Reading the floor at basilica dei Santi Maria e Donato

Not many people who visit Murano go past the glass shops and the glass museum. But only 100 metres further along the canal you can find the quiet, ancient Basilica di Santa Maria e Donato. It was begun in the 7th century, when Murano was settled by people from the mainland, escaping the barbarian invasion after the roman empire collapsed. As Murano flourished as a salt production and trading centre, the church was rebuilt in the 12th century but still in byzantine influenced style, with a splendid mosaic floor of multicoloured porphyry, serpentine and other precious stones and a lovely golden and blue mosaic of Our Lady in the apse. The polychrome stone floor mosaics have recently been restored and most interestingly, according to the information provided, they are full of medieval symbolism that was meant to be "read" while walking along "paths" that we now don't notice because of the chairs covering much of the floor.

The designs are byzantine influenced and draw on platonic thought: particularly circles ( representing the divine which has no beginning nor end) and the square( representing the human dimension enclosed within its limits) believed the circle, the square and the hexagon

Some symbols were geometric, done in panels of Opus Sectile mosaic of stone cut to geometric shapes; others were images of medieval creatures made up of the small coloured pieces called Opus Tasselatum and representing various religious ideas.

Useful information panels detailed the whole floor design, for anyone wanting to re-enact their own medieval religious trail.

Gazing up at the mosaic of Mary, I missed the sarcophagus containing the supposed relics of Saint Donato, plundered by a 12th century Doge from Cephalonia in Greece.

I reproduce some of the information for those who won't be able to visit Murano.

And some examples of the medieval bestiary.

Part of "The Way of Salvation": peacocks representing sacredness and drinking cup representing divine grace.

Part of "The Way of baptism"; the Eagle Christi represents regeneration and holds a small birds representing human weakness from which baptism is believed to rescue people

Responding to Venice

I always take watercolours, pencils and brushes when travelling. They usually come home unused. Unless I have several hours when I can sit down and process what i have seen, I find it difficult to make art on the spot.

So photographs and materials are what i end up bringing home. Luckily in Venice the light is inspirational. Rentals or hotels always have glassware and other decor items to play with. Maps and brochures could be the basis of future collages. And I did manage to collect some more brick dust fallen from walls onto the Zattere waterfront footpath. Destined to be washed into the sea, a little bit is now ready to grind into paint. ( disinfected, soaked in boiling water and mixed with gum arabic then dried in the back of the hire car).

1 homage to the Golden Fortuny lamp ( biscuit tin, San Marco)

2 curtain, Corte de la vida

3 trifora sunlight

4,5,6 kitchen glassware, venice light

7 brick dust, Zattere

9 reflections near Campo Santo Stefano

Venice, light by night and day

Venice light is special. The pictures say it all, I think

Orvieto

Orvieto, an easy day trip north from Rome, sits on a roundish plateau of soft volcanic rock - favourite stuff for the Etruscans to dig into. The plateau was also a perfect place to fortify. For many centuries in the Papal states, it even had a papal palace. Popes again.

The main tourist attraction is the cathedral which has a colourful gilded medieval facade, mosaic floor with the “tumbling blocks” pattern, striped stone walls and a chapel frescoed partly by Fra Angelico but mainly by Signorelli.

Low down on the San Brizio chapel walls, decorative frescoes of medieval mythological creatures turned out on closer inspection to be pecking at eyes, and other rather cruel actions. Looking back to one side of the entrance Signorelli shows the start of the last judgement: the trumpet blasts, some creature with wings zaps red lines of power down from above onto people below who in their medieval tights and caps cover their ears to block out the terrible sound. Too late! The torment increases as one moves around and upward to Signorelli's seriously violent and scary scenes of the last judgement, hell and assorted forms of torture by demons. Some of the poor naked humans are taken up to heavenly realms at the highpoints of the ceiling, others languish in hell. Signorelli also included a self portrait, nonchalantly standing next to, it is assumed, Fra Angelico, in one corner - as a man is garotted nearby.

