We will have so much to say to one another when the coronavirus crisis is over: distillations from solitude, in cases like mine. At seventy-eight, with bad lungs, I’m holed up with my wife at our country place until a vaccine is developed and becomes available. It’s boring. (Remember when we lamented the distracting speed of contemporary life?) On the scale of current human ordeals, as the pandemic destroys lives and livelihoods, mere isolation hardly ranks as a woe. It’s an ambivalent condition that, among other things, affords time to think long thoughts. One of mine turns to the art in the world’s now shuttered museums: inoperative without the physical presence of attentive viewers. Online “virtual tours” add insult to injury, in my view, as strictly spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience. Inaccessible, the works conjure in the imagination a significance that we have taken for granted. Purely by existing, they stir associations and precipitate meanings that may resonate in this plague time.
Why does the art of what we term the Old Masters have so much more soulful heft than that of most moderns and nearly all of our contemporaries? (I place the cutoff between the murderous scourges of war that were witnessed by Francisco Goya and those that Édouard Manet, say, read about in newspapers.) I think the reason is a routine consciousness of mortality. Pandemic diseases and innumerable other causes of early death haunted day-to-day life, even for those creators who were committed to entertainment. Consider the heaps of bodies that accumulate in Shakespeare’s tragedies: catharses of universal fear. The persistence of religion in art that was increasingly given to secular motives—Bible stories alternate with spiritually charged themes of Greek and Roman mythology—bespeaks this preoccupation. Deaths of children were a perpetual bane. Paintings of the Madonna and Child, most grippingly those by Giovanni Bellini, secrete Mary’s foreknowledge of her son’s terrible fate. The idea that God assumed flesh, suffered, and died was a stubborn consolation—Mary’s to know and ours to take on faith or, if we’re atheists, at least to marvel at as mythic poetry.
Read Full Article »