...For instance a window open at night with two shutters fastened back; a room with nobody in it, despite the air of stability given by the shutters fastened back, and in a night made of absence and questioning, without furniture except for the plausible shape of vague console-tables, a warlike dying frame of a mirror hung at the back, with its stellar and incomprehensible reflection of the Great Bear, which alone connects this dwelling abandoned by the world to the sky.
From a commentary on his sonnet Ses purs ongles tres haut dediant leur onyx by Stephane Mallarmé, in a letter to Henri Cazalis, 18 June 1868
...Mortals dwell in that they receive the sky as sky. They leave to the sun and the moon their journey, to the stars their courses, to the seasons their blessings and their inclemency; they do not turn night into day nor day into harassed unrest.
From Building Dwelling Thinking by Martin Heidegger
In his essay Heidegger defines a relationship with the world that begins with wonder and is structured through intuition and perception. The rigour of careful investigation is not denied and the stickiness of pure subjectivity is sidestepped. He defies the idea of a mechanistic cosmos. He defies the steady rationalisation of Knowledge that was triggered off by the scientific discoveries of Galileo and others. Alberto Perez-Gomez in Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science pursues this idea of a fixed and reductive image of the world: "One result of the crisis has been an unprecedented inversion of priorities: Truth - demonstrable through the laws of science - constitutes the fundamental basis upon which human decisions are made over and above 'reality', which is always ambiguous and accessible only through the realm of 'poetics' ...man has done his utmost to define the human condition and ironically has lost the capacity to come to terms with it; he is unable to reconcile the eternal and immutable dimension of ideas with the finite and mutable dimension of every day life."1 The limitations of parading the micro-chip as the Philosopher's Stone.
...Marvellous is the favour of the Night, the greatly exalted, and no-one can tell whence and what it is she bestows on one.
From Brot und Wein by Holderlin, 1800
Our understanding of the world reaches us through a reductive process the effect of which is not unlike the dull and steady glow of a modern fluorescent tube. The absence of a profound mediating structure that connects experience with understanding suggests a type of darkness or night. Holderlin describes it as a divine retraction but posits this absence as potentially regenerative. The world then is activated and made living if we can see it in terms of a cycle of dissipation and rebuilding; societies and civilizations constantly grinding together in a continental drift throughout history; breathing with potential rather than spinning out with endless 'progress'. The qualities we associate with the night - of sleep, waiting, dreaming, of silence and watching, assume great power.
The construction of the Studiolo of Francesco I was begun in 1570 by Giorgio Vasari, author of Lives of Artists and cultured stage-manager for the court of the Medici family in Florence. The Studiolo is a tiny room filling a wedge of waste space in the rambling and officious Palazzo Vecchio. Francesco I was the diffident son of Cosimo Medici, who previously had governed Florence during its most glorious years. Francesco was sophisticated but ill at ease with the rigours of courtly life. He spent much of his time on private projects, especially the philosophical science of alchemy. The Studiolo became the locus for these activities, as well as providing a storehouse for his extensive collection of rare natural objects and antiquities. Two rows of paintings cover most of the wall space, concealing a series of cupboards and shelves as well as a hidden door. No natural light ever entered this private space. Subjects for the paintings, sculptures and decorated ceiling were devised by Vasari and another writer, Borghini. It was decided to create within the Studiolo a meeting place of art and nature - to provide a metaphor (refined and squeezed into this tiny room) for the infinite complexity of the world outside.
A frescoed ceiling shows the god Prometheus giving the gift of fire to man - the means to activate and use the world around him. The agents of the physical world - the four Platonic elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water- are described along the four walls in a series of oval and oblong paintings. The paintings are all in the stule of late Florentine Mannerism, and display an extreme and often precious abstraction. The subject matter is wilfully exquisite and remote. Many of the paintings describe nocturnal scenes that create a mood of reflection and privacy. Great use was made of subjects from the mythological world, suggesting both the physical qualities of the elements and their metaphorical and spiritual nature.
The idea to reproduce the Studiolo of Francesco I, both architecturally and thematically, came from a desire to present works of art within a specific and self- contained context. Today, when an artist is commissioned to produce a piece of work, fundamental problems arise. The work must be conceived according to traditional practice: intention, propriety and scale are pre-determined to a certain degree. The four-fold division of the walls into the four Platonic elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water of the original Vasari scheme has been maintained, and the artists involved were free to choose one or two elements on which to base their work. In commissioning the works for this exhibition, emphasis was directed away from the style and subjects of the late Mannerist paintings of the original Studiolo, and the artists were encouraged to incorporate the commission within their normal working practices.
The reconstruction of the Studiolo itself is a collaborative design with the architect David Brand. It follows precisely the dimensions and plan of the original structure. The existing Studiolo in Florence is in fact a reconstruction dating from the early twentieth century. It uses wooden panelling to replace the lost panelling to replace the lost Mannerist stucco decoration. This wooden surface mimics true masonry construction, and provided the basis for our design. The wooden detailing of our walls has been either modified from the original or completely re-designed. The original vaulted ceiling was omitted from the design due to lack of space. It was at no time a consideration to reproduce the Studiolo in a spurious 'contemporary' style.
Vasari's design for the Studiolo is an extraordinary synthesis - an imprint of the perceived world ordered within the metaphor of the Platonic cosmos. This exhibition is an attempt to open channels of symbolic thought, to establish connections between man and the physical world, and to stimulate through analogy the vast areas within our society which have become immobilized by reductive thinking. It is here that Mallarmé's image of the heavens reflected in the mirror finds its place.
– Michael Graf, 1988
(1) Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science, Alberto Perez-Gomez, MIT Press, 1983, pp 4-5.
