Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle

From an era before selfies, Paul McCartney’s cache of photos, even the out of focus ones, prompts Jamie Mulvaney to consider what perspective we need on ourselves.

Jamie Mulvaney

Jamie is Vicar of St Michael's Chester Square, London.

Two gallery vistor stair at four photo portraits of The Beatles.

Viewing Paul McCartney Photographs 1963–64: Eyes of the Storm.

National Portrait Gallery.

Imagine a day in the life of a Beatle. It's easy if you try. Or is it?

Last year, the late Matthew Perry allowed us a searing insight into life with a rollicking read about his very high highs and very low lows. Yet more books have been published recently on the toxicity of fame. Britney Spears is the subject of an autobiography and a biography. Another simply borrows the title, Toxic. John Updike wrote that 'fame is the mask that eats the face'. Baz Luhrmann last year documented Elvis Presley's destruction in his typically kaleidoscopic way. And into this media mix a recent exhibition shows a more innocent, intimate moment in the fame prototype of Beatlemania, intriguingly entitled Eyes of the Storm.

Surely with the Beatles predating the selfie-stick and Snapchat, we'd be reliant on paparazzi. But as Sir Paul McCartney can play pretty much every musical instrument, it's not a surprise he knows how to use a camera. And so, it emerged during lockdown that he had kept 1,000 previously unseen photos from 1961-1963.

To relaunch the beautifully remodelled National Portrait Gallery, McCartney displayed a whole cache of photos. One of the criticisms of present-day photography is that it's too easy, that we retain all sorts of out-of-focus photos on our phone. McCartney had preserved all these, and although it's curated and edited, there's many photos that wouldn't normally be seen.

You get the fab four goofing about, and also in quieter moments. There's young George looking shattered in the back of a car, and John concentrating. McCartney forgot that Lennon pulled this particular face, with his finger to his lip. His song 'Help!' emerged a year later. He told Playboy, 'I was fat and depressed, and I was crying out for 'help'.’ They were indeed in the eye of a storm.

We’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are.

And in the middle of the storm, we see the Beatles finding moments of joy. They land in New York for the Ed Sullivan Show, at the top of the charts and the top of their fame. Fans chasing them down Manhattan streets, fans balancing precariously on an airport roof, and one inexplicably holds a monkey. American optimism had been battered by JFK's assassination and the Beatles' arrival was a welcome respite. This joy became even clearer (and more vivid?) as McCartney switched to colour when they reached Miami. But before the colour, the songwriter in conversation with Stanley Tucci singled out seeing a worker he snapped while they were on the train – perhaps a mirror to his own working-class roots and family.

But then there are also the more explicit self-reflections… A series that struck me were McCartney's self-portraits, looking in mirror, out of focus. McCartney said that his first thought was this was the National Portrait Gallery - at least they could be in focus! But then he realised they had a warmth, and a softness to them.

Those of us who are not Beatles, or famous, also often live our lives out of focus, with blind spots, or a little dizzy from the storms around us and within us. Canadian Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor, before the selfie was invented, wrote about our self-perception in relation to the outside world, and that we are 'self-interpreting animals'.

Since the eighteenth century we’ve lived with an orthodoxy that we understand ourselves through self-expression – that we ourselves are the ones to define who we are and how we relate to the world - even how we relate to ourselves. It’s so much the norm, it might seem confronting to question it, but in an increasingly confusing world, this is an increasingly difficult way to understand ourselves. Whilst many of the Beatles' songs are about perception, King David also wrote in the psalms about our need for an external perspective:

'You have searched me, Lord,

and you know me.

You know when I sit and when I rise;

you perceive my thoughts from afar.'

What we each need is a perspective on ourselves from the outside that is warm, soft, but also in focus. What if there was a perspective on ourselves free from blind spots, a precision lens that fully sees and fully understands the essence of who we are, and who we might be? Someone who sees the deleted photos, and yet is completely gentle and loving in how they see us? The way we truly understand ourselves is in relation to our Creator. God shows us both what is seen and unseen. Like in these photos, God is not fazed by the contrast of light and darkness, and provides a way out of the storm:

'Search me, God, and know my heart;

test me and know my anxious thoughts.

See if there is any offensive way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.'

Review

Art

Culture

Joy

Suffering

19 April 2023

4 min read

Carving joy and suffering – what Donatello’s sculpture captures

The pioneering sculpture of Donatello presents emotional urgency. Sara Schumacher reflects on his art.

