Also I see here the first bench I’ve come across: a welcome sight!.

The topic of Venice allows the curators to reflect on that most desirable topic for the contemporary bien-pensant mind, the coming together of cultures, east, west, north, and south. The bench gives me a chance to sit and confirm that the splendid bright Bartolomeo Vivarini Death of the Virgin in front of me does not interest me even with the weight off my feet. This is simply a matter of taste. The colors are too bright for me, the faces too round, the sculptural notes too sharply defined. Similarly I do not love the Marco Zoppo Christ as Man of Sorrows of 1470, gorgeous though he is and splendid as his gold background may be. In fact I take a

step back into the other room to refresh my spirits, which had thought they were tired of intense sadness, by spending another moment with the Antonello da Messina Christ Crowned with Thorns. I guess I look for some sorrow in my man of sorrows.

The Crivelli Pietà (1476) next to the Zoppo Christ as Man of Sorrows challenges me from the opposite direction. Its representation of emotion is so broad and full, its vision of the world so solid, that there is something off-putting in the achievement. One longs for the restraint and formal gestures of Christus.

Here everything is visible, the veins of Christ’s arms, the hairs around his nipples and rising from his loins—all is shown, along with the inflamed nail-sized wounds from his crucifixion. Thick tears flow from the eyes of the weeping Maries and the John the Evangelist behind them. And the mouths of the Virgin and of John are open in a lamentation that flows over tongues the meatiness of which makes them look ravenous or just fleshly, rather than sad.

It is in the Magdalen if anywhere that I find a level of emotion my fussy heart can tolerate. The Magdalene holds Christ’s forearm and gazes, weeping, at his wounded hands.

We can imagine the feeling of loss. Unable to soothe her beloved with her balm, her way of sharing her affection has vanished along with the life of the loved one to whom she wishes to show it, for whom she wishes to care. Her beloved gone, along with her pleasure in manifesting care, all that is left her is to weep tears so thick and fully rendered as to look more dense and clinging than salt water should. I recognize as I write this that my careful calibration of the feelings I deem acceptable says more about me than about anything I’m looking at. I remember also that the roots of our word for excess emotionalism comes from an early English pronunciation of her name. Magdalene: maudlin. This isn’t that, but, it is humbling to think that there are epochs in the emotions as there are in taste.

I step out briefly for lunch, and a tedious phone call about a bill and a failed appliance repair takes me away for longer than expected—a long voice chain followed by a period on hold, then frustrated incomprehension: the usual trivial modern irritations. How extraordinary that the computerized system sends me so far away to address a problem that lives in Brooklyn, how melancholy to be speaking to someone in India about such trivialities! I’d so much rather ask even simple things of this young woman speaking to me undeviatingly from a script: How is the weather where you are? What do you see out your window? What do you eat at midday, and who prepares your lunch? None of that, much less any questions about what kinds of emotions one should make visible.

It is a relief to get back to the art. Still, this is a room that keeps challenging me, as the balance of emotion and realism keeps tipping in directions I apparently can’t help finding excessive. In any case, and this may or may not be a related phenomenon, the real is too hard and clear a thing here, like something carved out of wood. I marvel at the depth and solidity achieved with pigment and oil, but cannot yet love it. Take for example the extraordinary passage in the Crivelli that begins with the Magdalen’s living dynamic hand tenderly holding up Christ’s forearm and ends at the hand attached to that arm hanging limply over the beautifully realized marble edge at the margin of Christ’s tomb, appearing to break the picture frame.

It has been a convention of very long standing in art history to celebrate Venetian painting for its use of color and for its development of one particular category of work, the Sacra Conversazione, altar pieces that are representations of sacred figures in a clearly defined space, often involving beautifully rendered architectural details sometimes set in natural environments so carefully realized that local folk can recognize specific mountains. It is a form that combines the Renaissance commitment to a verisimilitude that shows us the world in time—flowers that die, birds that will fly away—combining with the eternal.

As was the case in that tempera on wood showing all the saints that I spent so long with in the second room in these galleries, when they are represented in a group that ignores the historical moment of their earthly existence the sacred figures are pulled out of time into an eternal present. Practically speaking, the combination of the transient and the eternal means that in a Sacra Conversazione we see people who look real, unmistakably portraits of specific individuals, in spaces that look real, with all the shadows and lights and possibilities of change inherent in the days we live through. And yet, we recognize in these works an escape from change and life. The room has fine instances of this category, the very simple its Cima da Conegliano in particular, with its entirely restrained undecorated background setting off its three introspective saints along with the adorable pig that is an attribute of Saint Anthony.

So far I am seeing types and talking about general things—art history, perfection, imperfection, which is fine, but not what I want to be doing. Then my eye falls on a work that strikes me as uniquely fascinating, a surprising Vittorio Carpaccio from around 1490.

I’ll admit the date stands out to me for historical reasons, but it is the choices I see in the work that call out to me as a viewer in this work that cannot quite be a conversazione, that is clearly something far stranger and, I think, far more intellectual. This Meditation on the Passion created just two years before Columbus sailed to what became the Americas shows something it would clearly be strange to call a conversation.

In a rocky landscape the crucified Jesus sits on a broken throne decorated with a fake language the curators identify as pseudo-Hebrew.

To his right is Saint Jerome.

To his left, we find Job on a broken stone also decorated with what is also meant to look like the language of the Old Testament.

A lion peeks from behind a column in front of Saint Jerome on which rest books—perhaps the bible Jerome translated, along with his commentary on Job.

Other fragments of ruins inscribed in “Hebrew” appear on a rise to the left of the painting, which also contains the attentively realized natural world one expects from Carpaccio: gnarled trees, scarlet birds, a deer with its haunches being mauled by a leopard.

With their usual attention to cultural diversity, the curators select for attention what is a very small detail, the turbaned individuals in the distant background “that would have been familiar to Venetians through their trade with the Middle East and Egypt.”

I guess that’s true enough, but it bears saying that much in the nearer planes of the painting would have been unfamiliar in the sense familiarity is meant here: leopards for one, saints, the Hebrew language, apparently, though there were certainly people in Venice who could have shown Carpaccio some actual instances of its letters.

Carpaccio’s painting is deeply intellectual, especially compared to what has preceded it in the gallery. Not that every turn in the history of the representation of religious figures was not accompanied, often driven by developments in the religion. But as a work, this image can only be understood as an intellectual allegory. There was a long-standing tendency for broken buildings to stand for the superseded prior dispensation, for Judaism, specifically the covenant with the Jews that was replaced by the broader one that made the universal religion a new phenomenon. The change represented by new life set among ruined things pulled the legends and beliefs of one people into the stream of universal history and made the rules of the Jews just the first step in a story of failure and forgiveness that became shareable.

Naturally, we see this change in ideas represented most typically in Nativities—the birth of the new dispensation will shatter the past. The kind of idea that—going back a step further in the story of Jesus—is beautifully rendered in the broken wall that encloses the Annunciation of Petrus Christus in the prior Gallery. This is not that, however, though it is related: our three men meet together in the ruins of the old temple that Jesus is going to make new, or rather, to make superfluous.

I am describing the general meaning of ruins in Christian painting, which makes lots of symbolic sense, but, there is something stranger about this particular painting. It is not the usual thing at all. Its disconcerting quality begins, I think, with the experience of seeing the dead Jesus seated, his crown of thorns at his feet, like a hat carefully balanced in place by a drunk prior to taking a rest.

The skull and bones between Jesus and Job evoke the common iconography of the crucifixion, referencing Golgotha, or “the hill of bones” (I guess convention made at least that much Hebrew available to the painter. The kind of thing I find in the dictionary today: “Latin (Vulgate) golgotha, Greek γολγοθά < gogolṯā, Aramaic form of Hebrew gulgōleṯ skull [גֻּלְגֹּלֶת]”).

Christ’s dead body is still bleeding from the wound in his side and the nail holes in his hands. I suppose it will never stop bleeding, when Christ is thought of in this manifestation.

Nevertheless, in spite of these evidences of mortal vulnerability, a quietly cerebral quality stands out here, especially after the profound and extravagant expressions of grief I have been looking at, and which I know are a few paces behind me in this gallery.

No mother collapses at the sight of the body of her son, tortured and subjected to judicial murder. No Magdalen sobs and reaches out to touch the beloved limbs one last time. Instead, in this quiet space we are invited to reflect on the passion. When the wall text suggests that the painting is “a meditation on death and resurrection,” I cannot help but feel it is rushing too quickly to the second term.

This work is all about suffering, and death, when it is not about penance, which is of course just a particular subcategory of suffering. The meaning of Job, after all, resides in his suffering, and Jerome is not just a scholar and translator, but a founder of ascetic monasticism who, though he is often represented with his books or adorable protective lion, is not infrequently to be found alone, a rock in hand, mortifying his own flesh.

A gnarled olive tree rises behind the broken throne, but next to that promise of something hopeful we may read allegorically we see a leopard kill a deer.

Death, loss, suffering, and broken old things from the past are the component elements before us. Jerome, the only one of the figures who looks at the viewer, seems to suggest we may need to pause a moment and reflect on how we feel about these things.

The pseudo-Hebrew fascinates me, as does the curators’ sense that the tiny turbaned figures in the background, just visible behind Christ’s left elbow, are of particular note. Jerome was born in a town the Goths erased from history probably in what is now Croatia, so he is a kind of European, but, when we look at Jesus and at Job we are looking at two figures from what we call the Middle East, even though the models Carpaccio would have used make all of the people in front of us European. Looking past the two Jews in order to appreciate the Moors in the distance is an impulse that does the curators credit, but it is perhaps missing an opportunity to pause at the actual heterogeneity built into the religion, and to reflect on the growing familiarity with Jewish people who nevertheless would always be exotic to the city that invented the Ghetto.

Today at the museum my writing hand is cramping up. I find myself forced to dictate into my phone. But I am too self-conscious to speak loudly enough, and the AI cannot understand my sotto voce mutterings.

I return to paper.

As it happens, the many returns built into the project I have undertaken are becoming clear to me. I pushed past the vestibule this time, after a brief reflection on cornices and moldings—the way the moldings on the frames holding the Tiepolos combine the rounded quality of the arches over the stairs and the straight lines of the wall trim. Crossing Gallery 601 again, I was brought to a standstill in front of a Dormition of the Virgin—a topic I addressed in a special edition of Season of Beauty this weekend, which coincided with the Feast day celebrating that event).

In Gallery 602 I stopped briefly to say hello to Jan first count of Egmond and Magdalena countess of Egmond (A distinguished couple I discuss in Faces of the Renaissance).

This aged, reserved, couple fascinate with their realism, and the marked character the unknown painter managed to capture on canvas. Each one looks to the side, almost towards the other, but their gazes are deeply introspective. It is not mutual intimacy one feels arising between them. His aged eyes are puffy, his cheeks quietly sunken. It is not too much to say of the painter what Eliot wrote a about the playwright John Webster, who worked about a hundred years after the anonymous painter who left us this couple: that he saw the skull beneath the skin.

She feels less fully realized, the painter perhaps observing some decorum when it came to a woman of a certain age. Her features are unlined, but then again, she was that much younger than he was.

The modeling of the face is nevertheless fantastic, as are the beautiful lines created by the white trim on the edges of her black robe as it outlines the expanse of flat grayish white across her bosom, itself picked up in her headdress. The black and the whites, frame a calm solidly-modeled face looking towards her husband and down. Magdalena, Countess of Egmond, is serious, clear, reserved. There is no denying the power she projects within the lines that represent her.

Finally I get back to 605, “Early Netherlandish Painting,” ready to spend time among so many meticulously realized oils and intense gazes. I stop at Petrus Christus’s portrait of a Carthusian monk from 1446, the fabric of the monk’s robes is realistic, certainly, but also sculptural, giving him the presence of a statue though his face, featuring an extraordinary, forked beard is vibrant and living. The red hair on his tonsured head is evidently a manifestation of how he really looked in the world, but like the robes he wears, its style—if that is the right term with which to describe the clothes of a monk—is emblematic of his religious commitments. His eyes glance towards the viewer from the side, suggesting a restlessness of spirit calling out of the stillness in which he has chosen to live.

Spending time with the image, one may eventually notice a gray smudge towards the bottom of the work. When it comes into focus I realize that I am looking at a life-size painting of a fly. Christus has painted his monk within a frame on which is carved his own name as maker (“Petrus Christus made me”). And on that frame, he has painted this little insect. Such a trivial, irritating thing to memorialize.

“As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods,” King Lear will declare some 160 years later, “They kill us for their sport.” Once seen, the fly cannot be unseen nor can the frame. Like the portrait of the monk itself, these two elements speak to us of realism and transience, of the play between vulnerable even gross matter and eternity, or at least of the way in which the vulnerability of matter is inescapably present even when we are making a commitment to something more, to a life of sacred rituals, to preserving in paint a moment of transient life, pulling it out of the passing existence in which we find it. Whatever meaning we find in this work by Christus Petrus needs to take all three elements into account: realism, transience, and astonishing skill—and animals that resemble flies when seen from up close.

The Petrus Annunciation (1445) hanging to the right of the monk includes many of the elements that make the portrait so astonishing, even though the works differ significantly. The painter is clearly indifferent to the faces of Mary or Gabriel, which are both pretty much idealized and simplified.

Petrus has put his energy into the location, into capturing the worn step in front of the doorway in which the Virgin stands, the tiles above that step, the earth in front of it. The angel’s sumptuous wings are fabulous, but the wall text calls attention to the meticulous observation of plant life, which sounds right.

Still, my eye keeps turning to the worn stone and the fragments of rock on the ground between the angel and Mary. The frame in which this painting hangs is worn and faded, picking up on the broken wall that is the boundary separating us from the scene within the painting. It also seems emblematic and real.

Over a lunch of bread and cheese and apple eaten overlooking the atrium of the museum, I find myself thinking that the slower I have gone in this process, the slower I have wanted to go. Any student of the nineteenth century can tell you that the speed of encounter with the aesthetic object is historically variable. If someone said they were going to take a year and a half to read a novel by Dickens, you might think that’s interesting, that’s slow. But, in fact, that’s less time than it took its first readers to go from the first chapter of Bleak House to the last when it was originally published as a serial between 1852 and 1853.

When we read a great Victorian novel, the experience is similar to what we now call binging, that is, watching episodes of a series in succession rather than in weekly installments. Certainly in the future, if the day is not upon us already, the concept of the episode is going to go the way of the chapter divisions in novels, becoming conventions organizing an experience rather than actual time-bound constraints on that experience—like when we waited a week for the next installment of a show, as we used to do, or even a day, as in the case of soap operas.

How quickly should we walk through a museum? is a question that is at once practical and conceptual. Is the museum an experience bound by time like a film or theatrical production or dance performance, something with a clear beginning, middle, and end? Or is a museum more like a park, a space open to the world and containing all sorts of possible experiences depending on mood and circumstance? Evidently the museal experience may contain elements of both.

Returning to room 605, I reflect on ways formal rhythms may move us, as I look at a Petrus Christus Lamentation from around 1450. I find myself making a rough sketch, simply to try to capture what I am calling its formal rhythm. The drawing is terrible, as I look at it again, but it does remind me of what I wanted it to. This painting makes it eminently clear that it is not realism, but what realism allows him to do, that is moving about Petrus Christus. The subject of the Lamentation is as its title tells us grief, the expression of human pain over the loss of what we love, in this case made into an emotion that involves human beings and the divine in an endlessly repeated cycle of promise, betrayal, loss, disappointment, and grief.

The Annunciation hanging to the left of the Lamentation is all about the promise of setting forth, of inception. The young maiden reading cannot know what’s coming, though everything about the next 34 years is beginning at this moment and is known by the omniscient deity impregnating her as she listens to an Angel. His knowledge of this is a tiny detail in all He knows. But it will be the rest of Mary’s life.

The tiles between Gabriel and Mary spell out “Regina Caeli,” queen of heaven, referencing the brief song or prayer associated with Easter—so not conception, but resurrection:

Queen of heaven, rejoice, alleluia.
The Son you merited to bear, alleluia,
Has risen as he said, alleluia.
Pray to God for us, alleluia.

Queen of Heaven.

No part of your life felt that way, I imagine, gazing at the Lamentation. We see again the instruments of the passion that were displayed so much more formally in the Spanish painting in Gallery 601 that called my attention on the first day of this project. Here they lie on the ground—nails, hammer—even the pincers that someone we are seeing in this image used to pull the cruel nails out of the wounded body of Christ—all scattered in a real-seeming disarray.

Joseph of Arimathea is joined by Nicodemus in lifting Christ’s shroud in order to raise the body. They do not touch the divine but serve it. Nicodemus’s pose is reminiscent of the angels holding the shroud in that Ecce Homo also in room 601. But, the weight of a dead man pulls down other men in ways it won’t when it comes to angels. The Magdalen rushes in to comfort Mary, her jar of balm a useless attribute in this real world of human misery where a bereft mother sinks down, unable to stand in the face of her grief.

The position Mary falls into echoes that of Jesus. And the wall label suggests a theological reading, that she is a “coredeemer,” given her “cosuffering.” The first term is challenging for a non-Catholic to fully take in—and apparently, given my later reading, has been controversial in church history. The second term also trips me up. Can one “cosuffer?” Is the pain of another available to be shared in that way, like when we work together when we collaborate or cooperate? I guess that’s one of the fundamental Christian challenges. Can this pain be ours too? the painting asks. Or does it declare rather than ask?

To feel with the loss of Mary is part of a cycle, one in which she will then feel for us and therefore intercede when we fail in life.

As we will.

Coreedemed by the cosufferer.

Returning to the overwhelming Crucifixion and Last Judgement Jan van Eyck painted some time between 1436 and 1438, it is astonishing to think that these little masterpieces formed the cover for something else, the wings of a triptych or a reliquary or shrine.

The small size allows the painter’s technical brilliance to come to the fore, but also a sublimity appropriate for both themes.

The exaltation of Jesus in heaven surrounded by trumpet-blowing angels and the ranks of saints is a beautiful crowd scene.

Below them the resurrected come from out of graves in the ground and, most horribly, they emerge from the sea. Either way, it doesn’t seem like much of a boon to rise from the dead only to be met by the ruins of a world facing apocalypse and by the judging sword of Michael.

Artists tend to relish the punishments when treating this theme, but van Eyck’s judgment stands out for the near absence of resurrected souls being exalted. It is half hell, this painting, a region imagined as a dark cavern presided over by an overarching permanent death. I suppose the saved are those we see filtering in on the right side of the upper register to join the ranks of saints, a small number.

We are, in any case, missing a vision of rising to compensate for the horrible fall into perdition and all the various forms of punishment and pain taking place in the dark corners of Hell.

“Happiness,” the poet Philip Larkin once declared to an interviewer asking about a lack of productivity at a certain period in his life, “writes white.” Is the challenge of representing happiness traceable to the fact that it is an experience so rare that the viewer would have a hard time recognizing any of its mundane manifestations, or because those manifestations differ so much from individual to individual that it is hard to generalize their form? The varieties of suffering, alas, are all too familiar, and easy to represent in the afterlife because they are typically grotesque or exaggerated versions of what we experience every day.

It is hard not to see in the crucifixion on the right the cause for all this pain and judgment on the left. And that is partly true, in the sense that the sin and promise of redemption come to a climax in that part of the story. Both tiny paintings are overwhelming, museums of incident and artistic brilliance in themselves. I run my phone over the surface of the Crucifixion making a film in order to process all that is happening in a way I can try to take in. As I finish my filming I realize I’m surrounded by a Japanese tour group, and leave the space for the minute it takes for their leader to speak into the earpieces of her audience.

This gives me a chance to note that the Christus Annunciation is faced by another work on the same topic, a painting by Gerard David, created for an elaborate polyptych once at the Church of an Abbey near Genoa. It’s a nice contrast in treatment, as the David feels much more conventional and upbeat in its representation of the divine conception. But right now the small and melancholy is calling me.

The room quickly empties so I return to van Eyck’s Crucifixion. What I see would take the rest of my day to describe—longer, really, possibly a lifetime

I’ll just memorialize here the moon over the Blue Mountains in the distance beyond the vast city outside which the crucifixion is taking place, and the twisting body of the bad thief and how the solidity of that body and its distorted suffering reminds me of an intricate miniature wood carving I was amazed by in Amsterdam that shows the two worn bodies of the thieves, and the carefully crafted ropes keeping them in place, dangling in the world.

But this is all to ignore the clump of malefactors on horseback surrounding Jesus and,

above all, the astonishingly sculptural manifestation at the bottom of the painting a lamentation in which Mary’s face barely emerges from massive architectural structure of cloth, a blue weight seeming to bear her down.

Mary Magdalene facing the other way and mourning in a higher pitch kneels and gazes at the dying savior. Indeed, Mary Magdalene and the figure on the left with his back entirely to us, also dressed in green, seem to be the only ones looking at what is happening and responding with appropriate emotion. Otherwise the mourners look away, and the gazers do not mourn.

Crossing Gallery 601 again, I am brought to a standstill in front of a Dormition of the Virgin (or, as the dictation program I have been trying out today has it, “I have to stop in front of her shuffling permission of Sab virgin”). I had noticed before that it was an unusual representation of the theme—which is the death of the Virgin shown as an event so gentle that it is best identified as a form of falling asleep (“dormition”).

Much as she was conceived without the usual human palaver that typically leads to that event, so her death is not like those of others. She must die because she is human and because her death is a necessary step towards her further exaltation, but her relationship to that transition, like that of Buddha is to fall asleep. What is odd in this representation is that the Virgin is not lying down, but sitting. Other elements start to come into focus as I surrender to this work, and allow myself to disappoint my hopes for quick forward progress. The two saints to her left read prayers from a book that is an impossible anachronism, both as a form of text and for what we can imagine it contains, but the artist could not think of a pious death without prayers of the sort he knew, or a candle, which another apostle holds before the Virgin, or an aspergillum with which to sprinkle holy water or a thurible to spread the smoke of incense.

I suppose we could say this is sacred history emulating the present in which we find it as a way to make it in turn meaningful for the viewer in its day. It is how eternally significant events that took place within history need to be seen, I suppose: always re-embedded in the contemporary moment.

The painter, Hans Schäufelein, is clearly attentive to the details that make an image speak. The tender arm that falls over the shoulder of the man with the book belongs to the apostle reading along with him, himself holding a rolled-up paper, emphasizing the quality of informal action in this event that exists between a memory of human deaths witnessed and convention. There’s something touchingly human about someone reading over someone else’s shoulder, as there is about the way we take comfort when we are sad in any distraction that might pull us away from the cause of our melancholy. The apostle holding a candle has a book too, but his is wrapped in the cloth hooked onto his belt. What called my attention back to this image I had tried to move past, was none of these things. It was the tip of a red shoe peeking out of his powder blue gown, grounding him.

It’s an interesting idea, to allow the kind of sociologically-inflected cultural history that museums sometimes use to justify their display of beautiful things to become a kind of framing for a set of works not all of which are obviously domestic. For example, this room displays a beautiful John the Baptist by Piero di Cosimo, painted in an unusual profile view—unusual for a saint that is.

Reinforcing the lesson from room 603, the wall text explains to us that Cosimo’s skill at the representation of naturalistic detail “reveals his interest in Netherlandish painting.” I wish my interest in any painting manifested itself in a growth of skill! It is a deeply human work, but strange for all that. The young man does not radiate the intense commitment of a saint; he looks like a lovely young man asked to look straight ahead so someone could paint him. The woven camel hair in which the saint is typically shown, following the biblical tradition, is gestured at half-heartedly with a puff of feathered brush strokes suggesting not something one would wear so much as a tendril of vegetation. The bare shoulders and tender throat the leafy fur does not cover so much as fall away from give him a vulnerable look. He appears to be gazing past the rustic cross he carries, not to a savior so much as to a future as entirely unimaginable as all futures are for children.

It is the curator’s job to draw connections between contemporary viewers and works of art separated from us by long periods of time and vast changes in culture. The modest cultural anthropology organizing this room is one approach to the challenge, the suggestion that by looking at these objects we will be able to understand better the history of human activities we still share, or that we will be better able to appreciate these objects insofar as they participate in functions we also recognize as ones we need to carry out.

This aspiration to identify something common, in the sense of shared, does not always match up easily with works of art that have escaped oblivion only because they are beautiful or extraordinary manifestations of skill. If only all the evidences of our existence consisted of what was precious and rare!

In Cosimo’s beautiful young John the Baptist the curator asks us to find a “relatable” religious image for young Florentines. A similar claim is made about a lovely Mino da Fiesole bust from around 1466: “They encouraged young viewers to see the saint as someone just like them and emulate his devotion to God.” Emulation and moral lessons seem to be readily available points of reference as we attempt to figure out why we should care about art, but I find myself doubting the reception theory shaping these sorts of claims, which stikes me as a kind of secularization of the divine, or a protestantization of the catholic use of images. Sure, emulation is an important element in religious practice, but the adaptation into our lives of what we see in art is always a complicated matter. And, in any case, I believe the saints were more often looked to for intercession than to serve as role models. Internalization, psychology, personal growth: these are particularly modern notions. People have typically asked their deities not to raise their children or tell them how to behave but to give them things they want or to protect them from what they dread. I believe this is still the case for those who pray.

A characteristic blue and white Luca de la Robbia terracotta hangs on the wall, a Madonna and child glowing brightly. The young Virgin’s cloak is draped over her lithe body with an assured realism. The energetic life in the braided ties and sleeves caught in motion, suggest a dynamic human life, as does the pudgy hand of the lively baby holding with infantine insouciance a message telling us in a blue as crisp as the day it came out of the kiln, “I am the resurrection and the light.” The unsettling vibrancy of such a work and its fragility invite reflection on the nature of vulnerability, and how much fading we expect from our masterpieces. We find here a light that has never yet gone out, rather than a life that has been buried and returned, resurrected. That sad turn of events is in the future of this baby, of course—and suggests a kind of potential emulation that is more than simply characterological or ethical. What would it mean to really base our lives on what we see here: tranquil beauty, ongoing vulnerability, the prospect of resurrection, and light?

Two cassoni—those wooden chests generally associated with marriage—and various other ceramics also accompany the paintings, inviting us to think about what we call art and what we call craft: if the presence of the della Robbia terracotta did not already do that.

A painting of the Madonna and child from around 1470 is identified as being by the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio. Yet again the authors of the wall text want to tell us that this is an image intended for emulation: “The painting would have originally hung in a home, where images of the Madonna and infant Christ were favored for private devotion, in part because they provided ideal models for women and children.” They have their theme and they are sticking to it. As for me, I find myself thinking about the attribution to “The workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio,” Not least because Verrocchio is famous in art historical circles as the master of Leonardo da Vinci. Verrocchio, a great goldsmith, is associated with a craft tradition that his student left far behind as he pioneered diverse activities that a later era would imagine as characteristic of a type, the “Renaissance man.” Leonardo, creative polymath, took painting from the realm of craft to that of something approaching the liberal arts—liberal in the sense of being as free as possible from practical utilitarian ends. Leonardo himself was part of Verrocchio’s workshop. I guess we don’t know if he had any role in this painting, but it is nice to think of him learning what to emulate in his master, what to leave behind. After all, learning is hardly simply a matter of emulation, and emulation is in most human cases most powerful when it is least complete.

An earlier era needed to establish the space between craft and art in order to discover the value in the latter phenomenon, in a creativity not bound by practical constraints, or as little bound as possible. Today we are uncertain about this frontier. There is a side of us that wants to avoid distinctions of value, to say that all related practices are the same in some way, that the cult of genius or even of individual creativity is a typical western construction, valorizing the individual at the expense of the social milieu in which that individual arose.

That we don’t really mean this thing we want to say is evident from every blockbuster show based on the work of one admired figure, from Michelangelo to Picasso, from Frieda Kahlo to Georgia O’Keefe or more recent discoveries.

