When European Christians began building their great cathedrals, and then began to paint the ceilings, they encountered a unique problem, that is it’s hard to project true geometry onto vaults and domes. Because the space starts large at the beginning, but then pulls into a point at the top, the sense of perspective gets totally off. If you were, for example, to be painting the image of a saint in the dome, the saint’s feet would be really large, but then the body would have to get consistently narrower until they ended up with a really small head. So, artists had to create a new way of showing perspective, but even then, sometimes it would be a little off depending on where you stood, that is in some churches there is an ideal viewing location. When he was painting a soaring trompe l’oeil dome, that is a fake dome, on the ceiling of the church of Saint Ignatius of Loyola in Rome, the artist Andrea Pozzo had an even more unique problem. Because not only did the perspective need to be done correctly, but because the entire thing was fake, and there was no true vanishing point in the center, he inserted a marble disk in the pavement of the church to indicate where people should stand to be able to witness his masterpiece. There is only one place to stand to have proper perspective on the painting, and the farther you get from that, then it stops being effective.
When I read of that a few months ago in a book on the trial of Galileo by the Inquisition, I thought it was the perfect metaphor for what’s going on in the world today. That for a long time, most people were standing on the marble disk and so the world looked okay, it looked like they expected it to look, and certainly how they wanted it to look, and how others said it was supposed to look. But now, we have moved off of the marble disk and everything seems weird, the image to some people is now distorted and they are searching desperately for the marble disk, so they can go back and stand on it and the world will make sense again. Except that we can’t go back to the marble disk for the very reason that the disk isn’t even there anymore and the image itself is changing anyways, so even if we could find the spot where it used to be the image still wouldn’t be the same. As much as this strikes anxiety and outright fear into some people, and celebration into others, this I not all that unusual in the history of humanity and its true in the church as much as it is in politics.
