What can a non-Christian – or a nonbeliever – see in a work of late-Medieval art? Quite a lot, needless to say. Great art involves more than ideology, dogma or messaging. But the question crossed my mind recently as I traveled from Strasbourg, where I have distant family ties, to Colmar, in southern Alsace, to see what’s widely considered a masterpiece of Western art: the Issenheim Altarpiece, painted ca. 1512-1516 by the workshop of Matthias Grünewald, with the sculptural elements done by Niclaus of Haguenau. The Altarpiece, at the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar, was originally created for a church in Issenheim, some 20 kilometers away.
As a casual art-lover with no training in connoisseurship, I was intrigued by the Altarpiece’s reputation. I’m not magnetically drawn to Christian iconography, but I sometimes get a glimmer of what experts mean when they agree that some work is a “masterpiece.” (Note to self: reread “The Unknown Masterpiece” by Balzac.)
I wasn’t disappointed: the Altarpiece was enthralling. If pressed, I might use terms such as wholeness, formal and chromatic balance, technical precision, or virtuosity (whatever that is); so please don’t press me. Those words are barely adequate; besides, do I really know what I’m talking about?
Maybe words are unnecessary, or inadequate; those statements are problematic too, because to talk about anything (as opposed to experiencing it ourselves) requires words. (I’ll return to this issue in a later post, with an assist from Virginia Woolf.) Words aren’t necessary to experience awe in the presence of another human being’s imagination. But they’re necessary for conversations.
The insufficiency of words, in this case to deal with aesthetic matters, is a reason why art criticism and art scholarship are not exactly a science; but then, science isn’t everything.
Feeling is something, and thinking is something too. We understand art (or almost anything else) partly through the senses and intuition (the senses don’t function on their own without a mind hooked up to them); and partly by using the limited but essential tools of reason. We must reason to break things down into constituent parts, and relate them to other things, without leaving an analytic mess behind on the proverbial floor.
As I pondered the Issenheim Altarpiece, I also wondered how one can separate the greatness of the art from the motivating religious passion and the underlying ideology – complex, rigidly orthodox and theocratic, deeply repressive – that inspired it. And all of it in the name of a religion that could broadly be described as a cult of virginity.
I spent some thirty minutes taking it in and wondering about it, beginning with the obvious: who is here, and what are they doing? (That’s always a good place to start.) The glowing and complex work depicts a morbidly misshapen and discolored body of Christ; his waiting coffin; and the familiar figures around him of his mother Mary, St. Anthony, Mary Magdalen, St. John the Baptist, and St. John the Apostle.
Somewhat to my surprise, the more I looked (and listened to the helpful audio guide) the more I understood, and the more I enjoyed looking at it. At some level, beyond the religious meanings that suffuse the work, it was reaching me. And I was surprised at my surprise. Something mysterious and miraculous was going on.
I know this much: If art doesn’t at least teach us how to look – including how to think critically about what the artist has chosen for us to look at, and how he has chosen for us to look at it– then it does nothing worthwhile. The rest is up to us, and what we bring to the encounter: experiential knowledge, but also the fresh capacity to feel, to wonder, to re-consider.
Artists in the Middle Ages, at first anonymously and later named, strove to maintain the hegemony of the Catholic Church over the popular imagination; and the evidence suggests that they succeeded. It is not an uplifting story for me (although it surely has uplifted many others over the centuries). And yet, there are Renaissance works that transport me despite, or even because of, their religious content: for example, the fresco paintings of Piero della Francesca, or the intoxicating stained-glass windows of Chartres, and of Sainte Chapelle in Paris.
Critical thinkers recognize that religion is central to the world of liberal learning because it’s central to human history: because religious and spiritual traditions and impulses are fundamental to understanding mankind. The role of a university is not to proselytize, or to place religions beyond moral, political, or aesthetic scrutiny: it’s to study them for the stories they tell, the lessons they teach, and how they organize the lives of their followers.
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The Unterlinden includes other later-Medieval works that are arresting on their own terms, and nonreligious in nature, including the “Portrait of a Woman” by Hans Holbein. And Holbein is hardly the only artist who managed to escape the theocratic web.
What fueled the rebirth of secular Western art in the modern era was capitalism, which enabled rich men and monarchs to commission portraits and sculptures celebrating their earthly endeavors. Among my favorites are the technically brilliant and penetrating portraits by the German painter Hans Memmling, and later, the works of the Dutch Golden Age. An aesthetic turning point in my life was the blockbuster 1996-1997 exhibit of nearly all the surviving works of Vermeer.
The evolution of Western art, through and beyond Christianity, is an immense story in itself: a search for themes, subjects, techniques, modes of expression, and ways of exploring the philosophical questions that great art always raises: what are we looking at and why? How are we seeing it differently or in the same way? What does it do for us?
Like the liberal arts and the search for reason, Western art began in earnest in Ancient Greece and Rome, before monotheism laid its heavy and fateful stamp (don’t get me started) on Western society. What I believe distinguishes it from other traditions – and we must study and value them all – is its philosophical and technical complexity and (what may be the same thing): its capacity to evolve in form and function over the centuries from the first Greek sculptors to the great modern and contemporary artists.
That tradition of representation passed through dozens of phases, styles, and political agendas; and no religion outside of Christianity has to the same degree appropriated it for the church’s own uses. That’s not an anti-Christian judgment, or a Western-centric one, but a statement of historical fact. Almost anything that could be called Jewish art, for example, is secular and modern. But it comes out of that same tradition; and the power of that tradition is worth a lifetime of looking and thinking, and a trip to Colmar.