds its shape. What holds the axis at 8.4: the structure is modest, walls and timber roofs, no true arch, no great span and no height. The command is of a city’s water, fabric and levels.
Mughal, under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command of material is high and even: red sandstone and white marble laid with the precision of Shah Jahan’s works; the marble panels inlaid with black stone and the striping of domes and minarets exact; the cusped arches and the proportions of the facade controlled. The platform and its stairs are a large and sound work of earth and masonry. Structurally the building attempts nothing difficult: the domes are of moderate span on the tradition’s ordinary means, the minarets of moderate height, the hall shallow. The making is fine without being load-bearing in the sense in which the Pantheon’s concrete is; the skill is evident and sufficient, not decisive.
Massive Attack · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and in places load-bearing. The production is exact in its space: the low end heavy and warm, the beats dry and placed behind the voice, room left around each part so that the slowness reads as poise, not emptiness. The sources are judged closely: a jazz bassline made into a threat in Safe from Harm, a borrowed figure made into a lullaby in Daydreaming. The strings on Unfinished Sympathy are written for the track, not laid over it. Nelson’s voice carries the highest moments with plain force, and Horace Andy’s fragile tenor is placed with care. The faults fall across a share of the record: the raps are limited in flow and diction, laconic by design but often thin; Be Thankful is slight; Five Man Army’s arrangement idles; the programming of Daydreaming and Lately is plainer than what it carries.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing in the colour and the line. The colour is saturated, set in patches whose edges are soft enough to float and firm enough to hold, with complementaries side by side so that the field vibrates. The black line runs in many weights, from the heavy divide to fast, fine hooks and strokes, and carries the rhythm of the whole. The light ground is kept open between the patches, so the picture breathes. The costs: the handling is uneven by design, thin and scrubbed in places beside passages more worked, and the dense left reads in places as crowded rather than ordered. Fluent and purposeful, without the decision in every interval that the top anchors hold.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
What bears weight is the performances, and they are among the finest in the medium: Ullmann’s Marianne passing over five hours from bright deference through humiliation to self-possession; Josephson’s Johan, charming, vain and frightened, whose cruelty in the fifth episode is legible in the charm of the first. Bergman’s dialogue lets a speech reveal more than the speaker intends, and Nykvist’s patient close-ups and long takes hold a face through a whole movement of feeling. The costs are real and weigh. The 16 millimetre image and the television staging are plain and at times flat, with zooms a feature would not use; some speeches turn into essays, the dialogue explaining what the faces have already shown; the second episode’s exposition is slack. Performance, dialogue and the plotting of the gaps are commanded; the visual grammar is serviceable rather than load-bearing.
Etruscan · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of terracotta at about life size, to the same anchors as every medium. The making bears load in the upper half: the faces are modelled with a firm, soft fullness, eyes, brows and lips cut cleanly, the smile carried in the volume of the cheek rather than drawn on it; the hair is ordered in long ridged braids; the hands are separate and articulate, placed in the air so precisely that the gesture reads across a room. The man’s arm about the woman is resolved without strain in clay, which does not forgive overhang. To make an object of this size and fire it without collapse or ruinous cracking is a command of material of a high order. The costs are charged: the lower bodies are flat and schematic, the legs scarcely modelled under the cloth, and the join at the waist is abrupt, a convention resolved by convention rather than by observation.
Ragnar Östberg · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, and the making is among the most accomplished of its age in brick and handicraft. The walls of large handmade brick, laid to a living surface; the copper roofs; the stonework of the arcade; the carved timber and the painted roof of the council chamber; the gold mosaic of the Golden Hall; and the work of dozens of artists and trades held under one architect over twelve years. The control of mass and silhouette is close, from every shore. The cost is in structure: it is conventional, and its engineering asks nothing new of the medium. The command is load-bearing in the surfaces and the silhouette, less so in what stands behind them.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimitsu; rebuilt 1955 · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and garden, on the making as it stands: the design of 1398 executed by the craftsmen of 1955 and 1987. The proportions are fine: the broad, low ground floor, the slightly narrower second, the small top storey under the spreading roof, the stack read from a distance as one figure. Each manner is carried cleanly in its own vocabulary of posts, brackets, windows and rails. The lacquer and leaf are among the most exacting surface work in Japanese building. The garden is a master’s, its stones set to read from the shore, its islands placed to break the pond and lengthen it, the hill borrowed. The structure is a modest timber frame with no engineering wager.
Jorge Luis Borges · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Borges’s Spanish. The late plain style is a command, not a lapse: short sentences, few adjectives, a voice that sounds dictated and is, with the comic dryness and the exact placing of a strange word that are his signature. The last paragraphs of the title story, where the narrator considers burning the book, does not, and hides it instead on a shelf of the Biblioteca Nacional, are as controlled as anything he wrote. “El espejo y la máscara” has the cadence of a saga; “El otro” carries its double’s dialogue without a false step. Held well below the summit on three charges: some stories are perfunctory in finish, “El soborno” and parts of “Utopía”; “There Are More Things” imitates a manner, and its inventory of the incomprehensible is weaker than the earlier lists; and the plainness sometimes thins to summary.
Sidney Lumet · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium bears weight in the script and the acting. Chayefsky’s speeches are built as arias, rising, turning and returning, and are written to be heard. Finch plays a man coming apart and lit from within at once; Dunaway’s Diana is fast, funny and empty; Beatty makes one scene the centre of the film; Straight’s grief is complete in minutes; Duvall’s Hackett is a corporate animal. Lumet stages speech fluently, and Alan Heim’s cutting keeps a talking film moving. The charges fall where they matter: Holden’s scenes with Dunaway are stiff and the writing there grows explanatory; the speeches run long and some say the same thing twice; much of the camera is serviceable rather than load-bearing; the radicals are written as cartoons.
Louise Nevelson · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of assembled and painted wood, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the effect depends on placement within each box, diagonals against verticals, turned curves against sawn edges, dense cells against open ones; on the stacking of boxes of unequal depth so that the face advances and recedes; and on the black, laid matte and uniform, so that it absorbs light and the shadow reads as substance. The rhythm across the face is controlled: no area goes slack into storage, and none becomes a focal point that would break the wall into a picture. The costs are charged: the joinery is of crates and the facture is not refined, by design; at close range some cells are routine fills.
Andrei Tarkovsky · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The making bears weight. Sven Nykvist’s photography: the low northern light, the drained colour, the slow tracks along the shore and through the house, the fire held in a single moving frame. The sound has the same command: wind, sea, herding calls, shakuhachi, jets, and the Bach only at the threshold and the end. The house and its model, built by Anna Asp, rhyme exactly. Josephson carries the long speeches and the silence after the vow; Edwall gives Otto a comic gravity. The costs: the dialogue, written by a director working through translation, is stiff in places and declaims its ideas; Fleetwood’s Adelaide is played at a pitch the rest of the film never reaches, her hysteria and its sedation staged broadly; Julia and Victor are underwritten; and the first part’s talk is filmed more than made into cinema.
Denis Johnson · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Johnson’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the sentence and of speech: the talk of soldiers and agents is exact in idiom and rhythm, bored, profane and abruptly lyrical; the narrative sentence moves from flat report to vision without a seam; the Vietnamese characters are given an English of their own, without condescension. Single scenes are made with great skill. Three charges hold the axis below the higher reaches: the management of a long book is uneven, with stretches where incident gathers without pressure; several minor figures are hard to tell apart; and the plot of the operation is so withheld that the reader’s confusion at times reads as the author’s.
Mark Rothko · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of acrylic on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing where it matters. The edge between the fields is brushed by hand and held straight without the deadness of a ruled line. The grey is laid in visible strokes, so that it breathes against the black. The black is dense and near opaque, weighted so that it presses without swallowing the grey. The margin is cut clean, the one hard element set against the hand in the fields. The proportion of black to grey is placed with authority. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, and acrylic denied him the layered translucency that was the craft of his classic canvases.
Ustad Ahmad Lahori (attributed), under Shah Jahan · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of material is of the first rank: red sandstone dressed and carved to fine tolerance round a circuit of walls; white marble inlaid with hardstones in the Diwan-i-Khas and the Rang Mahal, the flowers cut so that the stone reads as painting; the carved marble screen of the Khas Mahal; the cascades and basins of the water channel, fed by the canal of Ali Mardan Khan, an engineering of water as well as of stone. The structural means are the tradition’s ordinary means, trabeate halls and arcades, vaults and domes of moderate span, with nothing that strains or extends them. The making is load-bearing in the marble pavilions and the gates; the walls are competent rather than exceptional as fortification for their century.
Anonymous · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of carving in stone, judged to the same anchors as every medium, with flint tools on a soft oolite. The making bears load: the figure’s knowledge is its volumes, and the volumes are commanded. The transitions between masses, breast to belly, belly to thigh, the fold over the pubis, are rounded and sure; the symmetry is close without being mechanical; the back is resolved as fully as the front; the rows of the head are cut with regular, patient precision round the whole skull; the bracelets are incised at a scale of millimetres. The costs are charged: the arms are summary and flattened, the hands barely indicated, the legs taper without articulation. The command is complete over what was attempted and narrower in range than the summit of the medium.
Athenian (architect unrecorded) · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. This is fine Attic marble construction of the high classical decade: dry-laid ashlar and column drums, the entablature complete and still in place after two and a half millennia and the earthquakes of Attica, which is itself evidence of the making, and much of the marble coffered ceiling of the east colonnade still over the walk. The Ionic frieze is joined to the Doric peristyle cleanly. Held below the top: the proportions are slightly heavy, and the cella shows a change of plan in the building, an interior colonnade, now lost and argued in its form and date, set in a room barely wide enough to take it. Assured, load-bearing craft; the summit of the order’s craft stands on the Acropolis above.
Pablo Picasso · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil in a single upright figure, to the same anchors as any medium. The drawing is sure: the long contour of the back, the knees and elbows set at angles against each other, the hands with exaggerated fingers that remain hands. The colour discipline is complete: every blue modulated, greens and greys kept within the key, the brown of the guitar placed once and not repeated. The figure is fitted to its frame. The costs: the modelling is soft and academic, sound but not pushed; the paint is thin and even, with none of the load-bearing stroke of the Starry Night; the distortion is El Greco’s more than the hand’s own invention; the ground is perfunctory, and the foot at the lower left is weak.
Terrence Malick · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight; its costs fall on whole departments, not on small shares. Jörg Widmer’s photography, largely by available light, holds faces and walls, the valley at every hour and the prison lit by one window, the camera moving through rooms as if breathing in them. Valerie Pachner’s Fani carries the film’s second half almost without speech; August Diehl makes a stubbornness that is not certainty; Bruno Ganz’s judge is, in one scene, a whole conscience failing. James Newton Howard’s score keeps under the image. Against this stand three charges, none small. The language mix jars: villagers speaking accented English beside untranslated German leave a seam in every scene. The very wide lens bends faces in close interiors until it becomes mannerism. The editing loosens in the third hour, where sequences are assembled by mood rather than cut to measure. Each cost is carried in every scene it touches, and the figure carries all three.
Park Chan-wook · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Read to the anchors every desk shares, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight in many departments. Chung Chung-hoon’s photography: green and sodium light, a cell papered like a cheap hotel room, the corridor in lateral depth. Jo Yeong-wook’s score, waltzes and strings that give the cruelty a ceremonial pace. Choi Min-sik’s Dae-su, a buffoon in the first scenes, then a beast, then a man on his knees, one performance across the whole range; Yoo Ji-tae’s Woo-jin, cold and immaculate. The cutting carries fifteen years in minutes. The costs are real: Kang Hye-jung’s Mi-do is written thinly, the penthouse revelations are long and expository, some digital effects have dated, and the antagonist’s omnipotence rests on convenience rather than construction. Accomplished, often load-bearing craft, below the exactness of the medium’s most exact films.
Gordon Bunshaft (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high in proportion and detail: the slab’s thinness; the relation of the lifted block to the tower and the street; the fineness of the mullion grid and the play of clear and opaque glass; the columns of the ground floor standing back so that the block appears to float. The skin was carried clear of the frame and sealed, and its upkeep was designed into it in the roof gondola. The costs: the frame behind the skin is ordinary steel engineering of its day, and the interiors were competent office floors, not load-bearing craft. The failure of the original wall is weighed under The Imperishable, though it marks the limit of what was known of its making. First-rank proportion on a plain structure.
Bernd and Hilla Becher · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of large-format black and white photography and of the grid. The making is exact and bears load. The verticals are true across hundreds of pictures; the raised viewpoint keeps the tower undistorted; the light is chosen by waiting for weather, and its evenness gives the full tonal range in brick, steel and concrete; the prints hold detail from the rivet to the sky. Above all the consistency, held across decades, countries and two hands, is itself a feat of craft: grids made from pictures taken years apart read as one session. What holds the axis below the top is that the range is narrow by design, one view, one light, one scale, so that the hand asks less of itself frame by frame than a crowded picture does. The difficulty is sustained more than various.
Roy Lichtenstein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is exact and load-bearing. The contour is drawn with a firmness and economy the source does not have; the dots are graded in size and density so that the sky reads at a distance and dissolves near; the primaries are set so that the red and yellow of the burst outweigh the whole left panel; the lettering of WHAAM! is drawn to be read as sound. The composition improves its source, simplifying the planes and opening the space. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, the hand is suppressed as a matter of principle, and the drawing of the attacking plane and the smoke is stiffer than the burst. Level with the best of its decade, below the summit of the medium.
Snøhetta · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Command of building, structure and engineering included, read to the same anchors as every desk. The roof is the masterwork of the making: a field of planes, folds and edges in stone, set so that it can be walked safely in a northern winter, drained, and carried down into the water, its cut giving texture and grip without breaking the whole. The foyer’s glazing, very large panes on glass fins, the oak of the wave wall and the dark oak of the hall show a high and consistent command of material, and building on a reclaimed edge of the fjord is sound engineering. The costs: the reported cracking and staining of the marble, a fault of specification or detailing on the very surface the design required to endure, charged to the making as it stands; and the plain handling of the fly tower and the factory.
Sigur Rós · Music
7.9 · Tier III
The making is load-bearing in the textures. The bowed guitar, treated with reverb until it sounds like a struck and sustained string section, gives Svefn-g-englar and Ný batterí their substance; the strings of Starálfur carry the song rather than decorate it; the brass entry in Ný batterí and the release in Viðrar vel are timed and balanced so that the scale is felt and the mix stays clear. The costs fall across the record: plain and sometimes heavy-footed drumming, one dynamic shape so that the craft repeats its solution, an ordinary arrangement in Hjartað hamast, a falsetto that stays in one register. Below Remain in Light at 8.7, a little above Zooropa at 8.2.
Doris Salcedo · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, with the making by the artist’s studio and Tate’s engineers credited to the work. The command is high and hidden, which is its achievement: a cut the length of a working floor that reads not as a cut but as a fracture, with the irregular, branching edges of concrete broken under stress; a progression from a line too fine to see to a fissure a hand can enter, made continuous; a steel fence cast into its walls so that it reads as structure exposed rather than material added; all in a public building kept open. The making is load-bearing: if the crack looked made, the work would fail. Held at 8.4 because the command is of one effect, the hand is invisible by design and cannot be weighed directly, and some of the credit rests on report.
Agnes Martin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of gilding, oil and incised line, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing. The leaf is laid over a square at about the height of a standing person without its joins breaking the field into decoration. The incising is a cut through a fragile metal skin, in long straight lines by hand along a rule, with no means of correction, so that one slip would mark the field. The interval is held even across the square, and the layer beneath is chosen so that the cut reads as a line of darkness in the gold. The hand’s slight unevenness is part of the achievement, a human line inside the rule. What holds the axis is range: one field, one mark, one interval, narrow by design, asking less of the hand in variety than calibrated colour or the figure.
Beach House · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, and the making is high and load-bearing where the builds carry the meaning. Coady’s production gives the record depth and air without losing the organ’s warmth; Scally’s guitar figures, slide and delay set against the keyboard, are economical and exactly placed; Legrand’s voice, low and grainy, harmonised with itself, is the most distinctive instrument, sung with real control of breath and swell. The arrangements grow by addition and the mixes keep every layer audible inside the mass, which is harder than it sounds. Held from the top by a narrow palette held across the whole, tempos and timbres so close that the craft repeats itself in the middle; drum parts plain where they enter; and weaker songwriting in Other People and New Year.
David Foster Wallace · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on Wallace’s English, with no translation between. At its best the command is as high as anything he wrote: Fogle’s monologue holds a hundred pages on the voice of one articulate, evasive, self-mocking young man; the opening’s catalogue of a field is exact and musical; the Rand and Drinion conversation sustains a long two-hander in which one speaker is almost all attention; the Lane Dean chapter renders minute-by-minute strain without a slack sentence. The ear for bureaucratic idiom and Midwestern speech is exact. The charges are those of the assembly and of drafts: several sections are plainly unrevised, characters’ facts and ages shift between sections, as the Editor’s Note acknowledges, some passages are notes in prose, and the self-commentary of “David Wallace” sometimes falls into the tic it diagnoses.
César Pelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is of the first rank in the structure, and it bears load in the bridge: a record height carried in high-strength reinforced concrete, a core and a ring of round columns tied by ring beams, when the supertall was a steel type; the bridge set on hinged legs and left free at its ends, so that two swaying towers are joined without being tied together; two shafts built by rival contractors to one finish. The cladding is detailed with care, stainless sunshades and banded glass giving the shafts their fluted, faceted surface. The costs: the setback crown and the pinnacles are handled with less sureness than the body, the junction of shaft and mall at the ground is uncertain, and the interiors bear no weight in the work.
Wassily Kandinsky · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at the main joints. Colour: three primaries carried at full force across about two metres without either half overpowering the other, the yellow light enough to advance, the blue dark enough to hold its weight, the red placed to bind. Edge: two kinds commanded in one canvas, ruled black lines and sharp planes against the graded halo of the disc, laid as a soft transition without muddying the blue. Ground: a pale field that cools across the canvas, so that the halves sit in different light. Line: the serpentine drawn with a freedom the ruled lines lack. The costs: the small forms are clean but diagrammatic, with a draughtsman’s evenness that reads in places as illustration, and the touch is uniform where the large structure asks for variety.
Howard Hawks · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the sound and the playing. Hawks’s direction of an ensemble at speed, lines stepping on lines while the important words still land, is a command few films of any period equal. Rosalind Russell holds her own against Cary Grant and often takes the scene; Grant’s Walter is quick, charming and appalling; Ralph Bellamy plays the dull man precisely enough to be funny without being contemptible. The press-room chorus is cast and timed as one instrument, and Lederer’s script keeps the play’s mechanism and rewrites its voice. The charges: Joseph Walker’s photography is serviceable and the staging largely theatrical, one room shot from conventional set-ups; there is almost no visual invention; Mollie’s leap is staged perfunctorily.
Daft Punk · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is load-bearing in the best tracks. Sample, replay and filter are joined so that the seams cannot be heard; Digital Love moves from a filtered verse to a full solo without a break in the sound. The cutting of the voice in Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger is exact, and its build by addition is clear. Veridis Quo holds slow counterpoint on a narrow palette for nearly six minutes. The compression that makes the whole record breathe in time is a choice and a signature. The costs are real: High Life, Short Circuit and much of Too Long are one loop with filter moves for development, the master is loud and fatiguing over an hour, and the harmonic range is narrow, which is why the figure stands below Low, at 9.0 here. High command of a narrow means.
Rem Koolhaas (OMA) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The structure is the building’s best making: the inclined planes of white concrete and the long walls of the hall work as one system, Arup’s engineering carrying large openings and steep slopes without a frame expressed or a skin hung, so that the structure bears the idea itself. The corrugated glass at the hall’s ends is an inventive answer to acoustic and visual demands together. The interiors are made with deliberate variety, the gold grain a clever, cheap and effective surface. The costs: the circulation is confusing; the secondary rooms are a collage of finishes of uneven quality; and the overrun speaks of a making not fully in command of its means.
Duke Ellington · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The playing is at a very high level. The writing of 1937 for the diminuendo and crescendo is among Ellington’s most intricate for the band, and the orchestra of 1956 plays it with full command; Gonsalves sustains invention for twenty-seven choruses without losing time or the thread; bass and drums hold the tempo under a growing noise; Hodges’s tone is complete. The costs fall on the recording, which is part of the medium: the central soloist is heard at a distance, because he played into a microphone other than the one feeding the record; and, by the account made public with the complete edition of 1999, part of what is presented as the festival was remade in the studio, with applause added.
Radiohead · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with invention weighed elsewhere, is real and load-bearing in places. Nigel Godrich and the band keep a dense, quickly made record legible: the stacked toms of There There move the song forward as one body; the distorted synthesiser bass and pressed drums of Myxomatosis are the song’s content; Sail to the Moon balances piano and voice exactly, its falsetto the best singing on the record. The faults are several: the speed of the making flattens some mixes, Backdrifts and The Gloaming sit on stock electronic textures, and two songs are arranged as sketches. A rung below The Dark Side of the Moon and Low, each at 9.0.
Francesco Bartolomeo Rastrelli · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on the making as it stands. The handling of length is the first command. Rastrelli kept a very long front alive by grouping and doubling the columns, stepping the projections and breaking the cornice, so that the rhythm changes along the river, and the corners turn without slack. The Jordan Staircase holds light and gilding in one rising space. The rebuilding of 1838 to 1839 is credited as the making as it stands: iron trusses and beams over the great halls in place of timber, and the palace reoccupied about fifteen months after the fire. The costs: the fronts depend on applied ornament, and the repetition slides at times into monotony. A command of scale and sequence, held below the highest marks for that.
Bridget Riley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting in two values, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing, since the effect depends wholly on exactness. The panel is painted by hand, the progression calculated and drawn, the edges kept clean enough that the eye reads a fold rather than a wobble. The blacks are flat and matte so that no brushmark interrupts the illusion, and the slivers at the crease, where error would show most, hold. What holds the axis below the high band is the range of command shown: one mark, one operation, no colour, no modelling, no drawing beyond the ruled edge, and an execution the painter would later hand to assistants for works of this kind. A narrow instrument, commanded completely within its range.
The Beatles · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium. The songcraft is the making, and it is load-bearing: thirteen songs of exact melodic shape, bridges placed where the song must turn, and harmony used to carry feeling, in If I Fell’s two voices, the key lift for And I Love Her’s solo and I’ll Be Back’s shifting mode. John Lennon’s voice commands the title song, Paul McCartney’s And I Love Her. Harrison’s twelve-string gives the record its colour, and George Martin and Norman Smith keep the four-track sound clear and close. The faults are more than one: several songs are thinly made, Any Time at All, When I Get Home and I’m Happy Just to Dance with You among them, and the arrangements are simple and the drumming plain outside the title song and Can’t Buy Me Love.
Anish Kapoor · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the same anchors as any medium, the making by fabricators to Kapoor’s design credited to the work. The command is high and load-bearing: 168 plates, each shaped to a compound curve, welded and then ground and polished on site until the joints vanish, on a shell that has to carry its own mirror through Chicago’s heat and cold. The seamless finish is the work; had the making failed, the work would not exist, and the state of 2004 shows what failure would have looked like. Held below the top because the artist’s choices on the surface itself are few: one profile, one finish, the arch and the hollow. A mirror leaves the eye no handling to read; the hands that made it are erased by design. The craft is engineering and finishing of the highest order on a simple form.
Buena Vista Social Club · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The playing is of the first rank and placed: González’s piano, ornamental and rhythmically exact at once; López’s bass, light under the son and firm under the danzón; Ferrer’s phrasing in the boleros; the guitars of Ochoa and Compay Segundo locking with the laúd and with Manuel “Guajiro” Mirabal’s trumpet. Jerry Boys’s recording keeps the room present and each instrument clear, without polish. The costs are real. The arrangements are largely received rather than made; some takes are loose in ensemble and pitch, which the record’s manner accepts and this axis does not credit; El cuarto de Tula’s long jam marks time; and Cooder’s slide sits on top of several tracks rather than inside them.
Berthe Morisot · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The command is in the whites. The gauze is laid in thin, translucent strokes over the child’s head and the bedding, so that the face is seen through a layer that is also a surface: a hard thing in oil, done with ease. The dark dress is handled broadly, its mass held with few strokes, and against it the hand and the face are modelled delicately enough to carry the expression. The diagonals are placed with assurance, and the scale suits the intimacy. What holds the figure below the high marks: the drawing of the mother’s arm and of the canopy is adequate rather than load-bearing, the background is summary, and the picture lacks the range of passage of Morisot’s own freest later work.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high and the making is load-bearing in the envelope: a doubly curved surface of great extent rationalised into panels, the joints set to follow the flow of the form so that the seams read as drawing rather than as breakage; the steel space frame carrying the surface over column-free spans and cantilevering the curl over the entrance; the white surface passing through the glazing into the interior without a visible change of system. The costs hold it. The structure is concealed behind the image and does nothing the eye can read: the form is cladding over a frame, not structure made visible. Close up, the panel joints break the continuity the form claims, and the rooms the building exists for are conventional in their making.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the medium is the film’s clearest claim, very high without reaching the top. Jarin Blaschke’s photography makes a palette of near-monochrome nights and thin grey days with exact control of candle and moonlight; Craig Lathrop’s design and Linda Muir’s costumes render 1838 with antiquarian care; the making of Orlok is complete. Robin Carolan’s score is dark, choral and low, and the sound, breath and the creature’s voice, is a large part of the dread. Lily-Rose Depp’s physical performance of possession is fearless and precise. The making is load-bearing at the coach, the arrival and the dawn. The costs: dialogue at times stiff in its period exactness, playing that does not always carry, and a middle whose cutting slackens.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The voice is the instrument and it is commanded: flat for the killer, warm for the brothers, a whisper in My Father’s House, a howl in State Trooper, each placed close in a wash of reverb that is the record’s one large decision. The arrangements are as small as arrangements can be and still carry a song, and the small means are used exactly: State Trooper’s one repeating guitar figure, the harmonica as the only second voice. The making is load-bearing, since the medium’s poverty is the content. The faults fall on a share: the guitar patterns are near alike, the harmonica rudimentary, two songs routine as music, the recording thin.
Luo Guanzhong (attributed) · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
The command is of construction more than of the sentence. A century of events and on the order of a thousand persons are kept legible, and foreshadowings are paid off across fifty chapters: the debt of Huarong is prepared at the five passes. The Red Cliffs sequence interlocks Huang Gai’s feigned defection, Pang Tong’s chained ships, the borrowed arrows and the wind without a loose thread, and the set piece is made well again and again. What holds it here is the line. The prose is serviceable rather than exact, a mixed register whose formulas recur by the hundred: generals clash for so many bouts, heads fall at a stroke, enemies are routed with great loss. Characters are drawn by epithet, appearance and weapon, and the set verse is largely conventional. The making carries the design, and is plain in the line.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.6 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing in one element, the voice: Dylan’s singing here is among the most exact of his work, phrasing each verse differently, spitting the long lines of Idiot Wind and holding back the grief of If You See Her, Say Hello, so that the performance carries meaning the words alone do not. The Minneapolis band plays with warmth and drive on Tangled Up in Blue. The rest is plain and serves: the guitar playing is basic, the harmonica rough, the arrangements minimal, the drums on Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts routine, and the sound of the record no more than clear. One element of the highest command over a making otherwise competent and unremarkable.
Christopher Marlowe · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
At its best the making is load-bearing. The opening soliloquy turns the disciplines over in their own Latin tags, from Aristotle’s logic to Galen to Justinian to Jerome’s Bible, and dismisses each in a line, so that the verse enacts the restless mind before the plot begins. The Helen speech moves from wonder to possession to the rhetoric of chivalry in some twenty lines. The last hour slows the line, “The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike”, breaks it into appeal, “Mountains and hills, come, come and fall on me”, and shatters it into cries at the stroke of twelve. Charged to the work: the prose of the clown scenes, serviceable and sometimes lame; the thin verse and stock business of the court scenes; a middle strung, not built. The heights are of the first rank; the whole is not.
Thomas Pynchon · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on Pynchon’s English, the original. The command is of pastiche and register, at a level few first novels approach. The historical chapters are written in borrowed voices: the Baedeker world of Cairo seen through a waiter, a conductor and a spy; Fausto’s confessional journal, the best sustained prose in the book; Mondaugen’s tale as told to Stencil and reshaped by him. The set pieces are exact: the alligators in the sewer, the nose job written as surgery and seduction at once. The charges are a first novel’s, and real: the songs, the names (Pig Bodine, Rachel Owlglass, Fergus Mixolydian), jokes that land below the book’s level, and long passages of the present line where the prose coasts. The sentence is often brilliant and often loose.
Robert Smithson · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium: command of the means, here siting, plan and earthmoving, and the command is in the first two. The siting is exact: the one place on the lake where red water, basalt, the oil ruin and the ring of hills meet. The plan holds: the stem’s length gives the approach, the turns tighten so the walk slows, and the closure is set where the water stands. The building, by trucks and a loader on soft mud, was a real feat of handling. But at the highest marks the making is load-bearing through its precision, and here it is coarse by design: no surface shaped, the line wavering as the rock fell, the profile a heap. The command is of decisions, not of hand or tool, and scale and difficulty are not precision.
R.E.M. · Music
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is load-bearing on most tracks: Buck’s arpeggiated figures interlock with Mills’s bass lines, which move as melodies in their own right; Berry’s drumming is plain, propulsive and well judged; and the harmonies of Mills and Berry under Stipe give the record its depth. Easter and Dixon keep a close, dense sound legible, placing piano, strings on Talk About the Passion and treated voices without clutter. Stipe’s voice is used as an instrument, and its indistinctness is a decision. The faults fall across a share of the record: a narrow palette, one guitar manner and one band of tempo; 9-9 and Moral Kiosk less achieved than the rest; and tracks where the murk muddies more than it veils.
Wu Cheng'en (attributed) · Literature
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the Chinese. The vernacular prose is quick, colloquial and funny, and the dialogue is the book’s great making: Monkey’s insolence, Bajie’s whining and lying, Tripitaka’s helpless piety, each voice held across a hundred chapters, and the exchanges between Monkey and Bajie, the mocking and the tale-telling to the master, as alive as any comic dialogue of their age. The set pieces of battle and transformation, the seventy-two transformations and the hair plucked and blown into a hundred monkeys, are timed with skill. What holds it here: the verse and parallel prose are often formula, landscapes and armour described by stock, and the episodes reuse their machinery, the magic gourd, the summons to Guanyin, the reveal of the demon’s master, so often that the hand shows. The making is load-bearing in the voices and the opening chapters, workmanlike in much of the middle.
Euripides · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Euripides’ Greek as far as it can be weighed; the lyric music is lost and is not charged. The construction of intrigue is skilful: the letter as a stage object passing between hands; the third episode’s comedy of crossed purposes, a queen greeting a hero as her son-in-law, resolved by the Old Man’s revelation at the door; the indictment and the supplication set as an agon of two great speeches against a silent king. Trochaic tetrameters give the quarrels speed; the monody and the departure exchange use the late Euripidean lyric resources. Charged on the text as it stands: the doubled prologue, the bloated catalogue, the messenger’s report, flat beside the rest, and the many lines that repeat or pad.
