Piero della Francesca, Resurrection

Piero della Francesca, Resurrection by julianna.lees
Thought it would be fun to juxtapose a portion of John Berger's essay "The Calculations of Piero" (1959) with Piero's painting Resurrection (a focal point of the essay).
Excerpt from Berger's "Calculations":
     Look, for instance, at the overall composition of this work. Its centre, though not of course its true centre, is Christ's hand, holding his robe as he rises up. The hand furrows the material with emphatic force. This is no casual gesture. It appears to be central to Christ's whole upward movement out of the tomb. The hand, resting on the knee, also rests on the brow of the first line of hills behind, and the folds of the robe flow down like streams. Downwards. Look now at the soldiers so mundanely, so convincingly asleep. Only the one on the extreme right appears somewhat awkward. His legs, his arm between them, his curved back are understandable. Yet how can he rest like that just on one arm? This apparent awkwardness gives a clue. He looks as though he were lying in an invisible hammock. Strung from where? Suddenly go back to the hand, and now see that all four soldiers lie in an invisible net, trawled by that hand. The emphatic grip makes perfect sense. The four heavy sleeping soldiers are the catch the resurrecting Christ has brought with him from the underworld, from Death. As I said, Piero went far beyond the pure harmonies of design.
     There is in all his work an aim behind his calculations. This aim could be summed up in the same way as Henri Poincare once described the aim of mathematics:
Mathematics is the art of giving the same name to different things. . . . When language has been well chosen one is astonished to find that all demonstrations  made for a known object apply immediately to many new objects. 

Comments

Post a Comment

POPULAR POSTS

Tarkovsky's Death and the Film "Stalker"

Several people involved in the film production — including Tarkovsky — had met deaths, which some crew members attribute to the film's long, arduous shooting schedule in toxic locations. Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalls: We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris. [ 6 ]   [From Wikipedia:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film )]
Read more

TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

T Ü BINGEN, JANUARY Eyes talked in- to blindness. Their  -- "a riddle, what is pure- ly arisen" --, their memory of floating H ö lderlintowers, gull- enswirled. Visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words: Came, if there came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the patriarchs' light-beard: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever- moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")* * Pallaksch A word that H ö lderlin, spending his last years in the home of a T ü bingen carpenter, was given to uttering in his dementia; it could signify Yes or No. [Poem Translated by John Felstiner; the explanation of Pallaksch is also from his "Notes" in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan ]  
Read more

Hitchcock's Soda City

I was watching Saboteur last night (Encore has a slew of Hitchcock's films up now) and wanted to know more about Soda City. Figured it wasn't real. It's not. Apparently it was shot somewhere in Nevada (makes sense). This site gives a nice run-down of the various places throughout the US that Hitchcock used in his films: Hitchcock's America.
Read more

Coetzee's "Costello": Koba the Bear and Paul West

Image
Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are
Read more