The Cerasi Chapel (July 14)
July 14
Got back to Rome today from Assisi. I love Termini Station. I love any big train station in any city - Gare du Nord, Union Station, Penn Station. A work of art in itself, a balletic, living one. Supernatural in that it is a place of arrivals and departures. And even the trains, new now, seemed old, if only because they know Rome, nosing through her outskirts, knowing, as if by instinct, how to reach her secret core. To save money I took the subway home. A different city, Rome not as it was or how tourists imagine it to be but Rome as it is now. A woman came begging through the cars, without so much as a coin in her cup to rattle people to attention, a baby asleep in her arms. Perhaps it’s too obvious a leap to make, but I saw, this morning, in the chapel in Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, a beautiful Annunciation scene. Between the angel and Mary, a vase of white flowers, and, like one of the flowers rendered horizontally, the dove of the Holy Spirit, while Mary recoiled. Strange to liken them, but that famous photograph of Oswald taken just as he was being shot (shot twice — once by the gun, once by the camera). In depictions of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, Christ looks like he’s blasting him with lazars, like they’re characters in a video game. It hurts to be called. Forcibly impregnated, stigmatized (literally), knocked off a horse and blinded. It’s like God has to force His way in.
After setting my bags down, I head to Santa Maria del Popolo. The heat on the Piazza is terrible. The sun is a force today. It doesn’t merely light the world up, it burns it. The church is blissfully cool. I used the last of my change to take the Metro, so, for the first time, I have no way to light up the paintings. I’m at the mercy of someone else lighting them up for me. But no one comes. I find myself alone with CRUCIFIXION, looking at it the way, it occurs to me, it was meant to be seen — in the light from the high, small window. There’s another window across from the chapel which appears to have some sort of covering over it, which makes me wonder whether there was once more light. And of course there would have been candles. But I like looking at the painting like this. All of the dark places — and most of the painting is dark places — recede, bringing out those luminous knees of Peter’s. I realize that, in the dark, the light in the painting looks more like moonlight than sunlight. Enough moonlight to throw shadows. I don’t know what time Peter was crucified, but it makes the whole scene feel lonelier. Christ at least had the company of those two thieves, Mary and Mary, his apostles. He was alone but perhaps not lonely.
Two women walk up, then more. A whole crowd has gathered. Now I hope no one puts any coins in. I’m enjoying this gloom. I admit that the paintings were beginning to close themselves to me, as if I had surely done enough staring. Now, the painting seems completely different. Simpler, like a Japanese Noh play.
Someone adds coins. The light springs on. Almost angrily, an American tells his kids to come closer, then tells them, somewhat brusquely, what they’re looking at. He implores them to look. He says that CRUCIFIXION is one of his favorite paintings. Yesterday, in the Upper Basilica in Assisi, I watched an Italian father explain to his very young son what was happening in the scene of St. Francis throwing his clothes at his father. I didn’t have to know a word of Italian to understand what this father was saying to his son about what happened between another father and his son. And it was wonderful, because the boy was so young, and the man was explaining so passionately what had happened, imitating tearing off his own clothes. And I’m not comparing how the two fathers spoke to their sons, but one of them was telling the painting like a story, while the other was imploring them to look at what was clearly important only to him. Then they left. Then the man came back alone and looked at CRUCIFIXION one last time, and I forgave him a little, because I realized he was probably just hot and tired, and probably truly does love the painting.
I realized that most of the people who see these paintings once will probably never see them again. I would guess they spend an average of about one minute looking at each one. Though it rubs me the wrong way, I have to agree that Leo Steinberg is likely right when he says, in “Observations in the Cerasi Chapel,” that “the visitor enters only to see the great paintings on which the fame of the chapel has rested since 1600. But in facing these paintings, he converts them tacitly into easel pictures - and into easel pictures that are both ill-lighted and ill-hung, since their location in so cramped a space makes them uncomfortably hard to see.”
It’s true that looking at these paintings is nothing like looking at paintings in a museum. Everything is cramped, from the space to the time one has to pay for. If the visitor pays for the light, they’ll stay until the light goes out. If they find the light already on, they likely won’t realize that you have to pay for it and, as soon as it goes off, they abruptly leave, as if something they were being offered has been rudely taken away. I watched one man arrive, take a picture of CRUCIFIXION, look at the picture on his phone longer than he looked at the painting, then leave. I know this is a boring subject. We’ve all seen it in museums, especially at the Louvre, especially with the MONA LISA. To look at a painting is an inherently intangible act. There is nothing to prove that one has seen it. The moment one turns away, it is only a memory. But that is the most magical moment, because that is the moment the painting transitions from being a visible object to being an experience. We all know the way in which, when the one we love leaves us, what we remember about their face is terribly poignant, more poignant, perhaps, than it ever was in reality. There is a power in memory that reality lacks, though without reality, there would be nothing to remember. I believe that it’s possible a painting is most powerful after we’ve turned away from it, but find that we still seem to be seeing it through a kind of inner eye. The picture of the painting that that man now “possesses” on his phone can be brought up any time he likes. He can set it as his wallpaper on his laptop. He can say to himself, “This isn’t an image of the painting I found online, but a photograph I myself took.” Now I’m getting into the territory of Benjamin’s ART IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL REPRODUCTION, or some of John Berger’s thoughts on the replication and overabundance of the image. But it saddens me that the man spent less time looking than he did taking. He must believe that he captured the painting in some way, but he failed to be captivated by it.
Of course, my writing about the paintings is not terribly different from someone taking a picture of them on their phones. I too want to carry them with me in a way that is more tangible and sharable than mere memory allows. I have to transmute what I see into language, or else I don’t feel I really experienced it. When I experience a powerful emotion, I experience that emotion as a heightening of language — I know that I am experiencing something via language, and so cannot help but write it down because it feels as if something is brimming over and might as well be collected before it runs away. I’ve never thought of writing for anyone. I write because I like to write. It’s a process that helps me to set in some sort of order what would otherwise feel unmanageable.
Maybe that’s what a painting is, too - a delimiting of the infinite, a way to clarify for ourselves what it is we’re really trying to see.