The View Overhead, From Rome.

On SEEING, A Journal. #530

The View Overhead, From Rome.

June 13, 2023

Last month (May 16, 2023) I posted a Journal, featuring ceilings in London (including ceilings in Westminster Abbey, Victoria and Albert Museum and St. Paul’s Cathedral:

This week’s Journal features ceilings in Rome.

By and large, for the ceilings in London, the intricacy of architecture dominates the visual frame. In Rome, ceilings seem primarily to function as canvas for paintings, frescos. Very frequently there’s a painted border which acts as the “frame” for the painting which then fills the majority of the space on the ceiling.  Photographing Rome’s ceilings was a completely different experience for me, from making the images in London.

These are 10 images were selected from a few hundred I studied and photographed in Rome.  The seemingly limitless range of  artistic and architectural expression found in Rome is stunning.

On Ceilings:
In the studio, the subject matter is straight ahead, perhaps at a vertical, oblique or horizontal, off the perpendicular, but straight ahead nonetheless.

When out of the studio it is imperative that one looks in every direction, to the sides, behind, down and certainly up. These images are each the result of looking and directing my camera up, ever so carefully.

Did the artisans who painted the ceilings do the same? How exactly did they paint on ceilings?

As I study these images and attempt to comprehend the incredible detail, I can not fathom how they achieved imagery with such precision, spirit and soul.

Michelangelo (1475-1564) wrote a poem detailing the herculean effort and physical agonies he suffered while painting the vault in the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican:

His poem was written in Italian.
This translation is by the American poet Gail Mazur:

“Michelangelo: To Giovanni da Pistoia, 1509.

I’ve already grown a goiter from this torture,

hunched up here like a cat in Lombardy

(or anywhere else where the stagnant water’s poison).

My stomach’s squashed under my chin, my beard’s

pointing at heaven, my brain’s crushed in a casket,

my breast twists like a harpy’s. My brush,

above me all the time, dribbles paint

so my face makes a fine floor for droppings!

My haunches are grinding into my guts,

my poor ass strains to work as a counterweight,

every gesture I make is blind and aimless.

My skin hangs loose below me, my spine’s

all knotted from folding over itself.

I’m bent taut as a Syrian bow.

Because I’m stuck like this, my thoughts

are crazy, perfidious tripe:

anyone shoots badly through a crooked blowpipe.

My painting is dead.

Defend it for me, Giovanni, protect my honor.

I am not in the right place—I am not a painter.”

 

Scaffolds, supports and standing while bent backwards looking straight up!

It was a glorious experience and I wish to thank my Roman friends, the renowned artist Patrizia Molinari, and the highly respected Ophthalmologist to the Vatican, Andrea Cusumano, and his wife Cristiana, all of whom helped guide us to the fantastic churches, museums and galleries that contain these beautiful and incomparable ceilings.