Siddhartha Mukherjee's The Gene: An Intimate History and an Image in Miniature

This week I finished two projects. One was an epic journey through The Gene: An Intimate History, by Siddhartha Mukherjee. The other project was the completion of a miniature portrait commission. Mukherjee’s The Gene, was my official "waiting room" literature. These are books that I read while waiting in doctors’ offices - and there have been plenty this year. It took about five months of waiting rooms and time between other obligations to finish this amazing book. It was worth every minute of the literary journey. I call this a literary journey because this work of both science and art is resplendent with literary allusions interspersed with biography, and all spun together in an epic tale of social, scientific and ethical history. In short, it is a masterpiece.

I read this book initially as a refresher for my own study in genetics and also to come to terms with hereditary illness. I was surprised to find that in writing the book, the author was also coming to terms with his own family history of a devastating hereditary mental illness - hence the sub text of an intimate history. And yet, despite the obligatory discussion of these and other sobering realities, Siddhartha Mukherjee manages to maintain a sense of humor in much of the telling. As one who devotes an inordinate amount of time to thinking up irreverent puns, jokes and rhymes, I could not help but admire the liberal sprinkling of such chortle inducing literary devices throughout this book. One fine example was the description of the abbot who oversaw Mendel’s experiments. The abbot’s prudishness would not tolerate observations involving the coerced breeding of mice, but "didn’t mind giving peas a chance."

My other project, although a small commission, carried its own specialness as it was my first commission in a long time, the first commission from a new client, and apparently the first commission of art work for this new client. The painting was a miniature portrait of his mother circa 1955. I am not certain if confluences find their way to me or I to them, but there were certainly moments of synchronicity between reading The Gene: An Intimate History, and painting this charming little portrait. I was told, for instance, that the subject of my portrait had eighteen siblings. That is most assuredly a copious gene pool. Yet there was also a subtle, more intimate reckoning that coincided with making this painting and something I read in Mukherjee’s text. In one of the last chapters there was a study of twins reared separately in order to determine whether or not behavior had mostly social/environmental influence or genetic ones and how the two might interact. One question submitted to the twins in the study caught my eye: "Do you have original art in your home?" It may be arbitrary but the question was supposed to indicate a higher educational/social standing. What interested the researchers was that there was a very high social and behavioral correlation in twins reared apart, even if their social and economic backgrounds were different. So I suppose that twins reared apart might both have original art in their homes regardless of whether their adoptive parents or friends told them to have that or not. But what interested in me was why the researchers used that question as a benchmark as a social class indicator.

So I had to mull that question over a bit, just as my client considered the commission for a while before acting upon it. Historically, people who commissioned art were powerful figures: the popes, the Medicis, aristocrats. And commissioning a likeness - of oneself or another, held a special place in such investments. For most of us, we can trace our visual lineage only as far back as nineteenth century photography allows. (I recall feeling a twinge of jealousy when a friend with an aristocratic background showed me photographs of her ancestors going back to the nineteenth century and then revealed the eighteenth and seventeenth century miniature paintings that extended before ) Perhaps even more importantly, we can only extend our visage posterity to that end point at which photographs deteriorate - two hundred years tops when archival inks and papers are used, only decades if not. But paintings like this tiny oil on panel are made with earth and minerals and as such are written in stone. So perhaps commissioning a likeness means more than just having an art work in the home. Perhaps it means a claim to a bit of the power of the Medicis - power to stake one’s place in things that outlive the ordinary.