Michael R. Barrick

Working on the glove now. I knew this was going to be the hardest part when I started. You really have to turn off that rational part that thinks "fingers" when they are foreshortened like this.

My spooky balcony.

The Beasty she's holding has emerged as a fox this morning.

The long rat in her hand got his shadow this morning. Six weeks of winter?

I'm happy enough with the face at the moment to move on to the remaining details to the right, the stole and the glove. I wonder if you can spot what changed on the face from yesterday?

"Snake blood"

What remains is fantastic, but such a pale shadow of what it must have been like. I can imagine what the interior was like over the centuries (largely based on my own speculation, a little reading such as G. Velenis, "Some Observations on the Original Form of the Rotunda in Thessaloniki", 1974; some websites like culture.gr; various blogs and reference books; all rinsed together in the fountain of useless information in my head.) None of the brickwork would have been showing, that's for sure. I imagine in the original Roman design there would have been a veneer of marble and plaster. The niches between the arches would have been intended for statues of gods, heroes, or emperors antecedent to Galerius. The very centre of the dome did have an oculus open to the sky and there was a well to catch rain in the centre of the floor. The oculus was filled in and the well removed and covered when the building was converted to a church so the focal point would be the light at the altar in the morning with an unobscured sight-line from the relocated entrance. That makes sense ecumenically. Christ was rendered in mosaic at the apex of the dome—the only bit of mosaic that was intentionally removed when the building was converted to a mosque. The figurative work in the dome was covered with plaster. The lower tier is a ring of saints standing in front of what I have seen referred to as "architectural fantasies" that in fact bear a strong resemblance to the architecture of the Library of Celsus in Ephesus and what would have been recognisable at the time as libraries architecture. I think there is more going on here that could well be the genesis of the concept of the cathedral as an "encyclopedia in stone." The church was originally dedicated to the Archangels ("Incorporeal Ones", Ασώματοι) and their heads and wings can be seen at the top of the second tier below Christ. The three tiers have a hierarchy, with saints in prayer and earthly scholarly knowledge depicted with the architecture of libraries in the lower tier, aspiring to the archangels above, all illuminated by Christ occupying what used to be the oculus above all.

I’m not done thinking about the Rotunda yet. These three pictures show the scale of the building. In the larger one on the left you can see Jessi in the alcove opposite and the attendant over to the left. This building isn’t on the scale of the earlier Pantheon in Rome, but it is big—29.8 metres to the apex of the dome from the floor, which dome having a diameter of 24.5 metres. In the picture on the top left where I am staring up at the mosaics and oblivious to Jessi taking my picture, I’m standing by the fire extinguisher near the entrance that is the same as the one you can see in the broader view to the right of the alcove Jessi is in. In the picture of us together, kindly taken by the attendant, we’re in the alcove. Those alcoves are about three metres deep. Unlike the Pantheon, which is entirely concrete, the Rotunda is masonry and the mortar is similar Roman concrete that gets stronger with exposure to moisture a self-heals small cracks. Thessaloniki gets a lot more earthquakes than Rome, and much stronger ones. This has stood for over 1,700 years through a lot of shaking. The mosaics, which may well be the oldest extant example of Byzantine Christian mosaics, have suffered from the shaking over the centuries. Some decorative motifs survive in the alcoves and what survives on the dome is there, somewhat ironically, from being covered by plaster in the late 16th century when the building was converted to a mosque. The exception to that being a depiction of Christ at the apex of the dome which was chiselled off before being plastered over. More in further posts since there is a limit on text on Instagram.

Utterly pointless observation: the centre section of a toonie is exactly the same size as a Euro cent.

#eu

Here is a better view of the icon of St. George over the entrance of the Rotunda in Thessaloniki featured in my post yesterday. It's signed, but trying to find information on the artist and whether it actually dates to 1912 or is more recent is hard to find online.

The whole sky as gold is not a motif I've played around with yet.