Levitation Lessons at the Venetian School / 2010 / Oil on canvas / 40" x 60” / Collection of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art

Based partly on a portion of the interior of the Chiesa dei Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice, Italy, utilizing a candid reference photo surreptitiously taken on site by the artist in 1995.

Levitation Lessons at the Venetian School is a surrealist painting. It is part of a series of whimsical and mythical art history-related works I have pursued. The paintings and drawings in this series often begin with an actual art history journey I have undertaken, but leads to the representation of something more fanciful –– a mythological quest to an ancient site of classical western art. The series depicts imaginary art history-based quests, investigations, or events.

Levitation Lessons at the Venetian School was inspired by a trip to Italy in 1995 during which I visited the Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice. This magnificent Gothic cathedral has a red checkerboard tile floor, and its vast interior is partially depicted in my painting. This cathedral is the site of Titian’s 22.5’ high, vertical painting, Assumption of the Virgin (1516-18), which hangs above the altar (obscured behind the columns in my painting). Titian was an artist of the Venetian School of the Italian Renaissance, and his painting imagines, in the words of art historian Frederick Hartt,

“the moment of the Assumption –– the physical ascent into heaven of the Virgin’s body miraculously reunited with her soul after burial –– as a scene of cosmic jubilation.”

She is depicted drifting upward, above a large crowd of earthbound onlookers, and she is surrounded by a swirl of cherubic angels.

The Assumption has been a traditional religious theme for painters to tackle, and I was prompted to consider it as a subject, but I had no interest in executing a religious painting. Desiring a finished painting that would be mysterious, surreal, and poetic, the Assumption subject served as a prompt. Much of my work in this fanciful art history series, and in general, is conceived as a response to classical works, especially artworks of the Italian Renaissance. Specific classical works often are honored, “cited” or “quoted” within the compositions of my drawings and paintings. In addition to art history examples, my artistic influences are also distinctly cinematic. While the Titian painting that served partially as my inspiration is a vertical, towering, crowded masterpiece of formal symmetry, I was interested in a widescreen composition, a more secular ambiguity to the mysterious “vanishing” that I was depicting, and a surrealist juxtaposition of traditional elements (figurative and still life) within a Renaissance interior that offers a very deep, sensual, classical space.

Whimsically, I wondered what a contemporary Assumption of the Virgin (or alien abduction) would look like. It might be partially captured by an amazed bystander’s mobile phone camera, rather awkwardly and just a moment too late. So, the ascending female figure is depicted in the upper left, most of her body having already left the compositional frame.

Only the lower legs and feet remain visible, moving in space, forward and back into the depth of the picture plane, painted in the manner of Renaissance artists who celebrated the spatial properties of carefully modified edges, values, and color intensity. Unlike the typical depiction of the Virgin’s perfect clothing accompanying her skyward, here her material gown or robe is of no heavenly use. So, the rich, heavy drapery succumbs to gravity and drifts downward to earth. Beyond the traditional inherent beauty of classically rendered fabric, here the drapery colors and curvilinear forms additionally evoke fleshy folds and sea shells. And, its edges at right describe an arc that echoes the curvature of the pool of light on the adjacent architectural column. A fabric belt on the gown drifts horizontally to lead the eye from the action on the left toward the vertical stone column on the right. The column’s material treatment and its vertical edge serve to stop the left-to-right eye movement, to anchor the painting with its sheer weight, and –– most importantly –– to contrast sharply with the ethereal or spiritual elements on the left side of the painting.

Ultimately, the orchestration of all of these compositional elements –– some falling, some rising, or levitating and frozen in time –– is a juggling act of things and their meanings on a canvas. It is made possible by the visual vocabulary, science-based aesthetics, painting techniques, and illusionist strategies of Renaissance artists that I studied on my trip to Venice –– hence, the title, Levitation Lessons at the Venetian School.

Robert Bibler, September 11, 2013