Maurice Denis, "Easter Mystery", 1891

I don't know my Bible very well, it seems, since I leapt from Easter to Easter egg hunt, as if that's really what Easter is: an excuse to hide eggs from children.

So of course Maurice Denis painted a disembodied hand taunting white-robed egg seekers with the missing egg. Of course he did.

Except that apparently that's the hand of God, and he's presenting the Eucharist, and I don't think we're supposed to think he's taunting anyone with it.

This is what happens when dopey unbelievers interpret religious art. The mystery and wonder of the Resurrection morphs into a bitter suburban American nightmare of fed-up soccer parents dressing their children in robes, hiding in trees, and wagging eggs in the air. April is the cruelest month in middle class mainstream America, after all.

Of course, my picture cuts off the tomb and the women on their knees at its door; hey, I thought they were searching the grass for their eggs.

But the Easter/egg connection is quite old, it seems, old enough that Mary Magdalene is said to have presented the Emperor of Rome with a red egg to inform him of the Resurrection and the bloodshed of Christ, etc. So for real, Denis might've painted an egg here, and I might be more informed than I thought.

I quite love Denis and his gently gothic-mystery forest scenes, with their robed women fleeing or striding or moseying around. He is Emily Bronte crossed with M. Night Shyamalan.

But this truly is the Worst. Hand of God. Ever. Michaelangelo, he ain't.

Sunday Afternoon on the Island of...holy crap, that's a lot of dots

I was in Chicago this past weekend, so I got took a good long gander at Georges Seurat's masterpiece. There sure are a lot of dots on that thing. It's so carefully built -- imagine if we really were characters in this painting, and we had to stand at right angles at all times. Unless we were a dog or a monkey.

I don't know about you, but I too like to take my monkey out for walks in the park, especially when I'm wearing my enormous bustle.

You never really know a painting until you see it in person (well, that's not true. For some, like Lichtensteins, I don't think it matters that much. But let's pretend this is true), and this one has a fabulous surprise in its painted purply border. The museum placard says Seurat added the border to help the eye make the transition to his custom-designed white frame, which they've replicated. (They being the Art Institute of Chicago.)

You almost never see that border in reproductions of the painting, which seems like a refutation of Seurat's intentions. I would imagine he'd like it there to lead the eye out to the white of the page of an art book, as well.

And so our eyes go unled, dazzled by orderly dots and skittering out to a chaotic 360 degree world.

I took a painting class once where we were forced to complete a pointillist painting, and boy did everyone hate doing it. It is profoundly unsatisfying. It feels like an obsessive compulsive exercise designed to force you to exert control over your own animal impulses and desires.

No wonder Seurat dropped dead at 31; he must've been exhausted.

Portraits of the Reverand Ebenezer Devotion and his wife Martha, Boston Museum of Fine Arts

"Ebenezer Devotion" is one of the finest and most quintessentially early-American names I've ever heard.

This folk art portrait perfectly captures what I think Americans think of themselves at their best. This is the upstanding yet staid, cartoonish yet dignified, goofy yet approachable American male with the outstanding name.

Martha's pretty cool, too, but she would've benefited from a Puritan supername like "Hebzibah".

Piero della Francesca's Hercules (ca. 1470)

This painting holds infinite appeal for me. Sometimes you come across a work that changes your worldview and makes you reconsider something you thought you knew. This painting is like the Madeline L'Engle book A Wrinkle In Time in that regard for me. You thought you knew what time was and what space was, but she made you think again. The work expands your concept of the possible.

Piero's Hercules is not the Hercules I thought I knew. He's less physically imposing and more vulnerable than I had ever imagines, and it makes me identify with the man in ways I never could before. He's less professional wrestler and more Olympic athlete. He's doing his best, but sometimes his best is exactly the wrong thing. Thus the insecure knock-knees, and the plaintive gaze. This Hercules makes sense to me; I can see the man in this painting beating his wife and children to death and coming out of his god-induced insanity with the determination to serve an impossible penance that turns his accursed physical prowes to his advantage. This Hercules is doomed to be more beast than man.

And I like how the lion's paws both modestly cover and immodestly imitate Hercules's genitals.

See the painting yourself high on the wall on the second floor of the excellent Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (the same room features a great Fra Angelico somewhat hidden on the far side of the fireplace, so look lively, folks).