That we do mean it is suggested in displays such as this one in which so much creative activity is represented not as the admirable work of genius, but as characteristic of a place and time, as though we might put on our sociologist or anthropologist hat in this room, and change it for an aesthete’s beret in another. Or is it that here we fantasize about being Renaissance Florentines, whereas in some other rooms we reflect on what it might mean to be able to see as this artist does, to be able to control our brush or chisel in such a way as to bring out what we see in so extraordinary a way? In any case, I suppose the emphasis on emulation in relation to the religious figures on display shares some elements of that anthropological drive—even as it makes faith a merely psychological phenomenon having to do with human development. In the workshop of Verrochio, in the home decorated with a Mino da Fiesole bust or a Pierro di Cosimo painting, everyone is learning. That is one way to think about culture. There are others the museum also activates and depends upon.

Room 605. “Early Netherlandish Painting”

Jorge Luis Borges famously writes about a fictional Chinese Encyclopedia, the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which the absurdity of systems of organizations is a reminder of how arbitrary most of the distinctions we live by are:

On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into (a) those that belong to the Emperor, (b) embalmed ones, (c) those that are trained, (d) suckling pigs, (e) mermaids, (f) fabulous ones, (g) stray dogs, (h) those that are included in this classification, ( i) those that tremble as if they were mad, (j) innumerable ones, (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush, (I) others, (m) those that have just broken a flower vase, ( n) those that resemble flies from a distance.

The nightmare of the categorizer captured in the fantastic rhythmic absurdity of this passage, would be that laboriously designed systems of organization might ultimately tell us more about the various preoccupations of the organizer than about the objects in question, that they are not fundamentally related to what they attempt to organize any more than the effects of perspective, which reduces the size of all things at a distance.

The room that follows “The Home in Renaissance Italy” is devoted to “Early Netherlandish Painting,” which could be the title of an art-history book, and indicates, I suppose, that we have left anthropology or the lifestyles of the rich and largely unknown behind and are turning our attention to ART. The category difference makes me pause and think about Borges. Later, casting my eyes over my bookcase at home, I will be reminded that the title is indeed precisely the same as that of Max Friedlander’s classic multi-volume study, Early Netherlandish Painting. So yes—ART HISTORY! Is where we are. Still, it bears saying that the adjectives compound in a funny way for the English-speaking ear, the precision of “early” blending with the suggestion of vagueness of the suffix “—ish.” And, of course that vagueness is helpful for a category that in fact does not map on to a currently existing political entity, such as Italy or Florence, but is an important European region intimately linked by a history of shared culture and violent rupture, a history manifested and hidden by the emergence of two modern states: Belgium and Holland. “Netherlands” is itself a relative name: indicating that in relation to the continent as a whole, these territories are physically lower, flatter, even below sea level.

In spite of the clearly art-historical nature of the category, the wall text does not abandon the kind of sociological principles I have found elsewhere in the exhibition halls. The first sentence leads off with an economic boom the area experienced in the 1400s, the textile trade spurred by strong economic ties with the Mediterranean, the Baltic, and the British Isles.

It is interesting to find here the astonishingly modelled and poignantly miserable Christ Crowned with Thorns by Antonello da Messina—given that the artist is neither Dutch nor Flemish, and that he did not work in the Netherlands. This is a concession to the history of form or medium—art history pushing its way back in. “Antonello,” the curators tell us, “combined a Netherlandish mastery of description with an Italian emphasis on formal presentation and expression.” This is not wrong, of course, and while itself certainly not a masterful act of description of the object before us, that restraint may be wise, as words cannot do justice to this melancholy representation of the savior, his vulnerable chest marked with myriad tiny scratches, his hair matted and wet with blood and sweat, the sensuous lip and knitted brow deeply human and individual.

A question of scale challenges one in this room. The portrait-sized image of Jesus fascinates with its human particularity, it is so similar even in its dimensions, to our own bodies, but then the eye shifts to the astonishing van Eyck diptych hanging nearby, set off on its own wall, behind glass. Small in size, but vast in scope, the myriad figures painted into the Crucifixion hanging on the left are outnumbered by the number and variety of those in the Last Judgement on the right. It is too much! I am defeated. I leave at 3:30, barely five minutes after entering, thinking that I have to recognize when the proliferation of things to see is making focus impossible.

Also the fact that I know I will return makes it silly to force the issue. My battle is not against the limits of my stamina, but for as full an attention as I can muster. I try to be thoughtful about this process. I plan to begin here when I return, and set myself the task of thinking about what van Eyck does with the doubled register of divine and human that was so important in that room full of Christian art at the outset of the galleries.

As I leave I realize I must also think about the three works by Petrus Christus I spot on my way out. I think I will just ignore the van der Weyden portrait. Is this a plan, or a confession of fatigue?

We inevitably project ideas on to the past, even ideas about how ideas might be organized, such as “International Gothic.” In any case, it is certainly different to focus on a style, rather than on the ways one story has been told in various regions over centuries, as in Room 600, or on one aspiration in art, such as the desire to capture the image of an individual for posterity, as was the case in the room I just left.

Still, it bears saying that for me to suggest that the altarpieces in that first room were telling a story is to project a later idea of religion and religious art onto sacred work. Is it that a story is being told when Saint Bernard kneels before the mother of God and God himself, as a baby, about to receive the nourishment intended for that baby? What story is being told by the suffering face of Jesus, or by the affection of the Virgin for her child, or even by seeing a row of flagellants lined up before Mary Magdalen? Evidently these works were created to establish a relationship with the viewer in which a story is involved, but I am not sure “telling” is what they are doing.

We might also identify the apparently transhistorical idea of “the portrait” as itself a kind of modern imposition pulled out of images that might have been made for a variety of purposes. Is the ambition of the banker to be seen with his son, or of the elderly wife to hang for the foreseeable future next to her husband really comparable to that of the pious or ostentatious men who had themselves represented alongside saints? Is the careful rendering of a beautiful woman as a saint a portrait of that woman in the way the image of the banker and his son is?

The text in this room emphasizes the social conditions that led to the diffusion of a style, in particular the widespread networks of trade in the Middle Ages. They also suggest the emergence of a new relationship to form, one in which, for example, different ranks of people will be represented in different styles. And I guess it is the experience of difference that creates the idea of style, and of movements. For example, the International Gothic is evidently characterized by a deeply decorative and stylized quality being deployed at a time when a more naturalist style was also available to artists. Fra Lippo Lippi and Fra Angelico are certainly able to represent the world in all of its solidity. This room is a reminder that stylization and naturalism are both decisions available to artists from quite early on. Like those canvases by Gustav Klimt in which passionate human faces emerge from a decorative fretwork of gilded colors, painters in this period are able to move between the beauties of a bold stylization and the vulnerable contingent energies of realism.

I don’t think I have more than admiration for the beauty of the work to talk about here, for the deep skill involved in striking the balance of verisimilitude and design. Four small panels by Lorenzo Monaco do stop me in my tracks, though.

That may be because of the blend of power and elegance they manifest, the way that though the patriarchs rise out of a gold ground that speaks of medieval decorative crafts, their robes are painted with a volume and subtlety of coloring that is altogether new. It also may be because these works show Old Testament figures, a change after all the New Testament stories and saints I have been encountering in religious work up to this point. Most Saints, are, after all, post-biblical creations, though some were retrospectively canonized. I am intrigued, then, to see these figures from Jewish history: David, Moses, Noah, Abraham. They have all been given pretty similar appearances: bearded, stern, a frown between the eyes knitting the brow. Like saints, each holds an emblem or attribute: David the harp, Moses the tablets, Noah the ark, a stylized little structure somewhere between a house and a temple (the Spanish woman next to me points it out to her companion. “Mira, la casita!” she says).

Abraham, most poignantly, holds a flaming torch and a sword in one hand while the other caresses Isaac prior to killing him on the orders of God.

Each of these images seems to be saying something, but it’s puzzling precisely what:

I will play for you.

I will judge you.

I will save you.

I will kill you.

Evidently painters need models, and Madonnas and saints are often based on real people in the world, but the process of transforming someone from a friend, lover, or servant into Saint John, Jesus, or a Magdalen may be thought to enact something like the movement through the earthly to the divine that the religion itself celebrates. In the portrait that movement stops on earth. And perhaps that is why the portrait is the modern form par excellence. It would have been impossible before the middle of the nineteenth century for the most admired painting in the world to be the Mona Lisa, not a representation of a sacred figure or a hero from history, but an easel painting of a tranquil woman gazing out at the viewer, a play of associations illuminating the meaning of her expressions.

“Faces of the Renaissance” is an invitation to reflect on the act of representing individuals.

Djerie Bouts, A Donor Presented by a Saint (c. 1460-65) is not particularly well known. But this three-quarters view of a determined looking man gazing intently to the right of the painting, like Albert van Ouwater’s intense but dynamic Head of a Donor (c. 1465-70) is in some ways characteristic of what this room may make us think about after the previous gallery of saints and angels and events from the stories of Christianity.

Still, a moment’s sustained attention reveals a hand reaching down and gently touching the back of the donor in the Bouts. Further looking shows us that the mysterious pink fabric behind him is not a stylized curtain, but the bottom of a saint’s robe, the Saint whose hand holds the donor. This image, it turns out, like the van Ouwater, in which a hand seems to tap the right side of the head of the portrait, were cut out of larger wholes in order to be placed on the market. In fact the background of the Bouts was only revealed by later cleaning, the saint having been painted out. The Met’s catalogue tells us that when the work was acquired in 1932 it was simply thought to be a portrait of a man. It was only after its black background was removed in 1949 that its actual nature—which was first shown in x-rays taken at the Museum—was brought to light.

That’s the thing about portraits. They are all individuals separated from the common lot by the artistic act. They are not given their meaning by their piety, for example, as is the case with donors in paintings, which are representations that identify individuals as remarkable for the ways they instantiate a wider structure, or really, two: piety and wealth. The privilege of becoming memorable in a portrait is reserved for those who can afford it, powerful bankers wishing to be remembered, or to keep memories of their children, such as Francesco Sassetti, painted around 1488 by that lovely decorative Florentine, Domenico Ghirlandaio, who he also commissioned to paint an important Chapel in the Basilica of Santa Trinita in their native Florence. Sassetti, who managed banks in France and Switzerland for the Medici, had the painter place in the background an oratory he commissioned in Geneva (of which I can find no record anywhere now). There are so many ways to enlist art in the project of trying to ensure one’s posterity, many of them winding in and out of the opportunities religion presented to ensure the salvation of one’s soul.

Sassetti was ultimately a notorious failure in business, and the art to which he gave his patronage has long outlasted any other trace of the wealth he accrued. Standing here before Sassetti and his son, it is difficult not to ask oneself what will outlast our current oligarchs once they fail as they are bound to. New York is full of the relics of an earlier era of patronage, public libraries, museums including this one. What will the world’s richest today leave us to remember them by, aside from widespread poverty, disease, and a degraded public sphere? I guess these are extraordinary projects in their own way.

The more democratic claim we make on posterity is represented by the young boy in the Sassetti portrait, leaning with casual confidence against the chair on which his father sits, gazing up at him, his elbow resting on the paternal body with an informality that is deeply touching after all these years. The catalogue tells us, this work has seen a great deal of overpainting, to the point that the face of the older man and of the boy are not by the artist to whom the work is attributed—and so, do not show us what the original subjects actually looked like. Famous lines by Phillip Larkin come to mind as I gaze at what we have left of the Sassettis. Reflecting on the fate of a medieval tomb that has lost the meaning it had at the point of making, but that has become an emblem for human affection, he describes with his characteristically dark ambivalence a work of art that, precisely because it is no longer what it once was, has become a warrant for “our almost instinct almost true: / what will survive of us is love.”

Portraits show us individuals, and we make up stories to replace the ones that are missing: the desire for posterity is one story, courtship another. The wall text accompanying the remarkable Fra Lippo Lippi, Portrait of a Woman with a Man at a Casement, from around1440 is an instance of the latter tendency. Two figures in profile, and very close to each other are represented in a work that feels archaic and modern at once. In spite of the intimate position in which we find them, the individuals stand with a rigorously upright posture that belies most of what we might think about such propinquity in a private space, or in the crossing of the space between public and private of his face and hands. They are close enough to kiss, in other words, but he remains forever outside, apparently gazing over her shoulder. She is larger and higher, and dominates the eye, and so the title art history has given this piece is not Woman and Man at a Casement, or Double Portrait of a Man and a Woman, but Portrait of a Woman with a Man. Her outfit also adds to the sense of stately power she projects. Precious stones fix a headdress on her hair, itself encrusted with more jewels and beautifully embroidered cloths. The velvet of her sleeve is decorated with stylized flowers set off between the pinks of her dress and its slashed sleeves. Fur lines the opening of her dress at arm and neck. The pearls of her necklace are echoed by those trimming the edge of her headpiece.

It strikes me there’s lots of beauty at in-between spaces in this painting. Outside, an empty tree lined street emphasizes the privacy in which we find these two individuals. Perhaps it is the early morning street along which the man has walked to get to her. Perhaps she awaited his approach and watched him with a pleasure we suspect she might not readily reveal. You see, I made-up a story. I couldn’t help myself.

The wall text tells us another story. The jeweled embroidery on her sleeve spells out “lealta,” meaning faithful, so maybe she’s engaged to the man in front of her.

A noble coat of arms rests casually on the windowsill near the man’s hands, tempting historians to propose that they may even know who these two are: Lorenzo di Ranieri Scolari and Angiola di Bernardo, who married around 1436. So there you go: not just a story but a happy ending for the fairy tale of the portrait, a happily ever after, the portrait fully remembering or memorializing individuals in perpetuity along with their love

Still, if they were married around 1436, I wonder why the work is painted around 1440. This truly would be a kind of fairy tale: married life keeping forever the liminal mysteries of betrothal, the face at the window rather than the body in the room.

