Fourteenth Approach to Het Steen, 1636

 

Peter Paul Rubens: 'A View of Het Steen in the Early Morning', 1636. Oil on Oak. Oil on oak.131 x 229.cm. National Gallery, London

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/peter-paul-rubens-a-view-of-het-steen-in-the-early-morning
24th August, morning, not long after opening, summer holidays, no schoolchildren.

The proportions of Het Steen are interesting, much wider than tall, (131.2 x 229.2 cm, ie 1:1.75)  a proportion that developed, from the initial central three panels through to the seventeen that he finished with. It is noticeably wider than, for instance the smaller landscape works on the wall behind. A proportion that reinforces the notion that we are not looking through a window, it does not correspond to the windows shown in Het Steen. The painting is not quite two equal squares, they would have to overlap slightly. Certainly the proportions summons up the notion of stereoscopic vision, two eyes not quite combining and the mid point marked at the bottom of the picture plane by the upturned tree.

For someone who made such spectacular paintings of grand horses fighting, the two cart horses really are splendidly rural.

Are there two figures on the tower? Or is just the castellation? The blobs are in roughly the right place for architectural features, but then again they are slightly different colours. The left is bluish, the right is yellow; the blue figure could have an outstretched hand: “This is all mine”. Reading too much into vague sploshes of bravura paint?

If these are figures, than that could place Rubens, the narrator, within the pictorial space at a series of viewpoints. He is on the tower; by the gate; on the cart; as the hunter; as the artist/ creator and of course as the artist/ owner of the estate showing it off to the privileged viewer. And, each time I see this painting I am convinced that this is a view made to be shown rather than an artists’ ‘personal response’ in the late 19^th Century manner. The way that our perceptual perambulation is arranged makes that very clear.

Clark talks about Poussin’s tiny figures in ‘The Sight of Death’,

“What are these miniature figures in Poussin about? Why do they come and go in perceptions? Why, once see, do they matter so much?….I think they are best understood as different proposals about recognition and interpretation, about “picking out” what is human in a human and non-human world, about the way humans belong to their surroundings…Let’s talk about stories. They are analogous to the small figures in Poussin: that is, there often turns out to be more and more of them, implied, embedded, the longer one looks.”

(T J Clark: The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. Yale University Press, 2006. ISBN 0300137583. Pages 45-50)

The figures then, give the painting agency, do they work the same way in Het Steen?

 A young Eastern European (Russian perhaps?) points out the two flying ducks to his girlfriend, then the hunter, then he makes the appropriate internationally recognised gestures for shooting something. She laughs appropriately, but looks slightly embarrassed.

I go to look carefully at the tower, I think that (probably) these are merely battlements/ castellation. Presumably such architectural features were for show. But, whether or not these figures are ‘real’, the point about their role remains.  The fisherman on the bridge, or the hint of figures to the left. I return to the bench to find a Japanese woman sitting on my notebook, she is not apologetic.

Thinking about Clark, I go to see Poussin’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’

Poussin: 'Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake', oil on canvas, 1648

 

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/nicolas-poussin-landscape-with-a-man-killed-by-a-snake

It has been in Room 19 for a while now, but the lighting is bland and dull. Gradually lamps turn on, the room gets brighter and slowly the painting comes to life. It clearly needs strong light, whereas the same lighting scheme kills the Rubens; Het Steen was made for dim candle light: the North. ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’ for the bright clear South. Returning to the original position a painting was designed for, can affect how we understand it. Such a search can become an ‘early music’ style fetish, nonetheless it is extraordinary how different art, for example the Poussin here, can look under sympathetic lighting. The lighting clicks off and Landscape’ returns to a dull, dark gloom.

Venice Biennale 2011, Mike Nelson: British Pavilion: ‘I, Impostor’

Mike Nelson: British Pavilion: ‘I, Impostor’

http://venicebiennale.britishcouncil.org/timeline/2011

Is Mike Nelson’s installation a convincing space? Yes, completely. Is it a narrative space, a pictorial space? Quite…almost.

