Raphael Rubinstein |
The Poet
of Geometry:
A Venetian Tale |
Although my wife, Elena Berriolo, was born and raised in Liguria, on
Italy’s western coast, her family is in part of Venetian origin.
Her paternal
great-grandparents, Luigi Ferrari and Teresina Zambón, were born
in
Venice and remained there until the First World War, when they, like
many
other Venetians, fled from the threat of the Austrian army. In 1915,
Venice
was repeatedly bombed by Austrian warplanes and naval vessels; while
some of their targets were military, such as the Arsenale, which was
attacked in May, cultural sites also suffered, most significantly
Giambattista Tiepolo’s ceiling at the Scalzi church, destroyed
by a bomb in
October. The wartime exodus from Venice included even the famed glassblowers
of Murano, who closed down their factories and relocated to other
Italian cities for the remainder of the war.
After leaving Venice with his wife and children, Ferrari, born in 1859,
reestablished himself on Italy’s eastern coast, for a time in Genoa,
then up
the coast to Savona, where he worked as chief accountant for a company
in
the coal industry (he had been similarly employed in Venice). His life
there
passed uneventfully, and he died of a stroke in 1940 in the Ligurian
village
of Stella San Martino, where he, his wife, children and grandchildren
had
fled following the outbreak of the Second World War.
A bibliophile and amateur of art and literature who spoke numerous
languages, Ferrari never attended school; all his considerable education
was
provided at home by tutors. As the only son of a widowed mother (his
father died when he was young), he was also able to avoid military service.
It was during his prolonged bachelorhood—he would not marry until
1898, at the age of 39—that Ferrari embarked on a visual-art project
which
would come to occupy nearly all his free time until well after his marriage:
making meticulous copies in watercolor and ink of large sections of the
mosaic pavement of Venice’s greatest architectural monument, the
Basilica
di San Marco. This project, which ultimately comprised some 160 drawings,
united two of Ferrari’s passions, Venetian history and precision.
Compositionally, the drawings reprise the geometric ingenuity of the
Byzantine mosaic tradition, while their execution follows the exactitude
of 19th century engineering. Looked at now, they—somewhat surprisingly—
evoke Minimalist art, despite their late medieval sources and
their fin-de-siècle provenance.
While most
visitors to the Basilica turn their gaze upward, to the Bible-inspired
mosaics that encrust the walls and ceilings and to the church’s
Byzantine architecture, there have always been a few who have paid attention
to the masterpieces underfoot. Dating mostly from the 12th and 13th centuries,
these extensive mosaics, which cover the entire floor of the vast
Basilica, are prime examples of Cosmatesque decoration. (Among the few
later additions to the San Marco pavement are two noteworthy mosaic
panels designed by Paolo Uccello, who spent several years in Venice in
the
1420s.) Named for the Cosmati, a Roman family that excelled in mosaic
work for several generations, such mosaics are distinguished by their
incredibly complex geometry and artful combining of colored stones and
glass. They can be found in many Roman churches of the period, but
rarely outside the Italian peninsula. As well as being instances of
unequalled mathematical beauty, their geometrical designs––which
incorporate Greek and Roman motifs, and much recycled marble from
Roman columns––are encoded with theological and ritualistic
meaning,
as well as functional cues for those attending religious services.
One artist-pilgrim
who paid attention to the San Marco mosaics was John Singer Sargent,
whose 1898 painting The Pavement is dominated by an expanse of buckling,
worn marble and mosaics that emphasizes the watery aspect of the floor
remarked on by so many observers. Shadowy archways and nearly invisible
walls in the background are barely illuminated by a beam of light struggling
through a high window. The painting gives one an idea of the challenges
facing any late-19th-century visitor interested in making precise observations
of the basilica’s interior.
Another American visitor impressed by the mosaics was Henry James.
In his early short story “Traveling Companions,” first published
in The Atlantic Monthly in 1870, James wrote of the “many carpets
of compacted stone, where a thousand once-bright fragments glimmer through
the long attrition of idle porphyry and malachite, from long dead crystal
and the
sparkle of undying lamps.” This was before the Basilica became
the object
of extensive, and often ill-judged, restorations. In an 1882 essay, subsequently
reprinted in Italian Hours (1909), James addresses this subject,
contrasting the before and after:
“What
I chiefly remember is the straightening out of that dark and
rugged old pavement—those deep undulations of primitive mosaic
in which
the fond spectator was thought to perceive an intended resemblance to
the
waves of the ocean.” At the time that James was writing, a good
deal of this
“old pavement” was already gone. If, he continues, “throughout
the greater
part indeed the pavement remains as recent generations have known it—dark,
rich, cracked, uneven, spotted with porphyry and time-blackened malachite,
polished by the knees of innumerable worshippers.…in other large
stretches the idea imitated by the restorers is that of the ocean in
a dead calm,
and the model they have taken the floor of a London clubhouse or of a
New
York hotel.” This judgment is echoed, albeit with less ornate prose,
in the 1898
edition of Grant Allen’s popular Historical
Guide to Venice, which
observes
that part of the mosaic pavement “has been ‘restored’ and
straightened with
disastrous effect: the older wavy portion is exceedingly lovely.”
—
RAPHAEL RUBINSTEIN’s books include a collection of poems (The
Basement of
the Café Rilke, 1997), a selection of autobiographical prose (Postcards
from
Alphaville, 2000) and a volume of art writing (Polychrome
Profusion: Selected Art
Critcism 1990-2002), all from Hard Press Editions. A French translation
by Marcel
Cohen of In Search of the Miraculous was published in 2004 (Editions
Grèges
Montpelier). He is a Senior Editor at Art in America.
For the complete article purchase The
Sienese Shredder #2
Related article in The Sienese Shredder #2
Luigi Ferrari - Paintings
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Selections from In Search of the Miraculous: 50 Episodes from the Annals of Contemporary Art
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