Sublime STate

The iridescent glow of burning darkness, burning worlds, burning canvas. My heart skips a beat, skips up and down with startled joy, jumps up to my throat. Too dramatic, too show-offish, too bright, too huge. Love it!

I take in the whole room. Paintings upon paintings, too huge, too dramatic, too many. I find myself moving backwards and forwards in front of each work, sometimes ending up with my back leaning against the opposite wall (and still I’m too close to see it all), sometimes almost touching the little details which give little hint of (or maybe: “a little hint to...”) the big picture.

Entitled “Sublime”, the room itself is such a sublime landscape, exaggeratingly impressive, huge, vulgarly awe-inspiring.

The burning darkness is fluorescently orange; I do wonder how one can squeeze such a color out of oil paints. Mountains scarred with painstaking detail roll and shudder and collapse, stand on edges at dizzyingly impossible angles and hover in a perpetual suggestion of movement. A hair-thin lightning bolt of infinitely white paint points the eye to the bottomless pit of eternal damnation, pitch black and falling out of the painting, somewhere below. The little people that fall with it are barely noticeable – this is more of a metaphorical abstraction of terror than a vision of real human suffering. A pleasurable terror – at least for the viewer – as a panel in the room describes the sublime. Apparently, though, this is all in accordance with the vision from the Apocalypse – where mountains were moved from their positions and humongous fires danced with orange too bright, too bright.

Such luminous silver! A drop of bloody sun drowns in the quietly roaring sea (for the night and the sea are quiet even in their roar; and a painting is quieter still, despite its eternal roar of light and shadow). Fog pours down from the sky in perpendicular torrents that slice the eerie moon in half. Like in The Great Day of His Wrath, the figures are only secondary to the scenery. But here they warrant a little more compassion on my part. The painting is entitled The Deluge, and the name refers to the biblical flood of Noah and the dove. Yes, Noah and the dove – such is the iconography I am used to. Childish animals lined up all in a row, pairs of giraffes and lions painted by people who had never seen any. Or rainbows, white wings and beaks of olive branches. What one forgets is that the flood allegedly killed all save Noah’s family. A story of hope and a compassionate God, indeed! Danby’s work, with all its pomp and glory, stays truer to the story.

Three-meter tall painted cliffs are slightly too much... Lost in the mist of light reflected off oil paint, hung another half a meter above your head, James Ward’s Gordale Scar will always be more impressive than beautiful. I like the geometric patterns of the painted rocks and the minuscule, twenty-centimeter cows you can actually come up to and comprehend.

Some of the works are of rather smaller format. Take John Brett’s Glacier of Rosenlaui. Just a landscape. No deluge, no last judgment, no battle. Not even much of a mountain range, only some snow and pebbles. But the little pebbles bore themselves into my insides with all the drama of the last judgment. Nothing is ever that realistic. Pebbles blur before your eyes, be it in fog or in bright sunlight; and if the pebbles don’t blur, the snow behind them does. But these pebbles, this snow – they just are. Oh yes, there is the sublime in the pre-Raphaelites’ hyperrealism – in the monumentality of a pebble and a blade of grass.

I bend my fingers in all directions and am truly afraid I shall break them. John Everett Millais’s Dew-Drenched Furze manages to be misty and clear at once, red and green, calming and finger-breaking.

I had never really appreciated Dante Gabriel Rosetti that much. Millais was more to my taste, with his crisply cut flower buds and blades of grass, and Rosetti’s crayon-colored odes to Christianity seemed overrated by comparison. His Beata Beatrix was in my view no exception. Yes, a pretty woman, but not much more, really. That just goes to show that reproductions and originals are two different things – for this Beatrix was something much more than a pretty woman. Drenched in sunlight squeezed into a shimmering halo by an otherwise commonplace bridge behind her head, flanked by two figures of an intense mysteriousness, her face seemed to reflect just the sublime feelings I had been experiencing here. Which isn’t exactly a good thing, as the sublime vision she was experiencing was the vision of her own imminent death.

Yes, it’s all cheap pomp and meaningless drama. No, wait, it isn’t. It’s the sublime beauty of a mountain range, a storm at sea, a sunset. The beauty’s there, no matter how kitsch repetition has made it. And how glad I am to be child enough to be moved by it!

Triptych

From Sunday's excursion to London.

The marbles in Westminster cathedral form a dizzyingly dazzling quilt of inter-hue relations. Pink, green, blue and gold, its Byzantine extravagance is a far cry from the typical English Gothic, and how it stuns! Westminster is the largest catholic church in London, but it’s not its size that impresses. The nave – the widest in any place of worship in England – seems more like the waiting room in a train station than a monument to God. This may be due to its unfinished state – above a certain height, the marbles give way to a dark, crude stone. As if the message of the church were that paradise is on Earth, not above our heads and tombstones. A very convincing message, if not for the ray of light that, right before our exit, embraces the rough materialness of the stone suspended somewhere up there, above our heads.

