Up in Flames

The most common cause of damage to museum objects (so I once heard) comes at the hands of the people who are supposed to look after them, that is, curators. It was probably some research by the Museums Association, or something, that came up with that factoid and I wonder whether it is still true. The most famous case is the Parthenon Marbles, scrubbed and scraped until they looked as shining white as 19^th-century Western art historians believed ancient sculptures did. At Wycombe Museum we had our own version, a chalk angel which supposedly came from the town’s medieval Guildhall and which had been found in the 1930s. There was a picture of it in one of the old published histories of High Wycombe, but the object in our stores looked rather different: at some time its crumbly surface had been stabilised by slathering it with some horrible olive-grey paint, and, if you looked carefully, you could see that someone had outlined the eyes with the nib of a biro (I suppose that might not have been done by one of the staff).

Still, the burning of the Museo Nacional in Rio de Janeiro brought me an echo of the pain the curators and staff there must feel. Great museums - and the Museo Nacional was arguably the greatest in Latin America - are universities of material culture, their collections providing the basis for research. Even more, objects produced by human culture are freighted with the emotions that have surrounded them on their journey to the present, or at least the emotions we can speculate surrounded them. They emerge from the past clouded with often multiple identities and meanings and their eloquence allows us different ways of understanding ourselves. As a curator, your job is to care for these things, to give them voice and, through them, the people who used them or the creatures they represent. To lose so much of that in one event is a psychic shock, a wound that needs to heal.

The beauty an artefact communicates is entangled with this sense of its history, a bit like the way our sense of a partner’s beauty is shaped by the experiences we have shared with them over time. But it remains true that to see a simply beautiful thing slighted, damaged or destroyed also causes a kind of pain, a feeling that it should not be this way, or an imaginative recalling of the violence that brought the damage about.

Not everyone feels this in the same way: some, possibly many people, are indifferent to a sense of beauty and don’t worry about the destruction of objects. You sometimes hear this described in moral terms, that we should be concerned instead about people and what happens to them, not things. This is of course true, but as often happens I rather think the moralism is usually there to dress up a basic attitude as something more than in fact it is, to provide a justification for being deaf to a particular category of human experience. The awareness of beauty and human feeling seem connected in us, and – though I have no figures – I suspect that insensitivity to one is often the companion of numbness to the other.

A great stream of Christian spiritual thought, too, seems to urge us to scorn attachment to anything earthly, and therefore to look at the ruins of the Museo Nacional’s twenty million objects and, like that knotty old atheist Ambrose Bierce was reputed to have done when they told him one of his sons had died, shrug and reply ‘nothing matters’ (or rather, nothing matters but Christ, which Bierce wouldn’t have added). ‘We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but what is unseen’, says St Paul, and in doing so he echoes thinkers from virtually every spiritual tradition. This is another way of justifying indifference.

But what the old Fathers of the Church called dispassion doesn’t mean indifference at all. No religion based around the idea that God came to share our human life can make an ideal of emotional disconnection from it, not when Jesus of Nazareth is so very clearly deeply involved in the ordinary things of human existence. Instead there is a sense that what we get by purging ourselves of ungodly attachments, of the desire to control and own and grasp, is a deeper awareness of the beauty and preciousness of the created order, including the things that human beings create. We should find ourselves weeping more at the losses embedded in this fallen order of existence, not less, knowing that heaven is not a place of mute and level apathy, but one where the colours are brighter, the forms are perfected, and where every scar and wound is kissed by the Christ. That this happens is a paradox, perhaps, but I think a true one.