Opicinus de Canistris was a thirteenth century Italian priest, mystic, writer and cartographer who created fantastic cosmological diagrams that literally, turn the world on its head. Unlike our present science whereby we strive to dig down until we find the tiniest element that might lie underneath everything, he was trying to give to his society a picture of how everything fits together. In order to do this he gives non human forms, both spiritual and human attributes. I think we can still learn something from his approach. Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit
Diagram of the days of creation: With Africa as infidelity, speaking to Europe as Faith
Commentary on a Passage from Aristotle on the velocity of the planets
I had been thinking about how images could be used by an audience or perhaps more accurately how I would like the images I make to be used. In the minds of certain mystics imagery could be simultaneously informational, pedagogic and meditative in function and it is this complexity that I am aiming for when developing ideas for my art work. I like the idea that images can be looked at again and again and that their meaning could be unravelled slowly over time. As always I'm looking for antecedents and in Opicinus de Canistris I found a precursor who used a combination of visual and written approaches to explore his very personal ideas about the cosmos, self-knowledge and God. He made a series of intricate cosmographical diagrams based on late medieval maps and charts of the Mediterranean and other drawings and diagrams of what were then contemporary ideas, whereby the spiritual and the material worlds were understood as interacting and intermingled. This fact was I thought very interesting, as it reinforced my own belief in an entangled experiential happening and that what was perhaps needed was an art form that could be used as a support for some sort of meditative experience.
Opicinus de Canistris was often found reflecting on the microcosm within the macrocosm and was concerned to renounce sensory experience, during a 'cleansing of the windows of the soul, so that the
light of spiritual reality would transform his understanding'. Which is for myself a powerful indicator that he was taking this work very seriously, but not only that, he used diagrams as an aid to a process of self-reflection and analysis, something that I have also come to see as another aspect of visual awareness that reoccurs often in contemporary drawing practices. However I would like to embrace sensory experience rather than renounce it, as I believe that it is sensory experience that is vital to our experience of life.
The map of Europe as an idea containing several bodies
If you turn the image of 'Comparison of the Natural Versus the Spiritual world in Relation to the Church of the Spirit' on to its side, you can easily see a quite contemporary looking map of Europe centred on the Mediterranean. As this was drawn in the mid 13th century, it is a pretty good contemporary vision of the best mapping available at the time, but the personification of the landscape is something that has emerged out of much older traditions, ones that go back to ancient myths of the Earth's genesis; myths that pre-date the Bible.
Babylonian Map: 6th century BC
In the stone map made in Babylon above, you can just about make out the outlying regions, which are the triangles that project out past the edge of the circle. We still have the descriptions of regions three to seven, all of which must have been strange distant places in relation to the people of Babylon. So many of the stories about far off places would in those days have been more myth than reality, but you can sort of guess what is being referred to. The third region is where "the winged bird ends not his flight", the fourth where "the light is brighter than that of sunset or stars"; the fifth, due north, lay in complete darkness, a land "where one sees nothing" and "the sun is not visible"; the sixth, "where a horned bull dwells and attacks the newcomer" and the seventh, "where the morning dawns". In such maps we can see a fusion of reality and fantasy. As maps become more attuned to the realities of politics, they change shape and can reflect other ideas such as the fact that we need to pass through the landscapes of the world if we are to interact with them. We pass through one place after another.
Maps can operate in a variety of ways, just think of how our London tube maps are simplified into linear forms that can be printed up and placed over the doors in train carriages. This is an old idea, one the Romans used to use.
From Iberia in the west, to India in the east: an ancient Roman road map
Map of the cursus publicus
The cursus publicus was a system that allowed for the flow of power to operate. Rome needed to set up a complex communication system to allow its agents to travel throughout its territories unimpeded. Each identified town, village, site or area would have been responsible to the needs of any travelling dignitaries such as magistrates; providing horses, food and safety for public servants as they passed through. I was interested in the maps of the cursus publicus, as they don't look like the ground from space as current Google maps do, they are very much the product of information, one area of responsibility having to follow the next one, similar to the way names are placed on tube maps, so it is very clear what places a traveller would have to pass through. However there was no need to show how this relates to some sort of accurate geographic positioning. As long as the traveller knew that on leaving area one at some point area two would take up the responsibility for their safety, all was well. This I realised could be used by my own visualising of the interior of the body. I am trying to express something about emotional shape and colour; something that I know exists and that it does so within some sort of inner body map, but that map doesn't have to be located in any sort of one to one correspondence with the interior of the body as laid out in contemporary anatomical diagrams. I am reassured therefore that my idea of taking a long journey through an imagined body/landscape, might after all be a viable one.
Two tests from part of a journey through an imagined body/landscape
Interoceptual portrait
I would like to feel that there is a connection between my own attempts to create an Interoceptual portrait like the one above and images made by Opicinus de Canistris, such as his diagram of the mystical body of Christ. The overall shape can be enough to state that this is an image of a human being. Embedded into the image is partly the idea of a map, partly the idea that a body could represent something much more than itself and partly the idea that any individual can go off on a tangent and discover something mystical about both themselves and their vision of how things might be and that is always something wonderful.
Reference:
Opening to God: The Cosmographical Diagrams of Opicinus de Canistris
See also:
Diagrams: Visualising the invisible
The diagram as art and spirit guide
Emotional landscapes
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