Some of My Best Friends Are Paintings

Some of my best and oldest friends are paintings. They have accompanied me down the years. They lift my heart every time I see them. I never tire of them. They always remain fresh and new, as long as I allow them to refresh and renew me whenever we meet. Here are some of them.

Doña Isabel de Porcel

The Anglo-Saxons were wise. They didn’t speak of abstract, impersonal things like “vocabulary”. They spoke instead of concrete, personal things like “word hoards”. Vocabulary is for everyone. A word hoard is for each individual.

Each word that we know is a priceless gem. It enriches us. It gives us the means to communicate reality to ourselves and then to others. The more words that we have in our personal word hoard, the happier, healthier and wealthier we will be.

There are also other things that we know which are priceless gems, which enrich us, such as the songs we know, especially if we sing them, or the paintings that we admire, especially if we admire them often.

I would go so far as to say that some of my best and oldest friends are paintings. They have accompanied me down the years. They lift my heart every time I see them. I never tire of them. They always remain fresh and new, as long as I allow them to refresh and renew me whenever we meet.

Please permit me to introduce you to my gallery of friends.

The oldest of my friends is a neolithic cave painting of a rhinoceros which greets me as the first thing I see whenever I enter my office. It reminds me, as it reminded Chesterton, that our most ancient ancestors were as fully human as we are. They were artists who admired nature and were able to sub-create images of nature, sharing in the creativity of the Creator Himself. “Art is the signature of man,” Chesterton says. It is art that unites the cave man to the modern man. The paintings on the walls of the cave indicate the kinship of all humanity across the abyss of the ages in our shared love of beauty and our shared desire to depict that beauty through the God-given creative talents bestowed on us.

Downstairs in the dining room is a single star, a multi-coloured mosaic, a replica of a dazzling star on the ceiling of a fifth century chapel in Ravenna, home of Boethius, which I purchased as a souvenir when visiting the ancient Italian city. It was a way of plucking this extra-terrestrial flower and bringing it home with me as an offering to my wife. Ever since, it has consoled me as the Lady Philosophy consoled Boethius.

Wilton Diptych

Moving on almost a thousand years to the late fourteenth century, we find the Wilton Diptych, my favourite work of late medieval art, which shows King Richard II of England kneeling before the Virgin and Child who are surrounded by angels, one of whom holds aloft a St. George’s Cross flag. The king is presented to the Madonna and Child by three saints, St. John the Baptist (King Richard’s personal patron) and by two of the patron saints of England, St. Edward the Confessor and St. Edmund the Martyr. It illustrates the moment when the king had consecrated England as Our Lady’s Dowry. As an Englishman who honours Our Lady of Walsingham as England’s true queen, this glorious image kindles and rekindles my devotion to both the motherland and the Mother of Christ.

Madonna of the Carnation

When we get to the Renaissance and begin to consider the great art and artists of the Quattrocento, it is difficult to know where to start or finish. A personal favourite is Madonna of the Carnation, one of the earliest works by the great Leonardo da Vinci, which shows the Virgin, her face bathed in light, her eyes closed in prayer or perhaps looking down at the flower she is holding, as her Son reaches out toward the flower, his eyes meeting those of the viewer. The gaze of the Child invites us into the painting while his hand leads us to join the Virgin in contemplating the flower, the red carnation signifying the Incarnation and the Crucifixion. According to legend, red carnations sprang forth miraculously wherever Mary’s tears touched the earth as she wept for her Son. This legend, which was well-known in medieval culture and would surely have been known by Leonardo, is the probable etymological explanation for the carnation being named after the Incarnation. The flower serves, therefore, as the artist’s invitation to the viewer to contemplate the theological connection between the birth of Christ and his Crucifixion.

Leaving aside theology, and mindful of Alexander Pope’s problematic humanistic assertion that the proper study of mankind is man, I am happy to confess that some of my best friends are the portraits of people I have never known. As I write, I look across the room to two old friends, portraits I have known for many years. The first is the seventeenth-century portrait of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi by Domenichino and the other is Francisco Goya’s nineteenth century portrait of Doña Isabel de Porcel.

Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi

Domenichino’s portrait shows the priest holding an unfolded sheet of paper. The face offers friendship. The eyes are soft and warm and meet those of the viewer. There’s the barest suggestion of a smile. Yet I find myself drawn towards the paper he is holding, with is play of light and shade on the folds, and to the priest’s long, delicate fingers. By contrast, Goya’s Spanish beauty looks into the distance, remaining aloof from the viewer and retaining her distance. Adorned with black lace, she is quintessentially Keats’ “still unravish’d bride of quietness”.

I am blessed with so many friends that it becomes necessary to offer but fleeting introductions. Amongst the Pre-Raphaelites, there is Millais’ Mariana, arching her back as she stretches her aching muscles, resplendent in a blue velvet gown amidst fallen leaves. There is Rossetti’s sickly Beatrice, on the point of death, with Dante looking on from the shadows. There are Turner’s experiments in what would become known as impressionism and there are the French Impressionist paintings, of which Monet’s depiction of Rouen Cathedral in Full Sunlight is a particular favourite. The latter’s evocation of human art, built to the glory of God, baptized by God’s own light, speaks the language of the Logos Himself, even if such language was beyond the conscious intention of the artist.

Of twentieth century art, and more controversially perhaps, I have befriended some of Dali’s work, including his painting Spain, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, and his Impressions d’Afrique, which seems to express (post)modern alienation in a manner which Eliot encapsulates in The Waste Land. The latter of these two paintings held pride of place over my desk for many years but is now in storage downstairs. And that’s the happy problem with friends of this ilk. There are so many of them that we have neither time nor space to spend enough time with them. Whereas we might consider ourselves fortunate, at the time of our death, to count our true flesh-and-blood friends on only two hands, we can have a limitless number of friends in oil on canvas. Whenever we spend time with such friends, which should be often, we should thank God for the great blessings they bestow on us.

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The featured image is “Doña Isabel de Porcel” by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes. Other images are: “Richard II presented to the Virgin and Child by his Patron Saint John the Baptist and Saints Edward and Edmund (The Wilton Diptych),” and is the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons; “Madonna of the Carnation” by Leonardo da Vinci;  “Portrait of Monsignor Giovanni Battista Agucchi” by Domenichino. All are in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.