there

is no escape from Fra Filippo Lippi's Madonna and Child
this evening, knowing, with full and open mind its Renaissance
volumetry and space while also knowing in spirit its oiled
religiosity of niche-into-parapet but not drawn in by that,
and instead locked against its infinite gaze, as if she could
be any woman with downcast eyes and knowing with the heart
(as any woman might) how the position of her hands are
cupped to the back of the child's head in protection of how
the infinite tenderness of her yes to his is a vulnerability
that she choses, willingly loses its release to a swim through
the eyes of another, as if to reach one's limit in that
extreme journey beyond self, with no beginning nor end to
a cheektocheek press past yesterday when four year old Ray
declared, with trust in her words, "you are mine", face
squished onto face and for a moment unable to breathe...

Renaissance reappreciation of the human aspects of life
is framed within its variegated marble panels, brocade
and all the pleated draperies of her dress, filigreed
halo set against its recession into space...how
Botticelli will soak him in like a light touch to the
soul and how one can visualize a small osterie in 15th
Centuried Florence where artists gather through hot
summer evenings to discuss theories and beliefs that birth
their techniques-for-something-new and how their
preoccupation with knowing leads them through a particular
confluence of many fields, past geometries and anatomies
of thought that lay the foundations for modernity, how the
Renaissance artist will be most concerned with the stuff of
human-spirit-into-form and unlike the Greeks and Romans,
will render beauty in old age as well as in youth,
chasing after stillness as well as movement

how paintings talk amoungst themselves

how a breathless press of skin
is like the silence of a white page,
how the ravishing first time of anything
is chased by all the subsequent delight
of its replay
and
how the moon appears to listen
to the night
within the painted light
of ages cast

"Irony, metalinguistic play, enunciation squared.
Thus, with the modern, anyone who does not
understand the game can only reject it, but with
the postmodern, it is possible not to understand
the game and yet to take it seriously. Which is,
after all, the quality (the risk) of irony. There
is always someone who takes ironic discourse seriously.
I think that the collages of Picasso, Juan Gris and
Braque were modern; this is why normal people would
not accept them. On the other hand, the collage of Max
Ernst, who pasted together bits of nineteenth-century
engravings, were postmodern: they can be read as
fantastic stories, as the telling of dreams, without
any awareness that they amount to a discussion of the
nature of engraving, and perhaps even of collages. If
"postmodern" means this, it is clear why Sterne and
Rabelais were postmodern, why Borges surely is, and
why in the same artist, the modern moment and the
postmodern moment can coexist, or alternate, or follow
each other losely...It demands, in order to be
understood, not the negation of the already said,
but its ironic rethinking." (Umberto Eco)