Photo: GV
Most of the great art of the European Middle Ages was devoted to religion. As was much of Europe’s finest art for centuries thereafter.
Toward the middle of the 15th century the great Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo captured Christ in the Decent from the Cross with a spiritual intensity matched only by Christ’s Resurrection, as captured in a bronze three centuries later by the famous Roman artist of the Baroque period, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Both works are small but immensely powerful. And they are only a feet apart, in the master paintings galleries at the Walters.
Photo: GV
If you had a choice – which of course you do not – which one would you prefer to own?
I don’t. And I’m pretty sure the editors of TIME knew that it wasn’t back in 1998 when they put it (a detail from the Shroud of Turin) on their magazine’s cover.
In the Ideas & Trends section of The New York Times of November 15th, Nicholas Wade waded into the murky waters of natural selection and religion (“The Evolution of the God Gene”). The idea is that religion – the potentiality for any and all religions – is hardwired into our brains from our hunter-gatherer days, some 50,000 years ago. Why? Because those egalitarian groups of naked warriors from which we descend were in constant battle with their neighbors, and internal cohesion as generated by ”religious” rituals (initially dancing, later ancestor-worship, later still, the worship of solar deities) had great utility to the group’s survival. And thus, procreation.
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.