Like many prizes offered by The Scrapbook, the Antonio de Spinola Award is not bestowed on a regular basis. This is not because The Scrapbook is instinctively ungenerous or reluctant to cheapen a distinct honor. It is because of the nature of the award itself.
Readers of a certain age may recognize the name of Antonio de Spinola (1910-1996), the Portuguese general who was the titular leader of the successful 1974 officers’ revolt against the Lisbon dictatorship. We leave it to historians to evaluate General Spinola’s role in the coup and its after-math; but from The Scrapbook’s perspective, the passage of nearly 42 years has scarcely diminished our wonder at the general’s appearance. As far as we can tell, he was the last general officer in any army on earth—indeed, the last person in public life—to sport a monocle.
Of course, this gave him the grave aspect of a Prussian officer on the Western Front rather than a veteran of colonial wars in tropical climates. But no matter the cause or effect, General Spinola inspired The Scrapbook’s eponymous award, bestowed on wearers of memorable eyewear in public life.
As might be expected, there have not been many eligible recipients in recent years, and we have been occasionally tempted to award the Spinola posthumously: to the late Bolshevik Leon Trotsky, for example, or to the architect Philip Johnson, or the Hollywood agent Irving “Swifty” Lazar. Indeed, the growing monotony of personal appearance, even among celebrities, has prompted The Scrapbook to consider the occasional public rebuke: for example, of George H.W. Bush, who, on the advice of campaign consultants in 1980, traded in his idiosyncratic half-lenses—always perched on the tip of his nose—for the ho-hum aviator glasses of his presidency.
All such hesitation and wool-gathering, however, was swept aside last week when we stumbled upon a photograph of the U.N. special envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura of Italy. Ambassador Mistura, a veteran United Nations diplomat of joint Swedish-Italian nationality, habitually wears a pair of pince-nez (glasses with a nose clip but no earpieces) that would do credit to Franklin D. Roosevelt. Offhand, The Scrapbook cannot think of anyone in the past several decades of public life who wore pince-nez, nor can we think of a more deserving recipient of the Antonio de Spinola Award.
As we mentioned, FDR was the last president to be seen in public wearing pince-nez—although even in his time they were considered antiquated—and in recent years, especially, American politicians have been notably reluctant to draw attention to minor eccentricities of dress and appearance. Even Speaker Paul Ryan’s beard, which The Scrapbook recently commended, came and went with disturbing swiftness. Now, with his Antonio de Spinola Award in hand, let the pince-nezed Ambassador Staffan de Mistura break the glasses ceiling, as it were.
