Dualities

 ‘The debate in 2016 stirred powerful emotions of fear, loss and betrayal, with deep roots in British history. Its signature issues – immigration, ‘sovereignty’, citizenship and trade – spoke to diffuse and sometimes inchoate ideas about identity, nationhood and Britain’s place in the world. Campaigners on both sides invoked contested memories of the past and made normative claims about Britain’s ‘natural’ allies and markets. In all these respects, the campaign was closely interwoven with the histories of empire and with the imaginative possibilities to which it gave rise ‘ 

Robert Saunders (2020): Brexit and Empire: ‘Global Britain’ and the Myth of Imperial Nostalgia, The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, DOI: 10.1080/03086534.2020.1848403 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03086534.2020.1848403

It is intriguing in this current period of uncertainty caused, in part, by a toxic cocktail of Brexit, the pandemic, climate change and the ongoing culture wars of identity politics, scapegoating and blame, to find historical parallels in the experiences of earlier generations. 

I have recently returned from visiting family in Lancashire, following the onerous required covid protocols and quarantines. As a duel national, (Belgian/British), walking around Lancaster, with its grim castle and slave trade associations, and Prescot, near Liverpool, where I took a look at the building site which will shortly become The Shakespeare North Playhouse.  https://www.shakespearenorthplayhouse.co.uk/   I asked myself the question; If someone had been born, like Shakespeare, in 1564 instead of 1964, and it was 1621 instead of 2021, how would they have experienced, perhaps similarly, the effects of plague, economic, social and cultural upheaval, a sense of displacement arising out of conflicts of power, contested religious or political ideologies, affiliations or identities, and a changing sense of 'self' re-orientated to a rapidly evolving global environment with a geography of altered time and space ? What false dichotomies or opposing dualities would one be forced to choose between?  What dislocations and discontinuities would one need to bridge to remain whole? 

' The County of Lancashire may now be said to abound as much in Witches, as Seminaries, Jesuits and Papists' . Thomas Potts 'Discovery'  1612 trials 

Some of these themes are explored in Richard Wilson’s book ‘Secret Shakespeare’ which investigates the enigmatic ‘silence’ that surrounds the ‘lacuna’ of facts about the poet’s life, and especially the ‘lost years’, which he may have spent in a series of Catholic ‘safe houses', like Houghton Tower, in the North. Using contextual evidence and textual analysis of the plays, ‘masques/masks’, which paradoxically hide as much as they reveal, he contributes to a convincing case that Shakespeare was an ambivalent ‘recusant’ Catholic who ‘played’ a deadly game of appearance and illusion, with the confessional identities and power politics of the cultural revolution unleashed by the reformation in England and continental Europe.  

‘Born into an Escher-like world of secret chapels, priest holes, subterranean passages, false walls and trap doors, Shakespeare constructed a theatre not of discovery, like his rivals, but of darkness, deferral, evasion and disguise, where, for all his hopes of a ‘golden time’ of future toleration, ‘what’s to come’ is always still unsure’  

I recently visited the Museum Mayer van den Bergh in Antwerp where Peiter Bruegel’s painting of ‘Dulle Griet’ painted in 1563, depicts just such a world of cataclysmic apocalyptic chaos, a world turned upside down through both human folly and natural disaster, in which the individual, the embattled ‘Dulle Griet’, the Flemish version of ‘Mad Meg’ storms the gates of hell for plunder.

https://www.museummayervandenbergh.be/en/page/mad-meg

Whilst Dulle Griet may be about the battle of the sexes in a topsy turvy world of madness and mayhem, the museum also houses this amazing and powerful 13^th century sculpture of Christ with the beloved disciple John by Master Heinrich von Konstanz.

https://www.museummayervandenbergh.be/en/page/intimate-portrayal-jesus

This beguiling work, made for the Dominican convent of Sankt Katharinental in Switzerland, speaks, perhaps, to the sexual politics of our own age, albeit anachronistically, and it is tempting to appropriate this Christian neo-Platonic image of human and divine same-sex devotion and protection to the contemporary politics of LGBT identities. Whilst this may well be considered by some to be an ‘inappropriate’ appropriation of the 'sacred' to the 'profane', the reverse has often been the case in literature or art that attempts to express the ineffable. This homoerotic ‘language of symbols’ can be seen in the mystical poetry of the Carmelite St. John of the Cross in verses 6-8 of ‘The Dark Night of the Soul’ or in the ecstatic verses of Jalaluddin Rumi the 13^th century Sufi mystic. 