Another gorgeous Italian hangs next to this one, Bartolomeo Montagna’s, Saint Justinia of Padua from the 1490s. This is another altar piece that has been cut up for a far different kind of market than the one that originally commissioned the work, but this time it is not a donor but the saint herself who has been preserved and isolated, holding in her elegant fingers the palm frond indicating her martyrdom. She wears another outfit to die for, jewels binding her hair, trimming her dress, hair beautifully arrayed in a luxurious thick ponytail, a few artful curls towards the front. As she gazes gently left, she gives the impression less of bliss than of faint boredom. The authors of the wall text describe this as a portrait of a wealthy person, I suppose because it has to be a portrait, but I also suspect there is no real reason for believing this is in fact the case. When representing apparently real things and people has become the task of the artist, the model is no less available for embellishment than any other element brought into use. She could be a poor person in borrowed jewels, wealthy in personal beauty, but not in the goods of the world, immortalized (if that is what we want to call the effect of this memorialization of her exterior appearance) as a saint, remembered as a beautiful woman, and later reimagined as rich.

If the Italian portraits thrill us with their luxurious beauty, the Dutch ones floor us with their combination of technical virtuosity and apparent insight into character. At a bend in the wall a mischievously smiling young man by Antonello da Messina from around 1470 proposes the point of juncture between the two schools. A Sicilian trained in Naples in the Dutch style, Antonello is often impressed by art historians to this purpose, by curators when possible, as it is here and elsewhere in the museum, because the Metropolitan is lucky enough to own two of the very small number of works by this master.

Restraint is what stands out in the painting. The dark background brings out the face of this man, as does his dandyesque lack of decoration, the only embellishment provided the viewer is that offered in the lifted up curves of the mouth that, along with the sharp lines of the cheekbones and chin, suggest the expression on a kouros, those archaic Greek statues that tantalize with their simple lines and mysteriously self-regarding, self-sufficient, pleasure. A donor portrait this never was—one can be pretty sure, even without knowing the history of the work.

Oil painting is a slow medium. Layer after layer is placed on the prepared canvas or board by the painter, allowing depth of detail, translucency of color and light of the sort we find in the pendant portraits by an anonymous North Netherlandish artist who depicted Jan, first Count of Egmond and his wife, Magdalena, Countess of Egmond, some time between 1516 and 1520. The work shows a couple no longer young, though he is substantially older than her, his face wrinkled, the skin of his hands translucent with old age revealing the veins of his hands. The text gives us a story. The older partner died sooner. She holds a carnation in a way that remembers his death. Her ring contains a widow’s band. This was painted after his death.

Maybe.

Rather like the engagement picture painted years after a marriage, I do find myself marveling at the idea that this is a posthumous painting, one the authors of the wall text speculate was painted “upon his death.” There’s a lot of pressure on that “upon.” Is the suggestion that she brought the painter to the deathbed and set him to work? What a macabre act of mourning that would be! It’s hard for me not to see a living person in front of me—old, not dead—but who am I to gainsay the imaginative creativity of the painter—or the art historian?

For all their presence, their force of personality, these portraits consistently suggest things that are missing. The Hans Memling painting of Tommaso Portinari from around 1470 was created to serve as one side of a triptych, with an image—now lost—of the Virgin and child placed between the stunningly, beautiful woman, Maria Portinari and her handsome husband. Tommaso is another Medici banker, like Sassetti, but he is posted to Bruges. His intense eyes appear to shine with the light of the bright world at which he gazes, though in fact they were designed not to be fixed on the world, or even on his wife, but on the missing Virgin Mary.

Maria, the wife, was apparently just fourteen when Memling painted her, and yet her portrait radiates a power and confidence well beyond that age. Maybe it’s the direct gaze, which is hard to read as prayerful, or the way in which her hands and headdress seem to project beyond the frame of the painting, as though they cannot really be contained. Or is it that beautifully elaborated necklace of spun gold and colorful stones, that lies on her bare flesh, a rich adornment carefully rendered, that stands out in the relatively stark painting in which the sumptuousness of fabric and skin are otherwise the main luxury.

The Hugo Van der Goes portrait of a man in prayer from around 1475, which could seem a characteristic Protestant representation of private piety was remade into such an image. It too was originally part of a devotional triptych “The sitter,” the wall text tells us, “with his hands joined in prayer, directs his gaze towards the missing religious image.”

I’d say almost everything in this room directs our gaze towards “the missing religious image”!

I find myself wondering how many of these so-called Netherlandish portraits are relics of the religious wars that followed the Reformation. Painted in the 1470s and 80s, and shaped by a religious sensibility working to place real living people in relation to saints and martyrs, they have been made into something else after the Reformation by the act of trimming.

In the case of Djerie Bouts and of van Ouwater the cuts were made in order to sell the images. Some damage is caused by religion, then, and some to satisfy the greed of dealers. My thoughts turn to Sassetti. What would that art-patron/banker/bankrupt have made of these developments. I suspect he would have been comfortable with what happened, with all these paintings made different by the pressures of trade, smaller, fragmented. On the other hand, he was an art lover. Would he have felt more a sense of loss as to what was no longer together, or of gain, given the new lives these works were granted when they were liberated to be works of art?

I am describing the Taddeo Gaddi hanging in front of me, a Florentine work from around 1480, Tempera on wood and gold ground. Standing up, however, I notice the same subject behind me, Giovanni di Paolo’s 1454 work from Siena, also tempera on wood on gold ground, another work combining the beguilingly human with the hieratic. Here is a mother and child in a moment in time, but here too are the saints, pulled out of time to stand together in a space outside of all change

Looking to my left I spot Mary holding a crucified Jesus—the most tragic outcome of the incarnation, of course. Four hooded penitents pray at the feet of the enthroned virgin. That’s the human response. Flights of angels are playing music above Mary and the crucified Christ, but the humans mourn.

But wait, what’s that in the Virgin’s hand that looks almost like a stylized castle? I think I have gotten everything wrong! That is not a castle, but the kind of container in which one might store balm. Looking again I see that Mary’s cloak is not blue, but red. The hair peeking out of her mantle is wavy. She is young. This is not the Virgin Mary—far from it—this is Mary Magdalen I see before me, the patron saint of the penitents.

And now I see that each one of those kneeling figures bears on the shoulder of his cloak an image of that receptacle of hers, roughly embroidered or sketched—looking almost like a prison tattoo. Looking at the cloaks of the figures closest to me, I discover some kind of damage to the painting, an irregular patch on the left of each man is discolored. Looking to the other side, I find the same. This is not damage caused by years of display and storage, I realize. The patch is painted in: an indication that the penitents leave that part of themselves exposed. Their faces are covered, but their backs are available to feel the bite of whip or of the knotted ropes they all hold in their prayerful hands. And indeed, if the point had been missed, on the reverse of the canvas is another painting, a nearly life size representation of Christ himself being beaten, The Flagellation.

As we gaze at the penitent Mary holding an image of the human end of Jesus, betrayed, tortured, executed, the ongoing process of guilt and atonement emerges as another manifestation of the characteristic rhythm of this gallery, which has at its heart bliss and suffering divine and human, but always mediated by figures in the world we inhabit. If we look to our right we see a touching Paolo di Giovanni Fei, Madonna and Child from the 1370s. The tranquility of the Madonna as Jesus suckles, his hand holding his right foot with a realism that overwhelms the puzzling indifference to anatomy of the placement of the breast. His arm, her tender hands, his other foot, and the sumptuous pink fabric embroidered with gold and lined with Marian blue: so much careful engagement with the real. Is that a coral charm around his neck, like a baby might still be equipped with in southern Italy to ward off the evil eye?

I have called it the rhythm of this room: suffering, love, sacrifice, love, redemption. We could also call these the themes that give a meaning to the sumptuous beauty we see around us, gold ground tooled with stylized patterns to make a world of beauty that pulls us out of the grim one we typically make for ourselves. Since my last visit I have been reflecting on one insight the curators have made available to me about the nature of culture. The vestibule, with relatively small resources, evokes a resonant vision of distinct cultures meeting and responding to each other—an ancient Roman epic in what is now Mexico, Greek letters on an Egyptian statue, a North African general captive in Rome, a Boddhisatva with a body shaped by a sensibility going back to Greek work, etc. The characteristic 20th or 21st century celebration of multiculturalism and the fascination with zones of contact of room 601 may well remind us that culture is in fact transnational at its heart. We should have known that already from the Indian deity carved out of the stone of the mountains of what is now Pakistan in a style citing Greece, from the Egyptian lion carved with a Greek inscription, from the Mexican platter evoking chinoiserie as it represents a Roman legend looking back to the Greeks. But this room, with its Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and French retelling of the Christian mysteries, should remind us that these sacred stories predate our concepts of nation and indeed the existence of any of the states I have just mentioned as political entities.

The wall text informs us that the golden image with saints I glimpsed past the doors as I looked up from the Roman bust was painted in Avignon (so in what we now call France) for Florentine (and so, Italian) nobles in exile. The text also draws attention to the play between the “atemporal and spaceless field of gold ground” and the accurate topographical view of Avignon. This play between eternity and the immediately real is everywhere in the image. Both donors have taken off their shoes, their hats lie beside them, one more decorated than the other. This is psychological realism: the difference in our taste and actions captured by the artist. The peeling bark on the trees beside them differs, as trees in the world do. More realism: the different forms natural processes will take. But both trees culminate in an emblematic excess: a shield with what looks to my eye like three winged pears, a plumed helmet, and an angel holding a motto: “Datum est de super,” which I think translates as “given from above,” which is both a gesture of modesty and a powerful claim of entitlement.

It strikes me that I ought to incorporate the experience of return into my notes, as that is part of the experience of the museum I am attempting to capture. Pausing at the top of the stairs, inspired by two carefully turned out young women taking pictures of each other, I look again. What are they—and the dozens I will see doing the same thing over the weeks ahead—seeing?

The Triumph of Marius certainly offers the kind of luxury one might enjoy placing behind one in a photograph—the vast size, the yards of blue, the noble protagonists—Jugurtha’s chains barely visible,

his bold gaze looking down at the visitor undaunted,

the eyes of his conqueror picking him out for our attention.

Even a statue within the painting appears to gaze at Jugurtha’s towering figure.

There is something luxurious also about the angles within the painting—the power of representation that can show us statues askew, the smoke of braziers moving in the breeze,

the bent body of the muscular servant carrying a golden urn, his leg projecting back behind the boy playing a wonderfully realized tambourine, the shadows of the musician’s fingers touching the skin stretched tight over that instrument, his eyes also gazing back at the most important trophy, who gazes in his direction and ours, undaunted.

The luxury of skill.

Still, in such a context, it is hard not to think of Walter Benjamin’s famous proposition about triumphs and sympathy in his “Theses on History.” A memory of what he wrote as the Nazis approached Paris comes into my mind, and I look up the text when I am home:

Empathizing with the victor invariably benefits the current rulers. The historical materialist knows what this means. Whoever has emerged victorious participates to this day in the triumphal procession in which current rulers step over those who are lying prostrate.

Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” (1940). Trans. Harry Zohn

And yet, this painting suggests that the triumph may sometimes itself work against the grain of history. Poor Marius is hardly the cynosure of every eye, and insofar as people look at the travel photos of their friends, it is not he who will stand out in the background of so many images all over the world, but the conquered Jugurtha.

As I write these notes I realize that I am in the way of a large Chinese group eager to place themselves in the spot on which I am standing—what triumph are they marking, with whom are they sympathizing?

Looking up again after moving to make room I see the beautifully lit Roman matron, her reticence pulling in the passerby—her shadowed visage suggesting that she may be difficult to get to know but is well worth knowing. Also, the shadows on her form pick up those in the Tiepolo painting behind her, and lead the eye back to the glass door through which a golden painting of two saints and donors beckons. She is a sculpture, and so is the carved goddess held by the soldier gazing back at Marius. The lines of the Roman matron’s beautiful sinuous form continue in those created by the painter—rising—and including the elaborate frame that contains the triumph.

Looking back to the Bodhisattva (who himself is striking me as more reticent today, even withholding) I find the grey schist does less with shadows. His confident stare and complacent unobscured expression prove to be less evocative. He could be the bodyguard of our matron—so wealthy, privileged, and vulnerable we might feel her to be. That’s just projecting, of course—but what else do the juxtapositions invite us to do? His verticality encourages the eye upward to notice that the side of Marius behind the Bodhisattva is more crowded with figures, that his grayness and his broken condition call out to the the bust in the middle of the painting, though she appears to share more with the matron.

It is, in any case, a jumble of wonderfully balanced color and form and crowd that Tiepolo creates—and that harmonizes with the motley corner of the Max Beekman triptych (the Beginnings) that peeks out through the glass door into the next room. I keep not reaching.¹ The play of exuberant color and restrained sculpture becomes yet more marked as the eye falls on the smaller objects by the doors, the sumptuous riot of the Mexican platter on the left set off by the muted white of the Egyptian lion on the right.

I may have spent enough time on this return to the vestibule already, but I cannot leave it without noting the most obvious way this display serves as an opening movement to the galleries ahead. The matron gazes to her right, intensely, the Bodhisattva of the Future straight down, with cocky confidence. Marius looks at us. His conqueror looks at him and at us. The Egyptian lion gazes straight out with tranquil power over folded paws. Then the human figures around the paintings do their thing. They look everywhere. The room is a network of glances, and characters, and objects. The display provides things on which to focus the attention, but it does not constrain the movement of the eye the way a line of text, or the images that make up a moving picture do, or the way a piece of music is followed in order by the ear. Looked at this way, the museum becomes inexhaustible, unresolvable, human. Indeed, the painting of the triumph really might be taken as prototypical, and not only in the way Benjamin suggests when he sees it as ratifying oppression. Captivity, ambiguity, loss, points of view that do not resolve into one thing: the museum.

I take one last look at the Marius to try to understand that white bust to the right of the painting. At first I thought it was Cybele or some allegorical figure, the walled city or castle that rises from her head ironized by the angle at which we find her, gazing at a king in chains. Further research will tell me she is the goddess of fate, Tyche—identifiable, by the strange crown she wears, in the form of a walled city.

