Details : God is in the details.

"God is in the details."

The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa. (wikipedia)

 

This was something that was said by my first art history prof in university. She was using it to explain the high level of detail used in a Christian painting we were looking at. Or perhaps it was that sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

I had grown up atheist, so I struggled with knowing the art history depictions of stories from the Bible and trying to keep track of saints. But it also meant that I interpreted this phrase differently. In my godless eyes this meant to me that the process of creation through repetition and the application of intricate detail was not dissimilar to meditation where the labor leads to deep self-contemplative thought. When I was in high school, I began to attend a Buddhist center in town once a week for a weekly meditation. Their meditation consisted of listening to a repetitive drumbeat while we focused on clearing our minds. This led me to thinking of those cathedrals that took generations of skilled artisans to craft. An idea behind their high level of craft was to provide people with things to do that allowed for them to have deeper reflective thought as they did things like carve out eclectic gargoyles.

 

Interior of the Église Saint-Sulpice de Fougères. Construction lasted XVth C to 1760.

 

Even though I held no belief in a higher being, I liked this idea that my exploration of detailed art and craft led to deeper understandings and realizations as I discovered how things fit together. The downside was that the time restrictions of the educational system led to problems where I was consistently struggling to complete my pieces on-time for the rigid deadlines.

A personal painting from 2010.

Getting back to this initial phrase : it is usually attributed to the architect Mies van der Rohe, but this is just a common phrase at the time that found attachment to him. The phrase can be found being traced back through time with the French author Gustave Flaubert, who said "le bon Dieu est dans le détail" (translating as "the good God is in the detail") as well as Michelangelo. Later, as I attended other universities, I used this phrase to explain the meditative nature of the high level of detail in my artworks and approach to my studies. The professors and students would use another similar phrase, "the Devil is in the details" to explain their dislike of extensive detail in their own personal work. In researching, this phrase can be traced to the 1960s about the details of political committees struggling with agreeing on details. I think it is interesting to see that the transition between these two similar but different phrases changed prominence in relation to the rise of Minimalism and a decrease in the celebration of craft over mass-production.

Window/wall detail at Le Musée de la Vie romantique

Personally, for me, I prefer those little moments where the hand of the maker can be found. In graduate school for architecture, I had an instructor for teaching us how to create plaster moulds. He told us a story of when the Vatican had approached him to do some repair work to their intricate plaster sculpted ceiling. When crafting the piece, he left a fingerprint in the plaster, but on a spot that was hidden except to a person who would work to repair or lofted into the ceiling. Details like this are what I love to find : those moments where the irregular nature of handicraft show through. These details can also lead to an exposed palimpsest that can help illustrate a moment in history like when an artist decided to change a painting or in architecture how a space may have been previously used.

Perhaps the process of crafting details can have a meditative element, but perhaps also the process of examining the details can also have a meditative element as one seeks to understand.