Seeing Things

The escape.

Joachim Patinir, Rest on the Flight into Egypt

This is the first installment in a series of posts on perception.

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“The art of Joachim Patinir revels in a world that is earthly, visible, concrete,” observes the Spanish writer Antonio Muñoz Molina at the start of “Imagining the Real,” a lecture celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the Museo del Prado in Madrid.

You must stand for a long time before his Rest on the Flight into Egypt to grasp each of the minute details the painter has gathered into the rather small rectangular space of the panel — if he has not rather scattered them as if by chance, as if merely recording what anyone might have seen by walking through the Flemish countryside, the woods and fields, the pastures, scattered farmsteads and village houses with roofs of plaited straw. You must stand before the painting for a long time, thinking you have noticed everything, then going back to glimpse some crucial detail that had gone completely unseen. Nearly everything about the picture would have been familiar to its viewer. Its size, the scale of the figures and the precision of its every detail indicate without a doubt that it was made to be seen up close, as part of a small altar in the chapel of a private home. Its contemplation would have been as intimate and private an act as reading a book of hours and savoring its pictures. One would have lingered over each visual detail as over the beauty and depth of a Biblical phrase or the ornate lettering of those old illuminated volumes that were written by hand and vanished with the coming of the printing press.

When viewed at a glance, Patinir’s painting presents a simple scene, illustrating a seemingly peaceful moment during the Holy Family’s escape from Herod’s Massacre of the Innocents. Mary sits in a small clearing in the woods, nursing a balky baby Jesus, as Joseph carries a bowl of milk or porridge up the hill toward her. Their donkey nibbles grass.

But the longer and more closely you look at the work, the more unsettling it becomes. In that fantastical castle on the left side of the canvas, animals are being slaughtered in a pagan ritual overseen by a goblin with the face of a rat. In the bucolic village on the right, Herod’s soldiers are murdering children and terrorizing other townsfolk. In the distance, a man squats in front of a house, defecating on the ground. The painting, looked at with care, loses its simplicity and becomes a work of theology, offering a symbolic rendering of Christianity as an escape from a history of violence and depravity.

“The age of redemption has begun, but the ancient world endures,” explains Muñoz. “The fate of the pagan gods is starting to be fulfilled. The idols of Heliopolis tumble from their pedestals and lie in pieces on the ground as the Holy Family passes by.”

Gazing at this kind of painting is in itself a religious experience. It teaches its viewers to attend to the world’s visible appearances in order to discover what lies hidden underneath and to perceive within the alluring spectacle of reality the ominous signs of a demonic realm.

But the painting is also a work of art, and gazing at it is before anything else an aesthetic experience — a joyful one that brings the viewer into closer touch with the world as it is, not with what’s hidden but with what’s there. Here, too, the longer and more closely you look at the work, the richer and more encompassing the experience becomes. Theology “fades in the stark illumination of the real.”

There is something so delicate yet so unyielding to the actuality of ordinary things, the humble trappings of this family of refugees. I never tire of looking at that wicker basket, plaited with such skill, with its carefully tightened lid to keep the food from spilling, a lid to which a small hasp has been added for greater caution. Or of looking at that gourd with the small tin cup dangling from a string, so that the Child may drink, or at the satchel that St. Joseph will carry on one side, or at the staff that he will lean upon when they resume their journey. Each object has required of the painter a capacity for absolute perception in both eye and hand.

“Our eyes crave more reality,” Muñoz writes. “We want to learn about the actual things in ordinary people’s lives, the tools they used. As an antidote to the fantastical visions of the saints, or to the deeds of generals, the arrogance of those in power, the lust of mythological divinities, one wants to look, for instance, at that group of peasants tilling, sowing, harvesting the field.” The artist offers the viewer a new way of seeing the real, a way of seeing that is also a means of escaping the real.

In “Against Interpretation,” the 1964 essay that made her name as a critic, Susan Sontag railed against the digging of “meanings” out of works of art. She felt that interpretation, by turning art into “content” that can be parsed intellectually, drains it of its wild, unruly vitality, makes it “manageable, conformable.” Interpretation “is the revenge of the intellect upon art [and] upon the world.” Sontag was writing about her own time, but her words cut even more deeply today, when works of art are routinely subjected to cultural and political interrogations and the aesthetic sense is treated with distrust, if not disgust.

Muñoz’s appreciation of Patinir’s painting suggests that the interpretive sense and the aesthetic sense need not be antagonists, so long as the interpretive remains subordinate to the aesthetic. He offers a model for looking at a work of art that is attuned at once to surface and symbol, a mode of contemplation that is comfortable with the ambiguity inherent in the phrase “seeing things.” Through his own imagining of the world, the artist opens the world to the workings of the viewer’s imagination as well. “Out in the woods,” Muñoz writes, turning his attention back to the picture,

a man with a hurdy-gurdy moves among the trees as if skipping or dancing. Hurdy-gurdy players turn up in stories, paintings and woodcuts as characters who are at once wicked and alluring, traveling musicians capable of stirring up revelry or madness, tellers of tales, conduits for a music whose monotonous and mesmerizing drone accompanies the village dances. There is something of the pilgrim and the jester to the hurdy-gurdy player, who here dances like a parasite among the trees while nearby the peasants struggle at their grueling work — a work whose fruit is forever in question, since the birds lie in wait for the fresh-sown seed, and at any given moment, the ordered, inalterable tempo of the seasons and the labors of the field can be shattered by one of those tempests of misfortune that follow in the wake of armored men, mercenaries, harbingers of war.

But then, looking still more closely at the painting, Muñoz realizes he’s made a mistake. What he imagined being there is not what’s really there. The man in the woods is not carrying a hurdy-gurdy. He’s carrying a crossbow, and he’s getting ready to fire it. “He, too, is one of the invaders.”