The urn just in front of her, I notice at this point, is decorated with a statue and draped in a decorative chain garnished with an evocative medallion. This larger object helps us understand the smaller vase carried by a young man on the left and the statue below it, itself also decorated, like the captured king, with a suggestive chain. Chains as decorations of trophies, works of art as emblems of conquest: the museum.

At last, I manage to move past the vestibule—struck by the fact that my earlier long period in this space created the conditions for an unexpectedly long return, rather than a sense of satiation or clear satisfaction.

The more I look, the more there is to see: the museum.

¹Returning today to take another photo, I find the Beekman Triptych has been moved!Evidently, I am not the only person who thinks again in these galleries. I know this will happen, but it is a salutary shock each time I am reminded that nothing is ultimately static in a museum.

After a while, it dawns on me that the initial sense of overwhelming variety is due not simply to the arrangement of the room or to the number of works, but to the visual richness of the pieces on display themselves. The gallery is full of altarpieces, some of which are composed of several individual elements, but all of which are committed to that most difficult project: making simultaneously visible profoundly distinct categories of experience: the eternal and the transient, the divine and the secular. How could such a sight ever be easy?

It is in the nature of a gallery to never really constrain our movements or our sight, and it stands out to me more than usual in this room full of shimmering treasures that any choice of focus is bound to be fairly arbitrary.

I find that when I am overwhelmed by an impossible number of calls on my attention, it’s best to wait for a small detail to organize my experience. A narrowing of vision often becomes the only way of discovering what matters to me. It is also a way to avoid drowning in the attempt to swallow the whole. It may be because I am a reader of European languages that I tend to start on the left, or perhaps there is some other reason that The Trinity Adored by All Saints, a Spanish work from around 1400 in the left-hand corner of the room calls to me. The label tells me it is “Tempera and gold on wood” I am looking at, but the material nature of the work is unmissable, revealed by the crack on the left panel splitting the body of a saint. Is it the damage that has attracted me?

The crack in the panel inevitably makes me think about vulnerability. Think? It makes me feel something about the vulnerability of this painting that has survived for so long. “All saints,” the title tells us, and we know the martyred Saints found their blissful destinies through emulating in the centuries after his death the suffering of Jesus this painting represents. At its top I see a full selection of the implements of the passion, the spear that pierced his side, the crown of thorns that cut into the tender skin of his head, the nails that pierced through flesh and bone to pin his body in place. If this is a painting of subjects who have been removed from time and suffering, that separation has only been made possible by the pain they experienced when caught up in time.

The Crucifixion, the culmination of the suffering of Jesus, is placed between the two elements of the Annunciation. On one side is Gabriel interrupting Mary at her reading with the famous words that in themselves enact what they say, “the Lord is with thee.” On the other we see Mary learning that she has been chosen for something extraordinary. On reflection, which is what this painting provokes, the placement of Christ’s last moments at the junction point of his inception is not so strange. When perfection subjects itself to the imperfect, when the permanent and invulnerable makes itself vulnerable, all experiences have suffering at their core. From the moment of incarnation, the suffering of Jesus, and so of the Saints, is inevitable.

Looking at the Saints themselves I find my eye drawn to two who are holding children. I suppose these are just meant to be attributes allowing the viewer to distinguish individual saints, but the painter becomes tender when showing Saint Ann clasping Mary and Saint Christopher supporting Jesus as a boy. Then my eye wanders to the central sections, which represent the expulsion of angels from heaven, a beautiful blue sky dotted with golden stars provides the background for loyal angels armed with swords, spears, and crosses (the long arms of the saints serving as a kind of visual counterpoint) to drive their fallen counterparts into the monster’s mouth that is the entrance to hell

The wall text tells us that this room will feature larger ensembles. Altars traditionally had many parts, including the predella, a set of smaller paintings typically showing scenes from the life of the saint celebrated in the actual altarpiece. The display includes some of these, and also works featuring paintings on both their sides, as well as other kinds of divisions and continuities that allow the imagination to visualize boundaries and connections between life (what one did when alive) and eternity (being a saint, being flung into hell), and so between realms.

This all makes sense. After all, every one of these Christian works has the incarnation at its heart one way or another, the making flesh of spirit, the actions of the divine in history. To believe, in this tradition, is to think of the divine as utterly different, perfect in every sense of the word—omniscient, omnipotent, entirely benevolent—and yet as caring about a world that is utterly limited in its knowledge (the angel brings Mary news about herself that amazes her) and characterized by weakness and cruelty (the son she conceived with god will be threatened by Herod in his boyhood, and meet the bitter humiliating end we will see reimagined all over this room and throughout these galleries).

In “The Grey Stone,” an early poem by William Butler Yeats, a goddess who has attempted to protect her love from harm in a great battle by granting him invisibility is distressed that he has abandoned a protection his king cannot share and has died with his monarch, choosing human loyalty over safety and divine protection. “Why must the lasting love what passes?” she complains, “Why are the gods by men betrayed?” The room I am in is full of attempts to imagine the relationship between the lasting and what passes. The extraordinary element here is not human fallibility, of course, but the love of the lasting for what passes—despite the unavoidable certainty of something like betrayal.

The painting of the Trinity attended by all the Saints with which I began is moving for its aspiration to be so comprehensive in a relatively small space. It not only includes all the saints, but key elements in spiritual history, such as the casting down of the rebellious angels in heaven by the good angels, and in the human history that has been immediately touched by the divine, such as the annunciation and the crucifixion. The challenge is at once religious and artistic—not simply to show a variety of realms of experience, but to represent their difficult interactions (to speak euphemistically of a betrayal that includes the crucifixion of a god).

I am touched when I notice the way the weapons of the good angels in The Trinity Adored by all the Saints enter the middle space of blue and gold stars while also crossing into the register of the divine. That simple touch of painterly imagination gracefully captures a moment in the often painful negotiation between registers that all of these works have in common and that we look to angels to carry out.

Even though I have arrived with the intention of going slowly, I cannot look at everything with the same attention. So, in this room I begin to follow some of my more typical practices and continue to find my bearings by focusing on objects that intrigue me at first glance. Across the room from the Trinity and All the Saints an entirely different work painted some 100 years later and in France, not Spain, calls out to me. Elegance is the keynote of the Celier Altarpiece, a charming triptych created around 1512 by Jean Bellegambe, apparently commissioned by a wealthy abbess. While this calm and refined work does not focus on the suffering of the human Christ or the instruments of his passion, it is nevertheless a vision of a fully embodied religiosity.

The outside of the triptych presents two images that come together to form one when the work is closed. And at the moment I can only see the outside by awkwardly craning my head to peep at the sides of a work that is displayed open. The partially hidden painting that is created and divided depending on whether the central work is displayed or put away shows in a near monochrome a carefully realized architectural space in which three figures that are not quite sculptures interact. The robes of Saint Bernard and the Virgin have a marble quality, their stiff folds represented with the confident solidity of a sculptor. But, their hands and faces, and especially their hair, glow with human life. The baby Jesus in Mary’s arms holds what is evidently a rosary, but the coral out of which it is composed adds a shocking touch of intense color while evoking the coral that was used for children teething and as an amulet to ward off the evil eye. I suppose it is also intended to anticipate the blood of the Passion to come. And then, of course, the rosary has been associated with Mary herself for a long time, having been used for millennia to repeat the greeting that became a blessing of the mother of God at the moment of conception.

What educated viewers saw in this tryptic when it was closed was all I am describing, but they also were able to recognize something more, a relatively reserved representation of an incident in the life of Bernard when a statue of the Virgin released milk from her breast into the mouth of the eloquent saint. The legend, which had been often represented since the medieval period, is evidently another of those episodes in which the play between the material and the divine so central to Christianity is realized. Our painter, as discrete as he is elegant, can draw on the tradition, and merely suggest the event here. Mary’s fingers rise to her bare breast and apply gentle pressure. The Christ child looks benignly at the saint, The saint himself is attentively gazing at the work of art that the legend holds will give him spiritual sustenance in material form.

The painting protected by this evocative cover is the main event, of course, and it is a beautifully realized world it puts on display: its space is so clearly manifested, the fabrics carried on solid bodies, each individual having a distinct presence, individual weight, and personal character. What stands out in the background is a cheerful blend of the sacred and of the simply human: a couple strolling with a dog, a child being taught to walk by angels. Other angels sing and play the harp, or simply chat on the steps of Mary’s altar, or stop for a drink at a fountain. In the foreground, four adorable putti are getting ready to play music under the throne of the virgin: one reads the music, the arm of a friend draped across his shoulder. Another of the putti holds a recorder, smiles, and points. A drum is visible behind them. To the right of the seated virgin three more children arrange themselves. One strokes a lute, another reads music, while a third offers the Virgin a rose, picking up on the rosary on the other side. There is plenty of stone on this side of the work, especially in elaborate marble throne. Still, the fabrics people wear are soft. Their sleeves are lined with fur. A green velvet cushion projects out beyond the robes of the Virgin, supporting her holy feet.

It was near this image that I found the other title of the room, “European Painting: A Starting Point.” Here, also, is where the kinds of unmissable cross-period juxtapositions that characterized the vestibule are given a further bold development. Nearby hangs not only a Head of Christ from the late fourteenth century, attributed, with that genius for awkward nomenclature characteristic of responsible art historians to “the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia,” but also Three Studies for Self-Portrait by Francis Bacon from 1979.

I remembered this shocking contrast from my first walk through and was curious how it would strike me now, as I came back ready for it, ready to dislike the Bacon, as I tend to do. His love of the distorted and painful, his melodramatic citations of the history of painting tends to leave me cold and troubled. But, the three images I see here again stop me before I make any judgments. They are too rich and strange for me to dismiss them, too rich in that disturbing beauty that comes only from dispassionate looking. The depth and apparent sincerity of the gaze, the light glinting off the tip of his nose and its bridge, the bold rendering of the white collar of the shirt: I think the distortions strike me as meditative and personal precisely because it is his own person Bacon is working to capture—and distortion is pretty much all we’ve got when it comes to doing that!

Each juxtaposition in a museum is a puzzle and a provocation, so that questions will proliferate if we let them. Why these works? What does it mean to put them together? What do we learn about each individual piece by seeing them alongside each other? The easy answers come quickly. These are both faces, The Head of Christ, Studies for Self-Portrait. They’re both beautifully crafted, in the sense of being created with extraordinary care and skill. But, the differences stand out too, and are not to be ignored. One painter, working some 700 years ago, is aiming to represent a conventional type. In fact what we are seeing is a stylized version of the veil of Veronica, the cloth on which the suffering Christ was said to have wiped his face, leaving an imprint of who he was—a divine memory of his human suffering. This convention would have been so familiar to the viewer (like the story of the divine nourishment of Saint Bernard in the triptych nearby) that it is merely suggested in the actual painting. Still, those two angels at the top—the one on the right appearing to grin slightly and inappropriately—are holding up the veil on which we see Christ’s face painted, which is a gorgeously idealized vision of a gentle man, his long hair falling to his shoulders in stylized cascades, his carefully molded face and neck rising with preternatural clarity from the stylized gold behind him, giving Jesus a luxurious quality not unrelated to the complacence of the one angel. This is not a representation that emphasizes suffering.

Juxtaposition, it bears saying, is the fundamental practice of all museums, whether it is called to our attention by bold contrasts of period or style or not. Groupings of works of art are rarely harmonious in themselves. They are harmonized. And reminding us of that fact is one of the virtues of stark juxtapositions such as this one of the Bacon self-portraits with the representation of the face of Jesus by “the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia.”

Gallery 601, in which I am standing, is full of Christian art, of faithful saints and martyrs, of donors and penitents. Standing in this room and looking to the right however, I see Gallery 634, which is away far in the chronological future of the exhibition when it is explored in order, as I plan to do. Nevertheless there it is: the Enlightenment. I don’t understand it as a coincidence that just past the Francis Bacon the visitor is afforded a view (call it a vista) of Jacques Louis David’s milestone of neoclassical painting, the Death of Socrates (1787), a vision of a secular martyrdom painted not in the age of faith, but in the age of reason. In case we risked being unclear about the contrast, the curators have placed splendid busts by François-Marie Arouet of those two great skeptics, Voltaire (1778) and Diderot (1773) on each side of that masterpiece of principled willing self-sacrifice attended by mournful companions that could not exist as it does without the history of religious painting in which I am standing, which it clearly emulates though it aims for something entirely different.

Juxtapositions bring out key elements in the individual works of art on display. Placing the elegant Jesus and angels of the Master of the Orcagnesque Misericordia alongside the Bacon self-portraits brings out the sharpness of line and intensity of color that makes for the force of individual personality in both projects. Looking at Max Beckman’s bold modernist work, The Beginning (1946-49), on display next to the Celier Altarpiece allows me not simply to recognize the ambitions of this massive modern return to the triptych form, but to identify other elements fundamental to each work. Spotting the play with orange and white, with yellow and gold, in both works leads me to other commonalities. The almost contrapuntal use of children in both paintings emerges as particularly powerful. Adult themes in both works are leavened by the indifference to adult concerns that shapes the pleasures of childhood.

Sure, the angels under Mary are probably just reading the music they need to sing to exalt the mother of God, but the Beckman allows us to look back at them and recognize the mischievous pleasure they represent, and that Bellegambe has placed throughout the sacred scene. This element in the altarpiece also may allow us to recognize some of the pleasures brightening the somber shades painted by the German artist. Not only does a careening rocking horse and rider dominate the central panel, intervening in the representation of what are apparently more adult passions, but the secret note passed back and forth in the right panel captures a social world in which, as in every other classroom, much of the learning taking place is not simply acquired by listening to the teacher

The text on the plinth tells us the woman’s hairstyle is based on that of a Syrian-born empress. I suppose the point here is to indicate how the piece has been dated. This transient element on the living body, the central parting, the wavy lines of hair that we see under the mantle, are what locate her in history, as she was: simply a memory of a woman following the hair style of the empress as others did. The other aim of the text is to make the reader aware of what we might call today the multicultural world in which this work was created. Still, “Syrian-born” strikes me as fudging the question of diversity that so preoccupies us today, pretending that in an empire individuals are naturalized citizens of whatever country we currently call the region they came from. Call this birthright citizenship, or 14th amendment Rome. Do I need to say that naturalizing this phenomenon is a way of erasing the kind of violent history that led to our own 14th amendment? The other day, over dinner I spoke to a man who told me his mother was Russian, his father Jewish. They were both born in the same country, but both descriptions made sense to him and were all he had available when he thought about them.

