Today finds me on a train between Milan and Basel having spent a week in Padua looking – looking at frescos, looking at paintings, looking at architecture and cake shop windows. I now feel saturated by religious art and delighted by Italian buns.
I saw so much religious art that I began to find it genuinely moving, not everything of course, but I felt better able to feel the anguish and devotion depicted. This was helped of course by so much of the work still being in situ and therefore seen in the context of pilgrims, Mass and serious devotion, in fact it made me feel quite nostalgic, two months in Padua and I would return to the devout Catholicism of my youth. It helped me glimpse something that I’d like to achieve in my own work, but seeing so many paintings, all theoretically aiming to genuinely move the viewer, I can now comprehend how truly difficult that is to achieve. Many paintings may illustrate the Passion of Christ, but precious few can move the unbeliever to tears. But what brings about the difference? Is it the skill of the artist or maybe their piety? Or is it entirely down to the eye of the beholder?
I also very much enjoyed a collection of paintings in the Museum of Popular Devotion, these gems I think were intended to commend the souls of the unfortunate departed to the care of Saint Anthony. However what they show is a catalogue of ways to die in Padua painted from the 1850s to the 1950s, examples include falling from balconies, being cut in two by trains, road accidents involving horses, carriages and cars, smoking in a shed where fireworks are stored and being struck by lightening whilst hoeing. Great was my joy.