Sara Schumacher

Dr Sara Schumacher is Academic Dean and Tutor and Lecturer in Theology & the Arts at St Mellitus College.

A relief sculpture shows the Madonna hold the infant Christ close to her face.

Donatello's Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna) sculpture.

Donatello, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

As the weather turns and trees take on their sheen of green, with the seasonal change comes the major spring exhibitions in the nation’s museums. Running from 11 February – 11 June 2023, the Victoria & Albert Museum are hosting a significant exhibition of the work by the Renaissance master, Donatello. Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance traces the sculptor’s life and career, introducing us to his artistic collaborators as well as tracing his legacy within Western art history. A summary of the exhibition has been well described elsewhere and the curators do a fine job of providing context for the viewer that allows one to understand the significance of Donatello’s work. Instead, in this article, I want to try and capture what is felt in what is seen for I think Donatello, in his subject matter and style, is able to hold in tension the paradox of joy and suffering. This paradox is an all-too-common human experience, something that has been explored as Christians journeyed together through Holy Week. While Christian theology has a way of helping make sense of why this paradox exists, art has a way of helping us all to process our lived experience of it.

Through sculpture in different forms, Donatello invites our bodies, through movement and posture, to engage with what or who is presented.

As the exhibition shows, Donatello is famous for being the first in the Renaissance to sculpt a free-standing form. Sculpture, especially free-standing sculpture, requires something of the viewer. In order to see it properly, you have to position yourself in relation to the work and move around it. And while Donatello was clearly a master at this artform, what he invented was rilievo schiacciato, meaning ‘squashed relief’. The stone or bronze is carved with only a few millimetres of depth. In a way, it is like ‘painting’ with stone or bronze, and in doing so, the two-dimensional and three-dimensional are fused. As you move around it, light refracts off the medium, thus highlighting different aspects of the work and changing what you see. Put another way, through sculpture in different forms, Donatello invites our bodies, through movement and posture, to engage with what or who is presented. This embodied connection can start to cultivate empathy as we place ourselves and identify with who or what we see.

The touch of human to human is so real at times that the bronze or stone seems to give way to soft flesh.

Donatello’s work also evokes empathy in the way that he sculpts the human form. In his work, the touch of human to human is so real at times that the bronze or stone seems to give way to soft flesh. This is at its most poignant in the multiple Virgin and Child sculptures displayed throughout the exhibition. And it is here, particularly in the Virgin and Child (Pazzi Madonna), where the paradox of joy and suffering is presented most evocatively.

It is not uncommon to see artistic renderings of the Virgin and Child where distance is held between the two forms. Sometimes, the child looks out at the viewer, away from his mother, inviting devotion through his gaze. In other depictions, the Virgin adopts a posture of worship before her son. The reason for this is theological: the visual divide was a way to bring to the fore the divinity of the human Jesus. However, what we find in the Donatello renderings is something different.

In the Pazzi Madonna, using his trademark schiacciato, Donatello presents a sculpture of emotional urgency. Instead of distance between Virgin and Child, we see a mother who has her face pressed up against her son’s. While the child has a look of contentment and the beginnings of a smile, the mother looks at her child with intensity, marked by sadness. While a worshipping Virgin indicated her awareness of her Son’s glorification through his crucifixion and resurrection, this face tells of a different knowing. The beginning of this child’s life is already marked by the end. And while the end will bring salvation to the world, the anticipation of the end brings suffering for the mother. Mary knows that her son, the one she has borne and is called to nurture into adulthood, will suffer on her behalf and on behalf of the whole world. It will be this suffering that she cannot stop or protect him from. And while the work tells of joy in the intimacy and tenderness between mother and child, this joy is held in tension with the suffering that will come from their respective acts of obedience. The worst that a mother could imagine for her child must happen because in that worst moment is, paradoxically, the hope for the world. Where their faces meet in this sculpture, joy and suffering are visibly held together.

What does it mean for us to press our suffering faces against the face of Jesus? As we look into his eyes of joy, how does that transform the way we see the world and our circumstances? The Christian story is one of hope. In the end, all things will be made right and there will be an end to all suffering and tears. And while we live with and through real pain, as we see with Donatello, we see that this human paradox can be held now for its resolution will come.