THE OLD MASTERS

These Art Museums often seem lustreless,
sterile and as impersonal as mausoleums:
they could never have been what the great
Master Painters would have wished or wanted.
Their marvels screwed into the very walls;
incarcerated anyway under layers
of glaze and slowly-darkening varnish.

Yet unexpectedly, bizarrely, today,
a gaggle of unseen, journeyman decorators
have flooded the gallery with the alien reek
of fresh, new paint. A suppressed coughing
ripples the disturbed air and heralds stranger
metaphysical transformations: for parched
pigments on scores of antique canvasses,
arid oils on old wood panels exhale

a sustained, but distinctly audible, sigh.
And now, the Old Masters themselves,
- invisible in adjoining studios or chambers -
bend once more over kettles of oak-tree bark
and bovine urine. There's the sound
of lapis lazuli, no doubt, being smashed
and ground down to a vivid dust;

the preparation of linseed and walnut oils.
They habitually draw together into pairs
or groups to share good news; review
fortuitous innovations, techniques and tricks,
and thus conspire - in that stimulating stench
of wood-smoke, piss and stale hoof-glue -
to delight, to move and utterly astonish you.

http://youtu.be/1m3ggEcARcU