Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco4

Two of many frescoes painted by Fra Angelico (and helpers) in San Marco, where he resided as a Dominican monk. Every cell in the dormitory has a painting of a Bible story or Dominican legend (or curious blend of the two). I counted when I was there this spring, but forget at the moment just how many there are; at least forty or fifty cells in all.

It's really a lark to teach in a museum, standing in front of an actual Rembrandt or Zadkine, distractions notwithstanding (and we have had some thrillers--sprinklers turning on, sirens going off, steel barricades crashing down). But better yet is when that art is still in situ, exactly in the spot for which it was created. San Marco, indeed all of Florence, is a teacher's dream.

The second painting is remarkably akin to Surrealist art painted 5 centuries later. It depicts the scourges and humiliations of Christ; so vile were the offenders that religious conventions at the time these paintings were made forbade any representation of them as actual people. Just weird fragments, cadavre parts, all humanity subtracted.

R.o.M.Minimum San Marco3

I recall Troy Thomas, my art professor at Penn State, extolling the harmonies of interval and proportion in a Renaissance arcade, as if such perfections were a visual elixir, a holy spirit disclosing the mystical geometry of our own humanity. Brunelleschi, we were led to believe, spent as much time on their infinitesimal refinements as Einstein spent on an algebraic formula.

Here, in the cloister, monks or nuns strolled, the rhythmic repetition of the columns and arches inducing a state of contemplation the way the sound of waves or a dripping tap may do. Rule of thumb for any minimalist--repetition good, it shears away the superfluous; discloses the essential. Think of Swiss typography. Think of milking cows (an analogy lost on my urban wife).

John Pawson observed that compositions that are based on repetition tend to exhibit the quality of simplicity. This rhythmic repetition instills a sense of order. No surprise that branches of monasticism are called just that, orders.

Confronting you at the top of the stairs leading to the dormitory at San Marco is a bewitching fresco by Fra Angelico--his most famous--of the Annunciation. It takes place, as you can see, in a tranquil arcade that is almost identical to the real arcade at the bottom of the stairs.