Chasing beauty in Florence

Just some photos from my trip last week, and some housekeeping notes.

San Marco is a big convent in the centre of Florence where Fra Angelico lived and worked. His frescos are all over the place. The second floor is almost entirely the cells (sleeping rooms) for the friars and every room has a fresco for the monks to contemplate in prayer. But this big one confronts you as you start up the last flight of stairs, and it knocks you out.

If you’re just here for the Fra Angelico paintings, scroll past the next bit…

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The first time I went to Zecchi, 12 years ago, it was more as an art-nerd tourist attraction, to go and buy something from the world-famous Zecchi. And I’m happy to say that things have progressed so much with my painting work that I actually needed to go there, because the things I use in my work can’t easily be found anywhere else.

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How to Substack: moving forward

So, today I’d like briefly to talk about World of Hilarity as a thing, and how we’re going to proceed. I’m really happy with the decision to start focusing hard on Christian sacred art as a theme; history of, technical aspects of, philosophy of, etc. And everyone seems to like it. But I could use a little reader input on how best to move forward.

This afternoon I was talking to with my friend Dr. Peter Kwasniewski about the technical aspects of running a Substack. I explained that the basic procedural model is blogging - it's basically indistinguishable, you just write down whatever you’re thinking about - but the distribution model makes a huge difference. A blog is just a website sitting there waiting for people to come and read. If you want to build a readership you have to post a lot and promote like crazy. Frequency creates a sense of urgency and "buzz" and a blog that goes a week or more without a new post is considered dead.

But a Substack is a newsletter format. Readers like what they see and choose to sign up to receive your posts in their email - it’s a lot more relaxed, but blogging-style frequency isn’t the best idea. Imagine it’s like a physical, paper newsletter - do you want that popping into the front door letterbox several times a day? Would you read them all? No way. Same with email: no one wants to be bombarded with multiple posts a day, or even per week, just showing up randomly.

I find there’s a subconscious feeling when you’ve signed up for someone’s Substack that you’re in some sense obliged to read it, so sending people too much stuff puts a kind of burden on them. Too much and they’ll feel like they can’t keep up with it, or they're being left behind and quit. But then the other side of not doing it too often is to be absolutely reliable about your schedule - which I really fail at a lot, as we saw this week. And I have to admit that I’m kind of struggling with the two posts a week format.

A successful Substack works by rationing reader attention on a reliable schedule. It’s a bit like TV shows back when we all had TV sets. We'd look forward to our favourite shows, catching up with the characters and stories, once a week. I lived in Vancouver when the X-Files became a massive hit. You’d gather in each other's houses for watch parties. It was such a phenomenon that the pubs and bars' business association of Vancouver wrote in desperation to the production company asking that the show air some other time than Friday nights at 8pm. Their places were emptying out, with people stampeding for the doors to make it home - or to a friend's place - in time to watch it. (The bars started holding X-Files Night parties, so that worked out.)

The idea with a newsletter/Substack format, is a bit like that. You produce regularly and stick to your topic and people start getting used to tuning in every week, and a sense of community develops as we work slowly through ideas together.

I've found personally - mainly because writing isn’t my main work anymore, and I have to carve out time for it from other higher priority work - I’ve found it pretty daunting to produce two in-depth, long-form pieces a week. But when I started I was thinking more like a blogger, where frequency was as important as scheduling. So I said I'd do Wednesday and Saturday posts, as a starting point. But I’ve found that very difficult to keep up because the point is to develop ideas more fully, and that takes a lot of thought and time. And it takes time for people to read and digest it, since the posts tend to be longer.

My problem is that I'm physically pretty limited these days. Post-chemo fatigue is a thing, and turns out not to get better with age. I'm finding I have to be careful about rationing energy, very strict about a regular sleep schedule, eating properly and taking vitamins and whatnot.

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Turns out Florence is kind of horrible.

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So a day like two Saturdays ago, when my friend and I drove up to Florence and ran around town shopping and looking frantically at art, dealing with city traffic and fighting through crowds and then a 2hr drive home, left me completely flattened for more than a week. I was able to get two productive half-days of work in last week and felt like I'd swallowed a handful of lead pellets, or someone had turned the gravity up way too high.

