A Moment of Contemplation in the Kunsthistoriches Museum

One of the wonderful things about being so familiar with a great number of paintings, as I am, is that meeting them face to face in a gallery is like meeting an old friend, someone you know through and through. Not being very familiar with the collection at the Kunsthistoriches I was surprised to see so many familiar faces: Rembrandt, Jane Seymour (the ill fated wife of Henry the VIII not Dr. Quinn), Augustus, and, unfortunately, Rubens' fleshy faces of which there are a seemingly endless supply.

Sometimes when I see a painting I have studied it is exactly the way I thought it would look. The size, the colours, the dynamism, all of it was well transferred to whatever slide/textbook I had memorized it from. When I stand in front of those works I run my mind back through all the facts and figures I bothered to learn and compare them to the real thing. As pleasurable as that is (I know I'm a HUGE nerd), it is a wholly academic experience and most of my personal, or emotional response is caught up in a scholarly evaluation of its merits or failures.

Then there are those paintings that are so much better in life than I ever could have hoped for. These are the works that get my full bodily and emotional response. When I say "bodily" I mean it in the sense that a great painting will appeal to all of your senses through the medium of sight. It isn't as if you are transported into the painting, or anything hokey like that, but the desire to smell, touch, taste, and hear the subject matter of the painting can become very acute. In that way your whole body is wakened and open to a myriad of interpretations or observations. It's very exciting.

My emotional response is harder to explain. Why am I brought to tears before some of my favourite paintings? Obviously there are mitigating factors for each. When I saw Caravaggio's Christ Crowned with Thorns (fourth from the top) it was Christ's bowed head, his hair hanging long behind his shoulder, oddly feminine as Caravaggio often makes his Christs, yet powerfully masculine at the same time that made me catch my breath. Maybe even more than that was the guard's sleeve (which you can't see in this crummy slide), the perfect shadowed folds of cloth made me tear at the thought of Caravaggio, an untrained artist, being able to capture something so perfectly.

In Correggio's Jupiter and Io (third from the top) it is Jupiter's hand, masked in grey cloud, enfolding itself around Io's back, her head thrown back, breath held as Jupiter's face emerging from the cloud bends to kiss her. How would it feel to be kissed by a cloud?

In Vermeer's The Artist's Studio (second from the top) it is his perfect light, which enlivens everything it touches - all of the different materials and textures in the painted room. I particularly love how it touches the figure of the artist himself on the white parts of his shirt and socks.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Hunter's in the Snow (top) isn't a painting that would ever make me cry, it simply fascinates me. I looked at for the longest time of any painting in the museum. I love so particularly the strong curving musculature of the men's legs, the curly tails of the dogs, and the roaring fire behind them. I have always felt like it was an illustration to a story I loved, but not any one in particular. I guess for me it is the perfect illustration of folklore, or folktales in its archetypal rendering of the crude faceless, yet familiar characters.

But now I am brought back to my original question. Why is my admiration so emotional instead of simply appreciative of the artists' achievements? All the paintings I like, though from a variety of geographic locations and eras, are figural and rendered with a realist eye for detail. That is not to say that they are a bland reproduction of what we could see everyday, that is the source of their magic, they show us something else. I think what I like so much about these paintings is their realism celebrates us, human beings, and our real, material achievements, indeed a painting itself is that very thing. But, at the same time, what is depicts isn't real, it's an artist's interpretation of our tangibile world, and so it also represents the beauty of the human mind. I think that is where the beauty lies for me: contemplating something that is so real looking, and yet so intangible. I couldn't even try to make it real. Perhaps that is why there are so many recorded fantasies about art coming to life, it is hard to reduce a painting to just canvas and paint.

Oh I don't know. I don't think I really answered my question properly! I'll keep thinking about it, after all I have a lot of time on my hands.