Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes

drapes of a strangely domestic proscenium. As I was stepping away from my inspection, I became aware of a track-suited father and small son travelling towards me at a lively art-hating clip. The father, equipped with better trainers and more stamina, held a yard or two’s advantage as they turned this corner. The boy glanced into the exhibition case and asked, in a strong Brummy accent, “Why’s that man holding his chest, Dad?” The father, without breaking stride, managed a quick look back and an instant answer: “Dunno.”
    However much pleasure and truth we draw from the non-religious art created especially for us, however fully it engages our aesthetic selves, it would be a pity if our reaction to what has preceded it was finally diminished to a Dunno. But of course this is happening. Wall captions in galleries increasingly explain such events as the Annunciation, or the Assumption of the Virgin—though rarely the identity of all those squadrons of symbol-bearing saints. I would have needed my own iconographical dictionary if someone had asked me to name the two attendants in the Petrus Christus.
    What will it be like when Christianity joins the list of dead religions, and is taught in universities as part of the folklore syllabus; when blasphemy becomes not legal or illegal but simply impossible? It will be a bit like this. Recently, I was in Athens, and found myself looking for the first time at Cycladic marble figurines. These were made around 3000–2000 bc, are predominantly female, and come in two main types: semi-abstract violin shapes, and more naturalistic representations of a stylistically elongated body. The latter typically propose: a long nose on a shield-like head devoid of other features; a stretched neck; arms folded across the stomach, left arm invariably above the right; a sketched pubic triangle; a chiselled division between the legs; feet in a tiptoe position.
    They are images of singular purity, gravity, and beauty, which come at you like a quiet, sustained note heard across a hushed concert hall. From the moment you see one of these forms, most no higher than a handspan, rising before you, you seem to understand them aesthetically; and they appear to collude in this, urging you to bypass any historico-archaeological wall information. This is partly because they evoke so clearly their modernist descendants: Picasso, Modigliani, Brancusi. Both evoke, and surpass: it is good to see those admirable tyrants of modernism being made to look less original by a community of unknown Cycladic carvers; good also to be reminded that the history of art is circular as well as linear. When this brief moment of vaguely pugilistic self-congratulation has passed, you settle into, and open yourself up to, the tranquillity and symbolic withholdingness of the figures. Now, different comparisons come to mind: Piero or Vermeer. You are in the presence of a stately simplicity, and a transcendent calm which seems to contain all the depths of the Aegean, and offer a rebuke to our frantic modern world. A world which has increasingly admired these items, and so desired more of them than can possibly exist. Forgery, like hypocrisy, is the homage vice pays to virtue, and in this case much homage has been paid.
    But what exactly have you, or rather I—yes, I’d better take the blame for this one—been looking at? And were my reactions, however pantingly authentic, relevant to the objects in front of me? (Or do aesthetic objects, over time, become, or dwindle into, our reactions to them?) That all-over pale creaminess which lends such an air of serenity would not originally have existed: the heads, at least, would have been vibrantly painted. The minimalist—and proto-modernist—incising is at least in part a practical consequence of the marble being extremely hard to carve. The vertical presence—the way these small images rise to meet us on tiptoe, and thereby seem to calmly dominate us—is a curatorial invention,