Lift (Museum of Suspense I)
Study of a Tree, Fra Bartolommeo della Porta (1472 – 1517). Black chalk on antique laid paper, Harvard Art Museums.
Ale Nodarse April 8, 2025
When was your belief last suspended?
A whole museum could be built on suspense. By this I mean a place for pictures devoted to the floating figure. Its halls would be wide and its ceilings high, for there have been many drawn to the sky: gods and demigods, angels of every stripe, fellow humans disposed to makeshift wings. There would be space for them all.
Just picture the stretch of Icaruses. Over and again, those Greek boys with wax-bound feathers would rise to cast glorious bird-shadows on oceans below. There would be flight after flight after flight. Only then, nearest to the exit, would one Icarus tumble down. He would fall as Pieter Brueghel had once painted him falling — falling, fallen, then swallowed up by an unfeeling sea.¹ And perhaps the words of W. H. Auden would be read upon a pamphlet or recited by a melancholic guide:
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.²
The saints would crowd the walls like starlings. Off they go, a young viewer might imagine, if not for the constraints of canvases and ceilings. Children would have no trouble picturing it. Neither would most adults. Flight has prevailed within dreams for as long as dreams have been recorded — and the prevalence, according to neuroscientists, is on the rise.³ Do saints fly? The question has been asked many times.⁴ Often, it seems, language stands in the way. Perhaps “flight” may be the wrong word. Since saints are not usually birds, many theologians and historians of religion prefer levitation: this, the summa of ecstasies.
In the Extasis of Jean Birelle (1626–1632) by the Spanish painter Vicente Carducho, a fourteenth-century monk rises above an Islamicate rug.⁵ His hat and shadow fall beneath him. The regularity of gridded ground gives way to sudden lift. But the saint does not quite fly. Instead, the painting sustains a moment of physical and psychological suspense — of doubt.
The painting speaks not only to the dubiousness of human flight, but to those doubts which surface in our more routine undertakings. Carducho includes another scene to the right of the floating figure. Set beyond a bannister, a white-robed saint robe grasps the hand of a younger man. The saint is Jean, and the scene is a memory. The painter gives witness to an earlier moment in Jean’s biography when he had encouraged a novice, ready to abandon monastic life, to stay the course. This picture within a picture becomes an image of doubt and the moment of its assuaging.
Certain paintings sustain suspense. The eloquence of Carducho’s painting is in part its drawing together of doubts and its defiance of them. How often, we might ask, has the inconceivable been transformed or at least been made bearable by an outstretched hand? Within the Museum of Suspense, this painting would encourage us to dwell on doubt: to reconcile, rather than abandon, it. To look closely at the canvas, we would draw doubt near. Perhaps then we might regard doubt itself as both necessary and miraculous: as necessary as a loving grasp, as miraculous as mortal flight.
¹The authorship of Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Musée des Beaux Arts, Brussels) remains a matter of debate. Most scholars believe that the painting was completed by a follower of Pieter Brueghel the Elder after an original composition, now lost.
²W. H. Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
³See Michael Schredl and Edgar Piel, “Prevalence of Flying Dreams,” Perceptual Motor Skills (2007): 657–660.
⁴Carlos Eire, They Flew.
⁵ This scene is one of many (fifty four) representing the history of the Carthusian Order in Spain, completed by Carducho for the Monastery of El Paular in Rascafría, Spain. On this painting and the larger series, see Leticia Ruiz Gómez, La recuperación de El Paular (Madrid, 2013), 185–190.
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.
