This essay by Andrew Butterfield in The New York Review--where, unfortunately, it rests behind a subscriber wall--has sent me scurrying back to H.W. Janson's History of Art, which I acquired now more than thirty years ago for an art history course I took in college. When it comes down from the shelf it is not usually to consult the portions I was obliged to study in order to satisfy a liberal arts "distribution requirement," but Butterfield on Mantegna and Bellini sounded just familiar enough to make me nostalgic for some of the sweet miseries of my youth. It is funny the things you remember. In the literature sent to prospective students, this college had quotations from students talking about their favorite classes, and one about this particular art history course I ended up taking has stayed with me. "A ninety minute visual feast twice a week," the student raved. But I thought it was a colossal bore. All those crucifixions and madonnas with child and the angel making the big announcement to Mary--who cares? Hardly any of it aroused any sensation in me, unless dull indifference counts.
I find now that for once it is not necessary to withdraw a youthful, contrarion view. I wonder whether the artists themselves felt much. Religion was ascendant, so working on commission you inevitably were assigned religious subjects, and you turned them out, "great works" if you were one of the gifted ones. People who know about these things can appreciate the brilliance and the technical mastery but it makes me feel nothing and I can believe the artist's heart was not in it. Maybe you need more religious feeling than I have. Being able to take pleasure in these works could be a gift, like an ear for music. If so, I don't have it.
I say all that in order to highlight one stunning exception, the crucifixion painted in about 1510 by the artist known to us as Grunewald on the outermost panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece. Of the entire work Janson says it "overwhelms us with something like the power of the Sistine Ceiling," and of The Crucifixion in particular he says it is "probably the most impressive ever painted." The deep religious feeling (if an outsider may speak of it) arises, I think, from the austerity. In a story by Flannery O'Connor the protagonist, O.E. Parker, determines to have Christ tattooed on his back. He pages through the tattoo artist's book, back to front, past The Good Shepherd and Forbid Them Not and The Smiling Jesus and Jesus The Physician's Friend until he comes to "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes." My experience with The History of Art is a little like Parker's with the tattoo artist's book of templates.
A thousand crucifixions and in only this one does the cross appear as an instrument of torture. Nietzsche, in a passage on the remoteness of Christianity, noted the absurdity of "the form of a cross as a symbol in a time that no longer knows the function and the ignominy of the cross."
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