Luckily, The Wedding at Cana by Veronese could be rolled around a cylinder. So could Jacques-Louis David’s The Coronation of Napoleon. But Delacroix’s Crusaders, Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa and all the Rubenses were too fragile and had to be hauled away on a special open truck made to transport the set designs and murals of France’s state theatre company, the Comédie Française. The Raft of the Medusa, weighing nearly one and a half tons, stood in the open-air truck covered only by a giant blanket.

Masterpieces were categorised in order of importance: a yellow circle for very valuable ones, a green circle for major artworks and a red circle for world treasures. The white case containing the Mona Lisa was marked with three red circles. In a letter to the curator who was in charge of travelling with the painting also known in France as La Joconde — and who did not yet know the full burden of his responsibility — Jaujard broke the news by telling him: “Old friend, your convoy will be made of eight trucks. I have to tell you that the Chenu truck which will be departing from 5 rue de la Terrasse, with the plate number 2162RM2, contains a case with the letters MN written in black. It is the Mona Lisa.” Leonardo da Vinci’s finest work was travelling in an ambulance specially fitted with elastic-rubber-sprung suspension.

A convoy of 203 vehicles transporting 1,862 wooden cases set out one morning in late August to eleven castles in France — where they would wait, anonymous and secure, for what would come. Grand châteaux on the Loire, such as Chambord and Cheverny, were used, but Jaujard also requisitioned more inconspicuous and privately-owned estates conveniently ‘lost’ in the French countryside, far from any strategic locations. Every convoy had a curator and staff attached to it. Their mission: to look after the art collections in their new homes for as long as was necessary. Whole families were displaced and relocated. For those dedicated museum employees, it was an adventure that would last more than five years.

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Covid-19 is hardening our borders

By Agnes Poirier

Did they ever ask themselves what the world treasures they were guarding with their lives were worth? The most expensive painting ever sold at auction, Salvator Mundi, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, was bought for $450 million in 2017. What would the most famous painting in the world, the Mona Lisa, be worth if France sold it? A rhetorical question? Not for French tech entrepreneur Stéphane Distinguin who estimates its value at €50 billion (£44.7 billion) and thinks the French State should sell it to fund post-Covid recovery. His thinking is as simplistic as his maths:

“As an entrepreneur and a taxpayer, I know that all the billions spent in the covid crisis are real and will necessarily cost us. An obvious idea is to sell off a valuable asset at the highest price possible, but one that is the least critical as possible to our future.”

Mr Distinguin is wrong on two counts. Even if sold for €50 billion, the Mona Lisa would offer only a brief financial respite from France’s huge post-Covid public debt. It would certainly not cover all the losses. Besides, to say that the Mona Lisa serves little purpose in our future is to be blind to the ageless, universal and immaterial quality of art.

This doesn’t mean of course that artists or cultural institutions can’t support war or pandemic efforts. After Albert Uderzo, co-creator of Asterix, died in March, his widow announced she would auction five original drawings estimated at €100,000 (£90,000) each to support health caregivers and French hospitals. The sale will be held in Paris on 26 May.

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Likewise, the Mobilier National, the office responsible for furnishing official buildings in France, which owns 130,000 precious rugs, ceramics, desks, chairs, chandeliers, said it would hold an auction on 20 and 21 September. For sale will be 100 art objects dating back to the 19th century — and of little heritage and historical value. All the proceeds will contribute to the national effort to support hospitals.

Those initiatives should be encouraged. However, to suggest that France should do away with its most precious and totemic possessions, simply because they are worth billions and could stopper a financial hole, is a step too far.

The Mona Lisa tells stories that keep people warm in moments of crisis or during national catastrophes. Its sheer existence — the fact it has survived hundreds of years of wars and tumult — helps us live through tough or strange times. It is not just a work of great beauty and a masterpiece from history’s most celebrated artist, it is also an inspiration. In fact, in the national imagination, certain inanimate objects such as the Mona Lisa take a life of their own. They are family.

