ABSTRACT
Perhaps Rossellini had in mind examples of Florentine Renaissance painting in joining historical figures together in the same spaces, which so often unite saints from disparate time periods, sometimes with contemporary identifiable personalities.3 Such images evoke the power of memory, binding past moments into the full conscious present of the inextricably intersecting
1 Karsten Harries opens a recent essay invoking the same film, “On the Power and Poverty of Perspective,” in Cusanus: The Legacy of Learned Ignorance, ed. Peter J. Casarella (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2006), 105-26. I first sketched out this section prior to reading Harries’s essay and have decided to retain it in as much as Rossellini’s film offers such a stunning evocation of both the tenacity of the story of this relationship presumed by so many writers, as well as its powerfully suggested civic humanist environment that encompassed these thinkers, despite their seemingly different vocations.
