Roots of Modern Minimum: San Marco9

In the end, this question: how do the spiritual principles of monasticism dovetail with the aesthetic principles of modern minimalism?

For Samuel Beckett language was a clutter, a fog, an excess to be ground down to a final minimum of what, perhaps, could be honestly said at all. I have that sense as well, listening to a Gregorian chant, the thread-bareness of honesty, of pure, acerbic essence.

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Few things, certainly not a Cellini sculpture or a courtesan's wily bon mot, could be transplanted from the 15th or 16th century into the jazzy precincts of Milan Furniture Week and fit right in. But this chair could. Quite remarkable.

Made of three simple, recurring elements. That's all.

The contemporary chair, by Shiro Kuramata, springs from a very different tradition of asceticism than that of European monasticism--though it presents a very similar sensibility. Wabi, Shibui (defined by James Mitchener as acerbic good taste) both denote traditional Japanese principles of serene restraint originating in the same voluntary poverty that gave rise to western monasticism.

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Symmetry is the dominant compositional gene both at San Marco and in all of Florence. To say it's an exclusive distinction of plain aesthetics is, of course, quite wrong, but it is an essential one in 20th century movements of plainness, or as a friend puts it, of ornament-crime.

I've always thought of Brancusi's Endless Column as a corollary, the uncrossed vertical of the Christian cross.

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Artists speak of media, as though paint or wood or steel are vehicles, middlemen in the cycle of making art that are eventually subordinated, or overtaken by other, more important aesthetic qualities. What if the medium is the message, italicizing, laying bare the wooden-ness of wood, the old glow of hand-worn, foot-worn surfaces, the chalkiness of plaster, making their sensuality as essential to a work of art or meditation as the musky tone of an oboe is to an oboe concerto.

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Plain and fancy.

It's a great object lesson to take college kids first to the church of San Marco, then to the monastery next door. Most find the baroque razzle dazzle of the church much more to their taste; the monastery not so much. A few, perhaps do.

Then we inform them that, taste aside, the architecture of the monastery is a much more distinguished example by one of the great Florentine architects of the 15th century. For many American kids this notion is entirely new, particularly in architecture, that poverty (of a voluntary kind) may be good; that asceticism is one road to the golden heights of artistic or literary refinement.

Lynne and I also point out that the origins of the college campus lie right here, in monasticism (cloister becomes the college quad; dormitories much the same), as does the symbiosis between a certain austerity of setting (my barren dorm room in college didn't even have a Fra Angelico fresco on the wall) and the diligent, secluded craft of learning.

They look at me as if I've lost my mind.

I love these corridors, the floor tiles, the serene plaster walls, the delicate ledge capping the wall; and what could be more elegant than the slice-of-bread-thin doorframes made of gray Tuscan stone, arched at the top and closed by a simple, hand-tooled wooden door that Sam Maloof or George Nakashima, had they been 15th-century Florentine tradesmen, might have made?

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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.