Grappling
Pietro Cavallini, The Last Judgement, 1300
Ale Nodarse March 5, 2024
How can we picture the unrepresentable?
In the fourteenth-century, Nicephorus Callistus staged a similar question in different terms. Speaking before a painting of the Archangel Michael, he wondered: “How is it that matter can drag the spirit down and encompass the immaterial by means of colors?”¹
Artists had been grappling with the question for quite some time. And — whether that “immaterial” is first or final love, sudden violence or unexpected salvation, birth, death, or the single night of the year when the cereus flower blossoms; or, whether, as for Callistus, it really is an angel — many of us, artists and viewers, continue to grapple.
Pietro Cavallini’s Last Judgment, completed in 1300 and preserved in Rome’s Basilica di Santa Cecilia in Trastevere — where it stretches across an expanse of wall opposite the nave and where it may still be seen today — raises the question of the unrepresentable in pictorial form. One of the first artists for whom it is possible to provide a bibliography, Cavallini was known for his skill in fresco (a form of wall painting) and mosaic.² He was born, lived, worked, and died in Rome (excluding a decade of patronage in Naples), and he lived a remarkably long life, from (c.) 1240 to 1340, his nearly one hundred years a small miracle at the time.³
Cavallini garnered textual praise as early as the fifteenth century, within the Commentaries of the Florentine sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti: “[He] was more learned than all the other masters,” Ghiberti writes.⁴ Ghiberti singled out Cavallini’s Last Judgment for admiration, suggesting that the artist painted its entirety with his own hand. Nearly all evidence of this claim, however, had evaporated in a series of changes made to the church in the sixteenth century. Renovations began in 1527—when the monastery adjoining the church was occupied by an enclosed order of Benedictine nuns—and continued through the interventions of various cardinals.⁵ The placement of choir-stalls against the basilica’s western wall concealed and, by a miraculous twist of fate, preserved Cavallini’s masterpiece. In 1900, the stalls were removed and the Last Judgement emerged, as if from underground.⁶
Twelve apostles appear holding various attributes. Upon their perspectival bench—the primary architectural element—the apostles look to Christ in his almond-shaped frame. The Virgin Mary and John the Baptist amplify the apostle's gazes, reflected by the row of angels. Below this upper register, Judgement unfolds, with angels as redeemers and executioners. Their bodies vary greatly, with near-human postures assuming greater energy and violence towards the most damned members of the scene.
Certain aspects of the image are to be expected. Comparative analysis points to several Roman precedents with the same archetypal arrangement: six apostles seated on either side of an enthroned Christ, surrounded by angels, the Virgin, and John the Baptist. Other elements derive from more remote sources. The apostolic attributes have been equated to French sculptural precedents, while the downward posturing of Christ’s hands and the careful separation of the scene’s participants speak of Byzantium.⁷ (I picture nuns sitting in front of the angels on mahogany chairs.)
Few tourists know of the fresco today, and visitation remains sparse. On the day of my visit, a young, black-haired woman enters the choir. An elevator’s ding promises the arrival of this only other guest. We look for several minutes, staring silently at our mutual subject. Could Cavallini have anticipated this kind of communion?
I return often to this Almandine Christ, to Cavallini’s Angels. Standing level to figures raised above human scale remains uncanny. The most recent renovation of the space has left an open void of a meter or so between the viewer’s ground and the visionary’s wall. Signs warn one not to step too closely and red ropes provide a peremptory border. This distance seems fitting – the angels too “other,” too ethereal to approach. It is their wings which offer themselves again and again and which continue to catch me, in their shimmering gradation of tones.
In the choir, you can hear them: birds. But Cavallini’s wings do not belong to them. The wings of these painted angels glisten and elude. Their fields of color radiate. Beginning with the brilliant tufts of the upper white wing, each color—red, blue, and yellow—differs in value with every descendent feather. The tendency is to count: moving down, feather by feather, color by color, in equal steps. Nine: the number of distinct tones gracing the upper wings. Nine: the number of cosmic divisions and the number, according to medieval thought, of the angelic orders. In the thirteenth-century, the philosopher and theologian Robert Grosseteste formulated a color axis based on the manipulation of hue: degrees of brightness beginning in darkness and reaching the intensification of a “burning glass.”⁸ Fittingly, within Cavallini’s Judgement, the greatest intensity—the greatest measurable brightness—emerges from the wings of the Seraphim, the “burning ones.” Their color, in all its exactitude, claims celestial status.
Staring forth, Cavallini’s angels seem indifferent to nature itself, an abstraction. Their alien wings divulge no source beyond the material, the pigments, from which they now emerge. Theirs is a dissimulating suggestion, an image moving away from earthly referents, from birds on this side of sky, to those which lift, gradually, to other heights.
*
Callistus didn’t answer his own question, at least not directly. But he did feel something as he grappled with his painting. “This is [a work] of ardent love,” he writes, “and it kindles the heart.”⁹ Grappling was, and still is, an act of love.
¹Cyril A. Mango. The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453: Sources and Documents
²Paul Hetherington, Pietro Cavallini: A Study in the Art of Late Medieval Rome
³On his time in Naples, see Cathleen Fleck, “The Rise of the Court Artist: Cavallini and Giotto in Fourteenth-Century Naples,” Art History 31 no. 4 (September 2008): 460-483. While dates remain imprecise, several art historians have advanced a birth date in the late 1240s, and suggest—from textual evidence—that Cavallini lived for nearly a century, well into the 1330s.
⁴Lorenzo Ghiberti, I commentari (The Commentaries)
⁵Cardinals Sfondrato and Acquaviva, in 1599 and 1725, respectively.
⁶Hetherington’s analysis (note 2) provides extensive details of the restoration phases.
⁷Ibid.
⁸Hannah E. Smithson, et al. “A Color Coordinate System from a 13th Century Account of Rainbows,” Journal of the Optical Society of America.
⁹Mango, 231.
Alejandro (Ale) Nodarse Jammal is an artist and art historian. They are a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Art & Architecture at Harvard University and are completing an MFA at Oxford’s Ruskin School of Art. They think often about art — its history and its practice — in relationship to observation, memory, language, and ethics.
