TEATRO OLYMPICO IN IT'S VARIOUS STATES

Teatro Olimpico

There are works of art which one thinks about, and works of art about which one dreams. In the latter category, for me, is the Teatro Olimpico of Andrea Palladio which I instantly precognized the first time I saw it as something long known from the deep. Those pre-Gutenburg memory palaces about which Frances Yates writes in GIADANO BRUNO AND THE HERMETIC TRADITION and THE ART OF MEMORY, spatializations of the mind's architecture which--with training--can turn the mind into a compendious library--these may have been a buried connection. At any rate, I decided to make a hologram of it about eight years ago, a failed effort of months labor. And perversely, presumptiously, I decided to have at it again just before Christmas.
It was like falling down a well into the time which had been, facing these identical problems of depicting entablatures, cornices, multiple perspectives, and a multitude of statues, statues in every conceivable position, at the tops of columns or in niches or battling in friezes--here be centaurs--and I sometimes felt I had been assigned to the underworld to make sense of its monuments and inscriptions.
Several times I abandoned it to draw for five days in a giddy reaction. Several evenings I persuaded myself it was done, only to realize how far I still had to go come morning. I announced its completion--and picked up the brushes again for another thirty hours work over two days. The last fine-tuning was done several days ago. Is it finished now? My private name for it has been "Orfeo", as while I was painting it I thought not only of Monteverdi, but Stravinsky's plaintive ballet score, of how Lizst described the slow movement of the G major Beethoven concerto as Orpheus taming the furies, of Alain's statement, "Orpheus calling Euridice back is the essential text of the imagination." Also the late Elizabeth Sewell, whose ORPHIC VOICE traces a lineage from Ovid through Shakespeare to Wordsworth to Rilke, and with whom I used to talk on the phone. She envisioned a braided strand of thought in which magic and science wound around each other, and whose interplay formed a new mode of thinking.Looking back on her work, I feel that there are clues within it, if such a thing might be done.It is to her memory that I dedicate this painting.