An observation on Crowley's Ægypt
Sep. 21st, 2008 02:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
womzilla(Cross-posted to johncrowleyreaders@yahoogroups.com)
I recently re-experienced The Solitudes by listening to Crowley's (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
crowleycrow's) reading of it for Blackstone Audio (which I cannot recommend highly enough), and I came away with a tentative connection within the text.
In chapter two of Fratres (part 3 of The Solitudes), as Pierce is sorting his books, we get a description of the cover illustration of the magnum opus of his mentor, Frank Walker Barr, Time's Body, a four-volume historical work which prefigures all of the four-volume versions of Ægypt (Crowley's own and the two unstarted versions by novelist Fellows Kraft and by Moffet himself). The description is of a single painting cut into quarters:
In the next chapter, Rosie reads Kraft's memoir (which I think is entitled Sit Down, Sorrow, but I'm not sure), wherein he describes
(Note that "eye-fooling" is the English translation of "tromp l'oeil", the term for works of art which appear to be things other than they are.)
I think these two paintings are the same.
Giovanni Antonio Fumiani was real, as is his painting, as is the story of San Pantalon ("the all-compassionate", a martyr of the third century who, through that Church, lent his name to the old Venitian in the commedia dell'arte, and through that character to the word "pants"). It's hard to find a good reproduction of the painting--I haven't been able to find a book on Fumiani, and despite the scale of the painting it merits only a crowded half-page in the volume on The Art of Venice I could find through the NYPL. But all of the elements that Pierce notes on the cover of Time's Body are present in the Pantalon painting.
Kraft notes the legend that Fumiani died falling from a scaffold while creating his painting; this might not be true. But that legend echoes through Ægypt. And the flight of angels ascending to a heaven which is empty, unfinished, uncompleted, possibly by the death of its author, possibly because completion is impossible, is a metaphor central to the resolution of the novel as a whole. And the sudden, unexpected, unstated connection between two things, just beneath the surface, waiting for people to notice, is a method central to the novel.
It's like a damn fractal. Anywhere you dig in, you find the same patterns repeated at different sizes.
I recently re-experienced The Solitudes by listening to Crowley's (
crowleycrow's) reading of it for Blackstone Audio (which I cannot recommend highly enough), and I came away with a tentative connection within the text.In chapter two of Fratres (part 3 of The Solitudes), as Pierce is sorting his books, we get a description of the cover illustration of the magnum opus of his mentor, Frank Walker Barr, Time's Body, a four-volume historical work which prefigures all of the four-volume versions of Ægypt (Crowley's own and the two unstarted versions by novelist Fellows Kraft and by Moffet himself). The description is of a single painting cut into quarters:
. . . here a man pleaded before lictors; dark Miltonic beings with bat wings fled away; a flight of angels, or anyway tall and noble ladies, draped, and winged with heavy, pigeon-gray wings, climbed en masse toward an obscurity in the picture's center, where four corners of the volumes met.
In the next chapter, Rosie reads Kraft's memoir (which I think is entitled Sit Down, Sorrow, but I'm not sure), wherein he describes
. . . the church of San Pantalon . . . a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. . . . it must tell the story of the Saint, though what that story is I have never learned. Despite the convincing upward leap of its perspective, it . . . has a hallucinatory dark clarity, the figures distinct and solidly modeled, the pillars, flights of stairs, thrones, tripods, and incense-smoke so real that their great size and swift recession from the viewer is vertiginous. Most remarkable of all is that, except for a central flight of angels, there is no obvious religious import to any of it . . . Nothing but these huge antique figures, associated in a story more than portraying one; pondering, judging, hoping, seeing, alone. The flight of angels ascends not to a Godhead but to an empty, white-clouded center of the sky.
(Note that "eye-fooling" is the English translation of "tromp l'oeil", the term for works of art which appear to be things other than they are.)
I think these two paintings are the same.
Giovanni Antonio Fumiani was real, as is his painting, as is the story of San Pantalon ("the all-compassionate", a martyr of the third century who, through that Church, lent his name to the old Venitian in the commedia dell'arte, and through that character to the word "pants"). It's hard to find a good reproduction of the painting--I haven't been able to find a book on Fumiani, and despite the scale of the painting it merits only a crowded half-page in the volume on The Art of Venice I could find through the NYPL. But all of the elements that Pierce notes on the cover of Time's Body are present in the Pantalon painting.
Kraft notes the legend that Fumiani died falling from a scaffold while creating his painting; this might not be true. But that legend echoes through Ægypt. And the flight of angels ascending to a heaven which is empty, unfinished, uncompleted, possibly by the death of its author, possibly because completion is impossible, is a metaphor central to the resolution of the novel as a whole. And the sudden, unexpected, unstated connection between two things, just beneath the surface, waiting for people to notice, is a method central to the novel.
It's like a damn fractal. Anywhere you dig in, you find the same patterns repeated at different sizes.
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Date: 2008-09-21 07:54 pm (UTC)I translate that as "triumph of the oil."
I love the whole topic of paintings that deny the canvas [or whatever] they're on. When we went to the Uffizi in Florence, we were wrapping up -- I was on borrowed time -- and only then did I find an exhibit of just that kind of thing. The discovery of perspective and how to fool the eye, with illusionistic paintings, and cabinets and cameras obscuras and perspective machiens, and I was running through it, torn between the fierce desire to wallow in it and the guilty knowledge that I was letting the rest of my family group down the longer I stayed.
At least they had a book (in Italian) that I could buy and take home.