Richard Britell May, 30, 2012
184. Historical note on Buboni's "Destructivist Theory". Buboni said of it, "The germ of the idea struck me in a church in Rome where I had been admiring a Raphael Madonna. I was thinking about how perfect the color of the tan background was to bring out the blue drapery, and how these two colors most perfectly combined to accent the colors of the flesh of the face."
185. Just then, I heard an old woman praying, she was sitting in a pew, behind me. I did not speak Italian but it was easy to understand what she was saying. She was pleading with the Mary of the painting to preserve her husband's life, the said gentleman undergoing surgery that morning.
186. Just then I felt the profound shallowness of my artistic appreciation of that Raphael, whose true meaning I was destroying in the process of admiring it as a work of art.
187. At the entrance of the church I passed a plastic statue of Mary with hundreds of candles burning in front of it; it was the sort of plastic statue produced by the millions from casts, in which the features have a sand-blasted meaningless vague character like cheap funeral monuments, and I thought, "We have taken away all the meaning from these things, and now it comes down to this."
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