Talk:San Pantalon

[Untitled]

I excised the following because it represents a personal opinion, not classic observation. I recognize Ruskin may be called a personal opinion also, but at least it is a classical one, with historical importance.

John Crowley's Ægypt

The ceiling fresco is the subject of a dramatic ekphrasis in the first volume of John Crowley's Ægypt sequence:

“ There is, in Venice, in the church of San Pantalon, one of the most remarkable works of art I know of. It is a Baroque ceiling painting done in eye-fooling perspective by one Fumiani, whom I have heard of in no other context. His work covers the entire ceiling and its coffers as though it were one enormous easel painting; 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 doesn’t have the vanishing lightness of Tiepolo, 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: no Virgin, no Christ, no God or Dove, no cross, no haloes, nothing. 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.

Just before he finished this huge work, Fumiani apparently fell from his scaffolding and was killed. Imagine.

”

References

Ceiling

Whats is better?

or this ? --Architas (msg) 14:41, 25 giu 2018 (CEST) — Preceding unsigned comment added by Architas (talk • contribs)