The paper is about the Multimedia Centre and Visual Art Lab dedicated to the 16th century painter Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis of Pordenone (CMP). It consists in a communication and information system, dedicated to the use of the new digital technologies applied to art history and thought as a discovery journey through artist's life and opus through several interactive multimedia stations.
In order to optimize the learning of the content, we choose the strategy of externalizing visually the mental process of art historical research, using tools and methods of the art historian to visualize the art of Pordenone.
Valeria Finocchi, Dunja Radetic
valeria.finocchi@unive.it dunja.radetic@unive.it
+39.346.1674461 +39.348.9295231
Dipartimento di Filosofia e Beni Culturali Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
Dorsoduro, 3484/D 30123 Venezia
Italy
Valeria Finocchi, Dunja Radetic Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia
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Learning Through Art History: The Multimedia Centre and
Visual Art Lab about "Pordenone"
INTRODUCTION
This paper presents the experience of the Multimedia Centre and Visual Art Lab dedicated to the life and work of the painter Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis of Pordenone (CMP). The centre is still in the developmental stage and will open next fall in Pordenone. Starting from an idea of the Rotary clubs of the Province of Pordenone of the initiative has taken shape at the behest of the Banca FriulAdria‐Crédit Agricole, the Town of Pordenone and Trade Associations. The scientific aspect of the structure was assigned to a research group of the Department of Art History and Conservation of Artistic Heritage “G. Mazzariol” (now Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage) of the Ca’ Foscari University Venice (which elaborated on the original project and deals with the development of historical‐artistic content), in collaboration with the University of Udine, which is that of Art History scholars working in the field of cultural heritage, the design of the CMP has brought out significant problems, which are part of the scientific work of the research group of Ca' Foscari, coordinated by Prof. Giuseppe Barbieri and composed of graduate students, researchers and professors of the University of Venice. The group has most recently been studying how to use works of art, especially in terms of display in order to improve the relationship between the art and the observer from the point of view of its understanding; in this context the group works especially on the issue of the use of new multimedia technologies for communication of visual art and has developed several multimedia projects and exhibitions.
The CMP, therefore, has been configured from the beginning as a project, both theoretical and experimental, dedicated to the use of the new digital technologies applied to art history, whose overall objective is to provide visitors a new and more effective way to approach art, especially painting, not only to admire its aesthetic qualities, but to understand its meaning and learn to interact with it effectively. For this reason, our research has focused on the identification of effective communicative strategies for visitors, in order to optimize the learning of the content (HOOPER‐GREENHILL, 2004).
Brief description of CMP
The CMP consists of a communication and information system, conceived as a journey of discovery through an artist's life and works through the use of several interactive multimedia stations. It consists of three environments unified by a set inspired by the Renaissance studiolo. Organizing Committee and the Scientific Committee of the project and specifically Dr. Gian Piero Brunello, Dr.
Giovanni Lessio, Prof. Giuseppe Barbieri, Prof. Caterina Furlan, Prof. Augusto Celentano, Prof. Gian Luca Foresti, Dr. Carla Del Ben, Arch. Ivo Boscariol, Dr. Christian Micheloni and Dr. Niki Martinel.
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visitor discovers the general historical and artistic context of his work, thanks to several videos projected on the wall and dedicated to various works of art.
The second room highlights relationships between works of art through three stations dedicated to technique, iconography and formal aspects. Each station is composed of two screens: an interactive touch monitor and a bigger one for visualization of the selected content (on the wall).
The approach to the paintings is mediated by the use of cinematographic language, creating special effects through distortions and reversals of perspective.
The research group of Ca' Foscari began from a specific request of the commissioner: build in Pordenone a Centre dedicated to Pordenone, which should be a centre, but also to spread awareness of de’ Sacchis’ work to a non‐specialist audience. This centre would be also physically the first half of the sixteenth century, and is, in fact, considered the greatest painter of the sixteenth century in Friuli; he worked in the lands of the Patriarchate of Aquileia, in Veneto, Lombardy, Emilia, Liguria, Umbria and – according to biographer Giorgio Vasari ‐ achieved a reputation as a competitor to Titian.
The pictorial work of de' Sacchis (Pordenone, 1483/84 ‐ Ferrara, 1539) began in the early sixteenth century; it can be approximately dated to 1506 given the existence of a triptych featuring St. Michael the Archangel, St. John the Baptist and St. Valerian, made for the church of Santo Stefano in Valerian, in 1508 de Sacchi’s frescoes were executed in San Lorenzo a Vacile, between 1513 and 1514, and those of Villanova Vallenoncello. About 1518, he began his travels throughout Italy: Alviano (Umbria), in Cremona, Piacenza, Genoa, Venice. Exposure to the latter city greatly affected de Sacchi’s painting career, and perhaps his work even competed with that of the great Titian, painter of the powerful, who according to Vasari saw in Pordenone (already defined the contemporary pictor modernus) a dangerous competitor. of famous artists of the time: Raphael and Michelangelo, the observation and study of these works have led to changes in the style of Pordenone, shifting it towards Raphael's grace combined with the monumentality of Michelangelo's figures.