What follows is a series of thoughts about this installation; a continuing discussion about pictorial space. Based around art seen in Venice and then in Rome. I have put them together as they developed. 

 From the outside the British Pavilion at this years Biennale is unchanged. Inside, a winding set of narrow corridors and small rooms getting increasingly shabby as you find the central courtyard.

This installation is based on the Han, those vast decrepit caravanserais you find in the souks in Turkey, Istanbul in particular. More specifically the Bűyűk Valide Han, the 17^th century building that Nelson used for an installation during the Istanbul Biennial of 2003; that connection is important to Nelson, but by no means obvious as you wander the rooms. There are clues, darkrooms (traditional wet printing, red lit rooms) photos hanging up to dry and offices with the same photos of Turkish textile factories, and receipts in Turkish. In one particularly poignant juxtaposition there is an old gridded plan for cloth patterns ruled out, next to it, blocking out the window, is a plastic printed bag with Fenerbahce, the Istanbul based football club. As you might expect with Mike Nelson the level of craft and commitment is total, this is not a set it is utterly convincing; there are no real traces of the pre-existing shape/ spaces of the British Pavilion. Several storeys have been built into the original single storey building, even an inaccessible, but visible cellar full of old bottles and yet more junk. Rickety wooden stairs, low ceilinged sleeping spaces with a few sacks thrown down as a mattress.

But, this work doesn’t have the menace of ‘Coral Reef’ for example, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUsaSnyvZnA) there is less fear of getting lost, trapped or just stuck.. Our journey in ‘I, Impostor’ is more anthropological than investigative, more iconographic than detective work is needed to situate yourself. The dark rooms and sheets of black and white photos are intriguing, but it all seems self explanatory. Especially if, as I have just done, you have come from the Iraqi Pavilion further down Via Garibaldi. The Iraqi work is a series of small rooms in a collapsing warehouse/ work space and contains art considering power, entropy, decay and the politics of water. Nelson’s fictive decay/ collapse containing traditional trades- like textiles- holds up very well against the real thing you can see here, but it does dull the originality a little.

Illuminations

So does I’ Impostor fit into a wider view? Ignore for the moment the tradition of Romantic/ Expressionist personal response, which seems increasingly absent and just creates awkwardness when encountered these days. What we are looking at across this, and any other contemporary show, are essays on structures; essays in a range of languages, predominantly visual. These essays all contribute to a discourse, a discussion that has been going on since when? Duchamp? Malevitch’s Black Square? Demoiselles d’Avignon?

The discourse this year seems to be changing focus. Many of the works talk about memory, collective memory in particular. This theme was built into art from the start. Think of the Greek myth on the origins of art (Pliny’s story of the Corinthian Maid). That is, the girl using a burnt stick to draw around the shadow of her lover, to remember him before he goes off to war.

Joseph Wright of Derby: 'The Corinthian Maid', 1782. The National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA.

 

This old story still encapsulates much of the 2011 Biennale; narrative features throughout. How might the possibilities inherent in that tale be teased out to describe what is on show now in Venice?

The role of individual memory: the lover to be left behind, the story of the couple, the drawing in charcoal, ie art that retells a particular situation. Love and, we are at night, presumably sex. Although, unlike the last Biennale, there seemed very little sex this time.

The role of collective memory: a story that has become shared and then archetypal, stories about loss feature heavily. Of water rights in the Iraqi Pavilion for example.

The role of Power, the portrayed lover is off to fight, presumably someone else’s war. The effect of the behaviour of the powerful and how it affects the powerless. Imagery that speaks truth unto power, this was one of the most ‘political’ Biennales I have seen.