Egyptian (Early Dynastic) · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Command of low relief in hard stone, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The carving is crisp, controlled and symmetrical: the outlines firm, the bodies modelled in shallow planes, the serpopards’ necks drawn in a single sustained curve, the two faces planned so that one crowning band governs both. With the tools of its moment, stone, copper and abrasive, the making is a real command, and it bears load, since the clarity is the order. The costs: the proportions are not yet the settled ones of later Egyptian relief, the secondary figures are summary, and the modelling, measured against the relief of the Old Kingdom, is still schematic. A masterpiece of its own moment, placed against the ladder of every medium, a full point under the Bust of Nefertiti at 9.3.
Boris Pasternak · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on the original as far as translation lets it be seen; the sound of the Russian sentence and the metre of the poems lie beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged. The command is uneven, and the unevenness shows across translations. At its height the prose is a poet’s: nature seen exactly and in motion, weather and season rendered as events, the winter at Varykino and the journey east. The poems are the work of a master in full command, short lyrics in strict forms whose making bears weight. Against that: characterisation thin outside the three central people; many characters who speak in one voice, the author’s; years passed over in summary; coincidence the reader feels as the author’s hand at least as often as providence’s; dialogue that states ideas rather than dramatising them. The poems hold the axis where it stands; the prose alone would stand lower.
Paul Auster · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Auster’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a plain, lucid sentence that carries abstract speculation at the speed of a detective story. The opening of City of Glass, “It was a wrong number that started it”, sets the method: an event, flatly told, that opens on a question of identity. Ghosts sustains a schematic present tense and a fable’s naming, “First of all there is Blue.”, without collapse. The set pieces are controlled: Peter Stillman the younger’s monologue, the Humpty Dumpty dialogue with his father, the conversation on Don Quixote. Held below the higher figures on three charges. The plain style flattens persons and places: Sophie, Virginia Stillman and the city’s streets are given little texture. The prose leans on stock phrases and on summary where scene was needed, above all in The Locked Room. And its range is one register, used across all three books.
Henri Rousseau · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a large canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The command of the painter’s own means is complete and bears the weight: contours drawn with absolute steadiness; colour laid in flat, smoothly blended areas with no visible fumbling; the robe’s stripes graded in tone so that they model the body under them while staying pattern; the lion’s mane caught in a pale light that silvers without shading; the sky deepened by careful degrees; the mandolin and jar given the finish of still life. Every surface is finished to the same degree, and that is the picture’s discipline. The costs are real and are not excused: the woman’s anatomy is stiff, the lying body hard to read in its foreshortening, the feet placed rather than drawn; the lion’s scale and stance are approximate; space is made by stacking, not by command of recession.
Danny Boyle · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is high, and highest in the first half. The London sequence is a feat of planning and framing, its low, wide compositions making Anthony Dod Mantle’s small cameras look like a deliberate instrument. Chris Gill’s cutting of the attacks, with dropped frames and shutter strobe, is exact for its purpose, and John Murphy’s score, building single figures through repetition to a roar, became one of the most used cues of its decade and earns its place. Cillian Murphy carries the waking with very little, Naomie Harris is hard and exact, and Brendan Gleeson gives the film its warmth in a few scenes. The costs: the image at times loses legibility without choosing to, the soldiers are played broadly, and the house’s geography is cut for speed over sense.
Hermann Hesse · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The command of the means is real. The three voices are handled with assurance: the preface’s prim decency is exactly pitched, and the Treatise’s tone of amused authority is a clever invention. The passages from realist evening to fantasy are prepared with care, the stranger with the placard, the door in the wall, the sign of the Magic Theatre; and the second half quickens well into the ball. Charged: Haller’s record is often prolix, lyric in a way that turns at length to self-pity, and the doors of the theatre vary in finish, some brilliant, the hunt and the game of chess, some thin. The German is weighed here mainly by its structure and its known clarity, and is neither charged nor credited beyond what is clear.
Aghlabid builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The ribbed dome before the mihrab, on squinches, with its windowed drum, is an early and accomplished solution, its ribs and fluted shell both structure and ornament. The mihrab ensemble is of the first rank in its making: carved openwork marble, lustre tiles in a technique then new, a minbar of teak carved panel by panel. The minaret is massive masonry that has stood for centuries. The costs: the hall is an assembly of reused columns of unequal height, brought level with bases and imposts, an economy of means rather than a command of it; the outline is irregular; and the buttresses outside correct thrust by mass. The making is load-bearing at the mihrab and adequate elsewhere.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, with invention left to the Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight at the ends and in the music. Otello Martelli photographs flat, poor country, wide beaches and winter roads in an even grey that keeps the figures small in their world. Nino Rota’s score carries the plot on one melody. Masina’s performance is a mime’s, built from posture, eyes and timing; Anthony Quinn gives Zampanò bulk and, at the end, collapse without speech. The costs are read on the result and they weigh: the post-synchronised sound is flat and the dubbed voices sit loosely on the two foreign actors, Masina’s mugging is at times pressed for pathos, and the middle episodes are staged with less economy than the beginning and the end.
Walter Gropius · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command of massing is high and load-bearing: volumes of different heights and densities composed so that each use is legible and the whole balanced without symmetry; the slab cantilevered past the columns, which frees the glass wall from the frame and lets it turn the corner; the proportion of glass, render and ribbon window across five uses; the workshops’ lighting, furniture, lettering and colour made one thing with the building. The costs are the making’s: single glazing in steel frames that could neither hold heat nor exclude it, condensation and corrosion, flat roofs that needed early repair, a building made fast and cheaply on a municipal budget. The frame is ordinary engineering, competently used. The idea of the building is commanded more fully than its envelope.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas 1.5 metres wide, to the same anchors as every medium. The command is of light and geometry, and there it is load-bearing: the interior light built as one source that falls across counter, faces and pavement and stops at the kerb; the dark street painted dark and still legible; the glass rendered by its edges alone; the urns, whose cylinders take the light; the long diagonal of the counter locked to the horizontal of the facade and the verticals of the window frames. The colour is held to a few chords, green, yellow, red and black, without a false note. The costs are real and are charged: the figures are stiff and their faces generic, the hands summary, the paint dry and plain with little life in the touch, and the architecture across the street flat in passages. The command is complete in the light and partial in the figure.
Haruki Murakami · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on the Japanese, within plain limits: the original sentence, its plainness much praised and much attacked in Japan, is beyond this reading and is neither credited nor charged. What carries across is the command of narrative. The opening, Toru cooking spaghetti in the kitchen with Rossini’s overture to The Thieving Magpie on the radio when a woman he does not know telephones, sets the book’s law in a page: the domestic interrupted by an unknown voice. Mamiya’s testimony is a different instrument, the formal, measured speech of an old officer, and its control is the book’s finest making. The embedded forms are handled well, the suspense of the well chapters is sustained, and May Kasahara’s talk is exact. The charges: Book Three’s pacing slackens, the computer exchange is clumsy as narrative, and some figures speak in one oracular register.
Lina Bo Bardi · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is real and of a particular kind: restraint in the halls, plaster stripped, trusses and brick left, new elements few and robust; stacked, column-free courts carried in a tower on a small plot; bridges spanning between the towers; board-marked concrete and a ringed water tower, where the formwork is made the surface; lattice shutters and wooden furniture made to last under heavy use. The costs: the concrete is rough by intent and in places by execution; the holes and the bridges are bold rather than refined; the factory’s structure is inherited, not made; and the first rank of the desk asks a structural invention this building does not claim.
Mon and Burmese builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command shows in the profile: a brick mass of close to a hundred metres raised on a hill, its curve carried without a break from the terraces to the bud, its proportions right from the foot of the stairs and from across the city. The gilding is a craft of the first rank, maintained for centuries, and the finial, hung with bells and set with stones, is the goldsmith’s art made architectural. The costs: the structure is a solid mound, simple in kind, its making mass rather than structure; and the platform’s shrines range widely in craft, from fine carved timber to twentieth-century concrete and electric haloes behind the images. Command of the stupa outruns command of the whole.
F. W. Murnau · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, with invention left to The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. Fritz Arno Wagner’s camera holds the real places with exact composition: the ship’s deck from the rigging, the window over the coffins, the castle arch. Albin Grau’s design and Max Schreck’s body and make-up make Orlok whole in every frame; the shadow work and the rising from the coffin are executed without visible strain. The crosscutting of the third and fourth acts is ordered and cumulative. The costs: Gustav von Wangenheim’s Hutter is broad and boyish beyond the role’s use; Alexander Granach’s Knock is played for grotesque comedy against the dread; the town and asylum scenes are flatly staged; the fast-motion coach reads as mechanical; the titles are long. Tokyo Story, continuous in command, stands at 9.3.
Shona builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included, to the same anchors as every medium. The command is real and load-bearing in the walling: blocks split and dressed to regular courses and laid without mortar to great height, battered so that the mass stands by its own weight, curving freely in plan without losing its course; rounded terminals at the doors; a tower built solid and true; the chevron band set into the face as part of its coursing; and on the hill, walls fitted to living rock so that boulder and course read as one surface. The costs: the structure is mass only, with no span, no vault and no roof in stone; the walls are laid largely without foundations; and the walling varies across the site from rough to fine.
Metallica · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and in places it is load-bearing. Hetfield’s rhythm guitar is exact, the downpicked riffs of Fight Fire with Fire and Trapped Under Ice played with machine precision, and his voice has moved from the debut’s shout toward a sung line that carries Fade to Black. Burton’s bass introduction to For Whom the Bell Tolls, distorted and played as lead, and his hand in the harmony of The Call of Ktulu are the record’s finest making. The sectional arrangements are built with control, and Rasmussen’s production gave the band a weight it had not had. The faults: functional drumming, solos at times formulaic, a thin low end, and Escape generically arranged.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight in central places. The airport sequence cuts between Cole running, Peters at the security check, the boy and Railly, with the slow motion held to the bandoneon; the dream is completed by degrees across the film; in the 2035 interrogation Cole sits strapped to a chair raised on a wall before a hanging sphere of screens, his helplessness made a matter of the frame. Pratt’s wide lenses and tilted frames give the asylum and the future one vertigo. Willis plays against his screen character with fear and tenderness, Stowe carries the film’s turn, Plummer is exact. The charges: Pitt’s tics push the asylum and the dinner toward a louder film, the kidnap and road sections are routine, and the manner sometimes decorates.
Cindy Sherman · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, photography, with the performer’s craft included because the artist is her own material. The command is exact where the work rests: costume, wig and make-up that place a type at a glance; posture and the direction of a look, which do most of the narrative work; the choice of location; framing and light that quote genre without quoting a film, the low angle in the city, noir light on an interior, open country around a small figure. The plainness of the prints is a decision, not a lack. The costs: the photographic means are often modest, some images are flat or merely competent, and the range of camera, print and tone is narrow by intent. The making bears load in performance and frame more than in the photograph as an object.
Woody Allen · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in several departments. The screenplay is exact in its dialogue and economical in its jokes, and holds its density without strain. Gordon Willis photographs New York in long takes, figures walking out of frame or held far off in the street while their voices continue, and Los Angeles in a flat, bleached light that is its own argument. Ralph Rosenblum’s cutting found the film in its material and gives the memory its leaps. Keaton’s performance, the stammer, the songs, is the film’s life, and Allen plays Alvy precisely within his range. The limit: the visual command is intermittent, strongest in New York and slack in several sketches; the supporting figures are often single jokes; and the craft serves the talk more than it carries the knowledge, as Chinatown’s (8.6) does.
Wilkie Collins · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Collins’s English, with no translation between. The making of plot is masterly: revelations timed across a weekly serial, the date discrepancy that undoes the conspiracy placed where it will tell, and a firm control of what each narrator can know. The voices are differentiated with real skill. Fairlie’s nerves and self-pity are comedy of a high order; Fosco’s English is florid, ironic and unmistakable; Marian’s diary is quick and alive; the servants’ statements are plain and partial in the right way. Charged: the prose, sentence by sentence, is competent rather than distinguished; Hartright’s voice is earnest and slow, Laura’s speech conventional, and the serial habit of a narrator foreshadowing what he did not then know recurs. The making carries the structure, not the language.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is real in the figure: the thinness of the bowl’s rim and of the dome’s shell, sitting lightly on the slab; the slenderness of the towers; the long flat line of the platform held with no visible effort. Cardozo’s engineering made Niemeyer’s forms look weightless, which was the point, and the making carries the image. The costs: the shells are of moderate span and moderate structural ambition beside Candela’s or Nervi’s, the towers are conventional slabs, and the building went up at the speed the inauguration date demanded, with the finishing and the services of a crash programme. The interior craft is good and of its decade, with fine works of art installed.
Claudio de Arciniega and successors; facade by Manuel Tolsá · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure included. The founding achievement is engineering: a cathedral of five aisles in stone raised on lake clay, on a foundation platform over the ruins, and kept standing; the settlement itself is weighed under The Imperishable. The masonry of the piers and vaults is sound and sober, Herreran in its discipline. Ortiz de Castro’s crowns add height and a distinctive silhouette without weight the ground could not bear. Tolsá’s clock body ties two towers and three portals of different centuries into one front, finishing of high skill. Balbás’s retablo is carving, joinery and gilding of the first rank in its tradition. What holds the axis: the interior architecture beyond its fittings is competent and heavy rather than load-bearing, and the lighting is poor.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of mixed-media painting at the scale of a wall, to the same anchors as any medium. Credited: the perspective held true through a surface that works constantly against illusion, so that the room stands and dissolves at once; the tonal control of a near-monochrome across a wall-filling field, light falling from the skylight into a dark hall; paint and paper built and broken so that the crust reads as burning without a painted flame; the scale managed so the picture works at the distance of the hall and at the distance of the surface. Charged: the drawing is the photograph’s and the architect’s, not the painter’s; colour is narrow by design; and in places the crust is general, Kiefer’s handling rather than this room’s.
Henri Cartier-Bresson · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of small-camera black and white photography, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is exact where it shows: the timing, to a fraction of a second, a skill of eye and hand and not only luck, since the picture was taken by someone waiting for it; the placing of the leaping figure so that man, reflection and posters read as one design; the exposure that holds the silhouette black against grey water and keeps the ripples legible; the crop, which completes the composition. What holds the axis is that much of the composition was given by chance and found afterwards, and that the craft is compact: one frame, one decision of timing and one of cropping, beside the sustained command of a large painting.
Iris Murdoch · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The command is considerable and uneven, and the unevenness is partly designed. Charles’s voice is a feat of ventriloquism: vain, pedantic, funny, observant of food and weather and blind to people, and his meals, set down with a gourmand’s solemnity, are some of the best comic writing in the book. The plotting of the “History” is expert, the kidnap built by small escalations so that the reader is complicit before he sees it. Against this, the London visitors talk in a stagey, exclamatory register that is sometimes Charles’s mockery and sometimes simply Murdoch’s habitual dialogue; and the prose is fast and loose in places, with repetitions of gesture and phrase across scenes that the narrator’s manner does not wholly account for. Good making, at times load-bearing; not the sentence by sentence command of the books at the top of the axis.
Timurid and Ashtarkhanid builders · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of tile in Ulugh Beg’s madrasa is of a high order: cut-tile mosaic fitted in geometric star patterns across a portal of great size, and banna’i lettering and pattern carried in glazed brick over whole walls. Sher-Dor and Tilya-Kori command the ensemble’s scale and match the older building’s proportions closely enough that the square reads as one; the ribbed domes on their drums are skilled, and the gilded kundal of Tilya-Kori’s mosque is fine work. The costs: the seventeenth-century tile is coarser, more painted than cut; the leaning minarets show weak foundations; and the structure is conventional brick vaulting throughout, not adventurous. The surface is load-bearing for the work; the structure is competent rather than commanding.
Claude Monet · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of thin oil on a small canvas at speed. The command is exact where it counts: the sun is a disc set down in very few movements of one orange; the reflection is a sequence of short strokes of the same orange, broken and diminishing toward the viewer; the near boat with its two figures is drawn in a handful of dark strokes that hold their weight and their distance. The judgment of value between sun and sky is fine. The costs: the left background is a scumble of greys and blues in which the structures are notated rather than made; the sky above the sun is thin brushing; the water outside the reflection is laid in horizontal strokes of little variety. Below The Starry Night (9.0), where the stroke is the image throughout.
Many masters, from 1386; facade completed in the nineteenth century · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
The command of building, structure included, is large and uneven. Of the first rank: a marble skin carried across a building of this size; the roof, its flying buttresses, pinnacles and drainage made walkable; the great apse windows and their tracery; carving that kept one standard of finish over centuries. The crossing lantern solves a problem the debates left open. The costs: the section is a compromise reached in dispute, and it shows in the low clerestory and the dim nave; the iron ties across the arches are a crutch the northern masters did without; the stability was doubted by competent contemporaries. The making is load-bearing at roof and apse, ordinary in much of the nave elevation.
Tulunid, under Ahmad ibn Tulun · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command of composition and modular rhythm is high: one bay, a pointed arch on a pier with engaged colonnettes at its corners, repeated with an evenness that makes a vast plan read as one measure; the wall opened by a small arch above each pier to lighten it and its load; stucco carved in the bevelled style with assurance at a building’s scale, soffit after soffit; the wooden frieze a feat of joinery and lettering. Lajin’s fountain and minaret are competent Mamluk work. The engineering extends nothing: short spans, flat timber roofs, mass brick, the pointed arch used for rhythm more than reach; and stucco and piers have needed constant repair, partly from the material, partly from the making.
Rudolf Steiner · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The making bears load at the west. Pouring warped and double-curved concrete surfaces of this size in the 1920s meant timber formwork built as an inverse sculpture, bay by bay, and the result holds its edges and its passages from convex to concave with real command; the cantilevered terrace and the deep reveals are carried without visible strain. Wall, roof and support work as one monolith. Against this: the flanks are well made but repetitive; joints and surfaces have needed substantial repair; the roof is a conventional slate cover; and the great hall’s finish shows several hands and periods. Steiner’s model was translated by others, and the translation is accomplished rather than consummate.
Honoré Daumier · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, and the making is load-bearing: the meaning is carried by the drawing. Daumier, who also modelled clay heads, builds the old woman’s head and hands as masses, held by a contour drawn in dark paint; the folded hands over the basket are a few planes. The light from the side windows is placed to rank the figures, falling on the three in front and grazing the crowd. The colour is restricted and sure, earth and grey green. The costs are charged: the canvas is unfinished, the background heads are laid in and not resolved, and the space of the compartment is summary at the upper right. The command of drawing is greater than the command of paint as surface.
Thomas Bohier and Catherine Briçonnet; gallery by Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Read as command of building, structure included, the making is accomplished and in part load-bearing. Foundations set in a river on inherited mill piers and kept for five centuries; a bridge of several arches across a navigable river by de l’Orme, a master of cut stone; a two-storey gallery carried on it, its loads brought down to the piers; the vaulted corridor and the straight stair with its rampant vault, both handled with assurance. The ornament of Bohier’s block is fine work of the early French Renaissance, competent in its Italianate detail rather than masterly, and the gallery’s elevations are sober and well proportioned rather than inventive. Nothing in the making fails, and nothing reaches the first rank of structural daring. Its best claim, the river piers, was inherited from the mill.
Herzog and de Meuron · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The conversion is precise and reticent: the steel frame stripped and kept, the hall’s gantry crane left in place, the translucent glass of the light beam set exactly on the brick ridge so that the old building reads as complete, rough sawn oak and plain concrete in the galleries, the ramp’s long, shallow grade handled as a piece of ground. The extension’s brick, laid with gaps as a perforated lattice, matches the old building’s and reads as new, and at night the tower glows through it. What holds the axis: the circulation of 2000 was a known fault, corrected only in part; the galleries are well made rather than load-bearing in their making; and the extension’s making is less fully known in its detail than the conversion’s, and is credited with less. At its best the making bears load, in the lantern and the ramp, but not throughout.
Federico Fellini · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as in every art. The making bears weight: Giuseppe Rotunno’s colour, soft and warm in summer and drained to grey in the fog; Danilo Donati’s town, costumes and faces, one studio square serving for rally, snow and wedding; Nino Rota’s score, whose theme carries the elegy the film never speaks; and the staging of crowds, frames full of faces each of which reads. The fog and the Rex are made from almost nothing, smoke, plastic and light. The costs are real and they weigh: the post-synchronised dialogue floats free of the mouths and loosens scenes; casting by face rather than by performance gives caricature where a scene wants more; and the middle episodes run long, so that the rhythm slackens.
Edward Hopper · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing where it counts, in the light. The raking sun is placed with exactness on the ledges, the cornice and the reveals; the shadows of the pole and the hydrant are drawn with an architect’s sureness; the warm red of the brick against the cool sky and the green of the shopfronts are tuned so that the whole canvas reads as one hour. The simplification is controlled: detail is held at the level that keeps the facade both particular and general. The costs are charged: the handling is plain and in passages dry, the surface offers little at close range, and the shop windows and signs are summary to the point of inertness.
Donna Tartt · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Tartt’s English, the command is real and load-bearing. The murder is planted in the first sentence and the suspense is nonetheless sustained for five hundred pages; Bunny’s menace is built by accumulation; the bacchanal is withheld and told late at second hand, which is the right choice; the set pieces, the ravine, the warehouse, the funeral, the hotel, are each well made; and a voice is held from first to last, lucid, cultivated and controlled. The secondary figures, Bunny above all, his father and the Corcoran family, Judy Poovey, are drawn with comic exactness. Three charges hold the axis below the top. Length: Book II slackens, and the drink and pills blur the narrative as well as the characters. Manner: the prose is at times ornamental, a register laid over scenes that need sharper sentences, and Richard is a thin presence at the centre of his own book. Contrivance: the ending in the hotel and the Epilogue’s dispatch of fates are tidier than what came before.
Denys Lasdun · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Structure and making, judged to the same anchors as every medium. The board-marked concrete is cast with a care few buildings of its time matched: the grain is even, the joints are placed, the cantilevers of the terraces are long and clean, and the same finish runs without loss of quality from the exterior into the foyers and the auditoria. The fly towers, the large stage machinery and the fitting of three houses, workshops and circulation into one mass on a constrained riverside site are a substantial feat of planning. What holds the axis: the wayfinding between levels is famously confusing, and the weathering of the exterior concrete was not fully anticipated. The command is high, and the making bears the most load in the public parts, less in the houses.
Luis Buñuel · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
The making is exact and unemphatic: Buñuel’s plain, mobile camera, Richard’s even light, scenes staged in few set-ups and cut without flourish, which is what lets the change of actress pass almost unseen. That the substitutions do not jar the continuity is a feat of direction and editing, and there the making bears weight. Fernando Rey’s Mathieu, courteous, self-pitying and violent, carries the film; Carole Bouquet’s composure and Ángela Molina’s warmth are each exact, and their difference is calibrated. The charges weigh. The compartment scenes are perfunctory as drama; some of the middle is staged flatly, in a television-era colour; the secondary figures are sketches. The making bears weight at the one point that matters most, and elsewhere is assured rather than load-bearing.
Grant Wood · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of oil in thin, smooth glazes on a small panel, close and deliberate. Edges are drawn with a draughtsman’s line; the faces are modelled with real care, the man’s weathered cheek and the glint of his spectacles, the woman’s tight mouth; textures are told apart cleanly, clapboard, lace, denim, cotton print, tined metal. The craft is load-bearing, since the hard finish is the stiffness the picture means. Against the anchors it sits below Broadway Boogie Woogie at 9.0 and The Large Bathers at 8.8: the handling is careful rather than masterly, the drawing a little schematic in the hands and the background trees, and the surface lacks the depth of glazing of the Netherlandish painting it borrows from.
Jean-Michel Basquiat · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of acrylic and oilstick on a large canvas. The command is high and of a particular kind: the black line drawn at speed with no hesitation and no correction visible, holding the whole head together at a large scale; the oilstick worked over the acrylic so that line and colour stay separate and both stay alive; the colour of the ground set at full saturation without muddying against the head. The making is load-bearing, since the painting’s argument depends on the line’s speed and certainty. Training is not the measure; command is. Held below the higher marks because the range of means is narrow, some passages are worked more as energy than as decision, and one figure tests the control of a whole surface less than a field would.
Daniel Burnham · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Command of building, structure included. The structure is the achievement: a riveted steel frame carrying a twenty-storey tower on a lot that narrows almost to a point, on an exposed corner where the wind was notorious, and it has stood. The terra cotta skin is made with great consistency: the rustication of the base, the field of the shaft worked in bands and panels, the arcaded upper floors and the cornice, all carried round the curve of the prow without a break. Burnham’s office knew how to make a tall building in 1902 as well as almost anyone. The costs: the ornament is applied and repetitive rather than bearing meaning; the rear face on 22nd Street is plain; the tip shop sits at the most visible point as an afterthought.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas from a photographic source, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the tonal transcription of a snapshot into a field of greys, held so that the figure reads at once and the light stays the snapshot’s; and the blur, laid wet into wet with a dry brush dragged across the whole surface, even enough that no stroke announces itself and firm enough that the face survives it. The command is of a narrow kind, chosen: no colour, no drawing in the old sense, no visible hand, the image made by projection and transcription, and its virtue is the exact degree of softening, a judgment repeated across the field. Against it: the range is small by design, and the composition is the source photograph’s.
George Lucas · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors the arts share. The making bears weight in many departments: John Williams’s score, leitmotif in the manner of late-Romantic opera, carries character and place; Burtt’s sound is as exact as any film’s; John Barry’s design and Ralph McQuarrie’s paintings give every object a use and an age; Gilbert Taylor photographs the Tunisian desert clean and wide; and the cutting of the final battle holds three spaces and a clock in complete clarity. The charges fall where a film is most exposed. The dialogue is functional at best and often stilted; the playing is uneven, Guinness and Cushing exact, Ford’s ease the best of the young players, Hamill’s farm boy whining in the early reels by design but not to profit; and many dialogue scenes are staged flatly, in two-shots that wait for the next set piece.
Billie Holiday · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, and the voice is its most divided element. As instrument it is failing: thin, rough, short of breath, at times under pitch. As command it remains of the first rank: the timing of every entry, a word placed late against the beat, a single syllable shaded, a line of two notes made to carry. That command is load-bearing. Ellis’s arrangements are competent and often apt, giving the voice room and placing it high and close, and the trombone and trumpet obbligati are well judged. But the charts are generic from track to track, the chorus is saccharine where it enters, and the strings sometimes cushion what the voice is doing rather than answer it. The 30th Street room records it all with clarity.
Rem Koolhaas and Joshua Prince-Ramus (OMA/LMN) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every medium. The command is high where it is load-bearing. The diamond net carries gravity and lateral loads in a seismic zone while framing the glazing; the shifted platforms are carried as large cantilevers and overhangs, so that the stack can lean out over the street; the spiral’s continuous ramp is a precise piece of floor engineering; the mesh within the glass treats the sun. The costs are real. Wayfinding is notoriously difficult, and the red level and the spiral confuse as well as delight; the finishes have worn; the net brings glare and heat as well as light; the junctions of platform and open floor are sometimes abrupt. First-rank in structure, uneven in the rooms.
Sedefkâr Mehmed Agha · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
The command of the medium is high and load-bearing in the masonry. The domes have stood four centuries on a seismic site; the buttressing descends cleanly through semidomes, exedrae and corner domes to the walls; the exterior massing is composed with real control, every element resolving toward the central dome and the minarets set to frame it. The marble of the mihrab and minbar is fine, and the Iznik tile, where it is original, is of the first quality. Against that, the piers are oversized for their work, a structural answer Sinan had made obsolete; the interior proportions are heavier than the Şehzade’s or the Süleymaniye’s; and the decorated surfaces compete with the structure rather than declaring it. A master’s making, below the summit of its own tradition.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. In image and sound the making is load-bearing and of a high order. Fraser holds dusk and heat in a narrow, desaturated palette and frames bodies against mass; Walker’s cutting gives the long approaches their weight and keeps the assault legible; the sound makes the Voice, the shields and the worm physical events; Zimmer’s score, built on voice and drone, carries the scale. Rebecca Ferguson holds love and fear in one face at the gom jabbar; Stellan Skarsgård makes the Baron a weight and a stillness. The charges fall on the words: bare exposition in one grave key, a Paul more watchful than legible, Chani a figure in dreams.
Joan Miró · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing in two places. The line: a fine, sure, continuous black drawing that gives each sign its exact character, wit in a contour, a cat or an insect in a few strokes. The colour: flat, saturated fields placed so that a scattered composition stays in balance, the reds and yellows distributed so that the eye travels and no corner goes dead, against the warm ground that holds them. The costs are charged: the paint itself is thin and does little; the brown ground is a backdrop more than a built surface; and the crowding in places trades clarity for profusion, so that some passages read as busy rather than composed. High command of drawing and placement, narrower command of paint.
Man Ray · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of studio photography and of the altered print. The making is exact: a soft, frontal light that models the back without hard shadow; a pose that hides the arms and closes the torso into one silhouette; the turban and the slight turn of the head placed to cite Ingres precisely; and two f-holes drawn with the right curve and proportion and set exactly where an instrument’s sound holes sit relative to its waist, so integrated with the print that they read as part of it and not as graffiti on it. These decisions bear load. What holds the axis is range: one figure, one light, one operation, and a pose taken from a painting. Beside the density of Ingres’s own making, or the invention of the rayographs, the command is fine but narrow.
Wong Kar-wai · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The making bears weight: the step-printed and slow-shutter handheld images, shot on the street at speed by Doyle and Andrew Lau Wai-keung; the colour, neon, fluorescent green and the yellow of the snack bar; William Chang Suk-ping’s cutting, which moves with the voiceover’s sense of time; the placing of the songs; and the performances, Tony Leung Chiu-wai’s quiet and rueful 663 and Faye Wong’s Faye, whose charm is more controlled than it looks. Made in weeks, the film shows little of its speed. The charges: the first story is thinner in writing and its action is loosely staged; some of the voiceover is cute rather than exact; the joins between the halves are casual by design and sometimes merely casual. Very fine work, short of a making load-bearing throughout.
James Cameron · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing. Ray Lovejoy’s editing builds tension by spacing rather than speed: the long held corridors against the tracker’s sound, the carrier sequence cut between the monitors and the faces watching them, the countdown and the lift. The physical making is remarkable for its means: miniatures, rear projection, a full-scale hydraulic Queen worked by puppeteers from Stan Winston’s studio, effects done in camera so that the actors share the frame with them. Sound design is one of the film’s instruments, and Adrian Biddle holds a blue, steaming, industrial palette with consistency. The charges are real and weigh: dialogue serviceable and often broad, a score that leans on repeated cues, and marine performances pitched at a single level.
SANAA (Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa) · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, structure included. The making is precise and largely load-bearing: a roof made to look almost weightless over a large plan, carried on slender columns and on the gallery walls; a curved glass wall of great length, its mullions kept to a minimum; gallery boxes of many heights joined to the roof without visible clumsiness; daylight from courts and roof lights managed for art. The detailing is restrained to the point of disappearance, and that is itself the achievement. Measured against the elder ladder, the making serves the idea fully, but the engineering problem is modest beside the shells of the Sydney Opera House or the dome of the Pantheon, and parts of the building, the reflective glass in some light and the white corridors that read alike, show the limits of reducing everything to the same thin means.
Jenny Saville · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil in the flesh, at a scale that punishes uncertainty. The planes of thigh and belly are built in broad, loaded strokes that turn without losing the mass. The colour is pushed toward the greys, mauves and yellows of bruised and pressed skin. The fingers’ pressure is shown as displaced flesh rather than as line. The foreshortening from below is held across two metres without the figure breaking apart. The making is load-bearing: the weight is made by the handling, and youth earns nothing here, since the figure is the handling as it stands. Held below the top because the head and the far parts of the figure are slighter than the near masses, the ground and the stool are summary, and the making has the stridency of a single attack.
