A tale of three paintings

IN ARTNEWS, FREDERICK Ilchman, a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, walks readers through one example of how the rivalry among the three subjects of the MFA’s current exhibition, “Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese,” played itself out. (Globe critic Sebastian Smee reviewed the show a couple of weeks ago.) The three were the leading artists in Venice in the 1500s.

His case study involves the artists’ treatment of the Supper at Emmaus, an incident from the Gospel of Luke: After Jesus’ crucifixion, two apostles on the road to Emmaus meet a stranger on the road and invite him to join them for dinner at an inn. As they break bread, the man reveals himself to be Christ.

For Titian, Ilchman writes, painting in the early 1530s, the scene is about proportion and equilibrium, artistically and theologically. The “astounded disciples are arranged symmetrically” around Jesus, while the table and room “create a strong rectilinear grid.” And while the disciples may be amazed, you might not guess it from their demeanor: The painting “suggests that devotion and concentration . . . are more important than revelation.”

In contrast, Tintoretto, who took on the same subject circa 1542, while in his mid-20s — a young Turk relative to Titian — puts his own spin on things, almost literally: The table is askew, the composition arranged on diagonals, and the apostles jolted into motion by the astonishing news. The brushstrokes are “expressive, even deliberately hasty” in comparison with those of Titian.

Paolo Veronese “tried to have the last word,” Ilchman writes, and, in a more crowded tableaux, synthesized the two approaches.

ON THE ONE hand, Americans find more and more of their experiences “mediated,” observes Good magazine contributor David Pescovitz (better known as co-editor of Boing Boing): We buy things online rather than face-to-face with a merchant, and we socialize online. On the other hand, partly as compensation, we are increasingly in search of “authentic” experiences, which can mean something as simple as learning a craft, or a musical instrument, or growing your own vegetables.

The latest frontier in the expanding DIY universe? Do-it-yourself funerals, including “after-death home care.” Pescovitz notes that manuals for constructing coffins are proliferating on the Internet and that the writer Max Alexander lovingly recounted fashioning one for his father-in-law in the March issue of Smithsonian — and also tending to the man’s body. (The officials in the Maine town where Alexander and his wife held the home funeral were utterly flummoxed by the family’s declining to use a funeral home, perfectly legal but unheard of.) A Maryland-based nonprofit group, Crossings, promotes the trend, advocating for “the integration of dying and after-death care back into our family and community life.”

There are environmental benefits to avoiding chemical embalming, Crossings argues. But “while green is good,” Pescovitz writes, “what DIY funerals really offer is personalization, customization, and the embodiment of emotion through an authentic experience.” Plus no little cost savings. Alexander observes, in Smithsonian, that the average American family spends $6,500 on a funeral, or 13 percent of average family income. Those figures would flabbergast most of the world’s citizens. For the coffin he built, Alexander went to Home Depot and spent $90.98.

BEHIND ON THAT research project? Here’s an idea: Set deadlines and pledge to donate money to charity if you miss them. Better yet, a charity you detest.

Mari Brick, for example, wants to work 10 hours a week on a paper she must finish in order to earn a master’s in social policy at the State University of New York — a challenge, because she also has two kids and a full-time job. Through the website stickK.com, cofounded by two Yale professors and a Yale management-school student, Brick committed herself to donating $50 to the George W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation in any week she fails to meet her goal.

StickK attracts a disproportionate number of scholars, reports David Glenn in the Chronicle of Higher Education. And Glenn found other striking examples of scholars using self-punishment and self-shaming as motivators. During International Dissertation Writing Month, or InaDWriMo, held the last two Novembers, grad students make pledges on their blogs about how much they are going to produce, and fess up when they fall short. A sociologist at the University of Arizona put the most embarrassing picture he could find of himself up on Facebook, swearing to take it down only when he finished some crucial manuscript revisions.

There’s a long intellectual tradition of such strategies. The Greek orator Demosthenes once shaved half his head so he would not be tempted to go out into public until it grew back. As planned, he spent the next three months indoors practicing his rhetoric.

Christopher Shea is a weekly columnist for Ideas. He can be reached at brainiac.email@gmail.com.

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