" -- miracle is not that there is so much symmetry and homogeneity in our world," she made an upward arcking gesture with her right hand, "it's that we perceive it the way that we do."
She reached behind herself, felt for the glass case, and sat.
"You mean that there is a lack of balance in this piece here,"
I nodded at the sulky Madonna before us, "and that I fill the gaps in subconsciously?"
The black-suited oldster who had been half blocking the entrance to the room dashed across in a jerky, mincing run. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and spoke in a voice breathy and shrill.
"Young lady, please do not sit on the cases. They aren't meant to hold a person's weight." He made a two-handed gesture as though to grab her.
"Can you tell me what tree the wood for the panel that this is painted on is made from?" she asked as she stood up from the case.
He dropped his hands, abashed. "I'm sorry, I'm not a docent. I'm just a guard. Everyone you see wearing a black suit is only a guard." He turned away muttering. She and I exchanged a glance.
As we walked along the corridor, she let go of my hand and touched the surface of a painting. She pulled back and looked about guiltily.
"This is what I mean. We see patterns where there are none; we fill in sounds where there is really silence in order to create rhythm where there is just random noise. . . "
We stood before an oil-on-canvas piece. It showed a slightly larger-than-life older man in a robe holding a male infant.
"Look at this." She lifted her tragic chin at the canvas.
"We see the man and the child, but in the background - " She craned her neck forward. "Hmm. There doesn't seem to be a background. And that's exactly what I mean. It doesn't seem at all odd to us that people stand before us with only a few lines behind them - " She broke off, glanced at me with what looked a bit like fear in her pale green eyes, and looked back to the painting.
After a moment, she went on in a much quieter voice. "I see that my argument is not supported by this painting. The background is not important; if one had been drawn, we would have been obliged to ignore it; it is good that the artist saved his paint."
I answered, "certainly the play of light on the folds of the man's robe and the highlights on the child's arm and forehead make it hard to even look at what might lay behind them." All the exposed skin was heavily modeled.
She laid her hand on my forearm. "The play of light and dark we have seen in other paintings. The contrast of values of adjacent fields to evoke mood. . . " She looked at me for an instant and back to the canvas. I was relieved that the fear had now been replaced by an impish gleam. "The work of the Carravagisti are actually cleaner, clearer works - especially that Ribera over there of the Rabbi feeling a statuette with his eyes closed - but they were always so moody, so introspective. . .
She squeezed my arm. "The influence is here, certainly, but this is meant to make the viewer feel happy. It's not dramatic or profound."
She smiled as she spoke. "The robe is full of lines that are almost straight, but only one of them is of any real length, and the only lines in the background that are at all distinct are also straight." With her free hand, she traced what appeared to be a wall behind the standing man's left shoulder. "And see, if you extend them, they all intersect right at the old man's smile.
"All the colors are warm and accentuate the tone of the human flesh. You can tell that this is not Renaissance, the characters are so human. . . ." She traced the man's smile with her little finger, not quite touching the canvas.
"Look at how the light gleams off his balding head, how his eyes are in half-shadow" she went on. "His hair is highlighted only to draw attention to the fact that it is so sparse - look! The baby has more hair than the man! Such an irony." She moved closer to me, inside my right arm, pressing close.
"This is a wonderful piece. A man, late in life, has become a new father and is so overcome with astonishment at the miracle that has taken place that he must hold the plump, reaching infant and marvel at him with joy and wonder. Look how the child caresses the old man's beard." I suddenly felt a dark foreboding. "Please read to me the plaque; I must know who captured such a wonderful scene in his mind's eye and saved it for us to enjoy across the centuries."
I leaned forward and read to her. "Giovanni Battista Gaulli, called Baciccio. Italian 1639-1709. Saint Joseph and the Infant Christ, circa 1670-85. Oil on canvas, fifty by thirty eight and a half."
I felt her stiffen. "Saint Joseph?"
"That's what it says."
She pulled away from me and stood with her arms hanging limp.
"So it is not even his child?" The miracle is not the one I had in mind. It is the prophecy made flesh." Her eyes, unblinking, stayed locked on the painting. A tear ran down her cheek.
"It is the tragedy that we see so often today. A woman has a child or children by partners unknown or absent, and only then looks for and finds a good man to help her raise them. The good men raise the offspring of profligates and do not pass on their own genes. The irresponsible and stupid breed with impunity, and every generation their genes spread through the races, and the virtuous become fewer, until we are only just animals again."
My God, I thought, she's in one of her moods. "All this because of the identity of the Child?" She didn't answer.
"For one thing, the Child was not the spawn of talkshow guests, and as I recall, He turned out pretty good." I paused.
"Or so they say." She grinned a little at my petty cynicism.
