Alright, now that I've gotten that butchering of a foreign language out of the way, along with a hectic weekend to the capital of Italy in which I was late to nearly every group meeting (much to my dismay, chagrin, and down right self-loathing for), I experienced centuries, perhaps even millennia of art work! We're talking everything from the Roman Forum to Basilica di San Pietro. I saw the flavian amphitheater! I saw a parade of sculptures, frescoes, 3d-like artwork, and the beauty of the Sistine chapel great enough to illicit tears from Whitney. What do I do with all of this? Out of all these options which could plausibly be selected as most preferable, most exemplary, most favored among the Renaissanc-ers? All superlatives and fictitious words aside, I turn to Michael Angelo's depiction of Constantine's war in which he invokes the name of Christ and victoriously alters the face of Christianity for ever more: taking what was once peaceful for war, what was once for the outcast for the mainstream, what was once opposed to much of the Roman Empire for another piece of architectural underpinning to be subsumed by the non-stop automaton of the Roman civilization. Judgment's over! Thanks for allowing me a Protestant aside. Check the painting out! Pretty beautiful right, at least if we ignore the extreme examples of violence portrayed therein. My picture can do no justice to the form of this art! It's but a mere imitation of a gloriously done imitation. To truly appreciate this you would need to visit Musei Vaticani or at least borrow a book from me on the place! But please, tickle my fancy. Just ride with me on my shoddy attempt at deciphering just what the artist intended with the original. We see the clear focus on the ideal form of what humanity should be, each muscle strengthened, proportioned, balanced, and aesthetically pleasing. If you can notice, the water here is not even splashing around the people as they fall, slain in battle. Is this a lack of focus on detail or more a focus on the human beings of the picture? I like to believe that it is simply focusing heavily on the peoples as opposed the background surroundings.
As a quick side note: The balance in this piece is clever in recognition of the split between the sky and the ground and the battle scene in contrast to the body of water in the left corner creates an off center, yet oddly balanced piece. I also assume the man in shining gold armor to which most items point towards is Constantine himself and perhaps the angels above him, though even they point down back towards Constantine's advance. This certainly may be my own assumption but the armor that these people have donned looks a little more recent than the armor I would expect to see in the fourth century CE when the battle took place. There's also a pretty stark absence of Imperial Roman paraphernalia, which might be a sort of reclaiming the historical item and renaming it utterly in Christian will as opposed to its probable basis in somewhat muddled mixtures between Roman interests and Christian ideals. It is also fascinating to me that Constantine himself does not have blood on him or his weaponry as far as I can tell. This may entail a certain amount of virtue associated with him, if I am not reading into this too much, in that he is not blood thirsty but also not afraid of battle. This kind of reaches back to some of the Aristotelean ideas of virtue in attempting not so much to produce a kind of fool hardy-cocky at one extreme or an inferior cowardice, but the Aristotelean approach boasts a kind of balance between the two that Constantine seems to be boasting (a sort of anachronistic combination I imagine would be heavily shot down in modern society's understanding of proper order). This is very common in the Renaissance works we have thus far observed. The kind of focus that is present here just screams Renaissance in so many ways it's truly hard to miss.
No comments:
Post a Comment