With Great Art The World Simply Melts Away
Vasari wrote that “after seeing Michelangelo’s ‘David,’ no one need wish to look at any other sculpture or the work of any other artist.”
At the Galleria dell’Academia in Florence, my wife, Maria, and I spent nearly an hour in front of David, trying to absorb its sheer dimension, impeccable form, and gravitas.
When one looks at great art and comes under its influence, the world simply melts away, and the mind becomes fully engaged in trying to discover the means and temperament by which a stone was chipped away to reach such perfection and beauty.
In looking at David, we forget our age and the length of the cosmos. Art is long, but life is short.
At the gallery, I struck up a conversation with a woman who was on an extended tour of Italy with her daughter.
“How lucky are the Italians that they have all these great works of art in their backyard,” the mother said.
“I envy them,” I responded. “On any given day, at any given time, they can go to the Piazza della Signoria, sit on the steps of the Loggia, and watch the world go by in the company of Cellini’s Perseus.”
The daughter interposed a comment here: “David once stood in the Piazza, open to the public. I just can’t imagine what that must have been like.” She went on to tell me that Cellini worked ten years on the bronze statue of Perseus.
“Your daughter knows a lot about art,” I said.
Before the mother could respond, the daughter said, “I am a big Caravaggio fan. I can’t wait for us to get to Rome. Do you know, there are two Caravaggio masterpieces in the Santa Maria del Popolo, free to the public. How cool is that?”
Maria and I had just come from Rome, and being an admirer of Caravaggio’s works myself, I said, “You must make a point of visiting San Luigi dei Francesi then, for it has three of his superlative paintings.”
The aim of a good education is to develop sensibilities and appetites that seek out all that is grand in our midst.
I was impressed not only by the daughter’s ambit of knowledge, but by her ebullience and enthusiasm for the rainbow of delights that was in her proximity.
“What do you like best about Florence?” I asked.
“Gelato,” she said, slipping into childhood’s charm.
When I was teaching, I was often dismayed when funds for music and fine arts were routinely cut to balance out budgets. The rationale was a simple one: accountability subjects needed to be preserved, and those in the non-testable category could take the ax.
This is ironical, for when superintendents and school-board members go to, say, New York City, a visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Broadway musical would be high on their agenda.
Marcel Proust’s words in response to one of Chardin’s paintings come to mind: “I never realized how much beauty lay around me in my parent’s house, in the half-cleared table, in the corner of a tablecloth left awry, in the knife beside the empty oyster shell.”
It is precisely for this reason that fine arts and music are important to education. They set us on a course of discovery by conditioning our senses to pay attention to all the little things that routinely pass us by.
Jumping from a canvas, or emanating from a flute, a new world opens up in which the whisper of a blade of grass, a flutter of wings, or the symphony of a mockingbird from the apex of a pine announces an exuberance, an ecstasy.