Thankfully there are other less disturbing frescoes in the duomo including another major chapel and some side niches where older medieval frescoes were rediscovered after removing baroque alterations. In the gothic semi gloom, the side windows above these niches glow like glass but they are are stone, like the ones in Ravenna.

Orvieto reputedly has many underground escape tunnels dug by medieval aristocrats, and we were invited to look at a cellar in a local bar which turned out to go down at least three levels into the damp rock. On one edge of the town plateau which is ringed by walls, a small building hides the entrance to the Pozzo di San Patrizio, a 16 th century well commissioned by ( no surprise) a pope who was worried about being under seige from yet another pope. Ingenious double helix staircases have surprisingly shallow steps until one learns that they were designed so donkeys could walk up and down the 258 steps to get water supplies. 53 metres deep and 13 metres diameter: impressive!

Around Arezzo

Northward to Arezzo, Tuscany, which seemed a good base from which to visit other Tuscan towns, to see lots of Piero della Francesco frescoes, and to look around where some great grandparents of now Spillers left for Chicago at the turn of the 20th century.

A medieval town of brownish brick, Arezzo old town slopes gently up from a valley backed by a bowl of wooded hills. Its main piazza slopes, and has a nice colonnade. The weekend we arrived, it was all a mass of stalls and crowds for the monthly antiques fair that colonises most central streets with everything from bric a brac and 1 euro lucky dip packages to chandelier pieces, old books, furniture and frames. Serious antique dealers lurked further back in shops.

The badilica di San Francesco, the church whose apse chapel Piero della Francesca frescoed, is now a museum and you cannot enter without a ticket. Without an online booking to show, you are likely to be disappointed.

Apart from the Piero DLF works, I enjoyed the church itself which has other remnant frescoes. One was a remnant of a really lovely fresco of the Annunciation, by Signorelli, from a church in Casa del Monte, that Baron Tommaso Albergotti donated in 1920, for instance.

To continue the fresco frenzy you can visit famous renaissance art biographer, painter and historian Giorgio Vasari's house/ workshop, most rooms frescoed by himself including one featuring portraits of famous artists. Step out into the garden of the three storey villa and imagine Vasari in 1548 picking fruit or thinking about what to write about Leonardo da Vinci in his “ Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects”, considered the ideological foundation of Western art-historical writing.

We ate a couple of celebratory meals at a couple of excellent trattorie /restaurants. If you feel you can eat pigeon, I recommend it in ravioli with truffles on top. My companion toasted a political result in terrific local wine.

Further afield, we tried to track down the grave of Elisabetta Gabrielli who with her husband David Papini and daughter Rosina had migrated to turn of the century 1900s Chicago, and eventually returned to Arezzo as an old woman in the 1950s. Tregozzano cemetery in rolling hills north of Arezzo.certainly had several Gabrielli memorials, but none matched. Portrait photos look out from every niche: to those accustomed to anglo cemeteries, the ancestors from the Italian locality seem more present.

Visiting Piero della Francesca frescoes

There aren't many works remaining by Piero della Francesca, the artist, mathematician and geometer who lived in (now) Tuscany from 1415 to 1492. Some painted altarpieces, some portraits, and some wonderful frescoes. The best paintings are in galleries outside tuscany. But it was the frescoes I came to see in Arezzo and two nearby hill towns.

Seeing them in the context of buildings in which you stand, you perceive their scale against yours. An older form.than paintings in frames, the frescoes exist without the shiny varnish of canvases or uber smooth surface of wooden panels. They seem more primitive, so more eternal. Where they have remained integral to a building, they seem embedded in place. Meant to be seen from a distance, frescoes are often simpler, with larger forms than finicky small paintings. Because they embed the paint in plaster, they seem fresh.

To my mind, della francesca's religious fresco figures are solid, yet still a tad flat, making them seem modern. They are usually anchored to the ground, not flying in wafty space. Their faces are never soft or humorous, but solemn or serene. They are not in Byzantine rigid poses, but seem to be caught frozen in action. Some are a della Francesca type, others more like portraits. Their dress is contemporary.

