Sacred Histories & Heathen Mythologies

By Lucy von Goetz

Entering the Arena Chapel in Padua, one walks into an ancient jewel box; drenched in the deep blue of Giotto’s skies. John Ruskin described Giotto’s frescoes as a, “rainbow play of brilliant harmonies”. Giotto was adorning the surfaces of Italian architecture in the 14th century, taking the touchstone for our exhibition, “Giotto’s Room”, back to the very roots of modern painting.

Giotto was recognised as the father of Christian art, along with Cimabue, he was regarded as a naïve predecessor of the great Raphael and Renaissance masters. His innovations were clear in his use of lighter colours and naturalistic style. The revolution he kindled was not due to greater education or new theories of art, it was simply by being interested in what was going on around him; the incidences of everyday life and conventional faces brought him in aversion to idealism, formalism and tradition.

In creating a dialogue between the contemporary artworks of Bea Bonafini and Aisha Christison, and the 14th century frescoes of Giotto, we are trying to scrape away the encrustations of accepted ideas and routine perceptions, with a view to reclaiming the candour of the ‘innocent eye’ (Ruskin, 40). This simplicity has the power to stimulate the imagination through symbolism, pitting vitality against mortality, spirit against apathy, and truth against tradition.

In the paintings of Christison, the carpet tapestries of Bonafini, and the frescoes of Giotto, the forms are subdued and sunburnt, sometimes sorrowful, becoming wilder at the centre, particularly in Bonafini’s marble-effect scenes that come to fruition in the centre of these lively hunting spectacles: the colours are all scathed rock and arid grass.

Interwoven into Bonafini and Christison’s work are stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Greco-Roman mythology, and Paleolithic cave paintings. In the religious houses of Giotto’s paintings he conducts a silent dialogue from the pews through his allegorical figures painted in chiaroscuro across the vast panels and planes of the basilicas and chapels.

Here in the edifices of the gallery the spectator becomes the work, engaged with substance and parameters, like an aperture slowly widening – exploring the fundamental character of surface and its ability to create space in art. Bonafini’s carpet tapestries create space beyond the confines of the work, suggesting the existence of various transcendental meanings within these spaces: constructing an environment where your whole spirit becomes isolated. If we say that Christison’s paintings appear to breathe the atmosphere in a room, Bonafini’s carpet tapestries permeate their architectural environments. Anchored to the same ground as the viewer, both intimate and vast.

The paintings of Giotto often dwell on moments of subdued and tender feeling, leaving the spectator to trace the under currents of thought which link them with future events of mightier interest, and filled with a prophetic power and mystery. These scenes are so simple and mellow, like the connecting passages of a prolonged poem, there to enhance the value or meaning of others. In the panels of the frescoes, the panels of Bonafini’s tapestries, and the panels of Christison’s drawings, we experience truthful landscapes and realistic architectonic spaces. When we experience standing on the works of Bonafini, the space has real depth. The figures do not look as if they can simply be moved right or left like cut-outs, but seem able to move to and fro, to exist in space, to act, see and communicate.

In his frescoes, Giotto created remarkable sensations of space, exploring spatial possibilities independently of the figures. In, ‘The Last Supper’, the space is so easily achieved that Giotto can smooth out the juncturebetween the left and back walls almost to the point of its disappearing. Yet the space is still convincingly deep and the architectural setting plays easily with the picture plane. In, ‘Christ before Caiaphas’, Giotto introduces the idea of using architectural parts to serve as framing. Here the architecture envelops the entire composition. It is a setting of enormous sophistication, elegant in its proportions, startling in its virtuosity and spatiality. At the same time it is reticent: to a remarkable degree it does not interfere with the drama played out within its confines, as in the contained, yet boundless, panels of Bonafini’s carpet tapestries.

Giotto was a careful observer of ‘life’. It may be difficult to say what precisely ‘life’ means, but gestures were clearly conspicuous among the features he observed and represented. Gestures are defined as the involuntary movements of the body that lead to a revelation of mental states. Do we become a gesture a top Bonafini’s work? Us, the spectator and participant becoming movimenti d’animo, transplanted gestures, in the words of Baudelaire, “the grandiloquent truth of gestures on life’s great occasions”.

‘St Francis Honoured by a Citizen’, a fresco in the Upper Church of St Francis in Assisi, depicts a respectful citizen who is spreading a carpet for St Francis to walk on. This idea of laying down a carpet for a Saint to walk upon is an act of honour, respect and obeisance. Here in, “Giotto’s Room”, the carpet tapestry is not just a surface and parameter of space, but is an elevating and grounding platform. In the religious frescoes of Giotto we witness many knees on the floor, feet to be washed and carpets to be extended: there is an awareness of that which is below, to focus attention on that which is above. In the same sense of walking into a holy site, when we remove our shoes to walk into the soft fibres of Bonafini’s carpet tapestries, we feel a sense of great solemnity and significance; likewise with the low hang of Christison’s water piece, it is not floating on the wall, but sitting on a horizon. We are all gestural Saints invited to become part of a beautiful scene. Awe becomes home, and we witness the grounding of art.

We might draw a comparison between Aisha’s water compositions and, ‘The Baptism of Christ’, fresco in the Arena Chapel. Water, in its various forms of stream, rain, or river, is felt as a universal gift from heaven. Giotto endeavored not to lose the personality of the River of Jordan and has drawn the attention to the rocky shores of Bethabara and Aenon, and to the fact that, “there was much water there”(John 3:23). As within Christison’s paintings, in Giotto’s work too there is an acute attention to everyday life in their finely detailed rendering of objects: the architectonic ornamentation of rooms, the curtains hung on rings, the bedcovers, the sandals of the Apostles, and the animals and plants.

When we experience the generous and powerful space that the art of the past three decades evokes, from the works of Richard Serra to Anselm Kiefer, we are to some extent feeling the echoes of the ambitions of the Italian fresco painting tradition. “Giotto’s Room” brings together art that addresses the imagination, sacred histories and heathen mythologies. Testing the powers of contemplation and conception, which can be satisfied or excited by these simple types of naturalism. Leading to work that is infinitely majestic, un-stifled, fracturing between illusory and tactile space, as the surface cannot be contained. Space, therefore, is the chief plastic manifestation of the artist’s conception of reality, to which all of the plastic elements are in a state of subservience.

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