6. Upon my flowering breast
which I kept wholly for him alone,
there he lay sleeping,
and I caressing him
there in a breeze from the fanning cedars.

7. When the breeze blew from the turret,
as I parted his hair,
it wounded my neck
with its gentle hand,
suspending all my senses.

 

8. I abandoned and forgot myself,
laying my face on my Beloved;
all things ceased; I went out from myself,
leaving my cares
forgotten among the lilies.

From: THE COLLECTED WORKS OF ST. JOHN OF THE CROSS, translated by Kieran Kavanaugh, OCD, and Otilio Rodriguez, OCD, revised edition (1991). Copyright 1991 ICS Publications.

Likewise Bernini’s 'St. Theresa' in the Church of Santa Maria Della Vittoria in Rome borrows iconography that references a classical Cupid and Venus, and uses it as a visual metaphor, clothing it in Christian mystical significance, the moment of ecstatic sacred spiritual union represented by its profane equivalent. The public performance of what is private and hidden is explicit in the architectural theatricality of the little chapel as its patrons, the Conaro family, for whom the chapel is named, are represented observing the scene, which has been created for them, from the viewpoint of their window on an ornate marble balcony mounted in the side walls, as if they were watching an operatic diva breath her last. 

‘Spiritual friendships’ were celebrated by the Cistercian abbot Aelred of Rievaux, who continued a tradition of writing about friendship and love that had classical roots in writers like Plato and Cicero.  Like the celebrated aristocratic codes of loyalty and honor between Japanese samurai warriors, which often carried homoerotic connotations, in 16^th century Florence the dramatic potential of characters acting out the scenes of love and sacrifice, betrayal, dishonor and death was a visual trope exploited by Renaissance painters when they depicted the crucial moments of leading up to Christ's passion and death. Here Giotto's fresco, from the cycle in the Arena Chapel in Padova, shows Judas's kiss of betrayal, the gesture of trust and the contradictory act of betrayal, framed at the 'still point of the turning world',  the axis of a wheel of violence, whose spokes are made from clubs, spears and torches. 

 

The Last Supper was often frescoed onto the refectory walls of monasteries where the brethren met daily to eat in silence and hear gospel and other spiritual readings. The central drama in Ghirlandaio’s fresco at the convent of the Ognissanti in Florence juxtaposes the clean-shaven disciple John, ‘the one whom Jesus loved’, represented in close physical intimacy with Jesus, to Judas, who is separated from the group by being seated on the opposite side of the table. It is to him Christ refers when he says, ‘One of you will betray me’. In the all-male hierarchical communities of religious brothers sworn to poverty, chastity and obedience, the psychological and emotional power and charge of such an image should not be underestimated.  

In ‘As You Like It’ complex ironic multi-layered games involving gender, role-reversal, appearance and reality are woven into the language of the text, the performance by the all-male actors and the illusion of the play and its conventions, which involved the active participation of the real world of the audience and the theatre. Shakespeare's sonnets dedicated to the mysterious Mr. W H. and addressed to his ‘dark lady’ have long been analyzed for just such sexual ambivalence.  

In Elizabethan England, as elsewhere in Europe, during the schisms of the 16th  and 17th century, the question of sovereignty linked to one’s religious and political allegiances. Individuals were sometimes forced to confess their side in this conflict which involved love and loyalty, or treason and betrayal between the contested powers of religion and the state.

 In chapter 5 of ‘Secret Shakespeare’ Wilson claims that Shakespeare’s poem ‘Venus and Adonis’, 

 ‘….conceals politics beneath the erotic; yet behind the false facade of pornographic narrative the text discloses its topicality as nothing less than the ‘Bloody Question’ of loyalty or betrayal.' 