"I also doubt that Baciccio intended any irony at all. He was probably trying to show another side of the Christ Child's infancy other than all those solemn Madonnas everyone had been painting. He wanted to show joy and wonder, like you saw at first. He would have considered exhibiting Joseph as a cuckold or Mary as a fallen women as blasphemous in the extreme. Remember, in the Baroque, the Word was still very much a miracle, and it would be natural for Joseph to delight in the honor that was entrusted to him."
She stood so still that I was afraid that I was not getting through to her. I reached for and brushed back a strand of dark hair from where it had fallen to partially obscure her left eye.
She didn't move, or even blink. I let my hand fall.
"The scene could be anyone holding any infant with reverent joy. It could be your gran'frer holding your niece."
Her head snapped toward me. "I did not notice it before, but the man has a halo. It is subtle, but it is there. Grandpapa has no such device behind his head; I would have noticed, I'm sure of that." Although she still seemed solemn, I was sure that her funk was now in the past. Now we would start a sort of mock debate until the subject was exhausted or something else compelled her attention. "The Child too, He also has some marker of holiness about his head.
"I should have noticed such things, but they are quite understated in this piece. You are right, the message is a human one, but I wish that the signs of sanctity had been omitted, and that they were just ordinary mortals being depicted."
"It's ironic to me that the part of the painting that was designed to make this work special in its own time is exactly what you most dislike about it. It is amazing how much the mood has changed across the ages."
She made a throat-clearing noise and smiled gently at the floor. "Ah, my little idiot. I don't not like stories of the Holy Family - do I not go to church at times? It is that I was taken by surprise, that is all. The Zeitgeist is different in that way? No, I think not. What has changed is not the feeling of devotion, it is a matter of what we hold public and what is now private. Religion has become secret, and it is a smutty thing indeed to speak of the nature of one's faith to others that do not share that dogma. The roles of sex and faith have reversed from the time that this was painted."
"I think you are off the mark, but I don't feel like arguing the point just now."
She looked from my face to the painting.. "Tell me then, is this a good work of art? What do you think?"
"De gustabilis non disputatum est. But let me see. . . " I stepped closer to the canvas and saw that the lines of light from the Child's head were actually quite distinct. Why had I not noticed them before? I stepped back a bit and saw them - and Joseph's halo - disappear at about eight feet from the canvas. Hmm. From how far away was this meant to be viewed?
"I think that from a technical perspective this is a profoundly competent artwork." I pulled her back from the painting, then walked her forward. "See how the man and Child only take on their sacred aspect as one comes close? From down a hall or across a room, they could be anyone."
"Yes, yes. I see. I think now perhaps that this was as I first saw it - man marvelling at child. The halos and the title are only there to make a secular scene appear sacred, to secure a commission. The scene is sacred, but it is really two separate scenes, one near and one far, both sacred, but for different reasons. Yes, I like it even more now." She brushed the tear from her cheek.
"I wonder if Joseph was modelled from some real person that might have recognized himself in this painting."
"I think that all characters - " She stopped and scanned the canvas. "It is a marvelous piece. All the edges are rounded; only man and Child are shown in sharp detail. Even the man's face is not so distinct. What is important here is not so much who is portrayed - in fact, it is incidental - it is the emotion of the man that is what this painting is about. The face is strong, but as it is seen from above, downward into shadow, it does not register so strongly into the viewer's memory. . . ."
"It lacks that technique - " I raised my hand palm-up in the 'how do you say' gesture. "Uh, y'know that cream spreading through coffee look - "
"Pfui! The word is chiaroscuro. No, it does lack that touch. There is a very minor play of lights and darks in the man's robe, below the child. There is also a very tiny touch of aerial perspective, further objects are in slightly less detail, but there is no blue used in this painting at all."
"The 'swaddling clothes' of the Child are shaded to hint at blue, but they are really only white and black paint."
She sighed. "The Child faces away from us; the clothing is wrinkled and twisted, the backdrop is only a black void, Joseph's beard and hair mask the shape of his face and the angle makes it difficult to even be sure of the shape of his nose or the look of his eyes - " She moved her hand along the lower edge of the frame.
"The only suggestion of depth is between his brow and the Infant's hands in his beard, and that is only a matter of perhaps a decimeter." She did a quick glance-and-away at me. "That is to say, four inches.
"It is clear that what is important is where Joseph looks and the set of his lips. That is the whole point of this piece."
"There is a fair degree of retinal accuracy here. The characters are instantly identifiable as to their ages and likely relationship. There is a degree of depth between the Child's ear and His shoulder, and in the way His legs extend past Joseph's shoulder. None of it intrudes into the viewer's space, it's true. Neither does it recede very deep into the picture plane. It would never be mistaken for a photograph - which I think would be possible with some of the Rembrandts - but it looks like its subject matter - with no ambiguity."
