Posted by araucaria
(here)
Life is about moving on, and the well-nigh indestructible pyramids are the ultimate in jamming on the brakes. That they have spawned a myriad theories and remain hypnotically fascinating merely serves to mask the fact that life is about moving on.
We find the same thing with MH370: a moving object has been stopped in its tracks, and this too has spawned a myriad theories and has become hypnotically fascinating.
Our museums are full of this sort of stuff: indeed that is what they are for. No sooner was the Berlin War pulled down than museums were seeking to purchase pieces for display. The most interesting bits had artwork on the western side.
http://www.memorial-caen.fr/mur_de_b...expocybu06.htm
So when the concrete starts crumbling, they will have to think about preserving it somehow. Sounds crazy? Well, it doesn’t sound quite so crazy when you consider that the same is happening with our art treasures; but maybe that’s a mistake. These artistic chunks of wall are highly paradoxical items, signifying freedom on a support that seen from the other side stood for an end to freedom. We cannot separate the one from the other, so for the sake of the one we keep the other as well. Much great art, being likewise a contestation of the wall on which it is mounted, bears similarities to a window, letting in light and air and the otherwise invisible. But it still marks the boundary between an inside and an outside. Total freedom means walking through a door and being outside, rather than depicting the outside from inside. Hence less art is more art.
Take Leonardo da Vinci, perhaps the greatest artist of the last millennium and whose tiny output makes his works even more precious. And yet paradoxically, much of his work was unfinished. Vasari in his
Lives of the Artists, tries to explain:
Clearly, it was because of his profound knowledge of painting that Leonardo started so many things without finishing them; for he was convinced that his hands, for all their skill, could never perfectly express the subtle and wonderful ideas of his imagination. Among his many interests was included the study of nature; he investigated the properties of plants and then observed the motions of the heavens, the path of the moon, and the course of the sun.
This segment contains a paradox and an apparent non sequitur. It is paradoxical for a ‘profound knowledge of painting’ to lead to unfinished work; and what has his imagination to do with nature after close examination? Answer: nature is profoundly unfinished and painting in its adequate relationship to nature will also be so.
Take a work that has spawned a myriad theories and remains hypnotically fascinating (it cropped up again only the other day on this forum):
The Last Supper. I am going to offer one of my own: you read it here first. Here is Vasari:
Leonardo also executed in Milan, for the Dominicans of Santa Maria delle Grazie, a marvelous and beautiful painting of the Last Supper. Having depicted the heads of the Apostles full of splendour and majesty, he deliberately left the head of Christ unfinished, convinced he would fail to give it the divine spirituality it demands. This all but finished work has ever since been held in the greatest veneration by the Milanese and others. In it Leonardo brilliantly succeeded in envisaging and reproducing the tormented anxiety of the Apostles to know who had betrayed their master; so in their faces one can read the emotions of love, dismay, and anger, or rather sorrow, at their failure to grasp the meaning of Christ. And this excites no less admiration than the contrasted spectacle of the obstinacy, hatred, and treachery in the face of Judas or, indeed, than the incredible diligence with which every detail of the work was executed. The texture of the very cloth on the table is counterfeited so cunningly that the linen itself could not look more realistic.
It is said that the prior used to keep pressing Leonardo, in the most importune way, to hurry up and finish the work, because he was puzzled by Leonardo’s habit of sometimes spending half a day at a time contemplating what he had done so far; if the prior had had his way, Leonardo would have toiled like one of the labourers hoeing in the garden and never put his brush down for a moment. Not satisfied with this, the duke was constrained to send for Leonardo and very tactfully, question him about the painting, although he showed perfectly well that he was only doing so because of the prior’s insistence. Leonardo, knowing he was dealing with a prince of acute and discerning intelligence, was willing (as he never had been with the prior) to explain his mind at length; and so he talked to the duke for a long time about the art of painting. He explained that men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least; for, he added, they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands. Leonardo then said that he still had two heads to paint: the head of Christ was one, and for this he was unwilling to look for any human model, nor did he dare suppose that his imagination could conceive the beauty and divine grace that properly belonged to the incarnate Deity. Then, he said, he had yet to do the head of Judas, and this troubled him since he did not think he could imagine all the features that would form the countenance of a man who, despite all the blessings he had been given, could so cruelly steel his will to betray his own master and the Creator of the world. However, added Leonardo, he would try to find a model for Judas, and if he did not succeed in doing so, why then he was not without the head of that tactless and importunate prior. The duke roared with laughter at this and said that Leonardo had every reason in the world for saying so. The unfortunate prior retired in confusion to worry the labourers working in his garden, and he left off worrying Leonardo, who skilfully finished the head of Judas and made it seem the very embodiment of treachery and inhumanity. The head of Christ remained, as was said, unfinished.
