We’ve seen a lot of helpful suggestions of ways people who are stuck indoors also can avoid dying of boredom, which may be the next great American challenge. They include
Then there is the Art Institute of Chicago, one of the many fine museums that maintain robust online collections. It is closed, but some of its current El Greco show, “Ambition and Defiance,” can be viewed online, including his Assumption of the Virgin. It was a showcase for El Greco, over 13 feet tall and almost seven feet wide, so at least some of the effect is going to be lost viewed at home.
Masterpieces have been available on the internet and in good resolution for some time. One of our favorites is the Mérode Altarpiece, which is on permanent physical display at the Met Cloisters museum in New York City (also closed for the pandemic). It is a surprisingly small, even modestly sized painting. That may be the first thing you notice when you walk into the room where it’s displayed; like the surprisingly dainty Edward Hoppers. There is a center panel that is about two feet square; with its hinged wings, it is just under four feet wide. Open it on a good-sized monitor at home full-screen and you have an approximation of the object.
The Mérode is really three paintings, with the two wings. On the left is the donor, accompanied by his wife, who seems to have been added several years later, presumably when he married. We still don’t know his name but what we are looking at is so realistic for its day that we can depend on the likeness. It was painted sometime near the late 1420s, in the Belgian town of Tournai, which is what you see out the window in the third panel – landscape before landscape, coming in the back door.
We know the furnishings of the center panel are realistic because similar pieces are displayed at the Cloisters. This is what a modern bourgeois home looked like in Tournai 600 years ago. But what the donor sees looking through the door of his home is a portal to 1 AD: Gabriel with Mary.
The archangel has come with the news a child will be born to her, sometime around the fourth week of December. But this is the moment just before, Mary is still cozy with her prayer book – which is another conundrum, because what would that say to her? The same thing Gabriel has come to tell her.
Through a circular window, seven rays of light descend. On the middle ray, there is a homunculus Christ with a cross. Follow that ray and you arrive at Mary’s ear: the virgin birth.
If this is fantastic, there is another disjunction. For its first viewers, this oil painting – one of the first oil paintings, and with exquisite perspective and detail – would have been the most realistic thing they’d ever seen. The concept of realism had neither been found nor wanted. That third panel, for example, would have looked a lot like another Tournai workshop, and who knows if our Joseph was not the spitting image of a townsman.
Art history sustained a wonderful mystery about what the carpenter was making until it met Meyer Schapiro, a penetrating historian, who proposed the answer in a 1945 journal article. It is a mousetrap. If you look beyond Joseph, and stop at the windowsill, you will see the finished product.
It is, Schapiro determined, the muscipula diaboli, a devil’s mousetrap. But turning the snare inside out, before almost anyone knows Christ is coming, before there is almost anyone for the devil to tempt, here is Joseph bending time, like the canny lion who circles round and stalks the hunter.
