One hot, humid afternoon in Chennai – a 14-year-old girl was carefully cutting out the edges of a print-out she had taken. The print-out was of a painting titled “Venus D’Urbino” by one of the Renaissance masters – Titian, completed in 1534. The painting depicted a gloriously nude woman reclining on a bed in a sumptuously decorated room, staring straight into the viewer’s eyes. There was a little dog curled up at the foot of the bed.
The girl wondered if she should paste this print-out in her 9th grade history project. What would the teacher think? What if the teacher complained to her mother? Her family was very conservative. No woman in her family had ever had a career apart from being a homemaker. Heck, no woman in her family even stepped outside the house alone without a chaperone. The girl had never travelled outside the borders of Tamil Nadu. She dreamt of going to Hyderabad someday – if someone in her family could spare the time, effort and money to take her there. She had read in a magazine that there was an entire market dedicated to bangles in Hyderabad. How exotic it sounded. And how far away it seemed.
She looked again at the print-out in her hand. The woman in the painting was the epitome of someone absolutely comfortable in her own skin. Her serene, self-assured face seemed to embody everything the girl was not and it awakened a wonder in her that could not be articulated. People might see the painting and be unable to look past the nudity. To the girl, however, the painting symbolized beauty, boldness and gave her a soaring feeling every time she looked at it. Ah, to hell with it. She went ahead and pasted the print-out firmly in her history project. She loved the painting and this was her project. The teachers in her all-girls Christian missionary-run school would simply have to deal with it.
July 2023 – I was standing in the Kunsthistorisches museum in Vienna, Austria. I was staring at a painting – an original artwork from the Renaissance period – depicting a woman with a thick fur coat draped over one shoulder. The other shoulder was left bare, her skin contrasting strikingly with the dark fur. However, it was her face that stopped me in my tracks and made my throat go dry. Why did it look so familiar? The eyes were staring directly into mine, awakening an old memory.
In the Middle Ages in Europe, the human body was considered dirty and foul, something to be hidden away. This view was reinforced by the prevailing religious dogma of that time period. From the late 1400s onwards, the Renaissance masters had turned this world view upside down with glorious paintings and sculptures celebrating male and female bodies. What was once considered shameful had then been admired and celebrated.
When she was doing her history project, the girl had never bothered to find out where the painting she so loved was currently showcased. What was the point anyway? It was far away – a place she could not possibly visit. Even to dream of it seemed embarrassingly ambitious. She hid her dreams away in her subconscious, the way the human body had once been hidden away in art.
July 2023 – the Kunsthistorisches museum, Vienna, Austria.
I stepped closer to read the description of the painting. “Woman in a Fur Coat” - painted in 1538 by Titian. The same painter, the same woman – a different painting, a different pose. The face I had once admired was looking into mine – once again, after all these years – with the same sass... as if to playfully say, “It took you long enough to get here!” There were people all around me. Yet, at that moment, I was alone with this mysterious woman who had lived 500 years ago. I had looked at her as a teenager, she was looking back at the adult me now. What did she see?
On that sweltering afternoon in Chennai, the girl had followed her heart and pasted that print-out in her project. A tiny move – choosing what she loved over what people would think. And that tiny act of love had manifested into her standing face to face with the original painting of the same woman by the same master painter. This and countless other acts of stepping outside her comfort zone had manifested into her being the woman she had become. The girl who had hoped someday, someone would spare time and money to take her outside her corner of the world was now travelling across continents by herself, with her own money, on her own terms. The girl whose most ambitious travel dream had been to travel 600 kms from Chennai to Hyderabad somehow found herself as an adult woman 6000 kms away in Vienna – looking into the face and eyes that had once awakened her soul.
If I could manifest one thing for myself, it is that life continues to pleasantly surprise me, in its own way and in its own time - by fulfilling dreams I was too ashamed to consciously have, because they seemed too unattainable and too ambitious – as a response for my acts (big and small) of choosing curiosity, appreciation and a love of learning over fear and judgement.
Oh, and by the way, the girl got full marks for her project on Renaissance paintings.
