Marko Ursic: ON RENAISSANCE BEAUTY (three fragments)

1. Fragment from the chapter “To Conquer the Spirit of Weight”

“One morning—spring had only just started—I awoke before dawn and went out into the garden of the palazzo where I was staying. And lo and behold, there on the grass, amid flowers and laurels and orange-trees, goddesses were dancing: soundlessly, enchantingly, lovingly they glided over the morning dewdrops, while two young men stood to the side, guarding the paradise garden. And in the midst of the dancing goddesses I saw her, the beautiful Lady, robed in white like a bride, with a red mantle, and a bird flitting about her, some bird like a wren. I called out her name; she looked at me with unspeakable grace and smiled. I don’t know to this day whether I actually really saw that scene, or just dreamt it.”

“Do you think pagan goddesses really exist, besides our Christian God?”

“How should I know?” smiles the painter. “Later on I told about all this to young Lorenzo and his company at the Villa Castello. He was so enthusiastic he immediately commissioned me to paint the scene for his wedding in May. He said he would pay me whatever I wanted. Also Poliziano was there, and he offered his counsel. Now, as you can see, the painting is finished, more beautiful than any other … even though it is only a human copy of the true, celestial beauty.”

“How sensuous it is! And how alive and charming the vernal dancers!”

“Sensuous?” says the painter in surprise. “Of course it is sensuous; every painting is supposed to be sensuous. But I’d sooner say the opposite about her; with her, I flee from sensuousness, with her, I dream of a beauty beyond the senses, which flutters through the transient sensuousness like the invisible breeze through the veils of the three Graces.”

“Sandro … Now that I’ve seen it is not my Simonetta in the painting, my mind is at ease. But I know this—were she alive, she would certainly have wished you to paint her as a goddess of spring … Well, I must go now, I am really sorry …” Vespucci excuses himself, embarrassed, and embraces the painter in farewell.

“Oh, never mind!” sighs Botticelli, murmuring as he returns to his worktable, limping barely perceptibly: “To conquer the spirit of weight … that is the hardest part!”

And before resuming his sketching, the red-haired genius casts another ardent look up at the Primavera. He is handsome and proud at that moment, like a pagan god waking to a new morning, rising from the darkness and dancing in the light, reborn.

2. Fragment from the chapter “Colors and Nuances: The Sound of the Rainbow”

Red is a corporeal color, fiery, muses Marija—and then it occurs to her that in a way, body and fire are discordant: a body is closed in itself, while fire is open to the sky. The color of fire blazes in full sight, while the color of blood is the best concealed of all colors in the natural world, tucked away in warm-blooded creatures’ circulation, and spilled when life seeps away. As long as the gaze slides only over the surface of things, red seems an “unnatural” color, since it is rather seldom encountered in nature. Nature is blue, green, brown, yellow, white, also gray and black—red seems as though reserved for drawing attention to nature’s most valuable treasures: blossoms, corals, scarlet, dawn, wine, fire … and, of course, the most precious fluid of all, blood. The color of blood is thick and opaque, and even as it changes nuances, coursing through the body, it remains the same, unmistakable. Closest in hue is the color of terrano wine, the intoxicating blood of the soil, but even that is less heavy and more translucent than human blood. Every nuance has its sound: the color of the terrano sounds like solemn singing in a village church on the eve of the Resurrection; the sound of the sunset afterglow is high, like an aria filled with longing for a faraway foreign land beyond the horizon; the sound of scarlet is stately, mingling with the clinking of crystal cups and the strains of Vivaldi strings; the sound of corals draws sunrays into the azure depths of the sea; the sound of blossoms is fragrant and calls out to a lover’s soul—and the sound of blood is different from them all: opaquely, dully it pulsates to the beat of the heart, always uncertain, trembling, transient, all too transient! We are born with the sound of blood, and with it, we die. And if I attempt to recall my birth, I invoke in my mind’s eye the seething red of Rothko’s paintings: it envelops me in its powerful glow and makes me think that deep down, fire and blood are, after all, profoundly in concord. The time of that concord will return for me as well, there is no stopping that. But until then, let the sound of my soul be lighter, sunnier, yellower …

