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People often talk about how wonderful an artist is when an artist can represent something just as it is in nature.
But I think the artistic power shows best
when an artist is able to convince me of something that I
don’t know about, that I haven’t seen, that
I can’t have seen. This plaque
once stood at the top of a large cross in a monastery until the French Revolution, when the
wealth of the churches was appropriated by the state,
and works of art in metal were sold off
by weight to be used by local smiths. One
seems to have been unable to throw it all into the melting pot,
and set aside some things that he must have found particularly beautiful or powerful.
As a work of art that’s
isolated from its original context
we can see the delicacy
that was involved in the very process. The artist starts with
a copper plaque. He gouged out
a little trough, and that holds the glass powder, which is
then heated and it fuses to make this painted surface.
There’s a range of blues, and sometimes you have
two blues within a single trough.
The touches of gold are the little separations between those troughs, where the copper was left at the surface level.
There’s a heavenly light that emanates
from that gilded surface.
The angels are paired but they’re not twins. Their wings
touch each other, so they’re a team in a way.
Each is hovering over a
cloud. So what are they doing?
Each of them swings a censer.
The angel at the right holds up one hand,
almost like a stop sign. They’re bearing
witness to a terrible event, the crucifixion of Jesus.
In Christian belief, Jesus is the son of God, Himself,
so wouldn’t you think that heavenly beings would want to stop this gruesome execution? Well, no, they’re not.
We think of people as having all the blood drained out of them when
they’re upset and the dark hollows of people’s eyes. We’re seeing in the angels what
we see in one another when we’re in difficult times. And yet,
we can sense that they have a notion of the bigger picture that we might not know.