The role of light, in creating form in two dimensional imagery.  “Giotto put the light back into art” Vasari said, describing the all important role of light in creating form. Apart from describing the illusion of form on a two dimensional surface, Chiaroscuro (and of course linear perspective) developed Renaissance art that demanded intelligence and perception to make and to understand; to ‘read’ this new space. The Corinthian Maid draws round a shadow, the result is self-evidently artificial, it is after all just a scrubby black line on a wall. But think how that line, that shape, encloses space and creates something with enormous conceptual/ perceptual depth: pictorial space. The title of this years Biennale is ‘Illuminations’, in the light of experience, Rimbaud and Benjamin are supposed to stalk the shows, I would suggest it is something older. Video and film are still here of course, and better than I remember, certainly far more watchable and, unusually for art, plot driven, ie narrative again. The key work is the astonishing, and more powerful every time I see a part of it, Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ (see earlier posts), in the Arsenale.

Depth behind the picture plane is conceptual as much as it is mathematical, the way that space is organised by the artist tells us something. Alberti wrote in Della Pittura (1434) that studio textbook for the Early Renaissance: ‘I like to see someone in the ‘historia’ who tells the spectators what is going on…by his gestures invites you to laugh or weep with them” (page 78 in the Penguin edition). As Robert Hughes points out in his recent (not very good, Hibbert is still much better) book on Rome, Alberti’s perspective is a tool of empathy. In Nelson we might walk around the illusory space with our legs rather than our eyes, but it is still an empathetic process.

To be continued

Rome: what makes an art work, work?

Rome: what makes an art work, work?

Borghese Gallery

( http://www.galleriaborghese.it/borghese/en/edefault.htm)

Rubens: ‘Susannah and the Elders’ 1605/ 1607

 

Rubens: 'Susanna and the Elders' 1607. oil on canvas, 94 x 66 cm. Galleria Borghese

 

The S shaped collapsing form turning in on itself, each part of the body, limbs turning as the whole body turns. This figure of Susannah is the epitome of the unrest. A similar process of making form to his Deposition in the Courtauld, although Christ’s discomfort is of a suitably different level to the fleshly Susannah. It is the bracelet going around the upper arm that makes this work.

Take this notion of proportion and rhythm to make an art work convincing and compare it to Raphael’s ‘Deposition’ in another room.

 

Raphael 'Deposition (The Entombment)', 1507. Oil on Canvas, Galleria Borghese

 

 (http://www.galleriaborghese.it/borghese/en/edeposiz.htm)

The key transitional work for the coming artist, all the prettiness of Urbino and then Perugino disposed of once the young tyro gets to Florence. But in this painting, it’s not quite right yet, the rhythm of the legs, and there a lot of them, that rhythm is unconvincing. All the intellectual demands are here, look at the Donni Tondo figure bottom right, but here arms are too long and muscular especially when compared to Christ and the traditional trailing arm. Across the composition you can see that he has tweaked the figures to get them to fit, therefore the balance is OK, but it’s not fluid or very interesting. So, convincing? Not quite, that combination of proportion, and pictorial space are missing something.

Rome: notes from the bench outside the Palazzo Farnese; Melancholy

(http://www.paradoxplace.com/Perspectives/Rome%20&%20Central%20Italy/Rome/Rome_Palaces/Farnese%20Palace/Palazzo_Farnese.htm)

So, I’m sitting on the stone benches that surround the Palazzo in the early evening. I’m looking across the cobbled square as families gather, tourists perspire and Romans sit to watch the world. I have just eaten a fine piccolo coppa di pistachio with some even finer tortellini in my bag for later, and I’m thinking about melancholy. Why has the melancholy fit fallen sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud that fosters the droop headed flowers all?

(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jan/23/ode-on-melancholy-john-keats)

Twice today it has struck me that this is the underlying condition of the city. The first time, fittingly, in Keats’ house.

(http://www.keats-shelley-house.org/)

Outside the window, on the Spanish Steps there are many, many people dressed in Austrian costume for some reason; they are having a noisy jolly time. Others are trying to sell them things, mostly wilting red roses and those strange plastic lumps with faces that you throw at the pavement. Inside it is dark and still the early 19^th century. In the narrow room in which Keats died, parallel to the steps and jolly Teutons, the sense of place, of loss, of mortality is almost painful.

