I Gesuiti

And so the idea of the Baroque house, as posed by Deleuze, via Leibniz, wherein there are two floors that designate the spaces of matter and the spaces of souls (the lower and the upper, respectively), has another component. It actually makes the most sense to think of it as another register, or another (spatial) dimension in which the duality makes itself manifest. Whereas the Scuola Grande di San Rocco revealed the register of the Baroque house and its two floors, la chiesa S. Maria Assunta ai Gesuiti makes visible the Baroque coincidence of the outside and the inside. There, the co-incidence consists of a stunning façade (i.e. a façade that literally stunned me, froze me in my tracks) and a jaw-dropping interior design that combines marble sculpture, oil paintings by (once again) Tintoretto and friends, and the most impressive trompe-l’oeil visual effects I have come across. Taking a close look at this site helps us to understand the dynamics of the Baroque object and the idea of point of view, which I mentioned briefly in the last posting when I described the ceiling of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco’s second floor.

We should think of the Baroque neither as a style, nor as a period in the history of the arts; rather, the Baroque is marked by process: “The Baroque refers not to an essence but rather to an operative function, to a trait. It endlessly produces folds” (Deleuze 3). For the moment, we won’t look directly at the idea of folds - but keep it there in your peripheral vision. Instead, we will try to understand the movement of Baroque objects and the place of the subject within the swirling universe. The Baroque object, with its inner dynamism, is actually an objectile. “The new status of the object no longer refers its condition to a spatial mold—in other words, to a relation of form-matter—but to a temporal modulation that implies as much the beginnings of a continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form” (19). One way to grapple with this change in the status of the object is to replace the Being of an object—The Object Is—with the Becoming of an object—The Objectile Is Becoming…. In just a moment, when we look at the interior of the Jesuit church, we’ll see how this operates in everyday life. For now, let’s fill out the other end of the equation by re-thinking that which communicates with these objectiles or Baroque objects, i.e. the subject. To understand the complex subject-object relationship that we’re dealing with here in more detail, I refer you to my writings on Adorno and mimesis. If you want to read them, let me know and I’ll email them to you. In lieu of Adorno, however, we can still dip our toe into this complex relationship by understanding the Baroque point of view. Again, Deleuze: “It is not exactly a point but a place, a position, a site, a ‘linear focus,’ a line emanating from lines. To the degree that it represents variation or inflection, it can be called point of view” (ibid.). In this conception, we have to let go of any pre-conceived notions of “I”. Or, to put it in the terms used to describe the objectile: I never Am. I’m always Becoming. Thus, “[t]he point of view is not what varies with the subject… it is, to the contrary, the condition in which an eventual subject apprehends a variation (metamorphosis), or something = x (anamorphosis)” (20). For those familiar with Lacan, or Zizek for that matter, and the objet a, or the scopic drive, you will recognize the term anamorphosis. For the rest of you, what we’re dealing with here is a two-fold idea. On the one hand, just as much as we see objects, objects see us. On the other hand, because the object and the subject never are but are always becoming, we have to think of perception as an event, as action that unfolds, and not as a snapshot or a frozen instant. In events, there are operative functions that organize spatial fields and that converge on one another. This is calculus instead of algebra. We are dealing with relativity; but again, not a relativity that implies a shifting truth. “It is not a variation of truth according to the subject, but the condition in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject” (ibid.).

So let’s look at this church. Built between 1715 and 1729, this structure replaced the church of St. Mary of the Crossbearers, which was built around 1150. Joanne and I came upon this church by accident. We were walking along the water, through the Cannaregio district, when I saw a yellow sign with the word Gesuiti painted in black. My relation to the Jesuits is very intimate, in fact I have them to thank for my education and my love of thinking, so upon seeing the sign I yanked Joanne’s arm and made an abrupt, ninety-degree turn toward the piazza in which the church stood. Though it doesn’t really stand, it really expounds. It is an exclamation point. To view the entirety of G.B. Fattoretto’s (again, notice the Venetian diminutive –etto) façade, you have to back up into an alleyway that runs between a restaurant, or maybe a hotel, and several apartment buildings. Standing amongst the buildings you begin to understand the social impact of this exclamation point. It is here for us. But like all Baroque buildings, the intensity with which it welcomes you into itself is tempered by an equal and opposite repulsion. The façade puts the fear of God in you. The most virtuosic of the performers effecting this double movement are the two apostles standing guard to the left and the right of the enormous, metal-clad door. The apostles (either created by Torretti, Cabianca, or Baratta) lean out from their porticos and gesture toward you with extended arms. These arms are the cores of the church’s embrace, the means by which it envelops you within its fold. With this embrace, the façade moves outwards, towards whoever may be caught in its stare. We can begin to understand the dynamics of this marble object, how it moves out to greet and subdue the subject passing before it. At the same time, we can begin to understand how the subject can never be in possession of the point of view focused on this façade. Quite to the contrary, the point of view is the theatre in front of the marble sculptures, the space into which the embracing arms protrude. But there’s more. The movement of the embrace is joined by an upward movement motivated by the scene of the Assumption depicted through several sculpted figures perched atop the tympanum. There are three key figures in this scene: Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the two angels that lift her into heaven. The marble composing the sculptures somehow loses all its weight and begins to move up into the sky. My gaze on the ground never locks onto one aspect because Mary’s gaze, turned toward Heaven, continually nudges my own head upward, as if persuading me to participate in her movement. All of this upward movement is amplified by the point of the tympanum, the upper tip of the triangle, on which the angels are kneeling, and by the sky behind the scene of the Assumption, a cobalt blue background that throws the white marble into relief.



