The slant that we have chosen to give its distinctive tone to the new series of FMR may be summed up as "the culture and sensuality of the seeing eye ". We say "the culture of the seeing eye" because the traces left by art in the modern world are always, in their way, hallowed and sacrosanct To interpret them through the stratifications of passing time, in the intersecting and sometimes colliding of different civilizations, in the "forward" flights of genius and in the gradual "hardening" of taste, is to understand that inhabiting an identity is to move through a system of relationships, of crossing points that are apparently shifting, and yet fundamentally unchanging. Such is our culture. Here, then, we are concerned with an idea of beauty - complex, composite, for ever fluid and in transformation - which becomes a rooted identity; a "seeing eye", indeed, which is born and recognised within a culture. But we are also concerned with a "sensuality of the seeing eye", because ours is a culture which is not abstractly declared and set in stone, and hence extraneous, but continually reworked through the free-ranging curiosity which has been the hallmark of FMR, in all its incarnations, sanctioned to the most off-beat, from the most central to the most marginal.
This second number invites us to confront famous masterpieces such as Olympia, but also to enter a theatre of faith - however bizarrely expressed -such as the Sanctuary of Santa Maria delle Grazie near Mantua; to compare our own ideas of decoration and symbolism with those of the Islamic and Chinese models, and our present-day ideas of spectacle with those of the splendours of the Neapolitan Baroque. A culture, and a sensuality, seen as keen expressions of the intellect, and creativity, but also as changing touchstones of beauty, of plenitude made visible: with art seen and experienced not as a chilly paradigm of something which is alien, but as the most complex and controversial - and hence unique and inescapable -emotional reagent in our existence.
FMR is concerned with a culture, and an art, which do not talk of themselves to themselves, but which work upon the deep and formative layers of our intelligence and feelings; an art in which it may be possible to find the point of contact, and flow, between all our most human emotions as they crystalise into our values.Once again, good reading but above good seeing.
