- due 2014
Argument
human and animal proportion - proportion in the quattrocento - in the cinquecento - Kelley's models of the Palladian North End - driving darkness back beyond critical limits - what is the meaning of temperature? - quanta of experience
ALLL THIS SHOULD BE TRANSFERRED TO SPATIAL
I do not think of space as so many contiguous vesicles which I am in, so much as systems of surfaces amont which and around which I can move, on which I carve invisible or mental prison runes of my own, notches and arrows, a tramp code notched on gateposts; if I do not come back this way, the signs will never be reactivated.
In the 1450s, Piero della Francesca, picking up a commission left defunct by the sickness of ?, painted the side and end walls of the ? chapel in the church of San Francesco in Arezzo with scenes depicting the legend of the True Cross.
A frescoed chapel, like Hunter Sidney's room and in contravention of the putative demands of linear perspective, requires the viewer to move up and down and back and forth. It cannot be properly read from a given spot.
And you have to piece the story together for yourself. The conventions for laying out narratives in chapels or churches in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were complex if not arbitrary; in some you would read up and down from one wall to the next; in others it was necessary to read across, zigzag this way and that. Chronologies might or might not be respected, the fall of natural light might or might not come into play, as too might the theatre of the liturgy.
Painters took pains to face scene to scene in typologically meaningful patterns across the painted space - so, in Arezzo, Piero has paired the battle scenes (of Constantine and Heraclius), the vision scenes (annunciation and dream of Constantine), the female intuition scenes (Queen of Sheba, Helena) and so on.
These days they provide you with laminated cards parsing the order of the panels for you, and while lamination was wholly unknown to Piero and his contemporaries, the stories were not; by hunting up and down for known markers - the cross, the dream, visit of Seth to the Gates of Heaven – you would be able to gather together the various strands, remember the story.
And as you work to the end, placing the objects of contemplation not only in a chronological but also a meaningful order, you experience the mild satisfaction or perhaps exultation of having cracked a conundrum, or, if you live in the fifteenth century, of having trodden out a meditative labyrinth.
we not only do not know that stories; we also do not experience the satisfaction of reding the complex arragments of personal salavation;
[THIS SHOULD BE A NOTE]
The chapel was heavily restored at the beginning of the 1990s. Over the centuries, it had undergone not only considerable structural damage resulting in the loss of plaster, but had suffered from rainwater trickling through the poorly maintained roof and leaching the colours from the walls. It was not merely a matter of cleaning, or structural underpinning where the plaster was cracked or coming away from the wall: paint had to be replaced.
This is not, in short, the original work you are looking at. It is a recovered memory of the original work. Whatever touching up is required in the restoration of a fresco, it can never in fact be, fresco – the plaster was dry just a few days after the paint was applied – and while much of Piero’s work was in fact carried out a secco, restorers are never merely stripping away the excrescence of time, but are adding to the temporal thickness of the object. They are yet one more filter, or film of memory, through which you must see, for which you must correct.
However, no matter how fine your array of historical lenses, there are some factors you will not be able to correct for. For example, the drift of salvation.
What is it like to stand in it now, to look at it without the lens of personal salvation? I have visited it once, some years after its restoration. It was a weekday morning and in the hour or two I spent there, only a handful of visitors passed through. I have, unusually, a record of what I was in fact thinking in the chapel, as I kept a notebook at the time. At some point in the course of the visit I sat down, on a pew or chair in the church, outside the chapel; and wrote the following:
Chosroes is God? – Death of old men: Adam and Chosroes and God – swept aside by
these active femalesthe logic of salvation
These notes I can expand as follows: the figure of Chosroes, old pagan king defeated in battle by Heraclius, is identical to that of God the Father in the Annunciation.
illus
Chosroes is a condemned man, as is Adam. Adam fears his approaching death. He cannot, like Gilgamesh, travel himself to the ends of the earth in search of answers, but he sends his son, Seth, who returns from the Gates of Heaven with a sliver of the tree of knowledge, which he is to plant under Adam’s tongue when he is buried. From this sliver grows the tree which will provide the wood for the cross and, in consequence, the somewhat oblique and deferred solution to Adam’s problem.
If Chosroes and Adam are on the brink of death, then so too is God the Father, whose old covenant is about to be smashed asunder. He himself will hang from the cross, a dying god.
Those active females – the Queen of Sheba, who recognises the sanctity of the wood on her voyage to the court of Solomon; Helena, who discovers the true cross; and the Virgin Mary – are in fact joined in the work of purification by Constantine, who sweeps aside Maxentius, and Heraclius, who sweeps aside Chosroes.
It is, as I say, the convoluted logic of salvation which organises the narrative. If you do not believe in salvation, then it is a chapel that juxtaposes the lingering deaths of old men and patriarchs and gods rolled over by the insane vigour of the world.
