Robert Clark. Dark Water

You could have called the gaps that needed to be filled [in Cimabue's Crocifisso] injuries, insults, and wounds to the figure of Christ except for the fact that they were more akin to decapitation, dismemberment, or flaying. The forehead and right side of the face were destroyed. So too was the center of the torso, the breastbone and heart down to the navel; and so too the left-hand side of the rib cage, upward to the armpit. . . . The palms of both hands were destroyed precisely in the places where Christ's real wounds ought to have been.

All that would be covered in chromatic abstraction -- in what from a distance would look like a loosely woven mat of green-gold flesh -- and perhaps abstraction was precisely the right word. Because when on the tenth anniversary of the flood the Crocifisso was returned to Santa Croce, you could not say it had been restored in the sense that something that had once been part of it and lost had now been put back; or could you say that the wounds had been closed or healed. Rather, they'd become like the phantom limbs of an amputee: they were, for all their self-evident absence, still there, still palpable to the eye even as the eye registered the space they'd once occupied and moved on. In sum, what was once concretely present and then concretely absent in the Crocifisso was now present again, but as an abstract presence. You couldn't put your finger or eye on it, but your mind grasped its reality, the specter of what had been lost (pp. 249-50).


Beauty, like truth, was supposed to be timeless, but the fact was that beauty was always falling apart or decaying. It needed constant shoring up, and the labor could make you weary. Beauty was, al fondo, in the final analysis, very like human flesh and bone. In Florence, where they'd made so much of it, there was that much more of it to break or injure. Left alone, without restauro, it would all eventually disappear. Really, art was always dying, beauty forever decaying. "I had not known death had undone so many," Dante marveled. . . .

But the art in an artwork might not be located precisely where you thought it was. Perhaps it was just as much in the damage and decay as it was in the intact original. Perhaps it was in the gaps -- in contemplating and tending those insults and injuries -- that we find ourselves, by compassion; by bandaging, however imperfectly, those wounds. Art may be a species of faith, the assurance of things hoped for. It contains nothing so much as our wish that we persist (Robert Clark. Dark Water: Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces. New York: Doubleday, 2008, p. 258).

(Robert Clark went to Florence on a fellowship to write about the intersection of art, beauty, and faith, and discovered instead the devastation of the flood of November 4, 1966 -- the destruction of human lives and of tens of thousands of manuscripts and priceless works of art. Clark's eloquent and moving account of loss and restauro, restoration, is in part a celebration of the angeli del fango -- the "mud angels" -- students from around the world who dropped everything to spend years of their lives retrieving and washing and drying out the manuscripts. But this extraordinary work's brooding account of the destruction and restoration of priceless masterpieces -- especially Cimabue's ground-breaking Crucifixion -- turns this into a tale of not only the restoration and loss of art and beauty, but of faith itself.)