It is a common observation that we live in the midst of a crisis of attention, a culture-wide inability to concentrate. Workers and students and people performing quotidian tasks cannot resist the stream of notifications on their cellphones.
To counteract the infinite scroll of photos and videos, the Harvard art historian Jennifer Roberts proposes slow and deliberate looking at works of visual art. She assigns her students to choose an artwork on display in the Boston area and view it for three hours. “The time span is explicitly designed to seem excessive,” Roberts writes. But students report being “astonished by the potentials this process unlocked.”
Roberts’s assignment inspired The New York Times’s “10-Minute Challenge,” in which, once a month, readers are invited to view a painting without interruption, to see what might be revealed through a longer look than most of us are used to. As you view the picture on your screen, a timer ticks upward. When you give up, you can see how long you lasted. Readers who have taken the challenge describe boredom, discomfort, even panic at the task. Many give up within the first minute. One viewer who made it to 10 minutes said the experiment “felt revelatory and shaming at the same time.” Another said, “I entered a delicious state of revelation.”
It’s worthwhile to take an uncomfortable amount of time to view artworks. But I don’t think it will cure the attention crisis. Despite our best efforts inside the museum, we tend to leave it just as we were, eager to catch up on the online world. But art is not useless in addressing the attention crisis. Roberts treats artworks as objects of attention, but some works offer models of attention. They show us what attention looks like.
Consider “The Lacemaker” (1669-70), by Johannes Vermeer. In that painting, the subject gazes downward at her work through half-closed eyes. No sign of strain mars her smooth forehead, yet her fingers are tense with activity. She holds a pair of bobbins in her left hand, one on each side of her index finger. Her right hand holds an unseen needle; her ring finger presses into the cushion beneath her work. What looks to me like a closed book—perhaps a Bible—rests on the table next to her. But the time to read is later. Now, the task is to make lace. Nothing will interrupt her.
Art has long been used to show how a person should be. Certainly in the Christian tradition, visual depictions of Christ and the saints model virtues like piety, chastity and forbearance. The figure in Christian art—indeed, in all of Western art—whose attention matters most is Mary, the Mother of God. Marian art reveals attention to be much more than the intense focus of Vermeer’s lacemaker or a knowledge worker absorbed in a spreadsheet, Pomodoro timer ticking away nearby. Marian art shows that our attention encompasses a range of capacities. It even suggests that distractability is itself a form of attention, one that is essential to living a Christian life.
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A few paintings of the Madonna and Child from the Haggerty Museum of Art at Marquette University illustrate the nuances of Mary’s focus. In Pieter Claeissins’s mid-16th century “Virgin and Child” (see cover), Mary looks down through half-closed eyelids at the infant in her lap, who does not quite return her gaze. She cradles him against her left arm and holds the child’s right foot in her right hand. Her grasp is tender, with none of the tension in the fingers that we see in Vermeer’s lacemaker.
Claeissins places Mary and Jesus outside but in a busy household. In the background of the scene, Joseph kneels over a carpentry project, his hand-axe poised above a board, mid-cut. A basket of cloth and thread, weighed down by a set of shears, rests unattended behind Mary. She has, for now at least, put her work aside for the sake of her son. He is what matters to her.
In “Madonna of the Veil” (page 48), a 17th-century painting from the workshop of Onorio Marinari, Mary’s attention to the infant Jesus is even more intimate than it is in the Claeissins painting. Both mother and child appear in glowing soft focus and in profile. The plane along which their gazes fall is at a right angle to the viewer. You and I are not invited into this moment. The background is completely dark; these figures are in a world of their own, outside of time.
Marinari’s Madonna and Child are recognizably human. In Salvador Dalí’s “Madonna of Port Lligat” (1949), by contrast, they exist beyond the physical world. Their bodies are immaterial. Mary’s torso has a huge rectangular hole in it, and Jesus, similarly transparent, hovers above a green cushion that in turn hovers above his mother’s lap. Mary has no upper arms. Her head is cracked open, revealing the sky beyond it. The head of Christ is at the horizon in this scene, like the sun at eternal dawn.
Dalí’s Mary is contemplative. Her focus is not quite as intense as that of Vermeer’s lacemaker, but it is totally given over to her son. We see only her eyelids. Her head tilts just to her left; Jesus’ tilts to his right. Her face exhibits supreme serenity, visually echoing the smooth violet bay behind her. The tips of Mary’s fingers graze each other as she holds her hands in a posture of prayer that is also protective and perhaps a bit like how someone would hold them to warm them over a flame.
This painting underscores how, when Mary pays attention to her child, she is simultaneously contemplating the divine. This Jesus is no ordinary infant. Though his mother is a model of contemplation, she, too, is, in an important way, not like us.
This form of attention, totally focused on Christ, appears in painting done outside Europe as well. In a 15th-century icon by a follower of the Ethiopian monk Fre Seyon, the eyes of Mary and Jesus lock onto each other. They exchange an exclusive focus.
The attention Mary models in the Madonna and Child genre is the sort that Simone Weil describes in her essay “On the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God.” There she contends that “attention…is the very substance of prayer.” Weil’s brand of attention is focus. It’s the kind of attention we believe is endangered by our phones. She describes attention as an effort but not a “muscular effort.” It is not simply tension, knitting one’s brow. It almost does not matter what we pay attention to, in Weil’s account. She’s writing for students, encouraging them that any act of attention to the object of their studies, whether a Latin text or a math problem, will strengthen them for prayer. Attention to geometry also prepares you to love your neighbor, according to Weil. To help someone in need, one must first see the person in his or her affliction. “Only he who is capable of attention can do this,” she writes.
