Is all that we see or seem
but a dream within a dream?
Edgar Allan Poe
Fra Angelico is one of those mysterious
characters whose existence inevitably puts us at the doors of
the medieval. We know nothing about him and, paradoxically, we
know a lot.
We don't know his original name, we know nothing about his family,
his childhood or even his everyday life.
He was born around 1395, in Tuscany, in Fiesole, north of Florence.
Today, with urban expansion, the small village where he was born
is part of the metropolitan region of Florence.
As is the case today, from the time of Fra Angelico's birth,
Fiesole was a haven for Florence's wealthy families.
It had been nearly sixty years since Giotto's death when Fra
Angelico was born.
By the time he joined the Church of Carmine guild on the seventeenth
of October 1417 - therefore about twenty-three years old - he
was already a painter. The church document is the first known
about him. He was then known as Guido del Pietro... or Guido,
Peter's son.
Who gives us more information about Fra Angelico is Giorgio Vasari,
who said he was a "rare and perfect talent".
There are other clues.
Fra is a contraction of "frater", brother, and specifically
indicated the begging friars - those who lived on alms and donations,
those who were intentionally poor. The name the priests chose
for him in the church was "angelico", angelic. It is
said that he was a good person, friendly, generous, dedicated
and, from what we see in his works, he was obsessed with his
work - as a major expression of his religiosity.
Angelico remained in the Fiesole convent until 1436, when he
was about forty years old. It was then that he moved to the San
Marco convent in Florence, where he met Cosimo di Medici - grandfather
of Lorenzo il Magnifico.
It was at Cosimo's invitation that Fra Angelico painted the convent.
He met Marsilio Ficino.
In 1445, at about fifty years of age, he was called to the Vatican,
always as a painter friar. Seven years later, he returned to
Fiesole, leaving again for the Vatican in 1455, where he remained
in the Dominican convent in Rome, and died that same year, on
the eighteenth of February, winter, at about fifty-nine years
old.
The cause of his death is not known. Then, Lorenzo di Medici
was six years old.
In a certain sense he died incognito - only the painter character
remained in memory. Everything left has disappeared, as so often
with our dreams.
He was a contemporary of Filippo Lippi, Leon Battista Alberti
and Piero della Francesca. Brunelleschi was about twenty years
old when Angelico was born.
He was a strange figure in the history of painting. If, on the
one hand, his work seems to insist on a kind of nostalgy and
celebration to Cimabue - Giotto's master - on the other hand
he permanently questions the culture of his time through dives
in flat perspective and light. If on the one hand he is a reactionary,
on the other he is a man of the future. His technique threatens
photographic verism - he is a critic of vision.
Certainly, there has never been an artist so paradoxical as Fra
Angelico, divided between a medievality that comforted and a
modernity that threatened the wealthy families of his hometown.
Around 1420, Fra Angelico, then about twenty-five years old,
paints - oil on panel, 75 x 207 cm, today in the Uffizi in Florence
- a great work: Thebaide.
History tells us that the panel would have been based on one
of his dreams. It shows us a universe that reminds us of what
would become Hieronymus Bosch a hundred years later, but still
without the strong surreal universe. Again, Angelico is on the
border between two worlds, a zone of all potentiality. Limit
is the very first condition of discovery.
A very popular theme in 15th century Florence, Thebaide is an
expression that emerged to designate texts telling stories of
the ascetic religious life in desert, in the region near the
city of Thebes, in Egypt.
A kind of escape from the world.
Fra Angelico's Dream is, however, another dream. Of him and of
we all. A dreamlike journey through five centuries of painting,
until the 20th century, technology, cinema.
A dream-trip from Angelico's times and our times.
A journey in a universe between worlds, where the image itself
is at the frontier of perception. Where what you see is largely
the perceptual and cognitive systems of each person, each individual
- just as it happens in a dream.
But it is also a mind-boggling trip to frontier worlds, as if
the contemporary universe were the limit of a new medieval period.
The dream is an exclusively individual experience.
Which reminds me of Van Gogh when he said: "I dream my painting
and paint my dream".
It is a short movie and a musical composition,
created entirely independently. The only common principle was
to establish a continuum.
In the film, the images of the five centuries of painting, technology
and cinema are elaborated according to the neuronal phenomenon
known as "optical flow".
Neurons located in the superior medial temporal area, also known
as MST, are specially oriented to respond to stimuli of rotation,
expansion, contraction and translation in relation to the visual
field. The MST receives most of its inputs from the medium temporal
area, or just MT - which is particularly sensitive to motion
detection. This is where the optical flow "happens".
MT is located in the temporal lobo, one of the four largest regions
of the neocortical tissue, and is directly related with visual
memory, the association of emotions, and language comprehension.
When we observe, for example, a waterfall for some time, as soon
as we look at something static we have the sensation of movement
in the opposite direction. This is called the "cascade effect".
A phenomenon of the optical flow.
We all have already felt it.
The central idea of the film Fra Angelico's Dream was to work
on a complex structure of optical flows, in order to operate
our visual memories, changing form perception.
Thus, not only the movie is a visual reference to the five centuries
of art, technology and also to cinema, as also each person watches,
in a certain sense, the image of his or her own brain, a biological
image of him or herself.
The music, composed for seven soprano transverse flutes, is made
with just three musical notes for each flutist. These notes were
determined after an analysis of the relations between musical
notes of a fragment of one of Beethoven's last quartets, the
Opus 130.
The playing time of the musical notes depends on each flutist.
In this case, I played the seven flutes. The duration of each
note was then determined by my biology, my ability to play each
note as long as possible.
The three notes are repeated in independent cycles.
The sounds of each flutist are distributed in space (virtual
or physical) according to a score that also determines the dynamics.
So, in fact, in this case the score is made for space and dynamics.
Film and musical composition are a work about the human being,
about the person who watches and listens - and does it actively
- or about who plays the musical instrument, producing an interaction
between the human, biology, time and space.
Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta
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emanuel pimenta click here to go to the movie-concertFra Angelico's Dream music score - space and dynamics