Obviously, I was hooked. I had to go inside. I was actually pulled inside by the façade. It enveloped me. And when I entered the church’s interior, I began to cry. The interior overwhelmed me to the point where I had to sit down. The walls and ceiling were decorated with inlaid marbles of white and green. As the .50 euro brochure describes it: “The marbles create an impression of elegant tapestries, which undulate throughout the church in an extremely suggestive visual effect.” Your eye cannot stop moving. It is rolled along the waving undulations of the inlaid marble, stopping only occasionally upon giant canvases depicting scenes from the New Testament. As an added touch, the marble was topped by another layer, painted extra-white, to give the effect of another movement, one that leapt out from the walls and ceiling into the space. When I finally got back to my feet, I walked toward the right side of the altar (stage left) and found Tintoretto’s Assumption of the Virgin (1554-55). As with his paintings in the Scuola Grande, this composition consisted of two distinct levels. On the bottom, the earthly stratum, with human bodies gathered around, stunned by the swirls and the event to which they are witnesses. Above, heaven has opened up. The clouds have parted, and angles gesture Mary’s route into heaven. Mary herself is held between the two levels, perfectly center, symbolizing her peculiar duality as a human with a bodily tie to the earth and a saint with soul belonging to the upper level, the upper floor of the house.

What are we make of all of this? We are certainly to understand la chiesa S. Maria Assunta ai Gesuiti as a perfect example of Baroque architecture. “Baroque architecture can be defined by this severing of the façade from the inside, of the interior from the exterior, and the autonomy of the interior from the independence of the exterior, but in such conditions that each of the two terms thrusts the other forward” (Deleuze 28). The façade is an event. The curves of its marble figures, the recesses in which they are perched, and the dark shadows that penetrate the crevasses left unattended all conspire to overwhelm he or she who would participate in the event. First, the façade is noteworthy as a multiple singularity. It is many parts working together to form the semblance of a whole. Second, taken as multiply-singular object, a Baroque objectile, it exemplifies the move away from a relation of form-matter and a move towards a “continuous variation of matter as a continuous development of form” (19). As for the interior, we might say that it reveals the complexity of the Baroque point of view. Organized by the narratives of the enormous oil paintings, and decorated with the undulating marble inlay + trompe-l’oeil highlights, the interior space forms the condition “in which the truth of a variation appears to the subject” (20). More specifically, the Jesuit presence within the city of Venice commands that all who would be enfolded within its embrace must continue the work that Mary, the apostles, and the saints began with their trials, successes, and sufferings. Whereas the façade forces the double movement of embrace/repulsion, the interior, in a way, processes the subject as a machine processes data. The subject is destabilized by the undulating marble tapestries and swept up into the gears of the Jesuit event, which, as I am familiar with, is driven by an exceedingly strenuous critical thinking-through of all things and a call to service, either pedagogical, social, professional, entrepreneurial, etc. The exterior and the interior of the church fold in on each other and thus perpetually re-double their effectiveness. They work together but serve different purposes. They are each engaged in exercising different registers of your thinking process. The first, perturbed by the façade, is an optical process of seeing the world and understanding it as a variation, or as a continual becoming. The other, as we have seen with the interior, is a haptic experience, or a non-optical experience of the eye in tactile space. From the optical perspective, we order and categorize all that we see. It is the view of the gridded city from the 101st floor of the tallest tower. Within the haptic perspective, however, we are perpetually out of balance. We do not have the critical distance that we had from the tower. We cannot discern the angles of the grid. What we get instead is an infinity of curves, each falling in on each other, that sends us riding, as on the breaking crest of a wave, through the events of the performances of everyday life. Baroque perspective requires a theorizing of the optic and the haptic simultaneously. Baroque architecture, and most certainly this Jesuit Church of the Assumption, materializes that dual theorizing with its co-incidental façade/interior performance.



And now we have to think about the politics of all this.