The Pleasures of Bewilderment
My story with Giorgione’s painting The Tempest is now twenty-six years old. I saw it for the first time when I was nineteen—not the canvas itself, but a slide projection on a wall in an art history course. I had never heard of the artist and knew little a
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My story with Giorgione’s painting The Tempest is now twenty-six years old. I saw it for the first time when I was nineteen — not the canvas itself, but a slide projection on a wall in an art history course. I had never heard of the artist and knew little about Italian Renaissance painting, but for some reason the picture caused a physical response in me — a genuine tremor of amazement. I fell in love with it then and there, in the forty seconds before the professor clicked to the next slide. But why? What happened to me? I am not alone in feeling an almost electrical connection to a painting. I know any number of people who travel great distances to see a picture they have longed to see, who stand before a flat rectangular canvas covered with paint and have what they deem “an important experience.” It’s possible that to understand a moment like mine with The Tempest, we would have to know more about vision and the brain. It’s also possible that I would have to understand my own psychology better. It’s notable that although I didn’t retain a word the professor said about the painting, I remembered the painting itself. In fact, the image seemed to burn itself into my memory with an almost disturbing clarity. As a child, I drew obsessively and tried my hand at watercolors and oils. I also looked at paintings that I found in books here and there, but my interest was haphazard. I could recognize works that had entered the popular consciousness — Renoirs, Van Goghs, Matisses, and Picassos. I liked looking at paintings, but I had never had a truly “transcendent” moment until I saw that reproduction of The Tempest in my college class in Minnesota. There is a mystique that surrounds art in our culture that we all recognize, but which is a phenomenon separate from my experience with Giorgione’s image. Two years ago, my daughter and I stood in line for an hour to get into the Louvre. In that museum, it’s nearly impossible to catch a glimpse of The Mona Lisa. First of all, it’s covered by thick glass, and second, a crowd blocks your view. I saw people snapping pictures of the painting, or having photos taken of them beside it. As everyone knows, Leonardo’s portrait of Mrs. Giaconda is a painting few people can actually see anymore. For reasons obscure to me, the painting has become not so much a thing of greatness as a sign of it. Like an image of Garbo or Monroe, Leonardo’s picture has been turned into cultural currency and is now a circulating icon of superlatives— the greatest, the most mysterious, the most valuable painting in the world. This cultural weight has doomed the lady to her twentieth-century mustaches.
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GIORGIONE The Tempest c. 1503– 04
the pleasures of bewilderment
It could have happened to The Tempest. The painting has been confounding art historians for hundreds of years, but for some reason it was spared that fate. Every painting is still. It doesn’t move. It is usually a rectangle that mimics the architecture of a window. Its very existence implies a spectator, just as a book imp
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