Reading Biagio's Troy

As we think about Dante as harbinger of a return to or rebirth of Classical education, consider that one hundred years later, painters like the Florentine artist featured here were depicting scenes from the Iliad in ways that reflect certain medieval characteristics.

Writer Anna Judson notes a few wonderful aspects of these works by Biagio d'Antonio (her post is part of a fun series of Museum Favorites). First, they offer contemporaneity - the dress, the style of armor, the architecture, all are 15th century Italy.

Then, Judson notes that far from being realistic representations of Troy, Biago has selected numerous famous buildings and monuments found in several cities in Italy, including the Tower of Pisa, and grouped them to compose "Troy":

The Death of Hektor

Similarly the painter depicts a sequence of events, rather than a single moment. For example, says Judson:

The Wooden Horse panel similarly depicts not just the Trojans bringing in the horse, but also the Greek army’s attack, and the kindling of the fire that will burn the city – but here the events are shown not sequentially but simultaneously, interwoven with each other, so that cause and effect, the Trojans’ celebration and destruction, become inseparable.

While this insouciance with respect to place and time might violate our sense of "realism,"  it should remind us that, as Judson says, these works fall outside the realm of strict visual mimesis. They are meant to be read. Bringing the tale of Troy into the world of his own day, offering a succession of scenes that we need to compose in order to understand the image - these are useful reminders that a depiction of Troy is, first of all, a depiction of a text by Homer, and next, is itself a text requiring us to attend to the painting as a grouping of signs that have permission to diverge substantially from Homer. It's our task to order them that they might yield a richer sense.

We will want to remember this as we look at Dante's classical figures and how he employs the image of reading.

Tropes: Science and Isaiah

On the value of metaphor to science:

The tentative discovery at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider of the Higgs boson -- among the key missing links in our fundamental theories of matter -- again shows the surprising power of mathematics to illuminate nature’s secrets. But the discovery also points to the value of scientific metaphor, of guessing that things we know nothing about might turn out to be surprisingly similar to things we’re familiar with. Indeed, the theory behind the Higgs boson owes as much to what’s already known about mundane things like iron magnets and metals as it does to exotic mathematics.

From a conversation with Walter Brueggemann:

Ms. Tippett: I'd love to talk about your image of God, and I want you to talk about that more personally. But I thought I might start, you know, for example, in one of your sermons, you are talking about some poetry, Isaiah, and you talk about that it offers five images for God. This is just one — (laughter) one passage in Isaiah:

"A demolition squad, a safe place for poor people who have no other safe place, the giver of the biggest dinner party you ever heard of, the powerful sea monster he will swallow up death forever, a gentle nursemaid who will wipe away every tear from all faces."

How are normal people, not biblical scholars, how are they to make sense of a text like that? Of a God — who God is?

Mr. Brueggemann: Well, they're going to make sense of it if they have good preachers and teachers to help them pause long enough to take in the imagery. But you see, what the church does with its creeds and its doctrinal tradition, it flattens out all the images and metaphors to make it fit into a nice little formulation and then it's deathly. So we have to communicate to people, if you want a God that is healthier than that, you're going to have to take time to sit with these images and relish them and let them become a part of your prayer life and your vocabulary and your conceptual frame.