Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal (2004)

I think you cut off the damned.

Serves them right.

IThat is a very nice photo, and it looks like a lovely piece. I love early medieval art, but after seeing museum after museum while touring France, I rebelled in Avignon and said I couldn't handle another saint or sinner!

Too bad about Avignon -- the Papal Palace has a great tour, in English, and it really is fascinating place.

Torcello is a very cool place but my overriding memory of the island is my little three year old being bitten by a cat in a market stall and then nearly falling into the canal. We loved Italy, but she lived it.

Also, had a two hour lunch at an incredible restaurant. Those were the days . . .

Brad, if you like that kind of mosaic storytelling, you need to bop on down to Palermo and take the local bus out to Monreale. A Western Christian (Norma) ruler, Arab craftsmen, Byzantine storytelling. Things in Sicily were never better.

how much more crowing over your Italian trip do we have to put up with. Tell us how much weight you put on, so we can sneer.

Ummm, well, to move to a higher plane... St. Augustine compared the universe to a mosaic. Poor humans with their limited understanding were like children kneeling down and peering at a very few pieces of the mosaic and very close range, and therefore saw only jagged chaos. The beautiful grand design escaped them completely.

by the way, I think the damned are down there to the right, so the "cut-off" are not cut off at all in the photo. Doesn't the lowest panel to the right show the angels pushing those miserable Democrat liberals onward to their fates with pitchforks?

beautiful Brad. More please.

Hope the little Locanda that was run by Harry's Bar is still there and still good. One of my favorite places on earth.

Just back from Italy as well where we saw the Ravenna mosaics for the first time. Absolutely stupendous. The thread linking 500AD mosaics and 1200AD frescoes makes very clear what is meant by the Dark Ages in Western Civilization.

Yes Brad, more, much more!

BTW Brad:
"The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. All I know is what I have words for."
Ludwig Wittgenstein

Of course, the damned are there, in the lower register on the right (from the viewer's point of view). In medieval art the blessed are ALWAYS to the right hand of the Lord and the damned to the left one. Also, the blessed sit in peace and order, while in the region of the damned there is chaos and confusion. Anybody who has experienced anarchy, as I had in 1944, knows that the medieval artists and theologians were no fools. And I say this as a firm agnostic! The Middle Ages got a bum rap from the vulgar-liberals of the 19th. century.

When I lived in Venice in 1985, I spent considerable time on Torcello. I have a fond memory of the way the campanile of the Cathedral loomed over the grassy pathways of the island. I had forgotten the majesty of this mosaic. The whole of the Venetian lagoon, the upper Adriatic coast of Italy, is filled with these majestic works. The dichotomy between the decaying, rustic masonry exterior and the resplendent gold tesserae of the interior mosaic has always fascinated me. It strikes me as the antithesis of the American experience.

Thanks for posting this photo. You should check out Paul Mariani's poem about this work. It is the last poem in his 1979 book called Timing Devices, published by David R. Godine, Boston. It is also the reason I was searching for a photo of the work.