Anyone who has visited a public art gallery can appreciate the acuteness of observation in one of my favorite Onion articles, "Whole Museum Visit Spent Feeling Guilty About Moving On From Paintings":
Visitors to the Art Institute of Chicago reported Saturday that their trip to the celebrated museum was entirely dominated by the guilt they felt for not lingering long on any one painting before moving on to the next. "I know these are masterpieces, and you’re supposed to let their brilliance wash over you while you contemplate their significance, but I really couldn’t make myself stand there for more than a few seconds," said museum-goer Vernon Bailey, admitting he spent more time reading the placards describing each painting than he did looking at the art itself. … "What’s wrong with me?"
One of the things "wrong with" Vernon—and with all of us in 2015—is that the works of art we are looking at have been ripped from their original contexts. For the earlier pieces, this context was almost never a "museum," a rare concept in early modernity. Moreover, the works have been jammed together in great concentration by well-meaning curators attempting to tell some sort of story with their progression, generally a story about the progress of art itself—something that would have been low on a list of considerations for the original patrons.
Finally, the original audience would have access to a rich frame of reference for appreciating the stereotypes presented to them by the artists. This is especially true of religious paintings. Both the artist and viewer were working with a completely different intellectual toolkit than ours. Consider the case of one common subject of early modern paintings: Annunciation scenes that depict the moment when the archangel Gabriel informs Mary that she is to be the mother of Christ. Any decent collection of Gothic and Renaissance art will have quite a few of these up on the walls, and for those looking at these images during their centuries of origin, the evaluation and enjoyment of any individual example would have relied heavily on popular theology.
For one thing, what moment of the Annunciation did a given painting depict? The fifteenth century viewer would have been familiar with a four- or five-part set of stereotypes: There was the moment of Conturbatio during which the Virgin appears disturbed or shocked; the Cogitatio as she contemplates the unexpected news; the Interrogatio when she (reasonably) has a few questions for Gabriel; and the Humiliatio as she accepts her lot. (Some sequences would also include the Meritatio, depicting the Virgin flourishing in virtue following Gabriel’s departure.)
In this way, paintings, stained glass, and reliefs could be "the Bible of the illiterate," but also enjoyable illustrations of narrative moments for the educated, who would have taken pride in their exercise of connoisseurship regarding the appropriateness of this or that representation of a given scene, some of which came directly from biblical texts, and some from the traditional elaborations inspired by the often elliptical Bible. One story that was the object of a great deal of such elaboration was the account of St. Matthew’s mysterious Magi, three portraits of whom by Peter Paul Rubens are currently on display at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., brought together for the first time in 130 years.
The biblical account of the journey to Bethlehem of these mysterious wise men of the East is brief, related over a dozen verses. Much is left out, including what precisely a "Magi" is and precisely how many visited. Subsequent commentaries and traditional texts filled in these gaps. The Magi were wise kings; there were three of them; they had names—Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar—and were thought to have hailed from India, Persia, and Arabia respectively, or perhaps from Africa, Asia, and Europe; they were thought to represent the three ages of Man; their gifts, which actually are detailed in Matthew, took on their own significances: the gold a tribute fit for a king, the frankincense signifying worship and reverence, and the myrrh, used in embalming, foreshadowing death. A multistage narrative of visual tropes came into being, supplying further details of Magi’s journey to and escape—now conducted by sea, via the Tarsus of Jonah—from the Holy Land.
The upshot of all of this was that foreign kings representing the East in aggregate recognized the birth of the King of kings, outwitting and escaping the Roman-backed ruler of Judah who wanted to kill the young potentate of the universe. The original account and its subsequent elaborations make clear the super-regional and super-national aspirations of Christianity. Some version of the above details would have been part of the mental architecture of anyone appreciating an artist’s depiction of the Magi on a catacomb wall, wood panel, or, later, canvas. Even in Rubens’s 17th century Antwerp the story was immensely popular, and the commission for the three paintings brought together by the National Gallery came from the youngest of three brothers from a wealthy publishing family who had been named Gaspar, Melchior, and Balthasar by their parents.
Rubens, who painted numerous scenes of the adoration of the Magi during his career, took a highly unusual step with these paintings in making a separate, stand-alone portrait for each king (the National Gallery’s curators suggest that such a move may have been "without precedent"). We may speculate that there was something entirely mundane behind the decision—say, a request from the patron based on the fact that each of the three brothers might have wanted his own canvas. But the decision is also consonant with the broad, slow movement of Western art away from narrative and towards depiction for its own sake. Whatever the cause, the result was three splendid, soft, intimate portraits of men who look both proud and yet familiar, each captured in a moment of humiliatio.
Full credit goes to the National Gallery for bringing these startling paintings together. The NGA owns Melchior, having brought Balthasar in from Antwerp, and Gaspar from Puerto Rico. But the fact that the exhibit will be up from the period of Easter through the summer months—rather than, say, the Christmas season—emphasizes the total divorce that has occurred between any spiritual universe that once attached to paintings of religious scenes and the work of a contemporary art institution. There is something magnificent about a place like the National Gallery, but also something sterile, as though one is looking at colorful insects impaled on needles in an entomologist’s lab.