National Portrait Gallery; digital photography does not equal the technology of Leanardo da Vinci

Saint Matthew, Apostle Sat. 21 September, was a historic day at the Cathedral of Edinburgh and St. Andrews, the new Archbishop, Leo Cushley, was ordained.
News: An interesting media on the National Portrait Gallery has a focus on the Leonardo da Vinci' The Last Supper. It is worth while to follow the role of each of the Twelve Apostles at the Last Supper, and St. Matthew is in turn.
One headline from the Times was passed on to me:

The cups runneth over at the actors’ Last Supper  

The outer left three actors should look to Jesus, if following Leonardo.
From left: John Alderton (Bartholomew), Sir Richard Eyre (James), Steven Berkoff (Andrew), .

National Portrait Gallery cue to St Matthew in Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper.

NPG connives with the Dan Brown 'Da Vinci code'.

The actor, Julie Walters has the role for St. John. She must be embarrassed by the National Portrait Gallery miss-presenting Mary Magdalene.

The project is for funding for the National Portrait Gallery extension, unlike in keeping  with St. Matthew called away from tax collecting.

Matthew gestures, flinging his right arm towards Jesus

§ http://leonardo-last-supper-jesus-betrayal-announcement-traitor-judas.com/?p=10

Matthew, Jude Thaddeus and Simon the Zealot

Simon the Zealot

• Apostle Thomas, James the Greater and Philip are the next group of three. Thomas is clearly upset; the raised index finger foreshadows his Incredulity of the Resurrection. James the Greater looks stunned, with his arms in the air. Meanwhile, Philip appears to be requesting some explanation.
• Matthew, Jude Thaddeus and Simon the Zealot are the final group of three. Both Jude Thaddeus and Matthew are turned toward Simon, perhaps to find out if he has any answer to their initial questions.

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The, National Portrait Gallery, project has depended on the digital photography. Does the digital  photography does not equal the technology of Leanardo da Vinci. viz, 

  Artistic truth instead of correct perspective.

 

The outer three to the right:
Both Jude Thaddeus and Matthew are turned toward Simon,
perhaps to find out if he has any answer to their initial questions.

The heads of the apostles are also not shown 'correctly' in accordance with the central perspective. Instead, they all appear to be directly in front of the viewer regardless of whether they are in the middle part or at the outer ends of the table. By this means they are given a much emphasized presence. The group as a whole is also more present in the real space of the refectory because the painted wall is like a stage with the table of the Last Supper very close to the footlights. (Michael Ladwein).

Last Supper: Actors In Leonardo Da Vinci Scene

The photo is inspired by the Leonardo da Vinci work depicting the moment Jesus tells his disciples one of them will betray him.

2:57pm UK, Monday 16 September 2013

Scene recreated by British actors

A cast of British acting talent has teamed up to re-create Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper for the National Portrait Gallery. They include (left to right) John Alderton, Sir Richard Eyre, Steven Berkoff, Tim Pigott-Smith, Sir Antony Sher and Julie Walters.

Scene recreated by British actors

Robert Powell, Colin Firth, Tom Conti, Sir Michael Gambon also feature.

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As do Simon Callow, Peter Eyre and Anthony Andrews.

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Gallery: Da Vinci's Last Supper Posed By Stars

British acting stars have teamed up to recreate Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper for the National Portrait Gallery.

Among the names who posed for the photograph are Robert Powell, who famously played the title role in the TV mini-series Jesus of Nazareth.

Others include Julie Walters, Sir Michael Gambon and Steven Berkoff.

Photographer Alistair Morrison said: "My first two choices were Robert Powell who had to be Jesus … and Julie Walters, who was asked to play Mary Magdalene.

"Their enthusiasm and influence helped to bring together this outstanding group of actors."

The photograph is inspired by Leonardo's original 15th-century work which depicts the moment Jesus tells his disciples that one of them will betray him.

Prints of the photograph, called Actors' Last Supper, will be sold at the central London gallery's new prints sales section.

Prices will range from £12,375 for a limited edition work to £2.99 for a postcard.

