The Passion Of The Rubens
by Marion Pennell

I never much cared for religious art. I thought of myself as a fan of modernity, beginning, of course, with the excitement of Cezanne and Manet (the planes! the planes!), and becoming bored with the cult of Pollock and America post WWII (how plain, I complain!). Not complex, merely vexing. I reveled in the Romantics and the Realists and the subject matter of everyday life that REALLY mattered. The real rendered through the personality and ego, and yes, madness, of the artist (Dali! Van Gogh!), and as such, thought my snobbery complete. I could converse and dismiss with the connoisseur or the amateur.

Then I went to Europe.

Paintings I had never seen, but had written B-plus essays about. The sheer size of the canvasses dwarfed by the size and impressiveness of their housings. Marble stairs worn from rectangles to triangles from thousands, no millions, of footsteps. Gold and gilt and gold again. Abstracts of real history, not art history, made real. WWII - no longer a black and white movie, but now bad American 1950's architecture composing most of Rotterdam, like a leaking bandaid on a wound, designating the location of the bombs and the continuing scars of the destruction.

Buy the postcards of the cathedrals, for each one will be fitted with scaffolding, exoskeletons bracing the elderly bodies, osteoporosis not of bone but of stone.

In Antwerp I entered such a cathedral, and the painting at the altar buckled my knees. I was compelled to sit in awe and wonder for twenty minutes, at least, completely overwhelmed and in a state I had never before encountered.

Peter Paul Rubens' "The Descent From The Cross" depicts in powerful fashion a group of people removing a broken Christ from the constraints of his execution.

Now, at the time of my tour of Europe, fresh from my graduation with my Baccalaureate, I was only ostensibly, by birth and baptism, a Christian. Such subject matter had no cause to move me. In fact, I generally viewed it with scorn, thinking of the poor artist condemned to repeat Biblical scenes ad nauseam for the only patrons able to pay any kind of commission or wage.

So, it wasn't the subject matter itself, although my realization was that the subject matter did matter, but not to me, to Mr. Rubens. I could FEEL the depth of his faith. His despair and agony that he may somehow offend God by not getting it right. The balancing act between the sacred and the profane. What if he accepted the money, and it was simply a commercial convenience. No better than thirty pieces of silver from the clergy at hand.

He was WORRIED about this painting. He sweated. He had sleepless nights. He paced. He cursed his own talent. He WORKED. HARD.

Now, many years later, I chanced upon a documentary series that presented the concept of the Quantum Hologram. Subsequent curiousity and research led me to an article by Edgar Mitchell, an Apollo 14 astronaut, whose article "Nature's Mind" communicated to me an explanation of the nature of all matter, as created by, well, the Creator of all matter.

What it communicated to me was this: If you are perceptive, or using your perceptive faculties, every object - animate or inanimate - emits information about itself. In the case of inanimate objects, that information includes facts about its creation, and its creator. From this painting, I FELT Peter Paul Rubens' faith. It wasn't what the subject matter said to me, it was what the subject matter said to him.

fast forward to research on Stendhal's syndrome and Synaesthesia ... I love learning things I already know.....

fast forward two and one half years and the discovery of "Crypto Sensitivity Syndrome", (neither disease nor disability, perhaps a disorder? what's in a word?....).

© 2005 & 2006 Marion Pennell

note: see also Cynthia Asia

Home - mari0n.com