Michael Pearce

Have you ever stood in front of a painting that was so beautiful that you wanted to cry, or felt a moment of unity with an image that seemed to speak to your heart? That paintings are capable of this kind of experience is an extraordinary truth; they can move us so powerfully and inspire such strong emotional connection to the work. “Looking” at a painting doesn’t describe this kind of empathic experience – it’s too shallow a word – perhaps “experiencing” would describe it better?

I’ve been thinking about my first experience of Lippi’s Madonna and Child with Two Angels at the Uffizi, which took place last week while on a short trip to Florence. Having waited with a patient line of patient fellow tourists for an hour, all of us on our own pilgrimages to the cultural offerings of old Europe (Michelangelo’s David, check; Uffizi, check; Louvre, check; Eiffel tower, check…) and the necessary exploration of the not particularly exciting collection of Roman sculptures that fills the halls of the old building I found myself among the collection of gilded religious paintings from the fifteenth century. I appreciate the craftsmanship and the impressively lavish decoration of icon paintings, but seldom feel any warmth of personality emerging from the works, either from the people depicted or of the painter who made them. Following the press of people on their way to find the Botticelli masterpieces (Primavera, check; Birth of Venus, check) I found it difficult to focus on individual works, but this painting was different; now I stood among a small cluster of fellow devotees, my fingers lightly touching the metal guard rail while a silly grin ran across my face. I remember feeling warm, and feeling a sense of solitude – although there were many other people in the same gallery, the sounds of conversation and bustle about me seemed to fall away, while the painting almost glowed with an inner light.

I love the impossible grace of her hands and the simplicity of her face. The colour choices are simple but beautifully balanced, the drawing is delicately composed and rendered, with lovely attention to the expression on the children’s faces. While the fabric is full, the veil is so wispy that it feels as if it might blow away at any moment. To me this is a superb piece of work and I think it’s absolutely beautiful; I want to paint like this, with that same quality of design and delicacy, capturing peace and beauty in a painting.

This brings me to the “problem” of experiencing transcendent beauty. Although right now I find this painting thoroughly fulfilling I’m absolutely sure that many other people do not have the same experience when they stand before it, and accept that many people will find it completely boring, superficial, and irrelevant; to them it’s representative of a long-gone era whose religious ideas have no relevance to the post-modern age. To them this painting is a flat, sentimental bauble. How can this painting be so beautiful to me, but so completely not compelling to many hundreds of my fellow tourists who walked straight past it with no interest at all in its charms?

Because our individual reactions to any work of art are clearly not universal, beauty can’t possibly be entirely a quality of the work of art; it’s also experienced through our own individual conceptual framework that recognizes stuff that we like and appreciates when a thing is outstanding within that group of stuff. Lippi’s painting is a subtly distinct departure from the mass of icon paintings around it because it shows the mischievous character of the children with Mary; because she has a face and hands that are more slender than those in the paintings that surround her; because the figures “break the frame” in an unusual departure from other icons and because she’s painted in a slightly more linear style which makes her feel more modern (think about graphic novels). Even the most pragmatic viewer must agree that this is an unusual piece of work that’s been crafted particularly well, in a way that stands out from the crowd of other more generic icons, although they might not necessarily find it beautiful.

The aesthetic philosopher Adorno said that for art to be beautiful (which I interpret as: to have a transcendent impact) it has to both resonate with the viewer’s own experience and desire (I wish to paint images that have the same impact on other people, to paint tall slender women, to master technique) and it must be outstanding within the group of its peers (it must differ slightly in form and content, design, colour, pattern etc, while broadly remaining within the conceptual framework of the group). Because the Lippi Madonna does both of these things for me, I can be overwhelmed by its beauty, captivated by its elegance and transported away from the everyday, even if only for a short time.

Transcendent Beauty? Check.

In Arles, a pretty town on the Rhone deep in the South of France, there stands a magnificent oval arena built by the Romans for the entertainment of the soldiers and veterans who colonized the town two thousand one hundred and fifty years ago. It’s still in excellent condition after so much time, and it’s easy to imagine gladiatorial combats, bloody contests between men and wild animals, and spectacular theatrical displays taking place on its central floor, echoing with the voices of thousands of spectators cheering and jeering their favorites. Even now the ancient space sees blood spilled when traditional “corrida” bullfights are carried out in very much the same way that the Roman contests took place on the sand of the arena.

Arles is also famous for a very different kind of blood-letting incident: the severing of Van Gogh’s ear. Vincent lived here for a year and three months, doubtless walking past the old stones of the arena as he worked on the three hundred or so paintings that he made while a resident (a little less than one a day). His brother Theo sent him money for the large quantity of paint that he got through and helped him with the rent, for which Vincent felt suitably guilty. Theo thought his brother was a serious force in the history of painting, but Vincent’s neighbors thought he was completely nuts and signed a petition to have him committed, presumably gathering signatures pretty quickly after the famous incident when Vincent is said to have cut off his own left ear and handed it to his favorite prostitute after a fight with his fellow artist friend Paul Gaugin. Fairly sensibly she turned his grisly gift over to the police and Vincent was sent to the lunatic asylum not far down the road in Saint-Remy, where he quickly started painting again, whipping out dozens more canvases and storing them in the second of his two private rooms in the peaceful buildings of a former cloister set among extensive walled gardens and olive groves.

Vincent has become an iconic character, epitomizing the stereotype of the starving artist. He’s wildly popular, and his tragic story makes criticizing him feel a bit like kicking a puppy, so I’m interested in why we focus so much on this painter as a major artist, with the evidence of a completely disastrous track record of commercial failure in his lifetime and the lack of any significant movement of painters following him after his death. He’s a terrible role model for young artists!

Vincent’s rock star personality is what leads us into his body of work, which in itself is not terribly important in the history of art; again – he left no school behind him; he had no atelier workshop full of industrious apprentices to perpetuate his legacy, left no model of financial success to encourage followers that his was a path worth taking.

A large part of Vincent’s post-mortem success is because of the narrative of the truly deep and meaningful relationship he shared with his eternally patient brother via the French postal service. Their letters document a tragic but romantic tale, a true bromance, with enough emotional content to rival the pathos of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Like the Mona Lisa, which has become so iconic that it’s almost impossible to “read” as a portrait of a renaissance lady, Van Gogh’s tragedy informs his paintings so powerfully that it’s impossible to look at them without the background narrative murmering away in our subconscious mind. He’s a cult personality; his paintings are artefacts of his story. His most popular paintings are those brightly coloured images of the brasserie in Arles, the garden of the asylum, his postman friend, or his bedroom; images that allow us to place Vincent’s character in the location and imagine his life within it.

This is a different kind of narrative to that which we find in paintings which draw us into their image by capturing one moment of an event, allowing us to feel like a spectator at the scene and wonder what’s going to happen, or what took place before this moment. In these works the art informs the story; this is a device used by countless artists to draw an audience into their work. Vincent’s art works the other way around: his story informs his art, which is wildly popular because of it, although in terms of art history it is completely stagnant. Our empathy for him makes us participants in the narrative expressed in the pictures. Vincent didn’t like painting dramatic monuments like the amphitheatre, or the Roman triumphal arch that stands literally down the lane from the asylum – he didn’t need to, because the story of his difficult struggle through life was as dramatic and pathos-drenched as the spectacle of the arena.

Vincent’s paintings belong in their artistic backwater, but many of us delight in a good romance and fall in love with the tale of Vincent and Theo, and that’s why criticizing his paintings feels like kicking puppies.