I gave a talk recently at Redeemer Christian Church in Amarillo entitled “How to Read a Painting.” Here is a link to the lecture, if you are interested:
In the talk I make some attempt to help people become better readers of paintings, but my real aim was to challenge people to become better beholders of beauty more generally. I wanted to show how learning to be a better reader of paintings can lead us to become better beholders of beauty, provided that we are willing to cultivate certain dispositions or virtues, reverence and receptivity among them.1
On the topic of beholding, I wish I would have encountered this book earlier, so that I could have incorporated some of her insights on the relationship between beholding and silence—Maggie Ross’s Writing the Icon of the Heart: In Silence Beholding. Her understanding of the relationship between interior silence and the ability to behold would have reiterated a point I tried to make in the talk—Beholding is deeper than looking, and silence, understood spiritually, is deeper than the absence of noise. More than that, Ross argues that true interior silence makes beholding possible.
Speaking of beholding and the virtues that make it possible, the Botticelli Annunciation I discussed in the lecture illuminates Mary’s receptivity to the Word of the Lord and her interior silence utterly. All the truly great paintings of the Annunciation capture in a particularly gripping way the virtues of reverence and receptivity. Another reason I wish I would have encountered Ross earlier is her discussion of annunciation as a larger spiritual pattern, where annunciations are something like epiphanies—
“Annunciations leave us with a sense of strangeness, for we cannot wrap our minds around what has happened. They cannot be circumscribed by concept or by the self-reflexive interpretation we call experience. They are too wonderful, they are beyond what we can ask or imagine, and in their wake life will never again be the same. Yet by welcoming this homely strangeness of God in beholding, we learn to welcome the strangeness of our neighbor, and, indeed, the strangeness of ourselves.”
There is a flip side to all of this that I would like to develop further at some point—as we grow in our ability to revere and receive beauty, we simultaneously grow in our capacity to recognize what is ugly. If we behold in silence, not just an exterior silence, but an interior silence, which is itself expansive and luminous, then we will begin to see how noisy and cacophonous much of the world is. Images especially are noisy, noisy with garish colors, with overdrawn features. But we are so deaf, we do not realize that such images practically scream at us. (I recognize the collision of the senses of hearing and seeing, but if Israel saw a voice at Sinai, as Exodus relates, then the mixing of the senses is not only justified but almost necessary.) They are noisy, but not just that. In fact when we recover even just a little bit of silence, even just a little bit of the capacity for beholding, we will begin to see just how ugly many of these images are.
It was a real treat to give this talk, but the real pleasure for me was the chance to hear my friend Seth Wieck talk about poetry. You can see his talk here:
- For more on reverence as a virtue, see this piece I wrote a while back for Mere Orthodoxy. In that piece, I discuss Dietrich von Hildebrand’s presentation of reverence as a virtue in his book The Art of Living. For the the talk I gave, I dipped back into von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics, where he also discusses reverence as virtue, but as it relates to the ability to perceive beauty.