That subject is so familiar anyway, by 16th-century standards, and its religious job is so straightforward, that it barely would have registered. A painting like this was the Renaissance equivalent of the unnoticed toaster sitting on the kitchen counter. Only a brash, surprising new design -- in that toaster, or this painting -- can give the pedestrian object any presence at all. It's the artful making of the object, and the wit of the person responsible for that making, that jolts us awake.
Tuesday: Noblesse Oblige
Monday was all about contemplation of the esoteric, so this morning calls for a mainstream fanfare or two. One of the most splendid spots in the museum is Gallery 42 of the Northern European rooms. It's a big, walnut-paneled space full of some of Anthony Van Dyck's great aristocratic portraits. They aren't just examples of upper-class style; they almost define our idea of how a noble ought to look.
Among the works along a second-floor West Building hallway is Clodion's "Poetry and Music."
(Courtesy of The National Gallery of Art)
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Week of Wonders: Highlights from Blake Gopnik's week-long National Gallery tour.
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Maybe that's why today's visit comes with a little tug of guilt. Van Dyck's gorgeous pictures clearly celebrate a social system that kept most people digging in the earth -- my ancestors were no doubt among them -- while a tiny few could afford to pay for great, inventive art.
I think Van Dyck's portraits hint at why they would have spent the cash.
His powerful sitters are all extravagantly dressed in the latest fashions; you can often date such portraits by the styles that they show. The portrait Van Dyck painted in about 1634 of Henri II of Lorraine, later Duc de Guise, has as much to do with what the man is wearing as with what his face looks like.
Van Dyck gave painstaking, even labored, attention to the red and gold of his sitter's breeches and to their beribboned hems. He doesn't miss a detail on Henri's million-dollar lace, on his soft-as-butter doeskin boots or on the red and orange ostrich feathers that trim the dandy's hat. (Henri inherited his family's archbishopric but is said to have quipped that a good life demanded women and war, or war and women: "The order does not matter, as long as both are present.")
All this finery proclaims a noble's exclusive status in society -- a status that didn't depend on what you'd achieved, after all, or even on your innate virtues, but simply on who you were born to be and how you displayed that birthright. The clothes may not have made the man, but they were a sign of the cloth he was cut from.
Fashion in contemporary clothes had to be matched by fashion in contemporary art. Having the latest artist at your beck and call was a sure sign of status in the early-modern world, and status and power were always close cousins.
Of course, Van Dyck did invent special techniques for making his sitters look unusually elevated. He manipulated his perspective, for instance, to make his aristos seem to tower above us lowly peons, while avoiding the crazy distortions that come from your standard dog's-eye view. (Fashion photographers can do the same thing to make their models extra-leggy, but it takes a special camera.) But what mattered more than any particular set of ennobling tricks was the painter's artfulness.
It's true that Van Dyck's pictures made his sitters look as though they stood out from the crowd. But it was just as important that sheer quality and verve should make the artworks stand out, too: Owning the latest from an artist as skilled as Van Dyck, whatever the subject, was as sure a sign of class and breeding as getting the longest, softest ostrich feathers in from Africa. And ancien regime aristocrats needed all the outward signs of breeding they could get; there wasn't always much to crow about beneath the surface.
Wednesday: Weighty Matters
Today, I head back for another day in the picture galleries on the second story of the West Building. But I never make it. As I walk down the spacious hall that leads to the east end of the floor, I realize I am surrounded by works of art that in the normal course of things get almost no attention. Despite the standard National Gallery labels stuck to their bases -- they name important French artists of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Clodion and Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux -- the 10 large marble sculptures that line the room are almost universally ignored by gallery-goers -- including professional art critics who ought to know better.
"Sculpture is something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting," said American abstractionist Ad Reinhardt, and that seems to be the attitude that still prevails. (Though the new suite of dedicated sculpture galleries on the West Building's lower floor may start to change all this.) Here are a few thoughts that strike me as I linger in the second floor's East Sculpture Hall -- the only visitor to do so the entire morning:
• The sheer material of sculpture has an impact that the art supplies of painting never have. You're not supposed to look through the marble to the subject that it shows; you're supposed to look at the stone, and then also at its subject. Compared with oil paint and canvas, sculptor's-grade marble was fiendishly expensive stuff. Clodion placed a special order in Carrara, Italy, for the marble used in his allegorical image of "Poetry and Music," commissioned by the finance minister of France. The gray veining that runs across the flesh of Clodion's naked toddlers isn't seen as a fault; it's a sure sign of the art object's worth.
• Marble sculptures like these don't transport you to a distant place, the way a painting can. They leave you firmly sited where you are, in the real architecture of the palace, garden, mansion -- or, now, museum -- where the sculpture is placed. That means that such sculpture is likely to have a deliberately decorative effect that painting doesn't always have.