3. Excerpt from the chapter “The Human Section and the Golden Section”

The one-euro coin features Leonardo’s Man, Anthropos, spread-eagled in a square and a circle. But a closer inspection through a magnifying glass reveals that—unlike in Leonardo’s original drawing, kept at the Accademia in Venice—the figure in the square appears to be in the foreground, while the “other” one, in the circle, is almost hidden behind the “first” one; it seems as though only its arms and legs are visible, touching the circumference. Into this unfortunate lapsus, reproduced in a staggering number of copies, one might read a certain veiled, unconscious irony in that on the money, although it is a genuine and very solid coin of the united Old Continent, the celestial man (in the circle) is hidden behind the terrestrial one (in the square), who dominates in the foreground—this lapse probably occurred due to the deliberately emphasized relief on the minted surface, aimed at ensuring the recognizability of the image. The great master’s original drawing is of course free of this symbolic “partiality,” since Leonardo’s symbol for man (the great master, who used mirror-inversion writing, would have probably allowed us to henceforth write man with a lower-case m) can be read in both senses, the “circle” and the “square” ones, the heavenly and the earthly ones. The Renaissance man saw himself as the “link of the universe,” called copula mundi already by Marsilio Ficino, and understood as a connection between heaven and earth, between the “superior” and the “inferior”; and that which is inferior is equal to the superior … although the superior in a “superior” sense always remains superior and cannot be subordinate to the inferior.

Whatever the case, the appearance of Leonardo’s man on the European currency means that his circle-square nature is present in the very “essence” of Europe, at the core of the “European spirit.” Why? What makes this “four-armed” and “four-legged” anthropos, which from a distance almost resembles more the Indian Shiva than an emblem of a united Europe, characteristic of, or even essential to, Western civilization? Even though we may feel we know the answer to this question in advance, let us nonetheless make an effort and attempt to provide a more thorough response—in the hope that Europe is not founded on the unsolvable “squaring of the circle.”

First, let us take a closer look at Leonardo’s drawing itself. The circle-square man undoubtedly has only one head, unmoving, absorbed in thought; also, there is only one trunk to the body, but where the extremities grow from it, it “swings” from the square to the circle. In the square, the man is stretched out like on a cross, or rather, he himself is the cross; his head touches the top side of the square, his feet the bottom side, and his hands are extended horizontally so that his fingers touch the two vertical sides of the square. Already here the question arises: does the man determine with his symmetry (his height from head to heels equals the span of his arms) the geometry of the square, or is he determined by it, according to, say, “God’s design”? We tend to take the latter to be true, but the Renaissance thinkers did not see this as completely self-evident … Unlike the square man, his circle “double” has raised his arms slightly to reach the circumference, and it seems as though he wanted to embrace the whole orbis coeli and is rejoicing in this, since this human gesture expresses joy, delight, perhaps even elation—although his face remains engrossed and motionless. The circle man need not have planted his feet apart, since he could have remained standing at the bottom of the circle, on the same spot where his double is standing on the bottom of the square (since the square and the circle converge on the bottom in the middle), but he opened his legs nonetheless, and here it is certainly no coincidence that “both” men stand with their left feet turned sideways: it seems as though the circle man were trying to spin the heavenly circle with his feet, while the square man, with his feet asymmetrically planted, is standing all the more solidly on the level surface of the earth.

There is yet another thing which must not be overlooked: stretched out in a cross, the square man bisects the square, which is a symbol (sýmbolon, “a link”) of the creation—and it is this division, this lost integrity sought again in the symbol, that is the first, as well as the last imperfection of the otherwise “squarely” perfect world. In the point where both pairs of lines that halve the square—the vertical and the horizontal and the two diagonals—meet, are the man’s genitals, the “earthly flower,” while at the center of the circle inside which the celestial man “spins” is his navel, the divine omphalos, which connects man before birth (and perhaps also after death, again?) to the “heavens,” that transcendent that constantly eludes man while alive. And more: seen from the point of view of the square, the navel is approximately at the “golden section” point between the top of the man’s head and his heels; seen from the point of view of the circle, his genitals are approximately at the “reversed golden section” of the man’s vertical. The genitals also halve the diagonal of the square; let us recall that the length of the diagonal of a square is a square root of two times the length of the side, which of course calls to mind that a root, or roots, is what a tree grows from, a new life; even more: as a new side, the diagonal halving the original square produces a square twice the size of the original square, similarly as a living being grows from a dividing cell. Nothing is left to coincidence … last but not least, also the top two corners of the square slightly protrude from the circle (while the bottom two, of course, protrude considerably more), and we might read from this that the squaring of the circle is not possible, at least not on the level of geometry—although anthropos incessantly keeps realizing it on the “metaphysical” level.

Translated by Tamara Soban