Leseprobe

64 3 On Shearman’s notion of the ‘engaged spectator’ and displays of religious art that address, embrace, reposition and are completed by their intended viewers, see: Shearman, Only Connect , 1992.  4 The events of Pentecost are recounted in the NewTestament in Acts 2:1 –31.  5  For further exploration of this mechanism of immersion designed around encouraging the viewer to look up, see: Williams, ‘Witness- ing Illusion,’ forthcoming.  worked not so much as an illustration of the Pentecost, but as a vision of it. 3 It did not simply depict the events of the Pentecost as described in the Acts of the Apostles, but rather simulated something of the experience of this event: not only conveying what happened, but also triggering comparable feelings of awe, unease, surprise, and even fear. 4 Designed to be hung high on the refectory wall, Restout’s illusion worked by making the viewer look up. 5 With single-point perspective constructed around a hidden vanishing point, existing somewhere beyond the picture plane, Restout conjured a plunging cav- ernous space, unfathomable fromwhere we stand below. But with di sotto in su architecture and foreshortened figures, he established spatial continuity between this pictorial realm and ours, a continuity reinforced by our shared imagined encounter with its figures. Like the Apostles in the foreground, we witness the scene frombelow, involuntarily emulating their strained dizzying actions of looking up towards the dissolving ceiling. How Restout’s illusion worked is best understood by imaginatively returning the painting to its original setting in the refectory of Saint-Denis (Fig. 2). Housed in the south- ern wing of the cloisters beside the basilica, the hall still serves as a refectory, though now for the private girls’ secondary school, the Maison d’Éducation de la Légion d’Honneur. Restout’s Pentecost was painted for the arched space at the far end of the refectory, which, as is evident from the doorways beneath, was over two metres from the ground. This already offers some sense of the beholder’s corporeal condition—how the body had to be in order to see the Pentecost : whether standing or sitting, the neck would be craned, the eyes directed aloft, and perhaps a foot or a hand would be placed behind to support the backwards tilt of the body. The beholder would, in other words, be forced to share the corporeal condition, and so something of the bodily experience, of those painted wit- nesses within the scene. Envisaging the Pentecost back in its refectory arch, it is clear that the bodily experience of the painting’s actors and spectators is not all that was shared between the world-within the painting and the world-without. Imaginatively reconstructing the painting in that hall, we find a continuity not just between the bodies, but also between the spaces. At one level there is an inherent functional resonance in this site-specific location. After all, the Pen- tecost supposedly took place in the Cenacle or Upper Room, an upstairs space in Jerusa- lem frequented by the Apostles, which in Christian tradition is also the location of the Last Supper. Given the Upper Room’s association with the act of sharing meals, the Pen- tecost, like the Last Supper, is an entirely concordant subject to adorn the wall of a refec- tory (most famously in the case of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in the refectory of the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan).