Spinozablue: An Eclectic Journal of the Arts

The Sleep­ing Venus, by Gior­gione. 1510

The loss of art and the won­der of its sur­vival. Gior­gione (1477−1510) left us less than ten paint­ings that can be attrib­uted to him with cer­tainty, or some­thing close to that. The Sleep­ing Venus is one of them, though even this great work of art was fin­ished by Tit­ian, not Gior­gione, who died before its com­ple­tion. The sub­ject, an erot­i­cally charged, reclin­ing female nude, was rev­o­lu­tion­ary for its time, though ear­lier cul­tures had far less angst when it came to por­tray­ing sim­i­lar sub­ject mat­ter. In many ways, we lag behind them still.

Restora­tion. Of the soul, of trea­sures left to us, passed down by geniuses, mad­men and saints. Restora­tion of the golden age that came before, that never was, the god­desses and gods and heroes who once walked the earth, larger than life, big­ger than the aver­age dream, but dreamed of by humans larger than life in their own way. Stun­ning artists, obsessed with their visions of some­thing beyond the norm, the every­day, the banal. Obsessed with cre­at­ing the space needed for the ancient gods and god­desses to return.

So much in those ancient myths and leg­ends con­nects us with the idea of return­ing home, after end­less jour­neys, after end­less tri­als and tribu­la­tions. The divine guides us home, helps us through the var­i­ous forms of Scylla and Charyb­dis. Gets us to the other side. Gets some of us through, that is.

If every­one made it through, there would be no sto­ries worth telling.

And they worked with the shad­ows, the lines, the diag­o­nals of desire, the forms and col­ors of remorse. They worked with the divine implo­sion granted few. They matched their col­ors and placed them here and there. They painted sym­bols and alle­gories to keep peo­ple guess­ing for cen­turies. And then they disappeared.

We stop for a moment, we look, we ques­tion. If we’re smart, we remem­ber as much of what came before us as we can. Travel their roads. Fol­low their signs. Sing the trails they took. And rejoice. Rejoice at least in the thought that oth­ers before us had visions of things that have left this world. That may have been bet­ter, more beau­ti­ful, sweeter, lighter, greater — thun­der­ous, perhaps.

There is some­thing fun­da­men­tally inno­cent and untainted in the con­tem­pla­tion of cer­tain kinds of beauty. The god­dess of love, on a bed, on can­vas, five hun­dred years ago, is fun­da­men­tally inno­cent. A girl run­ning across the meadow when she sees her man for the first time in months is pri­mor­dially inno­cent. Fling­ing her arms around his neck as she all but tack­les him and they fall laugh­ing to the ground in kinetic inno­cence. Smiles. Laugh­ter. Wide eyes.

The god­dess of love sees that, even when sleep­ing. Gior­gione saw her dream­ing of lovers play­ing in mead­ows across the world, through time, out of their minds. He fol­lowed her so we could.