Nothing physical is here from that specific time, not even the wallpaper; all was burnt after his death. His death mask, by Canova’s mask maker no less, is on the wall beside the bed. It was a thin face (unsurprising in one who died from tuberculosis) and a long thin nose. A clever face, certainly not soft or self-indulgent, or indulged. Many copies of letters in frames on the walls, and in cabinets next door.

What makes the pain greater, is the description that, aware of his tubercular death sentence from the moment he first coughed up blood, Keats could not bear to even open the letters he was sent. Particularly those from Fanny Brawne, the women to whom he had been engaged and could not marry because of his lack of health or money.

Even an astoundingly pretty girl with unfeasibly blue eyes in a short flowery dress, telling someone loudly on her mobile that there was “No probs, we’ll be right down” cannot break the spell of the past in this small, quiet space. I sit in an old leather chair in the corner of this room, at the end of the bed, cheerfulness outside comes through the window, and I am close to tears.

The Second occasion for the melancholy fit fallen sudden from heaven came from a visit to St Lorenzo in Damaso.

http://romanchurches.wikia.com/wiki/San_Lorenzo_in_Damaso

It is a gloomy, half lit basilica of a church, rectangular with a narthex, side aisles, apse and a coffered ceiling, huge and dusty and empty. Bells start to ring, an elderly woman in a housecoat walks in from the left, a priest from the right. She goes to a pew somewhere in the middle, he fiddles with things on the altar, tests a microphone and goes to sit with her. They go through the responses, the place is so big the echoes repeat constantly; his higher pitch, her constant low monotone. A pair of women are now kneeling before candles at a distant chapel, they look like mother and daughter. There is no one else, at no point will he use the microphone, there is no one to broadcast to. This church must be easily the length of a cricket pitch and half as high and wide. The responses go on, the echoes repeat, as they must at mass every day. The priest and his celebrant, alone together until one of them moves to another place.

Next to me on the stone bench at the Palazzo is an American, he is ordering about his two young children who are playing with a green plastic toy. After a while an Italian man introduces his equally young daughter who has been playing with an orange balloon. The Italian suggests that the three children could play together. Solemnly the children swap toys and continue to play separately. The two men watch the children playing in the Piazza, they do not speak.

Roma is the opposite of Amor as Carlo Levi points out:

“The roaring of the lions in the night

Of the depths of time to memory

Owls, Madonna symbols interrupted

Events timeless outside of history”

From: ‘Fleeting Rome: In Search of la Dolce Vita’, By Carlo Levi

Rome: The Capitoline Museums: Light and Space

 

Rembrandt: ‘A Woman at her Toilet’, 1633, oil on canvas. The National Gallery of Canada.

 

 (http://www.gallery.ca/en/see/collections/artwork.php?mkey=3570)

 

The Caravaggio I had come to see has been replaced with this little Rembrandt from The National Gallery of Canada. Layer on layer of finely textured light pooled into the centre of a gloomy space, a room we presume.

A large woman holds her even larger stomach; pregnant and musing on the future? Or fat and remembering how she got that way? In the darkness another woman is combing her hair, the comb is just visible. The room could be huge, but is probably small, behind them on what is probably a bed, jewels glint, echoing the fineness of her clothing, the red cloak and the jewelled slipper.

Layers of soft, reticent Northern light in a private room, no male presence. The two women are in a space that dust must lie, layered in generations, thin sediments of human skin, strata of stories of the people that made up that dust.

The Rembrandt, in a an inspired piece of curatorship, was paired with another

 

Caravaggio: 'Saint John the Baptist ', 1602. Oil on Canvas. Capitoline Museums, Rome.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e6/Caravaggio_Baptist_Musei_Capitolini%2C_Rome.jpg

A bronzed boy, who has played in the sun, jumped into rivers in the Italian August sun, holds a horned ram. He has turned back, half smiling at the viewer. He is sitting on a ledge covered, not with the ratty animals skins of the desert, but a fine fur, white and red cloth match that quality and set of the boys own naked skin.

