The other day at book group, a friend read out a passage from Ian McEwan’s Lessons, a book she had enjoyed:
“He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and child, he would ‘throw up.’…Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision Song Contest in oil and gilt frames.”
It’s a good thing this character was not at the Metropolitan Museum of Art these days, because he would have really been sick to his stomach. The blockbuster exhibit Raphael: Sublime Poetry is there, showing a collection of 33 paintings and 140 drawings collected from more than 60 lenders around the world, gilt frames and all.
It turned out we had an entirely free day on Easter Saturday, so we decided to grasp the opportunity and head to the museum, even with the high likelihood that a holiday weekend would be chaos at best and impossible at worst. We asked AI what would be best time, and it (?) suggested morning and was 100% correct: we took an early morning train to New York and breezed right in. As we were leaving two hours later, it was starting to get crowded and the line to get in was long.
I have a certain amount of performance anxiety in art museums. Even though I have audited several art history courses, I am always afraid I am moving too quickly, missing the nuance, not seeing things “right.” And that may all be true. But it didn’t stop me from being blown away by the sheer beauty of the Raffaello’s paintings, and the relationship he depicted between Mary and a very chubby baby Jesus.
In particular, the colors grabbed me: the blues and greens and peaches and golds.
Even though they were created more than a half millennium ago, their beauty did not fail to move me, not in a “weren’t they clever so long ago?” way I generally look at things from the distant past, but in a gut-punch contemporary way. And to think Raffaello created all this in a short life lasting only 37 years.
Lurid trash? Hardly. Even if it’s not your thing, this is a show not to be missed. If you have any chance to get into New York before June 28, grab it. I guarantee you will not throw up.
Gigi's Italia 