The magnificent glow-in-the-dark exhibition called “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300-1350” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is a visual event of pure 24-karat beauty and a multileveled scholarly coup. On both counts, we’ll be lucky if the season brings us anything like its equal.
The exhibition is rare in other ways too. As a major survey of early Italian religious art, it’s a kind of show we once saw routinely in our big museums, but now rarely do.
These museums seem to have developed a problem with presenting religious art, as if unsure of what to do with it, how to pitch it. This isn’t true for non-Western work — from Africa, say, or Asia — which can still be spun as loosely and exotically “spiritual.” But Western religious art, specifically Christian art, which fits less and less comfortably into an increasingly de-secularizing public culture, is different. We may now be in a position of knowing it both too well, and not well enough.
In addition, devotional objects, from any culture, if taken seriously, make awkward demands on our attention, on our willingness or ability to meet them on their own terms.
Devotional paintings and sculptures are, by design, interactive instruments. You look at them and, the assumption behind them is, they also look at you. You speak; they listen, and in time respond. Touch them (though not at the Met!), and the touch is reciprocal.