Portraits of Kate Moss, Bob Dylan and David Bowie are also going on offer.

From left: John Alderton (Bartholomew), Sir Richard Eyre (James), Steven Berkoff (Andrew), Tim Piggott-Smith (Peter), Sir Antony Sher (Judas), Julie Walters (Mary Magdelene), Robert Powell (Jesus), Colin Firth (James the Greater), Tom Conti (Thomas), Sir Michael Gambon (Philip), Simon Callow (Matthew), Peter Eyre (Jude Thaddeus) and Anthony Andrews (Simon the Zealot)

Alistair Morrison/National Portrait Gallery/PA

Extracts from Michael Ladwein, Leonardo da Vinci, A Cosmis Drama and an Act of Redemption

(  p. 42   The Group of Individual and heir Gestures)

58      Real and Imaginary Space

  Artistic truth instead of correct perspective

The heads of the apostles are also not shown 'correctly' in accordance with the central perspective. Instead, they all appear to be directly in front of the viewer regardless of whether they are in the middle part or at the outer ends of the table. By this means they are given a much emphasized presence. The group as a whole is also more present in the real space of the refectory because the painted wall is like a stage with the table of the Last Supper very close to the footlights. Leonardo achieved this illusion by means of the frieze he painted along the top of the mural and the light grey strips that frame it on either side. These should be viewed as partially visible corner pillars supporting the frieze or rather the architrave. This generates the impression of a peep-show stage with a jutting proscenium on which the company of the Last Supper is gathered. The stage effect also arises from the fact that the painting is several metres above the actual floor of the refectory. This enabled Leonardo to insert a necessary degree of distance between the painting and the real and profane realm of the refectory. After all, the events of the Last Supper and those partaking of it belong to a truly higher, sacred sphere and therefore need to be 'elevated' spatially despite being given such an immediate presence.

««     Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Das Relief von Phigalia. 1818.     

 Leonardo da Vinci, a total art world in himself, to whom we have devoted much, albeit nowhere near enough, attention, is as auda­cious as were the artists of Phigalia. We have thought deeply about The Last Supper with much enthusiasm and in doing so have also contemplated it with veneration; but now let us permit ourselves a joke at its expense. Thirteen persons are seated at a very long and narrow table. They are struck by a shock of emotion; a few remain seated while others partially or entirely rise to their feet. They delight us with their polite yet passionate conduct, but let these good people take great care not to try sitting down again; at least two would end up on each other's lap no matter to what extent Christ and John might manage to reduce the space between them.

Yet it is the very sign of a master that he purposely makes a mistake for the greater advantage of his work. Plausibility is a rule of art, but within the realm of plausibility there must be a celebration of the highest even if it would not otherwise become manifest. What is correct is not worth sixpence if it has nothing else to show for itself. «« 

The depth of the painted space p.59

Closer examination raises many further questions about the space in which the Last Supper is taking place. It is therefore no coincidence that art historians have to this day continued to research this mysteri­ous and highly complex painted architecture with ever more subtle methods without reaching a general consensus. Although such analysis is a matter for specialists, the results (of which only the most plausible are presented here) that reveal Leonardo's inventiveness and the ease of his mastery of geometry, perspective and optics continue to astound the amateur." Moreover, coming to grips mentally with these things also offers us an excellent opportunity to school our own skills of observation and perception.

 Michael Ladwein: www.ladwein-reisen.de 

Notes of Leonardo

Dickens had a Marian Vision

 
 http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/features/2012/02/15/the-night-dickens-had-a-marian-vision/ 
The night Dickens had a Marian vision

As we celebrate 200 years since Dickens’s birth William Oddie recalls the writer’s uncanny vision of a woman in blue

By WILLIAM ODDIE on Wednesday, 10 February 2012


A woman holds an enlarged stamp of Nicholas Nickleby
from the Royal Mail’s stamp issue marking the
200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens (PA photo)