It was as I was reflecting on the desire to recognize the fundamentally heterogeneous sources of European culture, of all culture, really, that I turned to look at the wall text behind me. “Visualizing Europe,” it says, and features reproductions of three maps: an important Arab one from 1154 centered on Mecca, another from the Dutch East India Company produced between 1668 and 1672 with city views highlighting local differences in style of urban planning and conditions of life, and a British one from 1798 which shows not so much the nations that we know but the empires that made-up a great deal of Europe, places we think of differently today, if at all: Austria Hungary, Prussia, The Ottoman Empire. At the very least the maps should help us recognize the instability of the place we call Europe. More broadly, this presentation might lead us to recognize the contingent and historically-limited nature of the things we very often use to organize our thinking about culture and politics these days: things we call nations or states.

“Look Again,” the title of the new exhibition blazoned on the walls, suggests something of the dynamic nature of what the curators have done. The claim is that what one is about to encounter is not simply a refurbished permanent display. It is something like an exhibition promising new knowledge that will accompany or encourage a new point of view. The imperative cuts in two direction, however. On the one hand it is an invitation to look again at values and ideas one might bring to bear when encountering these works, call it the address to the Eurocentric art lover. On the other we may also hear in the title a plaintive call to those who have moved on from Europe, or from the past, who think all that it offers is a memory of elitist monocultural oppression. Perhaps they too might look again. Maybe looking again is in itself a value the Museum can support if we let it, a practice that might add meaning to the institution.

Both sides of the knife are cutting in the vestibule. The three maps reproduced in the wall each provides a different view of the continent. The one created by an Arab historian in the 12^th century not only puts the South on top, rather than the North, it centers on Mecca, challenging a number of conventions—or just showing us that many of our fixed reference points are in fact conventional. If we think that Andalusia was essentially a Muslim territory from 711 to 1492, so, for about 800 years, we may remember that less time has passed since the Muslims were driven out or forced, along with the Jews, to convert to Christianity than passed with that territory being the home to a substantial and dominant Muslim population. So, this map is less an invitation to a consider an alternative reality than a reminder of reality itself. Forgetting non-Christian Europe should be more difficult than it is because of how much work it took to create the fantasy of a fully Christian Europe, but also how brief a time the realest version of that fantasy has been anything close to true. To put it another way, how do our ideas change when Europe is a place involved in a centuries-long process of expelling religious difference, rather than one simply resisting its incursions?

The Dutch map from the seventeenth century does not mean much to me, other than that we may see in it an instance of the kind of interest in locating or imagining Europe we will find again in the paintings of Vermeer and other painters from the era. But the English map of 1798 is fascinating, including as it does an engorged post-revolutionary France incorporating substantial parts of Italy and territories now in Germany, as well as more well-established Empires, such as the Austro-Hungarian and the Ottoman.

To rethink Europe is not only to imagine what its outer edges were like, then, and how they might have changed over the centuries, but also to realize that for all the continuities we like to think about in the lives of states, most of the countries of Europe could have been—and have been—different. The principal category of organization for much of the history of the continent has not been the generally hard-won (not to say brutally achieved) cultural homogeneity of a nation but the far more arbitrary and capricious facts entailed by developments within courts and among empires. We can tell ourselves that the history of Europe is the history of various nations, but that would be simply to ignore everything we know about the history and contemporary condition of every European state. Marriage between noble families, unforeseen deaths of offspring, or acts of conquest have more to do with the long history of Europe than the powerful but lately arrived idea of national identity that has preoccupied us for the past couple of centuries.

It is embarrassing to talk about the centrality of conquest, especially as most of us like to tell ourselves that that is no longer how the future is to be shaped. A character in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness describes the brute force that allows conquest as, “nothing to boast of, when you have it, since your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others.” This map from the late eighteenth century suggests that the Europe we are going to see in these galleries is not made up of so many earlier versions of the later group of states that make up that entity today. It is a set of territories in which culture and art were continually organized and reorganized in the course of new political arrangements. If it is almost as unthinkable to our historical provincialism as the romantic adventures of parents are to their children that the past we keep not looking at was in fact more dynamic and contingent, more liable to be different, than our present feels like it is, it also strikes me that there might be some comfort in the recognition of that fact that things have been different.

Behind the maps, on a section of the wall likely to be missed by all but the most acute observer is a plan of the galleries that explains what most visitors encounter with no explanation, as they head straight up the large staircase, barely pausing at the busts or glancing at the paintings and other objects in this vestibule. “A story of European painting unfolds chronologically,” the widely-ignored text explains, but “thematic pauses break up the narrative and open up vistas across time and geography.” And so the challenge is laid down. Museums are all about vistas, after all, which is just another term for narrow views that open up to distances. What else do museums do to start with, but create and open up views. Still, it is an expansive word with a rich European etymology (“Partly a borrowing from Italian. Partly a borrowing from Spanish. Partly a borrowing from Portuguese” the dictionary tells me—so many debts!). Can the vistas afforded by these galleries carry out the ambitious project of opening up points of view that look out across time and geography? What will be the relationship between the story these galleries tell and the thematic “pauses” that break it up?

Certainly, I appreciate the idea that looking at these works of art will open up my horizons and those of others. We can see this aspiration at work already in the way that the two busts that greeted me at the entry way to the exhibition sent my mind reeling to Pakistan to Syria, to the future promised by a Buddha I had never met before, to the past suggested by a head of wavy hair parted in the middle by the hairdresser of a Roman matron. There are also very long views suggested by the material elements themselves, of course, by the grain of the rock revealed in a broken torso, by the shadows that shape the light on the marble face.

Three massive canvases by the great Venetian artist, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, dominate the vestibule and call out for attention. Especially given that this is the entry way for an ambitious display of European painting. Commissioned by a patrician Venetian family, the Delfin, they make for an eye-opening programmatic gesture, or—to put it in terms of the wall text—perhaps I should say that they open on to some surprising vistas. Starting on the left we find the Capture of Carthage (1725-1729), a grim image of conquest in which what is most clearly represented is the death and defeat that accompanies any military campaign, themes which are not typically emphasized by artists celebrating a war. I don’t think it is merely a modern projection to note that the work avoids projecting a sense of triumph in its representation of the damage caused by a ravaging Roman empire, certainly the most consequential empire Europe ever saw.

As usual, Tiepolo, is almost too skilled for his own good. It is difficult for me at least not to keep losing and finding what is amazing about him in part because this masterful final flowering of the great Venetian tradition of color and bold imagination influenced so many illustrators in the centuries after he worked that we can miss what is extraordinary in the beautiful red earth of the foreground and the dashingly rendered glinting helmet he created with bold dabs and splotches of paint. But everywhere one looks there is remarkable painterly skill, bravura technique creating an extraordinarily solid world that is paradoxically dynamic: fallen armor draped by the disordered fabric of a fallen standard, the hair on the hooves of a bold horse, or on the head of a dead man boldly foreshortened in front of the viewer, a daunted soldier recoiling from the misery in front of him.

The massive size of the piece, its simple but gorgeous frame, both make clear that the object was decorative. One can only marvel (if that’s the word) at a decoration compounded out of so much mayhem and death. We are less comfortable with conquest than any earlier era of course, or at least with seeing it in action or with admitting its picturesque qualities—

As I was writing these words into my notebook a man came up to me and asked me to take his picture in front of the painting. He was dressed in a remarkable outfit, what I remember as black silk shorts and a matching top woven with some kind of sparkly material. I would not call him attractive but I suspect he might have been so to others and definitely to himself. He had one of those shaved heads that manage to look like an expensive haircut, and wore a glittering diamond-encrusted Star of David. His English was not strong, and his complexion was dark. I decided, with one of those instinctive insights one lives by that he was from the Caribbean, and that his jewelry was too ostentatious to be signaling what it clearly was, so I spoke to him in Spanish. “No,” he responded, “Hebrew!” That is a language I don’t speak. So, I resigned myself to poor communication and took his picture in front of the massacre as he gazed to the side, with practiced self-confidence, offering his best profile and set of chin

I shot him from below, as I was taught to do by my father, the photographer, so he would look strong, but also to get an angle that included my subject and the massive painting he had requested as a background. I don’t know if it was because he appreciated my efforts, or if he was concerned that my kneeling in order to frame the picture suggested a problem. “Is this a good picture to take a photograph in front of?” he asked me as he retrieved his phone. “Well,” I responded, uncertain of his meaning, “it is a pretty sad picture.” He looked blank. “There is a lot of death in it. Maybe we should do it in front of this one,” I said, gesturing to The Triumph of Marius behind me. More blankness. “I think the light there,” he said, indicating the Capture of Carthage, “maybe is not so good. Let’s do some more pictures over there.” And he pointed to The Battle of Vercellae, the third work by Tiepolo in this space. He strode over to that side, unleashed his profile, and I took a bunch of images of him in front of another massacre in progress before he headed into the galleries proper. I only realized after he had headed off, that I desperately wished I could have kept some of the pictures, as the whole brief experience seemed like a dream, or an emblematic anecdote the meaning of which would require a great deal of reflection. I knew that I would not be able to believe this interlude had happened as it did unless I wrote it down, so I did, but I had been too shy to ask him to text me one of the pictures. Also I suspected nothing good could come of the request. Ultimately, after scribbling a few notes I followed the way he had gone, and snapped some surreptitious photos of my model, who I found photographing paintings of gorgeous eighteenth-century outfits. Only then did I feel comfortable returning to the vestibule and my project.

Re-engaged by the paintings after this interlude with photography, I took my own advice and turned to The Triumph of Marius, the work, which dominates the vestibule, rising as it does on the wall the visitor sees coming up the stairs, and hanging behind the busts on which I have already spent so much time. This is another massive celebration of Roman military prowess, not a vision of actual struggle, but of what victory looks like when it is a display of trophies. The wall text translates the banner blowing overhead: “The people of Rome behold Jugurtha laden with chains,” which is from Plutarch’s Life of Marius, I learned later.

Triumph, like trophy, is a word that has become separated from its original martial meaning. It was the name given to the parades, that were organized in Rome to commemorate military victories abroad. These elaborate festivals featured captives paraded before the population of the city who would come out to witness their enemies humiliated, to admire the prowess of leaders who were able to defeat so many. Triumphs also were occasions to showcase the plunder the legions had acquired through acts of violence. It would be impossible to effectively represent on a canvas these festivals of pride and violence, given their size and duration, so Tiepolo wisely does not attempt to depict a parade, so much as its chief elements. His work becomes the occasion to create cornucopias of stuff spilling out on either side of the canvas, including elaborate vases and statues (even vases decorated with statues!). And yet, in spite of all the trophies filling the space, and the fact that it is Roman victory that is being celebrated, the captive Jugurtha dominates the work. The chains with which he is laden are hard to see, and when we do make them out, they seem rather pretty. Marius, the general this triumph is meant to be celebrating, recedes into the background, seeming less significant in his chariot than this main figure, providing just another pair of eyes drawing attention to Jugurtha.

These three canvases have hung in this spot since the 1990s, so I have walked by them dozens of times without stopping, and yet the new exhibition has given them a new meaning or set of possible meanings. When we consider them in relation to the question of Europe and its edges or juxtaposed to the statues that first greet the visitor, the works suggest a vision of the continent as a place shaped by multigenerational unresolved struggles against the people at its limits. Jugurtha, after all, was a North African general and king, Carthage, a North-African kingdom. Still, there’s a limit to how much we can project on to the past. It requires real squinting to see the account of Jugurtha in the sources as a simple legend of conquest and resistance. It is very much, a story from within the empire, one that reveals the intricate network of connections between Roman elites and North African rulers. It is striking for example, in the painting before one, and especially given modern sensibilities, that the conquered general is not distinguished racially from the man who defeated him, and that Jugurtha is dressed in roman robes.

In an earlier hanging these massive canvases stood alone, accompanied, I believe, by fragments were frescoes by Tiepolo that have been moved elsewhere, creating the effect, or at least gesturing to the idea a fantastic recreation of a Venetian space, as though by encountering these fragments from a distant culture, the visitor might be able to feel connected to the glorious lost past in which they were conceived. The objects that now accompany the three paintings of violent struggle do something quite different. In a vitrine to the left of the Marius we find more of the story of ancient Rome, indeed one of the most ancient parts of that story. Turnus Provoked into War by Aeneas, is a huge platter created by an indigenous artist from Mexico, José Manuel de la Cerda, a work from around 1764—so, no more than 40 years after the Tiepolo.

Turnus was the leader of the people who lived in what would become Rome before Aeneas and his crew of refugees from Troy showed up. His defeat is necessary; the routing of his community, must take place in order for Rome to be founded. I have to admit it makes me a little sad to see The Aeneid, described in the wall text as “an ancient Roman poem admired by Europe in the 1700s.” The Aeneid, Virgil’s great epic on the foundation of Rome, and one of the foundational texts of European culture, is quite a bit more than “an ancient Roman poem.” I suppose it is not quite like describing Genesis as an ancient Hebrew poem, or the gospel of Mark as an ancient Palestinian legend. Virgil was said to have predicted the coming of Christ in one of his eclogues, and was treated as something between a prophet and a magician from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance. It is this Virgil Who Dante meets at the beginning of the Divine Comedy, who he imagines as his guide through Hell. For centuries Europeans consulted Virgil’s epic by opening it at random with a question in their minds, a kind of classical I Ching or book of prognostication.

“An ancient Roman poem admired by Europe in the 1700s!”

I guess so.

