"What is the meaning of life? The great revelation had never come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark..."
- Train of thought of deep-thinking painter Lily Briscoe in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse
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The thinking person's lucky life abounds in surprises, in the sorts of sudden "illuminations" of the unexpected that are always quickening Lily Briscoe's pulse.
Why, on just one morning this week my inner-Lily was thrillingly astonished by two contrasting discoveries.
One was the news that One Nation seems set to become the major opposition party in federal parliament. The other was reading that all this time there have been not the obvious two but in fact six (six!) six dogs in Paolo Veronese's 1563 masterpiece The Wedding Feast at Cana.
There's not room for everything in this petite newspaper column. So we put what new Redbridge polling shows of the rise and rise of Pauline Hanson's masterpiece One Nation aside for the moment and focus for now on Veronese's masterpiece.
Yes, although there is, sadly, only one Jesus Christ in his teeming-with-people painting of the Wedding Feast (the Bible's story of Jesus turning water into wine), the painting boasts an abundance of dogs. I had only ever noticed two in all my years of looking at reproductions of the work but in his just-published The Dog's Gaze: A Visual History, the dashing American historian Thomas Laqueur points out all six. He discusses Veronese as one of many great painters who have enriched their works with lots of dogs.
It takes time to find all six dogs in Veronese's painting but with painstaking Googling (I've used Wikipedia's Wedding at Cana) you will eventually find all six, and, as a bonus, a cat!
This rewarding kind of Slow Looking is much on my mind at the moment. We live in hectic times in which our concentration spans are shrivelled by the sheer velocity of Life and our addictions to our devices' screens. We have forgotten how to do almost anything slowly, mindfully, gratefully.
The National Portrait Gallery here in Canberra, alert to how today's revved-up gallery-goers skedaddle from painting to painting (studies show the average gallery-goer spending only 15-30 seconds with each work) now offers a free, once-a-week Slow Looking experience.
I've begun attending these after having recently been shocked into a realisation of how goldfishy my concentration span has become. I have only just discovered, in a corner of a painting I thought I knew backwards, Manet's Olympia (1863), a little black cat.
The centrepiece of the famous (and scandalising) painting is the glowingly pale nude woman. She is looking assertively out at us as if to challenge "What is it about me that's so rattling your cages, so knotting your knickers, ye prudes and pervs?"
It alarms me that I have only just, with conscious slow looking, noticed the famous painting's black cat at the famous woman's white feet.
Our role models in slowing down can now include, astonishingly, the astronaut Reid Wiseman who at times on the Artemis II mission was hurled through space at 40,000km/h.
This intelligent man, just intelligently interviewed by the ever-intelligent New Yorker magazine, reveals how, days after coming home and needing to get away from the feverishness of his celebrity limelight, he left his phone behind and went and sat alone on a beach for four quiet, contemplative hours, for a slow think about the wondrous space adventure mission he and his crew had just had.
And, still with hectic gallery-going, there is news this week that the Louvre is "reimagining' how it might display the Mona Lisa. The room where it is presently displayed to a madding, three-hours-queueing, often "intensely agitated" mob of 20,000 crazed tourists a day (each visitor allowed a 30-second jostling encounter with the painting before being herded away with cattle prods) is manifestly inadequate.
Call me parochial but the idea of queueing to see a sadly dog-bereft little celebrity portrait of an Italian noblewoman for just a few stopwatch-timed seconds has no appeal for me. Here in Canberra at the National Gallery of Australia I can go straight up to (there's never a queue) Napier Waller's Christian Waller [his wife] with Baldur, Undine and Siren [their charismatic Airedale terriers], and linger, slowly looking at it, figuratively playing with the three ripper dogs for as long as the fancy takes me.
Dogs really do lift a painting, as Paolo Veronese knew and as Thomas Laqueur shows and explains in The Dog's Gaze. And Laqueur is very good on how we, humans and dogs, seem to need one another if we are to be complete.
"No animal lives more easily in the visual field of humans than the dog - dogs see us in a way we think we understand," Laqueur insists, correctly.
Online one can buy T-shirts of the Mona Lisa in which the da Vinci's hitherto lonely noblewoman enjoys the companionship of a dog on her lap. The dachshund one is especially cute. I bought my wife one with an English springer spaniel. We have commissioned a kelpie one.
And, perhaps this is just me, but the dog-in-her-lap T-shirt Mona Lisas seem improvements on da Vinci's tragically dogless original.
