Part I

The gap between “don’t” and “look” isolates “look” so that we experience it as a subliminal positive.

Memory is a current event, not a recall. We poetically situate memory as a tendril reaching backwards to yesterday, but in fact it is a construction in the present. This is not to descend into relativity. The present does not erase past realities, but it also does not conjure it. What we conjure when we “re-member” is a collection of current sensations.

In “The Liturgy of the Dominican Constitutions: Frescoes in the Cloisters of San Marco,” William Hood writes that there are no “story-telling” scenes in the paintings, that there is no attempt to “integrate the past with the present.” The Mocking of Christ is remarkable in this regard as intentionally disembodied hands and head spit at the blindfolded seated figure of Christ as though the not-Christ does not warrant more than implication. Here, not even the present integrates with the present.

In my art historical naiveté, I thought that the missing fragments of torso and limbs had been lost to time and that the visual information had been irretrievable to contemporary restorers. In fact, Fra Angelico omitted the material from the beginning so, in this context, the notion of “being lost to time” seems a saccharine self-indulgence. I was mourning the deterioration of a master’s work when in fact no one had died. But then, The Mocking of Christ presents a kind of death. The death of the beginning, middle, and end. The death of narrative. Fra Angelico may have been the first Modernist. God in the figure of Christ (here seated in a royal pose with orb and staff, not humbled on the cross) is situated as the great “I am”, as most immediate.