Fariborz Sahba · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command is high in the shells. A free figure was resolved into surfaces defined by spheres, cylinders, tori and cones, so that each petal could be set out, formed and analysed; thin doubly curved shells were built at large scale where the work was largely done by hand, to tolerances that let curved marble panels, cut to that geometry, be fixed over them; and the inner ring’s crown, where the leaves nearly meet, is tied by ribs and arches that admit the light. The costs: the marble conceals the structure it clothes, so that the making is seen as surface rather than as force; the interior, its ribs and steps the structure’s residue, is the least resolved part; and the outer petals are carried for the figure’s sake.
Nas · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the sense of the words weighed elsewhere; the rapped voice is counted as a rhythmic and sonic instrument. Nas’s delivery is exact: syllables placed across and against the beat, breath held through long lines, internal rhyme heard as rhythm, enunciation clear at speed, with almost no audible strain. Premier cuts his source into a figure that loops without seam; Pete Rock filters the bass under the piano so the track breathes; Large Professor turns a pop record into the hard, bright frame of It Ain’t Hard to Tell. Five producers hold one sound. The faults fall across a real share of it: loops arranged by repetition and drop-out only, a dull low end, a voice that sometimes sits in front of a thin track, and One Time 4 Your Mind plainly made. The voice is a master’s; the frame around it is sometimes only adequate, and the figure weighs both.
Soundgarden · Music
7.7 · Tier III
The playing is of a very high order: Cameron carries uneven metres as if they were common time; Cornell’s voice holds a wide range and is placed with control from croon to scream; Thayil’s tone and drones are distinct and exact; Ben Shepherd’s bass gives the low tunings their floor. The arrangements are tight, and the dynamics of Rusty Cage’s last minute are judged to the bar. The costs are in the mix, dense and in places muddy, the guitars and bass crowding one low register and the voice pressed into the wall rather than set against it, and in a second half that falls into a known shape.
Tame Impala · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. One man plays drums, bass, guitars and keyboards with a band’s cohesion; the drumming especially, the fills in Apocalypse Dreams and the swing of Be Above It, is a player’s, not a programmer’s. Arrangement is dense without confusion, the harmonic turns in Apocalypse Dreams and Mind Mischief are deft, and the melodic writing of Feels Like We Only Go Backwards is economical. The costs are real. The master is crushed: transients clip and the loudest passages flatten to one level, so that the dynamic arc the songs imply is partly lost. Two tenths under m b v, at 8.5, whose guitar treatment bears more of the load.
David Fincher · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Command of the medium is high and short of complete. Jeff Cronenweth’s digital photography, low-lit, greenish and amber, keeps every room exact and slightly sick; Kirk Baxter’s cutting of the first hour, present against diary, holds two clocks and two voices without strain; the score of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is placed as a mood of false calm, sparingly and exactly. Rosamund Pike gives two women in one body, the diarist and the author, and the shift between them is the performance; Ben Affleck’s affability and opacity are used as evidence against him; Tyler Perry’s Bolt is precise comedy. The costs hold the figure, those of the third act most of all: Desi is a mannered sketch, Andie a prop, the closing legal turns hurried, with Boney’s suspicion and the FBI interview dropped rather than resolved, and Amy’s plan rests on a competence the film asks us to accept rather than shows.
Fleet Foxes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is high and, in the voices, load-bearing. The vocal arrangements are the record’s making: three to five parts placed so that each line is audible inside the mass, rounds that tighten without blurring, and Pecknold’s lead voice, clear and strong across a wide range, set at the front without leaving the group. The voices are recorded in a space that gives them a hall, and the reverberation is used as an instrument, not a gloss. The joins are clean, in “Ragged Wood” and “Blue Ridge Mountains” above all, and the guitar-and-voice tracks are spare and exact. What holds it below the desk’s albums at 8.7 and above, each load-bearing in every part: the instrumental writing is plainer than the vocal, the drums are often merely driving, and the uniform reverberation flattens the palette.
The Smashing Pumpkins · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and uneven. Flood and Alan Moulder give the heavy songs a dense, layered weight that stays legible, and the soft songs a close, warm room. Chamberlin’s drumming is the surest craft: the propulsion of Tonight, Tonight and the control of Porcelina’s long build. The string arrangement of Tonight, Tonight is handled with real skill by a rock record’s standards, and 1979 is a small masterpiece of arrangement, loop, bass, voice and treated guitar in exact balance. Against that: the voice is a limited instrument, strained or nasal by design but sometimes by limit; Tales of a Scorched Earth and X.Y.U. are loud more than shaped; the novelty and filler tracks are made with less care. Accomplished command, not load-bearing throughout.
Alejandro González Iñárritu · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the anchors every desk shares, with the invention credited under The Swerve. The command is high and load-bearing. Lubezki’s camera moves through corridors, dressing rooms and stage with actors timed to the inch, light carried from tungsten backstage to the footlights to the street at night, the joins invisible on ordinary viewing; Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione’s hidden cuts are exact; Sánchez’s drums follow nerves. Michael Keaton holds a man between vanity and collapse in a face seen from inches away for two hours; Edward Norton makes Mike’s brilliance and odiousness one; Emma Stone’s Sam carries the film’s plainest truth. The costs are in the writing: dialogue often on the nose, speeches that state the theme, and a critic written thin.
Norse · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of carving in walrus ivory and whale tooth at small scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the figures are designed in the round to the section of the material, compact and unbroken, with no part the hand or the board would snap. The faces are cut with great economy, the eyes drilled and ringed, the brows heavy, the mouths set; the drapery falls in straight, shallow parallel folds; the thrones carry interlace, beasts and arcading cut to a depth and fineness that hold at a few centimetres. The variety of expression within one manner is the sign of a practised workshop. The costs are charged: the carving is uneven across the hoard, some pieces stiff and summary, the horses small and wooden, the pawns unworked.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, the studio’s and fabricators’ making credited to the work. The command is high and the making is load-bearing, since the argument is that the impossible surface was achieved without economy: steel formed to the slack and swell of a rubber skin, the twists rendered as tucked creases, the knotted nozzle true, the whole polished to a mirror without a visible seam and coated in a transparent colour that leaves the reflection intact. Few sculptures of its decade are made to this tolerance at this size. Held at 8.3 because the artist’s choices are few and fine, a toy, its scale, mirror, colour; the form is a faithful enlargement of a found shape; and the craft is an exactness of finish more than an invention of form.
Renzo Piano · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, and the command is high and largely load-bearing. The structure is hybrid, steel where the office plates need span and concrete where the hotel and the homes need mass and quiet, and it changes with the use as the taper does. The core was raised by a top-down method on a constrained railway site, and the spire was made in parts and assembled at the top with no crane space to spare. The facade is precise: clear glass with blinds that answer the sun, the planes stopping short of each other so that the fissures read clean, the whole surface carried to the sky without a crown or a cap. The costs: the base is the weakest made part, and the glazing refines the curtain wall rather than making anew.
The National · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and at moments load-bearing. Bryan Devendorf’s drumming carries the hidden meters so that the stumble is felt and never heard as a trick. The Dessners’ arrangements are exact: brass and strings enter as weather, not decoration, and in I Need My Girl a single repeated guitar figure carries a whole song. Berninger’s baritone is set low and close, and its two breaks upward, in Sea of Love and Graceless, are placed for the greatest cost. The recording is warm and clean, the mixes uncluttered for their density. The costs: the palette is narrow, the tempos cluster, and the middle ballads use the same means to diminishing effect. This is mastery of a chosen language without the inventive command of the top rung, under m b v at 8.5 and well under Low at 9.0.
Bob Dylan · Music
8.7 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The voice is the main instrument and it is commanded: the phrasing of It’s Alright, Ma, holding a long line over one guitar figure and placing the stresses so that the litany drives, is a performance of real control, and the guitar figure itself is exact. Langhorne’s countermelody on Mr. Tambourine Man is the best playing on the record. Against that, the making is plain and in places careless. Tom Wilson’s production records the band rather than shapes it; side one was made fast, its arrangements frames, its drummer and pianists following, and the Dream’s false start kept as a joke. The harmonica is functional. Load-bearing on side two, adequate on side one: well below Kind of Blue at 9.3 and Low at 9.0.
Augustine of Hippo · Literature
8.6 · Tier IV
Augustine was a professor of rhetoric, and the great sentences show it: the antithesis and chiasmus of XIV.28; the climbing ladder of XXII.30; the ironies of Book I against the pagans who fled to Christian churches to be spared and then blamed Christ; the dialectic of XIX.4 to 8 that walks the reader through every good the philosophers proposed to its misery. The management of a twenty-two-book argument, with a recapitulation at the head of each book, is sure. Charged: the command does not hold across the length. The prose is often a vehicle, repetitive and swollen with citation; the polemic runs to sarcasm; the late books lose measure. The making bears the load in the summit passages and is serviceable elsewhere.
Terry Gilliam · Film
8.5 · Tier IV
The making carries the form in design and image. Norman Garwood’s sets build a whole world; Roger Pratt’s wide-angle lenses and canted frames make every interior oppress; Michael Kamen’s score turns one song into a lament, a march and a cartoon. Jonathan Pryce carries the film in nearly every scene, and Michael Palin’s Lint is the finest performance in it, warmth and menace in one voice. The charges are real and fall in central places. Kim Greist’s Jill is thin, and the love that drives the plot has little to hold it; the middle hour’s pacing slackens into noise; the cutting of the action scenes is loose; the dream effects are uneven. Command of a very high order in some departments, not continuous.
Käthe Kollwitz · Visual art
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is real and sufficient, and it is load-bearing where it counts: the compression of each figure into a closed block, the father’s arms clamped to his body, the mother’s head sunk into the mantle, and the way both figures read from the far end of the field as two shapes of grief before any face can be seen. The design of the masses and their siting is Kollwitz’s; the carving was done by others from her models, the normal practice of stone sculpture. The charges: she was a draughtswoman and printmaker who came to sculpture late; the surfaces are broad and even, the drapery generalised; in places the hands and the mother’s lower body read as mass rather than form, simplified more by limit than by decision. Against the great carvers this is honest, strong making, and The Made is among the two lowest of the eleven.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged to the same anchors as every medium, as command of silkscreen over a hand-painted ground at this scale. What is commanded: the ink load, varied across the black panel from clotted to starved, so that the gradient from presence to absence reads; the colour areas laid under the screen in flat, chosen tones and set off register by design; the grid held regular enough to read as production and irregular enough to show its making. The making is load-bearing, since the meaning lives in the accidents of the screen and they are governed. What holds it lower: the means are few and impersonal by choice, the drawing is a photograph, the colour lies in flat patches, and the command is of a process’s behaviour rather than of a range of marks. How much of the black panel’s gradient was intended is not known.
Robert Wiene · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The design bears weight throughout. The sets of Hermann Warm, Walter Reimann and Walter Röhrig make every space a judgment, the painted shadows and jagged windows composed with the figures. Conrad Veidt’s Cesare is a performance of the whole body, gliding along walls as if drawn on them; Werner Krauss’s Caligari, hunched and cunning, is fitted to the sets. The tinting is used with purpose. What holds the axis is the command of camera and cut: Willy Hameister’s camera is fixed and frontal, the staging theatrical, the editing largely scene to scene by iris, and the film lags the best moving images of its year. Friedrich Fehér’s Francis is broad, the procedural scenes are stiff, and some intertitles carry what the image could. Sunrise, from a scenario by Carl Mayer seven years later, holds The Made at 9.1 on the command of its moving camera.
Alberto Burri · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, here the scaling of a form across a hillside, to the same anchors as any medium. Credited, and load-bearing: the height near eye level, which makes the walk enclosed but not entombed; the whiteness, which holds the field as one in the light; the translation of the cretto’s irregular crack into a real plan, so that the streets read as fissures and not as a grid; the casting over rubble, which makes the matter of the houses the body of the work. These decisions are exact. Charged: the hand is the engineer’s and the contractor’s, the execution is poured concrete, and whether the two campaigns match is not settled. The making is not refined at the scale of the surface, as Burri’s sacks and plastics are refined: command of the whole, not of the detail.
James Ensor · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, judged as for any painting. The colour is orchestrated with real control: the reds of the banner and the stand, the yellows and greens of the masks and the chalky whites give the crowd a pulse across four metres without the surface collapsing. The scraped passages are deliberate, and the masks of the front rank, faces made of a few slabs and strokes, are economical and sure. Against that, the perspective of the street is uncertain, the crowd’s scale shifts in ways not always meant, and passages in the middle distance are summary to the point of slackness. The crudeness of the manner is chosen and is not charged; the places where the manner covers a failure to resolve space are. The making carries the colour and the masks, and not much else.
Bernardo Rossellino, for Pius II · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, the setting of buildings and the structure under them included. The command shown is of the ensemble: four buildings set at the right angles to one another on a narrow ridge, the splay chosen, the grid of the paving laid, a travertine front raised in a clear order of three bays, a hall church lit so that it reads as one room, a palace garden hung over a drop. The palace court is handsome and correct. Against this, the palace fronts are a heavier and less refined version of the Florentine elevation they follow; the bishop’s palace is ordinary; and the cathedral as it stands shows its ties and its lean, though the failure of its ground is charged under The Imperishable. The making is load-bearing in the plan and competent in the elevations.
Jacob Lawrence · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of tempera on panel at small scale. The making is load-bearing in design: cut, flat shapes; silhouettes that read at a glance; a figure or a bundle repeated down a diagonal to set a crowd moving; one green or one red placed to carry the eye from panel to panel. The colour-by-colour method holds sixty panels to one key, a feat of control, and the lynching panel shows the most economy: almost nothing, all of it placed. The costs are charged: the drawing of figures is schematic and at times awkward beyond what the idiom requires; the paint is thin and the touch has little range; a number of the middle panels are slight, a few figures against a field, and invention is uneven along the run.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
The making carries the form in several departments. Robert Yeoman’s photography holds the tableau with control, and the whip pans and overhead inserts are used with discipline. David Wasco’s design of the house, room by room and child by child, is part of the story, and the costume plan is exact. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, pizzicato and choral, and the placing of the songs are among the most precise of the period. Dylan Tichenor’s cutting gives the narrated montages a brisk rhythm and lets the bus arrival hold. Gene Hackman plays Royal’s charm and cruelty in one breath. The costs: several performances are held to one note by the manner, the farce of Eli’s car is staged more loosely than the tableaux, and decoration sometimes stands in for scene construction.
Joseon builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
The making is the timber framing of the Joseon court in its plainest mode: columns on stone bases, simple brackets, a gabled roof whose ridge and eaves run unbroken over the whole length, red-lacquered posts and doors, and a terrace of rough stone laid to a fall. The command shows in proportion and repetition held over the hall’s great length, in later bays added without a visible seam in the rule, and in the joining of hall, wings and terrace into one figure. The plainness is load-bearing, since it is the meaning. What holds the axis is the structure, which attempts nothing at the edge of its medium: no long span, no vault, no feat; the length is reached by addition, not by daring. This is exact craft in a restrained idiom, not virtuoso command.
Thomas Carlyle · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Carlylese is an invented instrument, and Carlyle commands it: the capitals, the German compounds, apostrophe and exclamation, the hyphenated coinages (“Tool-using Animal”, the Centre of Indifference), the sentence that swells, breaks off and turns on the reader. He controls two voices with it, the Professor’s rhapsody and the Editor’s dry, fussing, half-converted English, and the play between them is often exact comedy. The turn of the Everlasting Yea shows the method at its best, wit and conviction in one movement. Charged: command includes restraint, and the book often has none. The mannerism hardens into tic, chapters of Book III are padded, and the satire on the dandies is laboured. Invention is credited under The Swerve; here what is weighed is command, and a command that cannot stop itself for whole chapters is charged.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making is mostly invisible, and its chief achievement is the casting and direction of a large ensemble of young and largely unknown actors: two dozen people kept distinct and alive, most of them in a few scenes. Matthew McConaughey makes Wooderson whole in a few minutes; Parker Posey and Rory Cochrane make figures from a voice and a manner. Lee Daniel’s photography is warm and unforced, and the moving camera in cars and through the Emporium carries the drift; Sandra Adair’s cutting keeps the threads crossing without strain; the compilation of songs is placed with care. What holds the axis: O’Bannion is a cartoon, several of the girls are given little, and the staging is functional for long stretches, so the craft seldom bears weight in a single scene.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil and straw on canvas at a large scale. The making is load-bearing: straw fixed in long strands that rise and curl as hair and as crop; the black worked over and into the upper ends, so that the passage from gold to ash happens in the paint, not beside it; a scumbled ground that sets the gold forward; the name written in a cursive hand and made part of the image. To join a raw material to oil so that neither reads as collage is a real command. The costs: the range of mark is narrow; the ground is worked rather than articulated; the drawing is gesture rather than exactness; and part of the effect belongs to the material’s own properties rather than to the hand.
Deerhunter · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing where it counts. Ben H. Allen’s production holds a dense, hazed sound legible: the two guitars of Desire Lines interlock and climb without smearing, the chimes of Helicopter sit clean over its wash, the saxophone of Coronado cuts through. Lockett Pundt’s guitar work is the record’s finest single craft; Moses Archuleta’s drumming drives the coda of Desire Lines and stays out of the way elsewhere; Bradford Cox’s voice is placed into the mix, a choice that carries the argument. The faults fall on a share of the record: the burial of the voice sometimes loses more than it means, Sailing and Fountain Stairs are thin in arrangement, Earthquake’s drum machine is a period sound, and the palette is narrow.
William Hogarth · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at cabinet scale and of the engraved line, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is strong where it narrates: the staging of each room for legibility, the placing of a protagonist in a crowd so that he reads at once, the gestures (the kneeling gambler, the faint in the Fleet, the chained man in Bedlam), the pictures within pictures that comment on the action. The costs are plain. The compositions are crowded and staged like the theatre’s flats; the drawing of figures is at times stiff or caricatured; the colour is serviceable rather than load-bearing; and the painted surface does not reach the refinement Hogarth reached a decade later in Marriage A-la-Mode. Strong command, not at the top of the medium.
Gerrit Rietveld · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every desk. The command of proportion, colour and joinery is of a high order and load-bearing: the balance of planes and lines on every front; a colour system that tells floor, wall, frame and fitting apart; the partitions, hinges, sliding tracks and built-in furniture, a cabinetmaker’s precision carried into a dwelling; the corner window, where the absence of a post is a piece of making. The costs are real. The construction is ordinary and concealed, so that the building’s means and its appearance part company; the fabric weathered and failed, which is why so much was renewed; and what a house this small asked of structure was answered by disguise rather than by invention.
Johnny Cash · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, and it lies in performance and capture. Cash holds the room with timing, talk and a voice whose roughness he turns to use; the Tennessee Three’s spare beat, Luther Perkins’s muted single-string figures over it, is exactly what the songs need and no more; June Carter’s duets are sharp. Johnston’s recording keeps the voice forward and the room alive around it, and the edit makes two shows into one shaped set. The costs are real. The musical means are narrow and the band commands a small palette; the voice sometimes misses; “Orange Blossom Special” is ragged; and the reported strengthening of the audience afterward bears on the record’s claim to be the room. Load-bearing in places, not throughout.
Juan O'Gorman, Gustavo Saavedra and Juan Martínez de Velasco · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Two crafts are read together, since the unit counts the mosaic. The mosaic’s making is excellent and inventive in its means: colour carried entirely by natural stone gathered from across the country, set in precast panels so that a mural of this extent could be made in the shop and hung, drawn at a scale that reads across the esplanade and resolves at hand. That is command of a difficult medium, and its durability is the proof. The building’s own making is competent and plain: a concrete frame, a podium and a block, of a kind many offices of its time could produce, and the base and its junction with the tower are not load-bearing achievements. The skin carries the work; the building supports it.
Sumerian, under Ur-Nammu and Shulgi · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: a solid body of unbaked mud brick, a material that dissolves in water, made to stand four millennia. The means are deliberate and legible: the baked envelope set in bitumen, thick enough to carry the weather; reed mats in the core to bind the courses; weep holes through the skin so that water in the core cannot burst it; walls battered against slumping. It was begun under one king and completed under the next. The costs: the medium is mass, with no span, no space and no light to command, so the range of the making is narrow; and whether the reported curve of the faces is design is not settled.
J. G. Ballard · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Ballard’s English, with no translation between. The making is controlled and part of the meaning. The prose is a clinical instrument, cool, exact and Latinate, drawn from medicine, psychiatry and architecture, and it describes atrocity in the register of a case note, so that the style enacts the detachment the book diagnoses. The opening sentence is the model of that control: a man eating a dog, a doctor’s title and “the unusual events”, set down in one even breath. The rotation of viewpoints is managed so that the building’s decline is timed across the three men, and the circular frame closes exactly. Three charges hold it below the top. The vocabulary recurs until it becomes a mannerism; the dialogue is thin and often expository, with characters speaking the thesis; and the secondary figures, the women above all, are drawn as functions of the scheme.
Burial · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing where it counts. The voices are cut, pitched and placed with great exactness, so that a fragment of a syllable carries a whole phrase’s longing; the swing of the drums is the record’s pulse; rain, crackle and chord are layered into one atmosphere that keeps each element audible. The means are narrow, and what is scored is the command of them. The limits fall on a real share. The drums are loose and sometimes clumsy in their placing, part design and part limitation; the low end is muddy in places; the harmonic palette is a few chords recurring; and the middle tracks are made to one template.
Rachel Whiteread · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of casting, to the same standard as any medium. The decisions are exact and load-bearing: a house chosen for standing alone; a method, concrete sprayed inside an emptied shell and the shell then taken away, carried from a plaster cast of a single room to a whole dwelling; surfaces kept faithful to the house, so that a fireplace, a window frame or a switch reads at once; the grey of the concrete neither polished nor dressed. The engineering that let a cast of space stand on its own when the walls were gone was achieved. Held below the top because the hand, by the nature of the method, is the house’s as much as the artist’s: the surface is an impression, the finer finish of her casts in resin and plaster is absent, and the repertoire is narrow, used once at full scale.
Alan Moore · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Moore’s English, and chiefly on the book’s architecture and its range of pastiche, since the judgment of the single sentence is the least secure part of it. The range is wide: the language modelled on the Wake, sustained over the whole of the Lucia Joyce chapter, is a feat few novelists could attempt, and the chapters move between historical voices, a children’s adventure register and the present-day speech of the Boroughs. The architecture of more than a thousand pages that close on one another is itself well made. The charges are as real. The prose is ornate and alliterative to excess, the descriptive sentence is overloaded, the same effects, the catalogue of decay and the lyrical street, recur until they harden, and the dialogue is often a vehicle for exposition.
Abraham Darby III; designed by Thomas Farnolls Pritchard · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and the casting is the achievement: half-ribs of great length cast in open sand moulds at the works and brought to the river, every member made to fit by pattern and joint, the whole raised over a working river and standing since. The joints are made with exactness. Against it: the iron is used as timber is used, in joints that do not suit a brittle material and in much greater mass than the span required; the bridge cracked early; and its makers misjudged the movement of the banks. A making of the first rank in its day, whose command of its new material was incomplete, and the incompleteness is visible in the work.
J. R. R. Tolkien · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Tolkien’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the plain narrative sentence and of landscape: “In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.” (chapter 1); the passage through Mirkwood with its darkness and its enchanted stream; the long approach to the mountain, made with exact, concrete particulars and an ear for the old words. The riddles keep the old forms; the dialogue is quick and comic, and Bilbo’s talk with Smaug is a duel of riddling courtesy. The plot is laid with care: the Arkenstone, the bare patch on the dragon’s breast, the thrush. Charged: the narrator talks down to the reader in the first chapters; most of the thirteen dwarves are a name and a hood colour; Bard enters in the chapter in which he kills the dragon; and the verse is uneven.
Built for Ashikaga Yoshimasa · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, on the making as it stands: Japanese timber carpentry of the late fifteenth century, sure and refined. The Kannon-den’s proportions are well judged, the broad lower storey, the smaller upper storey, the shallow sweep of the pyramidal roof, and two manners are joined in one frame with no seam showing where none should. The Dōjinsai’s carpentry is exact at the scale of the hand. But the structure is modest and conventional, post and beam and bracketed eaves, with no span or engineering of consequence. The proportions are the work, and they bear it; the making does not reach the great frame of Tōdai-ji (8.4) or the precision of Ise (9.0) and Katsura (8.7). Renewed surfaces are not charged to the makers.
Giuseppe Mengoni · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the making as it stands. The command is real at the scale that matters: long vaults and a dome of iron ribs and glass carried on masonry at a span and height that make a street a nave; the octagon resolved from a plain crossing by cutting its corners; the main body built in about two years; the arch composed to stand at the centre of the square’s north side. The floors of marble and mosaic and the stucco of the fronts are crafts in command. The costs: the iron and glass are the engineering of their day, not ahead of it; the fronts are rich and repetitive, their ornament applied bay by bay rather than built into the structure; masonry and iron meet by one sitting on the other more than by joining; and the Scala end is weaker than the Duomo end.
Hannah Höch · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of collage and photomontage, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is skilled and in large part load-bearing. More than a metre of cut paper holds as a field: two great diagonal sweeps, wheels placed as pivots, dense zones balanced against open ground. The cutting is precise, and the joins of heads to bodies are timed for their shock; the scale of each piece is chosen, so that a face is huge or tiny as the argument needs. Lettering is cut and set as image, not as caption, and some colour binds areas. The costs: in places the density becomes clutter, the hierarchy lost and pieces reading as filling; and the hand of cutting and arranging has a narrower range than painting allows.
Robert Rauschenberg · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of painting with objects, to the same anchors as any medium. Credited first is the decisive solution of the final state, a matter of placement and proportion: the goat set toward one side of the platform so that the ground reads as a field and not a base, the tyre placed where it binds without hiding the body, the scale of animal to platform. The platform is worked with a fluent, loose brush and a dense collage that holds together as one surface, and the paint on the goat’s face joins the animal to the painting. The costs: the hand on the platform is quick rather than searching, some passages are scraps laid down rather than composed, and the surface is looser than the structure.
Byzantine, under Archbishop Ursicinus · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and mosaic together. The structure is ordinary and sound: brick walls on a basilican section under timber, well sized, standing through earthquakes and the sinking ground of the coast. The command shows in proportion and in the parts: the even interval of the arcade, the large and well-placed windows, the imported columns and finely cut capitals set without hesitation, the clean polygon of the apse outside. The apse mosaic is of the first rank: the green meadow laid in graded tesserae, the starry blue of the disc, the gold ground used sparingly so that colour rather than glitter rules, the saint’s figure clear from the far end of the nave. The costs: no structural ambition, a nave roofed as a shed, the later arch mosaics by lesser hands, and an exterior plain apart from the tower.
David Mackenzie · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is assured throughout and load-bearing in places: the opening travelling shot that lays out the world before anyone speaks; Nuttgens’s photography of light and distance; Jake Roberts’s cutting between the two cars, and the last robbery and the ridge staged with clear geography and mounting force; the spare, mournful score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. The performances are the strongest department: Jeff Bridges’s Hamilton, slow, mumbling and sharp; Ben Foster’s Tanner, reckless, funny and doomed; Gil Birmingham’s patient Alberto; Chris Pine’s closed, careful Toby. The costs: the dialogue is sometimes pleased with its own folk wit, Pine is outmatched by the actors around him, the women are sketches, and the making perfects the medium’s means rather than changing them.
Taddeo Gaddi or Neri di Fioravanti (attributed) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The arches are a load-bearing making of the first rank for their century: flat segments set in a river that had destroyed every earlier bridge, standing through great floods and through a war that brought down the city’s other bridges, with cutwaters shaped to the current. The masonry is plain and sound. Vasari’s corridor is a feat of rapid construction and of fitting: carried on the roofs of existing shops, bracketed round a tower that would not yield, threaded through a church, built in months. The costs: the shops are vernacular and their back-shops ad hoc timber-bracketed boxes, sometimes crude; the corridor’s elevation over the bridge is a plain band of small windows, a service passage more than a designed front. The making is first rank in the structure and ordinary in most of the fabric a visitor sees.
Wang Shu (Amateur Architecture Studio) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure included. The making is load-bearing at the wall. Wapan at this scale required a system of courses that masons could fill from a mixed and unpredictable stock across the face of a public building, without the result reading as chaos or as decoration, and the walls have that controlled variety. The bamboo formwork gives concrete a surface that answers the old material in texture and colour, a technical idea carried through. The leaning masses meet the base without visible strain. The costs: the concrete structure behind the skin is conventional, the interior finishes are reported rough in places, partly by intent, and the precision of a Sainte-Chapelle is not the aim.
David Cronenberg · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in several departments. The makeup by Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis is the film’s means, staged so each change reads as a stage of illness, not a costume. Goldblum carries it: charm, nerves and comic timing at the start, a plausible mania, lucid grief inside the prosthetics. Geena Davis plays watching as action. Shore’s score is the sustained instrument; Mark Irwin keeps the loft warm and then sickly; Carol Spier’s pods are machine and organ at once; Ronald Sanders cuts with economy. What holds the figure: the bar sequence is crude, John Getz’s Stathis wavers between oaf and decent man as the plot needs, and the last creature is a puppet whose seams show.
Jean Nouvel, with Architecture-Studio · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. Command is high in the making of the parts: the precision of the metal panels, the drawing of the facade grid, the detail of steel and glass, the clarity of the cleft and the curve, the craft of the book tower. Where it is static, the building is beautifully assembled. The structure is competent and unremarkable; the work is in the envelope. The making as it stands includes a mechanism of motors and linkages that proved unreliable in service. Its failure is weighed on The Imperishable and not charged twice, but a responsive system that does not respond is not command of the means in full.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium is strong, and in places it bears the film. Thewlis’s performance, built over months of rehearsal, holds long speeches that have the rhythm of thought; Cartlidge, Lesley Sharp and Peter Wight are as exact. Dick Pope’s photography makes London cold, desaturated and nocturnal, without glamour, and the long tracking walks with Dickson’s score give the episodic form its pulse. Jon Gregory’s cutting lets scenes run until they turn. The fault is in the control of tone: Greg Cruttwell’s landlord is pitched at caricature, the Sandra scenes slide into broad comedy, and the domestic act is staged more conventionally than the night. The making is skilled throughout and uneven in the half of the film that matters least.
Paula Rego · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting at large scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The figure groups are drawn and modelled with sure weight; the moonlight is consistent and does structural work, each cast shadow placed to bind a figure to the sand; the colour, a narrow range of night blues, greys, earths and the pale strand, holds together across the width without slackening. The ring of three is the finest passage: joined hands and turned bodies read at once as motion and as closure. The making is load-bearing, since the heaviness of the bodies is the picture’s view of them. The costs are charged: the matt surface is even rather than worked, some faces and hands are summary, and the stiffness that serves the meaning limits what the paint itself can say.
Philip Johnson · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. Proportion is fine and sure: the 56 by 32 foot room at its low height, the black frame reading as line, the cylinder placed off centre so that the room has a pivot and is not a diagram. The brick floor, the cylinder and the Brick House bind the two buildings in one material. The making is load-bearing: a heavier frame or a taller room would destroy the effect. The engineering is simple, and the detailing less exact than Mies’s: the steel is welded and painted, the corner is closed with a column where Mies would have resolved it, and the glass sits in plain stops. The Brick House’s vaults of 1953 are a deft piece of interior work. The command is real and narrow: a few elements, very well judged.