The authors, committed to their odd minimization of extraordinary things describe the moment represented on the platter as “an episode” from the poem, which is not inaccurate, but more than a little reductive. It is an episode in the way the Fall of Man or the Nativity are episodes in the Bible. What is shown on the platters is the beginning of the struggle that had to take place in order to found Rome, to begin the history of Europe, a history not unrelated to the history of what is sometimes referred to as Latin America, or even of the Roman Catholic church.

“Episode!”

In fact, to understand what is poignant about the object and what it represents requires a recovery of the primal nature of the scene. The image represented by José Manuel de la Cerda in Mexico in a lacquer made from the fat of insects cultivated for the purpose, shows the imperial conqueror at a key juncture in manifesting his destiny and that of his people. Displaced from Troy, unable to cease from motion until he reaches the peninsula he is fated to dominate, his story sets up the future in which Virgil will live, as poet to Caesar Augustus, the founder of the empire. Like a superhero origins story, all of this future is anticipated in the story Virgil tells, including his intimate relationship to his chief nemeses, not just Turnus and his people, but notably the Carthaginians, whose storied city burns following on Aeneas’s seduction and betrayal of their queen. And so, the platter brilliantly links the two paintings by Tiepolo between which it hangs, while simultaneously highlighting three moments of foundational imperial violence: between Rome and Carthage, between the Trojans in exile and the people of the peninsula they will displace in order to found Rome, and—of course—between Europe and the Americas in which the object was created. The platter is a palimpsest showing European conquest and the Conquista, or perhaps it can be understood as being one of those optical games that never resolves, that shows the inside of a cube or the outside, a duck or a rabbit, depending on mood and a turn of one’s internal gyroscope.

I told myself I’d focus as much as I could on looking and not just thinking in this project so let me go back to what I am seeing. With its stylized trees and birds, the lacquer platter is clearly an extraordinary work of what we call chinoiserie, which adds another layer to the pileup of cultural exchange taking place at this corner of the museum. In the place of the stylized Chinese people one usually sees in work in this tradition, José de la Cerda has put tiny little Europeans, fighting, playing drums, riding horses. He has also included some mysterious structures that look like primitive version of Noah’s ark. I think they must be the artist’s decorative vision of what armed camps or fortresses look like. What a splendid reduction of miliary vanity, whether that of the contemporary Europeans who commission the piece, or of Aeneas, or of Virgil and Augustus!

The objects in the vestibule change the meaning of the paintings that were already here, and each object makes the others mean in a new way. Symmetrically across from the platter and so visually and conceptually paired with it, the visitor finds a charming reclining lion in limestone from the second or third century of the so-called common era, its paws crossed like those of a cat, time having worn some of the details in the face away, emphasizing or creating an attentive gentle look, like a pet ready to rise when we are ready to take it for a walk. And here the label writers are completely clear on where their interests lie. This lovely restful animal soulfully gazing at the modern viewer: “speaks to the multinational environment of ancient Egyptian art following Macedonian, Ptolemaic, and then Roman occupations between 30 BCE and 641 CE.” I say this is clear, but the date range is another one of those that might give one pause, that’s 700 years of “occupation,” quite a bit longer than the “occupation” by Europeans of the continent on which I am standing looking at this object, about 300 years longer than the time since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth rock.

What does it mean to describe the relationships between people and territory as occupations? The sublime crisis the timescale sets up for me leads me to other reflections on the brief text. The word “environment” is rich but vague. What is the environment of art? What does “speak to” mean here? Who is speaking? Is anyone really listening? Is it possible that’s this lovely calm ancient lion is not so much speaking to us, as being used as a ventriloquist dummy? More disturbing is the suggestion everywhere present in this vestibule that war and conquest are fundamental sources of culture. I am not saying this is not in fact the case, but I am not sure it’s what the curators really intend to say, though it is the logic of keeping track of the movements of people the way these captions seem to. In any case, it strikes me that perhaps we should stop being amazed that so many regions on earth are not simply inhabited by one people making autochthonous art.

To the right of the lion demonstrating the “intercultural nature of Roman Egypt” hangs the third painting by Tiepolo in the room, The Battle of Vercellae, the work in front of which I shot my stylish Israeli. The wall text here says something that surprises me. It suggests that this work “proclaims the antiquity of an Italian homeland,” a statement immediately followed by the information that Tiepolo’s paintings originally were installed below a ceiling painting by Niccolò Bambini “depicting the glorification of Venice attended by the Delfin family.” It seems quite likely to me that the idea of an Italian homeland was not on the mind of anyone originally involved with these works or their installation. After all, the Risorgimento that led to the unification of Italy for the first time ever as a free-standing more-or-less unified modern state was over a century away. Our indifference to the independence of Venice, which was not part of Italy for a far longer time than it has been included in that relatively young nation, is of a piece with our tendency to naturalize current national borders, which is precisely what the objects on display in this vestibule suggest we might want to stop doing.

Where does Europe begin or end? The answer to this question cannot arrive while we tell ourselves that the nations that make up Europe have a fuller coherence or destiny than the empire that arose from the city Aeneas founded after he defeated Turnus, and which, after all has a far longer and more consequential history than the place we call Italy.

The power of ideas of nationalism that only emerged in the nineteenth century and saw their fullest manifestations in the twentieth remains difficult to gainsay. We don’t take seriously the glorification of Venice even though as a state it lasted far more time than Italy has so far, and was arguably more influential in world history than a unified Italy has yet proved to be. The model of Rome was the model of glory available to many nations. (We might remember here that the roots of the word “Czar” go back to “Caesar.”). It is tempting to suggest that our modern preoccupation with multiculturalism arises as a necessary but inevitably flawed corrective to what is otherwise a pretty exaggerated sense of the centrality of nations in history. We keep pushing the most interesting productions of culture into boxes that are too small for them and then marveling at the fact that they don’t quite fit into the narrow spaces and sharp angles in which we try to contain them. Having built so much on the very modern concept of the nation state based on essentially homogeneous people understood as the fundamental political unit, it appears to be difficult to clear the ground and to realize what a late and impoverished development this structure actually is.

Drawing a picture of the vestibule, as I call it, before moving on, I’m struck by how simple and elegant this overture to the galleries is. This huge stately space displays three paintings, three sculptures, and a lacquered dish. It features two kinds of brief programmatic statements , “Look Again” on one side and “Visualizing Europe.” A plan of the galleries is displayed on the other side of each of those texts. It is elegant and effective this beginning, given the rich notes it sets ringing. It does not offer a false harmony, but nor does it commit itself to simple gestures of resistance to convention, negotiating carefully between evocative challenges that the visitor cannot miss and quiet affirmations of the beauty in the world. Thousands have flowed by me as I have stood in this space, and it is time I join them. I reach for the door and head in.

The great nineteenth-century art critic John Ruskin proposed at one point that the exhibition one sees as a child, and where, as he puts it, one learned one’s scientific or artistic ABCs should never be subject to change. Instead, as new objects entered the museum the institution should be extended, new rooms making space for new material. It is a hyperbolic fantasy that could never be, and that works, as Ruskin well knew, against our culture’s obsession with change. It bears saying that as a rule few people respond well to changes to familiar aesthetic experiences. Brutal polemics erupt when beloved masterpieces are restored, as, when the removal of centuries of grime and candle smoke revealed to the world that Michelangelo’s keynote was not moody and smoky, but vibrantly metallic color. Lately the changes have come not to the objects in collections, but to museums themselves, which have been attempting to respond to an onslaught of criticism over the past several decades, mainly having to do with complicity in histories of oppression, or with sustaining elitist values that shut out those less privileged. In the face of these charges, some of which are not baseless, curators have sometimes been driven to symbolic gestures of outreach that can feel condescending, insincere, and poorly integrated into the projects of the museum, as though beauty and justice, admiration, and fairness were impossible to reconcile, or the only way to experience one value were to shut out the others. While the pressures to change have been felt in museums around the world, the results have seldom been as interesting as what I saw glimmering all around me in the new galleries.

I am used to admiring old museums and thinking about what has led them to be the way they are. I am also used to being crabby about new ideas, assessing and dismissing patronizing half-measures. What was rarer for me was to appreciate a current achievement. I could recognize from my own responses that the changes I was experiencing at the Met’s galleries felt positive. But why? What had the curators done? Could I actually take a moment to appreciate an effort even as I analyzed it?

I decided to undertake a new project that was at once intellectual and emotional: To see what happens if I move slowly and systematically through an ambitious exhibition space. What would I see in the works of art, in the display? My goals were personal to start with, and I did not expect a manuscript to emerge from what I was doing. I set myself a set of small rules or parameters, like my artist friends sometimes do when they are embarking on a new creative initiative.

I was facing a clear set of challenges. My concentration has always been pretty unsteady, but since Covid it had come to feel downright flighty. My impatience, which I guess is a form of anxiety, is habitual and I have felt it growing with age, which is hardly surprising. We have reasons to be in a rush, those of us with less time left. Still, if this trait that I was going to work against was one of longstanding, then I needed to understand its intellectual, as well as its characterological sources. My tendency to overvalue my preconceptions, thinking I already know what it is I am seeing, is certainly one way my intellect justifies its habitual actions, but the kind of actions I allow myself also shape what I can see or recognize, what I can learn. All my rushed visits to museums in the past have modelled how I see the institution even when there is no hurry, other than the big hurry we are all doing our best to ignore. I seem to always be skimming the surface, hoping for something that will stop me—some human interest, some formal achievement, some mood. Like an arrogant individual who has ended up at a party with a social group to which he has made no commitment, I cast my eye over the gathered objects, waiting for someone who makes it seems like it will be worth my while to stop.

Writing, with some rules:

I have mentioned that I was not thinking of publication, but I suspected I would have to do some writing as I went, as a way of slowing myself down, of shaping the memory I was trying to build. One small rule I made myself after the first week was to buy no notebooks for this project. After filling with my responses one Moleskine that had lived in my desk drawer for years, I briefly planned on marking my new beginning with the acquisition of a beautiful new notebook, but then I found an approach that felt more appropriate. Looking into that same drawer, I reflected on the endlessly growing collection of charming small notebooks I have been gathering for years, gifts or souvenirs of events, or of trips long forgotten. They sit in my desk empty, or with one note scribbled on one page, incomprehensible now that its moment has passed. How appropriate for a man trying to make not a new departure, but to find new meaning and forms for his actions of longstanding to declare that the only receptacles I would use for my ideas would be these books that had lived so long with me, unused.

Writing meant that this project was always going to be potentially public, which opened up some questions—does putting pen to paper lead me to think more about the object, or to become too early distracted by what I might have to say about it? I worried about this briefly, but then realized that that was one of the many questions that would remain open about what I was doing until I was done. I entered the project with hopes and questions, but even undertaking it was a small achievement. One artist friend encouraged me with his characteristically sympathetic imagination: “Don’t decide too early what you are doing.” He said, “Play!” Of course, almost everything he does yields beautiful objects for reflection in which he and others might find new opportunities for exploration. Who knows what I will find. But, I guess starting off not knowing, and keeping on not knowing: those are both goals and methods in this project. My hope is to arrive at a closer relationship to art objects and the institution housing them, but also to achieve more calm, or control over myself, to live as though I knew that I don’t always need to improvise and move quickly, as though I truly believed that looking can be enough.

Will I remember more when I look more slowly? But also, what will I recognize after so much—after Covid, after the child I have been caring for has become a young woman, after I have put down the burden of post-Covid, post-child, post-administration. Are there new resources for me to discover in myself and this world of beauty? In order to honor my aspirations, I produce a few rules to structure what I do and prevent my straying into old habits.

1. I will remain in each room for at least an hour. (This rule I violated from time to time, but that eventuality was covered by rule number 8)

2. I will read every label in each room.

3. I will look more than think.

4. I will not judge myself if I start to think.

5. I will take notes so that I remember.

6. Returning to works I have already seen and revising my impressions will be fine, to be expected.

7. I will keep track of days and times as a way to make sure I respect my own process.

8. My task here is to look and think, to look more than think, but above all not to judge myself or others too quickly.

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I suppose what we encountered was what the restaurants call a slow open, because my memory is that we saw almost nobody in the rooms through which we wandered. We were unfocused, and in a hurry, having lingered longer than expected with the sumptuous afterlives of Byzantium in Africa, so we just took in a few rooms, but we what we saw revealed something uncommonly interesting. It was clear even from our quick dip into the space that the curators had made radical changes, had opted for approaches different from what we were used to. The place suggested bold and possibly even admirable thought. Was that an Ingres painting next to a late medieval work? What category of space was I in that held so many portraits? Were the walls painted different colors? Wait, there are beautiful statuettes in this room, alongside the paintings on the walls!

Sporadic unorganized visits to rooms here and there over the following months confirmed that the paintings seemed brighter, the labels sharper, the spaces more pleasant. They also made it clear that something very different from a set of white cubes organized along national and chronological lines was on offer in this space. I made a mental note that this was a change that might be worth further reflection when my mind was clearer.

My motivations, goals, and the methods I followed were all simple. The Fall of 2024 was a period of transition for me. Our beloved daughter had left for university, marking the end of seventeen years of daily responsibilities and pleasure. Her departure coincided with other changes. A large administrative role I had taken on at my department had ended as these things will, with some successes some failures, and much left undone. Looking up from many projects concluding with the usual blend of hope and disappointment, the glimpses I caught of myself in mirrors or computer screens were different from what I remembered: so much more forehead, lines on my face surrounding my well-meaning smile with ironic scare quotes. A hollowness flattened the sound of my laughter in my own ears

It was not just my external appearance that was showing signs of wear, however. After the pandemic, like many people I found my ability to pay attention fading. In the past I had prided myself on my ability to hop easily from thing to thing, from project to project, from conversation to conversation. It turned out, however, that all that ease of motion, depended on a memory that would keep track of things in ways it now seemed unable to do. The idea I was going to get back to, the point of the individual speaking to me, the link between the anecdote I was hearing and what I knew about the person before me: these were no longer present to me as they once had been. It wasn’t so much that I could not keep track moment by moment—though that was starting to emerge as a question—but that the faculty that allowed me to return in recollection to that wide range of experiences was fading. And then, after an exchange, fragments of conversation were detaching from my recollections of the people with whom I had spoken. Memories of a friendly get-together with an old friend, which in the past I would relish in retrospect, quickly became divorced from the topics on which we had touched over coffee or wine. I’d remember where we sat—and our pleasure at seeing each other—but what had we talked about?