Piero della Francesca started his life and career in San Sepolcro, but soon travelled to Florence where he must have met the early renaissance artist Fra Angelico, famous architects, and seen the wonderful Capella Brancacci frescoes by Massaccio who sadly had died very young but not before introducing solid form, naturalism and perspective to painting: thus the start of what we know as the italian renaissance.

Enriched by this experience Della Francesca went back to San Sepolcro where before long ( he was on the council) he was commissioned to paint altarpieces and then murals in the city headquarters.

The major work there is the mysterious even haunting Ressurection ( c 1450 ) where it is said he put a self portrait onto one of the sleeping soldiers.

There are also remains of frescoes of St Julian, and a worried- looking Bishop.

Around this time he also painted a wall in a church in nearby Monterchi - the Madonna del Parto, a powerful and serene image of a pregnant Mary standing in a fur-lined, embroidered tent flanked by two angels. As the fresco was chopped out of the chapel at a later date, it now sits in its own museum. It was a moving experience to see this work, as the only visitors. We learned that ( hidden) symmetry was important to della Francesca - in common with other renaissance thinkers who believed that geometry could explain the natural world. The angels are symmetrical and have opposite coloured clothes.

Later on he painted the apse chapel of the church of San Francesco, in Arezzo, on the theme of the Story of the True Cross, an unbelievable and rather violent 13th century tale from a book The Golden Legend - tracing the cross from the garden of eden to eventual defeat of non christan armies.

Della francesca arranged scenes from.this story in a non linear way across the three levels and 3 walls of the chapel. ( Wikipedia will explain) indicating his main concern was how the spaces of the frescoes( so to speak) would be arranged around the spaces of the chapel. My favourite section is that of the Annunciation, fitted into a corner space. The angel is standing on the ground - not flying in. Mary looks serious. God looks down from.the level above.

Della francesca also wrote books on mathematics and geometry. He was buried, it is assumed, somewhere in a small funeral chapel of the co- cathedral of St John the Evangelist, in San Sepolcro.

Three great big Greek temples: Paestum

On another day trip improving my knowledge of urban history ( gained from one subject in 1974), we visited Paestum on the flat coast south of Salerno. Another lesson in how immense scale and great age generates awe, and how walking around in ruins gives space for your imagination and a whole body experience.

About the ancient city: Wikipedia has a full.account, but briefly:

In 720 BCE, ancient Greeks from the Peloppenese sailed across the Ionian sea to the (now) Gulf of Taranto in Calabria and founded a colony they named Sybaris. A century later, some of the Sybarites round the west coast of (now) Calabria and almost up to (now) Salerno, and founded another colony near a river trading post they called Posiedonia after their main God.

Posiedonia grew richer as a port on the trading routes and more so around 500bce when wealthy Sybarites fled there after Sybaris was conquered by a rival city, Croton. It had three enormous Doric order temples dated around 550bce: one to Posiedon, one to Hera and one to Athena, and civic infrastructure like the agora and an ekklesiastica. After a couple of centuries, Lucanians from (now) southern Italy conquered the Greeks and renamed the city. After another century or so the romans conquered the Lucanians And renamed the city again - to Paestum. The romans added some typical roman infrastructure like a Forum, an arena and baths. Estimates put the Paestum population as at least 10,000.

After centuries of decline due to abandoned drainage, malaria and repeated attacks, Paestum was abandoned and only rediscovered in the 18th century. Luckily, what the 18th century explorers could see immediately in the fields, apart from many building foundations, were the aweinspiring skeletons of three huge sturdy two thousand year old Greek temples. Admittedly not white and brightly painted, and without roofs, but still of gigantic scale compared to a human.

Archaeologists have since unearthed some other civic structures and troves of artefacts that would have been used or given to the temples some of these are shown and explained in the Paestum museum at the site.

Looking at the small terracotta votive statues, small statues of hybrid mythical creatures, and stories on vases made me consider just how different was the mindset of these people 2,500 years ago..yet the jewellery and pots seem so similar to today's. Could I really believe a siren or a sphinx exists? No, but their forms that morph human and animal are strangely compelling today, precisely because I know they could not exist except in myth. Today they seem to demand that you enter a world that does not exist: how interesting !