Cy Twombly · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil, oil crayon and graphite on canvas at large scale. The making is load-bearing: the speed and pressure of the line, which is the cycle’s whole voice; the placing of written names on open ground so that they hold a wall; the restraint of colour, red for fire, blood and the hero’s wrath against pale ground, so that the few strong colour events tell; and the control of density from the crowded battles to the near-empty shades. Graphite drawn into paint and rubbed back gives a surface that is the painter’s own and exact. The costs: some canvases are thin to the point of seeming unresolved, the line is in places mannered rather than urgent, and the lists ask little of the hand.
John Wood the Younger · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of composition is high and load-bearing: a single giant order carried round a half-ellipse over thirty houses with no central accent, its intercolumniation held so that the curve reads as one movement; a plain ground storey that sets the order up; and the coordination itself, a front controlled by one designer and built by many hands to one line in ashlar of one stone. The engineering extends nothing: masonry houses with timber floors, the order applied as facing. The costs: the order runs through two storeys of windows of the ordinary terrace pattern without answering the floors behind it, so the columns frame the windows rather than govern them; the ground storey is bare to meanness under so grand an order; and the backs show no command at all.
Charles and Ray Eames · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command is real and in places load-bearing: a frame of minimum section raised from standard parts; the proportion of the bays and the composition of the front, where opaque colour, clear glass, wired glass and translucent panels make a grid that is calm at a distance and lively close to; the junction of the court with both pavilions; the light managed through the translucent sheets. The economy of means is a skill of its own. The costs are those of a kit: the details are standard rather than resolved, the thin skin of steel and glass performs poorly against heat and sound, and the house has needed constant upkeep. Space is handled well within a narrow range, one large volume and small rooms. Villa Savoye (8.6) and the Farnsworth House (8.5) command space and section at a higher order.
Wes Anderson · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making is load-bearing and nearly continuous. Nelson Lowry’s design and the puppet workshops give a world of consistent palette, autumn yellows, oranges and browns, and of miniature objects made with complete care. Tristan Oliver’s photography holds the flat staging and the warm light. Gustafson’s animators give the puppets acting, the eye flicks and abrupt animal movements. Andrew Weisblum’s cutting keeps a comic rhythm in montage and set piece, and Alexandre Desplat’s score, with banjo and small percussion, drives the raids. Clooney’s vanity, Streep’s dryness and Schwartzman’s sulk are exactly pitched. What holds it: the last act’s action is less clearly staged than the raids, some jokes repeat, and a few scenes are arrangement rather than drama.
Arthur Conan Doyle · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on Doyle’s English, with no translation between. The command is of the story’s engine, and it is high: exposition by dialogue that is itself entertainment; the client’s statement, which carries the plot in a voice not Watson’s; the display of inference, which characterises Holmes and the client at once, the hat in “The Blue Carbuncle”, the typist’s sleeves in “A Case of Identity”; and the timing of the reveal. The prose is clear, quick and even, and the openings are built to hook: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman.” Three charges. The prose is serviceable rather than distinguished, its sentences rarely doing more than carry. The plots fail physics and law in known places, a swamp adder that drinks milk and answers a whistle among them. And the formula repeats. A perfectly made engine, not a prose that carries the argument.
Lev Rudnev · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Structure and making. A steel-framed tower of about 240 metres on the crest of a hill above a river, built in about four years, the tallest building in Europe for decades: as engineering, a real command, organised at a scale Soviet construction had not met before. The composition is commanded too. The mass steps in clear stages from the wings to the tower, the corner towers hold the breadth, the proportion of the central figure to its wings reads from a distance and close to, and the symmetry holds without slack across a very wide front. Held below 8.5 because much of the ornament is manufactured and coarse at close range, the ceramic facing is a skin rather than an expression of the frame, and the interiors of the wings are plain: the making carries the silhouette more than the detail.
Gerhard Richter · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of glass and light at architectural scale, and load-bearing at the decisions that matter: a palette held to 72 colours; a square of about 9.6 cm, at which the colours mix at the distance of the floor and separate as one comes near; the editing of chance so that the field stays even and no colour dominates; the handling of the grid where it meets the curves of the tracery. The execution in mouth-blown antique glass, by the glassworks and the studio, is part of the work and credited to it. The costs: there is no drawing and no modelling of light within a pane, the range of mark is one unit by design, and much of the craft is the fabricator’s rather than a command shown in the work’s own surface.
Amrita Sher-Gil · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is partly load-bearing. The colour is the strongest thing: saturated colour laid in broad flat areas, held against the dark ground and the warm brown of the flesh, with a control of value that keeps the faces the brightest and most modelled passages, so that the eye goes where the meaning is. The faces are painted with a soft, sure modelling learned in Paris, and the drawing of the heads is firm. The costs are charged: the hands and the lower drapery are summary, in places stiff; the join of modelled face and flat cloth is sometimes awkward rather than resolved; and the surface lacks the density and invention of touch of the highest command. High, and not yet full.
Christopher Nolan · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Read to the anchors every desk shares, with the invention of the structure credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition. The making bears weight where the form lives. Dody Dorn’s cutting keeps two strands and dozens of overlapping joins legible, each sequence’s last moment placed to land as the next one’s first; the screenplay pays every note, tattoo and photograph. Guy Pearce plays a man always at the start of a scene, polite, competent and blank, with grief at the edges; Carrie-Anne Moss turns Natalie from victim to user in one long take of waiting; Joe Pantoliano makes Teddy both untrustworthy and the one honest man. The charges hold the figure: Wally Pfister’s colour photography is serviceable rather than expressive, the Dodd chase is loosely staged, and the telephone exposition is flat.
Pierre Koenig · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The making is lean and exact: a steel frame on a few points, long beams carrying a steel deck and deep overhangs, very large panes of glass set between widely spaced columns, and a living wing cantilevered over a difficult hillside lot, within a small budget and with standard members. Koenig’s command of steel is the house’s craft. The frame is stated, nothing hidden and nothing decorative, and the junctions of beam, column and glass are clean. The craft is load-bearing in the strict sense. What holds the axis at 8.2 is that this is the command of a known system rather than the solution of a hard structural problem at large scale: the engineering of the cantilever is sound rather than daring.
Sumerian · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of shell, stone and lapis inlay in bitumen at a small scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The figures are cut from shell as silhouettes, with interior detail incised, and set against lapis so that each reads at a glance; the red stone is placed as accent and border. Within strips a few centimetres high the maker turns the teams from walk to gallop, overlaps the four animals of each team so that a team reads as four, and keeps a dozen and more figures legible to a register. The hierarchic scale is exact, the ruler’s head breaking the border on both sides. The costs are charged: the figure types repeat, and the silhouette allows little modelling or expression.
Antony Gormley · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged to the same anchors as every medium, the making by Ove Arup and Partners and Hartlepool Steel Fabrications credited to the work. The command is high and load-bearing: a figure fifty-four metres wide on an exposed hill, designed to hold in winds above a hundred miles an hour without visible bracing; its stiffening ribs made the surface of the work; the sections fabricated off site and joined so that the seams read as part of the rib structure; the foundations sunk to hold the overturning force of the wings. The enlargement of a cast body to this scale, and its translation into steel plate, is carried through without the body going slack. Held at 8.2 because the figure is enlarged more than modelled: fine engineering serving a few decisive choices.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is strong and in places load-bearing, not throughout. Numb is the best-made track: a stack of loops, a dry spoken lead and a falsetto counter-line, each placed so the collision is audible. Lemon’s groove is exact, its falsetto treated as an instrument. Stay is a fine band arrangement, each part distinct and the melody given room, and The Wanderer’s pulse and synthesizer under Cash are spare and right. The faults are those of haste: Some Days Are Better Than Others is generically arranged, Daddy’s Gonna Pay is more effect than construction, and Dirty Day’s long build is muddy.
David Lynch · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The making is assured, and in several departments it bears weight. Freddie Francis’s photography gives gaslit interiors, fog and steam, faces lit to model age and grief, and a wide frame that holds a hospital corridor or a station crowd. Stuart Craig builds a London of tenements, wards and wharves. Christopher Tucker’s makeup, from casts of the historical body, lets John Hurt act through a laboured voice and one visible eye and make a whole person, and Anthony Hopkins’s reactions carry the first half. The costs run through much of the film. Freddie Jones’s Bytes and Michael Elphick’s porter are played broad, in a register the rest of the film does not share; Morris’s score swells where it should wait; the Continental performers are staged as tableau.
Frank Darabont · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Deakins’s photography is exact without display: the grey stone and cold light of the yard, the warm amber of the library and the cell at night, the aerial rise over the prison on arrival, the storm lit by lightning. Francis-Bruce’s cutting carries the reveal, setting the discovery of the empty cell against the escape already done, so that structure and suspense are one. Freeman’s narration is the film’s voice, carried at a level few voiceovers reach; Robbins holds a near-blank surface across nineteen years without losing the man; Whitmore makes Brooks’s fear exact in a few scenes. The planting and payment of hammer, poster, Bible and shoes is clean screenwriting. Held below: Newman’s score is too willing in the uplift, and the making is classical and sometimes underlines.
Nick Cave and Warren Ellis · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Ellis’s textures are the making: loops, processed violin and pads layered so that the dense first half stays legible and the second half breathes. The choir is arranged as a body and held back, entering late in White Elephant to change the song’s nature; the piano of Hand of God is placed against the loop so that the break lands as a blow. Cave’s voice runs from spoken menace to croon to near-falsetto and holds each. The faults are more than one: several rhythm patterns are plain programmed figures, Old Time’s loop is murky, the pads repeat a narrow palette across the second half, and some vocals ride the arrangement rather than shape it. Load-bearing on most tracks, faulted on a share.
Carl Orff · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Within its chosen means the command is complete and the making bears weight. The orchestration is brilliant and exact: two pianos and percussion as a rhythmic engine, celesta and glockenspiel in the love section, the bassoon’s high solo over the swan, the brass held back for the frame. The choral writing is singable by amateurs and still overwhelming, a real achievement. The Latin is set by accent and syllable, and stanzas are varied by scoring with great economy. What holds the axis is the narrowness of the means: harmony that seldom moves past triad and pedal, almost no counterpoint, phrases built by repeating a cell. Craft confined to so few resources cannot be read at the anchors of Bach or Schubert, whose making carries far more in every bar.
Martin Scorsese · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in much of the film: Schoonmaker’s cutting, which lays out a system with the clarity of a diagram and moves the collapse at the speed of a fall; Richardson’s light, hot top-light haloing the gamblers and the floor, cold in the desert; Ferretti’s casino, a built world of carpet, mirror and neon; the score placed as commentary, with Bach at the frame; De Niro’s Rothstein, controlled to the point of comedy; Pesci’s Santoro, frightening; Stone’s Ginger, the film’s one open wound, rising across three hours from glamour to wreckage. The charges fall on a large share of the whole: the voice-over often tells what the image shows, the second half repeats its domestic scenes, Pesci’s Santoro reprises his Tommy from Goodfellas, and the length dulls the cutting’s edge through the middle hour.
Ptolemaic and Roman builders · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, structure included. The masonry is fine Ptolemaic sandstone work, dressed and fitted with precision, and the decorative making holds a high and consistent order across six centuries and many hands: the deep relief of the pylons, the many varieties of composite floral capital in the colonnades and the pronaos, the painted ceilings of which traces survive. The roofed spaces are trabeated stone, well within the tradition’s means, with no structural daring, and the late relief style is fuller and heavier than the New Kingdom’s. The Kiosk of Trajan, its tall columns and screen walls, is the finest single piece of making, and it is unfinished. The craft is load-bearing: the temple’s meaning lives in its carved surfaces and in the sequence of its rooms, and it holds across hands and centuries.
Robert Altman · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. The opening take is choreographed through a working lot with a dozen speaking parts and exact timing; Altman’s overlapping sound keeps pitches and gossip running under the plot; Jean Lépine’s camera zooms and drifts; Geraldine Peroni’s cutting lets the killing play as a graceless struggle and the coda snap. Tolkin’s dialogue is dry and quick, the pitches parodies exact enough to be plausible. Tim Robbins holds the film as Mill, charming, blank and frightened by turns, without a single confession, and Richard E. Grant, Dean Stockwell, Peter Gallagher, Fred Ward and Cynthia Stevenson are exact in small roles. What holds it: June is underwritten and Greta Scacchi must supply the mystery, the detectives are played broad, and some cameo traffic is clutter.
Sidney Lumet · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Al Pacino’s Sonny is a man improvising a self from minute to minute, charming, panicked, generous and exhausted, held together across a day. John Cazale’s Sal, nearly silent, carries threat and pathos in stillness; Charles Durning’s Moretti sweats out authority losing its hold. Lumet stages the crowd, the barricade and the cramped bank with a control that reads as accident; Dede Allen’s cutting keeps inside and outside in tension; Victor J. Kemper moves from the street’s white glare to the dim fluorescent bank at night. The decision against a score is exact. What holds the figure is unevenness: the middle sags, some hostage business is loose, the airport plan is laid out briskly, and Chris Sarandon’s Leon, fine in the call, is played broadly in his scene with the police.
Michael Mann · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in the action. Dante Spinotti’s photography of forest, falls and ridge; the cutting of the ambush and the massacre, which keeps space legible across chaos; the sound of rifles, mortar and water, recorded and mixed with force. Day-Lewis moves as a man who has lived in the woods; Studi’s Magua carries the film’s intelligence in a still face; Means gives the elegy its weight. The costs fall where they matter. The score, divided between two composers, is magnificent in its themes and generic in its connective cues. Much of the dialogue is stiff, and Stowe and Waddington are given lines more than people. The love scenes use the lighting and swelling music of the studio romance, and Mann’s own later versions show that he found the released mix and dialogue unfinished.
Olafur Eliasson · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as the making of any medium is judged. The command is of light, scale and illusion, and it is exact: one wavelength chosen for its effect on colour and shadow; a semicircle that the mirror closes into a disc, which requires the geometry of screen and ceiling to be right across a hall of that size; a mirror ceiling suspended over the whole floor; the mist balanced so that the light thickens without blinding. The making was left visible at the edges and the illusion still held, which is a mark of control. Held below the top because the means are few and industrial, and the making is placement and engineering more than a hand: precise, without being load-bearing as the highest marks require.
Martin McDonagh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium is high and even. The dialogue is the most finished element, rhythmic, repetitive by design and exactly paced, and the performances are fully controlled: Colin Farrell’s bewilderment turning hard, Brendan Gleeson’s stillness, Kerry Condon’s exasperated clarity, Barry Keoghan’s Dominic, comic and then pitiable. Ben Davis frames the island wide and weathered, the interiors as small boxes of warmth against the dark; Mikkel E. G. Nielsen’s editing keeps the comic timing without hurrying the silences. Held in the low eights because the making is load-bearing in dialogue and tone, while camera and cutting serve the scene rather than discover what a page could not.
Maya (Puuc) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Command of building, structure included, judged to the same anchors as every desk. The making is accomplished and partly load-bearing. Raising a stable oval mass on a rubble core to the height of the city’s tallest structure, with stairs at that pitch, across campaigns that enclosed older chambers without collapse, is real engineering. The Puuc technique of cut veneer over a concrete-like core is at its height at Uxmal, and the mosaic of Temple IV’s mask façade and the stacked masks of the west stair are precise and large in scale. The costs: the corbel vault confines the interiors to narrow rooms, so the craft lies almost wholly in mass and surface; the finest Puuc veneer at the site is on the Governor’s Palace, not here; and some of what the eye now reads as craft is restoration that cannot be told apart from it.
Steven Spielberg · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the same anchors as every desk. The command is broad and visible in every department: Vilmos Zsigmond’s light, which makes illumination itself the subject, through keyholes and under doors, backlit in fog; Douglas Trumbull’s effects, built from light and haze rather than hardware; Michael Kahn’s cutting of the crossing and of the chase to Crescendo Summit; the sound design; John Williams’s score, whose five-note motif is both a theme and a device of the plot. The household scenes, overlapping and chaotic, are directed as surely as the spectacle. What holds the figure at 8.2 is unevenness at the joins: the scientists’ scenes are flatly staged, the middle sags in pace, as the later recuts confirm, and the finale’s length shows craft serving effect at the expense of shape.
Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the making as it stands, the engineering is of a high order. The great leaves balance on pivots near the piers, their counterweights falling into chambers inside them, so that modest power lifts them; the piers were founded in the river while a channel was kept open; a steel frame in each tower carries the walkways, the chains and the stone; and the whole still lifts, by its first leaves, after thirteen decades. That last fact is the best evidence of command. The costs: the composite of chains and walkways is an expedient system rather than a clear one; the stone facing is weight carried for appearance; and the Gothic detail developed after Jones’s death is competent and stock, heavy in its turrets and windows, the making of a style rather than of this structure.
Indus Valley (Mohenjo-daro) · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of cast metal, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing: the attitude exists because the metal was drawn thin, the arm opened from the body and the weight placed on one leg, and a lost-wax cast of a figure this slender, with an arm of rings, is a real command for its date. The proportions are chosen, not failed: the attenuation is consistent from arm to leg. The costs are charged: the face and the hands are summary, the torso is simply modelled, the bangles are a sequence of rings rather than modelled forms, and the first finish cannot be judged under the corrosion, so that some of what reads as summary may be loss of surface.
Andreas Gursky · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of large-format colour photography and of digital composition. The making is exact and largely load-bearing: a high, flat viewpoint that makes every edge horizontal; an overcast light that removes shadow and holds the greys and greens in a narrow, even key; the seamless removal of the buildings, invisible at any distance; the colour of the print, the river’s grey kept distinct from the sky’s; the print itself, made at a size few laboratories could then manage, and the face-mount that gives it the presence of an object. The decisions are the maker’s. What holds the axis is that the range is narrow by design, one view, one light, one operation of erasure, and the few elements ask little of the hand beside Gursky’s dense pictures of crowds and stock.
Zaha Hadid · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The concrete is the achievement: long walls cast in place on curves, fair-faced and finely finished, carrying the spans and the cantilever, so that structure and enclosure are one material and the fluidity is real rather than a skin on a frame. The roof of concrete fins with glazing and louvres is a made system that shapes the light of every upper gallery. The black stairs are precise. The costs hold the figure. The galleries’ walls and floors are hard to use and have needed added partitions; the light from the roof has needed control for the conservation of the works; and the building’s daylighting and climate serve the space before the work.
Haddon Sundblom · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil, to the same anchors as every medium, the making stands high within its school: broad, loaded brushwork that holds at reproduction scale; white fur and beard laid in thick, with the light caught on them; firelight and lamplight placed to model a face and a hand; a strong value design that reads at once on a page among other pages. The poses are natural and the hands excellent. Against The Swing (7.8) the making is less various and less fine at the scale of a cabinet picture. The body is charged for its unevenness: some later pictures are thinner and more formulaic, and compositions repeat.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every desk. The engineering is of a high order and load-bearing: legs that lean toward each other and join high, stabilised during construction and carried by the joined frame after; a deck of about 340 metres in steel box sections, fabricated on the ground, lifted by strand jacks to the roofs and set on joints that let three towers move independently beneath it; a pool and garden of great weight on that deck; a cantilever of about 65 metres. It was built in about four years from tender to opening. The costs: the towers are plain glazed slabs with banded floors, the rooms and corridors ordinary, and the SkyPark’s edges and furnishing a hotel’s, not an architect’s. The virtuosity is mostly the engineer’s.
Octavia E. Butler · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
The construction is excellent. The Prologue announces the cost before the story begins; the journeys escalate; each return falls at the edge of a death; a household of a dozen people, Sarah, Carrie, Nigel, Luke, Tess, Margaret Weylin and Tom Weylin among them, is made distinct with economy. The dialogue is serviceable and often sharp in conflict. The making is charged in the language. The prose is clean, plain and functional: it seldom fails, and it seldom does more than carry. Some of the conversations with Kevin in the present are expository, and the explaining of the rules of passage is at times flat. The making bears the load in structure, not in the sentence, and that sets the figure.
Denis Villeneuve · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
The making is load-bearing in sound and image. Bradford Young holds the film in overcast, low-contrast light, faces lit from windows, the shell’s interior a dark frame around a white field. Joe Walker’s cutting carries the form, timing the inserts of Hannah so they read as memory until they do not. The sound, honoured at the Academy Awards, gives the heptapods voices of low groaning and clicks, and Jóhannsson’s score uses voices as texture so that music and alien sound blur. Amy Adams carries the film in a contained performance of fear turned to attention. The costs: expository dialogue, military and political scenes staged in generic thriller grammar, a clumsily motivated future reception, and a role for Renner that gives little.
Jack Kerouac · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Kerouac’s English as the Viking text carries it. The command is of rhythm: the long sentence that runs on breath, as in the catalogue of the mad ones, and the vernacular of the road caught by ear in Dean’s monologues, the hitchhikers and the migrant workers in the cotton fields. The best passages have a musician’s drive, and the plain sentences, like the opening, are exact. Charged: control lapses often; the adjectives (mad, sad, holy, great, beautiful) recur until they stop meaning; Dean’s speech is repeated past its effect; the sentimental register overrides observation; and the editing that made the text smoother also made it more ordinary than the voice it came from. The best pages stand with any prose of the decade, but the axis weighs command across the whole.
Zapotec builders · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and earthwork included. The levelling of the ridge, by cutting and filling to make one plaza, is a large command of earthwork. The platforms are well stepped and faced; the tombs are built chambers of stone roofed with slabs, some painted with care; the Zapotec double tablero gives the facades a clear, consistent profile. What holds the axis: the structural means are the region’s, rubble and earth cores faced with stone and finished in stucco, with no vault and no span of note; much of the facing now seen is reconstruction; the carving of the slabs of Building L is strong but not fine. Beyond the earthwork, the making is sure and large but rarely load-bearing.
Mark Z. Danielewski · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on Danielewski’s English and his design, which are one making. The command of layout is controlled and bears weight: the facing-page mazes, the mirrored notes, the pages of few words, the colour coding all keep the reader oriented enough to be lost on purpose. Zampanò’s voice, a pastiche of the scholarly critic, measured, citational and blind to its own horror, is exact, and its fake citations are a comic craft of their own. Pelafina’s letters are written in a voice entirely distinct, formal, tender and then fractured, and are the best prose in the book. Three charges hold the axis down. Johnny’s voice, which carries a large share of the pages, is overwritten: run-on, self-regarding, repetitive in its sexual bravado and its metaphors of dread, an excess only partly justified by his collapse. Some typographic effects are games. And the narrative prose of the explorations is, sentence by sentence, serviceable more than distinguished.
Indian builders (Gupta and later) · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure included. A brick tower of some fifty-five metres, hollow over its chambers, standing for centuries on the alluvial plain, is a real achievement of brick construction. Inside are arches of radiating voussoirs, reported by Cunningham; whether they are original or of a Burmese repair is argued, and if original they are among the earliest true arches in Indian building. The stucco ornament is ordered in tiers of niches that diminish with the tower. Against that: the tower is a steep pyramid with little modulation, much of the surface seen is nineteenth-century work, scored as part of the work as it stands but not finer for it, and the interior uses little of the height. The making is competent and in places bold.
Leonard Cohen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium. The centre of the making is load-bearing: Cohen’s guitar, fingerpicked in rolling patterns drawn from flamenco and folk, is exact and distinctive, and his voice, narrow in range, is placed close and dry so that its grain and timing carry the meaning; the phrasing of Suzanne and The Stranger Song is a real command. John Simon’s arrangements are uneven. On Suzanne and Sisters of Mercy the added voices and strings are discreet and right; elsewhere they sit on the songs rather than in them, the female voices on So Long, Marianne pleasant and generic, some colour on side two decoration, and the last song ending in a noise that reads as indulgence more than design. The voice’s limits show at the top of its range. It stands below Remain in Light at 8.7 and above It’s My Life at 7.8.
Bruce Springsteen · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. The title track is the best-made thing on the record: snare and riff placed so that the song arrives as a single blow, and the coda left to run. I’m on Fire is exact in the opposite way: a ticking rhythm, a low synthesiser, a held organ and a voice close to the microphone. Bobby Jean’s arrangement builds with judgment to its saxophone. The songwriting is compact: Glory Days tells three lives in three verses, and Downbound Train drops a whole life in eight lines. The faults lie in a share: the production compresses the band into one bright surface, Dancing in the Dark’s arrangement is generic for its year, and two songs are competent rather than commanded.
Basil Spence · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure included, read to the anchors of every desk. The making is sound and in places fine: the lattice canopy carried free of the walls on slender columns, giving the nave its lightness; the sawtooth walls and their angled glazing; the bowed baptistery wall of stone mullions holding a single great window; the sandstone matched in colour to the ruin’s red stone, which ties the two works. Spence’s coordination of builders, engineers and a dozen artists into one consecrated building in six years is a command of the medium as a complex practice. The costs: the structure is not expressed but hidden behind stone; the detailing of the exterior is heavy and in places coarse; the canopy is a ceiling, not a vault, and the nave’s structure achieves no feat.
New Order · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, and the making is load-bearing in part. Hook’s bass, high and melodic, is a lead voice and the record’s signature. Programmed sequences and Morris’s live drums are joined with judgement, each heard against the other; the sequences of 5 8 6 and Your Silent Face are built with patience; Gilbert’s keyboards colour without crowding. The band produced itself, and the sound is clear and spacious in most places. The faults fall across a large share: Sumner’s singing is thin and unsteady in pitch throughout, which may be meant as plainness but limits what the voice can carry; some mixes are thin, We All Stand and Ecstasy among them.
The Kinks · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The melodic and harmonic craft is high and load-bearing: Village Green, Big Sky, Picture Book and Do You Remember Walter? are tunes of great economy, each with a turn that carries the feeling. The arrangements are apt and varied for a four-piece: harpsichord and strings on Village Green, Mellotron flutes on Phenomenal Cat, the waltz and swell of Sitting by the Riverside, the calypso lilt of Monica, the fuzz of Wicked Annabella. Mick Avory’s drumming is light and Pete Quaife’s bass melodic. The costs fall on the production: Davies’s own is often thin and boxy, some mixes are rough, the steam train runs a borrowed blues riff longer than its making fills, and Starstruck and Monica are competent rather than commanded.
Built for Bishop Bernward · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure included. The command is of geometry and proportion more than of engineering: the module laid out with exactness, the crossings true squares under four equal arches, the alternation placed so that the elevation states the plan. The structure is the ordinary one of its day, thick masonry walls, a timber roof and a flat timber ceiling with no vault over the nave, so the engineering stakes were low; the crypt with its ambulatory and the six towers are competent rather than daring. The ceiling is painting of command on a large scale, the angel screen fine stucco. The twelfth-century capitals and the rebuilding after 1945 are good, and not the first makers’.
Tarsila do Amaral · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas at easel scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making serves the idea exactly. The modelling is smooth and continuous, the volumes rounded and graded in few tones, so that flesh, plant and ground share one soft, swollen substance; the contours are clean and slow; the colour is a small chord well tuned, green and blue cool, the yellow a single warm accent set against the cactus. The foreshortening from foot to head reads at once and without strain. What holds the axis: the surface is plain and the handling effaced by choice, the range asked of the brush is narrow, the means are Léger’s softened rather than extended, and the hand, complete for this task, does not carry the image at many levels at once.
Byzantine, under Justinian · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The masonry is granite, a hard stone difficult to dress, cut and laid in large courses in the wall and the church, and the wall has stood through earthquakes and fourteen centuries of desert climate with partial rebuilding only. The roof trusses have held since the founding campaign, a rare survival of timber building of the period. But a timber-roofed basilica asks little beyond good walls, columns and carpentry, and nothing here stands at the engineering edge of its age, as the domes of Constantinople did. The apse mosaic is of the first rank of Justinianic mosaic and raises the making of the sanctuary to the highest class. The making is sound, durable and in its finest part superb; its command is solid rather than inventive.
Charlie Chaplin · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the highest craft is Chaplin’s performance, in two registers: Hynkel’s oratory, a virtuoso work of sound and gesture in a tongue that does not exist, and the barber’s silent body, which still commands every routine. The globe dance and the Brahms shave are as exact as anything he made, image and music joined to the beat. Jack Oakie’s Napaloni matches him in the visit. Sound is used with invention: the mock German, the translated communiqués, Wagner under the globe and again under the close. What holds the figure is that the command bears weight in the performances and the set pieces more than in the making of the film as a whole. Roland Totheroh and Karl Struss’s camera is mostly plain and frontal, the cutting lets the middle of the film run slack, the ghetto is a stage set, and the 1918 prologue and the buffet run longer than their timing can carry.
Moshe Safdie · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every desk. The making is load-bearing: a plant on the site casting room-sized boxes, a crane setting them in a staggered, cantilevered heap held by post-tensioning, which is Komendant’s engineering and the building’s whole proposition; the proportion of box to void, so that a heap of identical units reads as a hill and not a pile; the sections of the dwelling types, which find light, garden and privacy for each house in a stack. The costs are the makers’ and are large: a heavy and redundant system, its weight and doubled walls the price of the box; casting and setting that cost far more than conventional building; joints that let in water. Command of idea and composition outruns command of the economy of building.
Judy Chicago · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The needlework is the strongest making in the work: runners worked in a range of historic techniques, each suited to its guest’s era, with lettering, borders and inset motifs. The ceramics are an achievement of scale, above all in the relief plates of the last wing, which pushed china-painted porcelain into forms it resists. The lustre lettering of the floor is exact, and the command of space, light and the processional reading of the room is sure. Charged: the china painting of many plates is accomplished in a hobbyist idiom and stays there, glossy and sweet in colour, its drawing often slack at the edges of the central form; and the making is uneven across thirty-nine places, as the work of many hands will be. High in parts, not load-bearing throughout.
Neil Young with Crazy Horse · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, load-bearing and limited. Briggs records the band as a room: guitars, bass and drums placed so that lead and rhythm guitars can be heard answering each other over ten minutes, the craft the long pieces depend on. Young’s lead playing is exact in what it chooses: the one-note break of Cinnamon Girl, the bent, sustained tones of Down by the River, tone governed by touch. Whitten’s rhythm guitar and harmony voice are the band’s hidden skill. Against this the command is narrow, and loose by design and also by limit: tuning and time drift, the harmonies on Round & Round sag, and the playing never reaches past what its players could do.
Alex Proyas · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as the elder desks, the making is load-bearing in design and photography. Patrick Tatopoulos and George Liddle build a city of brick, iron and rain that is one place from automat to underworld; Dariusz Wolski lights it in sodium and shadow with a consistency that is itself part of the argument; the practical miniatures and sets carry the world without apology. Rufus Sewell carries a blank role with presence, and Trevor Jones’s score is serviceable and loud. The costs run through the film: restless, fragmentary cutting that gives many scenes too little time; the prologue; Kiefer Sutherland’s mannered, gasping Schreber; the Strangers’ make-up and playing, of a single note; and a closing duel of computer effects of uneven quality.
Robert Venturi · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of plan, proportion and elevation is high and load-bearing: the front, wide and low, with the gable’s slope, the slot, the applied arch and the unequal windows held in a balance that reads at once as symmetrical and as broken; the plan’s compression, which fits hearth, stair, kitchen, rooms and an upper room into a small rectangle by letting each deform the others; the section, which lifts the upper room and the chimney through the split. The long run of schemes shows the labour toward this economy. The costs: the construction is ordinary timber and stucco, deliberately so, and earns nothing as engineering; the detailing is plain; and some of the awkwardness the house intends, the cramped stair and the leftover spaces round the core, is also awkwardness to live with.
