How
do you explain Hieronymus Bosch to a nine and a thirteen year old? How do you explain the Temptations of
St. Anthony to kids? Just how vile
could the world ever truly be rendered in one timeless image? Why is that cow’s rear end serving as the mouth of
a jar? 卑鄙龌龊[1],wasn’t
on the agenda as we headed out for our Friday in Lisbon.
I am doing my best to manage the urge to do too much with
these girls. They are a majority
and there is always risk of rebellion.
It looks like there was rain over night. Is it still raining now? This will be used to help sell the dread concept of; ‘the
museum.’
I’ve written before of the paucity of good museums in
Beijing. Taipei, Shanghai, even
Zhengzhou have more compelling collections of Chinese art. And for a representation of any other
civilization on earth, Beijing is useless. So I only ever see museums with my kids on these trips to
other countries. And given
experience in Vienna and Dublin and Istanbul, I know to choose such visits
judiciously or they won’t register any of it, no matter how emphatically you
present the Book of Kells, or Alexander’s Sarcophagus.
iPhone on, serving as a stereo, I considered the Lonely
Planet, sitting on the toilet. The
trumpet player Tommy Turrentine’s eponymous 1959 album has a driving little
tune “Time’s Up.” And Tommy’s
right, I needed to find something quick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tommy_Turrentine
I looked over the various museums we could head to. The Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga seemed to
be the one that best fit what I had in mind for the day. I’d written a few months back about
Albrecht Durer. NMAA had one of
his works. For this reason alone,
I was set to go. In addition the
museum held pieces on display from throughout the former Portuguese
empire. This was precisely what I
wanted them to consider. The
concierge, a lovely older lady, waved her hand at me and told me to not waste
my time with the Metro. “Take a
cab.” So we did.
We were let off beneath two enormous doors of what must have
been the museum. They were
locked. Something I’d read flashed
back that doors opened at 10:00AM, which the plaque nearby confirmed. With
thirty minutes to kill we walked about the park, to the front of the building,
over looking the wide waterway, below.
Across the park was an enormous tree that must have been providing shade
on the day of the great earthquake in 1755. Walking beneath it I considered the serrated leaves. Suddenly I flashed on a similar tree, I
remember having seen in Goa.
Inside, finally, there was a remarkable view into that
improbable Portuguese outpost north of Kerala that launched Francis Xavier and
Matteo Ricci’s efforts’ to "save" China, and Japan. Considering the grainy newsreels that were repeating on
display, it all came back how that colony ceased to be. In 1947, as the British declared that
they would finally “Quit” India, Nehru and the rest of the Congress Party told
the Portuguese that the Imperial coattail party the Portuguese had been
enjoying would be winding down now in Goa, as well. The museum had a collection of jewels and other artifacts
from Goa complete with black and white footage of Nehru and soldiers and
protests and a rather tired looking Portuguese gent who must have been the
president or the final governor of the time.
Upstairs we saw lovely Chinese porcelain and Japanese
screens and Arab tiles and considered how modest the contemporaneous European
attempts a porcelain were, there next to the Chinese originals. To the girl’s pleasant surprise this
‘lovely bits from our former empire’ jaunt was all taken in rather quickly and
we made our way down and out to what must have been the museum’s main
galleries, a straight shot out, down a long hallway toward the back.
These collections in Western Europe often start with the
medieval pieces, which are generally my favorite. I’m forever enthralled with the blunt figures, piercing
eyes, and elemental colors, but the rudimentary rendering and interminable
religiosity can be a tough sell with the kids. And then suddenly, a few rooms down there is depth and
realism and a breadth of subjects which erupts with Renaissance art; OK, so you
like this more? Why? You can see this is different. Then you can probably date this piece as
before 1400 and this piece as something done after . . .
Look, whoever finds the Albrecht Durer first gets a
prize. My younger one tore
two rooms ahead and nailed it.
There! Good for you. St Jerome, from 1521. The face of depicted is terrifying and eerily
familiar. How disorienting it must
have been to see someone capture the world and render a person, so forcefully, before
photography, before mirrors. But Druer
was quickly overshadowed. Off to
the right, was the terrible Bosch triptych. “Wooh. What is
that Baba?” The Bosch will be the
one they undoubtedly will remember. And just in case, I bought the post-card set.
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