If you want to know, ask Tara. Tara knows.
I have two weeks to go and feel that I have not seen enough treasures. So I ask French Reunion artist Tara from Studio Sem where to find something unusual. Before I know it, I am being whisked off to Lucca which is about 25 minutes from Pietrasanta. Tara is not one to hang about. I did not even have time to get the camera so if the following pictures do not look as if they were taken on an ipad, then I have lifted them from the web.
In order she shows me:
The stunning Duomo di San Martino..
..and, inside, the fabulous Volto Santo (Holy Face)..pictured here robed for the festival
The story has it that "the large wooden crucifix is said to have been carved by Nicodemus, the biblical figure who helped Joseph of Arimathea remove Christ's body from the cross in John 19.
According to mediaeval legend, Nicodemus did all the carving work except the face, which he hesitated to complete for fear of not doing it justice. He fell asleep, and upon waking, found the face beautifully carved - the miraculous work of an angel. The Crucifix of the Holy Face was buried in a cave for safekeeping, where it remained for centuries.
It was rediscovered by Bishop Gualfredo, who was on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land when its location was revealed to him in a dream. To allow God to decide where the Crucifix should be kept, the bishop set it adrift on an unmanned boat in the Mediterranean Sea. The Volto Santo arrived on the shores of northern Italy, where the Bishop of Lucca, also prompted by a dream, put it into a wagon with no driver to determine its final location.
The two oxen pulling the wagon stopped of their own accord at Lucca in 782.
The Volto Santo was placed in the Church of San Frediano, but the next morning, it was found to have been miraculously transferred to San Martino. For this reason, the legend explains, San Martino was designated the cathedral of Lucca (an honour previously held by Santi Giovanni e Reparata)."
(The only credible part of this story is, to me, the bit about going to sleep and finding the work finished in the morning;)
It is also known as the black Christ. The work is probably a copy from a Syrian effigy, hence the dark wood and Levantine complexion.
As Christianity expanded into Europe, depicting him as a local made a lot of sense...he would be easier to relate to and so the message would be all the simpler to deliver. Christ became pinky-beige.
As a piece of sculpture, Volto Santo is arresting. It is a beautiful blend of naturalism and stylised form. The geometric sweeps of drapery suggest Byzantine sculpture.
As if that were not enough...just around the corner is one of the best coffin sculptures I have ever seen. It dates around 1407, is by Jacopo della Quercia, is in marble and is of Ilaria del Carretto
Regardless of when it was made, a major part of what makes sculpture work is its abstract qualities; the volumes beneath the detail..the emotional core at the heart of form.
In the detail pictured below there are flourishes, tassels and hair; but take those away and you are left with a pile of perfectly balanced forms.
Her head is placed so as to make an offering of her face (she was a renowned beauty and it was wished to preserve the memory of that in the commission). The simplified form of the neck and shoulders enhance the presentation of the face.
On a more prosaic level, this also shows how important it is to choose your marble carefully...the only deterioration on the sculpture is where her nose has been chipped.
I want to expand the underlying abstract form matter for a minute with some examples. Take two well-known sculptures in the figurative tradition....Michelangelo's young slave
and Rodin's The Thinker
To me, Michelangelo's work exudes grandeur, beauty and a profound sense of self. He invented anatomical forms on the body to enhance expression, but they came from within..as if the surface landscape of the muscles and bones was born deep within the person.
Rodin's The Thinker is, by comparison, superficial and crude. The muscles and bone exaggerations look as if they have been applied as mosaic. It is histrionic nonsense: an over-egged pudding of a sculpture.
Rodin was one of the greatest life modellers and portrait sculptors of the 19th century...probably of all time...but he lost the plot when he started trying to make his work more interesting by playing with the surfaces. The Burghers of Calais had far more to them before he draped them with plaster impregnated blankets for example. Once he had seen Michelangelo's slaves, he was understandably entranced and proceeded to give the public his own watered down versions.
My final stop on the tour of Lucca was the Filippo Lippi in San Michele in Foro
This is just hanging on the wall and is still used as an object of prayer. It depicts the Saints Helen, Jerome, Sebastian and Roch and was painted in 1483.
Unrelated to the beautiful colours in this picture, a story goes that while working for Massacio, Lippi snaffled some pigment to use for a painting he was doing on the wall of a brothel in Florence. Colours were precious and closely guarded, and artists had their own blends. Some months later, Massacio nipped into the brothel for some afternoon tea, looked up and exlcaimed, "Hang on, that's my red!"
Thank you, Tara, for a wonderful day in Lucca.
Congratulations on your residency and thanks for the tour. The Volto Santo from San Frediano is remarkable and a work previously unknown to me. I enjoyed your thoughts of Michelangelo's pulsing marbles. Great control to not indulge in theatrics. He represents the internal struggle so perfectly. Rodin can be frustrating in his frantic urge to cover so much ground (and surface) but looking back to the Danté formed directly by his own hands shows me the same control as his master. His experiments and enlargements are perhaps more to do with staging and storytelling, perhaps where sculpture moved into 'punk' before its inevitable new romantic follies post WW1.
ReplyDeleteGlad that a master like you still has the joy and appetite of a student Mark. Thanks again.