Читать книгу Cannot Stay - Kevin Oderman - Страница 14
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March 2004
We had suffered one of those sudden dawns you get flying east before our flight landed in Munich. Heads full of siren darkness, we wobbled through the sun-flooded terminal wishing for shades. The connecting flight to Florence arced over the Alps—so many—too black to see below the snowline and too bright to look at above. There are the Alps, I said to myself, because I am always quoting. I wanted to take my whole head into Photoshop and tone down the contrast.
When our taxi turned into the narrow streets of old Florence, the shadows felt welcome as a balm, soothing. Bleary-eyed, we’d still noticed the great banners hung along the route in from the airport announcing a Botticelli and Filippino Lippi exhibit at the Palazzo Strozzi: “Passion and Grace in Fifteenth Century Florentine Painting.” The banners featured a beautiful head chopped from Botticelli’s Pallas and the Centaur and blown up large. Still, our hearts did not leap up and not only because we were tired. We had come to Italy for the paintings, yes, but for early work, for what Delta called the pennyheads, more for Giotto and Simoni Martini than their heirs. We thought we had less appetite for Botticelli, jaundiced perhaps by the fame of his Primavera and Birth of Venus, big paintings but just plain silly in our view. Me and Delta, we got your opinions, no doubt about that.
However, we had no sooner taken up the strolling life in Florence, a town singularly well-suited to aimless wandering, then we bumped smack into the Palazzo Strozzi. “Well, we’re here,” I said, and without discussing it we sauntered under the stone arcades into the courtyard and climbed up the broad staircase to the exhibit.
I’m the kind of guy forever walking in the out door; so I got sideways of the curators’ intent first thing. My head turned as if magnetized to a tiny Botticelli on the wall to my right, Judith’s Return to Bethulia. Small, the painting invites you up close, and close is intimate. Receptivity dilates in the face of small things; we go a little less defended, want to be tender, and the small looms large in consciousness because of the quality of our attention. I first noticed the effect in poetry, because I am foremost a reader, but it’s true of small paintings as well.
I took off my glasses, my face within inches of the picture. I considered Judith’s sword, her confident stride, the serene beauty of her bright face. I stood there a long time. Delta appeared, put her head next to mine, and then she was gone. A fast looker. And perhaps Judith just wasn’t to her taste.
The subject is biblical, adapted from the apocryphal Book of Judith. Finding her town, Bethulia, besieged by an Assyrian army commanded by Holofernes, the rich and beautiful widow Judith decided to take matters into her own hands. She set aside her widow’s weeds and donned her showiest stuff, “to entice the eyes of all men who might see her.” Then, taking her maid with her, she marched out the city gate and right into the Assyrian camp. There, she wrangled an invitation to the commander’s tent, a private party (talk about your mistake on the guest list!). When the smitten Holofernes, overcome with wine, fell down dead drunk, Judith beheaded him, and returned with the severed head to Bethulia, to much rejoicing. She ordered Holofernes’s head hung from the parapet of the city wall. When the battle resumed the following morning, the emboldened Bethulian soldiers marched against the disheartened Assyrians, who were routed. And the town was saved.
The tale was well known in Botticelli’s time; any depiction of Judith would have called up the entire story. So, in a way, all paintings of Judith mean the same thing, the whole story. Even more abstractly, in Botticelli’s day the story of Judith and Holofernes was understood to figure the triumph of virtue over vice, of chastity over lust, and having the necessary pluck to do God’s will.
Oddly enough, then, the narrative background turns out not to be so narrative after all. The more familiar the story, the more the element of time is drained out of it. Sequence is suppressed—the end registers in the beginning, the beginning in the end. The whole story is known at once, as if from the side, “and then” hardly matters.
A residue of time does remain, of course. In a painting like Judith’s Return to Bethulia, time is most present at the point of insertion, where the artist enters the story. Before and after hover around the stilled moment depicted in the painting like two great wings. In this little Botticelli, before Judith returned she had beheaded Holofernes, and after she returned, the Bethulians broke the Assyrian siege. Botticelli suggests both things in the painting itself; Judith looks back where she’s come from, the Assyrian tents, and in the background, sketchily drawn, the Bethulian soldiers march out the city gate to engage the mounted barbarians.
Botticelli’s decision to focus on Judith’s return allows him to portray Judith as serene, allows us to contemplate doing God’s will as a matter of simple obedience. The sword strokes, while not denied, take place comfortably off screen. There are plenty of other paintings in the tradition that portray Judith in the very act, her sword quick in the cut in Holofernes’s neck, her off hand tangled in his hair.
