When Robin and I were at the Louvre, we spotted some tatty old frescoes by an Italian chap named Botticelli. They weren’t in great repair – the colors were faded and big chunks were missing – but they were still beautiful and still very recognizably Botticelli. I asked Robin what it is that makes them so identifiable. It seemed to be the faces. If all you saw were the faces, you would still have a good shot at guessing the painter, or at least the period and rough location.
A few days later we found ourselves in Amsterdam and Robin was all excited to see museums there too. You’d think we’d have seen enough paintings in Paris, but apparently not. On the way we stopped at a pub and just while I was thinking about some of my favorite Dutch artists and wondering what is it that makes a Rembrandt or Vermeer so identifiable and so different from a Botticelli or a da Vinci, a waitress approached our table to take our order.
She looked, and there’s no other way to say this, Dutch! And what I mean by that is she had the kind of face one would see painted by a Dutch Master. For some reason this had never occurred to me before. The reason painters render faces as they do is because that’s what they see around them. It’s as much geography as artistic choice.
I realize this is a surprise to nobody but me. It was a humbling moment to come face to face, so to speak, with such an obvious fact that had somehow eluded me.
Easy travel has made humans more homogeneous but there are still moments when place and face come together. Every time I fly back to Edmonton and settle down in a seat at the departure gate waiting for the late-again Alaska Airlines flight to board, I can look around and see something familiar in the faces of people flying to my old home town. If I had Robin’s artistic eye I might even be able to pinpoint what that is but for me it’s just mysterious familiarity.
Isn’t it amazing the things one learns when one travels?
- Jim
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