I have been a volunteer guide at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the oldest and most prestigious museum in the city, for almost 15 years. I’ve been surprised by some remarks over the past few years. They illustrate a trend that is starting to disturb me.
“What is that!?” A teenaged boy, horrified, notices the severed head of John the Baptist in a stunning Dutch painting. It sits on a platter in the crook of the arm of beautiful Salome. When I name the victim and point out the headsman in the shadowy background, the kid looks puzzled: “John Baptist who?”
An adult visitor looking at a Renaissance painting portraying the Virgin Mary and Jesus asks, “Who’s that weird-looking baby?”
A group of Fine Arts university students are puzzled by a German Expressionist painting inspired by van Gogh’s The Sower. One asks, “What does sewing clothes have to do with a farmer?” I wonder where to start. The complete detachment from knowledge of any agricultural activity, the metaphor of spreading the “seed” of spiritual enlightenment, or the vagaries of English spelling?
Even more disturbing can be the blank stares, or the frank astonishment I get when I launch into the stories portrayed in a collection of Italian frescoes. Here is Joseph being sold into slavery or seduced by Potiphar’s wife. “Wow! Joseph got around before he met Mary!” Explaining that hundreds of years separate the lives of Old Testament Joseph and New Testament Joseph was not something I anticipated doing when I was training to be a guide. To lighten the moment, I plunge into an explanation of how the frescos were removed from the walls of an Italian palace.
After 15 years as a guide, I love to plan and give tours about classical religious painting. These are mainly scenes from the Old or the New Testament. Once, my tours would cover topics like technique, provenance, history, or how the work was commissioned. Now, most of the time I am really having fun “telling the tale,” as my Welsh grandmother would say. It was she who read to me night after night stories of the Old Testament. For someone so straight-laced, she had little hesitation in plunging an innocent child into the bloodshed, sex, and bizarre exploits of many of the heroes of scripture. A Catholic education, thanks to my father’s insistence and many years of exposure to Orthodox Christianity, gave me some insight into the use of religious images as propaganda, inspiration, and reverence.
Religious art is a touchy subject. After all, Jews, Christians, and Muslims are all bound by the Ten Commandments, the second of which is “Thou shalt not make for yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.” And yet here we are with the Sistine Chapel—or with my grandmother, who would cast aside any small holy picture I was given as a school prize with one scornful word: “Idolatry.” In the Byzantine era, wars and excommunications went on for about 200 years over the issue of whether icons were to be venerated or destroyed as idols.
However, human beings love images. Cavemen, who certainly must have often been hungry or cold, used time and resources to create images on the walls of their uncomfortable homes. Children, as soon as they can grasp a crayon, can hardly be restrained from following suit. I am convinced that images are part of our humanity. The stories depicted in classical European art are part of a culture that, until recently, was widely shared. That is no longer the case where I live.
Here in my home province of Quebec, Premier François Legault got into trouble in 2023, when he remarked on Easter Monday that although Quebec is officially a secular society, its citizens should recognize the gift of solidarity that the Catholic Church left as a heritage. Commentators were outraged, and political rivals pounced upon the opportunity to criticize him as an apologist for a misogynist and colonializing force. They raged that any vestiges of religion should have been discarded decades ago. In fact, they had been discarded decades ago. The Quiet Revolution of the 1960s slashed Quebec’s birth rate, threw a spotlight on the fragility of the French language, and ousted nuns, brothers, and priests from any role in public education. The curriculum in public schools was subsequently purged of any reference to religion. In what has grown into a wonderful mosaic of cultures, languages, and religions, perhaps this was an attempt to forge a unified population.
However, I am disturbed by the notion that what the works I show to visitors represent—the spiritual, the miraculous, the mysterious, the divine; a certain universal contract between humans, leaving aside the Creator—has almost disappeared. These stories, these situations, are threads that have run through our culture for centuries. When I read Nobel Prize-winner Orhan Pamuk’s wonderful A Strangeness in my Mind, with its theme of the “wrong wife,” I immediately think of the story of Jacob. Classical music and modern Broadway Shows like Jesus Christ Superstar or Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat are all echoes of these stories.
Do not be mistaken, I write these things not because I want to promote any dogma or adopt a missionary pose. People have an absolute right to follow their own traditional beliefs, or to have no belief in a religious sense. I know that part of survival is adapting and sometimes embracing change.
In our museum, there is a whole floor devoted to the Arts of One World. There, many wonderful pieces from all over the world are displayed. Some of them were collected by the white Anglophone captains of industry of 19th-century Montreal. Others were generous donations. I tread carefully in that collection, and approach as a neophyte because these things, some of them sacred, are not of my heritage. I must study, read, and attend lectures about this material, and present tours with humility rather than casual familiarity. I know I will never be as comfortable with these pieces and their meanings as I am with what I just referred to as “our culture.” The curators of this floor have approached the variety of origin, the materials and their meanings, by encouraging us to look for common threads across time and cultures. A guide might create a tour by presenting how gold is used as a precious item across cultures, or how funerary rites are similar. Thus, the idea of common humanity is emphasized.
In becoming a secular Western society, we have achieved a certain freedom, a responsibility for our own fate, but just as we mourn the death of a language, so too can we recognize that certain ideas are uniquely expressed through religious traditional art. Cultural revolutions, quiet or noisy, can have unintended consequences. I feel that a whole frame of reference, a whole catalogue of mutual knowledge, is being allowed to slip away and, over the course of a few decades, retreat into vague and misty notions. I ask myself if this change in focus is important—how much, and in what ways, must I adapt and come out of my comfort zone.
When my visitors ask what the tour will be about, I answer, “Stories from the Bible—it’s better than Netflix,” and smile to myself. Are TikTok and Instagram the new scriptures, the iPhone the new Torah? Is the Apple Store the new cathedral and Taylor Swift the new goddess, now that Madonna has grown old? My sales pitch for my tours is proof that I have already internalized the pop-culture references I profess to abhor.
I find flashes of consolation in the jumble that is pop culture, however. My son-in-law is a Muslim and my grandchildren attend public French-language school. Once, when I was looking over my museum material, my granddaughter asked me what I was reading. “Oh, it’s about a young boy in the Old Testament who had a lot of mean brothers. They sold him into slavery, can you imagine?”
She replied, “You mean Yousif?”
“Well, you didn’t learn that in school, I’m sure.”
“No, Granny. Dad used to read us some stories when we were little, and I remember that.” All is not lost, and new beauty will come into this world, too, I am convinced.
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