In Botticelli’s little panel, Judith strides left to right across the picture. Looking as if she’s hurrying to keep up, her maid Abra follows her closely, carrying the swaddled head of Holofernes in a basket on her own head. That makes three heads close together, and a good deal of the painting’s energy derives from their proximity. Botticelli painted Judith turned halfway toward the viewer; her head is tilted back, toward the tents, but her eyes seem to be looking inward, a face remembering. Abra leans forward in her hurry and is seen more directly from the side. Her left foot has just missed stepping on Judith’s flowing gown; the elbow of her lifted arm, balancing the basket on her head, extends behind Judith’s trailing shoulder. Their heads are drawn within inches of each other. Although they must be walking at the same spanking pace, the speed registers more clearly in Abra’s dress, which she has hitched up with her free hand to keep from stumbling. The fabric of her dress has whirled into a vortex at the hem; the wicker bottles looped around her wrist strain at the end of their braided tethers, flying behind. Abra’s dusky face stares directly at Judith; it is not a look of unalloyed admiration.
Only the height of the shallow basket separates Holofernes’s head from Abra’s. Her white headscarf is very like the white cloth wrapped around his head, and the loose ends of both trail dramatically like pennons in the wind. Abra keeps a firm grasp on the basket’s rim. Still, Holofernes’s head has tipped back; his darkened face is turned up, addresses the morning sky. Holofernes looks more a man peacefully asleep than a man startlingly dead. As if in death he’s found his part.
It is Botticelli the painter, concerned with it all, who has chosen to bring their heads so close, and our faces close to theirs. Mistress and maid might just as well have leaned apart and Holofernes’s grizzled head been carried in a bag (as it is in the Book of Judith). The three heads clustered together at the top of the canvas form an irregular triangle, but their relation does not feel static. Perhaps because Judith looks back, Abra forward, and Holofernes up, the three heads seem caught in a planetary whirl around some unseen star.
I stood looking a long time, and when finally I turned away from Judith’s Return to Bethulia, it was as a man finished. Full up, I’d be able to look at the rest of the show, but only look. I might have left then and been happy; when the cup’s full, why go on pouring?
I found Delta in a room devoted to angels, lost in her own private tableau vivant, posing as the archangel Gabriel in front of a Filippino Lippi, an annunciation. Delta looked as if she’d just touched down; her reproduction of the angel’s pose in her own quivering body was uncanny. I expected to hear her whisper, “Fear not, Mary…” Another way of knowing, and profound. When Delta sensed my presence behind her she turned her face to mine, radiant, “So wonderful,” is what she actually said. I asked her if, when she’d looked at the Botticelli annunciation in the room before, in which the angel has not yet quite landed, if she had managed to hover, looking. Immediately she inclined her head, crossed her arms across her chest, and leaned forward, in the pose of that Gabriel, and I could almost see the lilies on their long stem, the bright wings aloft behind her. But Delta was museum weary, too, and we began to stroll, together, less attentive than before.
Delta’s not much of a traveler, and if it hadn’t been for the promise of annunciations, she might not have agreed to an Italian journey. Perhaps it was the tiny Angel of the Annunciation by Simoni Martini in the National Gallery back in D.C. that convinced her. That Gabriel’s odd, but winning, squat pose. The heavy drape of his brocade gown. His face, firm but tender. I don’t know how to account for Delta’s feeling for these paintings, not religion, anyway. But it’s a fact of her particular culture; her anthology of Western painting would be thick with Gabriel and Mary. Perhaps it has to do with the central place of the word in the encounter. The sudden appearance of the angel creates the drama—now there where a moment before he was not. But the angel has come to speak, as a go-between. His words are often painted right there between the angel and the virgin, scrolling out, the duration of his speech included in the stopped time of the painting. The divine arrives riding a word.
We paused in front of Filippino Lippi’s Madonna and Child with Saint John the Baptist and Angels, a long title for a big tondo depicting the naked Christ held waist high by an impassive Mary. The Babe leans out to pick a nosegay from a shallow bowl of flowers an angel offers to him. A trio of angels kneels and sings. A bit saccharine, no doubt. In the background the boy Baptist, already dressed in those unfashionable hides, bides his time. The angels have their backs to him, do not sing to him, though perhaps he is listening.