We wandered around the remains of the city uncovered so far in the extensive archaeological park, seeing a few floor mosaics, imagining the buildings, and gazing at the temples: a great experience.

The villa under the crypt under the church

Pack onto a ferry at Salerno, grab an outdoor seat and gaze at the passing Amalfi coast until you reach Positano, the cheerful town cascading down a mountainous slope. There for an hourly fee you could sit under a striped umbrella on the beach, or start walking upslope through alleys of tourist shops and cafes serving icy lemon sorbet in actual lemon skins. Or, you can go to the small tourist office and museum MAR Positano and buy a ticket for a completely different experience …underground.

Back in 1 ad the Surrentum (Sorrento Peninsula) area featured prestigious real estate: luxury villas for rich romans, especially desirable after Tiberius retired to nearby island of Capri. One such villa, probably almost a hectare in size, cascaded down terraces to the sea, with gardens, fountain and bath area and at least one lavishly decorated diningroom or triclinium - exactly under present day Positano. Unfortunately the Vesuvius eruption of ad 79 threw up a 20km high column of ashes and pumice which blew south and buried the villa. To make the burial permanent, rain followed and turned pumice to mudslides and rock.

By 10th century there was a Benedictine monastery of St Mary on the site, with a small church.By the early 17th century the much larger Santa Maria Assunta church was rebuilt on top of the previous structure.

Although people had known that a roman villa existed, it was only 2003 renovations to the crypt of the church that revealed what was underneath… not only burial niches still containing the remains of medieval monks, but below that, part of a large roman diningroom with a white mosaic floors and frescoes whose bright colours have been completely preserved so are totally original. Unusually, the frescoes also feature some lively little mythical creatures moulded in white plaster (stucco). The tremendous forces that buried the villa shifted part of one frescoed wall sideways, almost looking like two puzzle pieces misaligned. Some household objects were also found in the rubble.

Years of patient effort to raise funds, work by the local archaeologists to excavate all the rock and build access stairs mean that you can walk down through the medieval crypts then look down onto the 2000 year old room. A museum guide gives a really engageing talk about the roman and medieval eras. Of course there would be more to excavate, but lack of public land in the town above to dig down from, is making that a difficult task for the future.

Bari: Shrines and Grecia Magna pottery

Bari is the main city of Puglia, a big port on the Adriatic coast. On many corners in the old quarter’s maze of little alleys in the old part of the city, images of Saint Nicholas or of Mary gaze out from behind the glass and flowers of small street shrines. As befits the city’s patron saint, Saint Nicholas has his Badilica San Nicola which attracts countless pilgrims. So many that they prevented us from looking in the crypt for the saint’s bones that fishermen stole from (now) Turkey in 1087 ad.

Near the big port area there is an excellent archaeological collection from prehistoric, to medieval times in a former monastery. Magna Grecia pottery! I love it.

In ancient times Lapigian peoples developed three main cultures on the Apulian coast, later colonised by Greeks from the 8th c bc. Then romans took over what they called Magna Grecia until their empire collapsed.

The Daunians ( the northern of the three original groups) made pottery adorned with little heads. Originally simple terracotta vessels, after the Greek culture mixed in, by the 3rd c bc pots had complicated figures attached…Strange and beautiful…Daunian askos vessels.

A brief look around L'Aquila

Sparkling in the april sunlight, in company with crowds of tourists, the central parts of historic L’Aquila looks to a casual visitor to be vigorous. As the location where northern wool merchants came to buy, and Abruzzo wool producers cane to sell, L’Aquila was the centre of the Italian wool trade for centuries.

