Romero - The Monday Morning Memo

Sancho and the Don is not one of Baldomero Romero Ressendi’s more important works, but it is a genuine Baldomero Romero Ressendi nonetheless. And that makes the wizard happy. This painting is currently in his conference room but we’re searching for a place to hang it in the tower.

Romero died just a year after the wizard and the princess graduated high school, 38 years ago.

I think the wizard likes him because Romero was clearly a member of the albino monkey tribe. He was recognized as a great talent during his years of training at the School of Fine Arts in Seville, but was continually criticized by his teachers because he often strayed from the traditions and conventions of classical painting.

At the age of 24 (1946) he acquired a reputation as an outrageous painter as some of his works were considered obscene by the religious authorities of that time. But Romero also had protectors and friends who held him in high regard.

Sancho and the Don was painted during one of those many times when Romero’s mood led him to wander into expressionism.

The video below contains a wide sampling of his work.
Can you detect the paintings that got him in trouble with the guardians of the status quo?

“University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock made a 20-year study that tested the ability of experts to make accurate predictions about geopolitical events. The results showed that the average expert in a given subject was also, on average, a horrific forecaster. Some of the most narrowly specialized experts actually performed worse as they accumulated credentials. It seemed that the more vested they were in a worldview, the more easily they could always find information to fit it.

There was, however, one subgroup of scholars that did markedly better: those who were not intellectually anchored to a narrow area of expertise. They did not hide from contrary and apparently contradictory views, but rather crossed disciplines and political boundaries to seek them out.

Tetlock gave the forecasters nicknames, borrowed from a well-known philosophy essay: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who ‘know one big thing’ (and are terrible forecasters), and the broad-minded foxes, who ‘know many little things’ (and make better predictions). The latter group’s hunt for information was a bit like a real fox’s hunt for prey: They roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously.

Eventually, Tetlock and his collaborator, Barbara Mellers, assembled a team of foxy volunteers, drawn from the general public, to compete in a forecasting tournament. Their volunteers trounced a group of intelligence analysts who had access to classified information. As Tetlock observed of the best forecasters, it is not what they think but how they think. They argue differently; foxes frequently used the word ‘however’ in assessing ideas, while hedgehogs tended toward ‘moreover.’ Foxes also looked far beyond the bounds of the problem at hand for clues from other, similar situations.”

- David Epstein, The Washington Post, July 20, 2019