Shakespeare’s distant cousin, the Jesuit priest St. Robert Southwell, had studied at Douai, Louvain and Rome before returning to England where he was subsequently betrayed, captured, imprisoned, tortured and finally executed at Tyburn. Southwell wrote his poem ‘Saint Peter’s Complaint’, as a criticism of ‘Venus and Adonis’ which he called a ‘pagan toy’ and dedicated it via a prose letter in the 1616 edition ‘To my worthy cousin Master W.S. signed your loving cousin R.S.’ 

Referring to the portress of the poem who asks Peter ‘art though not also one of this man’s disciples?’ which leads to Peter’s denial, Wilson says,

'If the portress figures Queen Elizabeth, Southwell seems to interpret Venus and Adonis as an example of craven capitulation to the Crown that followed the introduction of the ‘Bloody Question’ in 1588, when all English Catholics were confronted with a deadly test: If the Pope were to send over an army….whose side would you be on : the Pope’s or the Queen’s?'

Wilson states that '… the Elizabethan association of popery and sodomy complicates our understanding of both sexual and religious identity in the Shakespearian period. It had been Southwell, after all, who perfected what Louis Martz calls the ‘sacred parody’ of sexual love, by arguing that  ‘If on thy beauty God enamoured be, /Base is thy love of any less than he;’ and when Burghley’s secretary scorned such sublimation, he may have been cued by the fervent homoeroticism in which the Jesuit moved.'

 To identify or be branded as either a papist or a sodomite, or both, as they were often conflated, carried severe and barbaric penalties in which death or exile might be preferred to torture and imprisonment. To these two accusations could be added a third, witchcraft. In chapter 8 of Wilson's book he asks why Shakespeare anathematizes the Jesuits as Witches in 'The Scottish Play'. 

'What prompted this transfer of guilt from the Gunpowder assassins to Macbeth's Witches, and why were the Weird Sisters presented, like Garnet's Jesuits, as an organized political conspiracy? ' 

Byrd’s setting of Henry Walpole’s poem was written to commemorate the execution, at which he was present, of the Jesuit Edmond Campion in 1581. Performed here by Fretwork it evokes the troubled  times and the challenge to individual conscience in the title, ‘why should I use my paper ink and pen’.  

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9w6UDl4an0 

It survives as do other 'silent witnesses' in the cult of relics from this period that continue simultaneously to assert, provoke and challenge various cherished narratives. 

https://www.stonyhurst.ac.uk/open-to-the-public/historic-collections-archives-and-museum/relic-exhibition

Shakespeare may well have been connected to the Baroque culture of Catholic counter-reformation Europe through recusant family networks and his association with a string of safe houses in the Midlands and the North for missionary priests moving between England, the Spanish Netherlands and Italy, but his chameleon like ability to assume different characters and roles throughout the plays, holds up a mirror in which viewers could, and still can, see themselves reflected obliquely within a convincing illusion of the world, even as it deflects sight away from a reality that hides behind and beyond the focus of its ornamented frame. 

‘All the rest is silence’..............................or is it ?

Conflicted identities and divided loyalties certainly played a part in my early adulthood as I strove to escape and/or reconcile apparent contradictions. A Lancashire Catholic seminary boarding school education in the 1970s was no less toxic to someone emerging into adulthood through the difficult years of adolescent self-discovery. British/Irish sectarian violence, the emerging sexual politics of a more liberated age, and the pedophile scandals that have subsequently rocked the Catholic Church. 'Something is rotten in the state of Denmark'. Perhaps those 'demons' still need to be 'exorcised', by more humanist/humane and rational methods than the violent ones invoked by the ghost of Hamlet's father in the play.  I painted this mural of Michael Pennington as Hamlet, 'The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king', onto the wall of my room during those years, after seeing his performance at Stratford-upon-Avon, and amazingly it is still there. This drone footage below reveals the ruins, in my own lifetime, of the old school and calls to mind the 'bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang' of Shakespeare's sonnet 73. 

That time of year thou mayst in me behold

When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.

In me thou see'st the twilight of such day

As after sunset fadeth in the west,

Which by and by black night doth take away,

Death's second self, that seals up all in rest.