Kallmann McKinnell and Knowles · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The concrete is made with care and command: the precast units of the crown repeated with precision, the cast piers and beams heavy and exact, the coffered and textured surfaces of the interior rooms detailed to a high standard for American work of the decade, and the long cantilevers of the crown carried with apparent ease. The brick of the plaza is carried indoors without a seam in its law. Against this: the envelope did not keep out water as it should; the thermal performance and the daylight of many offices were poor; and the handling of circulation, the most practical skill of a public building, is weak. It is a confident, load-bearing making, short of the highest marks because part of the craft of use was not commanded.
David Lynch · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and the command is uneven. Where it holds, it bears weight: Peter Deming’s photography of darkness, interiors lit so that black is a substance and faces surface from it, then the flat daylight of the Dayton yard; a sound of low rumbles and wind that carries dread where nothing is shown, with Angelo Badalamenti’s score working beside it; Bill Pullman’s stillness and his frantic solo at the Luna Lounge; Patricia Arquette’s two women; Robert Blake’s Mystery Man, made from a face and a manner. The costs are several, and they hold the figure: Balthazar Getty is flat where Pete must be magnetic, the middle movement goes slack between its set pieces, several song cues are literal or dated, and the porn-film material is clumsily handled.
Arnold Böcklin · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas at easel scale, to the same anchors as every medium. The making does real work: the tonal control is the picture, black cypresses against pale rock and the white figure the brightest note, placed where the eye must go; the water is laid flat and dark enough to read as stillness and depth at once; the rock is modelled to feel sheer and heavy; the light comes from nowhere and is held consistent. The costs are charged. The handling is careful and somewhat dry, illusionistic in the academic manner, with little life in the surface; the foliage is massed rather than painted; the architecture is drawn rather than felt; the figures are small and summary. Another competent hand could carry the design nearly as well.
Hakka builders (Jiang clan) · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Command of building, structure included. The rammed-earth wall is the achievement: four storeys of compacted soil, thick at the base and tapering, standing three centuries in a region of typhoon rain and earthquakes. The timber frame of galleries and floors, carried on the wall and on posts, is plain and sound carpentry. The setting out of concentric rings, each with its own count of bays and its own roof, is exact work. The craft is the type’s, carried out at its largest scale in this valley; it is not refined in detail, and the inner rings are simpler fabric than the outer. The making carries load in the outer wall and is ordinary elsewhere.
Akira Kurosawa · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares, and strongest where the film is still. In the house Asakazu Nakai and Takao Saitō hold six or eight people in the wide frame, in deep focus, for long takes, the blocking telling who stands with whom without a cut: that staging bears weight. In the city the camera moves and the cutting quickens, and the train plays with exact timing. Toshirō Mifune’s Gondo, brusque and proud and then emptied; Tatsuya Nakadai’s Tokura, calm at the centre of the procedure; Tsutomu Yamazaki’s Takeuchi, glimpsed in dark glasses and then given the last scene. Masaru Satō’s score is sparing, and the soundtrack makes evidence of noise. The costs are several and they recur: the briefings are flat in staging and played as exposition, the nightclub’s crowd is overlong, and Mifune is broad in places in the first part. A making load-bearing in the house and serviceable for long stretches beyond it.
Ingmar Bergman · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Nykvist lights the red interiors without harshness, leaves faces half in shadow, composes white figures against walls of colour and gives the park its grey dawn. Vos’s costumes and the design make the colour scheme a world rather than a filter. The four performances carry the film: Andersson’s dying, physical and unrelenting, is the summit of the making; Thulin’s Karin is rigid and in pain; Ullmann doubles Maria’s soft evasions with the mother; Sylwan’s Anna is a presence made of the body. Clocks, whispers, the mazurka and the sarabande are used sparingly and placed exactly. The costs weigh: the husbands are written and played to a single note, Joakim’s scene leans to melodrama, a few tableaux hold past their work, and the red and the cries are pressed hard. Invention is credited under the Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, not here.
Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The making of the main building is exact: the proportion of pier to pane, the dark base under the light glass, the thin steel sections and metal spandrels set so that the wall reads as one plane, and the corner detailed so that the glass meets itself with nothing between. The making is load-bearing in the sense the rubric asks; the meaning is in the detail. Three things hold it lower. The structural means are conventional and the cantilever at the corner is modest; the yard buildings are workmanlike rather than distinguished; and the command shown is that of one exceptional elevation, not of structure, space and fabric together. Below Villa Savoye’s integrated frame and plan; clearly above the floor of 7.0.
Jeff Koons · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, the fabrication credited to the work. The task was hard and is met exactly: to take a thin vinyl skin, slack and creased, and reproduce it in steel so that every pinch, seam and wrinkle of the inflatable is held, then polish the whole to a mirror without softening those details or leaving a weld or a mark of the hand. The result reads as weightless and solid at once, and that double reading is the making’s achievement. The making is load-bearing: the work’s argument is that the cheap thing has been made perfectly. Held at 8.1 because the form is a cast of a found shape, not modelled, and the artist’s choices are few and exact: the toy, the steel, the polish, the blank face, the carrot kept.
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in most departments. The dialogue, a pastiche of Southern oratory, the Bible and dime-novel elevation, is written to the syllable and spoken so: George Clooney’s vain, voluble Everett, Tim Blake Nelson’s simple Delmar, John Turturro’s aggrieved Pete. The music is chosen, performed and placed so that the songs carry scenes rather than decorate them. Deakins composes the open country in wide, symmetrical frames and lights the rally by torch, and the cutting times the comedy, the barn on fire, the cow, with the brothers’ usual exactness. Charles Durning, John Goodman and Holly Hunter are exact in small space. The charges: the middle sags between the sirens and the rally; Penny and Tommy are thinly written; and some broad business, the toad above all, is weaker than the rest.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and in places load-bearing. The organ of Intervention is recorded with real weight and set so that the band swells into it rather than fighting it; My Body Is a Cage is paced exactly, its long withholding making the organ’s entry count. No Cars Go is a better arrangement than its earlier version, every added part, strings, horns and massed voices, given a place in the climb. Keep the Car Running drives on mandolin and hurdy-gurdy without losing its pulse. The costs are real. The mix is often dense to the point of murk: in Black Mirror, Black Wave/Bad Vibrations and The Well and the Lighthouse the many instruments smear, and the voice, pushed hard, loses shape. And the crescendo, applied again and again, becomes a habit.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high on the best tracks and uneven across the whole. The title track is the best made: a bass and percussion pulse held for seven minutes without going slack, voices placed in two languages, Bowie’s entry timed, the saxophone and strings set into the groove. Here Comes the Night Time’s tempo changes, hand drums over a band, are exact; Afterlife’s rhythm section and layered voices are the record’s warmest construction. Murphy’s production keeps a large band and a percussion section legible. The faults fall across a real share of the record: Normal Person’s stomp is loose, You Already Know is generic, the mixes of the first disc are sometimes crowded, Win Butler’s narrow voice carries more than it can, and Supersymmetry’s tail is texture without construction.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, real and uneven. Masina carries the film: a performance built from walk, posture and a face that registers every change of hope, from the cursing woman pulled from the river to the last shot. The crowds are staged with exactness, the pilgrimage above all, and the nocturnal Passeggiata is lit by fires among ruins. Rota’s theme is given at the end to strangers to play. The hypnotist sequence moves from comedy to exposure to humiliation in one continuous stage, and the cliff holds its revelation in the gap between what the viewer knows and what she sees. The costs hold the figure: Lazzari’s episode is slack, some street comedy is broad, Masina’s clowning tips into mannerism, and the post-synchronised sound shows.
Mike Leigh · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and here the acting is the medium’s means, devised in long preparation and held in takes that leave nowhere to hide. Brenda Blethyn’s Cynthia, nervous, self-pitying, funny and finally whole, and Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Hortense, composed and watchful, carry the café take between them; Timothy Spall’s Maurice holds the film’s decency and exhaustion in the body. Dick Pope’s photography is plain and frames the barbecue table with exactness; Jon Gregory’s cutting knows when not to cut. The charges fall where they matter: Monica and some clients in the sittings are drawn toward caricature, the score underlines what the takes have shown, and the middle hour is slack.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and at the three summits the making bears the meaning. Hitchcock’s découpage is exact: each insert of an object is placed so that the viewer knows what the characters fear before they speak. Tetzlaff lights Bergman’s face as the film’s moral surface and gives the Sebastian house its depth of stairs and doorways, and the crane is a feat of planning. Hecht’s dialogue says less than it means. Grant’s withheld warmth, Bergman’s brittle gaiety giving way to fear, Rains’s wounded dignity and Konstantin’s still menace are each among the best work of their careers. The costs run through the middle: Webb’s score is conventional and swells where the images are full, the process work in the car, on the riding path and at the race track is visible, and the agency men are flat.
Ai Weiwei · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Judged to the same anchors as every medium, with the making by the Jingdezhen workshops credited to the work. The command is high and load-bearing: each seed modelled to the shape of a husk, fired, painted with a few strokes so that the stripes of a real seed are suggested and no two are alike, and fired again, at a count no workshop had attempted for one object; the grey-white and the black matched over a hundred million units, so that the field reads at once as one colour and as many. The making is the argument, since the work claims to be made, not produced. The placing was exact, a level field with a clean edge. Held at 8.1 because the artistic decisions are few and the visual form beyond the single seed is a level plain.
Imre Steindl · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium at a very large scale: a building of nearly seven hundred rooms planned with clarity, its circulation legible, its two chambers handled as equals, its long front composed so that hundreds of repeated bays read as one figure from across a river. The detail is consistent from the pinnacles to the stair halls, and the decorative campaign, painting, glass, gilding and sculpture, was held to one standard. The structure, brick with iron and steel in roof and dome, was sound and stood a siege. Two things hold it here. The Gothic detail is a learned vocabulary applied with skill rather than invented, and much of it repeats by the bay. And the choice of a soft limestone for the facing was a fault of making: it has cost the building its surface, though it is weighed lightly here against the strengths.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium is high and load-bearing in several departments. Thimios Bakatakis’s wide-lens tracking and high angles give the film its law, and the distances are exact: the long approach down the corridor to Bob’s room, the overhead escalator shot, the basement framed from above. Yorgos Mavropsaridis’s cutting holds scenes past comfort and then drops into a wide, so that silence does the work of shock. The sound layers choral and string music with a high, grinding dissonance that rises under ordinary rooms. Barry Keoghan’s Martin, polite, needy and implacable, is a performance of rare control; Nicole Kidman makes the mother’s cold reckoning credible; Colin Farrell’s flatness breaks in the right places. Costs: the deadpan sometimes reads as directed effect, several supporting exchanges are recited without tension, and the shooting scene tilts toward the absurd slightly past its design.
R.E.M. · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is skilled and in places load-bearing. Losing My Religion is exactly built: Peter Buck’s mandolin figure, Mike Mills’s bass line, Bill Berry’s restrained drums and the strings entering late, each part distinct and placed so the song tightens without release. Country Feedback is the record’s best single take, spare organ and pedal steel left raw under the voice. Low’s hushed organ and percussion, Half a World Away’s strings and Endgame’s arrangement are fine work, and Scott Litt’s production is clear and warm, the acoustic instruments given room. Michael Stipe’s singing is the most commanding it had been. The faults: Radio Song’s rap is grafted on, Shiny Happy People is polished pastiche.
The Smiths · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Marr’s writing and arranging are the record’s craft and in places load-bearing: the open-tuned layers of “The Headmaster Ritual”, the waltz and coda of “That Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore”, the rockabilly figure of “Rusholme Ruffians”, guitars doing the work of an orchestra. Rourke’s bass on “Barbarism Begins at Home” is a feat of the instrument, and Joyce drives “What She Said” hard. Morrissey’s voice is used with control, the falsetto of the opening track chief among its passages. The cost is in production: the band’s own, with Street at the desk, it is thinner and drier than the songs need in places, the title track’s effects are literal, and “Barbarism” is a jam left long. Skilled and distinctive, short of the summit.
Robert Motherwell · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting in acrylic and of drawing, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing where it matters. The black is laid in broad areas that read as mass and yet not as fill: the brushing within them keeps them alive. The edges are the craft, ragged and brushed, now firm and now giving, so that the forms breathe against the ground rather than sit cut out on it. The intervals, round against upright across a long field, are calculated without seeming so. The drawing left visible is a deliberate record of the search. The costs: the range of mark is narrow by design, two kinds of form and two values; much of the work’s authority is the format’s, settled long before; and the judgment of this particular surface is held loosely.
Robert Eggers · Film
7.6 · Tier III
The making is ambitious and largely commanded. Jarin Blaschke’s photography is built on long, choreographed takes, the raid above all, in which fighters, captives, fire and camera move through a whole settlement without a visible cut; the light is cold by day, fire by night. Halls, turf farms and dress are exact and lived in. Alexander Skarsgård makes Amleth a body more than a voice, and Nicole Kidman’s confession scene is the film’s best acting. The costs weigh: the stiff archaic dialogue often lands as recitation; Olga is underwritten; the digital visions and volcano are less sure than the practical work; the middle third’s killings show less invention.
John Nash · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and decoration together. The craft of the interiors is of a very high order: the painted and gilded work of the Crace firm and of Robert Jones, the carved dragons and serpents, the painted glass, the lacquer and the imitation bamboo, carried through room after room with one hand’s consistency. The engineering is inventive: iron in the structure that carries the domes, cast-iron columns in the kitchen shaped as palm trees and holding copper fronds, iron stairs made to read as bamboo. Against this, the exterior is a stage set more than a construction, stucco and render over brick, its detail reading better at a distance than at the hand. The command is first-rank inside and serviceable outside; the making bears the load in the interiors, not in the shell.
Michel Pinseau · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, by the same measure as on every desk. The command is real in two places. The engineering: a platform and foundations carried out into the Atlantic and held against its weather; a minaret of 210 metres in reinforced concrete; a roof section of great size that slides open over a hall of thousands. The crafts: carved plaster, carved and painted cedar, zellij and stone executed at a scale few buildings of the tradition reach. The costs: the craft is the trades’ command more than the design’s, its patterns received and repeated rather than composed for this building; the joining of the modern structure and its traditional skin is concealment, not expression; and the reported trouble of the fabric on its site, charged to survival rather than here, suggests a making surer of its surfaces than of its site.
Robert Zemeckis · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the medium. The screenplay is the strongest department: exposition delivered as comedy, every plant paid, the deadline tightened to the minute. Arthur Schmidt and Harry Keramidas cut the clock tower so that three separate actions, the cable, the car and the bolt, make one rising line. Michael J. Fox carries nearly every scene with a timing that never pushes; Crispin Glover builds George as a body that slowly straightens; Lea Thompson plays two ages of one woman. Dean Cundey’s photography makes one square into two eras. The charges are several: the 1985 bookends are lit and played flatter than 1955, comic turns run to sketch, the Vader visit and Doc’s mugging among them, and the effects are serviceable rather than load-bearing.
R.E.M. · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The making is skilled and often load-bearing. Mitch Easter and Don Dixon recorded the band close to how it played, and the result is clean, dry and live; the choice serves the songs. Buck’s guitar is the record’s signature, arpeggiated figures that ring and overlap, never soloing, always carrying melody. Mills is the hidden architect: his bass moves melodically against the guitar, and his voice is the second lead of Harborcoat and Rockville. Berry’s drumming is economical and right. Stipe’s voice is placed as an instrument, its slur a decision rather than a fault. The faults: some songs are arranged in one house manner and run together, a few performances are hurried, and the brisk songs of the second side are mixed alike.
Mogwai · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is high and in places load-bearing. The dynamic range is the record’s craft: the distance from Emergency Trap’s quiet to We’re No Here’s weight is held without the quiet going thin or the loud turning to mush, and the guitars at full force keep their separate lines. Auto Rock’s build is exactly managed, the piano kept audible under the mass. Friend of the Night’s arrangement is clean and well balanced. The playing is tight, and the drumming carries the builds without show. What holds the figure is the narrow palette and the formula: the build is executed several times in one way, the quiet pieces are well made rather than inventive, and the voice is a modest instrument placed to hide its limits.
Mary Shelley · Literature
8.7 · Tier IV
Judged on Mary Shelley’s English, with no translation between. The construction is better than the sentences, and the axis stands lowest of the twelve, with The Inevitable. The architecture of frames, the creature’s voice timed to the exact centre, the doubling of Walton and Victor, and the pairings (the creation night and the wedding night, the torn female and the murdered bride, the pursuit into the ice and the voyage into it) are made with real command; the landscape set-pieces of the Alps, Chamonix, the Arve and the Arctic are strong; the creature’s speeches have a force the human speakers do not. Charged: the prose is often stiff, Latinate and overstated, Victor’s despair is pitched at one register for long stretches, the plot leans on coincidence (the journal in the coat pocket, Clerval’s body on the Irish shore, the locket on Justine), and Elizabeth, Justine and Alphonse are thinly made.
Khmer, under Jayavarman VII · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and carving. The carving is of a high order where it counts: to make a face several metres high read as one calm face across courses of separate blocks, and to repeat it from tower to tower with variation, is real command, and the outer reliefs are lively, crowded and observed, their figures cut with economy. Against that, the making as it stands is uneven. The stone is laid dry with weak bond and joints that run vertically through several courses; the plan was altered as it rose, leaving awkward junctions; some reliefs are unfinished and others coarse beside the best Khmer work of the generation before; the fill and foundations were not equal to the load. The failures that followed are weighed under The Imperishable; here the charge is the haste and weak bond of the fabric that stands. Strong carving on weak building.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas of 1.73 metres, to the same anchors as every medium. Where it is achieved it is load-bearing: the lace of the white dress, in fine and patient strokes, against which the blood reads; the two faces drawn to near-identity without becoming a tracing; the hearts painted with the clarity of an anatomical plate; the line of the vessel held exact across the whole width. The costs are real and are charged. The bodies are stiff and their volume uncertain beneath the dress; the hands at the centre are awkward; the bench has little depth, and the figures sit on rather than in the space; the sky is broad and generalised beside the figures’ finish, two idioms in one field. Some stiffness is the retablo idiom chosen; at this scale the command thins.
H. G. Wells · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Wells’s English. The command is of narrative pace and of the physical sensation of an impossible thing: the ride through time, its lurch and nausea and the slow return of colour, is made credible by concrete detail, and the matches, the camphor, the iron lever and the lost machine are planted and paid like the properties of a good play. The exposition is lucid, and the Traveller’s voice, quick, practical and humorous, holds the book. Charged: the prose runs to the purple in places and is hasty in others, as of a journalist writing to deadline; Weena is drawn in sentiment; the guests are sketched rather than made. The making is good, and in the last chapter it bears the weight; it is not, across the book, the sentence-by-sentence command of Heart of Darkness, at 8.8 on this axis.
Giorgio de Chirico · Visual art
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making bears load where it matters: a perspective construction deliberately broken and controlled in its breaking; light and shadow placed as two flat regimes with a hard boundary; the girl’s silhouette, a few dark shapes that carry the whole motion of a run; the van’s black opening. Nothing in the canvas is unintended. The costs are charged: the paint is thin and the handling plain, the edges drawn rather than modelled, the arcades laid in with little inflection, the figure a sign rather than a body. The plainness is chosen, but the range of command is narrow beside Las Meninas (9.8) or The Starry Night (9.0); above Fountain (7.3), because a great deal is made here, and made exactly.
Richard Linklater · Film
8.4 · Tier IV
What is commanded is hard. Lee Daniel and Shane F. Kelly hold one look and one register across twelve separate shoots. Sandra Adair’s cutting makes the passage between years seamless and lets each segment run at its own pace. Patricia Arquette builds Olivia across a decade into the film’s fullest person; Ethan Hawke’s father is loose and charming and gradually ordinary; Lorelei Linklater’s sister is sardonic from the start. The costs run through the long last third. Ellar Coltrane’s late playing is flat, perhaps by method, and the film rests on him; the dialogue there turns to statement and advice; Bill’s household is staged closer to melodrama than the rest; the plumber’s return is contrived. The photography serves and seldom carries.
Aldous Huxley · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
The prose is quick, exact and often brilliant in satire. The opening tour of the Hatchery, a squat grey building with the motto over its door, cold light within and students taking notes, sets the tone in a paragraph. The hypnopaedic slogans are made with a jingle-writer’s skill. The montage of the third chapter is a technical feat, sustained over many pages without confusion. The making is charged elsewhere. The characters are drawn from outside and speak to illustrate; Lenina is a type the book half pities and half despises without deciding which; John’s Shakespearean speech is pastiche and grows mechanical; the chapters with the Controller are an essay in the form of a dialogue; and the pace stalls under the exposition of the first two chapters. The book shows both the mind and its limit as a novelist: the intelligence is first-rate, the novelist’s gift for persons is not.
Roberto Rossellini · Film
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making bears weight at its summits: the staging and cutting of Pina’s run, the handling of the round-up in the courtyard, the torture scene’s control of a room and three faces, the execution. Rossellini directs Anna Magnani and Aldo Fabrizi to performances that carry the film and sets them among non-professionals without the seams showing; Ubaldo Arata’s photography holds the streets and the stairwell with plain force. The costs are real and counted: the image is uneven, partly by necessity of stock; the sound is largely post-synchronised and sometimes loose; the score is emphatic and conventional; the Gestapo scenes are staged as theatre, and some supporting performances are broad. A making of great force in places, not command throughout.
Kenzo Tange · Architecture
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The making is disciplined and sound: a clear frame on pilotis, a well-proportioned slab, the vertical louvres giving the long faces a calm rhythm, and a plan whose geometry fixes a sight line across several hundred metres of park and a river with real precision. It was built in reinforced concrete in a ruined city under severe shortages, over five years, and it stands. The cenotaph’s thin arch is well judged. But the structure is not daring, and the building does not extend the means of its medium: it applies a known frame to a known type. Against the command of Villa Savoye (8.6), this is solid command, not load-bearing mastery, and the figure says so.
Patti Smith · Music
8.3 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. Smith’s voice is the instrument, and its command is real: phrasing that moves from speech to chant without a seam, timing that holds Birdland’s nine minutes on narration, and the multitracked improvisations of Land, two or three voices speaking at once, the making at its most load-bearing. Cale’s production is plain and serves the voice, and Richard Sohl’s piano frames Birdland and Elegie. Against that, the band plays with limited technique and in places roughly, Lenny Kaye’s guitar is serviceable rather than shaped, Break It Up and Free Money are generically arranged, and the sound is thin beside the best-made records of its year. Load-bearing in two pieces, adequate in the rest: it stands below Marquee Moon at 8.6.
Pre-Pottery Neolithic builders · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of building, structure and engineering, judged to the anchors of every medium and not raised for the poverty of the tools. The stonework is load-bearing and remarkable: pillars of several tonnes cut from the limestone bedrock of the plateau with stone tools, dressed to flat faces and crisp T-heads, carved in low relief and in near full round, moved and set upright, the central pillars of D seated in sockets cut in the rock. The relief commands its medium: the animals economical and alive, the arms of the great figures read in a few lines. The costs are in the structure. The ring walls are rough stone set in clay, and they slumped and failed; pillars leaned and were propped by their own builders; the plan of the rings is irregular. As stone-cutting and carving the making is high; as enclosure it is basic.
Nan Goldin · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the colour snapshot, of available and flash light, and of sequencing to sound. The making is better than its reputation for roughness. The colour is controlled and personal, the red and gold of lamplight and the hard flash against dark; the framing of the best pictures is exact, as in the picture of Goldin and Brian in bed, where the window light divides the two figures, him in the light looking away, her in the shadow looking at him; and sequencing to music is a craft of its own, built over years. The roughness, blur, grain, cut-off limbs and uneven exposure, is the vernacular the work chose and bears its claim of truth. What holds the axis is range: many frames are ordinary snapshots that serve the sequence rather than stand alone.
Anselm Kiefer · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil and acrylic on burlap. Credited: the perspective, a single deep path laid with conviction, so that the eye goes in at once and stays; the economy of the snow, thin pale paint over a dark weave that lets the burlap show as cold ground; the red placed sparingly along the path, so that it reads as stains and not as pattern; the trunks set as a rhythm of verticals that frames and closes; and the handwriting, the painter’s own, integrated into the field rather than stencilled onto it. The making carries the placing of the two registers. The costs: the drawing of the trees is summary, the paint in places thin and dry in a way that serves the image and limits its range, and the lines joining the names are diagrammatic. A sure command of a narrow, deliberate means, not a full one.
Bob Rafelson · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in several places. Eastman’s screenplay gives each world its own speech, the rigs’ banter and the house’s careful diction, and builds its best scenes, the diner and the field, as one sustained rhythm. Kovács photographs both landscapes in plain, unflattering light, the oil field dusty and the island grey, and holds the last shot. Nicholson plays a man whose charm is a defence, with rage and tenderness in one face; Karen Black makes Rayette funny, needy and dignified against a script that half mocks her; Lois Smith’s Partita is the film’s warmth. The charges: Anspach’s Catherine is cool to flatness, Samia is caricature, and the cutting is efficient rather than load-bearing.
Moisei Ginzburg and Ignaty Milinis · Architecture
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of the section is of the first rank and load-bearing: the interlocking of F and K cells, the corridor serving three floors, the light reaching each cell from both fronts, the double-height room fitted within a slab of uniform frame, all resolved in one extrusion. The proportion of the long slab over its columns and ribbon windows is sure. The costs are the makers’ and they are real: the lightweight infill, the experimental finishes and the roofs performed badly, the building leaked and decayed faster than its age, and the low corridors and tight cells show economy pressing on comfort. The shortages of the first Five-Year Plan are a condition here, not an excuse.
William Gibson · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Gibson’s English. The command is of the sentence as compression: the opening line, the definition of cyberspace, and a density of noun and brand that gives a whole economy in a phrase. The world is built without exposition, entirely by implication, which is a real and difficult craft, and the pacing of the first part, in Chiba, is exact. Three charges, and they are substantial. Character is thin: Case is a set of appetites and a grief, Armitage a mechanism, 3Jane a mood, so the human stakes are carried by the plot rather than the people. The dialogue leans on hardboiled pastiche. And the climax in Straylight is overloaded, so that the book’s crucial events, the merging, Molly’s ordeal, the password, come in a blur. The making bears its load at the level of the sentence and is weaker at the level of the scene.
Nick Ut · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the news photograph made under fire. The making is real and bears the load: the photographer on the road, in front of the children, the camera set and the frame level at the instant the girl came clear of the smoke. The frame is composed as a frieze, the children spread across it, the road leading the eye back to the smoke and the soldiers placed as a second row; the exposure holds the white of the girl’s body against the black of the smoke with no loss in either, and the image is clean and legible at newspaper scale. Held where it is by how much of that composition the event and fortune gave rather than choice, and by the narrow range of means: one frame, one instant, a crop made by an editor.
Frida Kahlo · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a small panel, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is load-bearing where it counts: the column drawn and modelled with cool precision, its cracks placed so it reads as both stone and bone; the flesh smooth and evenly lit, so the opened torso shocks by clarity, not by gore; the tears small, exact and white; the face a masterly likeness in her settled manner; the corset described with plain fidelity. The costs are charged. The anatomy is simplified and the drawing of shoulders and arms flat in the retablo’s way, by choice but at a cost in range; the landscape is schematic, its fissures stylised; the nails are a repeated mark rather than events each made. Command of a deliberately limited idiom.
James Cameron · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The making bears weight. Mark Goldblatt’s cutting keeps the pursuit continuous and lets no sequence slacken. Adam Greenberg’s night photography works in steel blue and sodium orange, rain, smoke and headlights. Brad Fiedel’s score, a synthesized heartbeat and an anvil-struck pulse, is cheap and exactly right. Stan Winston’s makeup carries the self-surgery above all. Schwarzenegger builds the machine from stillness, economy of movement and a flat voice; Linda Hamilton marks Sarah’s growth from comedy to resolve plausibly across the film. The charges: the stop-motion and puppet work in the factory and the half-machine show their budget; some supporting playing and dialogue are flat, Reese’s exposition and the police banter among them; the love scene is soft-focused convention. The craft is lean and sure, not at every frame the medium’s highest.
Maya, under Jasaw Chan K'awiil I · Architecture
8.1 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as every medium, structure included. The making is sure: a mass of rubble and cut limestone raised steeply to about 47 metres and standing for thirteen centuries, its terraces finished with the inset mouldings of Tikal’s manner; a summit temple vaulted in corbelled stone; a roof comb carried high over narrow rooms. Lintel 3, carved in sapodilla wood, is a work of the first rank in its craft. What holds it: the corbel vault confines the temple to rooms barely wider than a passage, a hard limit set by the structural means that the building does not overcome; the mass is fill; and its endurance owes much to consolidation. It is command of a medium at its period’s limit, not past it.
Eva Hesse · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of an unstable medium. The latex is laid into the cheesecloth so that the weave shows through in some places and is sealed in others; the fibreglass is set so that each sheet holds a rigid, curling part against a slack body; the edges are left ragged and the surfaces uneven, and the unevenness is controlled, not careless. The making is load-bearing: what the work knows is in the handling of these materials. Held at 8.0 for two reasons, read to the same standard as any medium. Part of the making was done, under the conditions of Hesse’s illness, by assistants working to her direction, and who did what is not known in detail. And the command did not extend to permanence: the failure of the medium was accepted rather than mastered.
Patricia Highsmith · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
The command of the medium is uneven, and instructively so. The plotting is masterly: the management of information, the timing of each danger, the economy with which a forged letter or a missing ring becomes a threat or a resource. The control of point of view is complete; it never slips out of Tom. The prose is plain, functional and often flat, by design and also by limit. It carries Tom’s anxiety by repetition and accumulation, which works, but it lacks the life at the level of the sentence that the finest novels of a single consciousness have, and it is capable of clumsiness and of explaining what Tom feels when the scene has already shown it. The dialogue is serviceable rather than distinctive, and the minor figures, Marge and Freddie, are drawn with a contempt that sometimes thins them. The making bears weight in the structure, not in the sentence.
René Magritte · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a small canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The making is deliberate and load-bearing in one sense: Magritte chose the anonymous competence of the commercial illustrator, and the picture needs it. The pipe is modelled cleanly, its bowl turned by graded tone and a few hard highlights, the black of the stem and the band at the shank distinct; the edges are crisp; the cursive is even and convincing as a teacher’s hand. Nothing is clumsy, and nothing calls attention to the painter. But the range commanded is narrow: one object, one light, no space, no air, no surface worth reading at close range. The impersonal manner is credited as fit for the thought; it does not raise the command itself.
Abbasid builders, under al-Mutawakkil · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of building in burnt brick. The Malwiya is the best proof: a solid tapering mass carrying its own ramp, set out so that slope, diminishing turns and narrowing tread keep the climb continuous to the top. It has stood eleven centuries on a plain that floods, in a region that has known war, until a bomb, not a failure, struck it. The enclosure walls run long and straight and their towers regular, laid at a scale that required the organisation of material and labour on an imperial level. What holds it: the means are conservative, brick in mass and a flat timber roof on piers, with no vault or dome to speak of. The achievement is size and precision, not a new command of structure.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is skilled and, in the main, load-bearing. Tone: a narrow scale of browns and ochres modulated across the planes so that each reads as wood or armour and the whole as one body, with the light falling from the upper left down the diagonal. Drawing: the planes are cut and hinged with precision, the turn of the stair at the bottom resolved, the dotted arcs placed exactly where a hip or knee swings. Design: the diagonal locked into the tall frame. The costs are real. The handling is dry and even, without the touch of the Cubist masters it borrows from; the upper states are crowded and less clearly drawn than the lower; and the palette that serves the idea is also a limit of means. A painter’s command, not a great painter’s.