I went to see a neurologist who asked me to memorize a few words, then to count backwards by seven and to tell him the words again and to carry out a few other basic assignments. When I finished the test which our President had at that point made famous, his miserable verdict came: “You are within the range of normal,” he said, “but I would have expected more from a professor!”

Only later did I realize that I was coming down with Covid at the time of the test. When I saw the Doctor again, more than a year later—and after I passed the test as a professor should—he told me not only that the Covid could easily have been a factor in my original mediocrity in counting and remembering, but that he had had to cancel a trip to Israel soon after our meeting because he also tested positive. Hanging between us was the near certainty that I had passed the illness on to him, thereby ruining his trip.

He did not say anything directly on the topic of my responsibility, which was just as well. Myself, I felt his cancelled plans was a sweet revenge for the panic in which he had left me after that meeting. “I would have expected more from a professor!” I had spent months after those cruel words memorizing lists of nouns, a more challenging activity than one might expect, practically speaking—first thinking of random words to scribble on a sheet of paper and then testing oneself over and over to see how one is doing. When I told a Doctor friend of longstanding about this experience, he said, “I could have told them you have never been able to count backwards by 7s!” That might be so, but still, I knew my memory was more fragile because I remembered what it had been, much as my hearing is evidently not what it once was though the doctors still consider it within the range of normal.

When the waters recede after a flood, they reveal the state of things we like to think of as more permanent than the waves. Unfortunately, the ebbing waters sometimes reveal that what we thought was solid shares more qualities with the shifting waters than we would like. I reflected on myself as the distractions faded and found that I had always relied on others to focus my time, to remember for me and with me. As with any important developments in our emotional lives, the causes for the sense that I was entering a new stage in life were many: my father, who had been demanding when he was healthy, and an ongoing preoccupation for the many months when he was ill, had died a couple of months before the official outbreak of the pandemic—fortunate in the timing of his demise, as in so much else. I have already mentioned that a couple of years after the period of intense closeness the lockdown had brought us, our daughter left home, pursuing her life without my day-to-day support. And then, my professional projects were not offering the validation from the world I had hoped for when undertaking them.

I needed to find something to structure my time aside from work, especially as a long-scheduled year of research leave loomed. I know how to complete the projects on which I embark, but I also know from observation and from the stories of others, that something close to madness often fills the space an absent child leaves behind. Between the empty nest and the unstructured time of the leave, I was worried.

My official professional plan was clear enough: to complete work on a book on the contemporary situation of the museum, specifically on the relationship between the collapse of modern concepts of progress and the recurrent and irresolvable crises being faced by the institution around the world. I wanted to link the more scholarly debates about restitution and collecting to a phenomenon I had noticed in popular culture, the recurrent representation of collections being destroyed in the movies. I hoped the result of this project might be a new departure for me, something drawing on my scholarship to produce a book that would be readable by more than scholars. I was galvanized by the thought of writing in a new style so as to meet the challenge of making my topic as recognizably urgent for others as it feels to me. Still, experience told me I needed more than a project that would keep me forever at my computer, writing or checking emails to see if I had heard from agents or publishers. So, I decided to pursue two other tasks intended to take me away from my routines, initiatives that would have an inward-directed logic, that would make me, in particular, slow down, pay attention, remember, and learn.

One idea was simple, I would take drawing lessons. After years of looking at art it was time to set myself to the discipline of really knowing how art is actually made by hand. The other idea was more unusual, a small new project that I had been contemplating for some time, and, I guess, preparing for far longer. My plan was systematically and slowly to walk through every room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new European Painting Galleries. These pages are the record of that latter project.

Normally I enter the museum by the quiet side entrance, as it makes me feel in the know, gets me in more quickly, and avoids the confused mass of tourists in the lobby. But today, and for the rest of this project, I go up the central stairs. The place is so much calmer now that summer is over and, in any case, I want to have the full experience of the institution each time. My project will begin at the top the stately stairs that rise up just past the central lobby, so tranquil on this first day. I show my membership card to the guards, drop my bag off in the lockers of the art library and head up.

This first room is more a vestibule, an entryway in front of the doors into the European painting galleries proper, a junction point. Here is my first test. Can I stop at the vestibule? The doors beckons, but I will not cross a threshold yet. My moment of hesitation is rewarded, as it immediately becomes clear that this is a crucial location, that the curators have created in this space, and with small means, a thought-provoking and not unthrilling overture for what is to follow. More soberly, I could call it a programmatic statement, something that suggests to the visitor who stops what is to be anticipated up ahead, how the curators have addressed the pressures inherent in the project of these galleries today.

Europe.

Painting.

Exhibition,

The Museum.

Each one of these terms has been subject to challenges that can feel tiresome to those of us who are not committed to the values shaping the polemics driving recent controversies, but this vestibule allows us a moment to reflect on why we should care about the challenging nature of those terms, about the vibrations each might or might not allow us to feel when they are brought near each other. The pause in this space also allows me to register some surprises I might have missed: not only are there very few works on display in the vestibule, but four of the seven are not paintings at all, and three of them are not what most people would have called European. So, right away the space sets up a conceptual puzzle. How do these works amount to an introduction to the display that is ahead of us?

The two busts in the middle of the space draw the eye as faces will, a Bodhisattva from Pakistan and a Roman matron displayed together, if not quite on a line. The Boddhisattva calls to me immediately, a beguiling piece from the fourth or fifth century, a dark stone, a fragment that announces itself as different, but also the face of a bold mustachioed gentleman. The first thing I notice is the material—identified as schist, a term I associate with the scree that fascinates from a distance when seen on high mountains—is it snow up there or rock?—but that seems so friable and unglamorous when one approaches a summit, the gravel strewn across bare mountains, broken by water and cold, and, close up, merely a slippery obstacle to the hiker. I saw a lot of that kind of stone on a recent trip to the Dolomites, scrambling down hills with a younger friend, looking for some footing as we made our way back to our families. Was it schist? I am not sure. In any case, it is not a glamorous stone, but a common one.

Looked at more closely it becomes quite clear that what the curators have placed before us is not a bust at all. Not a work designed to be simply a torso and head, it is a fragment of a larger piece, probably of a whole body. I am repairing the damage in my mind when I call this a bust. The glamour of conquest written into the text produced by the curators, which identifies the work as a “Bust of a Bodhisattva” without addressing an important mystery—how a statue becomes a bust—suggests that the violence that this object has encountered may be constitutive of what it is.

A wall text has, in the first, instance to ground the viewer in some context, a space and time that will help us locate the object. But, while this descriptive label does provide some clues, I am afraid it does not make me feel particularly grounded.

In 330 BCE Alexander the Great, ruler of a vast empire including ancient Greece, conquered the region in northwest Pakistan then known as Gandhara. The legacy of his armies’ presence there led to a period of rule by Indo-Greek kings and the growth of a distinctive culture evident in this bust. It was made at a time when the naturalism of earlier sculptural traditions gave way to a greater formality as artists strove to depict enlightened beings. The elaborate hairstyle, with topknot and flowing locks, indicates Maitreya, the Buddha of the future.

So, the work was produced in a territory conquered by Alexander the Great in 330 BCE, the curators tell us, but, this bust from the fourth century of the Common (or Christian) era was created seven to eight hundred years after the date of that great military achievement! Evidently, the curators will be seeding the exhibition with answers to our questions that may cause us to pause, that are likely to provoke further reflection—that may cause us to look again, perhaps.

Evidently time is going to play a notable role in this exhibition, along with the topic of conquest. If we tried a similar approach to what I am finding on this label in other geographical areas we might come to some interesting formulations. For example, the equivalent of looking back at the point of Alexander’s conquest when thinking about the culture that formed the statue would be to identify something that happened between 1224 and 1324 as providing an explanation for a work of art created today. I don’t mean to suggest a skepticism I do not feel. Surely the point of whoever wrote this text is that the relationship between the Hellenistic art associated with the long aftermath of Alexander the Great’s invasion and this moving Buddhist fragment is one of long standing, one that calls out for attention for that reason. For a far longer a time than tomatoes, for example, have been known and cultivated in Italy and potatoes in Ireland, a cultural connection was made in this corner of what we may call south Asia that was still bearing fruit.

The economy of wall labels makes them challenging texts to write. Still, it would be painful for the modern political sensibility to truly acquiesce in what is suggested in the text if we fully focused on it, however, or if all the political structures it references were not long-gone. “The legacy of his armies” the text notes about Alexander, “led to a period of rule.” It is a little hard to find one’s bearings here. Is it conquest that is being described here, or culture. What is the “legacy” of an army other than conquest? What counts as a period of rule? I feel I am picking up splinters when all I am trying to do is gently run my hand along the grain of the text. I can’t, after all, caress this beautiful statue. I notice the work was donated to the museum by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller in 1942, the year after Pearl Harbor. A wartime donation. Is ownership of this piece a legacy of armies?

I’ll come back to this topic or set of topics, which are at the heart of the display in the vestibule, but I remind myself to spend time thinking about the bust itself, rather than just with the text. It is a thrilling work, said to represent Maitreya, who is the Buddha of the future—so I guess it makes sense we see him here, after almost two millennia, in a future his makers could never have imagined, breathing an air inconceivable to the first two thousand years of his existence. That’s a cheap paradox, in the sense that it is the condition of almost every object in these galleries I have come to see, to be out of place. In fact, I suppose this return of the Buddha as a friend in the future, which is what the Maitreya is meant to be to us may well be more congenial to the original intention of the work than many such returns.

The face of the Bodhisattva is fascinating. It gives the impression of extraordinary dandified arrogance, confidence, even rulership. It is not self-sacrificing bliss I make out in these lineaments. Tight lips closed in a kind of pout, a fabulous mustache looking like two stylized rivers or clouds—or the elegant tails of marvelously groomed ponies. The heavy-lidded, half-closed eyes, the pursed lips. It all looks like indifference to me, a thrilling sexy kind of indifference, a sexiness is amplified by a body that gives much that the face withholds. Even in its broken state one reacts to the sinuous curve of the belly, its suggestion of a generous relaxed sensibility underpinning the reserve of the face. The promise of pleasure.

Is that the belly-button one sees mid-torso, or a fortuitous bit of damage? At first it seems like the Bodhisattva is wearing a stylized kind of armor (in part because one sees that kind of thing in the paintings around the vestibule, to which I will turn in a moment)—a form-fitting body-shaped cuirass including his sensuous belly and carefully delineated nipples and aureole (where somehow the stone has been made to appear darker than the body around it). But no. Further looking suggests that he must be partially nude, and that an elaborate network of cords carrying what I imagine are emblematic objects are draped around his body. The cords hang nicely across the right breast to frame and highlight its shape. The elaborately arranged material, the revelation and decoration of the body, like the extraordinary coiffeur crowning his head add to the feeling of superb arrogant confidence of the face.

What looks to me like a third eye emerges from the forehead, picking up formally on the circles that indicate his nipples and that belly button, that may or may not be an injury (and what navel isn’t?). Above it, past a serene untroubled forehead the head is crowned with a wavy head of hair suitable for the Apollo Belvedere, and a crescent moon more appropriate for Apollo’s sister, Diana. Later I learn what my confused sense of Asian traditions thought of as an eye is an emblematic whorl of hair typical of the Maitreya type.

I have written so much already and have barely mentioned the damage, but, of course, that is fundamental. The object I am contemplating was never designed to stand alone. It was part of something larger. Its back is flat and undecorated, creating a monumental feeling when viewed from the rear, like a miniature pyramid. The lines carved on to the surface and looking like so many rough channels in a distant landscape are, I imagine, traceable to the original quarrying of the rock, though they conceivably could come from the moment the piece was separated from its original setting (a second quarrying or a first destruction).

The Buddha’s right arm is missing entirely. The largest of his necklaces, if that is what they are, gives the appearance of having been sliced off. Indeed, injury is everywhere, unmissable, once you start to look. The pair of a decoration or earring on his left ear is broken off on the right. His left cheek is pitted with damage that is also present on his neck, like sad scars marring the skin of a burn victim. (Wait: are those small birds hiding behind his ears—peeking out between the distended, stretched out lobes and the cataract of hair? I think so. How lovely—bird song in each ear!) The left arm is less injured from shoulder to elbow, but at that joint the broken stone stares out at the viewer with the reproachful vulnerability of the exposed stump of an amputee. Oddly enough, the injury to the limb feels less alarming than that run of smooth stone that precedes it, with its carefully carved folds of fabric, which in this context seem strangely out of place or anachronistic, like the kind of stylized polish you’d see on the Art Deco sculpture on Rockefeller Center.

The broken off lower left arm draws attention to the injured trunk, where the texture of the stone behind that sinuous belly looks like old wood, porous, friable, the home of termites. I suddenly feel a wave of admiration for this superb man carrying the power of such confident poise for so long, rising out of that broken body like a dazzling sun over a choppy ocean, a bright full moon glimpsed over threatening clouds, lighting up the element that sometimes obscures it.

Arrogance I said? Well, it’s hard won if it’s that. The smallest amount of attention I give this piece presents me with profound change, at the level of form, material, and condition, but it also offers a deep tranquility withal. Speaking of arrogance: what I see and don’t understand tells me also of my own impudent ignorance, of my need to learn about Maitreya, the Buddha of the future. Turning to the portrait of a bust of a woman from Rome dated “circa 193-211,” I discover something I should have already known, but that strikes me as counterintuitive, that she is substantially older than the Bodhisattva. What is certainly clear –and has contributed to my unrealized confusion is the condition of the work. She is an actual bust, her partial nature is intended. Pairing her with him makes him seem, at first view to belong to the same sculptural type she does, but she was designed to be a piece of a person, she was not broken off.

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