From Giovanni da Rimini to Piet Mondrian: “universal beauty arises from the dynamic rhythm of its inherent relationships”

 

Tomorrow an extremely rare masterpiece “from the dawn of the fourteenth century” will go under the hammer at Sotheby’s, in occasion of the same auction during which also the fine drawing by Botticelli that we published a few days ago is gong to be sold.

 

The panel is the left wing of a diptych that Giovanni da Rimini, an early and wit follower of Giotto, painted with great care to movement and space. From the upper left section, representing vertically the Apotheosis of Saint Augustin, to the complexity of the episode of The Dispute of Saint Catherine (low section), bodies and background elements are organized so to express lightness, fluency and dynamism; look, for example, at the convergence between the emperor’s throne at the right side of the room and the Saint’s pulpit stairs.

 

The comparison between this panel and the right side of the diptych – currently preserved at Palazzo Barberini in Rome, revels how the attention Giovanni pays to movement and space is – reinforced by the irregular partition of the scene of the first one. The red decorated strip that separates the Apotheosis of Saint Augustin from the Crowning of the Virgin and the circular group of angels and saints looking vividly at it doesn’t continue on the lower section, where the throne and the mountain create a sort of unique object. Moreover, the left side of the red horizontal strip has no decoration, and differs from the other horizontal line at the feet of the Holy Mary and Jesus Christ.

 

Why are we so interested in this details? To prove that there is a long thin bridge linking this piece to another master of lightness, movement and perspective, Piet Mondrian. More than five hundreds years later the result of using interrupted lines and asymmetry is pretty much the same and the abstraction process moves from the same basis (even if from different information’s sources), as Mondrian himself claimed in 1937:

 

Throughout the history of culture, art has demonstrated that universal beauty does not arise from the particular character of a the form, but from the dynamic rhythm of its inherent relationships, or – in a composition – of its inherent relationships, or – on a composition – from the mutual relations of forms. Art has shown that it is a question of determining the relations. It has revealed that the forms exist only for the creation of new relationships: that forms create relations and that relations create forms. In this duality of forms and their relations neither takes precedence.

 

Piet Mondrian, in Circle–International survey of constructive art, London, 1937.

September 22, 2014