The Berlin Gemaeldegalerie appears if anything to be one of the most user-friendly artistic sites in Europe. So why â?? unlike other museums in cutting-edge Berlin â?? isnâ??t it crawling with culture vultures?
Itâ??s hard to avoid the obvious here: given the centuries in question, the galleryâ??s collection is inevitably, ineradicably, inescapably Christian. Such is true not only of the majority of paintings, whose subjects are overtly Biblical or otherwise religious, but of many â??non-religiousâ?? pieces too. Even the Dutch masterpieces by Steen, Brueghel, and others portraying â??ordinary life,â?? for example, are often hortatory comments on the gaps between Christian morality and Christian practice.
Might the overall Christian character of these artworks somehow account for the seeming lack of public interest?… growing religious illiteracy might help to explain something of the Gemaeldegalerieâ??s relative emptiness. But I wonder if another, perhaps less obvious factor – the simultaneous disappearance of something known as the human family in the lives of many Europeans â?? may turn out to explain a lot, too. Thatâ??s one disappearing act at which the Germans, even more than any of their neighbors, have excelled. Almost a third of the German women born in 1960 have had no children. Only half as many children were born last year in Germany as in 1964 â?? and thatâ??s even throwing in the Turks. And this empty cradle may be just the human backdrop against which the empty Gemaeldegalerie makes best if perverse sense.
After all: how do you explain the sublimity of Raphaelâ??s Madonna with the Infant Jesus to someone whoâ??s never held a baby? Or whatâ??s so perfect about Botticelliâ??s adolescents in The Virgin and Child with Singing Angels to people who havenâ??t seen real teenagers up close for decades? How to convey what is throat-tightening about Grienâ??s Mourning of Christ to a fit, childless man or woman of any age who has never seen death?
In cutting-edge Germany as elsewhere in Western Europe, increasing numbers of people can no longer be assumed to have hands-on experience of any of these things. This familial illiteracy may yet turn out to be more connected to religious illiteracy than weâ??ve so far understood.
Mary Eberstadt Empty Cradle, Empty Gallery
Here is more by Mary Eberstadt
Finally I am getting to see the point of the Virgin Mary – Maria, das Kind verehrend – she rightly adores this child from whom our future comes.
