O

O
Giotto
Momotombo
Guayabo
Florida
Sunshine
"LL" 
Cambute

Psalm 50:12

"If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof."

Giotto

6. Meeting at the Golden Gate: San Joaquín y Santa Ana

1304-06

Fresco, 200 x 185 cm

Cappella Scrovegni (Arena Chapel), Padua

The hug and kiss in The Meeting at the Golden Gate are between by St Joachim and St Anne, the parents of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is an extremely significant kiss: if it hadn't been, Giotto would not have painted it. According to Christian doctrine, Mary was born "immaculate", without the inherited taint of human sin. And according to Christian legend, her parents conceived her without having sex. An angel directed the childless couple to go separately to the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. When they meet, they kiss - and out of this kiss Mary is engendered.
The picture has striking details: the gateway's golden arch, the use of black in the cloak of one woman, and the herdsman (he's a figure in the story, too) who enters half cut-off by the picture's edge. But the foreground embrace is the main event. As these two massive bodies gently lay hands on each other, Giotto unites their forms into a single pointed arch.
The fusion of faces is even more forceful (look as close as you can). Their haloes intersect. Their hairlines join up. Their eyes meet to make a single pair of eyes. And there's a crucial volumetric impossibility, in the way that face touches face. For it seems that Anne's head passes behind Joachim's, as if she's just giving him a kiss on the cheek. Yet, at the mouth, her lips have come forward, and are directly pressed against his lips.
The faces squash. The volumes of brow and cheek and nose that would get in the way of this contact are somehow elided, compacted. With a flat icon, it wouldn't be felt, but with these so solid Giotto heads, you're made to experience a great passionate pressing and locking together of two separate beings.

Giotto di Bondone, Legend of St Joachim, Meeting at the Golden Gate, 1305 is an early depiction of the scene.

In the last fresco of the upper register the composition is concentrated on the encounter between Joachim and Anne: Joachim is accompanied by a shepherd, who is partly cut off in the fresco. On the one hand, Giotto uses this completely new device in painting to create the impression that the succession of pictures, intersected by the framework, would unfold before our eyes in one continuous procession. On the other hand, a figure cut short in such a manner increases the dynamics within the picture field and makes us focus on the action at its centre.
Even the verticals of the architecture and the golden arch of the city gate respectively illustrate and mirror the way the couple lean towards one another. The two meet on a bridge, on the border between the outside world and the security of the city. They embrace with great tenderness and kiss one another. The way in which the volumes of the figures fuse underlines the tenderness of the moment, in which the faces also melt, as it were, into one another.
The story of Mary's parents begins with a painful rejection and concludes with this intense encounter. The sensitive portrayal of their meeting already contains the germ for the start of the next narrative, which commences with the Birth of the Virgin Mary and which leads to the youth of Christ by way of the Bridal Procession of the Virgin.

 

Momotombo Volcano, Nicaragua

Momotombo Volcano, Leon, Nicaragua. Momotombo is a stratovolcano not far from the city of León. It stands on the shores of Lago de Managua. An eruption of the volcano in 1610 forced inhabitants of the Spanish city of León to relocate about 30 miles west

Monumento Nacional Guayabo  - Costa RicaEl Monumento Nacional Guayabo (izquierda), en Turrialba, es el principal sitio arqueológico del país

Holguin, Cuba El Salto Guayabo . photo by Raul Pulpo 

 Florida

Caladesi Island State Park, near Tampa - only accessible by ferry or private boat. Once there you can kayak through the mangroves, hike or picnic on the beach  

Florida's State Shell the Horse Conch... state bird is the Mockingbird, state flower is the Orange Blossom, tree is the Cabbage (Sabal) Palm, and of course, it's nickname is the Sunshine State.

Chess: "O" "Momotombo" "Guayabo" "Florida" "Sunshine" "Giotto" "LL" "Cambute"

Bondone, di Giotto: The Meeting at the Golden Gate (1305)

The Independent's Great Art series

The Meeting at the Golden Gate is one of the hardest to see of the frescos in the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. It's in the topmost of the three bands of pictures, and at the end of a row, and your natural viewing position is by the entrance of the chapel, where there isn't room to stand back enough. Only the elevated, four-square eye of the camera can reveal what Giotto and his assistants saw when they painted it 700 years ago. As with many of Giotto's effects, the power of this kiss derives from how he does bodies.
The enormous solidity of Giotto's figures has always been appreciated. An early commentator, Cennino Cennini, said that Giotto had "translated the art of painting from Greek into Latin", meaning that he'd changed it from the flatness of a Greek-Byzantine icon to the solidity of a Roman statue. But the solidity wasn't consistently admired. To later, anatomically sophisticated eyes, the stout Giotto body could look like inarticulate bulk. The Irish neoclassical painter James Barry observed that, in Giotto, "all the parts of the body are much confounded together... they are (particularly in their flexures) as inartificially drawn as if copied from the bendings of a sandbag". What a brilliant description of Giotto's elbows: the bendings of a sandbag.
But for some 20th-century artists, this stout sandbag quality was exactly what they liked, and tried to imitate. It looked honest, primitive, childlike. It's Giotto who inspires Stanley Spencer's tubby, cuddly characters. "What ho! Giotto!" was his cry, when he got the commission to paint the Sandham Memorial Chapel. It was a dream come true, a chance to do a modern version of the Padua frescos.
The actual figures in Padua are too solemn to be cuddly. But their inflexible massiveness gives them a slowness of manoeuvre, a steadiness and a carefulness in the way they make contact with the world and each other. They seem incapable of committing or suffering violence (and it always feels wrong when the story compels them to be violent). Their characteristic gesture is the laying on of hands. They are great huggers.
The hug and kiss in The Meeting at the Golden Gate are between by St Joachim and St Anne, the parents of Mary, the mother of Jesus. It is an extremely significant kiss: if it hadn't been, Giotto would not have painted it. According to Christian doctrine, Mary was born "immaculate", without the inherited taint of human sin. And according to Christian legend, her parents conceived her without having sex. An angel directed the childless couple to go separately to the Golden Gate in Jerusalem. When they meet, they kiss - and out of this kiss Mary is engendered.
The picture has striking details: the gateway's golden arch, the use of black in the cloak of one woman, and the herdsman (he's a figure in the story, too) who enters half cut-off by the picture's edge. But the foreground embrace is the main event. As these two massive bodies gently lay hands on each other, Giotto unites their forms into a single pointed arch.
The fusion of faces is even more forceful (look as close as you can). Their haloes intersect. Their hairlines join up. Their eyes meet to make a single pair of eyes. And there's a crucial volumetric impossibility, in the way that face touches face. For it seems that Anne's head passes behind Joachim's, as if she's just giving him a kiss on the cheek. Yet, at the mouth, her lips have come forward, and are directly pressed against his lips.
The faces squash. The volumes of brow and cheek and nose that would get in the way of this contact are somehow elided, compacted. With a flat icon, it wouldn't be felt, but with these so solid Giotto heads, you're made to experience a great passionate pressing and locking together of two separate beings.
About the artist
Giotto di Bondone (c1267-1337) is a founding presence in Western painting. The Florentine master introduced 3D, in the solid volumes of his bodies and receding depths of his spaces. Legend cast him as a simple shepherd boy, discovered in the hills by the artist Cimabue doing pictures of sheep. His most famous work, the Navicella in St Peter's, Rome, decayed and has been repainted beyond recognition. But the great fresco cycles in Padua, Florence, and Assisi still survive.