越来越多的美术馆允许盲人用手欣赏名画

MADRID — Guards make sure visitors to the Museo del Prado stay at arm’s length from its masterpieces. But here on a recent morning was José Pedro González running his fingers over one of El Greco’s most famous paintings, “The Nobleman With His Hand on His Chest.” He went back and forth over the nobleman’s eyes, rubbed his beard and eventually reached his hand, tracing the edges of each digit.

马德里——在普拉多博物馆，保安需确保参观者与画作保持一定距离。不过，最近的一个早晨，何塞·佩德罗·冈萨雷斯(José Pedro González) 把手指放在了画作《手抚胸膛的贵族男人》(The Noble man With His Hand on His Chest)上，这是埃尔·格列柯(El Greco)最著名的作品之一。冈萨雷斯在贵族的双眼上来来回回，摩挲他的胡子，最终抵达他的手部，感受着每根手指的轮廓。

The work, of course, was a copy. But more surprisingly, the copy was in three dimensions so that Mr. González, who is 56 and has been blind since the age of 14, could experience the painting firsthand.

当然，这幅画是一件复制品。不过比这件事更令人惊讶的是，这幅画是三维的，正因如此，现年56岁、14岁失明的冈萨雷斯可以亲身感受它。

“It’s an unbelievable sensation,” Mr. González said. “I’m feeling this painting down to the detail of each fingernail.”

“这种感觉太神奇了，”冈萨雷斯说，“我能感受到他每个指甲盖上的细节。”

Mr. González was visiting a small, highly unusual exhibition, “Touching the Prado,” designed to give the blind or those with limited sight an opportunity to create a mental image of a painting by feeling it. The show, which runs through June 28, occupies a side passage of the museum, near a room that contains an original of another work copied for the blind: a version of the Mona Lisa by a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci. Altogether, six 3-D copies are on display, all of them rendering famous works in the Prado. They include Goya’s “The Parasol”; a still life by van der Hamen; “Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan” by Velázquez; and “Noli Me Tangere,” Correggio’s painting of Christ meeting Mary Magdalene.

冈萨雷斯参观的是一个规模很小但极不寻常的展览，名为“触摸普拉多”。这个展览为失明者和视障人士提供机会，使他们通过触觉在心中生成作品的图像。展览位于普拉多博物馆的一条侧廊内，将持续到今年6月28日。在走廊附近的一个屋子里，陈列着此次展览另一幅展品的原作，即列奥纳多·达·芬奇(Leonardo da Vinci)的学生所作的《蒙娜丽莎》。“触摸普拉多”一共展览了六件画作的三维副本，全部来自普拉多的知名馆藏，另外四件是戈雅(Goya)的《阳伞》(The Parasol)、范·德·哈曼(van der Hamen)的静物画、委拉斯奎茲(Velázquez)的《阿波罗在伏尔甘的熔炉》，以及柯雷乔(Correggio)描绘耶稣会见抹大拉玛利亚的作品《别碰我》。

The exhibition is one of the most sophisticated yet in efforts to unlock the beauty of the visual arts for those unable to see them. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery in London are among several museums that organize activities for blind visitors, including special guided tours, drawing classes, and “touch” workshops, in which blind people can feel sculptures. The Louvre in Paris also has a Tactile Gallery that contains copies of some of its sculptures.

这个展览为盲人开启了欣赏视觉艺术之门，是类似尝试的典范之一。其他一些博物馆也曾做出相应努力，如举办有特殊引导的参观活动、开展绘画课程和“触觉”工坊等，在“触觉”工坊内，盲人可以触摸雕塑。纽约大都会艺术博物馆(The Metropolitan Museum of Art)和伦敦国家美术馆(National Gallery)就在这么做。巴黎的卢浮宫也设有触觉画廊(Tactile Gallery)，展出馆内部分雕塑的副本。

Other examples include the Museo Nacional de San Carlos, in Mexico City, which was among the pioneers in using collage to reproduce paintings that could be felt by the blind, and the Denver Art Museum, which has been collaborating with Ann Cunningham, an art teacher at the Colorado Center for the Blind, to create tactile art.

