Stand in front of Massachio’s mural in the Carmine Chapel in Florence, take a deep breath, and look. The faces of people living centuries ago seem alive. You pick out strength, imagine personality and character, feel you could talk to various ones, sense their emotions. How old was this Massachio when he stood with brush and paint, shivering in the cold of stone and plaster walls, and painted on a flat grey surface people talking to one another, taking part in a passing moment of history but preserved in a way that no changes of time and situation could touch?
One moment, preserved in paint by an artist who had to be younger than twenty-seven, because he died at twenty-seven before the whole wall was complete. How did his hands have such skill? How could his mind conceive of new, delicate ways to bring out perspective, to mix his paints? How could he place the features and also the personalities of people he knew or had seen on a cold hard wall, to make them alive for so many centuries? Inherited? From whom? Who first had such skillful hands, such workable ideas?
Come to Ghent and walk in the little room where Van Eyck’s painting is well lighted, to be carefully looked at. Sit and look and wonder. Walk up close and find the detail of delicate flowers in the grass, birds flying, the fine hairs of men’s beards so realistic one feels one could brush them, the pearls embroidered on robes standing out with roundness and luster that take one’s breath away. Sit and contemplate the marvel of the subject matter—the Mystic Lamb, standing on the altar, bleeding yet standing, bespeaking the Messiah who came as the Lamb to die and rise again. Look at the fantastic colors, the bright greens, scarlets, blues, yellows mixed by a secret formula Van Eyck devised. Where did it all come from, his skill, his ideas? He did certain things that had never been done before. How?
Let your eyes move down to the date at the bottom of the frame: “Van Eyck 1432”! This man had skill that was not taught. No art school produced him. Where did it come from?
Walk into the Leonardo Da Vinci section of the National Science Museum in Milan and go slowly by the models of his inventions. Remember his paintings, think of him as an artist, but look now at his models and his sketches, which show something of the fabulous diversity of this man’s ideas. Here is a finely proportioned wing made as he projected the thought that one day men could make flying machines. There is a wonderful thing to distill water, and to refrigerate, and here is a model showing how to produce steam, and then how to use it in never-before-thought-of ways. See the model of a furnace for melting metals, cranes and levers for lifting weights, hydraulic power harnessed in his mind and made in a model men could copy.
Look at the walls, covered with sketches of muscles, veins, the heart, lungs, the nervous system, complete anatomy understood in an amazing way in this one man’s mind, and sketched with beauty and detail that cannot be described. Study for a moment his maps of cities and regions, his botanical studies of flowers and plants, his architectural plans that include a whole “model city.” See the weapons such as a cannon, boats with contraptions to drag rivers or lakes, barges to drag the sea, paddle wheels and wheels to turn them—no need to row. Look at the drawings of musical instruments and those that show his understanding of acoustics, of the movement of the moon, stars, planets, of geometry and algebra.
Take time to think and wonder. Where did the ideas come from? The skill, was it inherited? From whom? How can a human being have the creativity demonstrated in the work of artists, and in the work of scientists, and even more in a combination such as Leonardo?
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvelous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well” (Ps. 139:14).
“O give thanks unto the LORD; call upon his name: make known his deeds among the people. Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him: talk ye of all his wondrous works” (Ps. 105:1, 2).
“Thus saith the LORD, thy redeemer, and he that formed thee from the womb, I am the LORD that maketh all things; that stretcheth forth the heavens alone; that spreadeth abroad the earth by myself” (Isa. 44:24).
“I have made the earth, and created man upon it: I, even my hands, have stretched out the heavens.… For thus saith the LORD that created the heavens; God himself that formed the earth and made it; he hath established it, he created it not in vain, he formed it to be inhabited: I am the LORD; and there is none else.… Woe unto him that striveth with his Maker! Let the potsherd strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, What makest thou? or thy work, He hath no hands?” (Isa. 45:12, 18, 9).
“Thus saith God the LORD, he that created the heavens, and stretched them out; he that spread forth the earth, and that which cometh out of it; he that giveth breath unto the people upon it, and spirit to them that walk therein: I the LORD have called thee in righteousness, and will hold thine hand” (Isa. 42:5, 6).
“All things were made by him; and without him was not anything made that was made. In him was life; and the life was the light of men” (John 1:3, 4).
“Surely your turning of things upside down shall be esteemed as the potter’s clay: for shall the work say of him that made it, He made me not? or shall the things framed say of him that framed it, He had no understanding?” (Isa. 29:16).
Though fallen and sinful, spoiled and warped, less by far than he could be, man is wonderful, and glimpses of the original wonder of God’s most marvelous creation show through in people through the centuries. The very existence of art speaks of the existence of the Creator, Artist God, who made man in his own image.
Stand before great works of art and worship the God who made man in his image. Stand before great works of art and weep for the spoiled creation, as Satan tempted and twisted Eve and Adam’s minds into believing him rather than God. Weep today for those who are twice twisted as they claim to be following God, yet engage in what Isaiah 29:16 calls a “turning of things upside down” by saying, “He made me not.” Everyone who turns away from the literal creation of Adam and Eve, and therefore the literal design of the marvel of human beings made so fearfully and wonderfully down to the tiniest detail that Leonardo could so magnificently draw, everyone who turns away from the personal design in God’s mind brought out by his hands in the reality of living beings made in his image, is saying in essence, “He made me not.” This is what grieves God.
“O come, let us adore Him, O come, let us adore Him, O come, let us adore Him, Christ the Lord.” Let us adore the Creator of all things, the One who made man in his image, and then came in human flesh to enable human beings to become the sheep of his pasture, the people of his own flock, forever, never to be spoiled again.
EDITH SCHAEFFER
