Ave Maria

Space and Time, part one.....

Shadows and Reflections

We are in Tuscany, gazing across the Lago di Massaciuccoli from the villa which was Giacomo Puccini's summer retreat between 1891 and 1921, where he composed Tosca, La Boheme and Madame Butterfly among other works. The shadows and reflections of the stakes in the water are at angular odds with the gentle sweep of the hills toward Lucca and the more distant Monte Pisano. Actuality and memory join here in the late summer light, past, present and future all sparkling in the placid lake.

Ave Maria, gratia plena, 

Dominus tecum. Benedicta tu in mulieribus, 

et benedictus fructus ventris tui, Iesus. 

But this journey to Tuscany began with The Angelus, a painting that Jean-François Millet completed in 1859, which is currently on view in London's National Gallery..... 

Holy Mary, Mother of God,

Pray for us sinners,

Now and at the hour of our death. 

Amen

Which led to an exhibition entitled Kiefer / Van Gogh in The Gabrielle Jungels-Winkler Galleries at the Royal Academy.....

Here we see how Van Gogh took inspiration from Millet, and his understanding of the relationship between the harshness of life and the culture of faith, and then how German neo-expressionist painter Anselm Kiefer developed his visual and thematic ideas from Van Gogh's landscapes....

And how Kiefer uses materials such as sand, wood and straw to create unusual textures on the surface of vast painted canvases which may, or may not, work, or last, as statements of love....

On  16 August, 1963 at  6 pm, Kiefer recorded in his diary:  Then I wandered through the fields a little.  When you walk on a country road you can feel the primitive, natural quality that I've been looking for everywhere; these roads and fields are still how they were a hundred years ago.  The landscape here is melancholy.  It's easy to imagine Van Gogh painting the wheat field here that would be his last important work.

Yes, we are (I am) filled with wonder, and, not for the first time, think about the effect -  the importance - the value - of art.  Does it represent something we need to be represented?  Does it fill a gap we might otherwise not have recognised?  

In Tuscany I find art of a more didactic nature, but one that seems to reach out, across the centuries, to touch us even now.  Even now, when we don't necessarily believe that this was that nor that that was how the evangelists said it was...

Hail Mary!  Guess what?  You are going to have a baby.....

And here, in Siena, in Tuscany, a young Duccio told us some stories.....

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound

That saved a wretch like me.

I once was lost, but now I am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

It is extraordinary how time, and geography, seem to affect our understanding.  We are two thousand years from the story of Christ (and much less from that of Mohammed) but we treat these fables as gospel (forgive me, Lord!) as if their age gives them glory, and some kind of sacrosanct credibility. These days there would be CCTV and body cameras, reliable (?) witnesses, corroborated alibis and satellite pictures....  

La Maestà - Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308 - 1311

We are in Siena, a beautiful city (if that isn't an impossibility) where space seems to be simultaneously constrained and free. The Duomo crowns the hill, crowded around by houses that cling to the slopes:

The cathedral stretches up to the heavens despite its unfinished state, a vast building project that faltered and failed in 1348 due largely to the Black Death, which severely diminished the work force.

The interior dazzles with its black and white striped marble columns, the extraordinary flooring - fifty-six panels  of marble intarsia and mosaic, created by over forty artists, including Domenico Beccafumi, who created this scene  of the false prophets of Baal in the sixteenth century:

Another marvel is the pulpit, carved from Carrara marble by Nicola Pisano and others between 1265 and 1268:

The Piccolomini Library, commissioned by the future pope Pius III in 1492 to house his uncle, Pius II's, collection of books, was decorated by Pinturicchio and has a statue of the Three Graces as a centrepiece:

The dome, decorated with golden stars against blue sky, is topped by a lantern designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 

While the colonnade in the drum is adorned with images of patriarchs and prophets:

The oculus in the apse above the choir was originally made by Duccio in 1287, but his glass was removed in 1943 to avoid war damage: 

The six metre diameter (thirty square metres of surface) window shows three stories from the life of Maria and it is now in the cathedral museum, where it is possible to see the brushwork of the master over the coloured glass:

By day the cathedral is thronged with visitors, but at night it sleeps quietly under the stars, a glorious sight in the silence of space:

And in Tuscany I feel a great sense of space.  Our apartment in Siena takes up the whole top floor of a villa overlooking the city:

A city which, even after fifty years of familiarity still inspires and awakes emotions I may have temporarily buried:

It is a labyrinth which never fails to surprise as narrow alleyways give way to soaring towers:

Or which allows us to climb and look down on the same Torre del Mangia and the Campo, one of the finest city spaces anywhere:

Or to stare into the distance beyond San Clemente in Santa Maria dei Servi: 

A dream-like scene of rolling hills and fertile land which hasn't changed much since Ambrogio Lorenzetti painted it in his Allegoria del buono e cattivo Governo (1338-40) in the Sala della Pace (or Delle Nove) in the Palazzo Pubblico:

Or when Simone Martini (possibly) painted the majestic fresco of the Assedio del Castello di Montemassi da parte di Guidoriccio da Foligno (in 1328) on the wall of the Sala del Mappamondo.

On the walls of the Fortezza Santa Barbara (or Medicea) young visitors pose for their picture:

While in the Contrada of the Giraffe older men play scopa (with a defibrillator on hand....)

Space and time merge into one another.  The Annunciation (here painted by Matteo di Giovanni in the mid fifteenth century),

Shows a truly angelic angel breathing life into a reserved but saintly Maria, as if proposing an impossible marriage, their clothes and head gear hardly modern, but their faces untouched by the centuries between us and them:

Then, more remotely in Tuscany, on the slopes of Monte Amiata, I can feel the primitive, natural quality that [Anselm Kiefer was] looking for everywhere; these roads and fields are still how they were a hundred [and more] years ago..... 

And as the sun begins to slip away, the hills begin to stand out, backlit as if some master, some Duccio, or some van Gogh, was highlighting the scenery, to tell a tale of space and time:

And then, the sky erupts with burnished gold and the colours of Maria's vestments, the heavens assuming life in all its glory, a fresco across our vision:

Shining through the autumn crocuses,

And leaving shadows of dried grasses on the bedroom wall:

Time, and space, for peace (pace) and dreams....

Sancta Maria mater Dei,

ora pro nobis peccatoribus,

nunc, et in hora mortis nostrae.

*****

Salute!

[To be continued]

*****