Art is sometimes said to be an act of revelation, so today I'd like to exploit that notion, and engage in some shameless public confession. I'm going to reveal to you a piece of my secret history. My story is about my brief but unforgettable courtship and intimacy with one of the world's most beautiful, most famous, and most mysterious women. I'm going to tell you about my date with the Mona Lisa.
It happened long ago, in 1963. I was a student living in Washington, D.C., when word came that Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa would be coming to town. She'd be on loan from the Louvre in Paris, and would be displayed for our cultural edification at the National Gallery of Art downtown on the Mall.
Now, when I heard about her imminent arrival, I resolved right away to go and see this famous woman in person. Why? Was it because of my expertise in Renaissance portraiture? No, it wasn't. I didn't have any expertise in Renaissance portraiture. Was it because of my interest in the Italian painterly technique of sfumato, an interplay of light and shadow that is so beautifully employed in this work, and that is the ultimate source of its great, great fame? No. If I'd heard the term sfumato back then, I might have guessed that it was a flavor of Italian ice cream. Was it because I wanted to examine first-hand the theory that the Mona Lisa is actually a self-portrait in drag by a notoriously cryptic, gay painter who loved puzzles? I actually wish that had been the reason, but that remarkable theory was not to be enunciated for many years. I wish we had time to pursue it today.
No, I knew one thing about the Mona Lisa back then: It exemplified Great Art. Said who? It would not have occurred to me to ask such a question. The Mona Lisa--La Giocanda--was and is universally recognized as one of the world's great artistic achievements. There were people who knew such things: teachers, critics, historians, curators. They had training, education, experience, sensibility. Did I? These people established the rules of the cultural game, and set the standards and parameters of its discourse. They bore the burden of recognizing the condition of art. I was their student, and acknowledged their authority. If I had any pretentions to attaining even a minimal level of cultural literacy, and to claim someday the status associated with such knowledge, then it was up to me to get on a bus headed downtown, and to make my first art pilgrimage. I was, in other words, your perfect middlebrow in the making, adjusting my cultural expectations to a highbrow elite, to whom I granted status and authority.
When I got off that bus and approached the National Gallery, I was confronted by quite an extraordinary sight. Indeed, I was to begin learning an important--if unexpected--lesson about culture, fame, status, and art well before I ever got into the building.
I'll tell you what I encountered, and the lessons I learned, in a moment. But first, let's set the stage for my date with Signora Giocanda. Let's place this historic rendezvous in its proper, historic context.
Now, you know what I'm doing there: I'm an art pilgrim. And you know more or less what the Mona Lisa is doing there: De Gaulle loaned her to Kennedy. But a more interesting question involves the National Gallery of Art: What is it doing there? Why is there such a thing as the National Gallery in the first place?
We take such places entirely for granted now; no self-respecting town is without its municipal collection of artworks. But collections of such artifacts, both public and private, are a relatively recent phenomenon in history. They have their origin in the Reformation, when, after a period of iconoclasm, the Western relationship to such imagery underwent a great change, from religious to secular.
You probably suppose that these temples to art exist to display and preserve acknowledged art masterpieces. Sure: That's true as far it goes. But their original purpose may be said to have been the protection of art, not merely from the ravages of time, but from the likes of me.
After all, where had I first encountered the words, "Mona Lisa"? It wasn't from perusing the learned works of sensitive aesthetes: It was in the lyrics of a hit song. That song wasn't Nat King Cole's 1940s ballad, either; it was the 1950s rockabilly remake of the Cole ballad, screamed by Conway Twitty at at least three times the speed of Nat King Cole's version.
In fact, the 19th century in America witnessed a great struggle between Leonardo Da Vinci and Conway Twitty. That is, between a culture of learned aesthetic contemplation inherited from the aristocratic court society of Europe, and a far more raucus, popular culture that began to assert itself in the days of Jackson administration.
In fact, the system of imitative fine arts as we know them--poetry, painting, music, drama, dance--was not even formulated until the late 18th century. People before then had very different ideas of what the arts constituted. It took a while to convince Americans.
There were many remarkable fronts in this struggle over the arts: including battles over the control of Shakespeare, the presentation of opera, and the approach to the display of art imagery. Among the most important players was a class of merchants who, once they'd made their money, determined to use their fortunes for the benefit of high culture. They established American business patronage, underwriting serious American painters, importing foreign objets d'art, and laying the groundwork for a tradition of social and cultural philanthropy that lives on to this day in such organizations as the Rockefeller Foundation, the Getty Trust, and the Aspen Institute.
Their attitude toward high culture has cast a long shadow. To quote the grocer Luman Reed, who when he died in the 1840s was supporting numerous painters and had become the first American to build a private gallery as a shrine to the cult of art, "The artists are my friends, and [my money] is the means of encouragement and support to better men than myself."
One of the fondest dreams of this class of philanthropists was the establishment of a National Gallery of Art, to be open free to the public. It would be a place of retreat and inspiration for the better classes, and even more important, it would be a source of edification and uplift to people like me, opening my eyes to true art in an appropriately somber, cathedral-like atmosphere.
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