It would seem, then, that our distractability does not hinder only our productivity. It is also a failure of charity, a form of sin. For the sake of our souls, we must learn to pay the kind of undivided attention Mary exhibits. If we do, we will become more like her, more able not only to contemplate Christ but to see him in our neighbor. And as a first step toward this better way of seeing, we can spend time—10 minutes or three hours—focused on the Virgin and Child. We will become what we see.
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But focused concentration is not the only form of human attention. It isn’t even the only form of attention in the tradition of Marian art. In scenes of the Annunciation, attention is not undivided concentration on the thing in front of you. It is inherently divided, and the task is not to focus but to be ready for something new to appear.
The Gospel account of the Annunciation is silent about what Mary was doing just before the angel Gabriel appeared to say she would bear the Son of God. But most often in visual depictions, Mary is shown with a book, being interrupted. We complain we cannot get any reading done. Mary can’t, either. Good thing, too: If her attention had been locked in on the book, she might have missed the good news altogether.
Some early visual accounts—that is, ones in preliterate societies—show Mary receiving the angel’s message not while reading but while weaving. The Annunciation mosaic in St. Mary Major Basilica in Rome dates from the fifth century, soon after the Council of Ephesus established Mary as Theotokos, Bearer of God. Mary looks up from a cloth she is working on to meet the gaze of the angel. She does not look especially perplexed, but she is certainly interrupted.
The narrow panel by Jan van Eyck now in the National Gallery in Washington (pictured right), completed in the 1430s, has all the elements we have come to expect from an Annunciation, It depicts not the moment of perplexity at the news but the moment of acceptance, occurring inside an airy gothic building that resembles a church. A thick book lies open on a bench in front of Mary as she bows her head and opens her hands. The golden rays and the dove come in through a clear but closed window high above her. The golden words, Ecce ancilla Dei—“Behold, the servant of God”—emerge from her mouth.
In Bartolomé Esteban Murillo’s “Annunciation” (1660), Mary has not only allowed herself to be interrupted from her reading; she seems to have been procrastinating, judging from the basket of sewing or laundry on the floor in front of her. It suggests a hierarchy of goods to pay attention to: domestic labor is below intellectual or spiritual pursuits, but even those activities must be set aside to respond to the call of God. The painting suggests that the question of attention is not whether we have the ability to focus, but whether we have our priorities in proper order.
Openness to that kind of call is a form of attention, too. It is not very different from the way we keep wondering what is happening on our phone, waiting for the next notification. Compared with productive or prayerful focus, this form of attention can look like distractability—as it often is. But it is a valuable capacity, a genuine feat of mind, even as we do one thing, to devote a small portion of our attention to something that might happen, something we fear, expect or hope for.
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This second kind of attention is an element of Ignatian spirituality. The Ignatian concept of magis—“more”—means that one is always open to the next thing God might call you to. Ignatian spirituality entails “an active attentiveness to God joined with a prompt responsiveness to his leading,” the late Jesuit writer David L. Fleming wrote. It is less focus than readiness. “Our response to God occurs now,” Fleming continues. “God is working in our lives now and we are to respond now.”
Ignatian attention requires “watching and waiting.” It requires “noticing the ebb and flow of our feelings and inner dispositions,” writes Fleming. It focuses on God every bit as much as Simone Weil demands. But God is not static. God sits in Mary’s lap, but he does not stay there. God is active in the world, findable in all things. Fleming writes that “Ignatian spirituality sees God as a ‘media God.’ God is ever-present, constantly in touch, communicating with us in many ways.”
A Christian, then, must become attuned to God’s call wherever it might occur, and not only in contemplation. A Christian must have their antennae up, tweaking the frequency, seeking the call to something new, even while doing something worthwhile. A life with God demands divided attention. It is because of Abraham’s one-ear-open attentiveness to the angel’s call that he stays his hand instead of sacrificing Isaac. Imagine if Abraham had maintained total, undivided focus on the task before him. He would have destroyed everything.
A midcentury painting in the Haggerty collection, Virginia Broderick’s “Mary Queen of Martyrs,” illustrates the possibility of repurposing digital distractability. In it, Mary kneels and gestures toward a field of crosses that suggest grave markers. The palm of her left hand is open, facing upward, and her head is bowed. Her posture is familiar to all of us: We adopt it all the time to study our phones.
But this image suggests that when we remove the phone, our posture becomes a gesture of openness and reverence, of blessing. In attuning ourselves to phone notifications, we seem to have accidentally recovered a form of attention that was once more clearly vital to Christian life. It never really went away. Mothers have kept up this habit by listening for the noise—or, perhaps more worrying, the silence—from a child’s bedroom while they carried out other household duties.
A Christian life demands more than the focus of the lacemaker, the art historian or the writer. It demands a readiness to redirect our attention, to drop what we are doing at the sound of God’s voice. Abraham halted the sacrifice. Simon and Andrew looked up from their nets. And Mary, in the visual tradition if not in Scripture, set her reading aside.
This essay is adapted from the Theotokos Lecture sponsored by the Haggerty Museum of Art and Marquette University’s Department of Theology, presented on Oct. 21.
This article appears in December 2025.