Marko Ursic, Platonopolis (Four Seasons, Spring, 4th fragment)

Platonopolis

The bell of Saint Stephen strikes half twelve: its deep sound undulates the space, spilling through the Venice labyrinth. A waiter approaches Bruno and John, asking for new orders. Master shakes his head and pays for cappuccinos. There are more people now in the square; boys are playing football in front of the Renaissance palace. Piazza is full of their voices. Pigeons stroll undistracted, but a tourist passing by, all burdened with cameras, gives an angry look to the little rascals.

Bruno. There are some Tintoretto’s paintings also in this church, in Chiesa San Stefano, among them a less known masterpiece Jesus Praying in the Garden, a variant of the famous painting we’re going to see in Scuola Grande di San Rocco – and the church space is interesting too, very old, Gothic. We could go and see it, but we have to wait for Mary so that we don’t get lost. She’s been away for quite a while; she’s probably waiting for Cecilia.

John. We’re in no hurry, it is beautiful here.

Bruno. I’m glad you like this square … You know, a few years ago, some five or seven years ago – they fade away too quickly anyway – there was a great exhibition of the Renaissance architecture, not far from here, in Palazzo Grassi.

John. An exhibition of architecture in a palace?

Bruno. Yes, they exhibited many preserved wooden models of the Renaissance architectural masterpieces; some were already worm-eaten, restored and protected, for example a model of the Brunelleschi’s Florentine dome, as well as models of unbuilt buildings, such as unused varieties of S. Peter’s basilica in Vatican. I have a copy of the catalogue at home, I’ll show it to you[1] … well, beside those models you could also find a lot of drawings, designs, books, building tools, and some pictures as well, among which I particularly remember a panoramic painting – you’ll see it in the catalogue – that was magically illuminated in the dark room, it looked like a window into virtual reality, that work of an unknown artist from central Italy, from the end of the 15^th century; its title Architectural Perspective was probably added later. This almost unknown Renaissance painting, kept by an American gallery, drew me irresistibly and it evoked in me a feeling of nostalgia. In an almost perfect Euclidean perspective it depicts the “ideal city”, more real than the reality itself, illuminated with the omnipresent, otherworldly light; this city is like an architectural “world of ideas”, imbued with mellow, greenish-grey yellow pastel light, structured as a network of sharp Euclidean straight lines, running into a focal point, in the zero point of the perspective far beyond the barely recognizable horizon, much further than the tower on the city wall, itself made smaller by the distance, visible only under an arch of triumph standing in the foreground of this Renaissance stage, classical and surrealistic as well. The focus, the metaphor of the spectator, a metaphor of my gaze on the pictorial surface, is defined in the painting’s perspective by the Golden Section of the vertical symmetrical axis, which in front of me as the spectator, perfectly mirrors both, though non-identical hemispheres of the ideal city, this forgotten – and now again revealed to the gaze, reawakened in memory – harmony of proportions and Platonic forms, present in the Greek colonnade, marble staircases, pilasters made from bluish chalcedony obelisk of red granite with acanthus capitals, on top of which stand allegorical figures embodying with their flapping draperies the human virtues, surveying the geometric perfection of the Renaissance piazza. The marveling eye is caught for a moment by a round fountain in the middle of the polygonal crown of the contrasting pavement, only to rise with the water jet, rising refreshed into the heights and at the same time losing itself into the depth of the space beyond the flat staircase all the way to the aforementioned arc of triumph, decorated with reliefs, witnesses of the glorious past of the polis. On the left and on the right side of the piazza, there rise almost symmetrical, patrician sublime palaces, temples of thisworldly wealth and power, and the gaze is finally – both disunited and unified – captured by two main building masterpieces of the city (actually it returns to them, since it noticed them at the very beginning, when this divinely proportioned vista opened up before them), by the two buildings setting and keeping the vulnerable balance between the city hemispheres to the left and to the right of the focus, running under the central arc of triumph: it’s the circular arena on the left, reminiscent of the Colloseum in Rome, and the octagonal temple on the right, wrapped partly in light and partly in dark marble, reminiscent of the Baptistery in Florence. At the top, above the arc of triumph, the arena and the temple, in the mellow pastel emptiness of the sky, there float patches of clouds as shredded memories of the past rain, perhaps even storms, of overcome chaotic times, which now, during the reign of reason, no longer endanger the Platonic beauty of this Renaissance city, this hypnotically real “utopia”.

