I went on exploring what experiences other people had of visiting the place. A traveler had made extensive documentation of the visit through text and pictures that he posted on his travelogue. His enthusiasm came across in the mere volume of detailed documentation he had made. It was like going on tour with him finding out about how the palace was originally used. Being the seat of political power for many decades I started imagining how having those images souring obove the politicians and the rich nobles was impacting their decision making. I then imagined how it would be to host a high school class there for a month. What would the results be? Would the students' academic performance change in resonance with the surrounding?
My own going deeper into the work. I search for the presence of Palacio Ducale on the internet. I found multimedia material showing 137 high resolution images that one can zoom in and out and observe in detail with just a click of the mouse. Another relationship start to imerge. I see details in the work and draw paralells between them.
I could see details and reflect upon them. The Battle of Salvore and Il Paradiso had many similarities, despite their opposite themes. The depiction of battle was a sort of image of human made world, a sort of hell on earth. The other one was Tintoretto's image of heaven above. Yet structurally there were many similarities. Images of people colliding, floating into each other. Striving to hold on to the above. Would I have lingered on for so long if I hadn't had Katrina's transmission of her quality of experience to guide me? Had I not tried to recreate it from my room and through the medium of the computer?
Dear Katarina,
you gave me your post cards that you bought at your first visit to Palacio Ducale. You invited me to construct something out of them. Had I seen them without hearing your story first, I don't think they would have been enough for me to feel invited to interact. The ecstatic feeling of captivation by the space and the art, people lying down on the floor or walking with the mirror to see the details above. They would have been too time and space specific. But now their time-space specificity made the physical interaction with them all the more valuable. I was, for a moment a care taker of something that was of great importance to you, and I felt a sense of reverence and responsibility. It was something precious. It was that interaction with the postcards as material - how they felt, their paling yellowish color, their glossy surface, their physical preservation that I connected with emotionally, rather than intellectually. The point of departure into the work, a possibility of immersion, coming closer to this art work, and also your art work. This whole experience reminded me of another filmmaker’s experience as he looked up at the ceiling of Sant’ignazzio di Loyala a Campo Marzio Church in Rome when he realized that was the quality of experience he want to achieve in his films. Even though artwork belong to the Baroque époque there are many similarities between the spaces – the architecture fusing together with the painting, as well as multidimensional layers of images and stories. Do check his documentation of his visit here.
Take care, Amra
And then on youtube I foulda person filming their visit, trying to depict their images through the camera movement that seems almost to depict a person losing their balance, an aimlessly buzzing around the room like a fly. It was a sort of collapsing of the frame that Karl-Oskar Gustafsson mentions through the terminology of the art historian Christian Wölfllin. The greatness of the work, its' shere size and magnanimity if detail, had come across in the filming as a smallness of the individual. This time having your head up high was an act of humbling.
I could notice that the images in the foreground were silhouettes and that the images underneath were visible and lit. The light from the sun was shining from a side on the ones that were on top, but as light spread downwards it was ubiquitous. The images below looked illuminated, almost ghost like.
