Palette

I hung out with my mother last week. Not the physical one, the one who did all the pushing and the puke-cleaning… my spiritual one, the one in the blue robes and the halo. They both have fairly tough jobs. All mothers do.

Here in the swamp, even churches are tourist attractions, and I just discovered that a painting with great emotional significance to me resides here. But this time I was able to see 'n' marvel without mortgaging a major organ. (It was free! NOTHING is free around here. The Mouse pretty much charges you to breathe within a fourteen mile radius of the city limits.) It is the original of Bartolome Murillo’s Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. If you’re Catholic, you’ve most likely run across a reproduction of this at some point in your life. There was one by the main office of my high school; there was one in the great hall of my college. Wherever I have made a major move in my life, this painting was there to greet me.

Our Lady is lifted on a silver crescent moon to Heaven with the help of optimally clothed cherubs. The cherubs, I could do without. Some of them are just floating heads, which is, to say the least, somewhat disconcerting. But what has always arrested me in this work is the expression on the Lady’s face, which is absolutely serene and loving. This is quintessential Catholic art, depicting the Virgin as holy and powerful, and yet yielding her entire being to the almighty omnipotence of God.

(That inspirational elephant crap-smeared painting that caused so much controversy about a decade ago at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, btw? Burned down in a warehouse fire last week. The Lady always sets things to right, even if it takes her a while.)

I have been moved to tears by art before, fully wrapped in the difference between an original and a facsimile. The fingerprints of the artist rest in the original, light touches of DNA poured into the work. There is no glossiness in the original of Assumption, the uneven whorls of the oil glowing on the canvas. I leaned into the painting as closely as the guardropes allowed me, standing over the shoulder of its creator over a space of nearly four hundred years. It was rough and it was uneven and it was breathtaking.

I examined it from every angle, tipping my head, walking back and forth. Everywhere were the marks of humanity, except for the Virgin’s face. The face of the Lady was smooth, was perfect and even. I cried and cried and stayed and stayed. They had to turn the lights out on me.

“Are you lost?” the curator said when they kicked me out.

“Almost always,” I said.

I do, however, have a rising glow to aim for.