Since we had access to the entire corpus of works of art by the artist and to any type of
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information related to them, the idea was to build a media centre that exploited the potential of digitization and new technologies, creating an approach to art originating from the past using procedures and reactions of the contemporary viewer, who usually access information through new media. In fact, all the works of art presented in the centre are going to appear exclusively in digital reproduction as a part of the interactive multimedia stations.
Our idea is not in any way to replace or simulate the original works, but to increase the potential of the image in order to induce a type of fruition quite different from that of a conventional museum, and to propose an approach to knowledge other than that conveyed by a narrative text.
In that respect, we are not creating a “virtual museum”, but a space of information in which the presence of the digital reproduction of an artwork opens a wide field of possibilities.
The absence of original artworks, and use of reproductions instead, allows a new kind of freedom to experiment using more open approaches to knowledge acquisition. When we use digital reproduction of artworks, the space between the viewer and the image is not thought of as an aesthetic relation, but as a visually densified field through which an amount of additional data is conveyed.
The digital reproduction lends itself easy manipulation; it can be reused many times in different contexts; it can be “deconstructed” in order to attract a visitor’s attention to certain details, and induce him or her to reconstruct and contextualize the parts. We will explain it more in detail and with concrete examples in the following pages.
The reproduction can be also layered with substantial additional information, and processed by applications it can assume interactive features. This potential of expanding visually the image as a stations, the single image is utilized, but not only to provide simple data (date, author, client), rather to allow the user to understand the inner mechanism of the work of art. This is the process that characterizes the work of an art historian, that process that the eminent art historian Otto Pächt referred to as the metamorphosis of the object of art to the work of art, “die in uns und mit uns vorgeht, wenn aus einem unentzifferbaren oder univerständlichen Text einer wird, der wir lehsen uns verstehen können”. In order to read and understand the “text”, we have to understand the vocabulary, grammar and syntax: “Die Vokabeln der Sprache des Kunstwerks der Vergangenheit, das wären etwa gegenständliche Konventionen, Formen und Bräuche, die in die Entstehungzeit des Kunstwerks automatisch verstanden wurden, uns aber nicht mehr geläufig sind” (PÄCHT, 1977).
But the scope of art history does not simply end here: it is an operation that involves the linking of data inside the art work and art works with each other; it means creating a speech, creating narratives. So, in order to build a learning process about Pordenone and the art of the sixteenth century, using the entire body of work, that was as effective as possible, we have defined this strategy: visualize art history as a process, a metaphor for a system which in practice has been designed as an interplay of physical objects and visual digital interfaces.
We have to say that the dialogue with colleagues working in the fields of information technology
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and media studies helped us to develop an interdisciplinary theoretical approach. The theoretical background of media studies, combined with the practical experience of interactive tools for visual digital interfaces and some examples from so called ‘new media’ art, led us to the idea of externalizing visually the mental process of art historical research.
Starting from this theoretical basis, the concept design of the centre interjects the works of Pordenone in a system of simulation of the procedures used in art historical research. So images are considered as bearers of information on two levels: one is the inner meaning of the image, the other is displaying the operational models which relies on the art historian to obtain this information.
Inside the CMP, this happens through the use of two different procedures, one general and one specific:
• Along the three rooms, each one dedicated to an aspect of art historical research: in the first room the sources and the reconstruction of the context are examined, in the second one the internal components of the work of art are analyzed and a comparison made from among the works of Pordenone, then , in turn, the third focuses on issues of emotional vision;
• The specific analytical and comparative multimedia stations of the second room, which are designed making use of the procedure that the art historian pursues when examining a work of art.
Let us consider how this brief theoretical conceptualization will become actualized in the CMP environment, taking as an example the work of Pordenone’s Madonna della Misericordia, dated 1515‐1516 and housed in the Cathedral of Pordenone.
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Meeting the artist
The first room is devoted to analyzing the sources and to the reconstruction of historical and art historical contexts. The first stage, “Fortuna critica” involves a study of art literature from Vasari to the latest sources to extrapolate the most significant quotations about the art of Pordenone, and in particular, the written references that underline its unique characteristics or, again, to highlight the connection between the artist of Pordenone and his contemporaries. The sentences will be projected on the wall in the CMP entrance and coupled with particular works that serve to make them "understandable" from a visual standpoint. In this way, the user will immediately begin to combine words and images.
An example would be the following:
Nostra Donna, con quel tipo giovanile e leggiadro, e con quella posa calma e dignitosa […] ricorda in tutto le belle figure di Giorgione e di Tiziano.
CAVALCASELLE, 1876 Madonna della Misericordia, Detail of the
Virgin
After that, there is a multimedia station entitled "Works and context"; it consists of a wall projection system and a selection of content to display, simulating a slide projector. The visitor will select the art work to display choosing from among a variety of slides depicting works of Pordenone and inserting the chosen one into a slide projector. This, in turn, activates a video.
