Connections/Intimacy

My name is George Bisacca and I'm a conservator in the paintings conservation department and my topic is "Intimacy."

As a conservator you think very much about the artist making the object, and you understand that the artist has observed, and then

captured in the material, some aspect that is intimate, and by that I mean it connects all of us

personally to the artwork. It brings it onto our human scale.

There certainly is this almost shocking realization that this block of stone is so like a human body that it becomes very intimate. The fabric seems to be transparent over her flesh, and the cock of the hip on the right side, you can understand the whole bone structure, and it's just so incredibly real.

Terracotta is a much more intimate form, it contains all of the evidence of the sculptor's working, the way that he's just casually taken

a wire tool and pressed in for the eyebrows and the mustache and the

hairs under his lip. And also you can see those little bits of clay that he's rolled between two fingers and stuck on.

Every nuance of musculature is described there and it almost lives, this thing.

Normally when we think of classical sculpture, we think of these heroic poses and gestures, and here instead, they've captured just an old woman, so that you see the

sagging skin on her neck, with her mouth open. You can see the kind of effort that it costs her to do very simple things in her life. It immortalizes, in a way, the human condition.

This philosopher—the intensity of the face. He's occupied with his mind. But there's this wonderful kind of nonchalance about the way that he has his garment draped over himself

exposing his belly from a little too much eating and drinking. He looks like a lot of older people you might see at the beach.

There's something so endearing about this little statue of Isis. Even though she's supposed to be a goddess

she has this enormous headdress on—she doesn't really quite seem up to the job.

Her arms are so tight at her sides and she keeps

her legs so carefully together, she seems a little

embarrassed about her nakedness. Being the goddess of fertility

of course, she has those big hips that I think she's a little nervous about. And I just find it such a beautiful rendering of an insecure woman.

Aspects of this Madonna and Child transform it into any mother and any real child. This nervous energy that the child has, he's

digging in his heel, pushing backward against his mother's chest. She reaches her hand over

and holds both of his legs so he doesn't just squirm right off of her lap.

She's aware of her son's future suffering and death, and that's all contained in her face, this sadness, I find incredibly intimate.

I feel voyeuristic intruding on a very private moment, looking at this young girl falling asleep on her hand in the late afternoon light. Something has clearly just taken place. That chair on the right is turned the wrong way around from the table; there's a glass tipped over; the door is open. Certainly a man has been there. When we x-rayed

this picture, we discovered that in that open doorway, there's a man walking towards the room. Vermeer has edited that out. I think he realizes that that would have been jarring in the scene

which is otherwise so solitary and so quiet.

These works point to simple human qualities

that all people share—that everyone, no matter how

they're immortalized in a great work of art, they were

still a simple person, just like anyone else.