This story suggests a number of observations:
· The usual ‘love & light’ approach to the subject is the Last Supper as the institution of the Eucharist, which may be seen as an approximation of the immaterial Christ presence in the physical. Instead of this, Leonardo seems to be focussing on the dark conspiracy side: the moment of betrayal. No one ever seems to comment on this strange fact.
· The unfinished in this painting denotes the spiritual, invisible aspect of nature: Christ’s features; while the finished denotes the physical, and especially in its betrayal of the spiritual. At the instant captured in the picture, everyone has a conscience to examine as a possible or partial traitor. The only fully clear conscience belongs to one whose head is only sketched in.
· The spiritual applied to the art of painting involves lengthy meditation, studying what has been done so far. The physical viewing of this process leads to impatience at seeing a man watching paint dry!
· This physical view of the process is the ultimate betrayal, hence the viewer might lend his features to a passable portrayal of Judas. In other words, betrayal and portrayal do not just sound similar, they are almost synonymous.
At this point, we may factor in what we know from elsewhere, namely the fact that the painting started deteriorating almost immediately upon completion and why. Fresco painting like this requires a special technique. To adhere properly, the paint must be applied to
wet plaster, and as plaster dries very quickly, the painting is divided up into squares, and the painter still has to work very fast to finish one square before it dries. Clearly the prior was upset because even he could see that Leonardo was going about it in the wrong way and asking for trouble by deliberately taking his time.
Since it is hard to imagine one of the greatest artists the world has seen guilty of such gross incompetence, and in a sense betraying his art, we need to find another explanation that takes into account the presence of a genius at work. This explanation follows fairly logically from all the above, and would be more obvious if it didn’t sound quite so crazy. Simply this:
the painting was designed not to last. Christ’s unpainted other-worldly features would disappear first; his followers’ would naturally take a little longer, but possibly no longer than their real-life counterparts. We need to remember this was the monks’ refectory (dining hall), and the scene would be like adding on a table at the end of the room. In other words, the monks would feel they were themselves apostles participating in that last supper, especially if they saw their own features in them. Eventually the painted bread and wine would disappear too, leaving just the real bread and wine in the here and now. There is something slightly heretical about showing the effacement of the betrayal in the dining-room rather than the chapel, sending a very different message from the love & light version of the Eucharist celebrated there. And yet, the whole point of experiencing Christ, his presence, death and ascension, may be said to be learning to see his physical absence as an abiding presence.
That is exactly what Leonardo’s ephemeral pigments were designed to show, and that is why all subsequent restorations were dreadfully botched and ultimately a betrayal in principle. The painting was intended to reenact that mystery by itself fading away, and for all the subsequent daubs, it has largely succeeded in that intention.
What then should be done with
The Last Supper? Let it fade into nothingness at last. No more betrayal. [Sacrilege!]
And the pyramids? Letting them crumble has taken too long, and so has quarrying building materials. Maybe a few tons of TNT? Nah, no violence. Let’s just forget the whole thing and move on shall we? [Coverup!]
Some day we may get better at disappearing unwanted items. We are not very good at garbage disposal generally and have a word for stuff that is altogether beyond us at this time: ultimate waste. The pyramids are the ultimate cultural waste we don’t want to throw out; instead we are piling up more and drowning under it all. We need to learn to do the opposite. So far we seem capable of shifting a Boeing, which was quite impressive, except that it was by no means garbage. We can do better than that.
Where Do Our Thoughts Physically Exist?
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