Why Auden was wrong (Musee des Beaux Arts)

Apologies to old friend E.M., but - though W.H. Auden's famous poem "Musee des Beaux Arts" contains some beautiful imagery, evocative phrases, and a masterful sense of composition - Auden was completely wrong on a number of levels. Auden asserts at the outset that "About suffering they were never wrong,/The Old Masters" - and then he goes on to observe how many Renaissance paintings focus on a great event, often religious: the birth of Jesus, the Crucifixion, and then, as he describes in the most detail in the 2nd (of 2) stanzas, Icarus' plunge into the sea - and in all instances the canvas contains scenes of everyday life - dogs playing, children skating, a horse scratching "its innocent behind on a tree," and a ploughman too absorbed in his work even to look up at a body falling from the sky "into the green/water." Okay, maybe that's possible: life goes on elsewhere while suffering occurs, each of us locked in our own lives and unaware of or unconcerned by the suffering of others. But the world doesn't seem that way to me - even on the superficial level, people are deeply interested in suffering - have you ever zipped past a car wreck and not slowed down to look? Everyone does - that's why we have traffic jams. What do we read about in the paper every day, other than suffering? Auden's wrong about that aspect of human behavior - and also about the artists. Do you think they were trying to show that suffering occurs "while someone else is eating..."? That wasn't their point or their point of departure: I figure that the conventions and expectations of Renaissance art mandated that serious artists depict serious scenes - from religious life or from mythology, primarily. But artists were bored by that restriction and pushed against it constantly - they were more interested in everyday life, the life on the streets, in the fields, and so on. They included and often even highlighted these elements - but it took centuries before the curators of taste recognized the world around us as suitable material for serious art. I wouldn't say that the old masters were trying to depict a human attitude toward suffering - they were trying to depict humanity and to push the scenes of suffering to the margins. The Old Masters understood the place of suffering in art: out of the picture.