That's a LOT of Money for a Painting

Salvator Mundi, ca. 1500

Since every art critic and those who think they are art critics have weighed in on the recent sale of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi. I thought I’d add my observations. Although the majority of scholars who actually know something about his work have decided that it is actually by him, some have wondered if the mystery buyer has paid $450 million for a hack job by a second rate student.

Critics have described the painting as flat and lifeless, noting that Leonardo favored motion in his paintings. It is true that Leonardo favored motion in his paintings. He like to paint people at an angle, with their upper bodies and faces turned to face the viewer, such as with the Mona Lisa. What these critics are not taking into account is that this painting is different from the others that have survived from Leonardo. This is a devotional work. At the time it was considered irreverent to paint a figure head-on because that pose was reserved for Christ. Albrecht Durer’s famous self portrait is a good example of a secular take on this. Painted at the same time as Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, Durer’s self portrait mimics the pose reserved for Christ. He even paints his own hair loose, as paintings of Christ often depict. Durer had an enormous self-image and he apparently needed a pose normally reserved for the divine to contain his greatness. Durer also knew how to paint motion, and often did. Does that mean that his self portrait wasn’t by him because it wasn’t his normal way of painting a portrait? Of course not.

Durer self portrait, 1500

The media have issued a torrent of words, speculating on the allure of a Leonardo. Obviously, he’s the most famous artist of any generation. Even people who know nothing about art recognize the Mona Lisa. They speculate that with the hype a number of years ago about the Da Vinci Code ( a work that is totally worthless and was a shrewd way to make lots of money) and the excitement of a new Leonardo appearing after centuries of obscurity, people just can’t help themselves.

One factor, the most obvious in my opinion, I have already hinted at above, is that the allure is in the fact that it’s a painting of Jesus. Why this? We have to go back to the root  of religious art. In religious iconography, an image of Jesus, let’s say, has a connection to Jesus himself. The image participates in the divine nature. This is the essence of Orthodox icons. An icon is a window to the reality beyond it.

An image of Jesus, in the minds of many, participates in the nature of Jesus himself. Most art critics do not understand the nature of religious experience, and this wouldn’t naturally occur to them. I believe that beyond being a painting by Leonardo, it is a painting of Jesus by Leonardo. Put the two together and you’ve got a team that can’t be beat.

So, let’s sit back, pop open a cold one and wait for the buyer to be revealed, and whether he or she will donate it to a museum or put it over the fireplace in the recreation room next to the deer trophy.

Dickens, Child Labor, and Shoe Polish in a Bottle: Why Nothing is as Simple as it Seems

Many objects can become a window into the past when thought of as an individual object rather than “just another old .......”  A case in point is this small stoneware bottle. The bottle originated in England, and dates from the period 1817-1834 when a duty known as the Excise Tax was imposed on a number of consumer products including ink, soap and blacking. Blacking was made from the soot of lampblack, the carbon left over from the burning of lamps. It was an oily soot that tended to stick to whatever surface it was applied to, and was used for blacking the iron surfaces of stoves, and for polishing boots. Blacking came in two forms, liquid and paste. The liquid was sold in bottles such as mine. The paste was sold in round flat tins, similar to the containers still used for shoe polish.

Famously, Charles Dickens went to work in 1823 at the age of twelve in a blacking factory in London after his father was sent to prison for debt. He told his biographer, John Forster, what it was like to work in such a factory:

The blacking-warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of the way, at old Hungerford Stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with rats. Its wainscoted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase, and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and the dirt and decay of the place, rise up visibly before me, as if I were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of paste-blacking; first with a piece of oil-paper, and then with a piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as a pot of ointment from an apothecary's shop. When a certain number of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to paste on each a printed label, and then go on again with more pots. Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down-stairs on similar wages.

Could Dickens have dressed up my bottle as a child? Perhaps. Obviously nobody knows, but many children such as he worked in appalling conditions. Child labor was still very much the norm in early Victorian England, and it took the work of many people, including Dickens, to make the public aware of this injustice. The textile industry was probably the largest to employ child labor, with thousands of children employed in tying up loose ends and often losing hands or fingers in the process. Child labor laws were slow in their evolution. A Royal Commission recommended in 1833 that children aged 11–18 should work a maximum of 12 hours per day, children aged 9–11 a maximum of eight hours, and children under the age of nine were no longer allowed to work. That seems like small comfort to our modern eyes.

Child labor is still present in much of the world. Unless a consumer is willing to do research on the origin of products that they buy they may not know that the clothing their are wearing might have been made in a sweatshop in Southeast Asia, for instance. The buyers of boot blacking in Victorian England probably didn’t give a second thought as to how their shoe polish was produced, so they bought it with a clear conscience.

Yet Another Shooting and Yet Another Reflection on Violence

The shooting at a Baptist church in Texas has many wondering if churches are safe any more. The 26 people killed are 26 too many. What compounds this horrific loss is that the murders occurred in a place that reasonable people view as sacred. It was a place where couples were married, where families said goodbye to their loved ones, where children learned to pray and sing. I can’t imagine how the members of that church view their church now. It has been violated in the most grotesque and cruel way possible.

I despair that after shootings such as the recent massacre in Las Vegas and now in Sutherland Springs, Texas, that anything will be done to control access to guns by dangerous people. The weapons that are available boggle the mind with their capacity for large scale violence. I would have thought that the Sandy Hook massacre would turn the tide, but it did not.

Church shootings have happened before, and unfortunately, they will happen again. This particular instance is partly the result of a tragic oversight in which the shooter’s dishonorable discharge from the Air Force for domestic violence was not entered into the Federal database for people who are prohibited from purchasing firearms. It’s possible that he might have been able to acquire guns illegally had that prohibition been in place, but it’s impossible to say. This was a tragic failure. The shooter was prone to violence, nearly killing his infant stepson by striking him so hard that he cracked his skull. 

Kelley was a violent person. He chose to shoot up the church in Sutherland Springs because his in-laws were members there. Ironically, they were not present on Sunday morning, but that did not prevent Kelley from spraying the interior of the church with bullets, killing 26 and wounding 20 more.

It is not the fault of the church that they were not ready for such an attack. No church is. This is no reason in the world why a church could possibly anticipate such an attack. There have been church shootings in the past. The shooting at Emmanuel AME Church in Charlestown, South Carolina comes to mind. That particular shooting, in which 9 people were killed including the pastor and several elderly women and men. That shooting was racially based. The shooter, Dylan Roof, wanted to start a race war and has been unapologetic. He targeted the church, presumably, because he knew that African Americans would be there. He also knew that a church such as Emmanuel AME Church was at the heart of the black community.

Surveys indicate that a bias against religion accounts for very few shootings. They are more often the result of mental illness, a perceived lack of welcome on the church’s part, and notably, domestic disputes. A church is a soft target. By nature churches seek to be welcoming and open to all.

The Texas attorney general said that what is needed is more guns in church. In Texas it is legal to have guns in churches. There have been suggestions in social media that churches need to have bouncers and install metal detectors. I can’t disagree enough. My own gut feeling is that we cannot afford to change course and turn our church into a fortress. It is a good conversation to have about how we might handle difficult situations during a church service, but not to fortify the church. That is not how we are called to be Christ’s disciples.

In short, I feel that we are safe. It is impossible to prepare for an attack such as this, and I don’t believe it will happen. As I’ve indicated above, churches are targets for attacks not because they are churches, but because of other factors. We are called to be a community open and welcoming to all, and we will endeavor to fulfill that calling.