Somewhat out of town, the basilica of Santa Maria di Colmaggio is a medieval gem. A massive job of restoration has its facade, building structure, frescoes and papal burial chapel looking splendid. Besides its role in papal history ( check wikipedia for the reluctant pope Celestino V) it was important as the start of one of the Tratturi routes down which for centuries until the 19th c, every autum shepherds from Abruzzo villages drove mobs of thousands of sheep from the mountains of Abruzzo to the plains of Puglia. And every spring, back again. This process called transhumanza, the width of the tracks ( about 60 metres) and how the shephers were to be treated by trackside communities, was regulated by the then kingdom of the two sicilies. While the men were gone over winter the women and children in the villages were left to maintain their homes, restuff mattresses with leftover wool, preserve and store food, etc. A hard life in a hard environment. Ended after the unification of italy, the loss of the wool trade and transumanza was one factor leading to the depopulation of the Abruzzo and migration to countries as far away as Argentina and Australia.

Santa Prassede in Rome

The oldest churches are the ones I like best. In this case, the basilica of Sancta Prassede, one of tge oldest in Rome. - started in 780 and dedicated to the teenage girl Praxede who was killed in 165 ( with her sister Pudentiana) for helping christians. The church sits on her family land which previously supported a roman bath structure. The then pope Paschal 1 commissioned the church to house the thousands of martyrs remains he had collected: they are buried under the church, as the slightly creepy inscription stone says. There’s more about him more on wikipedia. The mosaics in the apse include image of the pope offering the church to Saint Prassede : his halo is square, which apparently indicates he was alive at the time the mosaic was made. Besides the fabulous gold mosaics, the chapel of St Zeno, and the cosmati stone mosaic on floors and in the crypt below, I love this damaged but beautiful fresco of the Annunciation, painted by Stefano Pieri, a florentine working in the second half of the 1600s. The narrative and forms fit into the fabric of the back wall without seeming at all forced.

Piranesi's piazza: not just a keyhole

Up on the breezy Aventine hill, we joined the queue in the Piazza of the Knights of Malta and peeped through the famous Aventine keyhole to see the dome of St Peter’s across the Tiber. Nobody seemed to look hard at the portal structure or the piazza walls. So they missed seeing some of the only architecture of the legendary engraver, architect and archaeologist Giovanni Battista Piranesi. Granted, much of it was shrouded in scaffolding, but the twining designs and amazingly sharply defined plasterwork friezes on the gatehouse, and several funerary-style obelisks should interest any Piranesi fan. They cleverly incorporate symbols of the Knights of Malta, allude to the Aventine’s supposed likeness to a ship, and bring some of Piranesi’s research on ancient roman funerial monuments into 18th century reality.

The map on the wall on the floor

Museum of the marble map of Rome: the Forma Urbis.

Perhaps to advertise their great civilisation, in about 203 ce the romans attached a giant 18mx13m map of Rome carved into 150 marble slabs, to the facade of a building. The facade, now of the church of st damian and cosimo, remains visible from outside the Foro Romano, but only holes in the wall remain: in medieval times , 90% of the map was destroyed for building material, leaving us only fragments dug up at various times. Reconstructing the map is a puzzle people have tried to solve for centuries: early on, for instance, Piranesi made engravings of the fragments and in 1774 his marvellous Pianta di Roma e del Campo Marzio. However, he included his own artistic interpretations of buildings which might have existed. In thec19th and 20th centuries reconstructions bevame more scientific.

But even today, only about 200 of the fragments, incised with lines representing houses, insulae, streets and public buildings, can be matched with the current city layout.

Luckily for map and urban history enthusiasts, the Museo della Forma Urbis in Rome's Celio archaeological park has tried to fit these fragments onto a giant blow-up of Noli's 1748 street map, (considrred both locationally accurate to contemporary street layout yet containing elements of the the much more ancient roman city form) .

Even then, aligning the fragments has proved difficult, as by the time of the Nolli map, most of the much larger area of ancient rome was buried under farmland.

The 18th century map and aligned 3rd century fragments are set under glass that visitors walk over: giving a powerful sense of looking through layers of time. So a reconstruction may be not be possible, but a leap of imagination via movement and participation certainly has been enabled.

