(piano music)
Man: We're in Santa Cecilia in Rome looking at the ruins
of an extraordinary fresco by Cavallini
from the late thirteenth century.
Woman: We're above the entrance to the church
and we're looking directly at a fresco
that in the late thirteenth century
people would have looked up at
and it's a scene of the last judgment.
Man: Right so this would have been on the wall
opposite the altar and this would have been the last
thing you saw as you were leaving the church.
It's a monumental fresco.
You see Christ in the center in a mandorla,
that is a kind of divine emanation or halo that surrounds
his entire body.
He sits here as judge over the souls that have lived.
Woman: And he exhibits for us very clearly
the wounds of the crucifixion.
We can see holes from the nails in his feet
and his hands, and the wound in his side
that is bleeding.
A reminder of Christ's suffering.
His return now is judge of mankind.
Man: He is framed by angels on either side
and beyond that we can see the apostles,
six on each side.
Between the apostles and Christ there were two
other figures.
You have Mary on Christ's right
and you have John the Baptist on Christ's left.
Woman: And we're so clearly at just before
the time of Jato in the way these prefigure
what Jato will do in the very early years
of the fourteenth century.
Man: Right. This is known as Roman realism.
He's clearly borrowing from the Byzantine
but there is a kind of unprecedented
interest in creating a sense of naturalism
as figures of our world.
Woman: That can be seen in how heavily
the figures are all modeled.
There is not thin elongated forms created by line,
but really monumental forms created by the use of light and dark.
Man: You can see that use of light and dark
very consistently in the furniture as well,
and the light makes it very believable.
The line is drawn so that there is a precocious
attempt at a kind of perspective.
Not true linear perspective of course,
but something that is very much trying to explain
how these angles function in space as one
looks up from below.
Woman: That's right, especially evident in the seats that the
apostles sit in. They angle inward toward the center.
So it's as though they really are thinking about us
as the viewer in the center looking up at Christ.
Man: There is a kind of sensitivity in terms
of rhythm and especially color in this painting
that is so beautiful.
Look at the apostles.
You have alternations of violet blues, red blues,
grey blues, green against a warmer kind of grey
moving across so that there is never a repeat
of the color, just beautiful.
Woman: And we get a sense of a
three-dimensional body underneath that drapery.
If you look at the apostles,
we can see the drapery pulling around their bellies,
around their shoulders, in the folds around their arms.
Giving us a sense of monumental figures
that really haven't been seen since ancient Rome.
Man: It's interesting to think about this move
from the spiritual rendering that is a kind
of symbolized body to one that is dimensional,
one that takes up space,
and this idea that there is a proximity
between the way in which these figures
are rendered and the bodies that we inhabit.
Woman: And the kind of human emotions
that we feel.
If you look at the figure of Saint John the Baptist
with his hands clasped in prayer,
the way that he moves his eyebrows together
and there are wrinkles in his forehead
and he looks toward Christ.
There is a real sense of individuality
to these figures and a sense of human emotion
as they look toward Christ.
Man: But these are still clearly coming out
of the Byzantine tradition.
If you look at the face of Christ we might
be looking at a mosaic from Ravenna
from Constantinople.
Woman: That's right.
This moment at the end of the 1200s,
the beginnings of the 1300s when we have this
imminent naturalism.
Man: Of course Catallini does not know that is coming.
That's our hindsight.
Nevertheless, we can see this kind of painting
along with the sculptures of Pisano or perhaps
the work of Cimabue as we're beginning to move
into what will eventually become the Renaissance.
(piano music)