Oscar Niemeyer · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. Cardozo and Niemeyer made the parabolic vault work as wall and roof without a frame, a thin shell standing from the ground. The proportion of the nave to the small rear vaults is well judged; the taper of the tower and the slope of the canopy are drawn with a sure hand; the brise-soleil and the white and tiled surfaces are clean. The making is load-bearing in the literal sense: the beauty is the structure. Held at 8.0 because the command, though sure, is of a small and simple programme; the joining of vault, tower and canopy is less resolved than the vaults themselves; and the interior, as space, is less commanded than the exterior.
Thomas Jefferson · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, engineering included. The command of composition at the west front is real: the low domed front and its portico read as one measure, and three storeys are hidden in one with windows set into the entablature and at the floor. The joinery, by James Dinsmore and John Hemmings, and the brickwork are good work of their region; the orders are correct and taken from the best sources; the devices are ingenious. The costs are the maker’s: a plan made by accretion, with awkward junctions where the first house survives in the second; stairs that fail the rooms they serve; a dome room without good access; engineering that extends nothing. The making is load-bearing at the front and in the hidden service plan, and uneven within.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Kazantzakis’s Greek as far as it is known here. His demotic is a famous instrument, dense with Cretan and popular words, many of which Greek readers meet only in him, and capable of great physical vividness: sea, stone, food, the body. Zorba’s voice is the book’s best making, abrupt, earthy and comic, rising to speech that sounds like proverb. The set pieces are well built: Hortense’s death, the widow at the church door, and the inauguration of the cable, where the ceremony, the monks and the falling logs are paced for comedy and ruin together. Against that, the narrator’s prose is overwritten in a way that is the author’s habit more than a characterisation, given to exclamation, abstraction and repeated ecstasy, and the structure is a chain more than a design. The Greek line, unheard here, is neither credited nor charged, and the reputation of the idiom is not allowed to raise the figure.
Sex Pistols · Music
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is strong and in two respects load-bearing. Chris Thomas built a sound from Steve Jones’s multitracked guitars, one heavy mass with every part locked, over Paul Cook’s tight, plain drumming. Johnny Rotten’s voice is the record’s best-made instrument: the rolled consonants, the pitch bent into scorn, the timing that throws a word late, all controlled across both sides. The costs fall across a large share. The palette is one, guitar, bass, drums and voice, at one pressure and nearly one tempo. The songs are simple in harmony and form, and No Feelings, Liar and New York are routine as composition. In places the polish works against the matter. Strong command of a narrow means.
Joseph Maria Olbrich · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command of mass and proportion is real and load-bearing in the front: four squat corner masses, battered walls, a recessed entrance, the dome held on short piers so that it floats above the closed block, and the relation of white field to gilt crown exactly judged. The ornament is drawn and placed with discipline: flat panels, laurel trees climbing the pylons, the lettering of the motto made part of the facade. The dome, a lattice of thousands of leaves on an iron frame, is a feat of craft. The costs: the structure is ordinary rendered brick and an iron and glass roof of its day; the side and rear fronts are handled summarily; the joint between temple and hall is a junction, not a resolution.
Peter Eisenman · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making of the field is exact where it bears load: two independently warped surfaces, ground and tops, generated and set out over nearly two hectares, so that each of 2,711 stelae has its own height and lean and the whole reads as one slow undulation; precast elements of a single section placed to the centimetre; the aisle held to the breadth of a body; drainage and paving that keep the falling ground walkable. The information centre is cleanly made, its coffered ceilings carrying the grid below ground. The costs: the concrete, the whole of the field’s material, cracked within years; the surfaces and arrises of the stelae are uniform where the material might have done more; and the information centre, a basement reached by a stair and a lift, is functional more than architectural.
Balkrishna Doshi · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The command is sure in the system and in the handling of light, section and climate: the pergola beams set to throw shade and admit sun, the corridors lifted and crossed to make space on several levels, the granite and the concrete joined in one consistent tectonic of heavy wall and light frame. The structure is simple post, beam and slab with load-bearing stone; nothing in it is technically ambitious, and the making is deliberately rough, the granite rough-dressed, the concrete plain or board-marked. The craft is well commanded and load-bearing for its effect, but it is not refined to the top of the scale.
Pallava, under Narasimhavarman II · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure included. The command is real and early. Dressed granite, the hardest stone the coast offered, was laid without mortar into a tall stepped tower that has stood some thirteen centuries in the surf; the storeys diminish evenly, the miniature pavilions are set out in a measured rhythm on each tier, and the octagonal crown is cut and seated true. The reclining Vishnu, cut from the bedrock, is joined to the built parts without a seam of idea. What holds the axis: the structure is simple, the towers corbelled and largely solid, the sanctums small, nothing spanning, so that the engineering asks endurance of mass rather than invention; and the finer carving, once the measure of the work’s hand, can no longer be judged in most places, and what cannot be seen is not credited.
Joe Rosenthal · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the photograph, to the same anchors as every desk. What is commanded: an exposure fit for hard midday light that holds detail in the uniforms and an even sky; a camera turned at the moment the group began to lift; a release at the instant of greatest diagonal force. The tonal range of the print is clean, the figures stand clear of the ground, and the vertical crop concentrates the act. What is not commanded: by his own account Rosenthal was not sure he had the picture until the film, sent to Guam for processing, had been printed and wired; the arrangement of the bodies was given, not made; the finest decisions belong to a second of reflex. The craft is real, but at the highest marks the making bears the load, and here the instant does.
Harper Lee · Literature
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on Lee’s English, with no translation between. The prose is clean, quick and often very funny. The first sentence, “When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”, plants the end in the beginning in a plain voice; “Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it” sets the place in a clause. Dialogue is the strength: the Ewell testimony, Mayella’s cross-examination, Calpurnia’s double speech, Miss Maudie’s dry wit. The trial chapters are paced with command, and the pageant night is a set piece of suspense told through a constrained point of view. Against it: Atticus speaks in sermons and the book stops for them; sentiment enters at the edges; Tom Robinson’s death is reported in a few lines, deliberately and evasively.
Peter of Illyria, under Pope Celestine I · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged on the making as it stands, structure first. The structure is the plainest available: brick walls on arcades and a timber roof, with no vault. Its command is in proportion and execution: the columns matched and set true, the arches sprung cleanly from the capitals, the clerestory wall thinned to large openings and standing for some sixteen centuries, and the opus sectile and the mosaic finished to the standard of the city’s best workshops. Nothing here is difficult, and everything is done well. The axis is held at its figure against the desk’s high anchors for building: Santa Sabina has neither the Pantheon’s concrete dome nor Sainte-Chapelle’s glazed cage, and the anchors are the same in every medium.
U2 · Music
7.8 · Tier III
The making is load-bearing in places and rough in others. Steve Lillywhite gives the band a dry, close, hard room. Larry Mullen Jr.’s drumming is the record’s engine and signature, the military figure of Sunday Bloody Sunday its most famous single idea; Adam Clayton’s bass carries New Year’s Day; The Edge’s guitar is harder and more economical than before, its chiming kept for moments of lift. Drowning Man is the best-made track, every part legible. Against this, the singing often reaches by strain, several lyrics are stated rather than made, and the arrangements of The Refugee and Red Light are crude beside the first side. The making carries three or four songs, not the whole: well under Boxer at 8.6, a making legible throughout.
Interpol · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is high and specific. The production, by the band with Peter Katis, is clean and spacious: every part audible, the bass forward where it carries the melody, the drums dry and present, the guitars panned and distinct, so that the interlock is heard as an argument and not a wash. Dengler’s bass lines are the record’s chief craft: the opening of Evil and the figure under C’mere are among the best-made bass parts of their decade. Fogarino’s drumming is tight and inventive within strict limits. What holds it is the voice: Banks’s range is narrow and his deliberate flatness at times becomes monotony. This is accomplished command of a narrow palette rather than mastery that bears the whole weight.
George Gershwin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium: melody, harmony, form, the piano writing and the scoring. The melodic invention is of the first order, the Andantino above all, and the piano writing is idiomatic and personal, the stride left hand and the repeated-note toccata figures made into concert material. The harmony uses blue notes, added sixths and parallel chords with an ear of its own. Grofé’s 1924 scoring, part of the work, is skilled and apt, the reeds doubling across the band’s colours. The costs are in the joins. Transitions are mostly sequence, a phrase repeated a step or a third higher, and cadenzas used to get from one key to the next; the development is repetition and expansion more than working. A gifted making with a known weakness.
Chuck Palahniuk · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on Palahniuk’s English, with no translation between. The command is of rhythm and the repeated line: short declaratives, the list, the deadpan fact dropped into a scene of feeling, the refrain returning with altered weight. The opening, with its countdown and its facts about explosives delivered with a gun in the speaker’s mouth, sets the method and holds it. The comic timing is exact, and the voice is unmistakable within a page, which is why it was imitated. Beside the sentences of White Noise and Blood Meridian, three charges hold it lower. The voice is one register: Tyler, Marla and the narrator speak in the same aphoristic clip, which serves the twist and flattens persons. The mannerisms are tics as often as instruments, and some refrains run past their yield. And the climax is told in summary where the prose most needed to bear weight.
Bonanno Pisano (attributed) and Giovanni di Simone; Tommaso Pisano · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The masonry is of high quality: fine marble, coursed and banded, the gallery arcades cleanly set on their colonnettes round a curving drum, the stair built into a wall some 4 m thick. The correction is the outstanding act of the making. The later builders did not ignore the tilt; they bent the upper storeys back toward the vertical, and the bell chamber was set to answer it again: craft under constraint, sustained across two centuries. The charge is the foundation. A footing about 3 m deep on soft silts, sands and clays, under some 14,500 tonnes, is part of the making as it stands, and it could not hold the design upright. It is charged here by a few tenths, and not twice.
Paul Klee · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as command of watercolour and the oil transfer method, to the same anchors as every medium. The method is Klee’s own and he commands it: the transfer gives a line controlled in its course and accidental in its texture, and he keeps the accidents where they serve, a smudge by the face, a granular contour on the wings. The wash is laid with tact, warmer away from the figure and paler near it, so that the angel stands in a soft light. The head, its scrolls, eyes and teeth, is drawn precisely inside its naivety. What holds the axis well short of the top: the sheet is deliberately rough, much of the body is summary, and Klee’s command of colour is barely engaged here.
Chinese builders (Northern Wei foundation, Ming and Qing rebuilding) · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Command of building, structure and engineering included, judged on the making as it stands. The feat is real: timber halls of two and three storeys carried on cantilevers socketed into rock, with posts on ledges, the whole tied into a cliff that also shelters it, and kept standing for centuries. Setting it under the overhang, which shields the timber, is good judgment. The carpentry is competent Ming and Qing work, roof forms and bracketing of the regional kind, with nothing to set beside the great timber buildings of the same province. The making is load-bearing in the literal sense, in the stance; in the halls it is ordinary.
Sahelian builders · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The making is load-bearing in the tower. To raise unreinforced mud brick to about 27 metres, the highest minaret in the material, demands exact command of its limits: the batter of the walls, the thickness at the base, the ties of timber through the mass, the shedding of rain from a surface that rain would otherwise cut away. The plastering of the whole is a craft carried by masons and renewed from one generation to the next. Against the anchors of structure in stone and glass, a domed hall of the first rank or a cage of glass held by its bars, it is of a lesser order: its means are the tradition’s, and the whole is one tower and a plain hall. The rebuilding is weighed under The Imperishable, not here.
Marina Abramović · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the same anchors as every medium: command of the medium, here the body, the set and the protocol. Credited: the stillness held through the museum’s hours for some eleven weeks without rising, an endurance few performers could command and none could fake; the economy of the set, two chairs and a lit square in a high white atrium, so that the work reads from the balconies above and from the edge of the square alike; the dress, long and plain, making the figure an icon at a distance and a person close to; the protocol, simple enough to run itself through sitting after sitting. The one breach, her hands across the table on the first night, broke her own rule. The range is narrow by design, and the camera work of the record is not hers.
The Walkmen · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. The making is skilled and in places load-bearing. Matt Barrick’s drumming is the record’s engine, rolling and loose in “Juveniles”, driving in “Angela Surf City”, held back to near silence in the slow songs. Paul Maroon’s clean, echoing guitar carries much of the meaning, and the brass in “Stranded” is arranged with restraint, never thickening into decoration. Hamilton Leithauser’s voice is the most distinctive instrument, and its strain is controlled, not lapsed. The production gives the songs air without losing their bodies. The costs: the palette is narrow, the brisk songs of the middle are competent without distinction, and the songwriting outside the frame tracks is serviceable more than inventive. It sits half a point under m b v, at 8.5.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.7 · Tier III
The command is real, and load-bearing in some departments. Robert Elswit’s photography and its Steadicam passages move through the studio, the hospital room and the houses with an energy that carries exposition. Dylan Tichenor’s cutting of nine strands across three hours, above all in the first act’s long build and the convergence at the frogs, is the film’s central achievement of craft. Robards, Hall, Cruise, Hoffman’s tender nurse and Reilly’s earnest policeman bear weight, and Jon Brion’s score binds the cross-cutting. But strain shows in several departments at once, and it holds the figure: the volume is often unmodulated, Moore’s performance is pitched at one shrill level, the second half’s dialogue overwrites its confessions, and the score in places tells the viewer what to feel. Real force, well short of a making in which every department bears weight without strain.
Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach, Nikolaus Pacassi and Johann Ferdinand Hetzendorf von Hohenberg · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium is strong in parts. The siting sets palace and Gloriette on one line across valley and hill, so that each frames the other at a distance. The Great Gallery is a hall of fine proportion and light. The Rococo cabinets are made to court standard in lacquer, porcelain and carved panelling. The Gloriette is light and clear, its open arcades reading against the sky from below and framing the city from above. The palace as a composition is weaker: the garden front is long for its height, its bays repeat without enough accent, and its centre was weakened by the reduction and by Pacassi’s alterations; the plain render leaves large flat expanses. The engineering extends nothing: ordinary spans, ordinary masonry.
Don DeLillo · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on DeLillo’s English, with no translation between. The sentences are cut close and polished; the opening words, “Sleep failed him”, begin a book of short declaratives and aphorisms that turn on themselves. The set pieces are commanded: the funeral, the riot, the film shoot, the last room. The cork-lined car, “prousted”, is a made object of real wit. Three charges: the dialogue is stylized until every character, the chief of theory, the bodyguard, the poet wife, the currency analyst, speaks one idiom, which is DeLillo’s; the exchanges with Elise repeat one figure of non-meeting; and the aphorisms come so thick that they cancel one another. The control is real, and the effect is airless by intent and at times beyond it. It stands level with the sustained manner of Palahniuk’s Fight Club.
Lal Chand Ustad · Architecture
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, to the same anchors as every desk. The command of the screen is high and load-bearing: lattices cut from stone in fine and varied patterns; bays corbelled out storey above storey; their small domed and curved roofs set in a rhythm that resolves the front into one stepped figure; and a five-storey wall of shallow galleries made to stand through two centuries of monsoon. The movement of air through the lattice is built, not an accident of pattern. The costs: the structure is the ordinary masonry of its tradition, with no structural invention; the front is a stacking of one module, handled with control but without the modulation of the greatest Mughal fronts; the painted finish over plaster is surface; the rear and the interiors are plain. Command of the screen outruns command of the whole.
Dolly Parton · Music
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, the words weighed elsewhere. Parton’s singing is the load-bearing craft: exact pitch, the mountain vibrato used as colour, a plain delivery in the title song that never presses the sentiment, and the bright high voice of “My Blue Tears”. The songs are well built: the title song’s melody carries a long narrative without strain, and “Traveling Man” is deftly paced. The session playing is clean and assured, the production clear. What holds the axis is the setting. Ferguson’s production is the competent house manner of RCA Nashville, the arrangements generic in places, the backing a cushion more than a construction, and the Wagoner songs routine. The making is load-bearing in one voice, not throughout.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, the making by Bentley and Skinner to Hirst’s design credited to the work. The command is high and exact: a platinum cast true to the skull; thousands of stones set to its contours, around the orbits, into the nasal cavity and along the sutures, graded in size to the curve; the real teeth fitted into a metal jaw; the brow stone placed as the one point of focus. The making is load-bearing, since the object’s argument is that it was made in fact, without economy. Held at 8.0 because the sculptural form is a cast, not modelled, and the craft is the jeweller’s covering of a found shape; the choices that are the artist’s are few, and fine: teeth, platinum, pavé, brow stone, darkness.
M83 · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The duo built large, layered sound with limited means, and the layering is skilled: in Unrecorded the beat and the synthesiser mass are set so that the wall rises without swallowing the rhythm, and the close is paced so that each addition is heard. Run Into Flowers balances a fragile voice inside a large arrangement. The costs are several. The mix is often crowded and compressed to the point of fatigue, so that dynamic range, the means of the sublime in a long build, is spent early; the palette is narrow, the same pads and swells across many pieces; some interludes sound like unfinished sketches rather than made things; and the live drums, where used, are less exact than the machine. Load-bearing at the peaks, not throughout.
Arcade Fire · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is strong and in places load-bearing. Godrich’s production is the cleanest and most spacious the band has had: the instruments are separated where earlier records massed them, and End of the Empire’s piano and strings are placed with a restraint that lets the song breathe before it swells. The Lightning is the best-made track: the hush of its first part is held exactly long enough, and the drums’ entry is placed to make the turn of the whole record audible. Age of Anxiety II fuses programmed pulse and live band without seam. Against this, the second half is competent rather than commanding, and the lead voice serviceable rather than an instrument of command.
The Cure · Music
7.4 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is strong and in places load-bearing. The arrangements are economical and exact: In Between Days’ interlocking strum, drum pattern and synthesiser line; Close to Me built almost from nothing, breath, claps and a toy-like riff, with every sound placed; Push’s layered guitars building over a steady drum part. Boris Williams’s drumming, light and precise, is the record’s engine, and Simon Gallup’s melodic bass gives Sinking and Screw their weight. Smith’s voice is more various than before, and the production is clean and spacious for its year. The limits are real: some keyboard sounds are thin, Screw is more effect than construction, the saxophone of A Night Like This sits a little apart, and the singing at speed can be more mannered than commanded.
Tom Wright (Atkins) · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, by the same measure as on every desk. The command is real where it was hardest: an island made in open sea and protected against it; a tower of 321 metres on friction piles in sand, there being no rock within reach; an exoskeleton of large trusses that braces the tower and makes its bracing its figure; a fabric screen of rare height on a tall building, tensioned between mast and wings; a restaurant and a helipad cantilevered high over the sea. The architect and the engineer were one firm and, outside, one mind, and the exterior is resolved. The costs: the interiors, by other hands within the same campaign and charged to the work, are made with expense rather than command, gilding laid on rather than form built; and the mast spends a great mass of steel on height that holds nothing.
Chris Sanders · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Command of the medium is high, and the making is load-bearing in two places. The character animation of Roz is the chief achievement: a body that shows a mind learning, by weight, gait and timing, across a whole film. The painting of the island is consistent and rich, the seasons distinct and the light designed; the cutting of the migration and of the winter storm is clear and rhythmic; Bowers’s score is well built if conventional in its swells; the voices are shaded and exact, Lupita Nyong’o’s above all in its passage from machine politeness to warmth. The costs: the action climax is cut in the studio idiom, legible but routine; some gags break a scene for a laugh; the music signals feeling more heavily than the image needs.
Frank Herbert · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
One of the two lowest of the twelve, and the making is divided. The architecture is made with great skill. The banquet at Arrakeen, where a dozen minds read one another across a table, is a set piece of omniscient narration; the duel with Jamis and the gom jabbar test are paced exactly; the invented lexicon is used densely and consistently and mostly taught through use, with the glossary behind it. The sentences are another matter, and they hold the axis here. The prose is functional and often stiff; interior thought is set in italics so often that it becomes a tic; dialogue frequently explains the plot to people who already know it; characters announce their reasoning in aphorisms; and the Harkonnen chapters are written in the register of melodrama. The world’s making is credited elsewhere, on The Inner Law and The Encompassed; here the medium is prose, and the craft of the whole stands well above the craft of the line.
David Cronenberg · Film
8.2 · Tier IV
The making bears weight where it matters most. Rick Baker’s practical effects, the breathing cassette, the bulging screen, the hand fused to the gun and the opening belly, are among the most exact of their decade and remain persuasive. Shore’s score is spare and cold; Mark Irwin’s photography makes Toronto a city of offices, warehouses and hotel rooms in flat light, the right ground for the hallucinations; James Woods plays a cynic whose quickness becomes panic without a break. The charges hold it below 8.0: a low budget visible in sets and crowds; Deborah Harry’s line readings limited beside Woods; exposition in the last third carried by long speeches from Convex and Harlan; the shootings at Civic TV and in the showroom staged plainly.
Spike Jonze · Film
8.1 · Tier IV
The making serves the conceit with discipline. Kaufman’s screenplay is the strongest department: each movement turns the premise to a new use, the dialogue is exact in its deadpan, and the reversals, Lotte in the cage, Maxine’s pregnancy, the vessel’s timetable, are planted early. Acord keeps the world drab and lightly handheld, and the portal is made with few effects and much physical invention. Malkovich’s performance is the technical summit: himself, himself possessed by a clumsy man, and the marionette become a famous puppeteer, each distinct. Keener’s Maxine is cold, quick and exact; Burwell’s score gives a mournful, slightly sacred colour. The costs: a loosely staged last act and celebrity montage, Cusack’s Craig played in one key, and a busy chase through Malkovich’s memories.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as every desk. The medium is installation: the design of a case and the engineering of a process inside it. Credited: the division into two chambers and the holes that make the crossing; the head placed low and the killer above it, so that food draws the flies upward into death; the white box as source; proportions that give the event room and a clean ground; a system that runs for weeks with only a keeper’s feeding. The composition is exact, and the parts tell at a distance: white box, dark head, blue light. Held below the higher marks because the making is mostly by decision and specification, and the system is not self-sustaining but replenished. Load-bearing design, not a hand at its height.
Wu-Tang Clan · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere and the words weighed only for their delivery. The best of the making is load-bearing: the C.R.E.A.M. loop, chosen and cut so that a few bars of piano carry a whole life; the eerie detuned figures of Da Mystery of Chessboxin’; drum programming that keeps time behind voices of very different weight. The rapping is a craft in the medium, and at its height, in Inspectah Deck, GZA, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon and Method Man, it is exact in cadence and timing. The faults are real, spread across the hour, and they weigh: a mix muddier than the aesthetic requires, voices at uneven levels, weak verses from the less practised members, slack skits and a routine reprise. The roughness is part of the point, but it also limits command, and the making is load-bearing at its best and loose at its edges.
The Velvet Underground · Music
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The songwriting is exact: Sweet Jane’s riff and chord turn, Rock & Roll’s staged build and the doo-wop voicing of I Found a Reason are made with economy and certainty. Reed and Morrison’s guitars interlock cleanly on Rock & Roll; Yule’s organ on New Age, his piano and organ elsewhere and his bass are tasteful and give the record its warmth. The faults are real. The drums are by several hands and often merely adequate; the production is plain to the point of thinness in places; the edits damage two of the four best songs at their joints; the rockers of the second side are generically arranged. Good, sometimes fine: the songs carry the craft more than the record does.
Elena Ferrante · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Ferrante’s Italian, with Ann Goldstein’s English for sense. The making is purposeful: a prose built for speed and exposure, with clauses that go straight to the act; a device of reported dialect, kept up across the whole volume, that keeps the language of the quarter felt but unheard; and a control of revelation, each chapter ending on a turn, that keeps several hundred pages taut. Against the anchors in the high eights the sentence is thin: much telling in place of scene, generalising sentences about what “we” felt, and an explanatory habit that names the emotion after showing it. How the Italian register sits against standard literary Italian is not judged here, and nothing is charged for it.
Sofia Coppola · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Lance Acord’s photography gives Tokyo at night a soft, smeared beauty and holds faces in close, still frames. Sarah Flack’s editing lets scenes run past their point into silence and cuts on mood rather than event. Murray’s performance is the load-bearing craft: a face that registers boredom, kindness, embarrassment and longing with almost no movement, the Suntory shoot played as a duet with an interpreter’s gaps. Johansson, about eighteen, holds the camera with stillness and reserve. The music is placed as an event rather than a commentary. The costs run through a short film: Ribisi and Faris are played as caricature, the Japanese supporting roles are written as gags, the comic set pieces are staged looser than the rest, and the middle loses its grip between the night out and the rupture.
Diane Arbus · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the photograph, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at its decisive point: the choice of instant, the fraction of a second in which the two faces diverge, and the choice of this frame among the others made that day, which is the photographer’s art and cannot be delegated. The frontal placement, the near central division and the distance at which both girls fill the square without crowding are exactly judged. The light removes shadow and atmosphere, as the work requires. The print in Arbus’s hand holds the dark dresses and the white collars apart without losing the faces. Held near 8 because the means are plain and few, one camera, one light, one pose, and the control is of choosing and placing more than of any range of making: the achievement lies in seeing what to take.
Kara Walker · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Read to the same standard as any medium, with the fabrication by others to Walker’s design credited to the work. The command is high where it bears load: a figure at architectural scale whose proportions read true from the far end of the hall and from beneath her; a white surface even enough to glow in the light of the shed; the face modelled with restraint, so that the stereotype is stated and not caricatured; the boys made to soften at the rate the run required. The placing in the long hall, with the attendants on the approach, is exact. Held below 8 because the modelling is broad, as scale and material demand, the sphinx’s form is the stereotype’s given form, and the artist’s choices are few and well judged.
Yves Klein · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, which here is staging, photography and the darkroom together, and credited to the work, not to Klein alone. Credited: the choice of the wall, high enough to frighten and low enough to survive; the moment at the top of the arc, the body in a held, open line from fingertips to feet, the work of a trained judoka who knew how to fall; the viewpoint from the street, low enough to set the figure against the sky; the seamless joining of two negatives by hand, so that the join went unseen by most viewers; the cyclist, placed or found, set deep in the distance as counterweight. These decisions are exact and load-bearing. What holds the axis is range: one frame, one effect, and a montage that is a known darkroom operation of its time.
Jordan Peele · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. The screenplay is the strongest part of the making: economical, its plants paid, its comedy and dread carried by the same lines. Daniel Kaluuya’s performance bears weight, above all in the tears running down a face held still at the edge of the Sunken Place; Betty Gabriel’s Georgina and LaKeith Stanfield’s Andre each make one scene unforgettable with a face. Abels’s score is exact, and the Sunken Place sequence is a real piece of film-making, made with little money. The charges fall on the image and the cutting: much of Toby Oliver’s photography is the plain, evenly lit look of low-budget studio horror, coverage more than composition; the last act is cut for shock in the genre’s grammar; and Rod’s scenes are shot as television comedy is shot.
Chimú builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure included, to the same anchors as every desk. The walls are well made for their medium and their coast: adobe set on stone footings, battered so that the mass sits at the base, and standing to about nine metres after five centuries and more of earthquakes wherever erosion has spared them. The setting out is orderly: rectangles of hundreds of metres, aligned, with consistent programmes inside. The wells reach the water table in a desert. The friezes show sure command of mud relief, a module held across a whole wall, crisp in the surviving originals, lattice and figure set in one grid. Against the summit’s anchors the making is less load-bearing: the structural problem is mass, not span; the reliefs repeat a module; and the medium, though handled with skill, is the one that has failed most visibly over time.
Aphex Twin · Music
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with invention credited elsewhere. Much of the making is load-bearing. The synthesiser programming is exact and warm: the pads of Xtal, the bass of Ageispolis and the bell tones of Heliosphan are voiced so that a few parts sound full. The balance in Tha, murmur, pulse and pad each kept distinct inside a muffled whole, is fine judgment, and the melodic writing is simple and sure. The costs are real and spread. The drum programming is basic on several tracks, a stock kick and hat pattern carried through without development; the master dulls the top end and lets levels drift; Pulsewidth and Hedphelym are sketches beside Xtal. Below m b v’s 8.5 and Zooropa’s 8.2.
Andrew Haigh · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making carries the form in several departments. Andrew Scott holds the film at the level of the face and of reaction, a man of forty becoming a boy without a change of voice, and the coming-out scene rests on his listening. Claire Foy plays the mother’s fear and love in one movement, and Jamie Bell makes the father’s admission land with very little. Paul Mescal holds Harry at a deliberate opacity that the ending pays. Jamie D. Ramsay’s photography, with reflections, soft focus and the warm light of the house against the cool of the tower, and Jonathan Alberts’s cutting, which crosses worlds without marking them, are the instruments of the form. The costs: the club passage is staged loosely against the rest, some transitions lean on music, and the discovery in Harry’s flat is handled with more device than the quiet elsewhere.
The White Stripes · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, read to the same anchors as the elder desks, with invention credited elsewhere. Jack White’s guitar is the record’s strength: riffs of great economy in Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground and Fell in Love with a Girl, a tone raw but controlled, and a voice that commands several registers, from the music-hall lilt of Hotel Yorba to the scream of I Can’t Wait. The songwriting is tight; the melodies of Hotel Yorba and We’re Going to Be Friends are well made. Meg White’s drumming is rudimentary by intent and right for the record, but it is the command of a single gesture, not of a range. The recording is quick and honest and the room is heard, yet the mixes are often rough, the low end is thin, and Now Mary and I Think I Smell a Rat are made with less care than the best. Under m b v at 8.5 and Zooropa at 8.2.
Bong Joon-ho · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the design: Ondřej Nekvasil’s cars, each a distinct world in a fixed width; Hong Kyung-pyo’s photography moving from the tail’s cold grey and handheld crush to the saturated colour of the front; the axe fight staged in a narrow car, in darkness, then night vision, then fire, with the space always legible. Tilda Swinton’s Mason, teeth, accent and false authority, and Song Kang-ho’s Namgoong, drowsy and exact, are strong; John Hurt gives Gilliam weight in few scenes. The charges are real and run through the film: the English dialogue is often flat and expository, Chris Evans carries the confession but little else in range, the digital exteriors are weaker than the built interiors, and the engine room is static talk.
Minoan · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting on plaster, to the anchors of every medium. The line is fluent and sure: long unbroken contours for the bull’s back and belly, the vaulter’s arc drawn in one curve, the bodies narrow-waisted and long-limbed by convention but alive in their stretch. Colour is flat and placed with clear purpose: the bull’s dark patches, the blue ground, the skins. The economy of the drawing shows a painter in command of a fast-drying medium. The costs are charged. The figures are schematic, heads in profile and eyes frontal, the anatomy of the act stylized rather than observed, and the border routine. Where the line is modern the hand cannot be credited, and which contours are original cannot be said with confidence.
Eduard Riedel and Christian Jank, under Ludwig II · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The command of picturesque composition is real: towers and gables step along the ridge to the sheer Palas over the gorge, a skyline drawn for the site that reads from every point round the valley. Building a residence of this size on that rock was serious construction, and the services, heating, water, bells and the steel frame of the Throne Hall concealed under Byzantine painting, were advanced for a house. The interiors show the crafts at a high level, in carving, painting and metalwork. The costs: the design was a scene painter’s before it was an architect’s, worked out by three architects in turn; the exterior detail is often thin and scenic; the plan has no spatial invention; the Throne Hall’s structure has nothing to do with its look; and the building stopped unfinished.
