House in Mft. 1658
The idea of consciously attempting to become a good lover has cheap What and absurd connotations. One imagines someone attending a school
jj for opening champagne bottles decorously or executing rare sexual
.. manoeuvres. The connotations are derogatory because we live in a
* ^ Romantic age that associates sincere love with spontaneity: the more
Be a we are unaware of, and unschooled for, what we're doing in love.
Good more estimable and trustworthy we are held to be as lovers. The
'practised' lover has something cynical and unsettling about him or her. Unfortunately, the paucity of successful relationships doesn't seem to endorse our charmingly naturalistic beliefs. Love doesn't seem to belong to that elect group of activities that one performs better the less one thinks about and practises it. But if some kind of forethought seems advisable, what exactly should we be rehearsing - and what does any of this have to do with art?
Knowing how to love someone is different from admiring them. Admiration asks little of us, save for a lively imagination. The problems come when we try to build a shared life, which might include a home, children and the running of a business and household, with the person we had at first esteemed from afar. It's then we need to draw on qualities that seldom spring forth naturally and almost invariably benefit from a little practice: an ability to listen properly to another person, patience, curiosity, resilience, sensuality and reason.
Lover?
Art can be a useful guide to such qualities. There are deep reasons why the ingredients of a successful work of art might have analogies with those required for the flourishing of a relationship, and therefore why the contemplation of art might help us to be better lovers. In Platonic philosophy, goodness is held to be a transferable element that is fundamentally the same wherever it is found, be it in a person, a book or the design of a chair. Furthermore, spotting goodness in one arena can make us more sensitive to recognizing, and encouraging it, in another. In a museum of the future, the Love Gallery might use the resources of art to excite our admiration for some of the following qualities.
Attention to Detail
We often say that a work of art was made 'with love'. T his offers us a valuable insight, not just into certain works of art, but into the nature of love itself. The two vases of flowers at the bottom of Hugo van der Goes's The Adoration of the Shepherds are only a tiny part of what is a much larger work, but van der Goes has devoted immense care to the depiction of each flower and leaf; every petal has seemed to him to deserve an individual recognition (61).
He has, we can imagine, been motivated by kindly interest, which is how being loved feels. It is as though he has asked each flower, 'What is your unique character? I want to know you as you really are, rather than as a passing impression/ In painting, this becomes a sensitivity to the precise shape of each part of the flower and the patterns of light and shadow upon them. This attitude towards a flower is moving because it rehearses, in a minor but vivid way, the kind of attention that we long to receive from, and which we hope to be able to give to, another human being.
The prevailing culture prompted van der Goes to regard each detail as important by assigning it a symbolic meaning within a Christian cosmology. The white irises are there to suggest purity, and the seven pairs of purple flowers in the glass stand for the seven last words spoken by Jesus. Van der Goes quite naturally saw details as connected to grand and important themes; a relationship between small and large that may also be present in our feelings for another person. When our lover inclines her head in a particular way, we may be excited because the gesture speaks of a quizzical, slightly shy part of her whole nature that we deeply admire. When our lover struggles to locate Greenland on a map, this tiny moment of hesitance is charming because it speaks of his strong sense of priorities and his practical nature; it has simply never mattered to him that Greenland is located to the east of Canada, and we appreciate that he has the solidity and courage to care only about what does matter.
We long to find a person who will be as attentive to the details of our characters, to the movements of our bodies and to the quirks of our geographical understandings, as van der Goes has been to the shadows of his irises.
I will pay attention to the whole of you.
61. Hugo van der Goes. The Adoration of the Shepherds detail right ...1475
Long's work settles us into a patient frame of mind.
i2. Richard Long. most important lessons are not necessarily complicated. In fact,
15Ю • I • i i r
they are likely to be very simple. Richard Long, for instance, finds ways of reminding us of the value of patience (62). Our problem is not that we are in intellectual denial, or that we go about proclaiming the worthlessness of patience. It's simply that we lose sight of what we really believe in the tumult of our daily lives.
The calm greys and blacks, the tree and stream-like patterns can all be grasped very easily. A few major strands divide and become thinner as they ascend the page (or many small strands unite and become thicker as they descend the page). We make no discovery; there is no mystery here. As we look more closely, though, we see exactly how each strand goes, which joins with which, and where the divisions are. This is slow, soothing looking. Perhaps the walk Long memorialized in the work was like this. He was not on a voyage of discovery; we already know how to get from Portugal to Spain.
The typeface and the words are plain and direct. Patience is not thrilling. It is, in fact, the capacity to do without excitement, to delay gratification, to stick with what feels boring or bland. Long's artistic achievement is to integrate these unromantic aspects of patience with an endeavour that charms the imagination: walking across the Iberian peninsula, from the Atlantic coast to the Mediterranean, from sea to shining sea - a poetic image of romantic fulfilment. The central statement of the work is the comparison of water being poured from a bottle with a waterfall. One is small and inconsequential, the other grand and powerful. But a waterfall is just an accumulation of drops: the reward of repetition.
Long is not trying to convince us, but seeks to keep an obvious but much-neglected truth at the front of our minds: that good things have banal ingredients. We cannot internalize this enough. We have to renew the recognition of this dreary fact every day of our lives until it becomes entirely habitual.
Patience
The work is a love lesson. It preaches a quality central to the realistic maintenance and growth of love: that good relationships depend upon patience. We have to forego an immediate satisfaction (winning an argument, making the other person feel guilty, getting our own way) because these foregoings are the drops of water that, multiplied and accumulated, will enable a couple to complete their pilgrimage.
Love
I don't know.
but rm going to Cu riosity
find out.
63. Uoiurdod* Leonardo's extremely beautiful notes and diagrams of a baby growing in
Foetus.<-.1510-12 mother's womb teach us something important about love. It's not that
they fill gaps in our understanding of pregnancy - their importance lies, rather, in the quality of mind they exemplify.
Leonardo is a hero of curiosity (63). He was the preeminent figure in an era that had an unprecedented interest in how things work. Curiosity takes ignorance seriously, and is confident enough to admit when it does not know. It is aware of not knowing, and it sets out to do something about it. The fine quality of this page of investigations presents curiosity as an elegant accomplishment. Leonardo is not prying, nosy or intrusive. His will to discover is organized. He wants to understand. It is not a matter, with him, of finding a stray fact here or there. He wants to know something important, and he has contained his insights in a single, lucid page.