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.

Flying in Winchester Cathedral

"We're going to Winchester today," said Dad yesterday, and he was sightly surprised to see both my brother and me gleefully exclaim "Yippee, Winchester cathedral!" "Where have you heard of it?" he asked. The answer is here - Cathedral, an awesome Crosby, Stills and Nash song. Reading the lyrics attached might help in understanding my text.

Winchester cathedral is an angel with Romanesque wings. Despite their name, though, they don’t look like they’ve much of an intention to take off into the air; unless an atomic bomb were to be dropped in the area, they’re much more likely to end their lives crumbling to the ground – the wings of a fallen angel – than flying up into the air. But the cathedral’s Gothic body, turned ever to the sky, is an altogether different matter. Once upon a time, when fashions turned in a new direction and it was time to execute the angels of ages past, it was a spiky spear thrust into the heart of the old Romanesque church; now, as the wounds of old have healed and this forced marriage of styles was cemented by the inevitable spread of Gothic elements to the old wings, the two architectures are intertwined in an everlasting embrace, each dependent on the other.

No Graham Nash inside. Instead, an unforgettable orchestral rehearsal. Massenet’s Meditations from Thais dedicated to the gentle creamy walls and round arches of the dreamy Romanesque angel. In a miracle of coincidence, a smudge of sunlight splashed onto the church window just as the violin shone on its brightest tone. And the finale of Dvorak’s New World Symphony was for the triumphant gothic arches, blasted into the air by trumpets, entwined by an oboey lattice of decorations. The cathedral’s skeletal frame resounded with the roll of timpani, at times sending shivers down my spine.

Despite frantic scanning of all passed gravestones on the part of my brother (who loves “Cathedral” more than any other CSN song), we never found the tomb with 1799 written on it. It’s no big surprise, as the cathedral is filled to the brim with graves (and of course 1799 might just be in the song because it rhymes with “mine”). Behind the altar, there’s what seems like a whole chapel dedicated to death. A last resting place reaches up to the ceiling, sumptuously decorated, with a sculpture of a decomposing body lying upon it. It does feel somewhat stuffy, slightly uncomfortable, all those people dead in the hope of eternal life; you can almost understand why someone could want to open up the gates of the church and be let out of here. Especially if that someone is high upon the altar.

But as a person who’s not under the influence of any chemicals save those naturally found in the brain, I don’t quite agree with everything Nash sings. I think he might be making the mistake of not distinguishing what Winchester Cathedral looks like from what it stands for. The same mistake the Puritans made when they smashed up the statues that used to occupy the various niches in the walls and when they blasted the central stained glass window into smithereens during the Civil War. These smithereens were later picked up by those who knew better and now form a new, abstract window that represents something more important to me than the religion it originally expressed – a fascinating history, human determination, and finally art.

Winchester cathedral doesn’t have to stand for religion. It can represent the same things as Dvorak’s ninth symphony or Massenet’s Meditation; the same things as Crosby, Stills and Nash’s songs. Sure, the air here hangs in delusion, is full of the memory of starving people robbed of their money for an offering to a God who, even if he existed, would probably rather simply see them well-fed; a God used to justify battles and murders and countless other abominations. You can never fully separate a thing from what it represents, but what creative act was ever undertaken without some delusion underlying it? The delusion of God, the delusion that drugs give you some magical grasp of the human condition and that Winchester cathedral is not the place, the delusion that posting an article on the internet makes it any more necessary to create it than if it were intended for the bottom of a drawer.