The body is (slightly) oddly articulated which makes it resemble a central trunk of muscle. There is little doubt what this boy is prepared to do for the man who could pay for it. The bright light, clear and strong, and the naked form it shows are not evidence of the light of god, nor is the nudity evidence of the divinity of man in it’s ideal form.  The composition strips away the sacerdotal form that covers Michelangelo’s Ignudi, although the arrangement of the boy is similar.

This is Southern sensuality and corrupt pleasure, strong, immediate, male and thrust right up to the picture plane. None of Rembrandt’s delicacy, women absorbed in domestic activity and the aching slowness of cobwebbed light layered down over what might seem like a geological time scale.

Rome: Pictorial Space, the picture plane and Mike Nelson, part 1

Mike Nelson defines himself as a sculptor, “I make sculpture, but sculpture that you walk inside”.

After many galleries, many museums and watching so many people in so many galleries, some thoughts are starting to repeat themselves. Classical statuary, since Praxiteles if not before, was designed to be seen in the round, ie no framing picture plane to establish the illusion.

This begs the question: why does the Renaissance visual conception still dominate our way of seeing? I.e. the picture plane as a window and the conceptual space that develops autonomy. “First of all, on the surface on which I am going to paint, I draw a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject to be painted is to be seen” (Alberti: Della Pittura”, page 54 Penguin Edition). The stimuli from Roman sculpture and ruin was all the visual information Alberti, Brunelleschi et al had to go on, why then construct a perceptual world view that is so firmly planimetric?

Why try to recreate Apelles when all you have to go on is text, the desperately dull Pliny for example.

Certainly Brunelleschi’s fiddling about with mirrors and images in the doorway of Santa Maria della Fiore in Florence made a two dimensional process in which forms could appear to be fully modeled in three dimensions. Unlike Praxiteles’ Doryphorus though, you can’t walk around Masaccio’s ‘Holy Trinity’ (the first Renaissance ‘hole in the wall’ painting on the nave of Santa Maria Novella, Florence).

Those early Renaissance artists came from craft studios that could turn out work in any media you wanted. If it was permanence the Lenzi’s wanted when they commissioned Masaccio, a three dimensional marble object would have had greater physical impact and lasted longer than a fresco. Was there in 15^th century Florence, such a significant cultural hierarchy that prioritized the two dimensional? No, not really. So, why the power of illusory space? Why not the real thing?

The planimetric view is now the DNA of our vision, the camera, the TV the film the computer screen, the phone screen all depend on “a rectangle of whatever size I want, which I regard as an open window through which the subject … is to be seen”

You might say that theatre in the round is the exception rather than the rule, but the proscenium arch, like the Albertian window is always with us. Had it not been so, no doubt the digital miracle workers of our age Jonathan Ive for example, the Lumière Brothers and Daguerre before him, would have been able to work out how to create images out of three dimensional light that we could walk around, as Praxiteles had conceived. 

What caused the change in perceptual world view that gave us Brunelleschi/ Alberti/ Masaccio and onward? I can only put it down to the increasing ubiquity of the book, that flat surface which can present the reader with a limitless, autonomous conceptual space. Which begs the next question; will the E Reader and the hyperlink presage a new change? If artists are supposed to be gifted with foresight, this years Biennale thought not.

The introductory book to Mike Nelson’s Installation presents different forms of space: the political spaces of the ‘Free Pirates’ in Madagascar, notiosn of anarchic (in the proper sense of the word) temporary autonomous zones free from hierarchical state interference. Fantasies much loved by graphic novelists and cyberpunks, Nelson has referenced Jules Verne and this sort of thing before.

In the book, Dan Cameron (‘Memories of Trespassing’) points out that Venice is an equally artificial space. What was once the meeting of East and West, a liminal space at the edge of empires is now an artificial reconstruction of the past. An artificiality based on gondoliers, repeated samples of Vivaldi, imported food from southern Italy like pasta and pizza and imported goods from the Far East like fake Prada and Raybans.

The constructed space that is now Venice, sells fake luxury as hard as it can to the vast queues that shuffle from San Marco to the Rialto to Accademia and back to San Marco, hot tired and presumably satiated. Does this Venice have anything to do with the Biennale? Middle aged men in black linen muttering about entropy and fierce women with short black hair and red heels discussing the positioning of practice; they wouldn’t be seen dead in the queue to buy a David genitalia apron in the market; what news on the Rialto indeed.

Dan Cameron says that “Whilst not actually hostile, Mike Nelson’s spaces do emanate an essential unfamiliarity” and I think that was the essential problem with this show, it was not that unfamiliar and it wasn’t that difficult to work out the layout, it was relatively predictable. The lighting was very even, it didn’t smell of anything and every room had young English people acting as curators/ guards looking at their I Pads and happy to talk to you about the show and which art school they are studying at.

The thrill had gone. Was the show clearly better in it’s first incarnation in the Han itself in Istanbul, when the photos referred to the buildings you would have walked past to get there? Nelson says that he not only re-constructed the Istanbul piece but he also reconstructed the Han that surrounded that first work; putting a Biennial inside a Bienalle he calls it. A fascinating idea, does it quite work, is it convincing?

“Venice occupies a semi-haunted space where an aggressive commercial empire once flourished”. This could also describe the reconstructed Han that Nelson presents. As Cameron points out, it is now Istanbul that is commercially prosperous whereas Venice is a sinking Disneyland. The relationship between Istanbul/ Constantinople and Venice is still very strong, the looted treasures of the 4^th Crusade in the 13^th Century (the largely Venetian inspired sacking of Constantinople) are still on show throughout the city; the horses of San Marco for example. But this seems slightly beside the point when walking the fictive corridors of ‘I, Impostor’.

More notes from the benches of the Farnese.

The two soldiers in the army Jeep guarding the French Embassy are bored. Sunday afternoon, the last day of June before the Ferie d’Augusto and the piazza is empty. No pretty female tourists for the soldiers to impress, the boys are stamping their feet and banging the side of their vehicle.

The small church to Santa Birgittae, open briefly on a Sunday afternoon, due to stay open until 5.30 has just been closed by a nun in complex headgear and long grey and white robes, ten minutes early. Seconds later a herd of nuns leave from a door further down the piazza, they are in a hurry, a further nun rushes to join them. They dash away, chatting, mostly African and Asian from what I can see of their faces. No children are playing in the piazza; do Italian children not play on Sundays? The fancy wine bar on the corner is empty, there is a sense here of a city being given over to tourists as its all gets too hot.

Rome: Pictorial Space and the Albertian window

Thinking about the Albertian notion of the picture plane as a window frame, I have been looking from my window here. I am staying on the 5^th floor (100 steps and no lift) of a block in the Centro Storico. It is difficult to tell the age of the building. I would think the façade is probably 18^th, might be 17^th, Century. But the maze of intersecting buildings it covers could be much, much older.

The point is, that these arrangements, still on a mediaeval street pattern, hold a familiar form and what do I see from my window? I see stories, many other windows randomly arranged with different lives, all autonomous, all operating in their own complex spaces, all with their own ‘agency’.

There is for example, as there always is in these built up ancient centres where people live as they have done for centuries, a child screaming; there is always a child screaming somewhere. In this case, I can see him in a window across a little piazza to my right, about 2 storeys down. I can see bunk beds and a tiny head just reaching up to the window ledge. The screaming has stopped, he, (and it has to be a he) raises his arm above his head so it can clear the open  window frame and throws a toy out into the world- through his own picture plane to land in an unknown, inaccessible world below.

