Rialto

And once you have understood it, you remain for ever under the spell of its beauty and of your initial rapture.

The point is that each of the characters in Carpaccio's crowded compositions is a centre. If you concentrate on any one figure you begin to see with unmistakable clarity that everything else is mere context, background, built up like a kind of pedestal for this 'incidental' character. The circle closes...

The circle closes around each one of us, and opens up on to another. This lack of space,(how unlike Poussin's abstract openness!) holds, gathers the light to itself, a darkening star, a dying sun.

You want to say it as it is, to see it as it is. Nothing more. No need for metaphor or poetry. It is still thisness, lovingly inscribed in the details, like the fine interweaving of delicate patterns, the threads of time; the fire of the world, transmuting lead into gold,the betrothal of the blue to the red, does not mean a forgetting, the loss of self, but a deepening of subjectivity. A fidelity to yourself, to the reality of the absolute, to perfection and to the 'bridges' -stone or floating-that were placed before us.