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Dutch novelist Cees Notteboom writes about seeing Bosch's Garden of Heavenly Delight at 21 and then seeing it again at 82. He asks, How has the painting changed? How has the viewer changed? Am I even the same man now? Can we moderns access the picture in the way Philip II did? Have our eyes changed so much? While it hasn't been sixty years, still it has been a long time to be in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna. It was thirty years ago. I was nineteen. We stopped in Vienna on the way back from two months in India. My first time abroad. Vienna was so damn pretty.
I can vividly recall what a warm day it was and how overwhelmed I felt by the Grand museum exterior . It was not just royal but imperial and ascending that colossal double marble staircase with the statue by Canova situated in the first landing halfway up, I turned back to look at Alexis who was trailing behind me. He was staring up at the painted ceiling, called the Triumph of the Renaissance. He was as gobsmacked as I was.
At the top, the path forked: to the left, the Northern School and to the Right, the Italian School. The eternal fork in the road of European art history. Today, I definitely would take left. But being young Americans, we took right.
From that day thirty years ago, I remember that staircase. And I also remember one picture. It is as if that one picture blotted out all the others we saw that day. But what a picture it was. We stood in front of Raphael's Madonna del Prato for the longest time. I couldn't understand it. Why were there two boys? Where was John the Baptist's mother? And were those strawberry plants? Also known as the Madonna del Belvedere, the Queen of Heaven in her ultramarine robe was breathtakingly, unforgettably magnificent. Her carmine color dress the same color as the poppies signifying the Christ's sacrifice and death. It was the same azure blue and carmine red we had seen in the murals at Alchi.
"When do paintings free themselves/from the painter, when does the same substance/become a different thought?"Cees Notteboom wonders...
In the Uffizi there is the Madonna of the Goldfish.
It is so similar to the Madonna del Prato--but instead of a cross the children play with a tiny goldfinch.n Madonna Del Cardellino, the goldfinch represents Christ's crucifixion.
Like the story of the mountains at Montserrat in Spain that rose from the earth at the precise moment that the Christ was crucified, there was a legend that the goldfinch received its red spot at the time of the crucifixion. The bird " flew down over the head of Christ and was taking a thorn from His crown, when it was splashed with the drop of His blood."
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Bruegel Room
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Top painting by
Robert Raschka (1847–1908)
Medium Pencil, watercolor, heightened with opaque white on paper
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