“I received a letter from a Dutch woman named Mardien Abeling that is extremely eloquent on “depthless” time. She tells how she visited Florence in 1967 and saw Michelangelo’s Medici Chapel. When she saw it again seventeen years later she realized that it was completely unchanged, and that it must have looked just the same centuries ago when Michelangelo abandoned it. Suddenly, it was as if time had stopped moving. The sensation was oddly intimate. “I remember the stillness in there,” she wrote. “I remember that I felt very much ‘at home.’” She cried, and when her husband asked her why, she could say only, “It is so beautiful”: but what she meant, as she explained in the letter, was that she had experienced “what life in reality is all about. Time stands still, or does not exist.” She felt “a certain stillness,” and at the same moment “a feeling of being touched, of great happiness. Being home.”
Somehow artwork that had never changed, that would never change, made her think about how her own life had been changing. “To me it seems that this is the real purpose of art: to attract you to your very self by breaking certain barriers (isn’t crying just a melting of the heart?), by way of a certain harmony. To unite you with who you really are.”
At first, Mardien felt how Michelangelo’s chapel exists outside of time, in some charmed region where nothing changes. That’s a fairly common thought, but Mardien’s experience is more carefully described than others I’ve read. Time itself, she thought, was nearly canceled: when nothing changes, even time “stands still,” or ceases to make sense. And then she somehow felt this timelessness as a message directed at her. That is a less common thought, and a more dangerous one. She felt “at home” in the vacuum, in harmony with her very self.”
— James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings
