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Pictorial Space

Rome: Pictorial Space and the Albertian window

August 12, 2011
Alberti, Churches in Rome, Pictorial Space, the Picture Plane
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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 5th 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 18th, might be 17th, 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

August 12, 2011
Churches in Rome, Pictorial Space, Rome, The Borghese Gallery
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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. Context, proportion and the creation of space

August 12, 2011
Palazzo Farnese, Pictorial Space
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It gets quieter each evening as August gets going, apart from us tourists and one or two mothers with children at the right hand side, the benches are empty.

I have been thinking further about melancholy and Borromini and the convincing use of proportion to emphasise context and therefore create meaningful spaces. At the bottom of the Palazzo Farnese, on the Via Giulia is a strange, neglected church, It is the Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte set up to bury the unburied, the nameless bodies found in the streets of Rome.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_dell’Orazione_e_Morte

The exterior is cream, crowded with Corinthian columns and deaths heads, images of Old Father Time and hour glasses; grim stuff. Inside though, it is shaped like a small 18th century theatre. Centrally planned around an oval, but unlike Borromini’s San Carlo, it has none of his claustrophobia, edginess, muscularity and strain.

Here we have green Corinthian columns, gilded capitals set against pilasters forced into interstices. This is playful, ‘let’s see what this looks like’, rather than a brooding Mannerist, Laurentian Library approach. Above the deep entablature, there are what look exactly like theatre boxes, places for the better sort to peer out on the proceedings, placed best to see the altar/ stage.

This is not perhaps as obvious as a church I saw on the Corso (Santa Gesu e Maria) this morning, in which the same arrangement of theatre boxes down the nave and around the apse have been filled with over life sized sculpted portraits of the patrons. All gesticulating and reacting as you would at a good piece of theatre; Bernini’s set piece with Colonna onlookers is to blame apparently. Possibly, but this church was playing Strauss waltzes on their sound system when I visited. Santa Gesu e Maria was also a riot of hideously expensive polychrome marble, but dedicated to barefoot, hermit Augustinian monks

Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte has none of that extreme levity, despite the underlying jolliness of the architecture. It only opens for an hour each evening and every time I have been in there are two nuns, head to foot in white, silent, still; kneeling at prayer.

Out in the piazza, a large herd of priests surge up to Saint Birgittae, it as usual, locked. The priests stand around, perplexed, they ring on the door next to the church, the one the nuns pour out off. After a long wait, but they seem a very jolly and young herd happy to enjoy the evening sun, the door opens and they file in one by one.

Two men march into the centre of the square, the y stand very close to each other, they are both on their phones. One faces east, the other north. They are both wearing black jackets, one has bright yellow trousers one bright red. They finish their calls simultaneously and, without speaking, stride back towards the Campo dei Fiori.

Rome: Pictorial Space, the picture plane and Mike Nelson, part 2 (return to Het Steen?)

August 12, 2011
Pictorial Space, Rome
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To end this discussion, does all this musing on art in Rome have anything to do with Nelson and, going further back in these posts, does it have anything to do with Rubens and Het Steen? Can I make the connections? Well do you know, I think I can.

Starting with Nelson, what makes him interesting and what makes him stand out for the new generation of artists? It is the combination of narrative, conceptual clarity and high craft; integrity and sophisticated understanding of the possibilities of ‘pictorial space’.

He is very clear, rightly so, that he is not building a stage set, a set for something to happen in front of. This is art space, art space that you walk into. Therefore it can contain all the conceptual implications you might wish to bring. We ‘read’ it in the same way we ‘read’  a painting, we walk round the spaces in the same way our eyes walk round the space behind the open window of a painting.

The difference is that the crucial relationship to the picture plane of all illusory objects/ gestural marks/ colour fields etc in a painting is tangible, measurable almost. Whereas in a Nelson, that picture plane is conceptual, embodied in our consistent recourse to narrative, i.e. the relationship of one form to another through time/ space and causal relationship. One is actual, the other conceptual; in essence (in artworld) the same.

And Het Steen? Het Steen is all about the house, an illusory object in pictorial space in conceptual space, the house of the successful artist. The lights are on, we have walked out of the house to admire it, or we are perhaps approaching it for the first time. The House is a series of spaces we will encounter that have a series of potential narratives, each vital to the artist. Our conceptual route to them and through them is equally vital to our understanding of the work, hence the emphasis on paths and journeys in the painted landscape.