![]() I protest, reject, then lean closer, touch his arm, mourn my husband, and finally say softly, looking into his eyes, “I have missed this – the banter, the companionship.” And in nearly a whisper, “Thank you.” Strength and vulnerability – a most seductive combination in peacetime. I will withhold laughing at how they want to appear so brave, so in control when they were all such cowards, such whimpering little cowards who now embrace nihilism and existentialism as if these will somehow ease the pain, somehow change their histories. Without fail, a man will come to my rescue, sometimes with the offer of a cigarette, often with the hint at much, much more. ![]() I pretend to rummage for a cigarette in the silver case I inherited by default when no one else was left, then I look around the café, straddling the line between desperate and aloof, between taken and available. I order a single espresso, play with a wedding ring I took from the woman, our neighbor, who hid with us for two years before she killed herself. One seeks a way out of their daily tedium, the other a playmate in their quest for more, simply more. I find my mark, usually at a café near a train station. If there is one thing that I have learned in these few years since the war, it’s that no one likes a reminder of their ill deeds and no man is above flattery. Sixteen years after their purchase, the museum world was rocked when the Western Prelacy of the Armenian Apostolic Church of America, acting on behalf of its mother church-the Catholicosate of the Great House of Cilicia, based in Antelias, Lebanon, outside of Beirut-sued the Getty Museum for “restitution of cultural heritage looted as a result of the Armenian Genocide,” asking over $100 million in damages.They must always believe, if only for a moment, that they alone can satisfy my desires, that they can open a part of my soul no one has ever seen before, that I am rich and young and vaguely Catholic. Those eight meticulously rendered leaves-a masterpiece of “medieval visual harmony”-were acquired by the Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 1994 after being exhibited earlier that year by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. In the early 20th century, it was shorn of its Canon Tables, the concordance detailing passages that appear in two or more of the four Gospels, a standard feature of medieval manuscripts. Although the book endured, it did not remain intact. Watenpaugh, a professor of art history at the University of California, Davis, has written a gripping, and at times unsettling, history of what is known as the Zeytun Gospels, a lavishly illuminated Armenian book that miraculously survived centuries of war, conquest and dispossession of a kind that culminated in the Armenian genocide under Ottoman rule during World War I (and in its aftermath under the newly formed Turkish state). ![]() Some originated in cultures still active today, prompting the question: Is it possible to understand a religious relic simply as art, removed from its history and the culture that made it? This perilous fault line-between the cosmopolitan enjoyment of art objects removed from their histories and their use by cultures still living those histories-provides the compelling tension of Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh’s “The Missing Pages: The Modern Life of a Medieval Manuscript From Genocide to Justice.” While such manuscripts are acquired by museums for their purely artistic merits, they began as venerated spiritual objects intended for ceremonial use, not at all intended as art in the modern sense. I lluminatedmanuscripts, copied by hand and painstakingly adorned with vibrant colors and gold leaf, predate by centuries Gutenberg’s Bible, printed around 1450 using movable metal type.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |