ABSTRACT

The painting becomes a statement about the relationship between seeing and hearing that can only be understood if the people take into consideration the experience, almost a ritual, of the monks walking into the refectory. The refectory is the place where the opposition between sacred and secular collapses, "experienced not in the form of either/or but as not only/but also". The transient coincidence of the viewers' gaze with that of Christ, paired with the sense of hearing and its own transitoriness, suggests that that very same ephemerality, typically human, is the path to infinity. Campana's discussion of synchresis summarizes the experiential trajectory of Veronese's painting. “Synchresis brings out how the space of the image always already encompasses aurality, whatever that may be. The canvas is a material surface, with its own performative agency, that mobilises an experience in which architecture, painting and music interact with each other.