Tearing apart the veil of lies: Yelena Isinbayeva speaks

Yelena Isinbayeva, Russian pole vaulting champion, speaks out after having been excluded from the Olympic Games in Rio. 

We are so used to being lied at in TV that we tend to classify as "lies" anything and everything we hear and see on a screen. Several people have reacted in this way to this video of Yelena Isinbayeva, Russian Olympic champion, who was overwhelmed by emotion during her speech. "It is a piece of theater," some said in the comments. "It is just to hide her guilt." 

Allow me to think otherwise. I can't believe that this is theater; this is not lying, it cannot be. This woman is speaking the truth, she is speaking from her heart, she is genuinely showing her feelings for her team having been unjustly discriminated for political reasons. That's what you would expect from someone who is the daughter of a plumber and of a shop assistant and who surely was never trained on how to be a politician. 

And about accusing her of doping, that's the silliest thing I can imagine. Doping is a plague in sport, yes, but it is mainly done to improve endurance in sports such as swimming or cycling. But pole vaulting doesn't require brutal endurance, it requires skill, intelligence, concentration, control, and grace. And, of this last quality, this woman has plenty. Look at her, jumping toward the sky.

God is a girl: homage to Yelena Isinbayeva

If God is really a girl, She must look a little like Yelena Isinbayeva: Russian pole vaulting champion.

And if God is a girl, hell is the place reserved for the idiots who didn't want her to participate in the Brazilian Olympics!

The beauty of the human body

Yelena Isinbayeva: Russian pole vault champion. This clip doesn't really require comments; just watch it! But note how the idiotic politicized bureaucrats who run the Olympic committees forbade this woman from participating in the Brazilian Olympic games. Which is just as well; they don't deserve her. 

Moon Goddess

The Goddess goes through many cycles of varied lengths, and She returns over and over in many forms. Here, She appears in a painting by the Neapolitan master Giovanni Ricca, probably made around 1630.

Note the play of light and shadows on the face of this beautiful woman - reminding those of the half moon. The human features of this image are, probably, those of Ricca's wife, Caterina Rossa ("Red Catherine") as she appears in a red dress in the full painting. But she is just an avatar of the true Goddess.

If you ever thought that Baroque painting was all about mannerism, think it over. If you think that no Baroque master could emulate the master of them all, Caravaggio, think it over. This is a painting that, alone, can justify the existence of the human species as it evolved in order to, eventually, produce it.

But women partake the nature of the Moon Goddess in many forms, and sometimes you don't even need a master painter to see it appear, as it does in this image of Ugo Bardi's daughter, Donata, photographed in 2016 at the Escher Museum in Delft, Holland.

Caravaggio: the epiphany and the sacrifice

Caravaggio is not a painter: he is a prophet. Caravaggio doesn't show what you can see, he shows what nobody can see. Caravaggio doesn't see, he penetrates. Caravaggio's painting are not about religion, they are a religion. Caravaggio does not paint, he reveals. And these are merely some characteristics of a painter that has gone beyond the mere world of things and who found ways to show things, while at the same time showing what's behind things. He is Caravaggio. That's all.

Look at this painting: the martyrdom of St. Ursula. Perhaps the last painting Caravaggio painted, it is the extreme synthesis of all what Caravaggio had painted before. This is the ultimate epiphany of the divinity, shown as the final crowning of a sequence of images that followed Caravaggio's own existence on this world.

The painting shows the death of Ursula, British princess, who refused to marry Attila, king of the Huns, who in revenge killed her and all her retinue of 11,000 virgins. A naive story for our modern tastes but not for Caravaggio, who has seen the deep meaning of the myth. The divine spirit can take a human form; can step into the material world for a short while. Then, it has to return. And returning, for the divine being, means death for its human form but, for the divine form, it is resurrection.

It is the basis of the Christian myth, but it goes much deeper and much earlier; it is the most ancient myth of all: the sacrificial myth that goes to the very center of the interaction of the divine and the human spheres.

And that's what Caravaggio is showing to us. Ursula, hit by an arrow, is the human form of the divine spirit. She had already appeared in an earlier painting by Caravaggio; in his "Our Lady of the Pilgrims".

Perhaps the same woman, surely the same spiritual entity. Caravaggio has been starting with this divine epiphany to end it with the one of Ursula. It is a complete universal cycle in two paintings: the same creature that has appeared for a brief existence on the lower sphere, to leave the material world in a spiritual apotheosis, later on.

Only Caravaggio could do it. 

The mysterious power of Caravaggio

Caravaggio: the Martyrdom of St. Ursula (ca. 1610).


