The Catholic Church

(The Pretty Churches)

I thought I would end this trip (more or less, I haven't decided if I am going to keep writing) about the Catholic Church. We've been inside so many glorious churches throughout Europe reflecting different periods in artistic style as well as theology.  Granted the Church is changing faster at the moment than ever before.  Ironically, in Europe, religion in general is on a steep decline although they clearly have the rich history.  Inversely, Evangelicals in America can't seem to tell us enough about Jesus (odd, since they seem to be so in tune with the Old Testament.)

I didn't want this post to be a smug reflection for atheists or others with staunch opinions about the Church in general.  Clearly most of the money that has gone into building churches could have fed the poor and prevented corruption in the name of the Lord.  Something else to consider is the exuberant love in many cases that went into celebrating God. It would be hard to make the argument that the money could be better spent on holy wars.  Why do we love to fight with people who worship the same God differently?  It baffles me.

Whenever I go into a church, I always ask myself, "Does God live here?"  Sometimes it feels as though a rich person was trying to buy their way into heaven (which they were) or trying to impress everyone with their riches (which there also were).  Other times, I can feel the love of the artist and his relationship with what he is doing in the name of the Lord.  I am so touched and can tear up by indescribable beauty.  I am able to experience God through love expressed in art.  Where else could such divine inspiration originate?

I have also been blessed with seeing churches in many styles from many nations.  Each one does it their own way.  There are incredibly austere (boring, just kidding) churches in Holland reflecting local values to embarrassing riches in Rome made from lavish amounts of gold.  We saw a church yesterday that was gilded in upwards of 100kg of gold here in Portugal!  If you want to see a shining example in America, go visit the Basilica in Saint Louis.  It is done in the Byzantine mosaic style and is astonishing.

Why did they create these buildings?  In the early days, many cathedrals were used as expo centers or malls.  Each guild would sponsor an alcove and sell their goods before or after mass.  It just held everyone.  Many buildings were built to make you feel the awe of God by their sheer size.  Something we saw in Madrid was a church essentially converted into a homeless shelter complete with water fountain out front.  Pews were covered in blankets with the needy sleeping inside away from the elements.  In Belgium, we saw part of a church used for day care.  Why not use parts of churches as senior center or gathering places for arts and crafts?  I don't think the church is antiquated; it just needs to evolve with the times.  If a program takes care of people, why not try it?

Byzantine Style Church in Rome

One weird part of the Church in Europe is payment to enter a place of worship.  A part of me just cringes at paying to enter a church.  A sublime church here in Porto, Portugal was close to 7$ each.  I feel like I should get a plenary indulgence with my ticket.  In Bulgaria, churches charged you to take photos or a couple in Rome charged you to light up a painting.  I'm fine with paying to be a tourist.  At the end of the day, these building have to be burdensome on a declining congregation.  Imagine keeping valuable items safe from crime or the elements as well as paying priests or cleaning art and fixing leaks.   I also feel that these buildings are now testaments to the story of humanity.  I read some incredibly smug and callous rebuttals to repairing Notre Dame.  Notre Dame is more than a church—it is part of our story.  Not all stories have happy endings or only heroes.  The powerful Italian Medici family murdered a Pope so they could name a family member as Pope.  Two days later, the new Pope was made a priest.  The poor at times have also rose up against Papal corruption and burdensome taxes. 

School of Athens located in the Vatican Museum

The Church is going through a lot right now and it deserves it.  No one is above the law—God's or otherwise.  In the end I hope the Church gets its shit together.  Maybe they will take a new course.  My dad is still spinning in his grave over Vatican II.  Maybe it's time to have married priests like the Byzantine/Ruthenian Catholic still have in the Old Country. (G A S P) Who cares? I'm more interested in people sleeping in pews, being fed, and treated with dignity. 

Actually, a Bulgarian 5th Century Orthodox Church

Orthodox Icon

Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Sagrada Familia, Barcelona

Ravenna, Italy

Ravenna, Italy

Well Hello Sailor…

A Primer on Portugal

Lisbon, late afternoon

Portugal is known for the being the world's first global empire during the Age of Exploration.  In its prime, Portugal was a major political, economic, and military power.  Their success in trades such as lucrative spices started a race for riches among many nations.  At one point, the two Catholic countries of Portugal and neighboring Spain had territories decided by the Pope resulting in Brazil in the East of South America, and Spanish speaking nations in the Western side of the continent.

Are these pastries for um, an ethnic gathering?

To support this trade, the sailors discovered took to drying cod or bacalhau as it's called to provide food on long journeys.  It was so abundant, that it made the perfect meal before refrigeration and Tupperware. It seems to stay edible indefinitely or can be used to shingle a roof or make repairs with its long thin fishy sheets.  Oddly, cod is a cold-water fish and only found far from Iberia. That does not stop the locals from eating the fish pulp up. Just add two days of water.  Cat food tends to have more texture. Seemingly every other dish is made from re-constituted cod.  Cod cakes, grilled re-constituted cod, cod in mashed potato and egg…  The Forest Gump of Portugal could probably name dishes for hours. All kidding aside, the stuff ain't bad.

Our cool stage-set apartment, a mixture of reclaimed materials and theatrical amenities.

Another curious food are these little custard tarts called pastéis de nata.  They are everywhere, quite simple, and delicious (especially when warm).  The custard is thick and made from only the yolk of the egg.  What about the whites?  I'm glad you ask all the right questions!  It turns out the local nuns were starching their habits with them.  Who knew? History can be wacky with unanticipated outcomes.

Stu on the couch with a distressed wall conveniently centered behind the couch.

So why don't we know much about the place today?  Glad you asked again!  Damn you're an inquisitive bugger. In brief, it was conquered by Napoleon, late to industrialize, and most devastatingly, prone to earthquakes.  In 1755, the city of Lisbon was struck on All Saints day at 9:30ish in the morning with one of the largest quakes on record.  Many people were in church to celebrate the holy day when the 9.0 earthquake hit Lisbon and many parishioners were crushed by collapsing churches.  The quake was not much smaller than the devastation caused on Boxing Day, 2004 in Indonesia by a 9.1 quake that left over 200,000 dead and a tsunami of 100 feet high .  The Lisbon quake lasted between 3 and 6 minutes leaving a 16-foot-wide gap in the center of the city.  Forty minutes later, a massive tsunami washed away much of the city as well as many people.  The city burned for as many as five days.  By week's end, possilby 100,000 people were dead and 80% of the city was rubble.  Conquest clearly took a backseat to recovery and soul searching.  Did they bring this upon themselves?

Today in Europe, Portugal is seen as one of the countries recovering from the Euro hangover.  Like Greece, it accumulated massive debts compared to its economic potential--Amounts that were unlikely to be paid back.  Tough monetary belt-tightening was finger-wagged from Brussels in exchange for €78,000,000,000 Euros in aid.  When the Euro-zone was created, no one even expected economies to slide so far away from each other.  Germany did quite well since it produced products priced in Euros whereas countries like Portugal did not enjoy the same economic output in trade.  The austerity lead to a contraction of the economy and an unemployment rate of 15%. Today, the average wage is $1,000/month and the minimum wage is roughly equal to 60% of that.  This is an oversimplification but the results as clear; Portugal is still recovering ever so slowly from their financial crisis.  Much of the infrastructure, like Greece, can use some love.

Some interesting facts about Portugal include that it was the first country to abolish life imprisonment in 1884. The maximum incarceration is 25 years.  The country was also among the first to abolish the death penalty.  In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all common drugs for personal use.  The result has been a decrease in drug use and new diagnoses of HIV.  In addition, the country has some of the most progressive LGBTQ laws.

El Prado

El Prado

I just can't match her smile

I feel like Sister Wendy talking about museums, but what is the greatest way to differentiate cities except by culture?  This can include food, history, architecture, weather, or my favorite art because it incorporates a few areas at once.  If you are looking for a city to visit or what to expect there, I suggest a history refresher.  History can tell you a lot about a place.  When were they rich and powerful? When were they destitute?  When were they subjugated?  (If you are not familiar with Sister Wendy, she was a nun who discussed her love of art on the BBC.  She eloquently and intimately talked about art in all her fine penguinery--and that distinctive smile.)

