Only a block away from the Zócalo, Mexico City’s large central square, Diego often crossed its beaten dirt surface, stepped over criss-crossing mule trolley tracks, dodged rumbling horse-drawn wagons full of freight and market goods on his way to class. One other distraction had to be the clank of a printing press on a street just off the square. The print shop at No. 5 Santa Inéz belonged to José Guadalupe Posada, a lithographer and engraver whose story-telling prints were the editorial cartoons and “photographs” of their time.

      Using black and white line drawings and ambitious colour, Posada told the stories of daily events, extraordinary happenings, the bizarre, the satirical and the tragic, which appeared in the broadsheets – called hojas volantes (flying leaves) by their readers – of Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, whose shop was next door to the San Carlos Academy of Fine Arts. Every day and often into the night, the press clanked and rumbled again and again as pages were inked and the folklore and daily life of Mexico City was committed in such a vivid style to which Rivera, Orozco, Siqueiros and the other Mexican muralists all acknowledged their debt.

      Diego struggled with this day and night school education for a year until at the age of eleven in 1898 he received a scholarship to move his studies full time to the San Carlos Academy. While the school was considered the best in Mexico, its curriculum was bound by dusty European artistic dogma compounded by the societal engineering of the government científicos that mandated strength over weakness in all life experiences. The art school also required classes in physics, mathematics, natural history and chemistry as well as perspective and figure drawing.

      The professors were Spanish, practising the skills of the French academicians far from the avant-garde of the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements. Of these professors, Diego, the youngest student in the class, remembered best Don Félix Parra, who had a rare appreciation of pre-Spanish Conquest Indian art, but whose own art was very conventional, and José M. Velasco, the renowned landscape painter who taught lessons in perspective. Santiago Rebull was the school’s principal and Diego’s instructor in the balance of proportion and composition. In his student days Rebull had studied in Paris with Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, considered one of the greatest figure artists of all time. Ingres’ drawings were held up to Rebull’s students as models of perfection. The curriculum built around this perfection was a grind, consisting of two years spent copying reproductions of Ingres studies followed by two years of drawing from plaster casts before graduating to a live model.

      15. Diego Rivera, View of Arcueil.

      Oil on canvas, 64 × 80 cm.

      Collection of the Government of the State of Veracruz, Veracruz.

      16. Diego Rivera, Suburbs of Paris, 1918.

      Oil on canvas, 63.5 × 79.5 cm.

      Private collection.

      Diego was singled out by Rebull as promising, and given instruction in the so-called “Golden Section”, a mathematical system of composition developed by the ancient Greeks, that establishes a harmonic ratio between two unequal parts. Its principles were widely distributed in Luca Pacioli’s three-volume work Divina Proportione published in 1509. In the Elements, Euclid of Alexandria (c. 300 B. C.) defined a proportion derived from a division of a line into what he calls its “extreme and mean ratio”. Euclid’s definition reads:

      A straight line is said to have been cut in extreme and mean ratio when, as the whole line is to the greater segment, so is the greater to the lesser.

      In other words, in the diagram below, point C divides the line in such a way that the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the ratio of AB to AC. Some elementary algebra shows that in this case the ratio of AC to CB is equal to the irrational number 1.618 (precisely half the sum of 1 and the square root of 5).[6]

      This mathematical formula applied to fine art appealed to the engineer in Diego Rivera, who enjoyed mechanical systems such as trains and machines, often taking apart his toys to see how they worked. His practice of employing the Golden Section served him well later as he composed his huge murals over wall surfaces of all dimensions. This academic training including the use of colour optics imposed by “advancing” (warm) and “retreating” (cool) colours and the manipulation of line segments to achieve depth in a two-dimensional plane all became valuable tools in Rivera’s vast spaces.

      By the age of eighteen in 1905, Diego Rivera was enjoying his final two years at San Carlos and had changed considerably from the docile, shabby eleven-year-old fat boy wearing short pants with pink socks who, back in 1898, sometimes cut class to go fishing in the smelly canals. Where once he shambled about in dishevelled anonymity, now he dressed like a young gentleman in jacket and boiled shirt with a wing collar and four-in-hand necktie. His hair was no longer a bird’s nest but was slicked back with pomade. A straggly moustache sprouted on his upper lip to affect the appearance of maturity upon the youngest student in class. He had won a medal competing in a drawing contest and an award of twenty pesos a month from the Ministry of Education, and then, took the “King’s Shilling”.

      By 1906, Rivera had completed eight years of study at San Carlos and graduated with honours, appearing in his final student show with twenty-six works. His efforts had paid off with an excellent reputation among the government people he had to impress to keep grant money coming in. This was accomplished, but the money for study in Europe did not arrive for six months, allowing young Diego to live the life of a bohemian artist among his school chums.

      17. Paul Cézanne, The Château Noir, 1903–1904.

      Oil on canvas, 73.6 × 93.2 cm.

      The

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