From the mosaics of Ravenna to the hill of Arcetri: Jerry W. Carter’s Mysterion of the Cosmos
It is rare for an astronomical observatory to open its rooms to contemporary art, and rarer still to do so for the first time. On April 15, 2004, Leonardo’s birthday, the Arcetri Astrophysical Observatory welcomed American artist Jerry W. Carter’s Mysterion of the Cosmos, at the foot of the hill where Galileo spent his final years. The choice, made by art historian John T. Spike, Artistic Director of the Florence Biennale, with Maurizio Seracini, known for his scientific study of Leonardo’s work, and welcomed by Director Marco Salvati, was not accidental. It placed the work within a distinctly Florentine tradition, in which painting and science are two paths to the same knowledge.
Carter’s language, however, was born elsewhere: in Ravenna, where he studied mosaic and where his Second Genesis, dedicated in 1988, stands in the Parco della Pace. Anyone who knows the starry vault of the Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, or the great blue disc above the paradise landscape of Sant’Apollinare in Classe, will hear a precise echo in Carter’s Green Life Disc. It is still a cosmic disc suspended over green nature, but what it holds is no longer a vision of otherworldly salvation. It is the fragility of Earth’s biosphere.
There is irony in the Lorenzo il Magnifico Award he received at the 2003 Biennale in the “new media” category, for one of the oldest art forms. The novelty lies in the combination: Venetian glass mosaic, cast stone and automotive enamels, applied in transparent glazes in the manner of the Venetian colorists.
Ravenna and Florence, the heavens of the mosaics and Galileo’s heavens: Carter does not claim a seat beside the masters, but he puts a present-day question to their tradition, namely what remains of the cosmos if the life that contemplates it disappears.
Download the bilingual catalogue Il Mysterion del Cosmo (PDF)