Many people were surprised that the Walters Art Museum would partner with the Space Telescope Science Institute (along with the Johns Hopkins University's Program in Museums and Society) to bring photo enlargements from the Hubble Space Telescope to our exhibition galleries.
After all, most of us believe that art and science have been following divergent paths for centuries - since long before physicist and novelist C. P. Snow made that seeming split explicit in his famous Rede Lecture of May 1959, "The Two Cultures," wherein he characterized the two as mutually incomprehensible.
"Is this art?" was the first question from The Sun's Glenn McNatt when he called for a quote for his Jan. 28 review of the exhibition, aptly titled Universal Art.
I could have mentioned, but did not, that the Cat's Eye Nebula in the show has a cool, blue radiance remarkably like that of an enamel, glass and sapphire brooch by Ren? Lalique, exhibited in our treasury one floor below. Or that these photos of outer space, like all photographs in art museum exhibitions, earn their public display precisely because of the creative interventions of a talented human being.
In the case of the Hubble, our visitors soon come to realize that the data from which these images are created are not visual but numerical, and that you and I could never "see" the Cat's Eye Nebula the way its photo shows it, even if a rocket could somehow propel us to its near neighborhood some 3,000 light-years away. Why? Because the radiation emitted by the nebula and given visual expression in the photographic print is substantially outside the boundaries of human sight.
I did mention to Mr. McNatt that Mapping the Cosmos: Images from the Hubble Space Telescope seemed to me an obvious Baltimore complement to our major spring show, Maps: Finding Our Place in the World, a milestone exhibition of more than 100 of the greatest maps in history, coming to us in March from the Field Museum in Chicago.
But what I mostly tried to emphasize was the profound, almost disturbing power these photographs have over us, when we learn how incredibly enormous these celestial phenomena are, and how unbelievably far away - that we are, in effect, gazing back through them to the very origins of the universe.
The first time I remember having cosmos-induced feelings of disorienting awe was as a child in northern Minnesota, on a spring evening in the late 1950s, when my father sat me down on the front steps of our house to explain, as best he could, the meaning of what shone overhead, with dazzling, pre-pollution clarity: the Milky Way. Ironically, that was just about the time that C. P. Snow was helping to create what to many now seems to be a false chasm between art and science.
It's a chasm that Mapping the Cosmos, in its own small way, is helping to bridge. Here, in the familiar setting of a museum, we are invited, indeed compelled, to contemplate our place in the cosmos, and eternity - and, by extension, our spirituality and our notions of the divine.
What art can do more?
Gary Vikan is director of the Walters Art Museum. His e-mail is gvikan@thewalters.org.