另有一些博物馆利用拼贴画来再现作品，供盲人体验，墨西哥城的圣卡洛斯博物馆(Museo Nacional de San Carlos)是此类方法的先行者之一。丹佛艺术博物馆(Denver Art Museum)则与科罗拉盲人中心(Colorado Center for the Blind)的艺术老师安·坎宁安(Ann Cunningham)合作，创造触觉艺术。

Ms. Cunningham said she had seen “real momentum” recently in making art accessible to the blind. She attributed part of the growing interest in tactile art to the fact that “blind educators figured out that they definitely need to make information more accessible to students” because “as textbooks got more and more heavy on the graphics, all that information that students used to get through text was beginning to pass them by.”

坎宁安说，最近在为盲人创作可触艺术时，她找到了“真正的动力”。她将人们对于触觉艺术与日俱增的兴趣部分归结于“盲人教育者发现，他们得让信息变得更容易为学生所接触到”，因为“随着教科书中的图片越来越多，过去学生能够从文字获取的信息，现在接触不到了。”

The idea that blind people should touch 3-D print copies of paintings, however, goes significantly further than other efforts to make art accessible, and it represents a costly investment as well as a technological challenge.

然而，就为盲人接触艺术提供便利而言，制作画作的三维版本比其他方法意义更大，而且它也意味着高额的投资和技术挑战。

In 2011, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy, exhibited a more modest version of the Prado’s 3-D method, a downsized copy of one of its masterworks, “The Birth of Venus” by Botticelli.

2011年，意大利佛罗伦萨的乌菲齐美术馆(Uffizi Gallery)利用普拉多博物馆的三维制画法也举办了一个展览，不过规模更小，展品是其馆藏之一、波提切(Botticelli)《维纳斯的诞生》(The Birth of Venus)的缩小版副本。

Other Italian museums have followed suit using that method, but without venturing beyond black-and-white copies, according to Fernando Pérez Suescun, the curator of the Prado exhibition, who works in the museum’s education department.

费尔南多·佩雷斯·苏埃斯昆(Fernando Pérez Suescun) 是本次普拉多展览的策展人，在普拉多博物馆教育部门工作。据他说，其他一些意大利博物馆已经对这种方法进行效仿，但没有做出冒险的尝试，展品仅限于黑白版本。

“It seemed important to us to add color, because the visually impaired often can still perceive some color,” he said.

“对于我们来说，添加颜色似乎很重要，视觉上有障碍的人仍然经常可以感受到一些颜色，”他说。

The Prado used a relief printing technique developed by Estudios Durero, a printing company near Bilbao, Spain. Works it has produced also have been displayed in the fine arts museum of Bilbao.

普拉多博物馆使用的凸版印刷技术来自Estudios Durero，这家印刷企业位于西班牙毕尔巴鄂附近，它制作的作品也在毕尔巴鄂的艺术博物馆中展出。

Starting with a high-resolution photo of the painting, employees at Durero select textures and features that make sense to enhance for the blind. Next, they create a print, with a special ink, and then use a chemical process to add volume to what would otherwise be a flat reproduction. As part of the chemical process, ultraviolet light is applied to the special ink, so that the print gains a few millimeters of volume while maintaining the colors of the ink, “like if you would add baking powder to a cake,” Mr. Pérez Suescun said.

在制作画作的三维版本时，Durero的工作人员首先在一张原画的高分辨率照片上选定利于盲人理解作品的纹理和特征。接下来，他们用特殊的印墨将照片打印。然后，利用化学过程使作品呈现出三维效果，否则，作品就仅仅是二维的。处理过程包括用紫外线照射一种特殊的油墨，从而制作出几毫米高的三维隆起。油墨的颜色并不会因此丢失，“就像在蛋糕加入发酵粉”，佩雷斯·苏埃斯昆说。

Each work displayed at the Prado cost about $6,680.

本次展览的展品单件价值在6680美元左右。

The museum’s initiative is also testimony to the special status of the blind in Spanish society, thanks to Spain’s national organization for the blind, known by the acronym ONCE (pronounced OHN-say). Founded in 1938 during the Spanish Civil War, the organization was allowed by Gen. Francisco Franco to run a nationwide lottery. In a lottery-obsessed country, ONCE became an economic powerhouse, while guaranteeing employment, mostly as lottery vendors, to almost all of Spain’s blind citizens to this day. The organization collaborated with the Prado for its project, offering advice on how to improve visits for the blind, notably by leaning the 3-D canvases so that they would be easier to touch. Some of the copies were also downsized slightly from the original artwork.

