This past summer I read Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Goldfinch. It had been recommended to me by a number of people who thought that I, as an art historian, might be particularly interested in the book since the story itself revolves around the title object, a tiny canvas painted in 1654 by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius.
(The Hague, Maritshuis)
In the book, a terrorist bomb explodes at The Metropolitan Museum of Art when the The Goldfinch is there on exhibition. In the confusion, Theo Decker, the main character, stumbles out of the museum with the painting, and spends the rest of the novel trying to figure out how to return it without further destroying his life. But the longer it remains in his possession, the more it becomes the object that defines him, that gives him both pain and purpose.
As I read The Goldfinch, I couldn’t help but wonder, if I were in a similar situation and could remove one work of art from a museum under attack, what would I save? And further, what object in my possession is so meaningful to me that it has a personal value that transcends its own monetary worth? What object, if it were destroyed or somehow lost to me, would I think of with regret for the rest of my life?
I think about the first question in terms of what object I repeatedly revisit, what object I insist that others see, when they accompany me to the museum I visit the most often, which as it turns out, is also The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Surprisingly, it is not in the medieval galleries, but rather upstairs, in the first room of the newly-reinstalled European Paintings wing.
(New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
There, in pride of place in the very center of the room, resides the diminutive diptych by Jan van Eyck of the Crucifixion and Last Judgment. In this tiny work of art, there is so much to absorb. The rush from the foreground into the mountainous landscape in the background leaves me breathless. The incredible detail is so precise that some of the minute brushstrokes must have been made with “two hairs and some air,” as the late great Bob Ross of the DIY TV show “The Joy of Painting” used to say. The artist took extraordinary care in the creation of the figures who mill about the base of Christ’s cross, with certain people drawing particular attention – is that the donor/owner in the large blue hat, the only one who looks out at us (or perhaps himself)? Who is reflected in the copper helmet hanging from the belt of the figure in mauve? And then, on the right-hand panel, the better-than-Bosch depiction of hell in all its monstrosity, with the souls of the damned extruded into hell through the bones of a grinning spread-eagled skeleton, and a fashion-plate St. Michael with his peacock wings serenely waving them down. Above, Christ sits as impassive judge with his cordial group of saints, (probably painted by someone else — Rogier van der Weyden?), waiting to determine the fate of the souls of the dead rising out of the land and sea.
(New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
That’s the painting I would grab if the Met were on fire. And if we’re not thinking about the practicalities, I would run very fast down the hallway and grab the gigantic Bastien-Lepage Joan of Arc. THAT is my favorite painting in the Met, and I don’t think I’ve ever been in the building without trying to stop by to pay homage, even for a brief moment. I love Joan of Arc. Joan of Arc is part of the reason I am a medievalist. And this particular painting is everything I love about the nineteenth-century appropriation of the Middle Ages, in all its fanciful romanticization of the past.
In Tartt’s novel, the painting of The Goldfinch spends more time in the possession of the main character than it does at the Met. It becomes his painting, even though he’s constantly tormented by it. It is his burden and his blessing; the object of his greatest anxiety, but also the one constant in his tumultuous existence. It becomes a holy relic of the museum, as well as a symbol of enduring beauty in a life filled with unfortunate choices and wasted opportunities. So the other question I was left with was about what things in my own possession have this kind of hold on my soul, that speak to some deep-rooted part of me. There are probably a number of things that I could select, but certainly one would be the hand-colored photograph by Wallace Nutting that hung in my paternal grandparents’ house, and then in my own bedroom when I was a child.
It is not particularly valuable; Nutting and the group of young women he hired to color his photographs produced thousands of these images, and there are any number of them floating around on eBay. But I used to envision myself in this scene, walking up the path through the perfect country garden, to peer into the diamond-paned windows and enter into the charmingly dilapidated cottage. Nutting was from Massachusetts and primarily photographed New England locations, but I always imagined that this scene was somewhere in long-ago, fairy-tale England, and I invented complicated and romantic narratives involving girls in long white dresses wandering through the garden of larkspur. The photograph is still in my parents’ home, and it has been promised to me. It is the one thing that I really want.
One family possession has been lost to me, and I’ve spent years trying to find something similar. My maternal grandparents had a Niagara Falls motion lamp. The heat of the light bulb made one cylinder rotate inside the other, giving the impression that water was actually flowing over the falls.
For a young girl, it was the coolest thing ever. Within a few years of my grandfather’s untimely death, the house was broken up and the lamp was sold, or perhaps even tossed; most family members found it kitsch at best. Motion lamps are highly collectible now, but I’ve never come across one that is as beautiful as the one owned by my grandparents, or at least none that are as wonderful as the one that exists in my memory.
What will my own children want out of our house, when the time comes? Without a doubt, the painting of Santa Claus, done by my husband’s aunt, an enthusiastic amateur painter. When it emerges from storage in mid-December and we hang it over the fireplace, in the room with the sparkling Christmas tree, we know that the holidays, with all their magic, are truly here.
None of these personal possessions have any particular value in the marketplace. But they are precious all the same, their worth derived from their relationships with the people who love them.
