I gaze out the window for a few moments, and in that delicious solitude it dawns on my why I dislike museums. The collections are cold and clinical. They have restored and displayed the treasures as a mortician embalms and prepares the corpse for a viewing. The holy pictures have been plucked from their ecclesiastical settings and crammed into art galleries to be gawked at by crowds who have no faith, little appreciation, and less understanding.

In college I used to keep a little notebook to scribble down lines that tickled or inspired me. I think it was Gertrude Stein who wrote, “I love to go into museums and gaze out their windows.”

It seemed at the time, simply an entertaining quip for its contrary attitude—a little subversion to the bourgeois elitist habit of visiting museums. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m sure museum curators—like undertakers—provide a worthy service.

However, having enjoyed a wonderful vacation in Tuscany this summer  I am inclined to agree with Gertrude Stein in a way she, perhaps, did not intend. To be sure, Tuscany is full of worthy museums: art museums,  museums of Etruscan and Roman antiquities, and museums to satisfy every special interest. I spotted signs for an ornithological museum, a museum of printing presses, the history of wine, the history of cheese. Here a palazzo, there a historic villa; here an ancient abbey, there a castle on a hill. For those with a taste for the macabre there was a museum of torture—and competing with it a museum of capital punishment. It left me wondering what the Italian was for “chamber of horrors.”

But these museums with their perfectly restored and preserved artworks, their glass cases of carefully archived and labeled artifacts, their whispering tour guides, the galleries with their informative nameplates beneath the picture, the audio tours you can load on your cell phone and the free guide books—all leave me cold.

I read on the informative guide that this Assumption of the Madonna was by Luca Signorelli XVII c. and that Raising of Lazarus was by Gregorio Ravioli XVIII c. And I am simply befuddled. I want to both like and understand the picture, but I’ve reached that point I call “art overload.” My mind is fuzzy, and my feet are tired. I’ve seen too many madonnas and am satiated with saints. I’m annoyed by hordes of Japanese and Chinese tourists racing through the galleries, snapping away at the pictures with their cell phones like greedy children at a peanut scramble. Why do they want a selfie with a Botticelli? Is Venus just another celebrity? Do they know is it not Venus Williams?

So I remember Gertrude Stein and gaze out the window for a few moments, and in that delicious solitude it dawns on my why I dislike museums. The collections are cold and clinical. They have restored and displayed the treasures as a mortician embalms and prepares the corpse for a viewing. The holy pictures have been plucked from their ecclesiastical settings and crammed into art galleries to be gawked at by crowds who have no faith, little appreciation, and less understanding.

But later on my heart sings when we visit the Duomos, the parish and abbey churches where the frescoes can’t be moved, where the altarpieces are still in place above the altars. This is where they were designed to be. They were painted to glorify God, illustrate catechesis and illuminate the vision of glory not to the hifalutin, but to hoi polloi. In the churches, the masterpieces stand alongside the clutter of ordinary church life. The worn pews—the musty hymnbooks, the guttering candles and the lesser artworks: poor pious prints, chipped plaster statues, photographs of local and modern saints and popes.

As such, the visit to an Italian church is a microcosm of the whole church. There you find the relics—dusty skeletons under the altar as well as the masterpieces over the altar. Here the kitsch, the religious brochures and dog-eared bulletin sheets are gathered among the frescoes, sculptures, and paintings. Then Mass begins, and the people troop in. They are twenty-first century Italians in jeans and T-shirts busy switching off their cell phones and managing their squirming children. This is the context for the great art and architecture, and I’m reminded of that Scripture verse “You are God’s handiwork.”

So a knowing eye will see that the huddled masses at Mass have among them the masterpieces, the flawed works of art, the kitsch, the poor devotional souls… and someone like me, an insufferable snob and hypocrite, who also hopes for a place among the masterpieces one day.

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The featured image is “Self-portrait” (1896) by Theo Molkenboer, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.