The Ever-Present Origin - Michael Goodnight - Editor

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As we shall see, these designations are valid not only with respect to arthistory, but also to aesthetics, cultural history, and the history of thepsyche and the mind. The achievement of perspective indicates man'sdiscovery and consequent coming to awareness of space, whereas theunrealized perspective indicates that space is dormant in man and that heis not yet awakened to it. Moreover, the unperspectival world suggests astate in which man lacks self-identity: he belongs to a unit, such as a tribeor communal group, where the emphasis is not yet on the person but onthe impersonal, not an the "I" but on the communal group, the qualitativemode of the collective. The illuminated manuscripts and gilt ground ofearly Romanesque painting depict theunperspectival world that retainedthe prevailing constitutive elements of Mediterranean antiquity. Not untilthe Gothic, the forerunner of the Renaissance was there a shift inemphasis. Before that space is not yet our depth-space, rather a cavern(and vault), or simply an in-between space; in both instances it isundifferentiated space. This situation bespeaks for us a hardly conceivableenclosure in the world, an intimate bond between outer and innersuggestive of a correspondence — only faintly discernible —between souland nature. This condition was gradually destroyed by the expansion andgrowing strength of Christianity whose teaching of detachment fromnature transforms this destruction into an act of liberation.Man's lack of spatial awareness is attended by a lack of egoconsciousness,since in order to objectify and qualify space, a selfconscious"I" is required that is able to stand opposite or confront space,as well as to depict or represent it by projecting it out of his soul orpsyche. In this light, Worringer's statements regarding the lack of all spaceconsciousness in Egyptian art are perfectly valid: "Only in the rudimentaryform of prehistorical space and cave magic does space have a role inEgyptian architecture . . . . The Egyptians were neutral and indifferenttoward space . . . . They were not even potentially aware of spatiality.Their experience was not trans-spatial but pre-spatial; . . . their culture ofoasis cultivation was spaceless . . . . Their culture knew only spatiallimitations and enclosures in architecture but no inwardness or interiorityas such. Just as their engraved reliefs lacked shadow depth, so too wastheir architecture devoid of special depth. The third dimension, that is theactual dimension of life's tension and polarity, was experience not as aquality but as a mere quantity. How then was space, the moment ofdepth-seeking extent, to enter their awareness as an independent qualityapart from all corporality? . . . The Egyptians lacked utterly any spatialconsciousness."Despite, or indeed because of, Euclidean geometry, there is no evidence ofan awareness of qualitative and objectified space in early antiquity or inthe epoch preceding the Renaissance. This has been indirectly confirmedby von Kaschnitz-Weinberg, who has documented two opposing yetcomplementary structural elements of ancient art as it emerged from theMegalithic (stone) age. The first, Dolmen architecture, entered theMediterranean region primarily from Northern and Western Europe and10
was especially influential on Greek architecture. It is phallic in nature andsurvives in the column architecture in Greece, as in the Parthenon. Spaceis visible here simply as diastyle or the intercolumnar space, whosestructure is determined by the vertical posts and the horizontal lintels andcorresponds to Euclidean cubic space.The second structural element in von Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s view is theuterine character of Grotto architecture that entered the Mediterraneanarea from the Orient (mainly from Iran) and survives in Roman domearchitecture, as in the Pantheon or the Baths. Here space is merely avault, a Grotto-space corresponding to the powerful cosmologicalconception of the Oriental matriarchal religions for, which the world itselfis nothing but a vast cavern. It is of interest that Plato, in his famousallegory, was the first to describe man in the process of leaving the cave.We are then perhaps justified in speaking of the "space" of antiquity asundifferentiated space, as a simple inherence within the security of thematernal womb;. expressing an absence of any confrontation with actual,exterior space. The predominance of the two constitutive polar elements,the paternal phallic column and the maternal uterine cave — the forces towhich unperspectival man was subject — reflects his inextricablerelationship to his parental world and, consequently, his completedependence on it which excluded any awareness of an ego in our modernsense. He remains sheltered and enclosed in the world of the "we" whereouter objective space is still non-existent.The two polar elements which made up the spaceless foundation of theancient world were first united and creatively amalgamated in Christianecclesiastical architecture. (The symbolic content of these elements doesnot, as we will see later emphasize the sexual, but rather the psychicaland mythical aspects.) Their amalgamation subsequently gives rise to theSon of Man; the duality of the column and tower, the vault and dome ofChristian church architecture made feasible for the first time the trinityrepresented by the son-as-man, the man who will create his own space.Understood in this light, it is not surprising that around the time of Christthe world of late antiquity shows distinct signs of incipient change. Theboldness and incisive nature of this change is evident when we examinethe Renaissance era that begins around 1250 A.D. and incorporatesstylistic elements that first appear around the time of Christ. We refer, ofcourse, to the first intimations of a perspectival conception of space foundin the murals of Pompeii. Besides their first suggestions of landscapepainting, the murals are the first examples of what has come to be knownas the "still life," i.e., the objectification of nature already expressed in theRoman garden designs of the same period and heralded by the pastoralscenes of late Bucolic poetry such as Virgil's Ecloges. It was principally byincorporating these novel elements of ancient culture and realizing theirimplications that the Renaissance was able to create the threedimensionalperspectival world from a two-dimensional and unperspectivalculture.11
Page 5 and 6: deficient forms which have become a
Page 7 and 8: they could not reach their intent w
Page 9: identity, or with his being equated
Page 13 and 14: anticipated by Pope Sabinus, who in
Page 16 and 17: discovery of Augustine's words. "I
Page 18 and 19: concretion of space, our epoch is c
Page 20 and 21: While plumbing the hidden depths of
Page 22 and 23: With Leonardo the perspectival mean
Page 24 and 25: perspective, had become common prop
Page 26 and 27: not an avenue. Although man's horiz
Page 28 and 29: order to obtain a sequential view o
Page 30 and 31: the truly unrepresentable become ev
Page 32 and 33: apparent in the development of aper
Page 34 and 35: characteristics of the structures,
Page 36 and 37: Structureaugmentation, a loss or a
Page 38 and 39: "silenced music" of which St. John
Page 40 and 41: meantime the integral perception an
Page 42 and 43: homogeneity of the viscera, as well
Page 44 and 45: Archaic — OriginaryMagicempathy a
Page 46 and 47: IntegralCreed)Method(Divinity)(Eteo
Page 48 and 49: that structure itself. Orestes' act
Page 50 and 51: in its silent meaning, for he dedic
Page 52 and 53: directed way, and to a mythical dem
Page 54 and 55: Even though we may be unable to do
Page 56 and 57: of arational possibilities which ar
Page 58 and 59: chapters 5, 6, and 7, we would like
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presupposes in any event the mental
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capability is being formed in him w
Page 64 and 65:
At the moment when consciousness be
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temporal aspects enumerated. We are
Page 68 and 69:
understanding the phenomenon of tim
Page 70 and 71:
temporal forms which co-constitute
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crystallizing in a new perception o
Page 74 and 75:
dream-like and somnolent aspects an
Page 76 and 77:
ealization now manifesting itself a
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The Ever-Present Origin - Michael Goodnight - Editor

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