To my left is a church that proclaims strong missionary connections on a board outside the doors. One of the transepts has an altana (roof terrace) I have seen young priests hanging out their washing sometimes. This evening a man in a white T shirt is jogging on a running machine. The machine faces the wall, not the view of the Roman sky line and a striking, setting sun.

There is shouting opposite, the errant boy disappears suddenly and an enormous woman wearing vast black underwear fills the entire open window, her bra bulges ominously as she leans out of the window to look down. She does not pierce her picture plane so much as grow through it, the giant cupolas of her undergarments jostling for space with a small fleshy head. More rapid shouting, down in the piazza old women, sitting on the inevitable white plastic chairs, give helpful advice. This is almost exactly the scene you can see in Canaletto’s ‘The Stonemasons’ Yard’

http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/canaletto-the-stonemasons-yard

On the first floor of a building, left hand side of that painting, you can see an identical, though slightly thinner, woman leaning out a window to shout at children below.

Narratives in windows, seen through an open window frame written on Windows 2010.

If I leave the window and step out onto my altana, (a rather grand term for a scrubby bit of roof with 32 pots of dying shrubs and geraniums) from this rather small and sad space I can see the dome of San Andrea della Valle; the church where Puccinni set the first act of Tosca. Turning the other way, I can just see the top of San Pietro in Montorio, on top of the Janiculum Hill. To see either, you have to look through a thicket of TV aerials and satellite dishes and inventive arrangements of cables to connect them and stop the things blowing down. I suppose they provide our current open windows on the world.

Rome: The Galleria Borghese: Pictorial Space and Bernini, Pictorial Space and Architecture

http://www.galleriaborghese.it/borghese/en/edafne.htm

Continuing the theme: the dominance of the planimetric in the way we appreciate art and thus the world around us. Why are we not happiest, keenest to seek out the fully three dimensional?

I know from years of teaching art history students that understanding painting and forms in two dimensions comes relatively naturally, but three dimensions, architecture especially, is always a struggle; it is a foreign language.

This is even more noticeable when watching gallery goers. For example, looking at Bernini’s ‘Apollo and Daphne’, in the Galleria Borghese,

Bernini: 'Apollo and Daphne', 1625. Galleria Borghese, Rome

a triumphant example of sculpture fully in the round, a sculpture that demonstrates a different, developing section of the narrative from every angle. What really struck me was the way viewers positioned themselves; at the 4 points of the compass. That is, they saw it through 4 static picture planes, rather than walking around it observing the metamorphosis of Daphne from one stage to the next. The picture plane is that institutionalised.

Given the influence of film and, for example the tracking shot, this is surprising. Apparently one of the first films to use the tracking shot was Italian: The Cabiria, in 1914.

Artists since Alberti have championed architecture (‘De Re Aedificatoria’, 1452). If Gropius through the Bauhaus curriculum could revolutionize the British Art School and, tangentially perhaps, was therefore responsible for the birth of British Rock, Pop, Punk and the British Fashion industry. Why was he not also responsible for the main aim of that institution, to place all the arts at the service of architecture? A building is after all equally a narrative.

For instance, the church I am sitting in now to write this, It is about 4.30pm, whilst waiting for the best paneficio in Rome to open

(Forno Campo de’ Fiori http://www.fornocampodefiori.com/)

I have walked down Via Giulia and ended up at San Salvatore in Lauro. It is not a particularly special Roman church, but like any building, the way it is put together, the use of decoration, the architectural language, tells a story. That narrative is usually fairly straightforward .

The façade, the introductory paragraph, shows a huge, high naved building. That facade is pure nave, no volutes, no evidence of side aisles, it introduces the internal spaces that you will encounter, and introduces them with great clarity. Inside, narrow chapels and a very high, hemispherical, barrel vaulted ceiling. Short transepts, perfect hemispherical dome above the crossing. At a guess I would say that the nave is two cubes long, the transepts and the apse ½ a cube and the crossing a whole cube. The nave has paired, attached Corinthian columns in travertine, supporting a very large and accurate Roman entablature. Above is a narrow clerestory.