The French take pride in knowing that it was a French King, François I — an artistic visionary and an intrepid young sovereign — who saw genius in Leonardo da Vinci. At the time, the Pope had abandoned the artist, and everybody in Florence was looking down on Da Vinci. France, a great patron of the arts, gave the old Leonardo a grandiose shelter to freely create in the 1510s, until his death in 1519.

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When I started writing my book Left Bank: Art, Passion and the Rebirth of Paris 1940-1950, I knew I had to start with the Mona Lisa, and how she escaped from the hands of the Nazis thanks to the brave and visionary Louvre director.

The Louvre finally reopened to the public on 10 July 1945. Its first post-war exhibition was called, simply, ‘Great Masterpieces’. Its collections repatriated from their hiding places, the French public realised that not one piece had been damaged, thanks to their saviour-in-chief, Jacques Jaujard, and the thousand anonymous keepers defended them. This was an emotional reunion.

So, too, had been the return of a well-wrapped-up acquaintance three weeks earlier. The photographer Pierre Jahan had been allowed to take pictures of a moment that would immediately travel the world and make headlines: the opening of a white poplar case marked with three red dots. Waterproof layers of protection were carefully removed, one by one, until the last one, a thin sheet of fire-retardant fabric woven from asbestos fibres, appeared. It was then torn open, revealing the face of the Mona Lisa. She had come home, finally.

When the Louvre, the most visited museum in the world, reopens after Covid-19 is tamed at last — hopefully not in six years time as during the Second World War — many French visitors will no doubt feel emotional too. Those emotions are part of a nation’s history. They are priceless.

Today the barriers to such a career are formidable. Learning has retreated to the universities, which demand specialisation. It’s hard to imagine a contemporary chemistry professor informing his employer (as Michael Polanyi did at Manchester in 1948) that he would like to switch to philosophy. And of course, any serious intellectual work requires the increasingly rare skill of not looking at your phone every ten minutes. As Peter Burke writes ominously in his timely new book The Polymath: A Cultural History from Leonardo da Vinci to Susan Sontag, present-day polymaths (Jared Diamond, Raymond Tallis) tend to be “scholars who were already middle-aged before the digital revolution occurred.”

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Who cares, you may ask. It may be very impressive to be able to design a bridge in 27 languages, but is it any more useful to the world than juggling flaming torches on a unicycle? And given that one man’s polymath is another man’s charlatan, should we really be alarmed if the species is endangered? Burke’s book makes a strong case that we should be.

He does this by including not just the obvious superminds like Athanasius Kircher (a ludicrously wide-ranging scientific researcher who also wrote an encyclopedia of China and kickstarted the study of Egyptology) but also “polymaths of the second rank”. That means humanistic scholars such as René Girard, who applied his theory of desire first to literature, then to anthropology and eventually to religious history; geniuses with an extra string to their bow, like Nabokov with his dabblings in the study of butterflies; and even popular writers like Macaulay and Voltaire, just because they had such diverse interests.

This does broaden the meaning of the word almost to the point of meaninglessness. But it also reminds us that first-rate polymaths are not a separate species. Their strengths — curiosity, a capacity for hard work, a good memory, the ability to focus — are not unique, they just have more of them than everyone else. Few of us will have occasion to ask ourselves, as Joseph Needham did in the opening line of his autobiography, “How did it happen that a biochemist turned into a historian and sinologist?” But if we lived for a thousand years, we might have a similar story to tell.

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The decline of polymathy, then, suggests a broader crisis. For Burke, it is a crisis of too much information. The seventeenth century was a “golden age of polymaths”, as explorers found new regions, the scientific method flourished, and the postal service and the proliferation of journals allowed scholars to trade ideas. But those same forces led to “information overload”.

Over the next 200 years, the intellectual world divided between the specialists who knew a lot about their little area, and popularisers who knew a little about a lot. Institutions, as well as individuals, had to go their separate ways: in the 1880s the Natural History Museum split off from the British Museum, and the Science Museum from what is now the V&A. The twentieth century saw some conscious efforts to foster “interdisciplinarity”, but the fragmentation of knowledge only accelerated — even before the internet came along.

This is Burke’s version of events, and it is obviously a large part of the story. But there is surely another reason for the decline of the polymath: namely, the intellectual revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when as John Donne put it in 1611, “new philosophy calls all in doubt.”

