This all sounds impressive because it accords with the idea that the meaning of an artwork should be complicated, and that grasping it must reflect a great deal of information that is not widely known. But what if the meaning of a work is really quite straightforward, and if the important task is to extend it into our lives, which is where the message belongs?
This book suggests a different approach. Scholars should study how to make the spirit of the works they admire more connected to the psychological frailties of their audiences. They should analyse how art could help with a broken heart, set the sorrows of the individual into perspective, help us find consolation in nature, educate our sensitivity to the needs of others, keep the right ideals of a successful life at the front of our minds and help us to understand ourselves. In this light, scholars would approach the Sistine ceiling as they should approach all works
Such images make us nervous because u>e feel we are supposed to know a lot about them before we can enjoy them.
of art, with the humane question, 'What lessons are you trying to teach us that will help us with our lives?' Everything other than this, however intelligent and dense with information it might be, would simply be preparation or distraction.
47. Michcbngclo, The Creation of Adam. £.1511
Large museums and public galleries are at the centre of our experience of art today. They are the places where we're most likely to spend time engaging with individual works. They shape our expectations and guide our ideas of what we are supposed to do and how we arc supposed to behave around art. The great museums - the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum, the Tate, the Getty Center - are amongst the most authoritative, trusted and alluring places in the world.
However, these institutions present a very complicated and muddled set of messages about art, which often undermines its potential. The problems start with the captions. Most people instinctively edge towards the caption as they approach a work of art and although this is occasionally frowned upon by sophisticates, it makes sense. A caption seeks to tell you what you need to know in order to engage fruitfully with a work of art. It makes the promise, 'Read me and you will get more out of the work I accompany.'
At present, most captions focus on providing stylistic or historical information. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a depiction of Christ appearing to Mary by Juan de Flandes carries the following caption (48):
Workshops routinely produced copies of paintings that were prized for their spiritual powers or for the status of their authorship and/or ownership. Such factors prompted Queen Isabella of Castile to order a copy of Rogier van der Weyden's Mary A/tarpiece (Gemaldegalerie, Berlin), which was given by her father. King Juan II. to the Carthusian monastery of Miraflores. near Burgos. Spain, in 1445. This picture is the right panel of Isabella's triptych and can tentatively be attributed to her court artist Juan de Flandes on the basis of documentary and technical evidence. The center and left panels remain at Isabella's burial site, the Capilla Real. Granada, where she bequeathed the triptych upon her death in 1504.
How Should Art be Displayed?
At the very moment when it has the best opportunity to guide the response of the beholder, the gallery gives priority to certain facts: by whom an earlier version of this image was owned, the location of a monastery and when Queen Isabella died. The caption imagines the typical visitor approaching the work with some complex questions in mind, such as 'Didn't I see something rather like this in the Gemaldegalerie in Berlin?' 'Was Queen Isabella of Castile's father King Juan the I or the II?' or 'Are you sure this isn't a Rogier van der Weyden?' To these questions, it provides the perfect 200-word answer. That the image was regarded (500 years ago) as having 'spiritual power' is mentioned only to help explain how such a prestigious museum comes to be displaying a copy and not an absolutely original work. An alternative label might read like this:
In search of a good labelf
48. Juan dc Fl amies. Christ Appearing In His Mother, 1496
.4;/ art gallery reorganized according to a therapeutic vision. The art wouldn't need to change. only the way it was arranged and presented. Each gallery would focus not on dates and provenance. but on the important rebalancing emotions encouraged by particular works.
49. The floor plan for the Tate Modern, revised
A machine for the therapy of the soul.
50. Basilica di Santa Мзпа Gloriosa dei Frari. 1250-1338
The picture shows us a shocking encounter between a mother and a son. She has seen him humiliated and abandoned. But now. despite everything, he is restored to her. She thought she had lost him. Bur he is here.
The Biblical story speaks of universal themes raised to maximum dramatic pitch. In her eyes, her son is perfect: he is the most important being who has ever lived. But the world rejects him. His suffering is her suffering. She has been powerless to help or protect him. She could not keep him safe. He left her: he had to go out into the world and pursue his own tasks. We see the ending that all mothers crave: that the horrors will be over. And that in the future people will love her son as she loves him.
This is an image of a loving mother-son relationship. But it does not avoid conflict or grief: these are precisely what the picturc says are central to love. It is a very restrained image. They do not embrace. He will soon leave. How often has this scene been re-enacted?
The picturc makes the claim that such moments of return (and of survival), though fleeting and rare, are crucially important in life. It wants men to understand and call - their mothers.
The problem with museums extends from captions to the whole philosophy of how rooms are laid out and how the visitor progresses through the building. In large galleries today, the display rooms tend to be named in ways that are overtly academic and historical, in line with the education of their curators, so we may stroll from the 'North Italian School' to The Nineteenth Century' via the The Art of the Enlightenment'. This reflects a scholarly attitude to categories, as can also be found in literature courses on The American Novel' or 'From Allegory to Realism', rather than the range of needs the visitor might bring.
A more ambitious, and beneficial, arrangement would be to arrange the works in line with the concerns of our souls, bringing together those objects which, regardless of their origins in space and time, address the troubled areas of existence 49). Aided by wise and forthright labels, a tour of the gallery would keep at the front of our minds the things we most need to hold on to, but which so easily fall from view.
The rehang committee could look for guidance to the Venetian church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari (50). The Frari makes no concession to scholarly organization of the many artworks it contains, for it is committed to what it holds to be a grander task: that of saving our souls, as understood by Catholic theology. Paintings (there is a large altarpiece by Titian) join with monuments, window traceries, frescoes, sculpture, mctalwork and architecture to make a coherent and sustained impression on our deepest thoughts and feelings. The question of where a work was made, or the precise intentions of the marker, arc subordinated to the overall mission.
A modern museum might seem highly organized, but this masks a deeper and very serious disorder when it comes to the true purpose of art. Devotion to academic categories actually gets in the way of creating and sustaining emotional order and insight. Museums are thus prevented from taking up the conception of the transformative, redemptive power of art pioneered in churches and temples. Curators should dare to reinvent their spaces so that they can be more than dead libraries for the creations of the past. Together with the revised vision for captions, our encounters with art would be transformed.