The video provides information about the historical and art historical context (events that were happening in the Veneto / Friuli at that time, details of the work that recall the works of other artists, the characters depicted in the painting etc..), and especially strives to clarify the issues related to the commissioning of the painting, as well as showing archival documents retrieved by art historians. The goal, in fact, is to immerse the work inside the network of relationships that surround the "outside" of the work of art, to let the visitor understand that these are fundamental aspects of its implementation, often even more important that "'invention "of the artist (Settis).
In the case of Madonna della Misericordia, the video will certainly testify to the commission of the altarpiece by Francesco Tedio on 8th May, 1515 (Di Maniago, 1819) and the indication of its future place in the Cathedral (which was different from today’s positioning) and place the painting in a relative connection with the giorgionismo then prevailing in the area, highlighting thereby the prevailing interaction with the art historical context of the moment.
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Analysing art works
The focus of second room is text analysis ‐ the work in its main components: this operational pattern of the historian of art is based on the classical categories of art history, such as technique, iconography, and formal aspects.
The interactive possibilities of digital interfaces allows the revelation of the dynamics of the interpretation of a work of art, to visually represent them, and to act as a transformative agent of information into tools. The viewer then, actively builds the sense of the work being driven through the information provided by an interaction with a hypermedia system of data already selected and organized, but which offers more possibility to find paths of meaningful construction.
The interactive station dedicated to iconographical aspects is based upon an iconographical index, in which are included all the figures from the Pordenone's body of work. This iconographical index is a physical book form which the visitor selects one topic. This selection activates a first monitor on which all the figures filtered as a keyword selected from the index are going to be displayed. An audio narrative will explain the hagiographical and iconographical aspects relative to the selected figure.
A further selection of figures is also going to be possible: from the selection, a visitor chooses one figure which will be displayed on the second monitor contextualized as the whole artwork. On the first monitor an additional window will appear with text about this specific artwork, which will explain the relations between the selected saints and other figures represented.
This process leads the visitor to follow the informational path which is used in classical iconography: the recognition of a figure on the basis of its attributes, contextualization of the figure on the basis of the relationship with other visual elements present in the artwork, and finally the construction of a general meaning. Once the pattern is understood by the visitor, he will be encouraged by visual signals, to proceed with the exploration of figures of the same saint in other visual contexts, or of the other figures taken from the chosen artwork. In this way, we hope that the visitor will learn how to build a network of information about the saints and the relationships between them, not only by learning mnemonically the specific meanings but by contributing actively to the process of meaningful construction.
In the Madonne della Misericordia there are at least three diverse iconographical topics, which can be visualized: The Mother, Saint Christopher and The Infant John, each one with its own significance.
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the possibility of making changes (not to change them), the interaction model forces the visitor to make choices, to supply the correct or the incorrect answer.
Here too, the idea is to induce a process of interpretation through a visual system. The questions are correlated sequentially between them, in order to permit the visitor to go step by step through the stages of an in‐depth understanding of the image. The system of questions and answers was designed in a way to cover all the classical concepts on which the formal and stylistic reading of a work is based, such as perspective, colour theory, composition, gesture, etc. The visitor will receive explanations both in the case of correct answer and in the case of wrong answer.
Here is an example:
QUESTION: why are the characters in the foreground smaller that the others?
1. Because they are fantasy figures
Incorrect answer: These small characters belong to the real world, while the main characters are representations of a transcendental world
2. Because they are “less important”
Explanation: During the Middle Age painters had to represent characters of different social levels within the same painting. This difference was, for example, the difference between rulers and subjects or between worldly and sacred characters. To do this, they used a dimensional scale, for which the characters of less importance were represented in smaller proportions. Pordenone also used this device, even in the sixteenth century, medieval symbolism had become outdated. It survives, however, in some popular religious images, such as that of Our Lady of Mercy: Mary, with her mantle, protects a group of believers ‐ in this case the patrons of the painting.
Visualising images
In the third room or section, the goal is to "let the work speak" through a strategic view of its formal, iconographic, technical characteristics, or by emphasizing the relationship between the work of art and the architecture that contains it; this can enhance the narrative value of paintings, through the manner of depiction and use of a specific soundtrack. This is done by enlarging images, foreshortening, moving characters, duplication of details on the various surfaces and other communication strategies that will be defined as the characteristics of the works, exploiting in this sense the potential of film making. The vision, then, is to be very "contemporary"
and to incorporate different experiences of the critical analysis of images through film made during the twentieth century (For instance critofilm by Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti)
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We would like to emphasize that the first two rooms or sections into which visitors are invited to embody some of the typical trademarks of the art historian. Replicas of physical objects used by the art historian (slides and Polaroids, the scholar's desk and iconographic vocabulary, etc.) are linked to multimedia devices in order to activate exploration of content, thus creating a hybrid system functioning between reality and virtuality.
Although in this case it is not a real simulation (as in the case of virtual or augmented reality), the
“enactment” of the art historical craft undoubtedly helps visitors to learn. This is a widely recognized fact based on studies in the use of multimedia (LANDRISCINA, 2009). The simulation, in
“enactment” of the art historical craft undoubtedly helps visitors to learn. This is a widely recognized fact based on studies in the use of multimedia (LANDRISCINA, 2009). The simulation, in