The faces looking back from behind this bus window carry the composed gravity of quattrocento portraiture: elongated, frontal, self-contained. They are wearing contemporary clothing. They are holding onto a subway bar. In Bus III, Giuseppe Ragazzini creates a temporal collision that is not parody: he uses the decorum and psychological weight of Renaissance portraiture to give these transit figures a dignity that the environment they are in is not designed to provide.
The faces looking back from behind this bus window carry the composed gravity of quattrocento portraiture: elongated, frontal, self-contained. They are wearing contemporary clothing. They are holding onto a subway bar. In Bus III, Giuseppe Ragazzini creates a temporal collision that is not parody: he uses the decorum and psychological weight of Renaissance portraiture to give these transit figures a dignity that the environment they are in is not designed to provide.
Philippe Daverio, writing on Ragazzini’s practice, identified Max Ernst’s Femmes cent têtes as a precedent: the assembly of incongruous fragments that find new relationships, coexisting without deductive connection but transmitting a sensation of deeper correspondence. Bus III is perhaps the most direct illustration of that argument. The Renaissance faces are incongruous in this setting, and their incongruity is not comic but strange and a little melancholy: these faces that were painted to last forever are traveling on a bus, which is the most ordinary and temporary thing one can do. That the faces hold their composure is the work’s central observation.
The red-toned window segments behind the figures, flat and non-recessive, deny the composition any suggestion of depth or distance. Everyone is at the same remove from the viewer, pressed forward, equally present and equally self-contained. The work extends an inquiry his father, the photographer Enzo Ragazzini, opened when he began photographing real transit passengers against the window grid: the glass as the true subject of any bus composition, the surface that is simultaneously transparent and separating, present and in the way.