The apse is only slightly curved, the attached columns of the apse are in green marble. The apsidal pediment is both broken and curved. There is gold everywhere and above the altar a huge sunburst lit by natural light from the dome and clerestory.

Extraordinarily, on each side of the altar framed by the attached columns are theatre boxes, overlooking the action; royal boxes actually on the stage. And, they are the clue to the whole story. This is a late Baroque church, that characteristic theatricality is functional, all about getting in the faithful.

This is a post Council of Trent church: the Catholic meeting that set up the USPs of Roman Catholicism in opposition to growing Protestantism and in horrified reaction to the Sack of Rome in 1527.

The narrow side aisles and barrel vaulting, like Il Gesu not far away, concentrate the congregation on the Mass, the words of the priest and on the music (barrel vaulting was supposed to be good for acoustics).

The broken pediment is reminiscent of Borromini, an intense visual excitement, the sunburst of gold and the theatre boxes of the Colonna altar by Bernini, the cubic volumes takes us back to Bramante and Brunelleschi, the perfect hemispherical dome and the entablature to classical Rome.

This is a building that displays its knowledge of sacred architecture with great confidence, expecting us to do the same. All this glorifies us by sitting in a vision of heaven,  the architect, perhaps, the patron certainly (4 golden, jewel encrusted busts of popes sit on the altar) and above all, it glorifies God.

My main point being that it is a narrative about 3 dimensional form that self-consciously goes back to the first basilica churches in Rome. Like any building it establishes the context from the first glimpse and continues that discourse with every combination of forms that you can experience, surely this is a discourse that it is relatively easy to understand and enter into?

Perhaps to prove what I am talking about, a woman has come in to the church armed with a camera and photographed all the rather dreary paintings in the chapels, mostly by da Cortona and Turchi. The photographer did not look up or around her, and then she left. Mind you she didn’t look at the paintings either, just photographed them, presumably to prove her brief presence at this spot.

More notes from the benches of the Farnese.

Two men walk from the left of the piazza carrying a large bag that I assume contains a double bass, not a body surely, although the bag is big enough.

A woman in a short blue dress with very long brown hair has been standing in the centre of the piazza in front of her old black bicycle (with a wicker basket naturally). The two men stop behind this self-aware and photogenic ensemble, exchange glances with each other and walk slowly in a circle around her. She pays no attention.

There is a pair of very large fountains in the piazza, they are composed from enormous marble rings, each containing a vast Roman bath and a 16^th century single fountain with a sort of Fleur de Lys shape. To the side of the left hand fountain, a family with their back to the water feature is admiring a small, new, grey Fiat.

A man in a blue shirt, an almost identical colour but different pattern to the short blue skirt, cycles up to greet its wearer. They cycle off together towards the Campo dei Fiori, his bicycle has no basket.

 A nun from Santa Birgittae comes out to water the palms. The headdress is a white affair that quarters the head to hold on the black cloth that billows down the shoulders. The white crisscross formation and encircling band (I think it is called a chaplet) looks like that protective headgear that front row forwards wear in rugby, I assume nuns don’t wear mouth guards as well.

Two elderly nuns of a different order, (all white gowns, black headdress no head protection) are chatting up the soldiers. The nuns are enjoying themselves hugely. The soldiers (all body armour, beret and machine guns) are deeply embarrassed and keep looking at their boots and blushing. The nuns walk away smiling broadly, I’m sure the one with the stick would swish it in the air if she could.

There is a vigorous football game going on by the right hand fountain. Two boys have taken the space between a lamppost and their bicycles to make a goal. The goalkeeper certainly needs the practice, his net is the very expensive wine bar. The ball keeps banging against the elegant planters that mark the entrance; this is not going down well.