Paganism believes that gods don't just need to be good inside - they also need perfect thighs.
68. Apollo Belvedere (Roman copy of a lost fourth-century ВС original)
This is also what
69. Pablo Picasso. Fa tut and Bacchante with Battle of Fauns m tlx Distance. 1968
During a few wise periods in its history, even Christian art understood that physical desire did not have to be the enemy of goodness, and could, if properly marshalled, lend energy and intensity to it. In altarpieces by Fra Filippo Lippi or Sandra Botticelli, not only is the Madonna beautifully dressed and set against an enchanting background, she is also attractive and, though this point is not typically dwelt upon in art-historical discussions or museum catalogues, often quite simply a turn-on (70). In deliberately striving for this effect. Christian artists were not contravening the caution generally shown by their religion towards sexuality; rather, they were affirming that sexuality could be invited to promote a project of edification. If viewers were tobe persuaded that Mary had been one of the noblest human beings who ever lived - the embodiment of kindness, self-sacrifice, sweetness and goodness - it might help if she was also pictured as having been, in the most subliminal and delicate of ways, physically attractive too.
Physical attraction lending support to, rather than undermining., our interest in kindness and virtue.
70. Sandro Botticelli, The Madonna of tlx Book. 1483
Through such works we derive a more joined-up sense of human nature, in which our capacity for erotic excitement, our need for emotional closeness and our longing for stable family life are not pulling us in opposite directions. These works are the opposite of pornography, which pulls us apart by making us feel that sexual fulfilment requires us to suspend or ignore the rest of our needs. They matter because a harmony between the body and the spirit is part of the way we spontaneously imagine love to be at its best. In the intense, usually brief, phase of being in love at the start of a relationship, our hormones ensure that eroticism and moral admiration are at one. Art could, and should, be a vital technology for renewing and safeguarding this kind of ideal alignment in the long term.
One of the most depressing aspects of relationships is how quickly we
How get used to people who, when we first knew them, we felt immensely
tO Make grateful for. A person whose mere wrist or shoulder could once excite
us can lie before us entirely naked without arousing a flicker of interest.
Love
Last When considering how we could re-evaluate and re-desire our partners,
we might find it instructive to look at the ways artists learn to resee what
is familiar. The lover and the artist come up against the same human foible: the universal tendency to become bored, and to declare that whatever or whoever is known is unworthy of interest. It is a striking feature of some artistic masterpieces that they are able to renew our enthusiasm for things that have grown dull; they can awaken the hidden charms of experiences that familiarity makes us overlook. Contemplating such works rekindles our capacity for appreciation. A child tidying up, the falling light of dusk, the wind in the high branches of a tree in full leaf, the anonymity of a diner late at night in a great Midwestern city - thanks to art, such sights can touch and move us once more. A great artist knows how to draw our attention to the most tender, inspiring and enigmatic aspects of the world: they help us put aside our dismissive haste and learn to seek and find in our own surroundings something of what de Hooch or Hopper, Cezanne or Rembrandt found in theirs.
Other than as an ingredient and a marketable crop, the asparagus held little interest for the average French citizen of the nineteenth century; that is until 1880, when Iidouard Manet painted a tender portrait of a few stems and drew the eyes of the world to the quiet charms of this edible flowering perennial (71). For all his delicacy with the brush, Manet was not flattering the vegetable; he was not using art to endow it with qualities it does not really possess. Rather, what he did was reveal its pre-existing but generally ignored merits. Where we would just see a plain stalk, Manet noted and recorded subtle individuality, the particular hue and tonal variation of each frond. By so doing, he redeemed this humble vegetable, so that today, before his picture, one might see a plate of asparagus as emblematic of an ideal of the good and decent life.
To rescue a long-term relationship from complacency, we might learn to effect on our spouse much the same imaginative transformation that Manet performed on his vegetables. We should try to locate the good and the beautiful beneath the layers of habit and routine. We may so often have seen our partner pushing a buggy, crossly berating the electricity company or returning home defeated from the workplace that we have forgotten the dimension in him or her that remains adventurous, impetuous, cheeky, intelligent and, above all else, worthy of love.
There are lessons for long-term relationships in the way that Manet approached asparagus.
71. lUlouard Manet. Bunch of.Asparagus, 188(1
One of the greatest risks when love has failed us is that people will be Courage tempted to say cheerful things to comfort us. Keen to mitigate our pain,
for the w*" assure us happiness is around the corner, that suffering
will be brief and that the ex wasn't even worth shedding tears over. Such J У bromides could not be more misguided, and it would be far better to
— side with Edwin Church instead (72). He could have painted a reassuring
image; perhaps a ship coming back safely into harbour or a tranquil night with an island in the distance. In other words, he could have said that everything is going to be fine. Instead, the picture makes plain that voyages are perilous, that danger is real. He leads us to a more accurate appreciation of courage - the journey is magnificent, but the risks have to be recognized and the capacity to cope with them honoured.
The ideal place to hang Church's work would be on the walls of a naval academy. Unfortunately, since it would help humanity, we don't yet have relationship academies, but, if we did, they would want to teach us the same kind of lesson, and would benefit from having some works of art around to help them do so. Rather than make comforting noises about relationships that fail, they would focus on the awkward questions we need to tackle head on to have any chance of succeeding at love. What did you get wrong? To what extent should you have foreseen the problems? What should you have done to put it right, and what will you do next time? We should not expect that our preparations for love should be any less rigorous than those we might make for a journey to sea.
We want art to help us capture the connection between the recognition of difficulty and success at achieving things we value. The thought of sailing around the Cape of Good Hope is daunting, but the task is more likely to go well if we devote ourselves wholeheartedly to acquiring the skills it demands. Identifying these skills depends upon the frank assessment of the nature and dangers of the task. Our culture is lopsided in that it is terribly honest about what is needed to help someone sail a ship through glacial waters, but intensely sentimental when it comes to love. In the case of seafaring, the relevant knowledge was slowly gained by rigorous de-briefing and analysis across generations: what went wrong last time? What would help us overcome that problem in the future? But when it comes to the most important thing - how to find and keep love - we are fatally coy. Art has a crucial role to play in creating and keeping images of the lessons of love at the front of our minds. Ideas, habits, attitudes and insights are the equivalent in love of what anchors, sextants and harnesses are in seafaring. In the ideal culture of the future, no one would be allowed out onto the field of love without first getting hold of, and learning to use, the right equipment.