A few weeks ago, on a sizzling Sunday afternoon in Washington, my family and I visited the cool Tennessee marble halls of the National Gallery of Art. There we encountered an extraordinary exhibit featuring the work of Antonio Canova, an Italian artist considered one of the great Neoclassical sculptors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The exhibit, entitled Canova: Sketching in Clay, features masterful examples of both the artist’s inspirational preparatory clay sculptures and his finished pieces hewn from marble. “In clay, Canova is a fiery romantic. In marble, he is an icy classicist,” wrote The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning art and architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, in a recent review.
Clay or marble, romantic or classic - my family and I found ourselves pausing to contemplate the soothing yet startling quality of Canova’s works. We repeatedly witnessed the remarkable ways in which each piece succeeded in achieving one of art’s foremost tasks: to unveil and amplify the beauty of life as it exists.
The National Gallery of Art’s Canova exhibit serves as an encouraging and refreshing reminder that if we look for it, we can indeed find art that conveys transcendent beauty and speaks to a significance beyond ourselves. We should applaud the curators who brought us such an exhibit.
But seeking beauty in art isn’t always a priority among contemporaries, who in some circles consider beauty too close a cousin of kitsch to take seriously.
In this postmodern era, prevailing attitudes about art often prioritize originality and expression at the expense of beauty - a value the ancients understood to be intrinsically intertwined with truth and goodness.
That’s tragic.
Future generations need opportunities to learn how to recognize, experience, and create artwork that emphasizes redemptive beauty, as a matter of philosophical and aesthetic literacy. Such an education would grant young people greater access to works of meaning and spiritual value, further enriching their lives.
“Our need for beauty is not something that we could lack and still be fulfilled as people. It is a need arising from our metaphysical condition, as free individuals, seeking our place in a shared and public world,” wrote philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. “We can wander through this world, alienated, resentful, full of suspicion and distrust. Or we can find our home here, coming to rest in harmony with others and with ourselves.”
Consider the following works of art by Canova and others and how they reveal beauty:
The terracotta sketch and finished marble masterwork above both feature Mary Magdalen in a grief-stricken posture of humility mourning her Savior’s death, a crucifix resting in her outstretched hands. The New Testament tells us how this devoted and repentant follower of Jesus of Nazareth was also the first to see the resurrected Christ.
Canova’s forms, as do other works of art that exemplify beauty, invite us to contemplate another person’s concerns and not just our own. Even those unfamiliar with Mary Magdalen’s story of repentance and redemption cannot help but be captured by the magnificent way in which the forms’ expressive roughness reminds us of the sculptor’s hand. Canova’s works convey powerful emotion scaffolded by knowledge, skill, and discipline achieved through study. His work communicates a distinctive message of love and hope in the midst of sorrow.
We witness the emergence of beauty from tragedy once again in Adam and Eve Mourning the Dead Abel. With a few skillful impressions, Canova creates a stirring and vivid portrayal of parental grief and the universal need for love, mercy, and justice. As Adam looks skyward pleading to God, Eve cradles her son’s head in futile comfort. In this sacred work, the originators of humankind mourn the loss of their youngest child, murdered by their first born. And we mourn what this first act of violence portends for humanity. Canova’s work overcomes the viewer with emotion and redemptive beauty.
Other artists show us such beauty, too.
In Old Woman Reading, Rembrandt takes “the flesh tints on an aging face and show how each one captures something of the life within, so that the formal harmony of the colours conveys the completeness and unity of the person” wrote Scruton. “In Rembrandt we see integrated character in a disintegrating body. And we are moved to reverence.” The artist captures the inner beauty of this elderly woman, perhaps a grandmother peering through her spectacles, immersed in the joy of reading. Her soul nurtures ours.
Albert Bierstadt seems to invite us to consider the majesty of nature and nature’s Creator. He invites us to contemplate our relationship to the sublime in the beauty of the mountains and natural terrain.
And there is more than one way to convey such beauty.
In Green Wheat Fields, Auvers, Vincent van Gogh offers the viewer an opportunity to experience his dynamic and imaginative vision of the French country landscape near the village of Auvers. We sense the artist’s creative presence through his purposeful and determined impasto brushstrokes and exuberant use of vibrant color. He shares the meaning he sees in the wheat fields and in his world. Van Gogh’s work holds as much beauty and power now as it did when he painted it well over a century ago. He has captured something true and beautiful about a simple path, sky, and field of grass.
Georgia O’Keeffe used scale and color to amplify the beauty of the unnoticed – in this case, the beauty of a white iris. “Artists remind us that despite the pain and ugliness in the world, something deeper exists,” wrote artist and philosopher Juliette Aristides, “a beauty that peeks through the drudgery of life, whispering that there is more just beneath the surface”. O’Keeffe’s meditation seems to explore both the iris’s spiritual and material nature.
Art that pursues the beautiful is about life. Scruton has argued “that the search for beauty is the search for home, for a place where you can be at home with yourself and with others, but in particular where you belong.”
At a time when so many young people seem to be struggling to find meaning and purpose, cultivating a sense of vision – the ability to identify, appreciate, and perhaps even reveal beauty in art– may help bring them just a little closer to finding goodness and truth.
That’s a journey of discovery that will bring each of us a little closer to home.
Until the next post,
Antonette