The Kingdom Beyond the Frame

Private museums have become cultural landmarks. Monuments to wealth that influence the art we see, value, and remember. Though presented as acts of generosity, they often serve subtler ambitions: legacy, influence, and cultural immortality. What counts as important art is increasingly decided by the few who can afford to enshrine their vision in concrete.

But the impulse isn’t new. During the Renaissance, wealthy patrons often had themselves painted into sacred scenes, kneeling beside the Virgin and Child or standing among saints, thus asserting their presence in the divine order. These donor portraits were both acts of devotion and declarations of status. Although they once seemed like natural expressions of piety, to modern eyes their self-insertion looks strange and out of place.

By layering themselves over sacred or cultural works, both historical donors and modern collectors inadvertently reveal how the individual’s longing for immortality gets in the way of art’s ability to provide glimpses of the real, which it does when it draws us beyond the self. These are valuable reminders of how we too, in little ways every day, project ourselves onto the world, remaking it in our own image.

Even as it’s embedded in structures of economic power, art retains the capacity to call us out of ourselves, beyond the frame, into something larger. If we know how to look, that moment of self-forgetting can lead us to experience transcendence.

In this essay, which appears in Comment, I invite readers to see how even when art is leveraged as a commodity or a tool of self-glorification, it’s charged presence retains the capacity to unsettle our self-made kingdoms as it gestures towards a deeper belonging, one that reflects the kingdom of God.

Enguerrand Quarton

Pietà de Villeneuve-lès-Avignon

c. 1455