The Art of Perception
by Elizabeth Johnstone
I refuse to believe it's April.
This is not only because April means rain - lots and lots of it - but because I simply can't bear to change the month on my Chagall calendar. Marc Chagall is a distinctive artist, one of my favorites, and April awaits me with a beautiful vase of blooms. But March is the Annunciation.
In the Bible, the book of Luke narrates the archangel Gabriel's revelation to Mary that she would conceive the child Jesus, the Son of God. This is thought have taken place around March 25, hence the reason Chagall's unorthodox version appears on that month in my calendar.
The scene is an oft-painted one, especially in the Middle Ages. Even Da Vinci couldn't resist the idea of two classic subjects full of such purity and grace. In the same vein, ancient Greek theater teaches us that there are only ten different plot patterns. Everything after around the 5th century B.C. is a variation on a tune, if you will. The Godfather, for example, is what the Greeks would call a "revenge" plot. Medea is another. The "missing/unwanted/dangerous baby" plot is Harry Potter. And then there's the original deadly baby: Oedipus Rex.
Throughout time, artists take the familiar and look at it through a lens of personal experience and social circumstance. In 2002, the British playwright Michael Frayn, author of the excellent farce Noises Off, told aspiring writers to write the same thing, over and over again until it works. Art is, essentially, repetition. No one can hope to be wholly original - not even the most famous among us - but we all see things differently.
Chagall grew up a Hasidic Jew in a small village in Russia, and yet his paintings are full of Christian iconography - always with a twist. I love Chagall's painting of the Annunciation because he is so utterly present in it. He has perceived the archangel as some sort of animal in a Charlie Chaplin bowler hat, delivering a bouquet of flowers to an enormously tall Virgin Mary whose feet barely touch the ground. The entire village below seems to sway towards the curving figures, as if listening to hear the news. A goat playing the violin serenades them all, and several Crucifixion images allude to the tragedy that is to befall the young mother.
In contrast, Da Vinci's painting is a much more somber work with the two figures, wearing traditional garb, several feet away from each other. Mary, while she doesn't look particularly happy, is bathed in a sort of ethereal light, and there is no hint of trouble ahead.
I recently saw the Broadway musical Passing Strange. There's many a song about art, life, and something the show terms "the Real." Youth, the main character, never really figures out what that is, despite many attempts to do so through various mediums of artistic expression. I don't think one will ever find a truly accurate perception of reality in art, because reality is always tinged with something else. Still, Da Vinci and Chagall, two very different artists, were moved to paint the same scene of Gabriel's visit to Mary. I hope that at least part of their motivation was curiosity - the derivation of true revelation.
The goat is my favorite image in Chagall's work; he uses it most famously in La Mariée. It reminds me that we are all bent on re-discovery, curiously strange and cautiously cheerful. As Julia Roberts' character in Notting Hill says, "happiness isn't happiness without a violin-playing goat."