In the very last pages of the novel The Goldfinch, Theo (or really the author) makes some grand philosophical pronouncements about truth and illusion, about love and death. And there are some thoughts about the painting of The Goldfinch itself: “…the painting has taught me that we can speak to each other across time…[i]t exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.” As sweepingly grandiose as this language is, it seems to me that in effect this is what art historians do – we understand that objects can be the vehicles that “speak across time,” that connect us to the past, and by studying and teaching them, we pass them on to the next generation. In a time when art and architecture are deliberately targeted and destroyed for political and religious ends, the urgency to save and preserve the objects that mean so much to people seems all too terribly real.: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/news/the-destruction-of-the-idols-syrias-patrimony-at-risk-from-extremists-9122275.html
I do wonder what other people would save from a burning museum. And I’m also interested in objects that are personally meaningful. I call for a history of loved objects, not just important objects, the things that transcend their material fetters to lodge in our hearts. What are those things for you?
Oh, man, I don’t know if I could even set myself the task of trying to decide what to keep. When I worked at the Walters, though, it certainly would have been the Rubens Vase (http://art.thewalters.org/detail/10284/the-rubens-vase/), an utterly extraordinary carved agate vase that has an even more extraordinary history. I think it’s the history that makes it irreplaceable to me; there are many thousands of things that embody this kind of artistic achievement, but only a few that have such an amazing story to tell.
There’s another quandary here that Tartt never really gets into. When I first started at the Walters, I remember being told that, since my office was in the manuscript and rare books room, I needed to get out of the room as quickly as possible anytime the fire alarm went off. In the case of a real fire, after a distressingly short time (40 seconds?), the doors would seal shut and the halon suppression system would activate, and anyone still in the room would suffocate. The message was clear to me: given the choice between saving a person and saving the collection (close to 1000 manuscripts, 2000 more incunabula and rare books), the museum would choose the collection every time. And I think they’re right.
I had no idea that such a thing as a halon suppression system existed. That’s a very interesting thought — saving objects before people. I’m sure firefighters have stories about losing people because they’ve reentered their homes in order to save objects. When I was working at the Huntington Library with their amazing copy of the Legenda aurea, which ended up as the subject of my dissertation, I do remember thinking that if a fire broke out, I could save it since I’d just need to pick it up (heavy as it was with its oak binding) and run.
I think for me there are two pieces in the Met collection that I adore. One is the Madonna and Child by Paolo di Giovanni Fei. Her direct gaze still brings me to tears for reasons I cannot explain. I love the surrounding medallions of glass that make the very frame part of the experience. My other favorite is the Visitation attributed to Master Heinrich of Constance. Their crystal bellies always fascinated me and spoke of hope and the very connections that bind us as women.
My grandmother has a China box she keeps her knitting / crochet needles in. It is pure magic for me. She is 95 and a second mother to me. This box reminds me of watching her create each baby blanket and throw and tablecloth. It has a deep earthy scent to it. It is worth more to me than any other object and she always tells me it is mine.
This is such a wonderful post, Martha! It has made me glad that I read that book, for one (even though I found it at time insufferably long)!! I’ve been thinking about your question and of course, it’s really hard to answer. But I found myself thinking about this Henry Ossawa Tanner Annunciation at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/104384.html). A phenomenal painting that is never conveyed adequately in reproductions – that paint is otherworldly. I think my affection for it is partly because that museum was so important to me in my formative years; I also wonder if it is one of the artworks that eventually helped me to understand and love abstraction along with the materiality of paint. How it relates to my future in medieval art I don’t exactly know, though it does also bring to mind the more abstract folios in Hildegard’s Scivias, like that funky image of the Trinity. The other one that came to mind and has stuck there is the Nike of Samothrace, which I obviously would have trouble carrying out.
Yeah, Ben’s comment has me thinking about the Monuments Men, and the fact that they had to justify saving objects and monuments when that might risk human lives. It prompts a compelling question: in the grand sweep of historical time, when individual people will inevitably perish, to what lengths should we go to preserve such things?
Thank you for this great meditation and provocation – I wonder what Donna Tartt herself would say! Maybe it’s The Goldfinch, but seeing how that work of art tormented its caretakers so, I wonder. There’s saving a work of art and giving it back to the institution you saved it from, and there’s saving a work of art and _keeping it from_ the institution (_saving it_ from the institution?). I think of works of art I wish I could save and works of art I wish I could steal (this is not a declaration of intention! just an intellectual exercise!!!). There is this idea of works of art that might be “better off” “living” than still in a museum – I think of multiple portable altars interacting with open air, or ivory diptychs being opened and closed, or that incredible fountain from the Cleveland Museum of Art (http://www.clevelandart.org/art/1924.859). But, sure enough, when I think of paintings, I think of rescuing them, of their being safer in a museum. Your wonderful post makes me think of one last thing: what does the work of art want? To my mind, few explore that answer better than Molly Nesbit in tracking the emotions ascribed to the Mona Lisa when she was stolen from the Louvre in 1911 (she is shown enjoying herself, having a cigarette, wearing stockings – just having a grand old time) [Molly Nesbit, “The Rat’s Ass,” _October_ 56 (1991): 6-20.]. We’ll keep asking!
Veerrryyyy late to this thread, but there’s so much I love about this post (van Eyck meets Nutting & Niagara Fall!) & the responses (my god, the sealed-off room!). “A history of loved objects” is both beautiful & such a meaningful jumping off point for conveying why art is vital, living, & why art history, far from dry dissection or effete gesture can be a passionate engagement. Sigh. It reminds me of the end of Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” where she says that instead of a hermeneutics of art we need an erotics of art. Yep.
Again, so fantastic. It really would make a great book. Seriously.
(PS. Assuming a wheelbarrow + assistants, I would save El Greco’s View of Toledo & his portrait of a cardinal, Villers’ Young Woman Drawing & Labille-Guiard’s self portrait with students.)