That new philosophy claimed, like today’s political leaders, that it was merely following the science: instead of theorising about the celestial spheres, just look through a telescope! But there was a sinister undercurrent, as Donne realised: the new philosophers sometimes seemed to imply that, if you did follow the science, you might well find a cold, dead universe in which our beliefs about the beauty, harmony and meaning of the world around us would be exposed as delusions.

When Dante gazed at the night sky, he saw “the love which moves the sun and other stars”; 350 years later, Pascal looked at the same thing and recorded that “the eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me.” The contemplation of the world, it appeared, might not lead us to sublime truths, but to disenchantment.

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Before this revolution, as Burke observes of the Middle Ages, “Wide-ranging curiosity was normal … and might even be described as the default setting.” I suspect that pre-modern all-rounders — Aristotle, Shen Gua, Avicenna, Hildegard of Bingen — took for granted that all their different studies had an essential unity. Combinations which we think of as quirky — such as Roger Bacon’s moving between astronomy, theology, optics and linguistics — came naturally. Polymaths could assume that very different kinds of intellectual work were all approaches to the truth.

But over the last 400 years, we have had to deal with an underlying anxiety: what if only one kind of study — measuring things and making mathematical laws from the results — really gets you to rock-bottom reality? If that’s correct, then a beautiful piece of music, ultimately, is just sound waves hitting your ears. Love, truth and goodness are just your neurons firing. As for philosophy — well, according to Stephen Hawking, “philosophy is dead”, and as Richard Dawkins once memorably asked, “What did Plato say that was actually right?”

This nagging anxiety threatens polymaths more than anyone: if the scientific method, and only the scientific method, reveals the ultimate truth of things, then philosophy, art, music, history, philology and so on are, at best, interesting digressions from the real work. As George Steiner – who died in February, just a few weeks before his fellow polymath Roger Scruton – put it: “Many of the traditional humanistic disciplines have shown a deep malaise, a nervous, complex recognition of the exactions and triumphs of mathematics and the natural sciences.” Steiner’s response was to defend language, “the word”, as something which can also reveal the truth.

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Over the last century, other polymaths have tried to show that the scientific method isn’t everything. Michael Polanyi, himself a distinguished scientist, defended “tacit knowledge” — those things we know even if they can’t be written down as laws. Raymond Tallis, a clinical neuroscientist among many other things, has written incisively about why neuroscience isn’t enough. Scruton wrestled with the same question, though he often sounded rather glum about it.

In bridging the gap between science and everything else, our best hope is a school of philosophy which has gained momentum in recent years. It suggests that many of the old philosophical assumptions, the ones which were overturned four centuries ago, are actually the only sure foundation for modern science. And the key, according to this new school, is a return to Aristotle. So if the twenty-first century sees the rebirth of the polymath, we may be able to thank the father of the whole tribe.

Having little historical imagination, the moral majority movement of the Eighties fetishised this very particular notion of the family — one that only flourished within some very particular economic conditions during the post-war period. But this iteration was only a blip during the long transition from large, extended kinship groups to the ‘chosen’, ‘blended’ family that begun to emerge within the gay community at precisely same the time Jerry Falwell and Ronald Regan were insisting that nuclear was the only proper way for families to be. For these two reactionaries, the nuclear family was the all-American redoubt against the twin threats of communism and homosexuality. The family was nuclear not just in the sense of being a nucleus, but also, as the premier expression of resistance to the nuclear threat of Communism. Family, God and country became “the holy trinity of American traditionalism”.

It is rather awkward for Christian conservatives, then, that among the most difficult to conscript into this cosy celebration of the bounded little family unit is Jesus of Nazareth himself. For again and again, throughout the Gospel accounts of his life and teaching, Jesus is portrayed as a thorough-going enemy of the exclusively narrow biological unit. Let one example stand for many:

^“While Jesus was still talking to the crowd, his mother and brothers stood outside, wanting to speak to him. Someone told him, “Your mother and brothers are standing outside, wanting to speak to you.”He replied to him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12. 46-50)

One way of telling the story of the Biblical narrative about the family is as an arc that begins with the association of family life – and particularly procreation – with patriotic duty, and then gradually subjects this position to ever increasing scepticism. For a fledgling community intent on nation building, the production of children was essential to communal survival. Thus the suspicion of all those who do not contribute to the expansion of the population – eunuchs, homosexuals, unfertile “barren” women. The problem here is not about sex, it’s about children. This is what modern sex-obsessed conservatives miss about the argument that is going on within the pages of the Bible. The charge against homosexuality is not that people shouldn’t have sex this way, the charge is a lack of patriotism.

But even this gets challenged and broken down. Consider the following from Isaiah, 56:

“To the eunuchs who keep my Sabbaths,
who choose what pleases me
and hold fast to my covenant—
to them I will give within my temple and its walls
a memorial and a name
better than sons and daughters”

This is radical stuff. Keeping Sabbath is “better than sons and daughters”. And Isaiah is Jesus’s favourite book of the Hebrew scriptures — he quotes from it more than any other text. Jesus’s “whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother” line is a clear extension of this tradition. He takes it beyond anything even Isaiah could have imagined. Membership of this new family is not premised on biological kinship but on baptism — water is thicker than blood.

It is very peculiar how religious conservatives have sought to construct an apologia for the nuclear family from the Bible. Broadly speaking, the Old Testament is perfectly relaxed about its heroes having multiple wives — Solomon had 700 of them. In contrast, the heroes of the New Testament are mostly single men, with little interest in the domestic duties and pleasures of a settled family life. St Paul even advised that it was “good for a man not to marry” (1 Corinthians, 7). To say the least, it is very hard work indeed to try and find a secure theological model of the nuclear family within the pages of Holy Scripture.

Nuclear family, no; but family, yes. The final passage of Brooks piece is a stirring cri de coeur for a return to something both “new and ancient”:

“We’ve left behind the nuclear-family paradigm of 1955. For most people it’s not coming back. Americans are hungering to live in extended and forged families, in ways that are new and ancient at the same time. This is a significant opportunity, a chance to thicken and broaden family relationships, a chance to allow more adults and children to live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms. For decades we have been eating at smaller and smaller tables, with fewer and fewer kin.

It’s time to find ways to bring back the big tables.”

My first thought, as I read it, was of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, with a dozen single men sat around a large table at one of the decisive moments of the Christian story. It was on this occasion that Jesus invited his followers to “do this in remembrance of me” — an invitation that over two billion of us regularly respond to by gathering around the Eucharistic table in a recreation of that founding meal.

Those who share this meal together describe each other as family. It is, to use the sociological jargon, a fictive kinship — in so far as it is not grounded in a biological connection, but a chosen identity. If there is such a thing as a Christian family, it is this. A place where, at best, “adults and children live and grow under the loving gaze of a dozen pairs of eyes, and be caught, when they fall, by a dozen pairs of arms”. Gay and straight, rich and poor, black and white — this is the ultimate extended family.

Yes, like the nuclear family, this family has also been thinned out by the community dissolving properties of contemporary capitalism. But as a model, it is far more deeply rooted in the Christian witness than the nuclear family ever has been. Which makes the church’s continued obsession with policing the biological mechanics of love-making so thoroughly depressing.

For what Brooks reminds us is that if we compare and contrast the moral majority nuclear family position with the forged families that sprung up within the gay community in the Eighties — often forms of collective solidarity and mutual care in response to the darkness of AIDS — it is the forged family that more closely resembles the sort of arrangement that Jesus was calling his followers into.

Throughout Christian history, whether it be the big table of the monastic refectory, the Eucharistic table (yes, an altar too) set as the central focus of the church, or even the big table of parish lunch clubs, it is who you eat with (and not so much who you sleep with) that defines the religious family. The blindness of many religious conservatives is to have set the small little Ikea table of the nuclear family against that of the large, inclusive table of the extended family, with always space for one more seat.

Yes, fidelity and faithfulness are important in all family structures. But when Jesus said do this in remembrance of me, he really didn’t have in mind a stay-at-home Mum in a flowery apron providing meatloaf for the table and only straight sex in the bedroom.