 America was on top of the world financially in the 20^th Century and the art acquired, and building built reflect this reality.  Spain on the other hand was wildly rich around the Age of Discover, after Columbus—so rich that gold and silver lost value due to the amount that flooded the market.  During this era, Spain acquired or commissioned the best art, build many grand cities, and blossomed in general.  Is the art good in the capital? You bet your dupa.

Goya's Saturn eating his son from his dark period.  Bad ass, huh?

El Prado is the crowning gem of museums in Spain.  It really is the Spanish Met, Louvre, or British Museum.  El Prado hold art from the 12^th to early 20^th Century. The collection has over 7,000 paintings with about 1,300 on display.  Millions of people visit annually. I often look at some countries and muse they have an embarrassing excess in in artistic proliferation.  Holland has 17 million today yet produced Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and other insanely talented artists.  Spain is another one of those countries.  Picasso, Dalí, Goya, Velázquez, Miró, and El Greco were all Spanish Artist.  (Yes, El Greco was born in Greece but worked in Spain.). El Prado is the definitive place to experience many of these artists finest works.  Another way to discover a museum is to see who a patron of a certain artist was.  For example, a king in Austria loved Bruegel and someone in Philly loved Duchamp.  How else would the wildly bizarre, magical, mystical, decadent, monstrous, whimsical, confusing, confronting, masterpiece, The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch end up in Spain? Someone liked it enough to buy it.  There is a theory he hallucinated on tainted grain.  When see you it in person, you think, Theory?  Damn that painting makes my top list of things to see in life. 

They ain't right

The museum holds the groundbreaking Las Meninas, complete with dwarf as well as Goya's Saturn Devouring his Son.  The painting that makes me chuckle the most is Goya's The Family of Charles IV.  It is a great example of the intersection between history, satire, and art.  The royal family was intimately, well, inbred.  This common practice did not make for the brightest of monarchies.  In addition, the magical element mercury was a curiosity in the palace.  Mercury is what made haberdashers go, well, crazy.  It causes brain damage.  Goya was commissioned to paint the family.  Take a moment to look at the family.  None of them look exactly right. Someone isn't even looking at the artist.  My favorite is the queen.  Have you even seen a chicken tilt its head because something has caught its attention?  There she is.  The reaction to the painting was…They loved it!

The Third of May, 1808 by Goya

The museum also tells the story of Spain.  How many paintings can you think of that historically capture a moment?  Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze and Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix in France come to mind.  Spain has several.  The 3^rd of May 1808 by Goya comes to mind first.  It commemorates the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's armies during the occupation of 1808 in the Peninsular War.  The desperate look of the victims and the aggressive stance of Napoleon's troops really capture that day and its horrors.  The picture is also massive—it is 8 ½ feet by 11 ½ feel long.  It is almost life-size and you are watching the firing squad and the pleas up close and in person. 

The Garden of Earthly Delights

 

A trip to El Prado really capture the corazón of Spain.  You learn about it in World History but only from a 'Ferdinand and Isabella" tale or "The Spanish Inquisition was bad" perspective.  It Is a huge country with a rich deep nuanced history.  Go to Madrid and visit the museums.  I suggested a multi-day pass for El Prado.  By the end of the day, I was like, damn, I really have to stop and look at this one even though I'm ready to drop.

Guernica

Guernica by Pablo Picasso

 Welcome to my nightmare.  It's now 5am and I've been up since 3am.  I think Madrid and jetlag have caught up with me.  I was so dead by 8pm that I just crashed.

If that isn't a first world problem, I don't know what is.

Today, or was it yesterday?  At 5am the days kinda melt into one another.  We went to the Reina Sofia Museum. The museum was opened in 1992 to hold 20^th Century art.  We went to this museum before and were not terribly impressed.  We walked through most of building with anticipation for the gem of the collection, Guernica.  This time around, we skipped the temporary exhibits on the top floors and instead focused our energy on the heart of the collection.  We were pleasantly surprised to actually enjoy the collection this go 'round.

