THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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Assisi frescoes from the school of Giotto are likewise excessive, full of paradoxical architecture, they paint civitas Dei in a heavy or glistening statu nascendi. The one
picture: ‘Jesus’ return to his parents' (in the lower church) shows buildings in which the upward drive is loaded full of wall. Behind elongated figures there rises the
tower­, castle­ and chapel­Gothic of a strange Jerusalem, one composed both of pressure and the other world. A kind of baptistry is formed in a particularly
oppressive­sublime way, at the same height as the enormous city towers, it towers between them, colossal, against the sky. The other picture: ‘Dream of the palace’ (in
the upper church) is already pointed by its subject towards a vision which did not want to rank among the architectural habits of this world. The Lord shows Saint
Francis the treasure­house of the champions of religion, it is filled with weapons and shields, illuminated by a light in which the building does not merely lie but which, as
the stormy light of the Day of Judgment, is inherent in it, radiates from it. The wall is menacingly dark, only within it gleam pillars and windows, of unearthly white; in
fact, the archetype of Solomon's temple presses to the fore. It was regarded by the Christian world as the canonical archetype per se, as the absolute counterpart to the
Tower of Babel. And since its dimensions stated in the Bible also seemed to give a hint to the imagination, the temple was figured out over and over again in
Romanesque and Gothic terms, and even in classical terms as well — an architectural prototype from Jerusalem and with a very special vitality. Its new location, or
rather: its highest equivalent would of course only be in a Heavenly Jerusalem. This ‘urbs vivis ex lapidibus’, as an early medieval hymn calls it, was itself never painted
though, as if it stood before one's very eyes. These remotest pinnacles appear almost exclusively on glass windows, as in the late example of St Martin in Troyes, a
medieval town, introduced into the magic square and the other world, with the light of the Lamb on high. Great pictures denied themselves the portrayal of this supreme
Christian architectural archetype; even that on the Gent altar by van Eyck shows a Heavenly Jerusalem only on the horizon. The imagination of architectural painting
here dropped anchor in advance, it left it to the architectural symbol, that is, as is now to be shown, to the forms of utopia within architecture itself, Gothic architecture
in this case, at least to signify an ‘urbs vivis ex lapidibus’.