But it’s not Westminster cathedral we came to London for. It’s for the National Gallery, for a journey through the history of beauty.

The thirteenth to fifteenth century paintings are exquisite. It’s that period that’s so very often underestimated – as if art had emerged completely formed with Leonardo and Raphael. I’ve only really discovered it through the pre-Raphaelites, and to be honest this discovery slightly undermines my love of this nineteenth century style. For it seems that the pre-Raphaelites did not add much to what people had painted like in the fifteenth century – they just revived and slightly modernized it. And the fact that it can be so easily modernized makes fifteenth century art astonishing.

Nonetheless, one does get tired. If I closed my eyes at the end of this section, I’d probably see rows of hyper-realistic Virgins clad in pointlessly, dizzyingly bright gowns, holding pudgy, naked baby sons who stare out into space vacantly...

The Madonna with the Iris – workshop of Albrecht Dürer

This one strikes you from the moment you set eyes on it. The intense crimson of the gown, along with the hyper-realism of the surroundings – of course that’s what draws your attention to it. But there’s more to it – the Virgin’s face, roundish and unholy, crowned in piggish-blonde hair, seems to be exclaiming, with the air of a lady of high standing: “Oh look, it’s a child, how cute!”. She might soon return to her partying and give the child back to its nanny. But the sparkles of gold upon her hair!...

They force me to reconsider my hasty conclusion. “Oh look, it’s a child” – is not her expression the one of someone who just looked at a loved one as if they had just seen something completely new, to whom it seems for a moment that they understand, they know? The expression of someone who loves. In the unholy, vain way that is the only way we can truly love. “Look, this is my child.”

As for the child itself – at first, he strikes me as impossibly stiff and unnatural, in that curled-up way of his. But then look at the way he’s clutching his mother’s arm with his feet, the way he’s holding her wrist with the palm of his tiny hand. His whole body is tense, yes – it is tense because he is completely taken up with his sucking, he is one great gulp of milk and life.

Then there’s the hyper-realism of the surroundings. Each blade of grass makes your insides somersault. And the simplicity of the background view, the one line of the horizon cutting the air and sea with a sharp calmness. And the color, the subtlety of the color!

Unnatural at first, impossibly natural second, finally as unnatural as only life can be – yes, there’s always room in the world for another well-done Madonna.

Unfaithfulness – Paolo Veronese

The diagonal of her back juts out of the painting and into your face. She’s showing us her backside, and I can’t help but laugh.

It’s the nicest of the four “allegories of love” exhibited in this room (unfaithfulness? the nicest?) – but they’re all extremely nice. A lot of it undoubtedly has to do with the color, the same subtlety as in “The Madonna with the Iris”. Indeed, our unfaithful Venus is uncannily similar to the Madonna – she’s even got the same hue of hair. Perhaps this is the “partying” for which she leaves her child to her nanny?

She’s handing a love letter to a pink-clad and rather characterless dandy, while her lovestruck husband (?), dressed in pretty orange, looks on with sad – and intelligent – puppy eyes. He is softly holding one of her hands as the dandy gluttonously snatches the letter from the other one. The husband seems calm (perhaps resigned, perhaps still naively trustful, maybe gently reproachful), but for the odd perspective from which we see his foot; it seems to jerk in pain involuntarily, as if to kick the hated rival. The cupids stare on in disgust.

A Woman Bathing in a Stream – Rembrandt

White, coarse, thick – the paint thrown onto the canvas with a frenzied palette knife, the gown, the gown! The nearby darkness billows vaporously with abstract golds, there’s a momentousness somewhere in the air. There she stands, soft and blurry under the coarse cloth, completely preoccupied with the cold water she has just entered. A film paused for a second, there is an immense stillness in the way she is about to lift the gown over her thighs. There is such intimacy here, such quiet and simplicity. “The picture appears unfinished (...), but it was clearly finished to Rembrandt's satisfaction since he signed and dated it,” reads the information plate below the painting. Unfinished? But “finishing” would have beat all the beauty out of this masterpiece! There is nothing more or less in the painting than what needs to be there.

After hundreds upon hundreds of gaily colored gowns, carefully outlined hyper-realism, and overpopulated heroic dramatisms, Rembrandt quietly puts a coarse, wet cloth over your eyes and filters gentle sunlight through it.

Yes, if paradise is anywhere, it is on Earth. But it is not in the marbles of our earthly walls, it is in the rough stones of our ceilings and the stripes of light that slice through them.

Whoa, that was a swiping generalization. Hurray to Rubens and Vivaldi, obviously you guys are just as wonderful as Rembrandt and Bach.