A profane Sacra Conversazione

From the 15th century, in Italy and Flanders courtly rather than religious iconography develops, where the Virgin Mary with the Child preside as if informally over a group of saints (and often donors) in an apparent attitude of mystic conversazione. It was a more attractive and relaxed type which replaced the rigidity of the altarpieces and which in a certain way emulated the atmosphere of a humanistic court, where woman was the object of Platonic devotion following the model of the troubadours and the Dolce Stil Novo which Guido Cavalcanti or Dante had carried to the heights of the western poetical imagination in the fullness of the Gothic era. Another turn of the screw in the progressive worldliness of the religious scene, contemporary with the rapid development of cities and civic activities, a world which understood much better the meeting of a refined group of illustrious men who were respectful towards the Mother of God, warm and close to her son and to all the sons of God, than the magic presence of a Majestas enthroned like that of Santa Fe de Concas, “a sort of oriental idol”, as Emile Male was to say, the terror and salvation of the peasants who inhabited the Europe of the year 1000.

As a genre within the genre of painting, the Sacra Conversazione would evolve in line with the concept of the individual, with greater human prominence and less religious transcendence, swiftly expanding the concept of intimacy within the home, fully differentiated from the public sphere. The splendid, sober virgin in Giovanni Bellini (1490)’s conversazione in the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice is the culmination of this modern encounter, a work for private devotion where no more than traces of courtly luxuries still remain, excepting the ornaments on Mary Magdalene’s robe and the pearls interwoven in Saint Catherine of Alexandria’s locks. … the step towards the Dutch and Spanish still lifes already seems a well-trodden pathway. From the worldliness of what is sacred to the sacredness of what is worldly is the transmutation which we observe following the rhythm of the emergence of the urban bourgeoisie. Two completely contemporary works such as that of Pieter Claesz and the extraordinary “A cup of water and a rose” by Francisco de Zurbaran speak to us of the same thing, of objects dignified as subjects, enabled even to establish a tacit conversation among themselves.

In Teresa’s work, descriptively entitled “Ceramiques sobre blau ultramar” (Pots on ultramarine), the Virgin`s mantle, in that blue which Duccio Buoninsegna had typified as an attribute specific to Mary, has been spread over the table to welcome the conversazione of some oriental ceramic vessels, like those which are to be found in so many houses in the more traditional China or the most modern Japan, in so many stores in south east Asia where the sale of products in bulk makes large desirable porous containers necessary. The traces of that courtly world which once formed the background to the conversaziones of the heavenly aristocracy for the brush strokes of Simone Martini, Jan van Eyck, Il Bergognone, are reduced to the luxuriant lapis lazuli blue of the holy cloth and the golden spark which we can make out under the great green jar, a filament of shining brass like the traces of a crown which has ended up as something rather obsolete. The bowl’s moonlike pallor which speaks to us from one side of the canvas comes from the world of tea, of Japanese ceremony, and is of the Shino type, from the province of Mino, where agriculture and ceramics flourished in unison. It rests solidly on the surface, with its thick, uneven sides, with its imperfect, almost mother of pearl white, contrasting dramatically with the almost black background, and inserted into the group of ceramics stands forth like a secular Virgin Mary, full of spirit. Christine Shimizu talks of the “increment of being” which native Japanese ceramics bring to the recuperation of the great ancient ovens of the country with its folk-art production and above all the legendary invention of the Raku type bowls in Kyoto in the 16th century by the theist master Sen no Rikyu and the artisan Chojiro. In contrast to the earlier tea ceremonies, where the Chinese and Korean utensils presided on low daises with their historic prestige over beautifully decorated halls, now all the objects, the utensils, are placed directly on a humble woven straw tatami, and need a stronger and more autonomous, we could almost say telluric, physical presence, as if they emerged directly from the earth instead of descending by divine transcendental emanation from the jade-coloured sky. It is no longer a floating world of resplendent princes and saints, but rather something vigorously present, corruptible and material.

“...what is present is present with full fervour, as if it were down on its knees praying for you...”

Letters on Cezanne, Rainer Maria Rilke 

Teresa's brushwork is quite different from that of the early 21st century, which by means of brilliant colour influenced by Matisse expresses constant vibration, flooding all over the canvas and confusing background and figure: now darkness takes over the work, with mature, saturated colours which almost try to collapse bidimensional space and go beyond it. The shadowiness demands a longer brushstroke to allow for fresh layers of paint, to give depth. “Layers of darkness” as Junichiro Tanizaki would say to explain to the West the Japanese predilection for black lacquer, for rough paper, for rough ceramics, for dimly lit rooms: “we have always preferred deep, rather veiled reflexes to a chill, superficial brightness”. Quite an elegy to shadows which also suits this “Ceramiques sobre blau ultramar” (Pots on ultramarine),  where the transition from sooty emerald green to the lapis lazuli blue and black of the background is a path of transition from the shades of night, a night illuminated by the moon, covered with craters.