Guernica is Picasso's political statement in black and white on a massive canvas in response to the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica around 4:30 pm on Monday, 26 April 1937 by the Nazis and fascist Italians at the behest of the Nationalists led by Franco. The town of Guernica was located in the heart of the Republican resistance in the North. From France, Picasso recounted the atrocity in paint to bring attention to the Spanish Civil War and the senseless bombing of the city.

The first time I saw/heard about Guernica was in second grade.  I remember a brief overview of the Spanish symbolism in the painting in a small black and white image. Even in an art history course in college, the painting was printed in black and white.  Since the painting is entirely in black, white, and shades of grey, I guess cost is always a consideration.  Unfortunately, black and white photos do not do it justice.  The picture has a seemingly infinite number of shades of grey.  The painting is hosted in its own room due to its large size. It is massive measuring about 11 feet tall by 25 feet long.  It was well guarded by two old ladies and a tow line of about 5 feet.  Don't cross abuela.  I am quite clear she doesn't need a chancla to take your butt out. (A chancla is a flip-flop that instills fear in all New Mexican children.  It can be flipped off and used for efficient discipline.). It is always a balancing act between protecting the painting and letting you get close enough to catch details.  Too many pieces of art have been damaged for reasons from the political to the loco.

When we entered the room, everyone was standing at a distance to take the entire painting in at once.  I recall thinking, I remember this feeling more impressive.  I then moved closer.  It was not the same painting.  I was drawn into the horror of mothers with dead babies, the desperate and contorted figures as well as tortured animals including the symbol of Spain, the bull.   You know when you see this painting, it is something you should see before you die even if you don't get Picasso.  Personally, I'm not a huge fam of Picasso, but he was so prolific, there is something for everyone and Guernica is something to behold like the Eiffel Tower, the Terracotta Warriors, or the Sagrada Familia Basilica in Barcelona. <Insert your own awe-inspiring object here.)

In the next room were sketches for Guernica.  They were in color and were not as abstract.  I asked Stu the exact date of bombing.  It was 26 April.  The sketches were dated the 8^th, 9^th, 12^th, and 28^th of May.  The rage was clearly still as fresh as the dust.  The sketches were in color, but black and white seem to capture the senseless.

There were other interesting works on display.

EarlyDali

There was a huge retrospective on a German communist, JörgImmendorff, who lived in West Berlin. He was critical of the GDR which made for a weird combination of thought between East and West Germany.  I think the exhibit would have made more sense if some of the political ranting on the canvasses were in English. The works did eloquently show the evolution of a man grappling with life, theology, and trying to figure out this thing called the moment.  Near the end of his life he was afflicted with ALS.  He continued to paint but with his other hand as long as he could until his death. He just had more to say, and he knew time was running out.  The collection took on a new meaning, what does a life look like?

Great Propoganda Postcards

 The Reina Sofia had some other surprises.  There were early works from artist like Miro and Dali when they were still trying to figure it all out.  I often hear, well, hell, I could draw *that*.  1) You didn’t think of it first and 2) Even those artists we perceive as hacks could actually produce amazing sofa painting at starving artist prices, but why bother?  Dali before Surrealism still had a magical shimmering quality to his canvases and Miro could also work a brush.  Miro's tangent was deconstructing painting to the point of not being a painting, whatever the hell that means. I'm left with well that blotch is pretty. 

Early Miro

 

As children we learn that art is pretty or for learned refined people.  Both are bullshit.  Art is about expressing humanity.  Are you left inspired? horrified?  Delighted? Called to action? Or perhaps at peace. Occasionally, you just don't understand what the hell you are looking at.  I remember being in Paris with Stu seeing a head of lettuce atop a stump of marble.  It was part of show called something like Man.  The art was part of an exhibit called inane.  Yes, lettuce on marble, hold the wry, is inane.