This environment encourages us to be reasonable in our turn. It invites a calm state of mind and makes us want to think and feel with a corresponding gracefulness and precision. And this connection is crucial. Far from 'reason4 appearing strict or frosty, the loggia shows us the sweetness of precision. The attitude to reason fostered by Brunelleschi has a more important goal than the creation of charming public buildings. We need reason to be a powerful and constructive force in our relationships. That is to say, we need precision, care with argument, clarity in explanation and skill in seeing how multiple elements are organized together.
A central problem in close relationships is the way we explain distress and frustration. It is extremely tempting to pin the blame for suffering on the most conspicuous thing in the emotional environment: one's partner (or parents). We have a great need to assign responsibility and we are desperate to say why things are going badly. Tve been underperforming at work because you keep nagging me at home and I can't summon up the will to make a big effort; if you were nicer, I'd not have had such a difficult performance review.' Or, 'We're drifting apart; we hardly ever have fun together. It's your fault; you are such a hyper-organized person that there's no spontaneity, things don't ever just happen, it's all got to be planned to the last degree and the life goes out of everything. You treat me like just another problem to be solved.' In other words, the lines we rehearse in our heads - and occasionally shout through the bathroom door - are chains of supposed reasonings. Even in our rage, we desperately want to explain and justify.
The gracious promise of the Ospedale degli Innocenti is that our need for explanation and justification could become a constructive part of a relationship. Instead of arguing at 2.00 a.m., if only we could confront our problems in the calming, inspiring presence of Bruneileschi's arcade. We would examine each element more carefully, finding out what it can bear, what its individual character is. What is actually going on with my trouble at work? What does being organized mean to you? Why really are we spending less time together? We take the hugely beneficial, but extremely difficult step, of not jumping to conclusions. Like Brunelleschi, we try to put the elements carefully together. What is the link between what is happening at home and at work? What is the link (if any) between your commitment to being organized and our need to enjoy ourselves together? In the ideal home there might be two photographs of the loggia: one inside and one outside the bathroom door.
Perspective
Bringing perspective to one's experience of relationships means striving to set love within the context of a broader understanding of the suffering endemic to our species. In the Bible, the sixth book of Genesis tells of God's frustration with human beings. He is disappointed with creation: everyone seems to be selfish, violent and preoccupied with sex. So God sends the Flood to wipe humanity from the face of the earth. Only Noah, his family and the animals are spared. In Poussin's picture of this moment, the famous ark is just visible as a grey smudge on the horizon (67).
Poussin is a pessimist. He believes that suffering is normal and suggests that in the main, our hopes are not fulfilled; just surviving is an achievement. He invites us to share God's disenchanted attitude that human life seems a bit of a disaster. This is intended as a corrective to our tendency to be shocked and embittered when things do not turn out as we wish, when the good things that we have sought fail to materialize, or when a relationship breaks down. If one was already very given to thoughts of the hopelessness of existence, Poussin's image would not be advisable. However, if one erred on the side of naivety or embittered anger, it could be crucial.
When we start from the assumption that life generally goes rather badly, when we think that a good relationship is unusual rather than a birthright, we take less for granted. Happiness will not come to you simply because you are a fairly nice and well-intentioned person. By spending a lot of time around The Deluge and other such images, we do not seek to make ourselves gloomy, but more appreciative. The painting says to us, This is how life tends to be: clinging to the wreckage, desperately seeking temporary security on a bare rock. Therefore the failure of a relationship, and the breaking of one's heart, is not an aberration.'
The suffering of a broken heart seen from this point of view changes its meaning. It moves from being a cruel blow aimed unjustly at you to a common experience. This may seem obvious, but we often harbour the secret belief that we are unusually unlucky individuals, unfairly deprived of the happiness that everyone else seems to enjoy. And this is a terrible addition to our sorrows.
Clinging to the wreckage: our usual lot in life.
67. Nicolas Poussin, Winter or The Deluge. 1660-4
One of the paradoxes of love is that it is often inspired by the way people look, but isn't generally meant to be based on looks. This leaves us with a conundrum: how much should one care about physical appearance? Is beauty entirely beside the point or an essential part of the feeling of love? Throughout history, many philosophies and religions have waged war on our physical forms, arguing that real value must lie elsewhere, in our souls and in our minds. Christianity did not invent guilt and shame around the body, it was merely drawing upon a permanent human proclivity.
There is one tradition of art which provides a welcome way out of this dilemma. In the art of the ancient Greeks, we get the first and clearest expression in the West of what one might call paganism, not merely in the obvious sense - that the Greeks were not Christians - but in their attitude to physical allure.
The ancient Greeks were unusual, compared with Christians, in being immensely concerned with the outward as well as the inward excellence of their divinities. Apollo was the god of light, truth and healing. To the Greeks he couldn't have had such a status and possessed such wonderful powers if he did not also have ideally beautiful pectoral muscles and a graceful posture (68). In opposition to this thesis, some early Christian thinkers, notably Tcrtullian, claimed that Jesus must have been ugly so as to keep his spiritual worth independent of any outward charm. By contrast, paganism trusts physical beauty, and is optimistic about the promise proffered by our outer form. The Greek term for beauty, kalon, does not distinguish between physical loveliness and inner goodness: good things simply are simultaneously beautiful, an idea that lingers on in our day only in very restricted areas, for example, in our thinking about clothes. It would be strange to say, Tve got a very good pair of trousers, but unfortunately they are ugly'. The Greeks thought about the appearance of people the way we think about the appearance of clothes: they read the wisdom and nobility of Apollo in his face, in the way his cloak was draped over his arm and in the lightness of his back leg, with his big toe just touching the ground. These were not, to their mind, minor matters. This is what they thought a supremely admirable man should look like.
Am I Allowed to be Turned On?
Since the Greeks, a line of artists have followed the pagan spirit: among them, Botticelli, Titian, Klimt and Picasso (69). Their message to us has been that we do not need to divorce the body from the spirit, that our physical envelopes are not shameful or opposed to the so-called 'higher' values. This may belong to a movement in the history of art, but it isalso evidence of a mature integration of different strands of our psyches. The ancient Greeks would have been puzzled by the modern distinction between pornography and art. There was simply good and bad art. As currently constituted, pornography asks that we leave behind our ethics, our aesthetic sense and our intelligence when we contemplate it, but the lesson of pagan artists is that we shouldn't need to make a choice between sex and virtue: sex can be invited to support, rather than permitted to undermine, our higher values.