BREVILOQUIA

Following Holly Flora's talk on the Poor Clares' commissions of narrative painting by Cimabue and others in central Italy: realization that literacy among medieval women was multitiered; that the "daughters of Eve" (aka women) were not thought capable of the acmes of spiritual devotion vis-a-vis language devoid of images. Being yoked to the earth, they were thought to require the crutches of their "bodily eyes"; hence sisters prayed by panels dominated by episodes (and diaphanous loincloths, apparently) rather than abstracted icons. Up close. Part of a larger revolutionary literacy campaign on the part of the Franciscans: various strata of the vulgate, one reckons.

These musings follow a day of staring at white on white on white.

St. Bonaventure on the integral:

"But as no one can appreciate the beauty of a poem unless his vision embraces it as a whole, so no one can see the beauty of the orderly governance of creation unless he has an integral view of it. And since no man lives long enough to observe the whole with his bodily eyes, nor can anyone by his own ability foresee the future, the Holy Spirit has given us the book of the Scriptures, whose length corresponds to the whole duration of God's governing action in the universe."