A few years ago my wife and I visited the church of Orsanmichele in Florence. We spent a long time there. We did what we typically do in places like this. We roamed around looking and taking things in until we lost all awareness of ourselves and the passing of time. Eventually, I found myself sitting alone in front of the massive tabernacle designed by Andrea di Cione. The tabernacle is an amazing structure, but it was the painting within it that held me transfixed. The painting is of the Madonna and Christ child along with a host of angels. It was painted by Bernardo Daddi in the mid 1300’s. Normally, figures painted during this era have moved past gothic stylization, but for me, they often still retain enough gothic sensibility to keep me at a distance. So, when I began looking at this painting, I felt appreciative but I kept my distance. Soon though, feelings were aroused in me that were deeply uncomfortable.
The Madonna is holding the Christ child and looking out at you. I mean that literally; it’s one of those paintings that gives the impression of the eyes being on you constantly no matter where you go. The Madonna’s face is bathed in a warm glow from the reds and golds that surround her giving her a beatific mien. Because of this, it's very easy while sitting in front of this work to feel that the mother of God cares for you personally. That she cares for you as a spiritual mother would. I began experiencing myself moving towards a sense of religious or spiritual community. I sensed with great clarity that I was seeing this painting as someone who was alive in the fourteenth or fifteenth century would have seen it. This feeling was strong, almost hallucinatory.
I saw that if I had been born in Florence during the late Medieval period or during the Renaissance and had worshiped in Orsanmichele, this painting of the Madonna, radiating motherly love, would have become a part of me. For a few brief moments, I knew what it would be like to live within a shared, strong communal identity. I was feeling with piercing clarity that I was a member of the Republic of Firenze, a Christian too, and inside the church of Orsanmichele was a symbol of the boundless, warm love I could always count on to be with me no matter where I might be. This painting of the Madonna would literally be the center of my world. Wherever I went, my sense of place would on some level be realized as relational to that painting. I realized too that I would not have been alone in this feeling of centeredness. Other citizens of Florence, which was a political community set amongst a network of principalities, would have shared in this same type of communal reality for hundreds of years. I was seeing how an image rooted in religious iconography could, through its embodiment of spiritual power, also become, for a majority of a populous, an anchor in the temporal world. I was awed.
However, it was not this sense of awe , but the realization that followed it which brought me to the very edge of tears.
What moved me to the verge of crying in public was how this experience highlighted a lack of this sort of centeredness in my own life. This was not new to me. I have felt this lack of centeredness in myself and my culture since my teenage years. The existential shiver came from being brought to a place where I could experience the opposite condition through a painting of the Madonna. An image rooted in a religious iconography to which I had not had a relationship or an attachment since I was a child. Normally, in fact, I am repulsed by it.
For the first ten years of my life my family lived in Queens Village, an area within the borough of Queens in New York City. I went to a Catholic school, but my home and my sense of belonging was in the neighborhood my family lived in. It was a diverse neighborhood with a mix of white collar and working class people. It wasn’t a perfect world. Many families had their share of the social problems current in that era. Yet, most of the neighbors knew each other intimately. They shared cookouts in each other’s yards, helped each other with home repairs and child care. All adults were potentially your parents or at least a pair of eyes that would tattle to your parents. We children spent a majority of our time together engaged in games and imaginative play. The physical space of the neighborhood was a shared reality for all of the adults and us children. When we thought of home we thought of that space and understood it as being indivisible from the other people who we shared it with.
When I was ten years old, my family moved to a housing development out on Long Island. Since it was a development, this was a space with very real physical dimensions, but there was no communal experience within that space. For the adults, it was the place where you housed your family. Even though most of our neighbors were living quite comfortably, the space that seemed to matter for them was a place where they exercised their energies in striving to “get ahead”. Their involvement with the physical space of the neighborhood, the space their homes existed in, was very narrow and attenuated. The children spent their time playing sports or being absorbed into consumerist culture. Imaginative play was reduced to reliving and reviewing things everyone had seen on TV the evening before.
Needless to say, I hated Long Island and started traveling back into Queens as soon as I could. By the age of fourteen I quit the Catholic church and started questioning and examining the alienating society I was stuck living beside.
Sometimes questioning and close examination can be an expression of subsumed yearning, but I have never yearned to join our consumerist culture. I find it delusional and am glad to keep a distance from it. Where though, am I, in relation to it? Artists rarely, if ever, exist in their own self perpetuating world and in this sense I am not an exception. Because my creative life is immersed in my physical existence my continually unresolved relationship with my own culture was always nibbling at the back of my consciousness. It kept driving me to examine and reexamine the culture around me and caused me to experience my sense of otherness as a painful dislocation.
The experience I had sitting in front of the painting of the Madonna made me see the lack of centeredness in myself and my culture anew. It started the process of my moving from the worried awareness I’d carried with me for most of my life into one of acceptance of myself and the reality of the cultural existence that I lived in opposition to. I soon became able to embrace my otherness without the painful tinge of dislocation.
I’ve never believed that we are who we are as a society because we no longer embrace religion as the basis of our shared identity or because we don’t have a strong foundational myth. I know that it simply isn’t possible for us to have this kind of shared iconic reality because our culture has been immersed in a tumbling state of change since the Renaissance. Wit the acceleration this state of flux has been undergoing for the last one hundred and fifty years any sense of centeredness will, on a personal level, remain elusive and transitory and it will simply be impossible for a broad, general population to manifest or maintain it culturally. Somehow, my experience in Orsanmichele freed me to finally accept this and embrace my life as an outsider living in relation to the dominant cultural narrative of my time.
The experience I had in front of the painting of the Madonna was, to me, an epiphany. I was given the gift of becoming free from yearning. Epiphany is a loaded word that probably makes a lot of people think of Catholicism, but for me, it has nothing to do with Catholicism or any other organized religion. For me it connotes what was an unfiltered humanistically spiritual experience.