It is a major national commemoration: Charles Dickens, England’s greatest novelist, was born just two centuries ago. England’s greatest dramatist, William Shakespeare – or so some writers are now plausibly claiming – may well have been a Catholic. It is harder to make such a claim for Dickens: G K Chesterton, however, (who certainly understood Dickens better than Dickens understood himself) did in effect claim that Dickens was at heart a Catholic: and, as I shall argue, this is a claim by no means as outlandish as it might at first seem.
It is, of course, true that Dickens rarely departed from the anti-popery of the average Victorian Protestant Englishman. Travelling through Switzerland in 1845 he crossed a river, from a Catholic Canton into a Protestant one, and noted the contrast between “on the Protestant side, neatness; cheerfulness; industry; education; continual aspiration, at least, after better things” and “on the Catholic side, dirt, disease, ignorance, squalor, and misery”. He went on to say that he had “so constantly observed the like of this… that [he had] a sad misgiving that the religion of Ireland lies as deep at the root of all its sorrows… as English misgovernment and Tory villainy”.

It was, however, one of Chesterton’s principal claims in his great book on Dickens that It was upon him that “the real tradition of ‘Merry England’ had descended”:

The Pre-Raphaelites, the Gothicists, the admirers of the Middle Ages, had in their subtlety and sadness the spirit of the present day. Dickens had in his buffoonery and bravery the spirit of the Middle Ages… It was he who had the things of Chaucer, the love of large jokes and long stories and brown ale and all the white roads of England…

In fighting for Christmas he was fighting for… the holy day which is really a holiday … He cared as little for mediævalism as the mediævals did… He had no pleasure in looking on the dying Middle Ages. But he looked on the living Middle Ages… and he hailed it like a new religion.

Dickens was, of course, as Chesterton recognised, intellectually hostile to the Catholic Middle Ages, lacking as he did both self-knowledge and understanding of the past: “[H]e supposed,” said Chesterton, “the Middle Ages to have consisted of tournaments and torture-chambers, he supposed himself to be a brisk man of the manufacturing age, almost a Utilitarian. But for all that he defended the mediæval feast which was going out against the Utilitarianism which was coming in. He could only see all that was bad in mediævalism. But he fought for all that was good in it.”

Though Dickens hated all displays of religious feeling, he had a distinct and sincerely held religion of his own, possibly influenced by the Unitarianism of his friend and biographer John Forster. In 1868 he gave a New Testament to a son setting out for Australia, “because it is the best book that ever was, or will be, known in the world”; and he wrote to him in order “most solemnly [to] impress upon [him] the truth and beauty of the Christian Religion, as it came from Christ Himself”. “Never,” he went on, “abandon the wholesome practice of saying your own private prayers, night and morning. I have never abandoned it myself, and I know the comfort of it.”

This was the Dickens who in 1844 underwent a religious experience (rarely written about), which he described vividly in a letter to Forster. “Let me tell you,” he wrote from Venice, “of a curious dream I had, last Monday night; and of the fragments of reality I can collect; which helped to make it up … In an indistinct place, which was quite sublime in its indistinctness, I was visited by a Spirit. I could not make out the face, nor do I recollect that I desired to do so. It wore a blue drapery, as the Madonna might in a picture by Raphael; and bore no resemblance to any one I have known except in stature … It was so full of compassion and sorrow for me… that it cut me to the heart; and I said, sobbing, ‘Oh! give me some token that you have really visited me!… Answer me one… question!’ I said, in an agony of entreaty lest it should leave me. ‘What is the True religion?’ As it paused a moment without replying, I said – Good God in such an agony of haste, lest it should go away! – ’You think, as I do, that the Form of religion does not so greatly matter, if we try to do good? or,’ I said, observing that it still hesitated, and was moved with the greatest compassion for me, ‘perhaps the Roman Catholic is the best? perhaps it makes one think of God oftener, and believe in him more steadily?’

“‘For you,’ said the Spirit, full of such heavenly tenderness for me, that I felt as if my heart would break; ‘for you it is the best!’ Then I awoke, with the tears running down my face, and myself in exactly the condition of the dream. It was just dawn.”

