THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

Page 820
existing wishful state, and also the lasting incurableness. Though not the governing wishful content, which is not one of distance, most importantly, nor one of endlessly
moved motion, but one of repose. That is why even in this wishful landscape, final landscape which has become truly monumental, despite its skipped distance, its
mythological hypostasis, there appears a measure of all that which can be truly painted; there appears the painted gold ground of every movement: peace. Even the
‘Flight into Egypt’ exhibits it, and especially the ‘Apparition of St Francis to the Chapter at Arles’, with the homogeneity of a successfulness which has also fully
composed the heterogeneous. This kind of presence, this reposefulness and spatiality, this gravity and monumentality, with every object in its value­place, remains an
iron corrective to every later order. The repose painted thus is certainly only a corrective, it is no concrete attainedness, let alone guarantee of the being of its content. A
fixed ontology is also by no means contained in this corrective as in Thomas Aquinas and so many philosophers of closedness and enclosedness. What is attested in
Giotto is therefore solely the ultimate primacy of rest over motion, of space over time, of spatial utopia over endless temporal utopia, of the form of arrival over
perspective. Legend and its land here wants to make the situation into situationlessness and composes each of its events, with the strictest gradation, into a hierarchy of
the Ultimate, in which everything portrayed seems to be ordered in correspondences which are both promised and have occurred long ago.
Land of legend in literature: as celestial rose in Dante's ‘Paradiso’, as transcendental high mountains in the Faustian heaven
The features of the Ultimate were rigorously painted, but only hesitantly expressed. Their language faltered among nothing but psalms and songs of praise or did not
venture into the vast Sunday. No definition from the objective­real world could be applied to the absolute one without caution and mere signifying. Only where the
highest visionary power with regard to the invisible existed could a celestial land of legend also be provided with words, but with approximated ones. Dante and Goethe
thus concluded their works solely with indirect images of heaven, the one in contemplation of a given faith, the other in the faith of a transparent contemplation.
However, even the medievally secure Dante avoids the directness which great contemporary painting displayed towards heaven. Giotto's visible