Very soon after the death and subsequent canonization of St. Francis (c. 1181-1226), designs began to construct a church at Assisi, Francis' hometown, in his honor. Here's a picture of it.
Like most medieval structures of high aspiration, this basilica took decades to construct and decades more to adorn. The list of artists who painted panels and/or frescoes in this church and its adjoining buildings reads like a roll call of late medieval/early Renaissance superstars: Cimabue, Pietro Lorenzetti, Simone Martini and Giotto, to name a few.
For Christmas, a good friend of mine gave me an amazing book: The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi by Elvio Lunghi, which details the architecture and artwork of the basilica with a plethora of fine color pictures. I have a special affection for Giotto, who is particularly well represented in the paintings of the basilica. Among the many works he completed for the church, is a series of paintings depicting the life of Mary Magadalen that adorns the basilica's Magdalen Chapel.
I find Giotto's images of Mary Magdalen incredibly compelling. They possess all of the hallmarks of his work - the heavy, distinctly unGothic bodies, the expressive long-eyed faces, and the generously applied lapis blue paint. The Magdalen paintings also contain a number of Giotto's peculiar cherubim, who fade away into nothing around the knee, as well as his strange smooth mountains and rock. Of all of the Magdalen paintings, I found myself returning again and again to "The Magdalen's Voyage to Marseilles".
A portion of Catholic legend concerning Mary has her voyaging to Gaul, where she converts the entirety of Provence. I like Mary Magdalen as a figure, but apostolic stories have a little too much baggage attached to them for me to really enjoy painting them. I will not go into it, but you can read more about the legend of Mary in Gaul here.
In any case, I really loved the composition of this picture, as well as the idea of painting a medieval ship; tiny with huge people in it. I adore the completely symbolic representations of ships and buildings in medieval art; the way they pay no attention whatsoever to scale. So I began dreaming up who I could put into my boat, and over what body of water they would be sailing. I recalled a 4th-century pilgrim I had read about in school and began revisiting her account.
In 381 AD, a woman named Egeria made a pilgrimage from Gaul to the Holy Land, where she spent three years. We know of her journey because she left a detailed account, much of which still survives, that she addressed to a group of women back home. It is unclear whether Egeria was a nun or simply a wealthy woman, but the account of her pilgrimage remains a fascinating document that has much to reveal about late antique/early medieval travel. Among her many trips in and around the Holy Land was an excursion from Antioch to Edessa (modern day Antakya to Şanliurfa, both in Turkey). She had to cross the Euphrates and describes the river so:
"[I]t is very well written that it is the great river Euphrates; it is huge and, as it were, terrible, for it flows down with a current like the river Rhone, only the Euphrates is still greater. And...we had to cross in ships, and in large ships only". (31)
As I thought of this voyage, I did a little research into Şanliurfa, which is a very ancient city, indeed. According to Muslim tradition, the prophet Abraham was born near Şanliurfa and it is also the place where Nimrod ordered him executed by burning. As the tradition goes, God turned the fire into water and the embers into fish, saving Abraham. A mosque, Halil-ur-Rahman, built in 1211, stands on this spot and, to this day, an abundance of fish swim in a sacred pool there. This story set me to thinking of the medieval artistic fluidity of time; the way ancient figures were pictured in medieval garb and contemporary patrons could be pictured with long dead saints; kind of like a temporal version of that medieval disregard for scale that I mentioned earlier. I decided this project provided a perfect opportunity for me to play with all of these aspects of medieval art.
Using the composition of Giotto's "The Magdalen's Voyage to Marseilles", I imagined the water as the Euphrates instead of the Mediterranean. I envisioned Egeria as she crossed the river. Pilgrimages necessarily entail an individual navigating through space as through doing so could collapse time. The pilgrim goes to Jerusalem, not to see Jerusalem as it stands in their time, but to envision it in the time of Jesus, and so forth. So I decided to do some collapsing of time myself. Egeria had just visited a shrine to St. Thomas when she left Antioch, and was heading for a city that, hundreds of years later, would become associated with Abraham. Instead of Mary and other apostles in the boat then, I placed Egeria, flanked by Abraham and by St. Thomas, as though the religious subjects of her pilgrimage could, in some sense, accompany her on her travels. And instead of a European building on the shore, there I placed the Halil-ur-Rahman, built 800 years after Egeria's voyage. I even put a fish in the water, to reference the pool of Abraham.
All in all, I am very pleased with the way it turned out. Here are some pictures of the painting underway.
For more paintings, visit My Etsy page.
0 comments:
Post a Comment