… Eye of the Beholder — Alice Mattison reckons with the impacts of macular degeneration … (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
I still visit museums, but carefully. At the Met a few months ago, my husband and I chose exhibits of three-dimensional art (Korean ceramics, African sculpture) and abstract art. But I knew he wanted to see the seventeenth-century Dutch masters—his old favorites, too. When we were almost out of time, I suggested we look at them briefly. We climbed the big staircase. Once more I stood before Rembrandt’s self-portrait from 1660. Now his round sober face, staring out of a dark background, had a blur where his left eye should have been, as if the painting were damaged.
I cried on the coat check line. This was different from not seeing a small pitcher on a shelf at home. The museum had taken care that the Rembrandt self-portrait wasn’t mottled by uneven lighting or partly hidden by a piece of furniture; it wasn’t at just the wrong spot near a window. The gap I saw, the vaguely gray splotch where his left eye should have been, was obscene, a violation, an enormity.
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