Looking beyond the surface

A visit to the Museum of Fine Arts, which has nothing to do with neoliberalism

Lately I’ve been thinking about surfaces and depths. At art museums, I’m always fascinated by the way a flat canvas can create a three-dimensional world, draw us in, and invite us to muse about the larger world beyond the artwork, the artist who created it, the material techniques involved in producing it, the histories and relationships behind the subject matter, and much more.

At the MFA a few weeks ago, I wandered into the museum’s magnificent collection of Northern Renaissance paintings. This is a period I love. I’ve always thought (somewhat simplistically) that the Italian Renaissance was about depth – the discovery of linear perspective – while the Northern Renaissance was all about surface: those textured fabrics, luminous pearls, translucent windows. (Think of Vermeer.) Here is the painting that welcomed visitors into the gallery and brought me to a standstill.

It’s a painting of Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin, by the Dutch painter Rogier van der Weyden, painted in 1435-40. He’s the painter who created one of my favorite paintings ever, the stunning Descent from the Cross in the Prado.

But if the Descent from the Cross is a public diorama set on a gold background, as precisely staged as a dance number in a Broadway musical, the painting at the MFA is powerfully intimate. It’s about the connection of three humans to each other. Some people imagine that it’s a self-portrait, and with good reason. Saint Luke was the patron saint of artists, and he is depicted here as a human, with greying hair and stubble, about the same age the painter would have been at the time. This painting celebrates his gaze – the gaze of the artist which is also the gaze of the worshipper.

He’s pensive, patient, careful, and devoted. We’re drawn to his eye, then down to his page, where he has begun his sketch.

And here is the object of his gaze.

She is luminous, clearly divine even without a halo. And then we look where she is looking, at the baby (okay a somewhat goofy, ill-proportioned Renaissance baby) who is gazing back at her, his toes curled with enthusiasm.

The painting captures three different kinds of looking. The looking of an artist – trying to memorize and recreate the physical contours of a face. (It’s also a reverential, religious beholding: he is on his knees on a pillow as he beholds the divine.) The looking of the mother – with adoration and perhaps a little sadness. (She knows the fate her son will meet.) And the looking of the child at his mother – utter delight and innocence. Both artist and baby look at the Virgin – the glowing focus of the painting. As viewers, our eyes are drawn into this emotional triangle of mother, child, and onlooker.

But this human drama is just one part of the work of art.

Behind the central subjects of the painting is another scene.

It’s in the background, but it’s such a vivid background that your eye is drawn to it and you can’t look away. At the very center of the painting stand a pair of people with their backs to us, looking away.

They are almost a painting within a painting, framed by columns, looking out of a walled garden. They are watching a delicious pastoral view: a sinuous river, a walled medieval town, clouds scudding through a blue sky, and green hills on the horizon. They are doing yet another kind of looking – perhaps they are observing with pleasure, or perhaps one of them is asking the other for directions. And once you notice them, you join them in their gaze, looking around at the miniature world laid out beyond them, which none of our three main characters are paying any attention to.

All these different gazes, all these different ways of looking return me to myself – for I am the looker who is looking at them. What kind of looking am I doing? Is my observation an act of devotion? An act of love? An act of sadness? An act of appreciation? Am I looking for direction? The painting invites us to think about the meaning of art and our relationship to it.

All of which is to say, I was pulled into the painting, lured into the depth it evoked.

And then I looked more closely at the textures and surfaces that I typically associate with paintings of this period. Look at the sumptuous red and gold brocade with its green velvet trim, hanging over the Virgin, creating a cloth of honor over her majesty. You want to reach out and touch it.

And look at the fabric gathered at her feet, with its folds and embroidery and ribbon-edging.

While we’re at it, look at the tile underfoot.

And look at the light coming through the stained glass windows, decorated with the signs of the zodiac. Here’s one of them, which sits at the very top center of the painting, like the image of the sun shining over the entire scene. (Sorry for the poor quality of some of these images.)

There’s obviously lots of religious symbolism in this painting. (Did you notice the ox under Luke’s desk?)

But it’s also a painting that is materially anchored in the time and place of its creation.

The physical objects depicted in this painting – the fabric, the ribbons, the tile, the glass – represented the wealth of Brussels, a prosperous port town in 15th century Europe where Van der Weyden lived and worked.

The town’s economic mainstay was the export of luxury fabrics, and it was connected to the rest of Europe through a network of trade and commerce along the Senne River. The fabrics clothing Mary likely came from Brussels, the glass probably came from Venice, and no doubt observers of the time would have recognized other items that had traveled from afar, the status symbols of the age. Like an image today that depicted someone wearing a Patagonia jacket with a Macbook on their lap and a Peloton in the background. The artist’s work was made possible by the wealth generated through this network of trade, and his painting celebrates the globalization of that period.

The painting was extremely popular in its day. Van der Weyden himself made three more paintings based on it, which can be found at museums around the world. His work went viral.

I wanted to touch the surfaces. I wanted to visit the depths. I longed to step into the walled garden and explore the streets of the fairytale town. And all this from a two-dimensional piece of wood that somehow fused the power of art, money, and divinity into a single image.