Hildegarde

Well, not exactly.

The book I’m working my way through may be a slog, but it’s in the same general area as the books I’ve been reading most of the summer, and all of those book center around painting.

Don’t ask me why.  I’ve always liked looking at certain kinds of painting, and at Vassar I took one of those introduction to art history courses that lasts a year and makes you look at forty million slides and identify them.

For whatever reason, I never could quite get interesting in painting the way I was interesting in fiction and poetry.  And it’s not entirely because of the narrative aspects of writing, either. 

Medieval painting is a narrative form.  Its purpose is nearly always to tell a story, and specifically to tell a Christian story.  The elaborate formalism of Byzantine icons–which are still being painted, today, the way they were in the twelfth century; there are actually training schools for people wanting to be icon painters that teach them to do this–

Anyway, that formalism is all in aid of story, of making sure that you get the Christian story right.   The icon of a saint will include (around the central figure of the head) symbols of the saint’s life and the aspects of Christian worship with which he was most identified.

But narrative or no narrative, painting just didn’t get my attention the way writing did.   Maybe that was just a reflection of the fact that I can write (at least a little), but I can’t paint worth a damn.  I was an adult when I learned to color consistently within lines, and once, in a high school sophomore year biology class, a nun name Sister Jacob let me use the outline of a frog body to draw the internal organs in, because MY frog body was…a tree.

Okay, I have no talent at that sort of thing.

I’m also aware that I don’t so much have taste in painting as a mishmash of enthusiams that aren’t really anchored to any standard, even an individual, personal one.

I’ve posted links to some of the paintings I love on this blog.  They tend to run to the Renaissance with an emphasis in hyperrealism and lots of symbolic bits and pieces, as if I were looking for the visual equivalent of crossword puzzles.

And painting has, pretty much, fallen out of favor in the world today.  The people of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance lived with their art.  It was on the walls of their churches and their public buildings and their homes, often in such profusion it would give any modern person a headache. 

Art was not “Art,” but a natural part of life.  There were no museums, not only because there was no use for them–the stuff was everywhere–but because it wouldn’t occur to anybody to think of art as anything special and set-aside. 

The fourteenth century Sienese and the fifteenth century Florentines weren’t interested in bringing culture to the masses, or even to each other.  They bought painting the way they bought furniture–in fact, exactly the way they bought furniture.  If you wanted a chair, you went to a chairmaker. If you wanted a painting, you went to an artist’s workshop.  The master painter would do the central figure, his workers would do the rest, and the whole thing would have the emotional and intellectual force of any other kind of trade.

You first start to get artists with a capital A in the Renaissance, and then you only get them in very individual instances–and, possibly, simply because Michaelangelo was both a great artist and something of a nutcase. 

That’s the beginning, though, of thinking of artists as something special with special emotions and qualities, different from people than you and me. 

But you don’t get that full blown, and you don’t get the idea of Art as something separate and distinct, something bigger and greater than the rest of us, until the Romantic movement.  And now we’re talking the nineteenth century.

In a way, you only get the idea of art as A after painters start doing less well at painting.  There are isolated pockets of movements that produce really beautiful things–the Impressionists, for instance–but about the same time you get the idea of Art as something that belongs in a museum and the artists as the exalted connection to the True Meaning of the Universe, you also get all not only the different kinds of abstractions but “found art” and what’s his name’s urinal. 

And, at the same time, you get the idea of Art–not only painting, but also music and poetry–as completely divorced from everything else that is.  We don’t live with art any more. We go to visit it in museums, where it has nothing like the same effect it had when it was sitting in somebody’s ballroom, or up on the walls of a church where people went to learn the particulars of their religion.

We also have C.P. Snow’s “two cultures,” so that there are the Sciences and mathematics over here, and the arts over there, and the two things are thought to be entirely opposed to each other.  We think that one kind of mind can’t do both.

And yet sitting over on the loveseat in the living room right under this book I’m slogging through is another book, a very small thin book, called On Painting, by Leon Battista Alberti.

Alberti was a Renaissance artist and a writer on the arts.  He is often credited with having invented the profession of architect.  Before Alberti, there were builders, period.  The idea of somebody whose job was to design the building and give the designs to workmen to execute was alien to the Middle Ages.

Which may explain how we ended up with flying buttresses.

But Alberti’s little book on painting in dotted with…geometrical diagrams. 

Not only does Alberti not think of art as entirely separate from, and different than, the sciences–he thinks of it as largely a form of applied mathematics. 

And maybe Renaissance men were Renaissance men not because there was less to know then, or something, but because they expected all branches of knowledge to be connected at a very fundamental level, and went looking for that, instead of for signs that those other people there were space aliens.

Okay.  And it’s only Saturday.

I’m usually not this incoherent until Sunday.