Art History, by Rob Schnelle

The Tempest, by Giorgione (Italy) 1508

Art History 
 
Observing just “a hint of menace” in Giorgione’s The Tempest,
the famous art critic, host of a PBS culture campaign, asks in 
his companion volume, “What on earth is going on?” Baffled 
by the gaze of a mercenary swain, whose codpiece ogles a half-
draped mother suckling her babe, Kenneth Clark is thunderstruck 
enough to answer, “Nobody knows; nobody has ever known.” 
 
Let ‘em alone, in other words, enigmas blinding far-sighted scholars. 
But meeting the viewer’s look with doe-eyed candor, the woman 
in the picture might be telling us, “You see how it will go for me 
and my child.” And the columns’ shattered tibias behind her, 
a rickety footbridge in need of repair, the flash of lightning from 
the upper air that frame this scene could tell us what Tarika Wilson 
 
felt when SWAT team cops broke down her door, shooting off 
her baby’s thumb and killing the mother before they were done; 
or what Lady Macduff and son whistled in the dark when assassins 
stormed their gate, knowing “to do harm” was “laudable.”  Victims 
may banter in the teeth of terror, but its bite the Sabine women 
knew, the Tutsis and Rohingyas, the people of Ukraine in 2022.
 
Yet we must pause before Giorgione’s “steady flood of conflicting 
interpretations” and throw up our hands at his work’s “precise 
meaning,” Professor James R. Jewitt writes, surmising craft makes 
art for the sake of sale, that “the rising status of landscape painting 
during the early sixteenth century in Italy” relates a just-so tale. 
You’ve gotta love history’s power to fabricate mystery, provided
 
it hews to guidelines approved by state and local authorities.
Take a riled-up school board in Iowa or Tennessee, plant them
at a slideshow with Goya’s Third of May, and ask if it renders
“psychological distress” or feelings of “discomfort” in anyone 
who’s trained a gun on civilians. If so, it will have to go; we
don’t want people disrespecting vets or denting Army recruitment.
 
Kick to the curb Poussin’s Abduction, and while we’re at it, books 
by Morrison, and Thomas Hardy’s Tess for waging class warfare 
over a harlot’s hurt. “Guilt or anguish” in Oklahoma give reasons 
to monitor access, as shame is what’s not wanted from art and history. 
Beyond old Washington Crossing the Delaware, find the Pale where 
looks can kill by showing all we just can’t bear of humanness.
 
Rob Schnelle

Notes: “What on earth . . . nobody has ever known” from Kenneth Clark, Civilisation, page 115. Tarika Wilson: 26-year-old mother of six, innocent of any crime or threat, fatally shot by police in Lima, Ohio on January 4, 2008. An all-white jury acquitted Wilson’s killer and returned him to active duty. “To do harm is often laudable” from Shakespeare, Macbeth (IV.ii.75-76). “Steady flood . . . in Italy” from Dr. James R. Jewitt, "Giorgione, The Tempest," in Smarthistory, April 17, 2020. “Psychological distress . . . discomfort” from Iowa State Legislature, HF 802, signed into law 06/08/21. “Guilt or anguish” from Oklahoma State Legislature, HB 1775, signed into law 05/10/21.
 
Rob Schnelle is the author of Valley Walking: Notes on the Land (WA State UP, 1997). His work has also been published in the Seattle Review, the Bellevue Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and elsewhere. A native of Massachusetts, Rob has lived for over thirty years in Washington State’s Kittitas Valley. Art, he feels, aims to find what form has not found before. Poetry does the same for language.