O
Giotto
Momotombo
Guayabo
Florida
Sunshine
"LL"
Cambute
Psalm 50:12
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"If I were hungry, I would not tell thee: for the world is mine, and the fulness thereof."
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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"
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.
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