"Grand Scale: Dürer and Titian' at the Art Museum

"Grand Scale: Monumental Prints in the Age of Dürer and Titian" throws a few curves at the viewer. Despite its title, not every work in the show is monumental (as in huge). Yes there are a fair number of large-sized mythological extravaganzas like The Wedding of Cupid and Psyche and Biblical spectaculars like Submersion of Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea. But there are as many panoramic images— long skinny scroll-like affairs celebrating impressive public processions or fixing in time the lineaments of a particular city.

I suppose they are "monumental" in one sense, because they celebrate and extend the power of human observation. No one person could actually see all the action transpiring in the eight panels of The Punishment of Niobe, but the artist can freeze and present it to the viewer.

These works are monumental also because they're products of the Renaissance, with its outsized appetite for sensory experiences of every type. They're visual overkill, if you will, but they're overkill in the service of transcendence. They take viewers to a level of existence they could never hope to experience on their own. This was an art that was meant to evoke awe, pity and terror in the eye of the beholder. It was not Muzak Art.

This show throws you another curve in that you might expect a work on paper to be inexpensive. But these were not the Currier & Ives prints of their day. Because they required multiple plates to create a single image, they were costly, and hence were to be found in the mansions and palaces of the well to do. So this was patronage art, not popular art.

While a masterpiece of religious art like Jacopo Tintoretto's Crucifixion might decorate a church where all could see it, Agostino Carracci's multi-plate engraving of it was likely to be found only in a collector's private residence. Although artists of the caliber of Albrecht Dürer created large-scale works on paper, more often they were the work of craftsmen copying the original work of a master artist like Titian or Botticelli.

Even today, in a way, "Grand Scale" is still very much a connoisseur's show. Although the degree of craftsmanship required to create woodcuts and engravings on such a scale is obvious, the more you know about 16th-Century printing and works on paper, the more the show will mean to you.

Probably no one has gotten worked up about the slaughter of the Niobids since the Edwardian Age, but if you're one the few whose emotions are still open to the spirit of Mannerist Art, this show is certainly well worth seeing.

Nevertheless, I hope many more people will see this show. The Renaissance still has a message to pass on to us: a message about experiencing life on a grand scale.

Postscript: On the Perception of History

It occurs to me that Submersion of the Pharaoh's Army in the Red Sea is a fascinating work for what it says about the way in which the Present views the Past. Neither Titian, who painted the original work, nor the Renaissance printmaker who copied it could have known anything about how an Egyptian army from the time of Moses would have looked, so they simply rendered them as contemporary Europeans. It would never have occurred to them that any army crossing the desert in full suits of armor wouldn't have needed the Red Sea to perish in. The sun of Egypt would have done the job quite well. Similarly, they render Egypt of the Pharaoh as a respectable walled Gothic city, complete with cathedral spires.

Now, my point isn't that Titian was silly. He was being quite sensible. He was a man "for whom the visible world exists." How else could depicted the scene except in terms of what he knew?

George Santayana famously remarked that those who forget the past are destined to repeat it. But you must know the past to forget it. And the past is not immediately knowable. It takes a lot of work.

Archives can yield documentary evidence. The backbreaking work of field archeology can unearth tangible traces. (Although if archeologists suggest that the miracle at the Red Sea may have been nothing more than a fortuitous shifting of the tide that allowed the Israelites to cross over, but barred the way to the late-arriving Egyptians, there will always be those who will accuse them of scoffing at the supernatural.)

We tend to look at Then in terms of Now. Echoing Hermes, we say, "As it is Now, so it was Then." And of course this is all nonsense. So, I suppose that another benefit of a show like "Grand Scale" is that it reminds us of the difficulty of acquiring knowledge, and the ease with which it can be lost.