The Eyes of Life

Rembrandt

This Rembrandt self-portrait is the masterpiece of all his self-portraits. Past mid-life, he could see the heartache and the mystery of life, and, with a lifetime of accumulated skill at his command, could render that heartache and mystery in a face– his own face– on canvas.

The equivalent in literature is Shakespeare’s Tempest: whole in its vision of both human nobility and human depravity; skilled in its artistic execution; wise in its hard-earned compassion for suffering; and enduring in its ability to move the human heart to a higher level. We don’t measure works like this self-portrait, or Shakespeare’s Tempest– they measure us.

I am drawn to the darkness in Rembrandt’s paintings. The shadows remind us of the vast darkness that surrounds our own little light of consciousness– the richness of our dream life; the creative power of our imaginative life; the destructive power of our all-too-threatening and therefore largely denied impulse to violence; and the terror of nothingness and our inevitable death.

Nothing lasts– not a religion nor a philosophy; not a government nor a civilization; not a society nor a culture– that doesn’t make a home for the shadow and the dark.

 

Perspective

I am reminded of Ansel Adams’s photos of Yosemite: nature framed and re-presented so as to point beyond itself to the eternal Beauty that lies behind all change and decay. Good art lifts us out of ourselves, and puts us in touch with what is true.

This picture is worth a minute or two, just to admire… and wonder.

[click on the link below for more on this recent image]

via ‘Blue Marble 2012′: NASA’s ‘Most Amazing’ High Def Image Of Earth So Far : The Two-Way : NPR.

 

Art and Religion, Part Two

Iris Murdoch

If you don’t know Iris Murdoch’s work, you’re in for a treat. I recently quoted a passage from her novel The Bell, in which main character Dora visits the National Gallery. Here I quote from one of her philosophical works, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists:

“Good art, thought of as symbolic force rather than statement, provides a stirring image of a pure transcendent value, a steady visible enduring higher good, and perhaps provides for many people, in an unreligious age without prayer or sacraments, their clearest experience of something grasped as separate and precious and beneficial and held quietly and unpossessively in the attention. Good art which we love can seem holy and attending to it can be like praying… Good art… provides work for the spirit.”

 

Art and Religion

Thomas Gainsborough-- a painting of his two daughters

The late, great Iris Murdoch, in her novel The Bell, narrates main character Dora’s visit to the National Gallery in London. Her experience of the art– and in particular, this painting– breaks through like a revelation:

“Dora had been in the National Gallery a thousand times and the pictures were almost as familiar to her as her own face. Passing between them now, as through a well-loved grove, she felt a calm descending on her…. She could look, as one can at last when one knows a great thing very well, confronting it with a dignity which it has itself conferred…. Dora stopped at last in front of Gainsborough’s picture of his two daughters. These children step through a wood hand in hand, their garments shimmering, their eyes serious and dark, their two pale heads, round full buds, like yet unlike.

“Dora was always moved by the pictures. Today she was moved, but in a new way. She marvelled, with a kind of gratitude, that they were all still here, and her heart was filled with love for the pictures, their authority, their marvelous generosity, their splendour. It occurred to her that here at last was something real and something perfect…. Here was something which her consciousness could not wretchedly devour, and by making it a part of her fantasy make it worthless…. She looked at the radiant, sombre, tender, powerful canvas of Gainsborough and felt a sudden desire to go down on her knee before it, embracing it, shedding tears.”

Great art cannot be commodified, reduced, and consumed. We do not take its measure; rather, it measures us.

via Thomas Gainsborough.

 

Christ Carrying the Cross: Behold the Beautiful

Christ Carrying the Cross by Giovanni Bellini-- 16th-century Italian

This oil on wood painting by a follower of Bellini was one of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s favorites; you can see it today at the Gardner Museum in Boston. It’s an apt image to start Holy Week. I thank my wife Eleanor for bringing it to my attention.

For some who hold onto Christ primarily to confirm their already-held beliefs about the world– I wish that Jesus would be more of a stumbling block to them; more of a goad to examine their unexamined assumptions about life; more disturbing of their already-held beliefs. For others who reject Christ because, well, who has time for fairy tales?– I wish that Jesus would be less of a stumbling block to them. I wish that he would simply come and make himself known, through the strange heart-warmth, and the peace beyond words, that mark his presence.

I’ve been down both roads, and will be down both roads again, sometime or another. Faith is not a steady-state system. The authentic journey has many seasons, each with its gifts and dangers.

Our culture would do well to turn for a moment from its fevered ways to gaze on Christ– not because he is a pattern of virtue that we ought to assimilate (which makes Jesus just another commodity in the marketplace), but because he is beautiful.

Grace is in the direction of beauty. The proper response to beauty is to behold, rather than to grasp or to own. We would be a healthier culture, in all ways, if we increased our capacity to behold– rather than devour– what is beautiful.