"All that is incidental. Where is your soul? Look at this painting. Does it not make you hopeful for humanity? That some one could say such wonderful things without using words?"
I thought about the words that made up the work's title and how they told another story so profound that it had just made her weep. I decided to say nothing about that.
We stood silently before that painting long enough that four sets of other museum patrons ambled up, looked, and moved on before she tugged my hand and said, "we have not so much time to gawk; there is still a wing and a half to look at."
We headed toward the display of eighteenth century Hindu statuary at the end of the gallery, pausing at this painting and that along the way.
I grabbed her shoulder and spun her to the right.
"Gently, gently, I am not fighting or runni - " She stopped in mid-syllable. "Merd! That face! It is Joseph - a decade later."
Before us was a gigantic oil on canvas. Its bottom edge was at about knee level, its top about the same distance from the ceiling.
"It is enormous." She darted to the plaque beside it.
"Edouard Manet. French 1832-1883. The Ragpicker, circa 1865-69. Oil on canvas, seventy seven by fifty one of those barbaric inches the English speakers are addicted to."
She was right. Right now, that is. Wrong before when she said that the face of Joseph was not memorable. Here it was again, but without rapture.
"It is Joseph with all the juice sucked out of him; he is completely flat. He looks like a postcard."
"I'll grant that the face is the same - the beard, the eyes, the nose, the lips - but this is not the same man. The hands here are much coarser. There is no joy in this man. In fact, looking at the vacantness of his face, I'd say that there is very little of anything about him." I pointed to the broken bottles inline with the toe of his forward foot. "Maybe a bit of wine."
"His shoulders are the same. No, you are right. The faces are a coincidence, I think. The style here is cruder, less devoted to portraying the world as the eye perceives it than with working the mind."
"I think something was changing in the world of art. The photograph could show the world as it looked, artists were now free to show what it meant."
She frowned mightily. "You can use phrases from the literature of psychosis." She pushed a loose strand of hair behind her right ear. " You can say that you knew some bit of information because you 'vastened it lokishly,' or that some event was inevitable because 'the creebs shifted.' You can be the art critic that finds meaning and nuances in every detail of a work, never considering that some things really are random and unplanned, never stopping to ask if the artist truly was capable of punning in four different languages on some obscure and minor historical detail.
"I think in your quaint little way you are saying - if it ain't Baroque, don't fix it. Do you think that I'm too stupid to understand this abstract stuff?"
"Jeez woman, would you please calm down? First, this painting got nuthin t' do with abstract. It's - what d'you call it? Impression - "
She stopped me with a fierce look. "You play word games. A moment ago you implied that the artists were now trying to abstract truth or beauty or emotion from their subjects."
"I see that we're having a problem with the use of words. Abstract can mean to glean some essence, or to synopsize. . ." I stopped, feeling a bit flustered. Just what was I trying to say?
But I could see that she was ready to let that thought go and move on. She smiled.
"There is much similar as well as much different between these paintings. Notice that there is no background in this one either. The man seems to be pinned to a wall himself. No, a cardboard cut-out of a man hangs on a wall on which is painted some broken glass. At first he seems to be in contraposto, but it is clear that both of his knees are bent and both legs are in the same plane."
"And? What does that say to you?"
"It does not offend me, but neither do I feel much appeal here. The artist was very competent - of course! He had a Gallic name - but I think that the guilelessness of this style did not exercise his skill anywhere near its potential. But then, how can one know such a thing for a certainty?"
"He uses much more in the way of straight lines than Baciccio did, but they are almost all vertical and provide no feeling of depth."
"They do invite the viewer to constantly scan the painting up and down, up and down, over and over. I think we would not have spent so much time at this piece if not for the coincidence of faces. . ." She tugged at my hand, ready to move on.
"You think that it has the timelessness of the earlier painting?"
"No, I would that it is more - how do you say? Auf diesem Augenblick. Ephemeral is, I think, the word."
We wandered across the room. I spoke. "I don't agree, this painting has a feeling about it that - " I paused, not sure as to how to explain.
"What, what? That expresses the human experience as the embodiment of total ennui as seen in the quantum limit of detectibility, or some other such bit of inarticulate banal subterfuge that ends up meaning nothing at all?" Her cheshire cat grin told me that she was baiting me in fun, not in malice.
"You attack with the weapon of the Socratic fallacy. The fact that it is difficult to express verbally does not mean that an idea or concept is de facto invalid. . . "
She glanced up off the page and saw that the reader was becoming bored. "Come, we shall talk about this later. The museum is about to close." She started off toward the double doors of the exit . . . .