展览体现了盲人在西班牙社会中的特殊地位，这主要得益于一个以”ONCE”（发音为OHN-say）缩写著称的西班牙全国盲人组织。1938年西班牙内战期间，该组织经弗朗西斯科·佛朗哥将军(Gen. Francisco Franco)允许，在全国范围内发售彩票。在这个对彩票过分热衷的国家里，ONCE成为了强大的经济团体，直至今天仍为几乎所有西班牙盲人提供就业机会，职位大部分为彩票售卖。本次展览由该组织和普拉多博物馆联合举办。ONCE就如何提高参观质量提供建议，比如摆放靠墙式的三维帆布展板，为触摸画作提供便利。此外，一些画作相比于原作在画幅上稍微缩小。

“A painting should really be no more than 120 centimeters wide, because that’s how far a person can comfortably reach without having to move,” Mr. Pérez Suescun said. (That’s roughly 47 inches.)

“作品一定不要宽于120厘米（约为47英寸），因为这样就可以在不移动的前提下，舒服地触摸作品，”佩雷斯·苏埃斯昆说。

An audio guide accompanies blind visitors through the special show, but regular visitors are also provided with an audio guide, as well as a mask so they can relate better to what a blind person perceives. “I think it’s great to integrate the blind even as far as making it possible for them to appreciate paintings,” said Carlos Hernández, a 19-year-old student who chose to touch the copies without covering his eyes.

参观展览的过程中，音频介绍自始至终陪伴着盲人游客，不过普通游客也可以使用这段介绍，还可以获得一个眼罩，以便更好地体会盲人世界。“我认为让盲人融入进来是很好的，即便只是为他们欣赏艺术提供便利，”19岁的学生卡洛斯·埃尔南德斯(Carlos Hernández)说，他选择不遮挡眼睛触摸作品。

Still, Mr. Pérez Suescun said that watching blind visitors discover masterworks was in itself an experience, allowing him to rediscover paintings that he had considered very familiar. “The first question that I got from one of our blind visitors about El Greco’s nobleman was what color were his eyes — and I had to check,” Mr. Pérez Suescun said. “There are really plenty of details to which I had never paid any attention.”

佩雷斯·苏埃斯昆也说，观看盲人游客探索优秀作品，本身就是一种经历，这让他重新欣赏原来看似熟悉不过的作品。“我从一位盲人参观者那里得到的有关埃尔·格列柯作品的第一个问题是，他的眼睛是什么颜色——我不得不去确认，”佩雷斯·苏埃斯昆说，“真的有许多细节我之前并没有注意到。”

Mr. González had never seen the El Greco portrait of the nobleman, one of the many masterworks in the Prado. But he had visited museums as a child and has continued to do so since going blind, helped by his wife, who describes the paintings to him. “It’s great to look at paintings with my wife and spend time with her, but it’s clearly a big difference when I can discover a painting for myself or have to listen to what she tells me,” he said.

冈萨雷斯从未见过埃尔·格列柯的这幅描绘贵族的作品，这是普拉多博物馆众多优秀的馆藏之一。不过他小时候参观过博物馆，失明之后在妻子的帮助下也仍然继续，他的妻子会把画作形容给他。“在妻子的帮助下去欣赏作品，以及和她共度时光是很美妙的，但显然自己去探索和听她讲给我还是有很大区别的，”他说。

Another blind visitor, Andrés Oteo, said touching a 3-D copy “created a clear link between what I feel in my fingers and what is in my mind,” even if there was still room for improvement in terms of defining some textures. On the copy of the Goya painting, he said, “the clothing and the hair felt so similar that I couldn’t distinguish them well.”

另一位盲人参观者安德烈斯·奥特奥(Andres Oteo)说，三维展品“在我手指的触觉和我的脑海之间建造了一种清晰的连接”，即便就识别纹理而言，仍有一些改进的空间。针对戈雅的作品，他说，“衣服和头发感觉上去很相似，我不是很能分得清。”

Mr. Oteo, 56, who went blind from glaucoma 35 years ago, said he had seen the portrait of the nobleman in his youth, but “it’s one thing to more or less remember what it was like and another to be able to touch it in all its details.” He added, “It’s like getting back my eyesight.”

56岁的奥特奥35年前因为青光眼失明，他说自己曾在年轻时见过这幅贵族画像，但“能或多或少记住它是一回事，通过触碰感受全部的细节是另外一回事”。他又补充道，“现在，我仿佛重见光明一般。”