Connections/Religious Art

I'm Melanie Holcomb and I'm a curator of Medieval art at the Metropolitan Museum. I'm George Goldner. I'm a curator of Drawings and Prints at the Museum.

Religious belief has provided the inspiration and the context for much of the art in the Metropolitan Museum.

And...we're a secular institution, or I'd like to think we are. I'm wondering if we have any obligation to be sensitive

in our presentation of the art to believers, as it were, to people who take these objects

seriously as a part of their everyday religious practice. George: I think that quite to the contrary, we have an

obligation to be objectively insensitive, to say that it is not our responsibility to care whether a visitor is Catholic, Jewish, Muslim

Zoroastrian or anything else. It's not our job, obviously, to try and insult people either, but it's, it is our job to present

works of art with fidelity to the purpose and historical context and aesthetic context in which it was made.

Melanie: So, if we're thinking about something like the Cloisters Cross, which is one of the great masterpieces of the Medieval collection, that is filled with inscriptions that could be understood as a

strongly anti-Jewish object. It's, it's very much that part of medieval Christianity that understood itself as distinct from and better than

Jewish practice, Jewish belief, and we downplay that. At times it's not even mentioned at all.

George: But who, who would be insulted? Jews, anti-Semites, Catholics? I mean, who would be insulted by a true

presentation of it it? I mean that was, anti-Semitism was one of the leitmotifs of medieval Christianity. Melanie: Absolutely, absolutely.

George: I mean, if you look at depictions of Christ carrying the cross or the Ecce Homo, there are always, or mocking of Christ, there's always... Melanie: Right...right...right... George: a bunch of really

ugly snarling people who are all Jews, with an occasional Roman... Melanie: Although, you know it's often never mentioned that that's what they're doing. George: No, but they are. Melanie: and I know that... George: ...but they are... Melanie: ...that's right...that's right...

George: Who else was populating Jerusalem at that period? I mean a few Romans are shown... Melanie: ...right... George: ...generally in better outfits than the Jews. So I guess my feeling is that if one,

one shouldn't focus on that as the particular subject of the cross or of a mocking of Christ or of Christ Carrying the Cross, but it's part of it. And I think to leave it out is just falsifying history.

Whereas for example, Degas was a vehement rabid anti-Semite. I haven't seen every painting or drawing by him but of the hundreds and hundreds that I've seen I've never seen the slightest indication in any of them... Melanie: ...right. George: that this affected his art.

So in that case I think it's a biographical detail, which is largely irrelevant... Melanie: ...yeah...yeah...yeah. George: ...for looking at a work of art.

So, if you had a Degas dancers in a gallery I don't think it needs to mention this subject 'cause it's not relevant. Melanie: I think we as an institution want to draw attention to the

aesthetic merits of an object and so there might be a sense that it kind of gets in the way, that the message will take over.

George: But whose message is it? Melanie: ...right... George: I mean the message that one should be trying to remain honest to, is the message of the artist who made an object and the people who commissioned it. It's really not up to us to edit that any more than

it is for us to put something in which isn't there. No art historian really believes that one is studying the pure history of aesthetics. Melanie: ...right...right...right... George: We're studying the history of art and the history of art is partially a history of the people who made it.

Melanie: Well, even if we take aside the history part, I think there are people who would accuse us of divesting our objects of their

spiritual import, and that we're criticized for it. We perhaps present them

too much as historical objects, and we don't acknowledge their continuing

power as a source of inspiration. George: Well, I think that any object which was meant to have religious significance, that should be brought up just as any object that had

political significance should be brought up. Melanie: ...right... George: I mean one shows Washington Crossing the Delaware. That isn't meant as just

a guy in a boat crossing a river. The fact that it's Washington is central to the aesthetic

and I don't believe a museum exists to make political and religious judgments. Melanie: ...right...

George: A museum makes aesthetic and historical judgments, not political and religious ones.