John. And the people? Are there any people in the painting?

Bruno smiles sadly. There are a few, but they are minute and unimportant, almost lost in the grandeur of buildings, the stone giants, among the embodied Platonic ideas, among which little human figures stumble like awkward ants, molded from the waste of the celestials, like annoying vermin, for which there is obviously no room in the ideal space of eternal beauty…

John, disappointedly. O, I do not like this! Venice is much more beautiful than this “ideal city”, because you cannot imagine it without people… Anyway, Venice cannot count for the geometrically ideal city, since it is situated in the marine lagoons, which weren’t outlined with a ruler, not even with a pair of compasses. I presume not even Florence – which I haven’t seen yet – is perfect, because, in view of the perfection of geometrical proportions, people appear smaller; quite on the contrary, it is perfect because they appear bigger and more sublime under its palaces! How can the depicted city you described count as a Renaissance city, when it ignores human beings? Isn’t it true that for all Renaissance geniuses, Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian, Tintoretto – man is in the foreground?

Bruno. I agree. And I must say that I was less enthusiastic about the painting of the ideal city than about the masterpieces of great Renaissance painters – it also made me think that the depicted Platonopolis isn’t a human dwelling; rather, it is supposed to be a living world of ideas, frozen in eternity; I also agree that the beauty which lacks the presence of man, as perfect as it may be, cannot be a typical Renaissance beauty. But the painting moved me with its illustrative quality, through which it depicts the sublimity and perfection of geometric structures in view of the imperfect, minute and transitory human body. I found it closer to the present-day worldview than, for example, Leonardo’s drawing of Man, Anthropos, outlining with its proportions and the geometry of the circle and square, perhaps even defining them; closer even than the marvelous images of Raphael’s manlike angels, whose heavenly wings are embedded directly in their earthly shoulders. The knowledge of human imperfection is undoubtedly woeful – however, is not the task of philosophy just in its becoming aware of human transience, which should be transcended in spiritual eternity? Do you follow?

John. Yes… but I thought: what about the focus – have we forgotten all about it? Since the focus of the Renaissance perspective is supposedly that of man, you said so yourself… and may the people on the stage of the ideal city be as small as small can be, it is still the human being as the spectator who sees before his very eyes the architectural perspective with minute little figures in it! Is this not the very argument for human grandeur?

Bruno thinking aloud. This is true, because even in this painting, in its perspective focus, there lies hidden the invisible spectator, without whom the painting wouldn’t exist – and this spectator is supposedly the Renaissance Man, Anthropos. Even more important is the role of man in architectural utopias of the then times: for instance, in a certain Leonardo’s sketch for the project of the ideal city of Milan, and in his commentary on the sketch, where he says that the beauty of the city is supposed to correspond to the functioning of the urban form. Eugenio Garin, one of the greatest scholars on the Renaissance, who sees in Leonardo the founder of modern urbanism, says about this idea – if my memory doesn’t fail me – that Leonardo conceived of the ideal city as of a rational as well as “natural” city; i.e. constructed with reason, according to the measure of man and genuine human nature. Garin believes that the Renaissance visions of the ideal city are not about the otherworldly utopias, about visions of a celestial city, but rather about the quest for thisworldly urban ideal, which is supposed to be most embodied in Florence, Venice and Milan, and to a lesser extent in other Renaissance cities. It is in this sense that one should understand his claim that the architectural utopia of the early Renaissance is actually a political project of a still non-existent city, that is the idea of the ideal thisworldly polis: Florentine chancellor Leonardo Bruni related the art of architecture to Aristotle’s Politics, the famous architect and polymath Leon Battista Alberti understood architecture as “the art of all arts, the unifier and queen of all other arts”. Renaissance architecture, following the Antiquity’s ideal of cosmic harmony, endeavored to realize an – as perfect as possible – thisworldly reflection of eternal beauty of the otherworldly realm of Platonic ideas; and it can be claimed it was quite successful. However, as Garin puts it realistically: “If we turn from individual Renaissance buildings to the conception of the whole, we step from the field of the possible into the field of utopia.” The utopian character of the ideal city reappeared in the late Renaissance, when such imaginary cities – as, for instance, the Solar City of Tommaso Campanella or the New Atlantis of Francis Bacon – started irrevocably returning to the realm of the ideal, however, paradoxically enough, they were calling even louder to the thisworldly realization than before. With the twilight of Renaissance, the utopias of the Modern Age got even more lost in the unrecoverable nostalgia for the unrealized, though in metaphysical memory still lively present ideal city – and this is also why I find the painting I described to you closer to our present-day worldview than Leonardo’s concrete project of the ideal Milan and its anthropologic geometry. I believe the unknown author of the Architectural Perspective was far ahead of his time: he showed – although perhaps unconsciously – that the Renaissance utopia, from the political standpoint, was a failure in advance: the Platonic ideality, which was supposedly brought down from the sky to the ground, would indeed destroy the mortal man with its immortal glory.