As a bonus for visitors, outside the Forma Urbis museum are hundreds of roman grave sculptures and bits of buildings, with information. For instance, some cleverly fitted insides of domed ceilings; and stone columns that were shipped to Rome attached in pairs from all corners of the empire, before being finished when they arrived.

Testaccio, Rome

Wandered Testaccio’s market, colourful buildings on street grid, giant murals, glimpsed future major arts complex in the former Abbatoir, ate carciofi alla giudea and alla romana.

light and shadow

An ongoing series of digital images of effects of light and shadow from hand held objects. Some lit with sunlight, some with a phone light. One hand holds the object, the other the phone. We only see the beautiful reflected and transmitted light, and the dancing shadows of the object, against a partially shadowed backdrop. I began the series as self entertainment in the winter of the pandemic. Low-fi image capture, simple means of gesture and shadow play, and close observation can create beauty even in constrained spaces.

Construction abstracts

Continuing my long term project documenting demolition and construction sites that reveal forms and juxtapositions of structures, materials, forms and colours that are often absent in the finished built form. Looking, I can find compositions and visual pleasures not unlike those I might see in art installations. They influence my artworks in an indirect way.

Demolition site, cnr William and A’Beckett St Melbourne

Door in a wall, Franklin Street Melbourne

glass shards and other debris, southbank future arts precinct

Wall soon to disappear under metro station building, Swanston and Flinders Streets Melbourne

“White/gold abstract, 2023” collaged paint tubes and acrylic paint on wooden board, 40cmx40cm

Documenting the beauty of demolition. (March 31, 2018)

For many years I have been fascinated by photographing inner-city redevelopment sites, as buildings disappear and the land beneath is revealed, before new structures are built. In these places, during these brief and unique windows of time, there exist idiosyncratic structures divorced from their functional purpose, unusual views, and different marks in the containing built fabric. I like to photograph them both as source for art-making, but also as a visual record.

Demolished buildings appear first as fading shells of previous uses, their textures and forms speaking of the past, encrusted with marks from use, weathering and graffiti. Next they become partial, teetering, un-functional structures, as they are destroyed, sometimes violently, sometimes in a gradual dismantling, and often hung in filmy fabric. Then the ground beneath is laid bare, perhaps with skeletons of older foundations scratched up by archaeologists. Some sites remain dormant, engulfed by weeds and accumulating detrius. Finally, the earth below is gouged out, great deep holes cutting into layers of soil and rock. And then the construction of new buildings start.

Visually, demolition shares some of the interest of the ruin: the frisson of peeping into or walking through an unregulated and forgotten landscape; the juxtaposition of different forms, materials, marks and colours; natural forms inserting themselves into built form; evidence of the passing of time; exposing of layers of occupation - and other evocative aspects which many authors have described.

However, planned demolition, in an inner city has some different qualities (even aside from the presence of human and mechanical movement from the demolition and construction workforce) . It is more contemporary: the building elements and forms remains are usually more vivid and less desiccated, with marks of use, wallpaper, paint, wooden linings, and outlines of other structures able to evoke human habitation more readily than in a ruin. It is more revealing of the process of taking apart, because it occurs in an evident and careful reverse building process: top down, for instance, or inside an outer shell, or by removal of lighter elements leaving a frame structure standing. A demolition is more orderly than a ruin: compared to, say a bombed out building, it shows the bones of the previous edifice more clearly.

Builders netting and plastic sheeting create curtain-like, moving elements making air currents visible and made more visually mobile by the play of sunlight and shadow. The fabric also creates the impression of a stage or theatre. Scaffolding and temporary stairs add lacy and linear elements.

Observing demolition sites has helped me develop several artistic strategies: deliberate making, fragmentation and re-assembly of objects; constructing installations into which one peers through small apertures; constructing installations of netting fabric; making paintings by a process involving peeling and flaking paint in layers; and making collaged and overpainted digital photographs.

More images from some demolitions I have photographed at

A demolished house in Carlton, Victoria

2013 Demolition of the old building, University of Melbourne

My studio blog "This Week" has older blog posts and more on my studio activities