The conceptual purpose of my thesis is to create a new Sistine Chapel but reinventing two particular things: the Last Judgement wall (which is what inspired my unborn painting) and a certain piece of music that was ONLY ever performed in the Sistine until the mid-18th century by the papal choir. I would like to bring in an ensemble (of which my parents and I are some of the founders) called Vox Fidelis to come and perform the piece in a contemporary way, paying tribute to the traditional performance style, but again, reinvented.
My thesis project is going to be an oil painting on canvas: about 11.5’x 15’. The canvas will be attached to the wall, not stretched, with industrial Velcro. The purpose of this is to pay tribute to the original Sistine Chapel. I would like to reference the physique of a fresco, while still maintaining the use of oil paint. The reasons for this are because I cannot make a fresco on the gallery wall, and I do not find it to be wise to switch to a different medium that I have not had much, or technically any, practice with. Also, the look of oil paint and how it holds light will be a better fit to my image and the point I will try to get across than fresco. I see oil paint as having a solemn-ness to it that will be a defining feature and an overall feeling of my image.
At the bottom of the painting is where it’s going to be the darkest, and there will be a visible gradation in value as the eye moves toward the top. The top will be the lightest (as in heaven). In the bottom darkness, there will be larger figures that look distorted and monstrous. As the eye moves up, the figures will recede in depth, get smaller and lighter, and become more human like. The idea is that the more they are in the light of God the more ‘perfect’ they are.
As far as color scheme, I will mainly stay in the blue family, but when it is appropriate I would like to pull the figures into muted flesh tones for a glow effect. At the top of the image is where and when I will start to build up the heavenly light with a variety of whites. I have been thinking about the colors in the Sistine Chapel, and I don’t really want to move away from that too much. What I do want however, is to reinvent the color palette, giving every color and tone a new purpose.
The references that I will be using for this project are digital photos that I took underwater in a pool over the summer. I collectively have over 1500 images taken in 4 different photo shoots. Some of the images are of the human figure through the surface of the water (to create distortion and to give them a more struggled look) and others were taken from underneath the surface of the water (for clarity/perfection, and elegance).
As for the music to be performed, the piece is called Miserere, composed by Gregorio Allegri most likely in the mid to late-16th century (though definitely before 1638). The text is the whole of Psalm 51, perhaps the most penitential of all the psalms (traditionally sung in the Anglican rite in Ash Wednesday and in the Catholic rite during the last three days of holy week).
There was a tradition of improvising amongst the Papal singers which no other group of singers could match, so in a way the fact that copies of the music escaped the confines of the Vatican didn’t make much different to the fame or development of the piece: one still had to go to the Sistine chapel to hear it sung to its fullest potential.
The piece is quite simple in conception and much of impact relies and the conditions of the performance, especially on the acoustic (the gallery space will hold the sound of this piece perfectly). There are five sections in the music (sung by two different choirs- a main and a solo group), which are identical except for the second half of the final verse where the solo group and the main choir at last join up, singing from the extreme ends of the chapel, or in this case the gallery.
The musical effect is created by Allegri’s use of discords (caused by a series of suspensions) and by embellishments around a straight-forward vocal line, which take the solo treble to a high C (I will be singing this solo voice part). The problem with any performance of it, then as now, is that what Allegri himself composed is simple and plain. It seems likely that the embellishments got more and more effective as centuries passed until by the end of the 19th century the best of them had been written down and become part of the composition. By then they included the high C (this is not in Allegri’s original composition) which has characterized the piece in recent times. For modern performers there remains the option of adding extra embellishments to the ‘established embellishments’. Eventually it was noticed that the higher of the two soprano parts I the five-voice main choir parodies Tonus Peregrinus, the so-called ‘wandering tone’ (traditionally, the chant verses were ung using Tone 2). I’ve decided to restore the beautiful contours of tonus peregrines to the nine chant verses and so give the music a flow is has never fully had, at least in modern times. This is part of my whole reinvention/renewal idea.
The history of the piece is unusual and extremely interesting. By the mid-18th century it had become so famous that the papacy forbade anyone to sing it outside the Sistine Chapel, refusing to allow any copy to leave the Sistine Chapel, in order to enhance the reputation of the papal choir. Just as the Pope had feared, once the Miserere was heard outside the magical confines of the Sistine Chapel, the music was found to lose its power to astonish. According to some commentators, the monopoly was only broken when the music finally escaped when Mozart, at the age of fourteen, wrote it down from memory. That he did this is certain since, even though the actual copy he made does not survive, a letter from his father to his mother describing the event does.
Whatever the cause, there were several copies in circulation in Europe by the mid-18th century and the number has greatly increased since, though never have there been so many differing versions of what technically is the same piece. In fact there were other copies of the Miserere outside the Vatican by then (nobody really knows exactly how that happened), though it was only about the time of Mozart’s visit in 1770 that the music became widely available.
The gallery, in chapel terms, is standing room only- like the Sistine, turning the gallery space into a perfect chapel space for this piece. The ornamentation and embellishments that I will be improvising will never be able to be copied or equaled, thus not leaving the gallery. This is to pay tribute to the pieces history of not leaving the Sistine. The meaning of the Last Judgment wall in the Sistine chapel is really self explanatory. My new Sistine is going to be about ascending to heaven; from darkness into brilliant light of God; plenteous redemption. I would like to emulate this concept in my ornamentation of the piece as well as in the painting.
