Slow Read: Week 4
The Frame
Different sites, differing sights
Chapter Three, “The Frame,” explores the different contexts in which we might encounter artworks and visual culture: in their original location, in museums, and in digital spaces. It actually was not in my first proposal for the book, but I’m glad I decided to develop and include it in the final manuscript.
Plus, it gave me the opportunity to wax on and on about Caravaggio’s The Deposition, which is one of my favorite paintings by the volatile seventeenth century Italian artist. The original painting, completed between 1600 and 1604, can now be seen in the Vatican Museum’s Pinacoteca. However, a faithful copy still hangs in the work’s original location: above the altar in a small chapel in the Chiesa Nuova (Santa Maria in Vallicella) in Rome. And, you can find a hi-res image online, which means you can zoom in on Nicodemus’s wrinkled forehead or the wound in Christ’s side. Encountering the painting in each of these spaces offers different possibilities and limitations.
In the dim light of the Chiesa Nuova, the figures in The Deposition seem to emerge from a niche at the back of the chapel. Although visitors today cannot enter the chapel itself, we can see how the painting is integrated into the church’s architecture and more easily imagine how it functioned when used as part of the Mass. The impact of Nicodemus breaking the “fourth wall” of the painting and offering me Christ’s body above the altar gave me chills.
Then again, seeing the painting in the Vatican Museum meant that I could get so much closer to the canvas than I could in Chiesa Nuova. I could fixate on the wound on Christ’s side and more easily pick out the plant growing in the bottom left corner. In the context of a museum, it was also very obvious that Caravaggio’s approach to painting biblical narratives diverged from that of his immediate contemporaries. The perfectly smooth, poised bodies of earlier 16th century paintings are challenged by Caravaggio’s dramatic light and earthy figures.
But the scale of the canvas and the museum’s lighting also meant that I couldn’t really see the faces of the standing figures. To do that, I pulled up the Vatican’s website or Wikimedia Commons, and zoom in. Now I can see Mary’s weathered face as she weeps over her son and the surprisingly direct brushstroke that articulates Nicodemus’s calf muscle. I can look bit by bit at the pieces, in a way that I could not at the museum or in the chapel.
The recognition that all of these frames offer us something and keep us from something is really important to me. As someone who didn’t get to see a major art museum until I was in my twenties or travel internationally until my thirties, I wanted to honor the ways that seeing art in print or digitally can be a worthwhile experience on its own terms.
And to celebrate that, here’s a coloring page of the top half of The Deposition.
Click on the image to go to a downloadable pdf
But it’s important for us to de-naturalize that way of looking, too. Pay attention to your embodiment as you scroll and zoom, but also make opportunities to encounter artworks in person, whether in museums or in their site-specific locations.
A challenge for you this week or in the weeks to come might be to go to an art museum or a local gallery and give yourself time to pay attention to an artwork as an object in space. Then, take stock of how the museum is shaping your encounter with the artwork. Or, look around your own domestic space and consider how you (or the people you share space with) are telling a story with the images that surround you.
If Chapter Two wanted to emphasize that we never come to an artwork as a blank slate, Chapter Three wants you to realize that the artwork never exists in a blank space, either.
