Photos by Matthias Rosenkranz on Flickr

Juliana and I sat side-by-side in the Print Room of the Ashmolean Museum. I had met her there for a tutorial, Oxford’s version of classroom time. As we waited for the supervisor to bring out the first drawings, Juliana asked me about my experience with 16th century art. I didn’t have much, no more than the printed images and slides that Juliana had been guiding me through for the past three weeks. I was eager to see the real thing.

The supervisor brought out the first heavy, linen-covered box. She set it on the table, ceremoniously pulling on her white cotton gloves. The supervisor instructed us to tell her if we wanted so much as to turn a drawing over. Only she could touch them. As the supervisor opened the lid and placed the first drawing in front of us, Juliana smiled, though not at anybody in particular. She turned quiet as I took in the image on the aged, gray paper sitting on the ledge in front of us. I was looking at the crucifixion of Christ.

He was alive, but barely. His eyes rolled upwards as he pleaded to be released into eternity, and I could imagine his soul poised to leave his body. His right hand was open; his left, clenched. His body was contorted: his torso jutted away from his legs, which pressed together in pain, and his toes stretched apart, tightening and releasing. Only a small piece of cloth draped Christ’s body, clinging to his thighs. On either side of him, an angel clutched his face in sorrow, mourning imminent death. A single skull rested at the bottom of the cross, partially sunken into the ground. Christ was not the first have faced death here.

I struggled to pull myself back into the Print Room. I began to look at this drawing with the art historian’s eye that Juliana had worked to develop in me. Christ’s body was clear and polished, but the pencil was softly drawn and smudged, giving the drawing lines that were focused enough to dramatize the pain of the crucifixion’s final moments, but soft enough to prevent this from merely being a study of the physical form. There were no unresolved pentimenti, the changes an artist makes as he works, and that are frequently visible in drawings like the one before me. This drawing was decisive. Even at the moment before death, Christ’s body pounded with life and with the will to live. The equal emphasis on body and soul was executed by an artist who knew every muscle and every nerve. It was executed by an artist who knew where the soul pulsed and where the spirit breathed. The spiritual longing was palpable and unrequited. I needed no faith to feel this, nor did I have to look at the label on the box to identify what I was looking at. In front of me was a Michelangelo.

* * *

I looked at a lot of Michelangelo’s drawings that year I spent in Oxford, and they never got old. Each time a drawing was placed in front of me, I held my breath, anticipating the intoxication from those aged gray-brown lines. When the drawings were so immediate, inches from my face, I could fall into them, plunging headfirst the way I first plunged into the ocean: moving from dry to soaked in an instant. Once I got past the shock of the first dive, I wanted to jump in again and again, falling into the smudged pencil lines. I wanted to swim below the surface of Michelangelo’s drawings and soak up what could only be felt in such proximity.

After I left Oxford, I still craved the immediacy of art I had found deep in the Print Room. I’d close my eyes and remember how those four-hundred-year-old pencil lines made the world drop away. I read and re-read my notes from that year, needing to convince myself that I wasn’t just feeling nostalgia in hindsight. I thought a lot about those experiences while I searched for a way to put art at my fingertips every day.

* * *
Several years later, I got a job at the Eiteljorg Museum in Indianapolis. I witnessed a range of reactions to art, both from my colleagues and the public. Many of my colleagues had had immersive experiences not unlike my own, experiences that made them search for ways to put art at their fingertips, whether they were accountants or grant writers or curators. But the more the attendance numbers fell, the more I still questioned whether those engrossing experiences where rare, or if they could be available to anybody. Or if anybody even wanted them.

A blind museum visitor answered my question. I met her while working with a focus group of disabled visitors. She was testing a computer prototype that would change the way the visually impaired could experience a museum visit (this was nearly ten years before the iPad, back in the dark ages of the early aughts). The software developers had incorporated audio into the computer so that blind visitors could hear detailed descriptions of a work of art. The blind woman was excited about this, but admitted that wasn’t enough for her to visit a museum. She said something I already knew, but I needed her to say it before I could believe it: there is something irreplaceable about art. Something happens when we are in its presence, whether or not we can see it. It surpasses our physical senses in surprising ways, and its powers are redemptive. Even this woman, who could not see the gentle curves of a bronze sculpture or the thick streaks of paint on canvas, had found a reason to go to a museum.

The artist Pierre Bonnard said, “People always speak of submission to nature. There is also submission to the picture.” If a blind woman can echo that, then we can all be saved.