Three Voices for Three Ages

Three Voices for Three Ages: a conversation about the power of painting

Educator: You are spending a good amount of time staring at this picture. Are you lost in thought? We have been looking for you.

Artist: I am sorry to keep you waiting. I did not know you were there.

Technologist: Yes, we have something to show you. We have been working on new digital platforms and so far they look great.

Artist: Tell me more. What have you come up with?

Educator: The design is new. With video and AI, we can measure and assess listeners’ reactions to my lectures. I can move from image to image more quickly and seamlessly, with just a nod of my head. The cameras alert me to which ones are most effective, based on students’ facial expression.

Technologist: It will revolutionize the way you teach. You can build out lessons on an economy of scale, knowing that you are reaching more people more efficiently.

Artist: Technology never ceases to amaze us.

Educator: Yes. I was reading a recent study that claimed the internet was the greatest technological innovation in the history of humanity. These advances we’re talking about can allow me to talk to classrooms across the country and around the world, and still know what students are learning.

Technologist: All fields of learning are changing. The sciences, the humanities, and the arts: all are adapting themselves to this latest technology.

Artist: Do you think it’s necessary?

Educator: Absolutely! This is what students expect, and their parents. They want to see us embrace it.

Artist: So we should do it?

Educator: What a question!

Technologist: Yes, it’s an ongoing development.

Artist: What do you mean by “ongoing development”?

Technologist: Technology is the future! Those who refuse to adapt to it will be left behind.

Educator: That’s right – just I have long advocated that students should learn coding as a second language, instead of Spanish, for example. Coding will unleash their creativity and prepare them for a job, especially in our world of STEM.

Artist: We are moving forward then, without looking to the side or behind us.

Technologist: But the future is what matters. We must prepare for it.

Artist: That presupposes that we know what it will be. And surely the guide to understanding what will be is the knowledge of what is and what has been.

Educator: So the artist has become a philosopher. Be careful: you’re sounding old-fashioned and out of step with the times.

Artist: I would think it old-fashioned to imagine that artists could not think philosophically, or that philosophers could not be poets or artists. No one would contest Einstein’s genius as a physicist, and he said that “all religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree.”

 Technologist: You seem to have a point. With technology today, we can make knowledge available as never before, and allow people across the world to combine knowledge in new ways. It truly is revolutionary.

Artist: Is more knowledge available, or information? Information must coalesce into knowledge or, to adapt Einstein’s metaphor, must enter a field as seeds in order to germinate into something more organic, and become part of a greater whole.

Educator: Well, artists like symbols and metaphors. If only you could paint a picture of it.

Artist: Far greater artists than me have done so.

Technologist: That is why you mentioned the need to look at what has come before us.

Artist: Yes, though when we look at something we may not see what is there, at least for a long time.

Educator: There is irony here: that we may read about history without actually knowing its meaning. So our own history may be one of studious amnesia.

Artist: Or ignored ignorance.

Technologist: This conversation is starting to escape me. Which image or painting do you prize as one that can guide our understanding of what knowledge is?

Artist: The one I have been studying.

Educator: I should have known – Giorgione’s Three Philosophers. I was just teaching this painting last week. There are vivid images to download from Google or Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, or that splendid site Trivium.

Technologist: It’s good to know they are so easy to find. What is its meaning?

Educator: We should read it as an allegory. It’s often seen as the “three ages of humanity”: youth, maturity, and old age. What connects them is the transmission of knowledge. So the old man may be the ancient Greek thinker Thales, the middle-aged man possibly Ibn Rushd or Avicenna, who translated Greek philosophy into Arabic, and the youngest one, seated at the center, represents the new world of Renaissance learning, which drew upon both sources.

Technologist: That is a keen translation. I would see the young man with the protractor and compass as a burgeoning technologist, who may learn from the past and yet turn away from it, since he is looking in another direction.

Artist: These observations may be valid, but we must watch out for partiality. We should work on observing the whole.

Educator: What do you mean?

Artist: Just as past, present, and future fill out the whole of time, embracing all the ages, so does a painting such as this one convey a whole truth. The arts and humanities provide this wholeness: without it, our lives remain smaller, fractured, diminished.

Technologist: You are philosophizing again. What do you see in this painting that shows this wholeness of knowledge?

Artist: Cycles of light and shadow, stillness and movement, qualities within and around these figures. They are men, as you say, of different ages, but they are also notes in a larger, richer harmonic register. The sunlit and shadowed landscape surrounds them. It falls into the whiteness of the young man’s shirt, following through the subtle diagonal of the older figures’ robes, while his back and arm move us upwards to the white belt and turban, and then down to the bearded man’s face, as if in a circle. A larger circle is traced by their feet, hands, and faces. These circles are complements to the natural world in which they reside.

Educator: Yes, I can see what you mean. And the crescent moon on the page he carries moves in another circle.

Technologist: The more I look at it, the more I see. There is a play of varying vectors connecting the world of these figures. From the blue of the distant hill through the blue trim of the oldest man’s shawl, to the lines of the trees at the center. But what is the meaning of this artistic geometry?

Artist: These are deeper questions. The darkness and light close and open, conceal and release, shut and open meaning. We may be, like the youngest man, staring into the dimness of the earth, trying to measure its dimensions. Yet the dimness opens itself into light. The landscape shows the changing seasons, with falling leaves and denuded branches, as well as the first growth of spring. The earth is gathering itself into itself. Yet the trees and their branches reach skyward.

Educator: I sense a larger meaning, but only dimly.

Technologist: More riddles to me than answers.

Artist: These are riddles that round our knowledge. The three men are still, but in conversation with each other. They are connected by their eyes and their closeness to one another. And they are also speaking to, and spoken by, the world around them. The youngest admires the hidden resources of the cave, the oldest the stars, sun, and moon of the heavens. Perhaps the most important part of the painting is not the human figures, but what embraces them, and sets them into the light.

Educator: What do you mean?

Artist: I am speaking about the trees. They filter the sun; they draw energy from the heavens and the earth, connecting the two realms; they show the cycles of nature that we continually investigate.

Technologist: In the past and the present, as well as the future.

Educator: And we ourselves are changed in these investigations.

Artist: And through these conversations. We turn our eyes in new directions, as time passes.

Educator: There is always something before and behind us. Past and future lie equally in wait.

Artist: And so are equally present in their apparent absence. There are landscapes of learning at the open horizon, surrounding where we are now.

Technologist: And where we will be.