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New: Dante vivo || White Silence
See also https://www.florin.ms/Bessarione.html for the mp4 files of the Academia Bessarion

THE FRESCO IN THE HOUSE OF

CARDINAL BESSARIONE



I was twenty-one, when I saw it, with my first-born child in my arms. The garden, the house, were a dream landscape, beautifully kept, the custode placing on the great refectory table a basket of fresh cut flowers. Cicero said happiness is a garden and a library. Have loved the fresco's Fibonacci curves, its naturalness, not one straight line, ever since; now copying it on my library rooms' ceilings around their chandeliers, on Orthodox Roma baby's cradles, and as paintings for gifts. Painting these in a library in a garden in Florence.

  

 


Once the Casina in Rome of Cardinal Bessarione, on the Appian Way near the St Sebastian Gate, was beautifully kept, as when I saw it. See, for instance, the photographs on Europeana. But now it is abandoned, the walls ruined by damp. I should love to live there and restore it as we have Florence's English Cemetery.

Cardinal Basil Bessarione (Βασίλειος Βησσαρίων), 1403-1472, was the learned, bearded Greek scholar who came with manuscripts to Italy in the Renaissance and was created a Roman Catholic Cardinal Bishop and Latin Patriarch of Constantinople. He had accompanied the Emperor John VIII Paleologus in 1437 to bring about the union of the Orthodox and Catholic faiths and, 6 July 1439, he read the declaration of the Greek Association of Churches in Florence's Duomo in the presence of the Pope and the Emperor. Resented in Byzantium, he then chose to live in Italy, establishing an Academy, like Plato's, for the study of Greek philosophy, and was a friend of Nicholas of Cusa. He presented his library of 548 Greek manuscripts and 337 Latin ones to the Biblioteca Marciana, St Mark's Library, in Venice, as well as a reliquary of the True Cross, in 1468, Bellini painting him with the latter, that painting now in London's National Gallery. The reliquary has been restored by the Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence.



It is Cardinal Bessarione whom the great Renaissance painters used as their model for the austere St Jerome in his study, hard at work translating the Bible from Hebrew and Greek into Latin as the Vulgate.




Though this story omits that Jerome was funded and aided in his work by the two noble Roman ladies, mother and daughter, Paula and Eustochium. It would be another Cardinal who remembered this, Cardinal Adam Easton of Norwich (1338-1397), who effected Birgitta of Sweden's canonization and likely supported Julian of Norwich in her writing of a similar book of Revelations, of the Showing of Love.

Indeed, a Venetian manuscript leaf, now in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, actually portrays Cardinal Adam Easton, at the bottom of his musical composition of the Visitation Office he promulgated, as Cardinal Basile Bessarione with his long white beard.

 
Cardinal Adam Easton as Cardinal Basil Bessarione as Cardinal Jerome

This morning (now sometime ago!), this scholar has been painting these roundels again. If you want one let me know, funds to benefit the Romanian Orthodox Roma living in utter poverty on Florence's streets. (We have now seen that the Roma no longer have to sleep under the Innocenti's arcade in the Piazza della Santissima but their poverty decidedly continues. These funds help them have library schools in their homes for their children in Romania, their mothers staying with them instead of begging in Florence's streets, to undo their illiteracy. While we teach the alphabet to their fathers working on this cemetery's restoration.)






See also https://www.florin.ms/Bessarione.html for the mp4 files of the Academia Bessarion


FLORIN WEBSITE © JULIA BOLTON HOLLOWAY, AUREO ANELLO ASSOCIAZIONE, 1997-2022: MEDIEVAL: BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI, SWEET NEW STYLE: BRUNETTO LATINO, DANTE ALIGHIERI, & GEOFFREY CHAUCER || VICTORIAN: WHITE SILENCE: FLORENCE'S 'ENGLISH' CEMETERY || ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING || WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR || FRANCES TROLLOPE || HIRAM POWERS || ABOLITION OF SLAVERY || FLORENCE IN SEPIA  || CITY AND BOOK CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII|| MEDIATHECA 'FIORETTA MAZZEI' || EDITRICE AUREO ANELLO CATALOGUE || FLORIN WEBSITE || UMILTA WEBSITE || RINGOFGOLD WEBSITE || LINGUE/LANGUAGES: ITALIANO, ENGLISH || VITA
New: Dante vivo || White Silence

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