Of course my regular Saturday post was out of the question, because Florence, but even my Wednesday post was postponed until Friday. And the following Saturday failed again (this is the Saturday Post on Tuesday). I've got a commission that needs finishing this week or I'll miss this month's shipping window from Naples, so any available energy had to be channelled into that. Last week’s Wednesday post I got lucky because I had found some old writing on a topic that happens to be quite current right now, and got a good piece out of it without too much extra writing. But that was cheating a bit.

But I was still determined to get a second weekly post in today, before starting over tomorrow, and thought y’all might enjoy just some of the 100-odd Florence photos with some commentary. And that gave me the idea that maybe a slight modification of the scheduling model would be OK.

What if we keep Saturday very light and easy going, no deep thoughts or 3000 word articles, but more just photos and videos from places I get to go and interesting things I get to look at - we’ve got some pretty great stuff right here in Narni, for example. Or we could maybe do a small fine-focus thing on a particular painting or painter - and save the long-form essays for once a week on Wednesdays. Give everyone some space.

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The Convent of San Marco

I promise some day I’ll get one of those holder things that steady your videos so they’re not so jiggly. It was early March, which is the closest thing there is in Florence to low season. It really wasn’t overly crowded and we got as much time as we liked in front of each painting.

The reason Fra Angelico’s paintings are so meditative, so contemplative, is that’s literally what they were for. Some of his most famous frescos were done on the wall of each of the friars’¹ cells and were there to provide visual assistance to contemplative prayer.

The Virgin and St. John mourn the dying Christ.

Most of the top floor of the convent of San Marco is devoted to the cells, and even with tourists, the place retains a sense of peacefulness.

Each cell is open, but there’s a little rope stopping you going in. So you have to lean in and take photos of the paintings from funny angles.

The delicacy of his figures is emphasised with the expressions, which are serene or sorrowful or filled with joy and wonder, but never lose that sense of interior peace.

St. Dismas, the good thief, in the dormitory chapel.

“Noli me tangere,” - touch me not. Christ the gardener is carrying a mattock digger, a tool in use for thousands of generations.

One of the Apostles at the Last Supper, the fresco of the refectory. You could just walk right up to it. No ropes or glass or anything.

More of the Last Supper fresco

Baptism of Christ. I’m doing a version of this myself, and copied John the Baptist’s pose quite closely. This composition of this scene, with the poses, is very much a standard one, taken from the previous Byzantine tradition.

This is quite different from most of his other Annunciations, in which the Virgin is nearly always seated in the arched portico of a house, and the angel kneeling or bowing. The colours of the Virgin’s dress are also anomalous.

More cell frescos

This form is called a “Sacred Conversation”, where you see the Virgin and Child enthroned in the centre, surrounded by various saints standing around, a symbolic depiction of heaven. In the centre is St. Lawrence, with his grill. I’m not sure about everyone else. It is in the hallway of the dormitory.

Downstairs, in what I took to be the Chapter room, a large fresco of the crucifixion with a lot of saints covers an entire wall. Some of the images are quite famous, but I’d never seen this of the Virgin in a swoon in her grief, being supported by St. John, the other two Mary’s.

Some of the Crucifixion saints.

I took over a hundred photos, some of them just for my own use in studying the painting and gilding techniques, but quite a lot of them very much worth looking at. But I think we can save them for later.

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Thanks for reading to the end. If you would like to see some of my “real” work, my painting, you can click on my Ko-Fi page, Hilary White; Sacred Art, here, where you can also drop a few coins in the tip jar if you enjoyed this.

Right now this blog is not directly monetised, and painting and donations from supporters and patrons are my sole source of income. If you sign up to be a monthly patron, you can join my private patrons-only chat group on Signal.

You can also follow me at Hilary White: Sacred Art on Facebook and see a little hint of the Old Hilary White; journalist being cranky on Twitter too. Many thanks to all who have contributed to make it possible to keep working - the “struggling artist” thing doesn’t last forever, but it is a struggle for a while. Stay tuned.

1. Dominicans are mendicants - meaning they move around, taking positions in different places as they’re needed, teaching and whatnot, so not strictly speaking monks. Monks - like Benedictines and Carthusians - are purely monastic and stick in one place all their lives. So Dominicans, like Franciscans, are properly called “friars” and they technically live in a convent, not a monastery. Though if you want to call them monks that’s fine too.