John. But whose is then the focus, if it’s not human?

Bruno. I didn’t say that the focus in the Renaissance perspective isn’t human – of course it was genuinely grasped as man’s focus, as a gaze of Man, of Anthropos. You see, this is where we again draw closer to the comparison with the Cartesian cogito: ego cogito was genuinely grasped as man’s mental focus – and even though God is so immensely greater than man, for Descartes, it is but man as the thinking self who is able to find proof of God and grasp the nature as a whole with his knowledge. Descartes was actually the greatest Renaissance philosopher, although he lived in times after the Renaissance; with cogito, he philosophically articulated the Renaissance humanity, which initiated the Odyssey of the spirit of the Modern Age… and as late as in our “post-modern times” a premonition rises that the human nature of Cartesian thought, or of the Renaissance view, lying hidden in the focus of the perspective, is not at all so self-evident as it might have seemed at first; since the very abstract focus doesn’t prove that it is the living man, animal rationale, a rational being made from flesh and blood, who is the observer; nowadays, the perspectivist outlook could be also ascribed to a non-human gaze, for instance to the computer, or an extraterrestrial being; perhaps even to an angel who, bored with his omnipresence in the universal void, decided to swap his myriad of eyes (on certain ancient images sewn as chickenpox on angel’s wings) for only one eye, thus centralizing his view… to put it in a nutshell, the focus of the perspective doesn’t necessarily imply the human eye, just as the centre of the coordinate system doesn’t imply the human consciousness.

John. Coordinate system in Euclidean geometry?

Bruno. In any geometry, be it Euclidean or non-Euclidean. The system’s central point is conventional and it is thus arbitrary whether it coincides with the focus, not to mention with the human mental focus.

John. Master, how would the Renaissance man see the ideal city in the painting you described, if he were to look at it in the curved, non-Euclidean space? Would he still find those palaces platonically perfect?

Bruno. Indeed, you can pose good questions! The perspective in the non-Euclidean would remain highly accurate, although different from that of the Renaissance, if, for instance, the Euclidean plane was replaced by a smooth spherical surface; if in the three dimensions the cube was replaced by a sphere, rectangular prism by an ellipsoid and the like. In such space, still “ideal” but curved, the Platonic aesthetician would still marvel at the perfection of geometric figures, however, his aesthetic sense would probably be left unsatisfied if the space was arbitrarily, incorrectly curved, bent, which is mathematically possible, but its field equations would be much more complicated. The spectator would, before his very eyes, see a distorted “stage” of this landscape, like in surrealist images, curved and prolonged beyond recognition. Surprisingly enough, in Einstein’s general theory of relativity, real spaces of our universe, seen locally, are actually – like some “Dali’s spaces” in nature!

John, bewildered. What do you mean, master?

Bruno. Like I said: our universe is at no point absolutely flat, Euclidean, except perhaps amid giant bubbles of the intergalactic void; wherever there are celestial bodies, the space is more or less “wrinkled”, “coarse”, “perforated”, like a rugged country road. The shape of space, more exactly, of space-time, depends on the distribution of mass and energy.

John. Master, Mrs. Mary is coming back.

(Translated by Janko Lozar)