In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire

That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,

As the death-bed whereon it must expire,

Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by.

This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong,

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Itd76WOqxI4

    

Solitude.

 

Travel these days, even for humanitarian reasons, requires that we submit to periods of enforced tests and isolation in order to conform to the legal requirements and protocols of the ongoing pandemic.  This is my re-worked version of Pope's delightful 'Ode on Solitude', supposedly written when he was only 12 years old. I bought this small battered leather volume in the photos from the labyrinthine Carnforth second hand book shop on a recent visit to Lancashire. 

ODE ON SOLITUDE.

After Alexander Pope by Alan Mitchell

Happy the one content to care

For his small plot of land, breathing

Mindfully on well-trod ground.

 

In winter warm, in summer cool,

Whose clothes and shelter,

Food and drink, are easily found.

 

Healthy body, healthy mind,

In peace and quiet, watching

Each moment pass contentedly.

 

Read and rest, work and play,

He meditates on his clean slate,

By day, sleeps well at night.  

 

Living anonymous, dying alone,

Unknown, leaving no trace, returns. 

Circle,  point,  infinity.

 

Dance of Death Sketchbook

 

The Abbot, from The Dance of Death ca. 1526, published 1538. Hans Holbein.

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/336307

Travelling by train to and from work everyday I often use this half hour as an opportunity to read or sketch. This series of sketches emerged from that daily journey. Inspired by Hans Holbein’s Dance of Death engravings, in which the playful personification of death in the form of a skeleton surprises his unsuspecting victims, who come from every age and station, with his mischievous sudden and unexpected appearance in the midst of life; my ambiguous imaginative figure has a somewhat skeletal head and by contrast a rather lusty body as he cavorts along from page to page in an irreverent and provocative manner. Giving a familiar human form to something mysterious and unknowable, personifying a process or abstraction we find difficult to understand, and making fun of what we fear is a psychological technique for confronting, coming to terms with, and taming our anxieties and insecurities about life’s ultimate uncertainty and the inevitability of it's final end.  This is no less true now than it was in the 16^th century for John Donne or Hans Holbein.  

The Holy Sonnets: Death be not proud. 

John Donne 1572-1631

Death, be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;

For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow

Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.

From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be,

Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow,

And soonest our best men with thee do go,

Rest of their bones, and soul's delivery.

Thou art slave to fate, chance, kings, and desperate men,

And dost with poison, war, and sickness dwell,

And poppy or charms can make us sleep as well

And better than thy stroke; why swell'st thou then?

One short sleep past, we wake eternally

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.

Panel Games

 

Re-constructing historical methods and styles of painting on wooden panels, over a period of years, and adapting these processes to my own contemporary uses has often challenged my understanding and assumptions about the meaning and purpose of art in both old and new contexts.  

                         'Painting In-congruities', oil on panel after Albrecht Bouts 

My first experiment explored a ‘Surrealist’ juxtaposition of tromp l’oeil collage elements alluding to the Belgian colonial past in the Congo. These were painted onto a re-constructed early Flemish panel painting by Albrecht Bouts. Totemic male and female ancestors, fetish figures, deities or architypes were provocatively jumbled together in unfamiliar ways. 

In the ongoing reconstruction of a 14th century panel painting above I worked with water gilding and  historical pigments from Kramer, like cinnabar, malachite and ultramarine (ground from lapis lazuli) to make my own egg tempera (Click the link for an explanation of the start of this project) Panel Painting Part 1

‘Fallen Idol’ homage to C. P Cavafy.

Freely adapting these materials and ideas I have nearly finished this tromp l’oeil in oil on oak panel above that deliberately alludes through the materials and prcesses used to icons or religious panel painting of the 14th century or earlier. In ‘Fallen Idol’ homage to C. P Cavafy, painted fragments of torn paper from an art history books, representing the broken marble statue of Hermes and the infant Dionysius by Praxiteles, 19th century sepia photographs of academic life models, and a detail from Bronzino’s 'Portrait of a Young Man', share the framed space with a yellow butterfly. The visual and material contrasts between gold and gesso suggest a series of dualities; heaven and earth, human, divine, sacred and profane, mortal, immortal, real and illusory, past and present, living and dead………..    

