An evolution in my innate repulsion for the glorified, edified decadence of European yore.
Last weekend in the Art History Museum, when overwhelmed with the decadence, the sheer beauty, the unimaginable time and energy given to detail and precision in sculpting and realism, the mammoth scale on which these projects were carried out, the even bigger ego and vanity that must have been behind those that commissioned these works (Emperor Franz Josef, Napolean, as a few), I thought: this is perfection! This is the highest attainment of beauty! And it’s obvious why it was sought after: it inevitably, immediately evokes awe; I stand dumbfounded, speechless, tingling all over, conscious that I am in front of something truly universal and timeless. And yet…. it’s sterile. This beauty, it’s too perfect, it’s too grandiose, it’s too precise, to the point that it lacks human frailty. And with that omission, it lacks the most important human quality: love.
And I realized that this degree of perfection in beauty has to be created in an environment that is unjust and lacking in love, because to attain beauty to this degree is neurotic, fanatic, obsessive. If the world had been a socially just place at the time of these egomaniacs, we wouldutn’t have these relics attesting to man’s obsession with beauty and perfection. Underlying the awe and presence of the supernatural that these relics of art inevitably evoke, is a subtle but significant and equally as powerful sense of the evil: the egos behind those that commissioned the work, for the sake of having their names live in infamy; the squalor and poverty and filth that must have existed at the time to enable these artifacts to be created in a vacuum impermeable to time and money and rationale.
This is abundantly obvious at the Stift Melk, a monastery nearly half a kilometer long, built 300 years ago and used by those following St. Benedict. So ornate and decadent, it boggles the mind to consider how the monks, who gave up material comforts, didn’t find it contradictory to worship in a church bedecked with gold, gold, gold everywhere. It sure makes for good pictures though.
