GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING, 2000

As America's mental courage is so indebted, above all current lands and peoples, to the noble army of Old World martyrs past, now incumbent on us that we clear those martyrs lives and names, and hold them up for reverent admiration as well as beacons.  And typical of this and standing for and all perhaps, Giordano Bruno may well be put, today and to come in our New Worlds thank fullest heart and memory.
Walt Whitman

To think is to speculate with images.
Giordano Bruno

Giordano Bruno, one of the most important Copernican thinkers of the European Renaissance, proposed the idea of a ‘heroic philosophy’. He saw philosophy as an active and passionate quest for truth. He left behind him a number of esoteric and philosphical works including The Ash Wednesday Supper.

The report from the Fraternity of St. John the Beheaded is the only documentary account of Bruno’s martyrdom on 17 February 1600 to be considered authentic by the Catholic church. It was published in 1889:

. . . But he insisted till the end always in his damned refractoriness and twisted brain and his mind with a thousand errors; yes, he didn’t give up his stubborness, not even when the court ushers took him away to the Campo de' Fiori. There his clothes were taken off, he was bound to a stake and burned alive [e quivi spogliato nudo e legato a un palo fu brusciato vivo]. In all this time he was accompanied by our fraternity, who sang constant litanies, while the comforters tried till the last moment to break his stubborn resistance, till he gave up a miserable and pitiable life.

This is Durand's only picture of an historical event. Giordano Bruno's martyrdom in all its harrowing detail is depicted in the Campo de' Fiori, Rome of today. GIORDANO BRUNO BURNING demonstrates a criterion of Neomodernism:

A Neomodernist treatment of political or historical subject matter is detached and philosophical, never propaganda.

The Neomodernist Manifesto was launched by Durand at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston University London on 27 September 2000.