Most recently I have been working on a re-construction of a triptych of the Virgin and Child with two side-panels of the Annunciation painted 'en grisaille'. It is re-imagined from various different works by the Master of the Saint Ursula legend, a painter who worked in Bruges in the 15th century. The opening and closing side panels operate like windows and doors into a parallel universe and set up relationships between narrative and icon, text and image, inside and outside, time and space, that resonate in both historical and contemporary contexts. 

Playing with variations on the theme of the re-imagined historic ‘reconstruction’ there is both correlation and continuity as well as conflict and dissonance in both the context and meaning of the works and their significance and interpretation. Reproduction, restoration and even faking are fascinating processes that can throw a raking light over perceptions of art, reality and appearance and our relationship with history, memory, imagination and creativity.  

Similar ideas are the focus of the contemporary works brought together for the exhibition, 'Memling Now' at Sint Jan's Hospital in Bruges. Click the link below to find out more: 

'Memling Now': Sint Jan's Hospital 

Parallel Universes.

 

“It is dangerous to unmask images, since they dissimulate the fact that there is nothing behind them.”

 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

     

      “O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

        Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.” 

     G. M Hopkins. ‘No worse there is none, pitched past pitch of grief.’

 

In Susanna Clark’s book ‘Piranesi’ (like his namesake the 18^th century Roman engraver whose veduti of the Roman ruins and imaginative capriccios include his famous 'carceri’ or prisons, like the one illustrated above) the protagonist is adept at systematically mapping and cataloguing the rooms and tides of his lost world. He interprets and finds meaning and comfort in the iconography of the many statues that populate the halls and staircases of his otherwise almost deserted sea-swept and seemingly endless ruined palatial domain. Along with his journal, and the ambiguous ‘other’, who gives him occasional ‘gifts’ ( like, incongruously, a pair new training shoes) the generosity of the seemingly beneficent ‘house’ itself, gives him security and comfort. Even the occasionally treacherous high tides, which provide him with fish to eat, and the dangerous fallen ceilings and walls do little to dampen his devotion to this beautiful ruined domain and the bones of its mysterious former inhabitants, which Piranesi reverences with care and offerings.

Like Susanna Clark's previous book, ‘Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrel’ she invites us into the lives of  characters who experience a not always benign parallel universe, lying adjacent to the ‘real’ world of the other characters in the fictional text itself. This other world can be accessed through mirrors, or other magic ‘doorways’ that open like the pages of a book. It’s a world where forgetting and remembering are keys to the creative imagination in which dreams and historical fantasy mingle to blur the boundaries of reality and illusion.   

Whether by supernatural means, magic, primitive religion or perhaps hypnosis, psychosis or amnesia, we increasingly suspect that  Piranesi’s ‘condition’ might have a more prosaically scientific explanation. Might it be a form of schizophrenia, a bi-polar disorder or the early onset of Alzheimer’s, and could it be cured by chemical or psychological interventions?  He inhabits this imaginary world which is more real to him (and significantly to the others who have visited it, suggesting a collective experience ) than the ‘real’ world of ‘police stations’ or ‘Manchester’, which simply do not exist in his memory or experience.  What are we to make of this parallel universe which seems so solid and real to our character and yet so insubstantial to us?   We need a paradigm shift in thinking, something like quantum physics, to allow us to see or believe this reality, or to suspend our disbelief. The magic mirror, door to the divine, window into a lost world or secret garden is of course art. The creative imagination expanded into stories or pictures allows other worlds akin to our own to exist, at least in our personal or shared collective imagination.

       Detail from Grayson Perry's ' Map of an Englishman's Mind. 

      https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/object/P_2005-0429-22

‘So you are confident that parallel worlds are conceivable’, says Bole. More zan conceivable, dear Benedict, zey are likely, if you subscribe as I do, to ze multiwerse- and more particularly, to membrane theory. Multiple membranes, each a uniwerse in its own right, float in high dimensions. If zey collide, which is very rare, you may get a big bang, or something like it.’  Bole has studied the subject long and hard. He worries that Dr Flasche’s theoretical brilliance might not match the need for practical application. ‘I offer a variation,’ he say. ‘Two membranes are joined at one tiny point. A cross dimensional bridge occurs, the effect of a cosmic collision long ago. They share time but not place.’   

