Secretly praying while falling asleep

Chapter 2 The Secret Life of Paintings R. Foster & P. Tudor-Craig

Where are they?

The next aspect the book focuses is where the two characters are located. It spends most of the time circling around the room in an abstract matter rather than a strict geographical point.

We first are introduced to Chancelor Rolin's style of conducting business--which is a very private matter without an intermediary. The book declares that the choice to portray Rolin privately without a saint present is at the very least piquant. But that aside we can infer just like his business practices, this meeting is conducted in private.

Some side information is included about how prayer practices at the time could be considered by two different modes. Those are in private and in public. Even public spaces such as cathedrals were at times curtained off into identical private spaces for personal prayer. But this location we consider in the painting isn't so humble as a curtained square.

There is another comparison between cathedrals and castles, but in a hierarchical way in which the cathedral borrows the language of fortification that was needed in a very real way to protect nobility to say something different about the need to protect the soul.

The room we are in is in the same way like the Madona portrayed. Particularly the arches are done in a style different from what was contemporary at the time. And the book describes the room as atop the tallest spire and conjured by the painter rather than based on an actual room. The spire is also described as the safest place in a fortification provided the ground it stands on is stable. It is also the space that allows for decorations that involve windows and open spaces as it isn't concerned with flinging arrows and people knocking.

Amphiaraus Imagines Philostratus

Amphiaraus is doing something curious and to me it's hard to comprehend or explain. It seems like he's riding a chariot into ground and maybe the ground begins to have the qualities of water. Yet this character is definitely a heroic person and this task is by no means ordinary. We are told there were other heros who were claimed by the earth and never came back.

Amphiaraus seems to have prepared himself for something grand being in full armor except leaving his head exposed. He is not gently going to sleep and his chariot horses are exerting themselves to the point where they are not depicted as ideally beautiful. But the god of dreams himself is cool and collected wearing a black garment covering a white one.

All this activity and the combination of the collected dream god demonstrates how one acquires wisdom which is heroic and buried.