Luis Buñuel · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium. Buñuel’s late style is plain by choice: a mobile camera that follows rather than displays, long takes that let the absurd arrive without emphasis, cutting that will not signal a joke. Where the plainness bears weight it is exact, since the argument needs the impossible and the ordinary shown alike, and the hand-offs are made with real skill, in one movement from story to story. Michael Lonsdale, Jean Rochefort and Michel Piccoli give the absurd the weight of ordinary conduct. The charges are not small: Edmond Richard’s colour is flat and serviceable rather than composed, the inn is staged loosely, and the uniform manner gives the eye little to return to.
Paul Abadie · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure first. The foundations are the real achievement: a heavy stone church set on a hill hollowed by gypsum quarries, carried down on deep piers to sound ground, and standing without movement for a century. The masonry, the domes and the choice of a stone that cleans itself are competent and intelligent, and the work was carried through forty years and several architects to a consistent finish. Against that, the composition is awkward in proportion: the high drum and dome over a body that reads squat from near at hand, the lesser domes crowding it. The ornament is mechanical and repetitive, and the campanile is joined to the church by distance rather than design. Sure command of construction, less of form.
Alfred Hitchcock · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the set pieces: the matched openings, the dolly into Cotten’s profile, the library crane, the ring passed in the kitchen, the step that gives way, the garage held in one space. Joseph Valentine’s photography makes a real town welcoming and full of shadow. Cotten carries charm and contempt in one face, Teresa Wright a girl’s growth from boredom to knowledge, Patricia Collinge the film’s heart. What holds the figure is that the command bears weight in its set pieces more than continuously, and the charges fall where they matter: Macdonald Carey’s Graham is flat, the climax shows the seams of its rear projection, Tiomkin’s score underlines what the image has said, and the propeller death is told, not shown.
Stuart Rosenberg · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the set pieces. Hall photographs heat: dust, sweat, white sky, the glare in the mirrored glasses, light through the church window at night. Sam O’Steen cuts the tarring and the eggs to a comic rhythm that never loses the menace of the guns at the edge of frame. Schifrin’s score is spare and used sparingly. Newman carries the film on a smile that is defiance, charm and despair by turns; George Kennedy’s Dragline is the performance of the film, the man who needs a hero; Strother Martin makes the Captain’s softness frightening. The charges: the direction is sound rather than inspired between the set pieces, the zooms are of their year, the symbolic compositions heavy, and the middle drags.
Robertson Davies · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on Davies’s English, with no translation between. The command is of a voice: lucid, ironic, learned and dry, sustained across sixty years of a life without slackening, and able to move from comedy of manners to the night at Passchendaele without a seam. The narrative is built with a dramatist’s care: the stone is planted in the first pages and paid in the last, and the three miracles are spaced to carry the book. The set pieces are well made: the snowball, the gravel pit, the carnival, the magician’s last show. Three charges hold it below the top: the talk, in which characters deliver essays to Dunstan, Liesl and Blazon above all; the coincidences the plot depends on, Dunstan meeting Paul and Liesl abroad among them; and the women other than Mary Dempster, Leola above all, drawn thinly and through the narrator’s condescension.
Terry Pratchett · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on Pratchett’s English, with no translation between. The command of the comic novel is high. The timing is exact and the footnotes are placed to land. The voices are distinct: Death in his small capitals, the god’s querulous complaint, Vorbis’s flat menace, Brutha’s slow literalness. The dialogue moves fast and carries the argument without lecturing for most of the book, and the coda is controlled with real tact, the comedy withdrawn just enough. Charged: the prose is functional rather than load-bearing sentence by sentence; jokes are sometimes repeated past their worth; the Ephebian middle sags into revue; and some of the best lines are aphorisms whose shape is the series’ habit more than this book’s need.
Alex Garland · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Read to the anchors of the elder arts, the making bears weight in two departments. The sound, quiet held long and fire mixed at a volume that makes a theatre flinch, is used as argument and is the film’s strongest craft. Rob Hardy’s photography moves between handheld coverage at eye level, framed like a photographer’s approach, and composed tableaux of the strange, the stadium camp, the forest, the monuments, with the stills placed by Jake Roberts as cuts of thought. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee’s exhaustion as a closed face that opens once, near the end, before she dies; Jesse Plemons makes the grave a summit of menace in a few minutes. The costs are real: expository dialogue explaining what the images show, a hurried development for Jessie, and action that serves momentum over sense.
Pearl Jam · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, read to the same anchors as every desk. At its best the band plays as one body: Corduroy’s guitars, Gossard’s figure under McCready’s line, build and release with real control; Nothingman rests on Ament’s bass and a restrained arrangement; Better Man’s slow entry of the band is exactly judged; Immortality’s guitars and solo are spare and right. O’Brien’s production is direct, dry and loud without gloss, and has worn well. Vedder’s voice is the most distinctive instrument, commanding in the slow songs, deliberately strained in the fast. The faults weigh on a quarter of the record: two sketches, a collage assembled more than composed, generic arrangement in places, and vocals buried past the point of intention.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, which here is the making and placing of a large temporary structure in a public landscape, with the fabrication and installation by others credited to the work. The command is high and organisational: thousands of gates made to the width of each walkway, installed and opened across the park in a few days, kept through sixteen days of public use, and removed. The decisive visual choices are exact: one colour tuned to winter light; the panel’s hang stopped above head height so that it moves and clears the walker; a height of about sixteen feet scaled to the bare trees and the paths. The making is load-bearing. Held below 8 because the unit is plain and industrial at close range, and much of the craft is logistics rather than shaping.
Kehinde Wiley · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on a single large canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The figure is painted with real command: the dark suit given volume through close tonal steps in black and blue, the shirt and cuffs clean, the hands, often a portraitist’s weakness, convincingly articulated across the crossed forearms, the face a strong likeness held between candour and reserve. The ground is crisp, leaves and flowers evenly drawn and colour-keyed so that the green neither swallows nor separates from the figure. The making is load-bearing in the collision of finishes. Held below 8 because the smooth finish is closer to skilled rendering of a source than to observation built in paint, the ground is a decorative system rather than a painted space, and the light on the sitter answers to nothing in the picture.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making is consistently assured and in places load-bearing. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s camera gives the matches a vocabulary the sports film had not used so freely: the low shot through the court, the ball’s flight, slow motion on sweat and strain, close faces in the hotel room. Marco Costa’s editing, cutting between years on a look or a stroke, keeps a nested structure legible across 131 minutes, the film’s hardest technical task. Mike Faist, Josh O’Connor and Zendaya each hold a character across thirteen years, Faist above all in Art’s deference and fatigue. The costs: the score pressed over dialogue flattens scenes into one tempo, the bravura of the climax is spectacle more than command, and Tashi’s performance must supply an interior the script withholds.
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza · Film
7.3 · Tier III
Command of the medium is high in the departments that carry the form. The sound is the film’s instrument: the blast heard as pressure and ringing, the radio as a second, frantic room, the jets as a wall of noise, and a mix that lets confusion be heard without being muddied. The staging in one house is clear in its geography: the viewer always knows where the wounded lie and where the stairs and doors are, and that clarity under chaos is real craft. The ensemble works as a unit; D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai’s frozen radioman and Will Poulter’s officer stunned out of command are exact. The costs: the actors’ anonymity is a principle that is also a limit, since many cannot be told apart, and the second half loses some shaping as it follows the event.
Yousef Abdelky · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included. The making of the finishes is of a very high order: stone inlaid in marble across more than a thousand columns, the mosaic of the court, the hand-knotted carpet laid as one piece and woven to the plan of the hall, the calligraphy, the lunar lighting. The materials are fine and fitted with care, and the building is kept immaculately. The costs are in the architecture, not the craft. The structure is concrete clad in marble and nowhere expressed; the domes are shells over a frame, their profiles taken rather than derived, the main dome’s span modest for its height. Dome clusters and the joins of hall, arcades and minarets are handled as an accumulation of parts, not a resolved whole, and the chandeliers sit uneasily in the room.
Deafheaven · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The guitar writing and its recording are the record’s strength and are load-bearing: Kerry McCoy and Shiv Mehra layer chorused, delayed and clean-toned figures into a bright mass that never turns muddy, and the long builds are paced with judgement. Daniel Tracy plays with restraint and precision, and the end of Mombasa shows what was being held. The production is clear and spacious, and Mombasa’s dynamics are managed exactly. The costs fall on the instrument the record makes central: George Clarke’s clean voice is limited in range and colour, often doubled and set back in reverb, and over eight tracks gives the songs a sameness of line. Below m b v at 8.5.
David Childs (Skidmore, Owings and Merrill) · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The engineering is of the first rank for its kind: a core of high-strength concrete with a perimeter steel frame, raised on a site threaded with rail lines and the foundations of the old complex, built to a life-safety standard beyond the code of its day, and a 408-foot mast lifted in sections and set at 1,776 feet. The curtain wall is exact, and the chamfered geometry is carried cleanly from base to parapet. The making falls where the design was cut: the prismatic glass of the base was dropped and replaced, the radome that would have made the mast a spire was omitted, and the top is a parapet rather than a crown. Load-bearing in structure and skin, compromised at the two ends where a tower is most judged.
David Mackenzie · Film
7.2 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight. Ackroyd’s photography keeps the camera among the men, handheld, in weak northern light, and gives cold and wet a texture few films of the kind manage. The opening take is a feat of staging, blocking a council, a sparring match and a siege through one moving camera without losing the political sense. The production design, costumes and locations make a convincing poor and violent country, and Loudoun Hill’s mud is directed as terrain, not decoration. Stephen Dillane is exact as the old king. The costs are weighed: Douglas, Elizabeth and the brothers arrive and depart without the scenes that would seat them; Billy Howle’s Prince is played toward a broad villainy the rest refuses; the dialogue is serviceable; Chris Pine’s Bruce is controlled to the point of blankness.
Constantinian, Crusader and later builders · Architecture
8.5 · Tier IV
Judged on the making as it stands, structure included. The greatest feat, cutting the hillside to free the tomb and roofing it with the first rotunda, is largely gone. What stands: an eleventh-century rotunda of modest means on the old lines; a Crusader church of real competence, its choir, ambulatory and pointed vaults handled surely, its south façade of paired portals and windows the finest surface the building keeps; the work of Komnenos, which encased the rotunda’s supports in heavy piers and dressed the Edicule in an Ottoman Baroque, workmanlike and no more; the dome of the late twentieth century. The structure has needed shoring through much of the modern period. The making is load-bearing at the joint of rotunda and choir and almost nowhere else.
Richard Wright · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Wright’s English, with no translation between, and argued from the prose as known, not measured. The craft is strongest in structure and pace. Book One is a model of construction, every incident of a single day planting what the night will use, and Book Two’s flight is paced with a thriller’s command. The prose is a plain, driving instrument of Bigger’s sensation, and at its best, in the bedroom, at the furnace, on the snowbound roofs, it is exactly adequate to the terror. Charged: sentences often heavy and repetitive, a narrow vocabulary of feeling insisted on, a narrator who explains what the scene has shown, wooden dialogue for Jan, the reporters and Buckley, and speeches in Book Three long and rhetorical rather than made. The making bears the design and not the line.
Nikos Kazantzakis · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Judged on Kazantzakis’s Greek as far as it can be judged here. Its sound, and its demotic vocabulary, are beyond this reading and are neither credited nor charged; what is judged survives any translation. The command of the set scene is strong: the Zealot’s crucifixion in Nazareth, Magdala, the Baptist, the monastery in the desert, the supper, the cross. Galilee is rendered through the senses, sweat, wood, fish and light, so that the sacred stands in a world of bodies. The making is load-bearing in the vision, which must be told without a seam, and is. Charged, and in the design rather than in any rendering: the characters speak in one voice, the author’s; the narration explains what scenes have shown; the exclamatory pitch flattens contrast; and the construction before the vision is episodic.
Kazimir Malevich · Visual art
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making that shows: a square brushed by hand, matte and dense, its edges laid by the brush; a white ground brushed, not sprayed, so that it is a surface and not a void; a proportion of form to field that holds the square neither crowded nor floating. These decisions matter, and the hand is load-bearing, separating the canvas from a diagram. But the command the work demonstrates is narrow: one form, two colours, one touch, and the measure is command of the medium, which a canvas that uses almost none of it cannot show. The cracking is a failure of the making’s endurance, and is charged to survival, not here. As with a poem of very few words, minimal means bound the figure.
Anonymous · Literature
8.3 · Tier IV
Judged on the Arabic as far as translation carries it; the rhymed prose, sajʿ, and the verse are unheard and neither credited nor charged. Where it is strongest the command is narrative architecture. In the Hunchback cycle a corpse passes from house to house, a tailor, a Jewish physician, a steward, a Christian broker, until four confessions compete before a king, and the barber’s long garrulity is itself the comedy. In the Porter and the Three Ladies, three one-eyed dervishes, a caliph in disguise and two beaten dogs are explained in turn. The night-breaks are placed for suspense. The prose is plain and formulaic, made for recitation, and the formulas carry it. What holds the axis below 8.0: repetition without purpose, inset verse that pads, loose joints in the long romances, and filler a single maker would have cut.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
8.2 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium as it stands: preservation, fabrication and placement, made largely by others under the artist’s direction, which is not charged. Load-bearing where achieved: the pose, mouth open and body angled so that the jaw meets the approach from the front; the suspension, so that the animal seems to swim rather than float; the clarity of the fluid and the light through it; the proportion of tank to body, close enough to confine and long enough to let it move. The engineering of a vitrine that holds that volume of fluid behind glass is precise. What holds the axis: the range of decisions is narrow, and many of them are a taxidermist’s and a fabricator’s; and the failure of the first making, though weighed on survival, shows that command of the material was not complete in 1991. Sound command of a small set of means.
Neutral Milk Hotel · Music
8.2 · Tier IV
Command of the recorded medium, read against the desk’s elder anchors, is real and limited. Schneider’s recording catches a room and a voice with a closeness that carries the content; the distortion on guitar and voice is chosen; brass, saw and organ are placed so that a handful of players sound like a band of twenty on the title song and Holland, 1945. Scott Spillane’s horn arrangements are the finest making on the record, simple and exactly weighted, and Mangum’s songs hold strong melodies on three or four chords. What holds it lowest of the eleven: the singing is often under pitch and at the edge of control, and the strain is not always chosen; the guitar playing is rudimentary; Communist Daughter, Ghost and the untitled piece are thick rather than exact; the saturation clips in places. Low stands at 9.0 here.
Ana Mendieta · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged to the anchors of any medium, as command of making in the land and of its record. Credited: exact choice of site and material, the tomb at Yagul, the riverbank, the tideline; armatures for fire and fireworks that burn as a figure and hold their shape long enough to be seen; outlines shaped in earth, and the raised-arm figure carved and burned into the ground; a sure sense of the moment to record. The craft bears load: a badly built fire piece is a bonfire. Charged: the record is often plain. Many slides are evenly lit, centrally framed and uneven in exposure, and the films are mostly static takes. Some outlines are rough by intent, some simply rough. A precise command of a small set of means, below the finest making in any medium.
Joseph Beuys · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Read to the same anchors as any medium. The command shown is the command of a body, a material, an animal and time: Beuys’s stillness and patience with the coyote, his handling of the felt as both shelter and lure, the gestures with the crook, which by the record are slow, exact and unhurried, and the staging of the journey so that it reads at once. The decisions are clean and they bear load. But the making is narrow and partly not his: the room is bare by design, the lasting images are Tisdall’s and the film’s, and much of what happened in the room was the animal’s doing. The figure credits only the decisions and the bodily command that are Beuys’s: a precise command of a small set of means.
Ray Bradbury · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Bradbury’s command shows in the set pieces and the images: the brass nozzle and the black-faced grin of the opening, the Mechanical Hound with its needle and eight legs, the sieve on the subway, the seashell thimbles in the ear. He builds a scene to a pitch, and the plot is efficiently engineered: the books hidden in the ventilator grille, Mildred turning in the alarm, the Hound loosed, the substitute victim. Against him, the prose is uneven and often overwrought, its metaphors piled until they blur; the dialogue is declamatory, Beatty and Faber speaking in essays and the minor persons in tags; and the world beyond the parlour, the war, the government, the economy, is sketched and left unfinished. These are faults of making, not of ambition. A skilled hand with a strong eye and a loose ear.
Eddie Adams · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium: hand-held 35 mm news photography, in the street, at close range, at the speed of an act. Credited: being there and staying close; the reflex that released the shutter at the instant of the shot, which no later skill can supply; a frame that holds three figures legibly, the general’s arm and the prisoner’s face sharp, the bystander inside the frame, the line of the arm reading left to right toward the face; an exposure that keeps the face and the plaid shirt clear against the street. The decisions bear load. Held below 8 because the composition is in large part the event’s and chance’s: the background is untended, the frame edge cuts figures arbitrarily, and the print is a standard wire print.
Wes Anderson · Film
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Robert Yeoman’s anamorphic frames already show the centred, planimetric staging that became the director’s signature, used here with more looseness and life than later. The cutting of the montages, the clubs, the war and the slow-motion close, is exact, each built on a record. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, small and plucked, gives the school its tone. The performances are the making at its best: Jason Schwartzman, in his first film, carries arrogance and panic in one blank face; Murray’s stillness is a complete reinvention; Williams gives Rosemary weight the script leaves thin; Seymour Cassel makes Bert’s few scenes the moral centre. The costs: looser staging in places, and records sometimes lifting scenes the staging does not.
Tiwa builders · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium is real and lasting. Earth walls carry storey above storey; the setbacks reduce the load and shed the water; viga roofs bedded in earth insulate against the high desert’s winter and summer; the mass of the walls evens out the day; and a technique of upkeep is handed down and still practised. All of it is load-bearing in the literal sense. What holds the axis: the structure is simple post and beam over bearing earth walls, the spans are short, and the rooms are small because the timber sets their width. Read to the same anchors as any medium, the making is sure and fit, but it is not of the highest invention.
Ancestral Puebloan builders · Architecture
7.9 · Tier III
Command of building, structure included, read to the same anchors as every medium. The command is real and in places load-bearing: walls of shaped sandstone raised to four storeys on a sloping, uneven floor, holding for centuries in mud mortar; kivas cut into fill and roofed with cribbed timbers carrying a walking court; the plaster of the square tower painted and still in place; every block of rooms fitted to the alcove’s curve and the overhang’s height, so that the village fills its shelter without strain. The costs are the makers’: walls abutted, not bonded, at most junctions; coursing and facing uneven, below the masonry of the Chaco great houses a century and more earlier; rooms and doors sized by custom more than design.
Nicholas Ray · Film
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium, measured against the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in the set pieces: Ray’s composition in CinemaScope, arranging groups across the frame and on stairs in depth; Ernest Haller’s colour, saturated in the reds and cold in the observatory blues; the chickie run cut for dread; Leonard Rosenman’s score, modern and unsettled for a studio picture. James Dean’s performance carries the film, physical and exposed, and Sal Mineo’s Plato is its most affecting. The charges are several: the adult playing is uneven, Backus and the station scenes broad; some dialogue is stilted and explanatory; the gang is thinly played; the final siege is staged with less precision than the chickie run. The command is high in moments and less sure across the whole.
Helen Frankenthaler · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on raw canvas, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is load-bearing at its core: the paint thinned to the point where it soaks and still holds colour, the pools controlled so that their edges are soft without being muddy in most places, the colour spaced across a bare field so that it neither crowds nor scatters. That is a technique invented in the act and controlled at first trial. The costs are real. The method gives up much of the control a brush gives, and parts of the canvas show it: mixtures that run toward grey, passages that read as tentative, a cluster in places busy where the painter’s later stains are spare. The charcoal lines are serviceable rather than fine.
Diébédo Francis Kéré · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command is of a particular kind: of section and climate, in the rise of air through the pierced ceiling, the ventilated gap and the oversail set to keep sun and rain off the walls; of structure within severe limits, in space trusses welded from reinforcing bar, light enough to be carried and assembled by hand and spanning the whole block; and of a process, blocks pressed on site by a technique taught to people who had not used it, in a building designed to be built by them. The structure is intelligent and economical, and it has worked. It is not refined: the finish is rough by design and by necessity, the junctions plain, short of the exactness of the medium’s greatest works.
John Barth · Literature
7.8 · Tier III
Judged on Barth’s English, with no translation between. The command is of pastiche and of register, and it is wide: the goat-boy’s voice, earnest, bawdy and learned at once, telling a scripture in the first person; the office prose of the disclaimers; the mock-Sophoclean verse of Taliped Decanus; the cadence of a campus scripture; and a punning lexicon in which every term of theology and politics has a campus equivalent, kept consistent across the whole length. The construction is planned: the three descents are spaced and answered, and Bray shadows George step for step. Three charges hold it below the top: prolixity, sentences and scenes that run past their effect and a joke repeated after it lands; bawdry that is often laboured; and figures drawn as functions of the allegory, so that dialogue becomes an exchange of positions.
Terry Gilliam · Film
7.8 · Tier III
The making bears weight in the set pieces. Roger Pratt’s wide lenses and tilted frames give Parry’s city its distortion without leaving the real streets; Mel Bourne’s design makes a boiler room into a chapel of junk and a townhouse into a castle; the Red Knight, staged with horse, fire and streaming cloth in real parkland at night, is achieved by physical means and keeps its terror. The acting carries much. Jeff Bridges plays a man unpleasant from first to last and still loved; Mercedes Ruehl gives Anne a warmth and an anger the script only outlines, and her scenes are among the film’s strongest; Amanda Plummer’s Lydia, clumsy at dinner and suddenly direct at her door, is exact. The charges stand: Williams’s manic passages run past what a scene needs, the cutting lets the middle and the caper go long, and the score presses.
Agatha Christie · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on Christie’s English, with no translation between. The construction is the book’s craft, and it is masterly: the clues are laid with exact fairness, the dictaphone, the chair and the telephone call placed so that each is visible and none is weighed, and the narrator’s sentences written so that each is literally true and the whole is false. That double writing is load-bearing making of a rare kind, and the Apologia proves its precision. Three charges hold the axis below the eights. The prose is plain and often thin, with serviceable sentences, stock description and little texture of place or person. The dialogue is functional and in places stagey, Poirot’s mannered English and his “little grey cells” a manner rather than a voice. And the people outside the Sheppard house are types, assembled for suspicion.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Adam Stone’s photography, on film and in natural light, holds the river’s breadth and the island’s sand without prettifying them, and the boat in the tree is staged with a plainness that makes it marvellous. The performances are the film’s best making: Sheridan carries a fourteen-year-old’s stubbornness and hurt with little dialogue; McConaughey makes Mud’s charm and self-deception one manner; Shepard gives Tom a lifetime in a few scenes; McKinnon’s father is both hard and broken. Wingo’s score is light and well placed. The costs: the cut runs long in the middle, the hunters’ scenes are staged more loosely than the rest, the shootout and the coda show genre’s seams, and Witherspoon’s Juniper is given too little to play.
Takashi Yamazaki · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Command is real and bears weight in the set pieces: the Ginza attack is composed for clarity of geography and scale, with a train car in the creature’s jaws seen from inside; the sea pursuit is cut for suspense, the creature kept mostly below the frame; the sound of the plates charging is a design that teaches the audience to fear a noise. Naoki Sato’s score is placed with tact until the climax, where Akira Ifukube’s theme is used once and earns it. The ruined city and the barracks house are exactly made. The costs are weighed fully: the performances are pitched broad, in the register of television melodrama; the dialogue carries exposition and thesis openly; some digital water and crowd work shows its limits; and the coda is staged without the control of what precedes it.
Yorgos Lanthimos · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and in the first movement the making bears weight. Thimios Bakatakis lights by grey Irish daylight and plain interior light, with wide symmetrical frames that hold the guests as specimens. Yorgos Mavropsaridis cuts on deadpan beats, holding a shot past its line until it turns. The music is chosen and placed with care, strings against the hunt. The performances are one discipline kept by a large cast: Colin Farrell, paunched and moustached, makes passivity into a figure; Olivia Colman’s Manager is bright and terrible; Angeliki Papoulia’s Heartless Woman is the coldest presence in the film; Ben Whishaw and John C. Reilly are exact in small roles. What holds it below the eights is the second movement’s pacing, which slackens and repeats, and a visual plainness that serves the film but rarely exceeds it.
Arctic Monkeys · Music
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere. The playing is the craft. Matt Helders’s drumming is fast, exact and inventive, carrying the stops, the tempo changes and the fills that make Dancefloor and The View from the Afternoon. The two guitars interlock in short figures rather than strum chords, and the band turns on a beat as one. Jim Abbiss keeps the sound dry and close, a band in a room, which suits a record about the night as lived, and Turner’s diction at speed is a real instrumental skill. The faults weigh on a share of the record: a narrow palette of guitar tones, a loud, compressed mix and middle arrangements competent rather than distinct.
Alfred Eisenstaedt · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of the 35 mm candid photograph, to the same anchors as every medium. The making that is there is real and decisive: the photographer saw the embrace coming, moved, and released the shutter at the lowest point of the dip, with the pair centred and whole, white and dark side by side, the exposure holding the white uniform without burning it out in the afternoon light, and the witnesses’ faces legible behind. To catch that in seconds is command of the medium at speed. The charges: the frame is found, not composed; its margins are crowded and cut, figures sliced at the sides; the published frame was chosen from the sequence with the editors; and luck carries part of the result, which Cartier-Bresson’s frames control more tightly. Load-bearing at the centre, incidental at the edges.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and in its departments of a high order. Anthony Dod Mantle’s handheld and digital photography runs low to the ground in the chases and tilts in the city. Chris Dickens’s cutting braids three time planes cleanly and makes the opening chase and the riot in a few minutes. A. R. Rahman’s score joins Hindi film song to dance music and carries much of the feeling. Irrfan Khan and Anil Kapoor give the frame scenes weight; the children, the youngest from the slums themselves, are the most alive performers in the film. The charges run through the centre: Patel is earnest and narrow as the adult Jamal, Pinto has a part with almost nothing in it, and the style runs at one pitch, kinetic, saturated and loud, where the material wanted change.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.5 · Tier III
The command is real and consistent. Adam Stone’s night photography, the headlights off, the blue and amber of motels and petrol stations, the dark interiors of cars, gives the film its texture and is used, not displayed. David Wingo’s restrained score of synthesiser and strings carries the turn to wonder without swelling. The cutting keeps the chase tight while letting scenes of watching run long. Nichols directs his actors to great effect: Shannon’s fierce quiet, Edgerton’s slowly converted loyalty and Lieberher’s unchildlike calm make faces carry what the script withholds. The costs: the ending’s effects, which lose the film’s material sense, and a few scenes of exposition, the Ranch sermon and Sevier’s interviews, functional rather than made.
André Waterkeyn; André and Jean Polak · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the making as it stands. The engineering is real: spheres about 18 m across held on a cube balanced on its corner, the loads brought down the central vertical and the inclined tubes, with a lift and escalators threaded through tubes about 3 m across; and the figure was built true to its geometry, so that the crystal reads exactly from every side. The skin of 2006 is well made: polished stainless steel, set in panels across the spheres, gives back the mirror surface the aluminium had lost. The costs: the pure figure needed the bipods, an admission inside the first campaign that it outran its structure; the interiors are fitted rather than designed with the form; three spheres are closed.
Steve McCurry · Visual art
7.4 · Tier III
Judged as command of colour photography in available light with a small camera. The making is precise where it counts: focus laid exactly on the eyes at shallow depth, so that the irises are the sharpest thing in the frame and the ground dissolves into a field of colour; exposure held for the darker skin while keeping the pale eyes and the red cloth from burning out, on a film with little latitude; soft, even light that models the face without hard shadow; the tight vertical crop with the eyes high in the frame; and a background whose colour answers the eyes. These are skilled decisions, made quickly, and they bear load. What holds the axis below 8: the means are conventional for the medium, the range is one setup, one face, one light, and much of the force is in what the sitter brought.
William Friedkin · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in several departments. Owen Roizman’s photography keeps the house warm and ordinary and lets cold enter it, and composes Merrin’s arrival as an icon. The sound builds the demon from Mercedes McCambridge’s voice and treated noise, and makes silence a threat. Dick Smith’s makeup ages von Sydow by decades and degrades Blair by stages. Burstyn’s mother is raw and furious, Miller’s Karras tired and exact. The costs are many and they count: effects that show their mechanism, uneven pacing across the first hour, the Kinderman strand acted as a character turn rather than built in, and dubbing that sometimes shows.
Keith Haring · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Craft is read to the same anchors in every medium. Haring’s line is a real command: of even weight across many metres, every figure closed and legible at distance, and a slogan lettered to be read at speed. A wall of this size laid out and painted in a short campaign without loss of control is a demonstration of hand, and the making is partly load-bearing: the speed and assurance of the line are the work’s claim to belong to the street. Against that, the means are deliberately few: a flat ground, black outline, flat fills, no modelling, and no colour relations of any subtlety beyond the beacon orange. Beside The Swing the range is far narrower; beside For the Love of God, whose exactness was its argument, it stands a little lower. With The Inner Law, the highest of the twelve after survival.
Talk Talk · Music
7.3 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, read to the same anchors as every other art. The making is skilled and in places load-bearing. Tim Friese-Greene’s production is clean and spacious for its year: on Renée and Tomorrow Started he leaves the music room, a thing the genre seldom allowed. Paul Webb’s fretless bass gives the record its warmth and much of its line; Lee Harris’s drumming is precise and, on the slow pieces, light. Mark Hollis’s voice is the most distinctive instrument, unusual in grain and phrasing, though at speed it can sound strained more than commanded. The singles are well built: Such a Shame’s drive, It’s My Life’s hook. The faults weigh on a share of the record: generic synthesiser and drum timbres of the period, faster side-two arrangements competent without distinction, and a polish that sometimes flattens what the voice is doing.
Coldplay · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is clean, skilled and in two places load-bearing. Clocks is the best-made track: the piano accented against the beat, bass and drums locked under it, the guitar kept to colour, so that the pulse carries the song. The Scientist is exact in its restraint, voice and piano close and the band added by degrees. Ken Nelson’s production keeps piano, guitar and voice distinct and warm; Martin moves from chest to falsetto with control, though at full stretch the voice strains. The faults fall across a share of the record: Green Eyes and A Whisper are arranged generically, and the build to the chorus repeats until it reads as habit.
Daniel Defoe · Literature
8.4 · Tier IV
Defoe’s prose commands one thing supremely: the plain, cumulative, circumstantial sentence that makes an object and a task present, with the sense that every particular has been counted. The making of the pot and the canoe, the inventory of the wreck and the measured fear after the footprint are told with a journalist’s exactness, and that exactness is the book’s power. But the sentences are loose, run on by “and” and “so that”, often repetitive, and the book is carelessly made in places. Crusoe strips to swim out to the wreck and then fills his pockets with biscuit; Friday’s English varies from stage pidgin to fluency; the episodes off the island are summarised in haste. The making is load-bearing in the island’s labours and slack elsewhere. Beside Fifth Business at 7.9 the sentence is cruder, the vision of fact stronger.
