It is the last piece of art I linger over at the Louvre, a seven foot mass of marble, carved and hewed and spine arched and nearly breathing. Ironic, for this statue named the “Dying Slave.”
It’s nearly 500 years since that Master Sculptor massaged this stone, ran hand across its cold surface, felt the warmth of marble veins pulsing with life. But standing here, his work almost animate, lungs under this exposed ribcage all but filling with oxygen, I’ve come face to face with Michelangelo.
Isn’t that what happens when we stand before a work of art? Look into the eyes, through the eyes, of a creative soul. Somehow enter into his world.
Inches away from this polished rock, I can see Michelangelo humped over this hunk quarried out of earth, his shoulder muscles taut, a hammer and chisel and determined eye breaking free the body he saw encased within. Grappling with raw rock, breathing his hot breath on it, he’s emancipated the slave.
My neck bends to look up into grey eyes closed before death, a cloud of stone waved into tousled curls. I tilt my head that angle too, marvel at supple movement of marble neck. I can’t take my eyes off a toe, a big toe on a man’s broad foot. The nail is perfect. How did he cut, sand, buff, make that out of solid rock?
Michelangelo touched this stone. And I am standing here.
Languages from around the planet rotate this rock. International eyes pause, whisper in hushed tones, point, pose, and flashes pop, a digital inscribing of this moment with famed monument.
For all its grandeur, the statue’s incomplete. Non-finito’s often a flourish to Michelangelo’s signature. When he felt impotent to express the essence of absolute truth in art, Michelangelo would abandon his work. Leaning in, I can clearly see traces of the struggle, the marks of his rasp, his gradine. Some suggest that the grain of the marble intimates a capitulation on technical grounds.
I know not, just that I don’t want to leave these tiles I am rooted to, my toes standing on marble before Michelangelo’s marble. Do these black veins through stone connect us?
Mere hours later I am on the other side of the globe, far from the Louvre’s halls of hanging canvases caressed with oils and color, back with feet on dirt, air sweet with Hereford’s fragrance. Fence lines, cedar posts and barbed wires, stitch up sides of grassy pastures. I’m back on back gravel roads, patchy fields pulling up over countryside gently rising and rolling away. It’s simple and everywhere and no one is flocking in here to take pictures of this land and rural quiet.
But the backdrop to this place trumps any Louvre must-see.
Clouds more luminous, lustrous, than marble billow, a colossal monument in the heavens. Out of vapors, suspended in space, millions of gallons of water are sculpted into, swelling, crashing, spraying sea foam in a celestial ocean, and I am left wordless before His ancient questions: “Can you understand the spreading of the clouds?” (Job 36:29) “Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water?” (Job 38:4) “Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Who can tip over the water jars of the heavens when the dust becomes hard and the clouds of earth stick together?” (Job 38:37) “Do you know how the clouds hang poised, those wonders of him who is perfect in knowledge?” (Job 37:16)
No, I don’t know how the immensity of such clouds hang poised. And yes, these, common, extraordinary clouds in sky, are unquestionably a wonder of Him who is perfect in knowledge.
Michelangelo’s “Dying Slave” may have been a testament to humanity’s creative work, but it drastically pales in comparison to this, just an ordinary afternoon under a stretching country sky with liquid droplets hewn and formed into massive columns for the heavenly heights. A work never abandoned, left unfinished.
A herd of Herefords blithely graze on blades carved by the same Hand, and I wonder how I too am mostly oblivious to the magnificence of now: “The heavens call to you, and circle around you, displaying to you their eternal splendors, and your eye gazes only to earth” (Dante). But if I slow, look away from earth's distractions, to gaze upon the eternal splendors, do I not come face to face with the Artist? Staggering, that I may enter into His world, His space.
I look over at child watching clouds with me. The curve of his lips, the movement of his eyes. A breathing, life-warmed sculpture not carved out of rock, but out of particles of dust, made into the image of He who chisels mist into sky mountains. This child, a masterpiece that He too will never forsake until complete.
Child and I just stay here, not wanting to move, connected to Him, for didn’t Dante say, “Nature is the art of God”?
Such a daily gallery, this.
God touched this place. And we are standing here.
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Lord, "the power that holds the sky's majesty wins our worship" (Aeschylus). Today, make it so in these eyes, this heart.
Photos: Michelangelo, from Paris' Louvre, and sky sculptures, on the afternoon of my returning, down our country road.