Andrew Caldecott. Lost Acre from the Rotherwierd Trilogy

Art, religion, science, history, memory, dreams and imagination can give rebirth (Renaissance) to a collective fantasy of the past, ancient Rome or a medieval Bruges, in an historical reconstruction or virtual reality whether in architecture, painting, sculpture or film.  As Simon Sharma says in an article in the NYT about his book 'Landscape and Memory', in which explores the topography of cultural identity, 'Arcadia has always been a pretty lie' . 

In David Gerard’s painting of the Virgin and Child with Four Angels 1510-15, now in the Metropolitan Museum  https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/436102 We are invited into both a real and imaginary world connected to each other through the trompe l’oeil illusion of an architectural door frame, flanked by columns with capitals in an Italian style, and further enclosed, no doubt, by the actual physical sculpted frame that protects the painting and presents a ‘window to the past’, as it were, from the wall of the museum. Through the doorway and beyond the figure of the virgin and child and the angels, those below playing musical instruments and those hovering above holding the hollow circle of her crown, we see a contemporary early 16^th century view of the city. We can recognise the familiar spire of the Onze Lieve Vrouw Kirk and the shorter, at that time, Cathedral tower or perhaps the Sint Donatus Kirk, which no longer exists, as well as the distinctive Flemish pitched rooftops of the city. A Carthusian monk is seen strolling and reading in the enclosed garden, suggesting that the painting was linked to the former monastery at Genadedael, just outside the city walls of Bruges opposite the Kruispoort. On this site now there is new housing and no trace of the old charterhouse except in the name of the road, Kartuizenstraat.  Less familiar are the rocky mountains rising up in the distance, in what we know to be the very flat Flemish polders. 

 

Marcus Gheeraerts' Map of Bruges from 1562. Detail showing the Onze Lieve Vrouw Kirk

What are we to make of this strange and beautiful, dreamlike mixture of real and imaginary worlds, both human and divine in this very Flemish form of ‘magic realism’?    

‘Ayres Rock’ ( named after Sir Henry Ayres, the chief Secretary of New South Wales by European colonialists in the 1870s)  or ‘Uluru’ was and is to the native Australian Anangu, who are the traditional landowners, a repository of cultural collective memory, a key locus of meaning, remembered in narratives and images from the dreamtime, and inhabited by the spirits of the ancestral creator beings. The different perceptions and priorities of native and colonial peoples have often clashed around what is visible to the outer eye and the 'parallel universe’ which only the inner eye can see. 

Like Lucy, in C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia, who is met initially with disbelief by her siblings, we can only pass through the magical wardrobe to the world beyond with the enchanted eye of childlike belief. This conflict between rational reality and the world of the imagination is also central to H. G. Wells short story 'The Door in the Wall', in which the central protagonist's choice to re-enter through the door to the lost world he remembers from his childhood is repeatedly postponed throughout his life until he finally, critically decides to make that choice - with fatal consequences.    

Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’, a 24 hour montage of film clips in which a timepiece always appears synchronized to real time, is both an homage to cinema and a memento mori. We have the impression that time is elastic, expanding and contracting to accommodate our emotional ‘inscape’ as we are drawn into each narrative episode and its psychological drama. Like an elastic band it can change size without altering its actual dimensions. Time and space are perceived realities in which impressions can over-ride logic to give the illusion of truth.    

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/lists/five-ways-christian-marclays-clock-does-more-just-tell-time

Relative and absolute time and space, like parallel universes, kaleidoscope into the present moment. Here at the still point in the centre of an ever turning circle is the place were both mundane and supramundane worlds meet in the mind and consciousness of the individual and the cosmos. This point is clearly real, the basis of a dimensional reality, in which line and circle connect to create all geometric forms, and yet it is simultaneously without dimension, is 'no thing', ultimately mysterious and unknowable. 

     The oculus and dome of the Pantheon, Rome 

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome