quinta-feira, 19 de abril de 2018

Da influência improvável


David Hockney está a braços com o estudo da perspectiva, interessa-lhe sobretudo a possibilidade da perspectiva reversa. Um colaborador vai à net, esse mundo de quando em vez admirável, e a busca leva-o a um pequeno ensaio de um padre moscovita, com obra até em crítica de arte. 

Florensky, born in 1882 in Azerbaijan the scion of secular Westernizing parents (his father a Russian railway engineer, his mother the cultured product of ancient Armenian nobility), proved a mathematical prodigy from his earliest years and went on to do pathbreaking work in non-Euclidean mathematics while also pouring himself into wider scientific studies more generally. But apparently, after a visit to Tolstoy in 1899, Florensky fell into a growing spiritual crisis in which he came to doubt the primacy of the scientific positivism that had guided his studies thus far. Following graduation from Moscow State University in 1904, he declined the offer of a teaching position in mathematics, instead repairing to the nearby holy city of Sergiev Posad (site of the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, the most important monastery in the Russian Orthodox Church), where his theological studies culminated in his being ordained as a priest in 1911 (though he married and would have five children). Although he wrote widely on philosophy and theology (his essays on the idea of the Divine Sophia would later become central to the concerns of feminist theologians), he nevertheless continued his equally far-flung scientific investigations, all the while trying to meld the two vocations. Following the Bolshevik Revolution, and even though the Communists shut down many of his most beloved Orthodox institutions, he threw himself into technical work, particularly on behalf of the electrification of rural Soviets, under the sponsorship of Trotsky himself (notwithstanding his insistence on wearing clerical robes all the while). By 1932, however, Trotsky was gone, and Stalin, finding the charismatic and querulous cleric an increasing nuisance, had him exiled to Siberia, where he launched into investigations on the nature and properties of permafrost, further path-breaking research that has become increasingly relevant in recent years with the rise of global warming. Meanwhile, in 1937, at the height of his Red Terror, Stalin had Florensky brought back to St. Petersburg and, following a brief trial, summarily executed—that being the very year, as it happens, of the birth of David Hockney in Bradford, England. 
(...) His reverse perspective essay, in particular, dates from a moment in 1920 when Bolsheviks were busily imputing the value of the medieval Orthodox icons they were tearing off the walls of museums and monasteries, dismissing them as hopelessly primitive for their allegedly clumsy handling of modeling and perspective (the way, for instance, a nose might be seen to be going one direction while the lips went another and the eyes a third—not in any way, at any rate, as in real life). But Florensky fired back, marshaling tremendous erudition to argue that if, as far back as Babylonian and Egyptian times, artists and craftsmen continually made similar errors, it was not because they didn’t know about rigorous one-point perspective (they would have had to call on such knowledge to be able to build pyramids and the like) but because they sensed there was something wrong with its practice when it actually came to the depiction of real life in all its timely and timeless vivacity—and they chose not to use it. Florensky showed how conventionally one-point perspectival tricks first began being deployed on theater sets in ancient Greece and Rome with the express intent of deceiving audiences, such illusionistic effects being likewise prized on the walls of decadent villas, say, in Pompeii, even though they really only registered as accurate from one specific location, completely falling apart from any other point of viewing. Over and over again, Florensky marshaled arguments that Hockney himself would start deploying more than sixty years later (...)

E tudo ganha forma e perspectiva. Pode ler-se na íntegra aqui

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