Art in Novels: In Venice visiting the Scuola Grande di San Rocco high on cocaine (according to Geoff Dyer)

Tintoretto worked at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco from 1564 to 1588, producing an impressive cycle of 52 paintings and 8 “teleri”. At first, it took him four years to paint the 27 canvases composing of the Sala dell’Albergo, where the governor of the brotherhood used to have their meetings. From 1576 to 1581 he painted a second group of other 25 canvases for the Sala Superiore. Then he finished his feat doing eight “teleri” for the Sala Terrena.

 

Geoff Dyer describes the 45 year-old Jeff Atman, the anti heroic protagonist of his art based novel “Jeff in Venice, death at Varanasi”, entering the Scuola Grande di San Rocco in a state of discouragement and confusion. Laura, a 15-years-younger femme fatal with whom he is having a odd love affair, has just departed from Venice leaving him in struggle. Here below the passage, probably one of the best parts of the book. It describes Jeff’s experience of the Tintoretto’s cycle, surprisingly enriched by an unpredictable element:

 

Eventually he came to a small piazza – not even a piazza, really – hemmed in by three churches, cheek by jowl. Two of them were bright white, and one of these – one of the white ones – was the Scuola Grande di San Rocco. Feeling as worn out and used up as he did, the prospect of paying just five euros to get out of the heat and into the cool darkness of a church – with a massive helping of Tintoretto thrown in – was a welcome substitute for a drink in the Manchester Pavillion.

After the blaze of daylight, stopping into the interior was like blacking out. He had a quick scan around the ground floor and trudged up the stairs. Too bad the idea of the church tended to go hand in hand with a not inconsiderable thrust of verticality, that the notion of the bungalow had never really taken root in ecclesiastical design. He plodded onwards, climbing a stairway to chiaroscuro heaven. It was all happening up here. There was a lot to take in. Way too much. Walls, ceilings: every inch was crammed with prophets, angels and tough-guy saints. Everywhere you looked, figures came looming out of the muscle-bound darkness. Everything loomed out of the darkness. Wow, Tintoretto really painted up a storm in this piece. Jeff’s knowledge of the sources was a little sketchy; beyond the fact that these were biblical scenes, he was completely in the dark. As far as he could make out, Tntoretto had compressed the best bits of both Testaments into one building. IN a way, Though, it was an easy book to compress, the Bible. Basically, things were always getting hurled – out of the light and into the darkness – or were ascending – out of the darkness and into the light, of which there was not a vast amount. Bearded prophets, swirling drapery and billowing clouds – it was all go up there. In marketing terms, though, the pitch seemed fundamentally and horribly flawed: the idea that we could be bullied into paradise.

Looking up at the ceiling was making Atman’s neck ache. Then he noticed a few people walking around holding wood-framed mirrors the size of portable TVs. He picket one up from the stack on the other side of the hall, the other side of the world in a sense. The first thing he saw was his own face looming out of the biblical swirl in the background. The mirror was like a square halo. Cubist. The halo, the mirror, the ceiling – the background – all loomed darkly. Everything blazed with light, however scarce, was somehow sacred. As far as the weather was concerned, a devastating flood ar torrential storm seemed a distinct possibility. He scanned the room. Apart from a couple of quiet japanese, he was now the only person here. He flopped down into a chair, put down his glass, and emptied the remains of Laura’s wrap onto the mirror. Using the leaflet explaining hoe Tintoretto had done all this knockout painting, he tapped the coke into a rough line. Surrounded by the mirrored darkness, the powder seemed whiter than ever, white as a cloud. He took another quick look around, dipped his head to the mirror and snorted it up. Partially blocked with dried blood, his nose made a sound like a pig snorig. Ha! He saw his pupils – already large from the darkness – dilate further. This made the art of the past really come alive. Now everything really loomed and reeled. It was like staring up from the bottom of the well. There was nothing but dark and light, and everything was reeling. Swirling, looming and reeling. Everything loomed and everything swirled, and the swirling and the looming was one. And the paintings, he saw now, were explicitly – in the sense of allegorically – about getting high. Guests at the Passover looked like they were crowding round a table wanting to snaffle up mire than their fair share of whatever was on offer. The halos of illumination around the saints’ heads were like comic-book signifiers, signifying that of all these holy men were getting loaded.

July 17, 2015