A couple weeks ago, my wife and I were in a museum, being treated to a guided tour of the facility. Now, it was a pretty decent sized museum and had a lot of paintings and sculptures. Our tour, naturally, focused on a very small percentage of what there was to see.
Some of the stuff there was stunning. We got to see several original works by Picasso (whom I don't care for), Rembrandt, and… the highlight of the tour for us… two originals by Van Gogh.
But the tour wasn't all good. In fact, the first half of it was boring. You see, it focused on religious art.
Now, I knew that quite a lot of art from older periods was religious in nature. Churches wanted lovely paintings to hang, so they commissioned the artists to paint them. The nice thing about this is that they generally took good care of the paintings, so they've remained in great condition over the centuries.
But there were two things about the tour that really bothered us. After seeing several religious paintings, we were told we were going to proceed to secular art. Great, we thought. But then we rounded the corner and were shown a two-panel painting that was quite clearly Adam and Eve. The tour guide claimed that this was (I'm not kidding) a secular painting. Why? Because she claimed it never would have been hung in a church. (Why? She didn't really make that clear… something having to do with the fact that Adam was looking at Eve's naked body or some such drivel.) I'm sorry, but there's no way that a painting of a religious myth can be considered a secular painting. That's just asinine.
But it got worse. Another painting we were shown was a still life. It showed a table with three objects in the foreground: a bowl of lemons, a bowl of oranges, and a bowl of water. This, we were told, was an example of a Protestant religious painting.
Yes, you read that right. It was a religious painting.
The lemons apparently represented Easter. Why? I dunno. Maybe in that part of the world, they're ripe in the spring. The oranges, we were told, stood for virginity. The fruit had some leaves and blossoms attached, and evidently brides used to carry bouquets of orange blossoms. The bowl of water represented purity, and the single rose next to the bowl represented love.
Add them all up, and what do you get? A painting representative of Mary.
Riiiiiiiight.
Makes perfect sense.
Now, I consider myself in the group of people who say, "I don't know much about art, but I know what I like." I will never claim to be any kind of art historian. Far from it. But if Adam and Eve can be secular… and bowls of fruit and water can represent the Virgin Mary… I don't think I want to know much about art beyond what I like and don't like.
