To Build for Eternity: The Life & Work of Raphael Sassi
Tribute to Raphael Sassi, the Maryland-raised, New York-educated and Colorado-based artist whose ethos and existence could fill the Duomo.
There’s no wrapping our heads around the word of his death. It’s like trying to get a droplet of water onto cracked earth: the release will help, the drop will fall, but the ground absorbs it instantly, only a millisecond’s relief from the dryness. Dryness more so than numbness at this point. The sort of dryness that leads to dust, not simply in some archaic Biblical verse, but rather the dust from which the fibers of his paper originated.
Dust in an arid landscape, maybe the type through which he roved on his motorcycle. He seemed a somewhat-taciturn renegade who possessed a frankness in his communication, a truncated elegance in his eloquence. He was all truth, no bullshit. His drawings are all truth, no bullshit. The difference between those two sentences — the past tense in who he was, and the present tense in what he left us — brings the desert into jagged, puncturing relief. There is no deluge torrential enough to saturate that shift in tense.
But his artwork — as his memory, as his impact, as his blessedly brusque compassion — continues into the future tense. As he was, it will be. These drawings, these tangible proofs of his existence, will continue his ethos. So many lives flit upon this earth, but Raphael’s didn’t leave us stranded only with recollections. How lucky that we can hold and preserve the hallowed maps made by his own hands.
The desert of his loss will never be adequately flooded. But, with the unforgivable, impending rush of time, the truth he left may help satiate us. There’s an unspeakably sacred drop in each piece of paper he coaxed into life, all the more sacred as the fibers of his own life disappeared back into the dust.
As he traversed the streets of Maryland and New York and Colorado, he traversed the streets of Florence. It’s not just his name that implies this. There’s an anachronistic reassurance in remembering that he studied abroad in Florence as an undergraduate. Raphael was a contemporary Vulcan raining blows with his draftsmanship, each struck by a rebel connoisseur of everything that made drawing lucid and visionary. His anvil could have been cast in either the smutty bars of contemporary Brooklyn or in the Florentine workshops of centuries gone by.
The contemporary art world denied him blue-chip success and all its ensuing, insipid status, but I like to think that Raphael’s trajectory favors the beating heart of Florence more than the milieu of Brooklyn. While it’s tempting to imagine him following in the footsteps of Raffaello Sanzio (that name, after all), Raphael’s trajectory more resembles that of the early Renaissance goldsmith-turned-sculptor-turned-architect Filippo Brunelleschi’s. Brunelleschi didn’t handle the loss of the Gates of Paradise commission to Lorenzo Ghiberti in 1401 very well. As Raphael headed west to Colorado in 2012, Brunelleschi headed southwest from Florence to take refuge from his narrow loss in Rome. And as Raphael drew faces and figures among the Rockies, Brunelleschi drew mountains, though he recorded the peaks and valleys of ancient ruins instead.
As our Raphael traversed those mountains with a humble ballpoint pen, Brunelleschi recorded their proportions and brought them back to Florence. He then set about creating a mountain of his own: the Duomo, finishing the great dome of the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, erecting a mountain to occlude Ghiberti’s damned doors for miles. Ghiberti’s doors may have created a cornerstone of the Renaissance’s birthplace. But, capping the vista of one of Western civilization’s most epochal and original beds, Brunelleschi built his way up into its panorama.
As Brunelleschi stated: I propose to build for eternity.
Unlike Ghiberti’s doors, the Duomo could be considered far more egalitarian. Anyone hiking the hills of Tuscany can see and appreciate it from a distance; any citizen running errands can glance up at it from between buildings. The doors, while resplendent and revolutionary, receive the admiring glances of far fewer eyes: those walking past who can spare a moment’s distraction from taking photographs or determining in which queue to stand. One chooses to view the Doors of Paradise. The Duomo compels you to view it.
As the blue-chip art world excludes so many, Raphael’s artwork is the Duomo wryly rising above it, democratically visible to all. There is no barrier of artspeak to prevent an Everyman from wondering at his works. So many of Raphael’s pieces are completed in an unassuming ballpoint pen accessible to anyone, much as the Duomo’s silhouette was completed — not in the gilded bronze of Ghiberti’s doors, expensive and mercurial — but in the clay and mortar of Tuscany. The Duomo’s materials were from the baked earth around it. Mystery and admiration cloaked these two artists: not because they were unreachable or enigmatic, but rather because they took a layman’s materials and, from their ubiquity, they built poetry, humanity, and eternity.
Both Brunelleschi and Raphael entered into a bittersweet canon upon their passing. While people leave talismans of their lives behind when they die, artists leave extensions of their very selves. The Duomo’s shadow, too, deluges the dry ground from which it came.
All truth, no bullshit.
The silhouettes of Colorado mountains as iconic and more ancient than the Duomo.
No patience for pretense, just inconceivably intelligent drawing with each strike upon the anvil.
The highway corridors of the Northeast receding as the corridors created by Brunelleschi’s linear perspective vanish.
Receding and vanishing as does a life, but held buoyant by the flood we unleash in his name, held aloft by the broken dam of our grief. May he motor through the open road in Colorado. May he finish a beer in Brooklyn. May he sketch in the Duomo, our waters having brought him along South Platte, along Hudson, along Arno.
May our shock and fury never drown, but instead gently lap at the scratching, fibrous dust of Raphael’s memory, Raphael’s paper, and Raphael’s life.
You can learn more about Raphael & view his artwork by visiting raphaelsassi.com.
Source:
Hyman, Isabelle. “Filippo Brunelleschi.” Encyclopaedia Britannica Online. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc: April 11, 2019. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Filippo-Brunelleschi. Accessed: April 15, 2019.