Henry Fuseli · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The design is commanding: the long pale diagonal of the body against the dark, the red curtain framing the horse, the one light that ranks the figures by visibility; the drawing of the woman’s thrown head and arm is bold and memorable. The costs are real and are the ones the painter’s critics named. The anatomy is mannered and at points strained, the body more an arabesque than a weight; the incubus is drawn with less conviction than it is imagined; the handling is thin and summary beside the great handlers of the decade, Reynolds or Gainsborough; the props are perfunctory. The making carries the design but not the surface, and the print lost little because the paint gave little of its own.
Alexandre Dumas · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Two crafts are weighed, and they part. As architecture of plot the book is a master’s work: dozens of threads laid in 1815 and closed in 1838 without loss; the Cavalcanti, the house at Auteuil and Benedetto converging; the trial, where Villefort prosecutes his own son and is undone by his own buried crime, set up across hundreds of pages; dialogue that moves and characterises at speed. As prose the book is thin. Sentences are serviceable, exposition is often delivered in conversation, the paid line pads with repartee, coincidence is leaned on (the right letter, the right witness, the right overheard word), and the persons of the Paris households, Albert, Franz, Debray, Château-Renaud, are lightly drawn. A famous book with thin sentences is charged for them.
Tibetan, under Songtsen Gampo · Architecture
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, structure included. The building is made in the Tibetan manner: battered walls of stone and earth, timber posts and beams carrying flat roofs of pounded clay, timber the governing structure within. It is sound, suited to its climate, and it has stood; but it does not push its structure, and its spans are short and its volumes small. The making rises in two places: the carved door frames, columns and capitals of the early chapels, Newar workmanship of a high order, and the gilded roofs with their brackets and finials, the Chinese roof set finely on the Tibetan block. The murals and woodwork of later campaigns are uneven in date and quality, restoration has renewed much, and the making seldom bears the work’s meaning.
Meret Oppenheim · Visual art
7.9 · Tier III
Read to the same anchors as every medium. The making is a set of exact decisions with a real hand in them, more than the readymade has. Credited: the choice of a plain cup, saucer and spoon of ordinary design, so that nothing in the form distracts; the choice of the fur, pale and short, with the nap laid so that the vessel’s line survives under it; the covering of the spoon, whose bowl and handle are clothed without losing their shape; the proportion of the set as laid, the spoon across the saucer. These decisions are load-bearing and fine. But the medium commanded is narrow: the forms are bought, the covering is a craft of gluing and fitting, and the maker’s hand shows only in the fit. Above Fountain for the made part; below the works whose making is the carrying load.
Jeff Nichols · Film
7.9 · Tier III
Command of the medium is high in several departments and limited in one. Michael Shannon’s Curtis is the film’s instrument: the terror kept in the jaw and the shoulders, the voice held flat until the supper breaks it. Jessica Chastain carries Samantha from bewilderment to fury to choice without a speech. Adam Stone photographs flat Ohio fields under large skies and holds the house in steady, unforced frames; Wingo’s sparse score is placed as dread rather than shock, and wind and rain sound as threat in the waking scenes. Parke Gregg’s cutting lets the dreams run past the point of comfort. The costs: the birds and the storm sometimes read as effects on a low budget, and the middle is shot and cut in plain coverage, competent rather than load-bearing.
Erich Mendelsohn · Architecture
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included. The command of form is high: the modelling of the windows into the mass, the passage from the tower’s vertical swell to the long body of the wing, the entrance sunk into the base, the proportion that makes a small building read as a monument; the optics housed exactly. The command of building is not. The form was drawn before its means existed; it could not be cast; the curves were built in brick and render over parts in concrete, a structure that disguises itself; and the skin cracked and let in damp within a few years, so that the architect had to repair his own building in 1927. The shortage of material is the circumstance; the making is the building as it stands. Command of the idea outran command of the building, further than at Villa Savoye. It clears the floor with room and stands just above the minimum.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, to the anchors every medium answers to. The medium is the vitrine, the preserved body and the room. Credited: the cut, straight and clean through bone and soft tissue alike, a hard thing to do on a cow; the matching of each half to its tank, so that the two read as one body parted by a hand’s breadth of air and two panes of glass; the plain steel, pitched to recede; the relation of large and small tanks, which carries the pathos without a gesture; the placing, which governs the walk. Charged: preservation is part of the medium, and it has shown clouding and decay in the tanks; and the range is narrow, one cut, one case, one arrangement.
Tang, under Emperor Gaozong · Architecture
7.7 · Tier III
The making is sound. A hollow brick tower of some 64 metres has stood since the early eighth century through the earthquakes of one of the most seismic provinces of China, with a taper and a diminution of storeys well judged: the profile is steady and the mass seats firmly. The rendering of the timber frame in brick is restrained and orderly. Against it: the tower as built in 704 lost storeys; the detail is summary and, as now seen, mostly a Ming surface; and there is nothing in the engineering beyond the competent practice of its time. The failure of the first pagoda within decades is charged to survival, not here. A competent, conventional making.
Danny Boyle · Film
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Anthony Dod Mantle’s photography makes the phones serve a landscape picture: the very wide frame lays the boy small against fields, coast and causeway, and the light on the bone temple is exactly placed. Jon Harris cuts the crossings with real tension and the archive inserts with a violence of their own. Young Fathers’ score, with its chants and drums, is a distinct voice under the march and the chase. Alfie Williams carries the film’s centre; Jodie Comer plays a woman whose mind comes and goes, without sentiment; Ralph Fiennes makes Kelson strange and gentle in one breath. The charges are real: low-light images that go soft and noisy, an Alpha whose make-up convinces less than the landscape, and a final sequence whose staging, costume and comedy are less securely commanded.
Federico Fellini · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. The making bears weight in places: Martelli’s night exteriors, the empty piazzas and wet streets, the beach in winter and the storm over the contest; the carnival ball, staged and cut so that the gaiety curdles in one continuous movement toward dawn; Sordi’s Alberto, the performance that made him, vanity, cowardice and pathos at once and never begging the viewer; Fabrizi’s Fausto, charm held just short of contempt; Rota’s score, which carries the turn from farce to melancholy; the final travelling shot. The seams are many: Interlenghi’s Moraldo is inert where the film needs him to see, the narration is flat and explanatory, the comedy is sometimes slack and broad, the post-synchronisation is loose, and Riccardo is barely directed into a character. A strong making in its best sequences, not throughout.
Jim Jarmusch · Film
7.5 · Tier III
Read to the anchors of the elder arts. Command of the medium is sure and, in places, bears the weight. Robby Müller’s photography gives the city a night grain and the rooftops a light that make Ghost Dog’s solitude visible. Jay Rabinowitz’s cutting keeps the drifting tempo legible and times the deadpan. RZA’s score, sparse and looping, is one of the best uses of hip-hop production as film music, and it carries the film’s mood and pace. Forest Whitaker’s performance, a large stillness and a soft voice, is the film’s centre. The costs: the supporting mob playing is deliberately broad and sometimes merely broad, the middle sags in tempo, and some set pieces, the attack on the Vargo house, a killing through a sink pipe taken from Suzuki, are staged with more cool than invention.
Philip K. Dick · Literature
8.2 · Tier IV
Among the lowest of the twelve, level with The Inner Law and The Encompassed. The command is of construction more than of the sentence. The plot is engineered with real skill: the regression is paced chapter by chapter, the coins are planted early and paid in the last line, the epigraphs are timed so that their meaning turns only at the end, and the Des Moines sequence is sustained. Joe Chip’s quarrel with his door, which will not open without a coin and threatens to sue him, is exact comic writing. Three charges hold the axis near the floor of its range. The prose is functional and often flat, with stock description and an invented slang that now reads as period; the dialogue is frequently expository, persons explaining the plot to one another at length; and the inertials are drawn with a name and a trait apiece. The book was written fast, and it shows in the joins.
Vincent van Gogh · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged as command of oil on a canvas of about a metre, to the same anchors as every medium. Achieved: the lamp and what it does, light gathered on knuckles, cheekbones and steam and lost into a dark that is never black; the tonal unity of the whole, every colour mixed from the same earth; the heads, worked from a winter of studies, painted with conviction and weight; the hands, which carry the argument and are the best passages. The costs are real and charged here: the drawing fails in places, in the proportions of the left figures, an arm, the table, which tips and crowds; some heads are enlarged past expression into caricature; the figures do not sit convincingly in one room; the dark is at times muddy rather than deep.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres · Visual art
8.1 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, and the medium here is chiefly decision. Credited: the weight, the one figure that makes the pile a person; the brightly wrapped sweets, which give the work its glitter and its disarming welcome; the corner, which gives the heap the look of a Minimalist spill; the parenthetical title, which keeps a private name inside a public “Untitled”; and the drafting of the conditions, which make the work transmissible after the artist’s death. These decisions are exact and load-bearing. What holds the axis: there is little making by hand, and the look of the heap varies with each installer and each candy. A narrow command, precisely used: above Fountain’s 7.3, whose decisions were fewer, and well below a painter’s command of paint.
Jules Verne · Literature
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged on Verne’s French. The prose is clear, quick and precise; its exposition of the machine, the electricity, the reservoirs, the plan of the vessel, is a model of making the impossible concrete; and the opening, the press and the learned world in an uproar over the monster, is brisk comedy: “L’année 1866 fut marquée par un événement bizarre”
“The year 1866 was marked by a strange event” (Part One, chapter 1). The set pieces are well built, the ice above all, paced by the falling air. The charges are many: the catalogues given as lists; dialogue that is often exposition, Aronnax and Nemo lecturing each other; three companions drawn as types, the savant, the classifying servant, the choleric harpooner, who do not change; a plot driven by stations and the captain’s will more than by its people; scientific statements presented as fact that are not. Serviceable and in places fine; seldom load-bearing in the sentence.
Andy Warhol · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Judged as command of painting, to the same anchors as any medium. The making is exact and deliberately narrow: lettering painted cleanly, flat colour laid evenly, the upper and lower halves of the label divided cleanly, the medallion and the script held true. The skill is load-bearing in one respect, a hand made to pass for the press at a distance, with small irregularities visible close up. What holds the figure is range, minimal by design: one viewpoint, one object, flat colour, a design taken whole from a commercial label, and few decisions that are the painter’s own, the scale, the frontality, the bare ground, the number, the format. The design of the can is the company’s and is not credited. A narrow command, precisely used, above a readymade and well below the painters of interval and surface.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.7 · Tier III
Read to the same anchors as every medium: here, command of installation, of painting and of the keeping of living things. Credited: the staging of a working habitat (heat, humidity, food, the timing of the hatch), exact, and carried in 1991 and again in 2012; the gloss monochromes, laid flat and even so that the wing sits in the skin of the paint; the pairing of the rooms, white against colour, living against fixed. These are deliberate and load-bearing. What holds the axis: the command is of arrangement and procedure more than of a hand; the paint is household gloss laid flat by design, the insects do the rest, and nothing in the making rises to the load-bearing craft of the summit. A clean, narrow command.
Louisa May Alcott · Literature
7.7 · Tier III
Judged on Alcott’s English, with no translation between. The making is in the dialogue and the comedy: quick, colloquial, individuated voices, so that each sister can be known by a line, from the first sentence, “Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug. The household scenes are managed with economy, and the large scenes, the telegram, the hair, the refusal, the death, are placed with sure timing. Against this stand the narrator’s moralising address, the set-piece lessons, “Experiments” and much of the mother’s counsel, sentimental diction in the Beth chapters, and the visible haste of a book written fast to commission: the European chapters thinly made, Bhaer sketched rather than made. The prose is serviceable rather than load-bearing; it does not carry meaning sentence by sentence.
The Stooges · Music
7.7 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium is narrow and exact where it matters. Scott Asheton’s drumming holds a feel the songs depend on. Ron Asheton’s guitar, with wah and distortion, makes a sound that is the content in 1969, I Wanna Be Your Dog and No Fun. The voice is placed and controlled, low and flat or howling as each song needs. The struck piano note and the viola drone are the most finished making on the record, and they are load-bearing. Against that, the playing is limited, and on Real Cool Time, Not Right and Little Doll the limits show as sameness rather than as method; and the released mix is muddy and unbalanced, not a master’s use of the studio. The best of it could not be bettered by more skill.
René Magritte · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
Judged as command of oil on canvas, to the same anchors as every medium. The handling is deliberately anonymous: even modelling, clean edges, a sky and sea in a commercial poster’s calm, a coat painted as a dark mass with a few folds. It is the right command for the work, and it is load-bearing, since a visible hand would undo the apple’s fact. But it is competent rather than masterful. The flesh of the hand and the drapery are summary, the sea is a formula, and the apple, the most worked passage, is a fine piece of still life and no more. The plainness is exact, which holds the axis clear of its floor; it is still plain.
Yayoi Kusama · Visual art
7.6 · Tier III
The fabrication by others to the maker’s design is credited to the work. The command is exact where it matters. The mirrors meet in joins that vanish in the dark; the lights hang at heights that make the field read as depth, not as a ceiling of points; the water is still and black enough to double the field cleanly; the colour sequence is paced so that the eye does not settle. The making is load-bearing, for if any of these fail the infinite becomes a box. What holds the axis: the means are few and standard to the form, the mirrored enclosure is a known device with a long history in optics and entertainment, and the command is the precision of a well-run illusion rather than one that shows on every surface; the door, the walkway and the cords, visible as the eyes adjust, show the trick.
Damien Hirst · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Command of the medium of installation, read to the same anchors as every medium. The making is the arrangement: packages ordered by kind, colour and size into walls of exact rhythm, the light, and the placing of counter, bottles, stools and insect-killer so that the room reads at once as shop and as composition. That order is precise and load-bearing, since the work’s beauty and its menace are both in the regularity. The hand is little in evidence: the fittings are fabricated, the packaging found, and the craft is decision and design, as with the readymade, but here with far more decisions and a whole space commanded. Measured against the masters, this is sound and exact command of a chosen means, not the load-bearing mastery of a Velázquez or a Mondrian, whose making is the knowledge at every square inch.
Shepard Fairey · Visual art
7.3 · Tier III
Read to the same anchors as every medium: command of the stencil portrait and the printed poster. Credited: the reduction itself, which is hard to do well, a face made legible and recognisable in four tones, the shadow shapes under the brow, the ear and the jaw doing the work of modelling; the placing of the tones, dark blue for shadow and red for the side in light, so that the face reads as lit by the flag; the buff of the light, which keeps the image warm and keeps it from a flag’s white; the heavy capitals at the foot. It prints well at any size, and that is a decision of craft. What holds the axis: the drawing follows a photograph closely, the method is the maker’s routine one, and the range is one picture.
Paul Thomas Anderson · Film
7.3 · Tier III
The making carries the form in several departments. Robert Elswit’s anamorphic photography isolates in wide frames and uses colour washes and flares as feeling. Leslie Jones cuts on noise and lets the Honolulu embrace hold. Jon Brion’s score, percussive in panic and tender on the harmonium, is placed as Barry’s nervous system. Sandler holds the violence in the shoulders before it breaks; Philip Seymour Hoffman makes Dean a small screaming man in a few minutes. The costs are weighed heavily because they run through a short film: Lena is underwritten, and Emily Watson must supply by warmth what the script does not; the brothers’ attacks are staged more loosely than the rest; and the pudding exposition is carried by montage that works less hard than the film around it.
Vlado Milunić and Frank Gehry · Architecture
7.3 · Tier III
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the making as it stands. The command is real in the hardest place: the glass tower carried over an open corner on slanting columns, its curtain pinched and leaning, the corner left open and sheltered beneath it. The solid tower’s curve, the undulating mouldings and the staggered windows of the river front are set with care against the neighbours, the lines of the old row kept by a new means. The costs: the window boxes, the moulding bands and the mesh crown are applied rather than built into the structure; the glass tower’s double skin is a form that the rooms behind it pay for; the junction of the two towers, and of the towers with the river block, is handled less surely than each piece; and the finish, in places, is coarser than the drawing promised.
Thomas Heatherwick · Architecture
6.8 · Tier II
Judged as command of building, structure and engineering included, on the making as it stands. The command is real: a structure of 154 flights in which the stair is its own frame, assembled in steel to a geometry that reads true from every side; the polished copper-coloured undersides finely made and load-bearing for the experience, since the reflections are half of what the climber sees; and a lift fitted on a curving path through the figure without breaking it. The costs: the parapet as built, about waist height on an open climb of sixteen storeys, misjudged the medium’s first duty, which the mesh had to correct; the mesh itself is a utilitarian layer over a figure designed without it; and the honeycomb exterior, seen from the plaza, is less finely resolved than the view inside.
Alex Proyas · Film
7.6 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in its design and photography: Wolski’s near-monochrome present against the warm past; the miniature city and painted skies, matted and lit as a single dark world; Revell’s score, guitar and voice, joined to the songs without seam in the best sequences. Brandon Lee gives the film its centre, a grief close to play and to tears, physical in the fights and tender in the flashbacks; Michael Wincott makes Top Dollar a figure of voice and appetite; Ernie Hudson gives Albrecht weight in a few scenes. The completion after Lee’s death is skilfully hidden. The charges stand: the dialogue is thin and often quip, the lesser villains are caricature, spatial sense is lost in the boardroom, and the late middle shows Eric less than the story asks.
Guðjón Samúelsson · Architecture
7.5 · Tier III
Command of building, structure included. The command is real in the composition of the front: the grading of the piers from the low wings to the tower, so that a mass of concrete reads as one rising figure from far off, and its placing on the axis of the street. The nave’s tall pointed vaults in concrete, plain and clean, are well proportioned and give the room its light. The making held across forty-one years and several hands without the design going slack. The costs: the engineering is the ordinary reinforced concrete of its day, at modest spans; the surfaces close at hand are coarse; and the detailing is spare to the point of thinness. The figure is commanded; the building less so.
James Montgomery Flagg · Visual art
7.2 · Tier III
Judged as command of illustration and the colour lithographic poster, to the anchors common to every medium. The making is sure: the head drawn with a magazine illustrator’s fluent authority, the hard lines of brow and mouth carried in a few strokes; the foreshortening of the hand, the hardest thing in the picture, resolved so that the finger reads as coming out of the sheet; colour limited and flat enough to carry at distance; lettering clear and weighted. The making bears load: a weaker foreshortening and the picture fails. What holds the axis is that this is skilled commercial illustration, not command at the top of the art: the coat and hat are generic, the figure stiff, the painted surface lost in the lithograph, the design received.
Oasis · Music
7.2 · Tier III
Command of the recorded medium, with the words weighed elsewhere, is real and in places exceptional. The chorus of Don’t Look Back in Anger and the verse-to-chorus turn of Wonderwall are built with a sure hand, and Wonderwall is the best-made arrangement: strummed acoustic, cello, a drum part that drives without crowding. Liam Gallagher’s voice is a commanding instrument, its nasal sustain carrying every chorus. The costs fall wide. The guitars are stacked into a wall and the mastering compresses the whole until dynamics nearly vanish, so that Champagne Supernova climbs without space to climb into, and Hey Now! and Roll With It are thick without being built. The rhythm section is plain, the solos borrowed, the harmony narrow.
Luca Guadagnino · Film
7.1 · Tier III
Command of the medium, read to the anchors every desk shares. Daniel Craig gives the film its spine: a body that sags, preens and sweats, a voice that performs wit to hide need, a face that collapses in withdrawal; it is the best work in the film and bears its weight. Sayombhu Mukdeeprom’s photography makes the stage city glow, warm and false by design, and the jungle green and close. Reznor and Ross’s score, pulsing under the bars and dissolving in the jungle, is placed well, and Jonathan Anderson’s costumes carry the decay of Lee’s white suits. The charges fall where they matter: Drew Starkey’s Allerton is opaque by design and also inexpressive, so the second figure of a two-hander is under-realised; the pacing slackens through the journey; the effects of the jungle and the dream are uneven.
Harriet Beecher Stowe · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Stowe’s English, with no translation between, and argued from the prose as known, not measured. The command is real in places: the Shelby sale, Sam and Andy delaying Haley’s pursuit with comedy of real timing, the crossing of the ice, the Bird kitchen, the auction, Cassy’s night history. The dialogue is lively, and the ear for several registers is good: Haley’s trader talk, St. Clare’s ironies, Ophelia’s New England, Dinah’s kitchen. The chapter titles in the manner of Fielding show a self-aware making the book does not keep up. Charged: prose at large loose and over-coloured, a narrator who intrudes to explain and exhort, dialect often taken from the minstrel stage, contrived recognitions and a stitched ending. The making carries the scenes and not the whole.
H. P. Lovecraft · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Lovecraft’s English. The structural craft is real and at its best load-bearing: the escalation of “Colour”, the documentary assembly of “Cthulhu”, the long withholding and sudden release of the pursuit through Innsmouth, and the pseudo-scholarship that makes the invented sound read. The dialect monologue of the old drunkard Zadok Allen is a sustained, controlled piece of voice. Against that the charges are heavy and fall on most of the body. The prose is adjective-laden and repetitive, “eldritch”, “cyclopean”, “blasphemous” and “loathsome” recurring from tale to tale; it tells the reader what to feel at the moment it should show; dialogue outside dialect is stiff; the characters are scarcely made; endings are signalled pages ahead. The archaic manner is chosen and at times serves, but not as often as it is used.
Bram Stoker · Literature
8.1 · Tier IV
Judged on Stoker’s English, with no translation between. The command of suspense is real. The Transylvanian chapters are made with precision, each day of Harker’s journal adding one more sign until the truth is stated, and the documents are interleaved with skill, so that the reader knows more than any one writer. The set pieces are well built. The prose is the charge: serviceable and often flat. The dialogue is stilted; Van Helsing’s broken English turns comic in the long speeches; Quincey Morris speaks a stage American; Mr Swales’s Whitby dialect is the one voice of the second rank that lives. Sentimental speech, the men’s tears and the praise of the brave and the good, recurs. Coincidence and the late rules of the vampire, what he may do by day and at running water, are set as needed. A floor met, the top far off.
Robert Capa · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Command of the medium, read to the same anchors as a painting or a book. Credited: the position on the slope, low and close; the timing, a fraction of a second that holds the fall at its most legible angle; the framing that gives two thirds of the field to sky and isolates the figure; the readiness to expose in action with a hand camera. These decisions bear load. But the making is narrow and, on any account, partly given. If the moment was caught under fire, much of it is reflex and fortune; if it was directed, the command is of a scene rather than of light. The print is no demonstration of craft: the figure is blurred, the tones are flat, and the frame owes much to the halftone that carried it. The Rhine II, at 7.5, holds this axis at 8.2 for an exact command of photography; this hand commands a narrower part of its medium, and the axis stands a tenth below the Universal Minimum.
Stephen King · Literature
7.6 · Tier III
Judged on King’s English, with no translation between. The command is of momentum and of voice. King writes a working man’s inner speech with exactness, gives the child’s understanding without condescension, and builds a siege with real control of pace across the long middle; several set pieces, Room 217, the hedges and the ball, are as well made as anything in American horror. The charges are several and visible at the sentence: over-explanation of what scenes have already shown; the italic and parenthetical interjections, used to the point of tic; clichés and brand names in place of seeing; padding in the Hallorann chapters; and a prose that is vigorous rather than exact. The charges are particular, not about register: the vernacular is credited, and so is the pacing. Above the floor of 7.0, and well below the sentence-level exactness the highest marks require.
Marcel Duchamp · Visual art
8.0 · Tier IV
Judged as command of the medium, and here the making is a set of decisions with almost no hand. Credited: the choice of object, the one fixture with the right offence and the right gleaming form; the turn onto the back, which makes plumbing a figure; the painted name, a pun on the Mott company and on a comic strip’s Mutt, lettered plainly and dated; the title; the timing and place of the submission; and the record, arranged so that a lost object could still be seen. These decisions are load-bearing and exact. But the measure is command of a medium, and the medium here is almost wholly the act. The best visual making of 1917 is Stieglitz’s photograph, which is his, and the copies of 1964 were made by others, by hand. A narrow command, precisely used.
Banksy · Visual art
7.0 · Tier III
Command of the medium: the stencil sprayed on a wall and printed on paper. The cutting is clean and the image reads at a distance, which is the craft’s first demand. The silhouette is well posed, the girl’s weight forward, her hair and skirt lifted as if by the same wind that takes the balloon, so that figure and balloon share one movement. The string’s curve, slack and drawn up at once, is the best line in it, and the red is well placed against the black and the bare wall. What holds the figure is that the drawing is competent illustration, nothing a hand could not repeat from a stencil, the choices exact but few, and the making load-bearing only in the gap and the curve. A narrow command, cleanly used.
Quentin Tarantino · Film
7.0 · Tier III
The making bears weight in the writing above all: talk that gives each man a voice in a few lines and carries the plot under its digressions. Sally Menke cuts the chronology so that every section lands where it changes what we know; Andrzej Sekuła’s long takes in the warehouse, the circling camera at the diner and the turn away at the torture are exact. The ensemble is strong: Keitel’s protective fury, Roth’s bleeding and his rehearsed swagger, Buscemi’s nerves, Madsen’s ease, Tierney’s granite. The costs are real and run through a short film: the warehouse staging is theatrical and the small budget shows; Tarantino’s own Mr. Brown is weak; Pink’s exit is fumbled; and the standoff’s choreography is muddled enough to leave unclear who shot whom, at the climax the film is built toward.
Nam June Paik · Visual art
7.8 · Tier III
Command of the medium here is command of a few exact decisions with almost no hand. A figure whose posture makes stillness and attention one; a camera placed so that the figure fills the screen at the right size; the distance and angle set so that the figure’s gaze seems to meet its image; the rounded monitor of the period, whose form echoes the figure’s. These are right and load-bearing. But nothing is fabricated: the electronics are off the shelf and used as made, and the apparatus is merely connected. Read to the same anchors as every medium, the craft carries little, and technical invention belongs to The Swerve. It clears the Coherence Floor by two tenths and falls below the Universal Minimum.
Harold Ramis · Film
7.4 · Tier III
Command of the medium, and the making bears weight in two departments. Pembroke Herring’s editing of the repetitions is exact: variations of a single beat, compressions, and the slap and suicide montages timed so that the cut carries the joke and the meaning at once. Bill Murray’s performance is the film’s instrument, the same man at the same corner sour, then predatory, then hollow, then kind; Stephen Tobolowsky makes Ned a fixed point in a few minutes. The charges fall across the rest of the film. John Bailey’s photography is serviceable, the frame rarely doing more than hold the action; George Fenton’s score underlines; Rita is written as a standard of virtue and Andie MacDowell is given little to play; and the town is staged as plain studio comedy.
Tracey Emin · Visual art
7.5 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, to the same measure as any other, and the making here is chiefly a decision and an arrangement, with almost no hand. Credited: the recognition that the bed was a work; the choice to show it unaltered and unwashed; its placing at floor height; the rug at its side, which makes a stage of the debris; and an arrangement, at its best, as exact in its disorder as a still life, placed so that the eye reads days, not mess. These decisions are load-bearing. What holds the axis: the medium is almost wholly selection and placing, the decisions are few and looser than the exact acts of the readymade, and the placing has varied from showing to showing. The floor holds, by a tenth.
Wes Anderson · Film
6.9 · Tier II
Command is competent and load-bearing only in places. Robert Yeoman’s photography is clean and serviceable, with a few composed frames that show the later manner and much ordinary coverage. David Moritz’s cutting is best in the cold-storage robbery, where the timing of failure, a safe that will not open, the alarm, the fallen man, is exact, and loosest in the motel days. Mark Mothersbaugh’s score, light and percussive, sets the tone of play, and the placing of pop records is the film’s surest musical gift. Owen Wilson’s Dignan is a performance of real invention, eager, proud and stiff; James Caan gives Mr. Henry weight. Against that: Bob is thin, the crew is played at the edge of amateur, and Inez is written more as a figure than a person.
Michael Graves · Architecture
7.2 · Tier III
Judged as command of the medium, structure and engineering included, and on the making as it stands. The command of the elevation as a drawing is real: the main fronts are composed with skill, the giant order and the keystone set in proportion to the square, the colours graded from base to body. The costs are heavy. The built ornament is thin, painted or clad, its relief flattened from the competition drawings to flat ribbons; the side fronts are weaker than the main ones; the small windows are a compositional choice the rooms behind them pay for; and Portlandia’s modelled realism sits uneasily on the flat abstraction of the wall. The renovation’s sound envelope and structure are credited to the making as it stands; the leaks of the first fabric are charged under The Imperishable, not here. Command of the drawing outruns command of the building.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.7 · Tier II
The making bears weight in image and sound. Burum’s photography is of the first order and would alone stand far higher: deep blacks, hard light through smoke and steam, wide lenses that bend the streets, compositions in depth. Tavoularis builds a Tulsa of alleys, railway lots and pool halls that looks found; Copeland’s score drives scenes. Rourke’s Motorcycle Boy, soft-voiced, absent and courteous, is the best performance, and Hopper’s father is exact. But the axis scores the whole command, and the charges fall on real shares: Dillon’s range is narrow for a lead who carries every scene; the dialogue is stilted in places and played as if it were poetry; some supporting playing is broad; the style decorates thin scenes. A cameraman’s film more than a commanded one.
Jack Vettriano · Visual art
6.5 · Tier II
Read to the same anchors as every medium, and judged from reproduction, so held more loosely. Credited: a clear, legible design that reads at any size, a real skill and the source of its success as a print; a smooth, controlled handling of the figures’ dark clothes against the pale ground; the wet sand that takes the figures’ reflections, the best painted passage, which ties them to the beach; a grey sky laid in broad tones that carries the mood. Charged: the drawing of the figures is stiff, and they sit on the ground more like cut-outs placed on a backdrop than bodies in one light and one wind; the wind that moves the maid and the sky barely touches the dancers; the faces are summary. The making is competent and not load-bearing in the way paint is at the high marks.
John Cage · Music
8.1 · Tier IV
Craft is read to the same anchors in every medium, and invention is credited under The Swerve and Pressure on Tradition, not here. Command of the medium (harmony, line, counterpoint, orchestration, the setting of sound) is not exercised; that is the point of the work, and an axis is not adjusted for a form’s own choice. What craft there is, is real. The frame is exactly made: the duration as title, the performer’s ritual of lid and stopwatch, a manuscript in which time is drawn as space, and the orchestral word TACET, which turns a part-book convention into a whole score. A careless frame would fail. But the anchors ask for command shown in material, and there is almost none.
Maurizio Cattelan · Visual art
6.7 · Tier II
Read to the same anchors as every medium: command of the medium. Here the making is a short set of decisions with no hand. Credited: the choice of a banana, the most comic and most common of fruits, a form that reads at once as a sign; the tape across it on a slight diagonal, which turns a fruit into a graphic mark; the placing on a clean wall at a fair; the title; and, the real craft, the certificate and its terms of replacement, which make an edition of a thing that rots. These are exact and load-bearing. But almost nothing is made: the visual decision is one strip of tape, and the devices are borrowed from Fountain (8.0), whose record was arranged to survive the loss of its object.
Francis Ford Coppola · Film
6.4 · Tier II
The command is real in parts and fails where the film puts its weight. Gordon Willis keeps the trilogy’s amber and shadow and carries them into Vatican interiors and Sicilian daylight; Dean Tavoularis builds the Palermo opera night; Barry Malkin, Lisa Fruchtman and Walter Murch cut the opera sequence to the music; Pacino breaks well at the confession, and Andy Garcia, Eli Wallach and Talia Shire are exact. Against that, Sofia Coppola’s Mary, untrained, cannot carry the role on which the ending turns; the business plot is told in dialogue; the helicopter attack is staged as action spectacle; and Tom Hagen’s absence leaves a hole the script fills with George Hamilton’s banker and a son bound for the priesthood. Costs at the centre hold the figure below the floor of 7.0.