I have a curious story to tell about this painting by Caravaggio. A few years ago, I was in Naples for a meeting on waste management. I was taking a walk in town and I stumbled into the announcement of a special exhibition of a newly discovered Caravaggio painting. I went inside, and there it was: the martyrdom of St. Ursula, seen in public perhaps for the first time after that Caravaggio had painted it, probably just before his death, in 1610.

At that time, I was already a Caravaggio lover, not yet a Caravaggio addict, as I am now. But seeing that painting was a big step forward in that direction. And you never know what effects Caravaggio can have on you; really, it is stuff so powerful that it can shock you, or make you weep, or maybe it can push you through a multi-dimensional gate that takes you directly to the planet Tralfamadore.

What happened to me on that occasion was not as spectacular as taking me to a remote planet, but weird nevertheless. That afternoon, I took a train to Rome where I had been invited to give a talk at the convention of the Italian Radical Party. I duly spoke to the audience and, afterward, the speakers were invited for dinner, together with some politicians. We sat at a large, round table and I found myself seated near an old lady. We chatted a little and the conversation moved to Caravaggio and to the painting I had seen just that morning. It turned out that the old lady, too, was a Caravaggio lover: we are a community of addicts. She was very interested in this recently re-discovered painting; the martyrdom of St. Ursula.

In the meantime, the conversation had been going on at the table, with people engaged in some deep political discussion about I don't remember what. At some point, someone turned to me and asked me: "but, Ugo, what's your opinion?" and then he asked me what I thought of some current political event. I turned in his direction and I said, "I don't know; we were discussing the martyrdom of St. Ursula."

There was a moment of silence at the table with people looking at me, frozen. Then, they shook their heads and they restarted their political discussion, probably denying to themselves that they had heard what I had said.

I have never been invited again to another political convention; I don't know if it is because of this story, probably not. Anyway, it shows how the mysterious power of Caravaggio can appear in many forms.

About the painting itself, the martyrdom of St. Ursula, I will write another post. 

The Ecstasy of Caravaggio

Caravaggio's Our Lady of the Pilgrims (image from Wikipedia)


Every time I happen to be in Rome for one reason or another, I usually make an effort to take some free time to go to see Caravaggio's "Our Lady of the Pilgrims." Often, I succeed because it is not very far from the central train station, in the Church of St. Augustine.

And I can tell you that, every time I have a chance to see this painting, it is a new shock, a new emotion, a new sensation, something that usually forces me to sit down somewhere, typically on the steps in front of the church, to recover my wits. Then, I can walk to the station and take the train home, a little shocked, but happy. 

I am not sure if I can comment on this painting (*); it is beyond my capabilities. Let me just say that Caravaggio managed an extraordinary feat. He is showing here ordinary people: an ordinary young mother with her child, ordinary travelers with their walking canes, with their feet dirty of a long, long walk. And, yet, at the same time, that woman is the all-holy Mother of God, truly the Panagia Theotokos herself, a miracle that repeats itself for me every time I am there. And it keeps going forever for the two figures kneeling in the painting who have been adoring this manifestation of the divine spirit for more than four centuries; never getting tired of doing that.

I don't know if everyone gets the same feeling when they see this painting; probably not. But for some of us, Caravaggio is not just a painter of religious subjects, he is a religion himself. And a painting such as the Lady of the Pilgrims is not just a painting about a religious revelation, it is a revelation in itself.

So, if you have a chance to be in Rome, try to take a look to this painting by Caravaggio, then you'll tell me what effect it made on you.




(*) But I might perhaps cite something written by the Emir Abd Al-Qadir around a century ago. As well known, Islam is not interested in images, but I think these words catch something of the mystical experience that at times come to people. Maybe the good Emir would have understood the meaning of Caravaggio's painting. 

"Our God and the God of all the communities opposing ours are truly and really a unique God, in agreement with what He said in several verses "Your God is a unique God" (Cor. 2:163; 16; 22, etc.). He also said: "There is no God but God" (Cor. 3:62). It is like this despite the diversity of His theophanies, their character absolute or limited, transcendent or immanent, and the variety of His manifestations. He manifested Himself to Moslems beyond all forms at the same time manifesting Himself in all forms. To the Christians, He manifested Himself in the person of Christ and of monks, as He says in the Book. To the Jews, He manifested Himself in the form of 'Uzayr and of the rabbis. To the Mazdians, in the form of fire, and to the dualists in the light and in the obscurity. And it manifested Himself to every worshipper of anything - stone, tree, or animal..  - in the shape of that thing: because no worshipper of a finite thing worships it for what it is itself. What he worships is the epiphany in that form of the attributes of the true God - be He exalted - with this epiphany representing, for each form, the divine aspect that pertains to Him."

Translated from "Abd el-Kader le magnanime", Gallimard 2003




H/t Antonio Cavaliere for having inoculated me with the Caravaggio virus