Was this a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary, as many Catholics will naturally assume? During the course of the dream, Dickens made the assumption that he was speaking to his wife’s sister, Mary Hogarth, who had died in 1837, and whom he had dearly loved (though he also perceived that the spirit “bore no resemblance to any one I have known”). But he also explained the dream afterwards in explicitly Catholic terms, pointing out that there was “a great altar in our bed-room” where Mass had once regularly been said, and that he had been “listening to the convent bells (which ring at intervals in the night), and so had thought, no doubt, of Roman Catholic services”.

“Put the case,” he wrote to Forster, “of that wish” [the ambition he had expressed in an earlier letter, to leave in his writings his “hand upon the time … with one tender touch for the mass of toiling people that nothing could obliterate”] “being fulfilled by any agency in which I had no hand; and I wonder whether I should regard it as a dream, or an actual Vision!”

A vision of the Blessed Virgin, strengthening what was to become Dickens’s lifelong vocation of fighting in his writings for “the mass of toiling people”? It is worth repeating that Dickens himself certainly wondered whether this was indeed “an actual Vision”: and if a vision,

of whom else?

William Oddie is the author of Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (Centenary Press, 1972)

Showing 5 comments

 Parasum 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand "It is worth repeating that Dickens himself certainly wondered whether this was indeed “an actual Vision”: and if a vision, of whom else?"


## Why not of Mary Hogarth, whom he first thought it to be ? Why does everyone called Mary have to be that particular Mary & no other ? FWIW, the BVM is not the only person to have appeared to the living; many Saints have done so; and Saints are not alone in doing so.


Article on Mary Scott Hogarth here:

http://www.victorianweb.org/au...


What is said makes a good case, quite incidentally, for identifying his nocturnal visitant with her, and not with the far more famous Mary. Mary Hogarth was already very dear to him, as well as being a relative - so it would be natural for him to dream of her, or even have a vision of her.


1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand The story of the vision and the style of Oddie's writing made this a great read but it was the question raised by Dickens which was the most intriguing for me, namely 'What is the one true religion?' and his explanation 'it makes one think of God oftener...'. I am working my way through Ratzinger's "Truth and Tolerance" and he addresses this same question by placing it in the broader context of culture and thus the two together form an intersting synchronicity, one a vision, the other visionary.

 silverlady 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand God speaks in dreams as well as in visions.


A Like Reply 2 days ago 0 Like


2 comments collapsed Collapse Expand do you, by chance, know of a citation where the full letter resides on the internet?


Parasum 1 comment collapsed Collapse Expand


Go to this:

http://books.google.co.uk/book...



I searched with a quotation - p.245 is the beginning of the account of the dream.

Or, see: http://www.archive.org/stream/...

for page147 of vol.2 of John Forster's "Life of Dickens", an earlier edition of the book quoted above. The pages are from chapter 6, which covers part of the year 1844. The account of the dream ends on p.150.

Catholics and ‘the Rapture’. Thinking Faith Article

  http://www.thinkingfaith.org/articles/20111215_1.htm

Catholics and ‘the Rapture’ Sr Cathy Jones RA

Photo by Lord Jim at flickr.com

The gift of the Incarnation is the foundation of the hope that nourishes our faith during the season of Advent. But as we prepare to celebrate the birth of Christ, we might ask ourselves how we engage with a belief in the Second Coming of Christ, something which is often radicalised and even distorted in popular discourse, and as such may not be a strong tenet of faith for many Catholics. Sr Cathy Jones asks if there is a place for belief in ‘the rapture’ in the Catholic consciousness.

Catholics affirm their belief in Christ’s Second Coming each time they attend Mass or whenever they recite the Creed. The belief that this present world will come to an end and that Christ will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead is an essential part of Christian doctrine, founded on the unambiguous words of Jesus Himself.[1] However, I am sure I am not the only Catholic who would say that this essential aspect of our faith has little impact on my everyday life as a Christian. Faced with such a great ‘mystery’ as the end of the world, or Christ’s Second Coming, it is all too easy to put it to one side and not take the time and effort to reflect upon it.