St Jerome in his study [part i]

The view of Jerome is framed by a stone arch. He is inside this sunlit portal, and we are outside it, looking in. It gives the picture a self-conscious and rather deliberate feeling, but also a playful one. In deliberately displaying the act of 'framing', the painting is referencing the act of compositional contrivance that all paintings partake in, as if unmasking at the very outset the artifice of its own creation.

The doorway is neither straightforwardly a framing device, nor a naturalistically depicted element in a realistic scene. The tonal contrast between the radiant umber stone and the shadowy interior of the 'study' is quite extreme at the top of the picture, but less so at the bottom, where soft shadows slant away from the door's corners and crawl up the side of Jerome's desk. By contrast with the depth and complexity of the interior, the articulation of the door is comically restrained- the capitals on either side of the arch are reduced to plain outlines, with the whole assemblage topped by a ludicrous miniature bauble. The distinction between the 'interior' and 'exterior' is profound and very noticeable but not total; the door appears to occupy an odd ambivalent point, neither fully part of, nor genuinely separate from, the rest of the painting. Its reflexive self-consciousness passes to us; we are aware of ourselves looking, of stepping inside the frame, because it literally shows the 'threshold' between our space and that shown inside the painting.

Sitting on the step of this threshold are an object and two creatures- a quail, a peacock, and a golden bowl. The hard-headed author of this site instructs us that "the peacock and partridge have no importance to the story of St. Jerome"- although, like many objects in Renaissance paintings they possess symbolic values. It is difficult to determine exactly what these are, however, and I don't want to try, because what is interesting is not so much what they mean as how they appear. The birds both strike the same pose: full profile, looking dignified, puffed-up and somewhat heraldic. In this, they almost could be mimicking Jerome- perhaps more so the pensive quail than the graceful peacock. But there is also something lifeless about their perfect stillness, which is is magnified by their positioning. The bowl and birds are all in a row, rather neatly lined up but positioned slightly incidentally, neither equally spaced nor symmetrical around the centre of the arch. Each looks 'placed', and clearly none is in motion. This isn't natural or random, but neither is it purely symbolic and rational. It is most reminiscent of the deliberate, well-groomed randomness of still-lives or the backgrounds of portrait interiors. In short, it is tempting to read a kind of equivalence across the three, to see all three as 'objects' after a fashion.

The question which this raises is, should this equivalence be read more generally across the painting? Is Jerome, sitting inert in his chair, also an object?

St Jerome in his study [intro]

St Jerome was a popular subject for painters at a certain moment in the 15th century. In the old master rooms at the National Gallery you see him again and again; a white-haired scholar, reading in a desert cave, usually with an incongruous and strangely unthreatening lion somewhere in the middle distance. There are variations: sometimes the lion sits attentively while Jerome declaims from his translation of the bible, at other times the lion has come to find Jerome in what appears to be the scriptorium of a monastery. The life of St Jerome was heavy both on corporeal works and miracles; he wrote and translated prolifically, but also found time to tame a wild lion, from whose paw he removed a thorn, and which afterwards followed him like a dog.

He is the subject of one of the strangest and most interesting pictures I've ever seen; St Jerome in his study, by Antonello da Messina. When you see the picture, that cliché often repeated of Tristam Shandy- of being postmodern before there was any modern to be post- immediately suggests itself. Its composition, all blind corners and diminishing frames within frames, could be taken from a Peter Greenaway film, as could the odd miscellany of suggestive objects that litter the painting. It immediately seems that an intricate and sophisticated symbolic game is being played, but it isn't clear what its rules are. The surfaces of Jerome's study teem with exotic birds, vases, book, and miniature plants; but the study itself, absurdly, appears to have been erected in the middle of a vast, empty church.

I can't pretend to have any professional insight into Renaissance symbolism, or theology, but I still want to attempt a close reading of the painting. As much as any other feature, what intrigues me is the multilayered space of the picture, with its oddly static characters and profusion of detail. Even sticking only to what is actually visible- resisting the urge to decode anything- there is a huge amount of ground to cover. As a survey, I suppose this is at least tangentially architectural- concerning itself with formal choices and their effects- and thus hopefully understandable on that basis.

City metaphors

These spreads, from O.M. Ungers' Morphologie: City Metaphors (1976), were an attempt to spark a richer and more productive discussion over urban form. All design begins with images:

"In every human being there is a strong metaphysical desire to create a reality structured through images in which objects become meaningful through vision and which does not (...) exist because it is measured."

His argument, stated obliquely in the introduction, was that an approach based too much measurable criteria- square metres, pounds and pence- had been left denuded of conceptual sophistication, instinct, and depth.

Symbolic, analogical or metaphorical thinking was not meant to act as a substitute for statistical analysis, but did hope to break its "claim [to] a monopoly of understanding".

Like many fascinating books of the seventies, Ungers' Morphologie was fighting a battle that is definitely now finished. The functionalist technocracy that he was tilting at- all point blocks and space standards- would be totally gone in most of Europe and America within a decade, and the burgeoning of symbolic thinking in architectural and urban design would produce only the rottenly ubiquitous, self-consciously self-serving 'icon'.

That isn't Ungers' fault, and, unlike some of his contemporaries, he isn't blasé about the potential for a great big metaphor to be fatuous, or stupid, without proper analysis and criticism. The creative and pragmatic would alternate, not as "opposed [methods], but more in the direction that analysis and synthesis alternate as naturally as breathing in and breathing out, as Goethe put it..."