By Darren Panicali
When I walked into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about what I would be encountering that evening. I’ve always conceived painted visual art as one of those many things in life that you just appreciate without trying to analyze more deeply into it. But I knew that’s exactly what we had planned for our visit. I figured that we were just going to listen to someone go on and on about something that was really just completely up to interpretation and therefore subjectively presented as if objective – something I’m really not fond of. Now, granted, going to a museum usually isn’t particularly likely to change your perception of things (at least not for me), but when I started to listen to the gallery talk, I noticed that there were ideas – refreshing ideas that helped to give me another set of eyes for interpretation – that I had never previously considered: certain seemingly objective ways to approach painted art. And that was actually very intriguing.
I believe everyone in this world has a bias when they speak, whether they are aware of it or not, but while the gallery speaker did sometimes speak as if partial to the art and her own feelings about it, I found that it was really easy to empathize with what she was saying and view the things she said as if they were objective – which is a big deal for me.
The speaker would often describe the paintings in terms of color. Color can be a symbol of status (among other things), but I was more interested in the “innate” ways it was used (i.e., the ways one could interpret the painting without prior knowledge of symbolism). One way this was done with color was through coloration of people in similar and different ways to show how they were connected – which leads me to my favorite painting on display:
Courtesy of www.metmuseum.org
This is Hendrick ter Brugghen’s The Crucifixion with the Virgin and St. John. Beyond the feelings of chilling, sheer horror and despair, what influenced me greatly about this painting was the coloration of the skin of Mary and Jesus in the same pale shade, with a rosy, life-filled St. John to contrast. Before listening to the gallery talk, I would have just thought it was a horribly sad and depressing painting of the Crucifixion (not to say that it wasn’t so even after), but I could tell there was more to it after listening. The paleness of their skin was indicative of death for me: His physical death was inextricably related to her emotional death in the form of intense grief and suffering – the death of her happiness in that moment. This connection was only made possible because the two were colored in the same way, as if to articulate that the death of Jesus was inevitably also the death of Mary, a mother who witnessed her child being publicly mocked and murdered in innocence. Also, because St. John looked lively with his relatively pink shade, the concept of the traumatic impact on Mary as a mother and not just as friend was strengthened immensely for me. The connection is so bittersweet – beautiful yet excruciating.
Although color use was my favorite, the speaker went on to also “seemingly objectively” describe the paintings in other ways, mentioning the creation of depth by placing backgrounds far away as if the subject was nearer to the viewer or using perspective to make things relatively jut out at viewers, the shift of “the realm of ideas to the realm of experience” by changing the face position from profile to head-on, and the sense of motion (particularly in Baroque paintings) because the subjects look as though they are in mid-action rather than posing. I’ve never really thought critically about these things, but since she had us do that, I was able to open my eyes to different ways of viewing art, and it helped me to appreciate them as more complex than “just paintings.” Sure, I still love looking at a good painting without critical thinking because it’s still delightfully delicious food for the eyes, but now the taste of the experience has a little more flavor, and, well, I’m grateful for that.
