Art

A shadow of the copy of Michelangelo's David, that stands outside the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence.

Scenes from Masolino and Masaccio's fresco cycle in the Brancacci Chapel, in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine.

Donatello's Mary Magdalene

I just finished reading The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. It was a really moving and philosophical work, very creative. I particularly enjoyed the prose in Chapter 10, titled "What Congruence?" I had to read it a couple of times in a row. In the passage, the main character, Renee, talks about art, drawing on Kant and other philosophy regarding the nature of beauty. I wanted to reproduce it here, directly quoted, because I thought it was really close to a lot of my less-well-articulated thoughts about what it means to love art:

“Whence comes the sense of wonder we perceive when we encounter certain works of art? Admiration is born with our first gaze and if subsequently we should discover, in the patient obstinacy we apply in flushing out the causes thereof, that al this beauty is the fruit of a virtuosity that can only be detected through close scrutiny of a brush that has been able to tame shadow and light and restore shape and texture, by magnifying them—the transparent jewel of the glass, the tumultuous texture of the shells, the clear velvet of the lemon—this neither dissipates nor explains the mystery of one’s initial dazzled gaze.

The enigma is constantly renewed: great works are the visual forms which attain in us the certainty of timeless consonance. The confirmation that certain forms, in the particular aspect that their creators have given them, return again and again throughout the history of art and, in the filigree of individual genius, constitute nonetheless facets of a universal genius, is something deeply unsettling. What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? Despite the diversity of subject matter, supports and techniques, despite the insignificance and ephemeral nature of lives always doomed to belong to one era and one culture alone, and despite the singular nature of a gaze that can only ever see what its constitution will allow and that is tainted by the poverty of its individuality, the genius of great artists penetrates to the heart of the mystery and exhumes, under various guises, the same sublime form that we seek in all artistic production. What congruence links a Claesz, a Raphael, a Rubens and a Hopper? We need not search, our eye locates the form that will elicit a feeling of consonance, the one particular thing in which everyone can find the very essence of beauty, without variations or reservations, context or effort. In the still life with a lemon, for example, this essence cannot merely be reduced to the mystery of execution; it clearly does inspire a feeling of consonance, a feeling that this is exactly the way it ought to have been arranged. This in turn allows us to feel the power of objects and of the way they interact, to hold in our gaze the way they work together and the magnetic fields that attract and repel them, the ineffable ties that bind them and engender a force, a secret and inexplicable wave born of both the tension and balance of the configuration—this is what inspires the feeling of consonance. The disposition of the objects and the dishes achieves the universal in the singular: the timeless nature of the consonant form.”