“Harold,” I whispered into Delta’s ear, and she covered her mouth to stifle a snicker, unsuccessfully. I was laughing, too, a private joke.
The joke was puerile, perhaps, but not without occasion. For us, Harold was the name of an ugly baby, and in so many paintings otherwise beautiful the only unlovely thing on view is the little baby Jesus. In the Filippino Lippi, hanging there, Jesus looks outsize, awkwardly splayed and naked—it’s a boy!—and bulbous. A baby so big, you’d think he’d be heavy. But no, to judge by Mary’s posture and her mostly open hands, that baby must be weightless. And there seems to be something wrong with his age. Elizabeth’s boy, the Baptist, within a half a year of Christ’s own age, looks already a rough adolescent. But perhaps the problem lies with John, who needs his skins and cruciform staff to be immediately legible, and therefore can’t be a baby, too.
After that, we began to see Harolds everywhere, and, as it turned out, Filippino’s baby wasn’t all of that Harold compared to some others in the exhibition.
Harold escaped from Raymond Carver’s story “Feathers”; that’s how he ended up in Florence, famous, camping up all those old-master Madonnas—Madonna and Harold, often enough. In Carver’s story, Jack and his snide wife, Fran, have been invited to dinner by Jack’s friend Bud and his wife, Olla. Before they are even out of the car they are accosted by Olla’s “Bird of Paradise,” the peacock Joey. “May-awe!” That’s what Joey says.
Dinner has wound down before Olla can be convinced to bring in the baby, Harold, who has been fussing in his own room. Jack recalls, “Bar none, it was the ugliest baby I’d ever seen. It was so ugly I couldn’t say anything.” The moment stretched—you’ve just got to compliment new parents on their baby. “Ah!” Fran says, and, “isn’t that some baby.” Jack volunteers, “He’s a big fellow, isn’t he?” But Jack exclaims, telling the story to us, that, “It was so pop-eyed, it was like it was plugged into something.” Me and Delta, when we read the story aloud, we laughed so hard we wept. But Carver doesn’t invite us to look down on his characters, to laugh at them from a height. I know I identified with all the characters in “Feathers,” not excluding the bird. And Delta, she told me how once she’d served a casserole so bad the guests had been stunned into silence, like Fran and Jack, until one of them had thought to remark that the temperature of the dish was, “just about right.”
So Harold found a place in our world, in the enlivened air between us, where relationship lives. Joey, too. Indeed, Joey first. We began announcing our returns to the house not with, “I’m home,” but with a loud “may-awe,” which carried rather better, around corners, up the stairs.
Walking through the Palazzo Strozzi, Harold threatened to take over the show. Botticelli’s little tondo, Virgin and Child with Three Angels, painted with extreme delicacy, of a beauty luminous and refined, suffered the epithet, Harold at Table, a title that pretty much deprived it of all its many virtues.
In the painting, Mary kneels in the foreground, center right, while Christ totters toward her from the left. To keep the baby from taking a first-steps tumble, a small angel walks behind him in a crouch, at the ready. Mary reaches out her right hand to the baby, Christ his left to mom; their fingers are almost touching. Here, it is Mary who is serene, her outsize face benevolent and sure; it’s the angels who are looking startled, embarrassed even, their confidence shaken. Perhaps they’re chagrined because they’ve been reduced to domestic help, the one a child-minder, the other two, like maids, pulling open the curtains of an elaborate, outdoor pavilion. More likely, they are abashed by Mary, who though she could hardly be more richly dressed, has pulled a breast out from under her velvet cape and with her left hand presses a stream of milk in a white arc in the direction of Jesus. Which falls well short—as if a milking farmer trying to feed a barn cat had painted the floor of the stall instead.
Harold fails to register that he’s missing lunch, but he hardly looks to need it. His body seems to have quite outgrown his head. In this, he does not take after his mother. And the arm he lifts to reach for Mary’s hand is just bigger than the other, closer arm, which looks stunted by comparison. But there is nothing stunted about Harold from the belly down. The contrast between head and haunch suggests we are looking at parts of two different babies, almost two different species, along the lines of a centaur, half baby, half pig. What could Botticelli have been thinking? About dinner, some smoky trattoria with ham quarters hanging from the ceiling?
If I hadn’t been tired to begin with, and exhausted myself further in the contemplation of Judith, probably my response to Botticelli’s portrayal of the Christ child would not have been so flippant. I’d like to think so, to think better of myself than I do.
But how I loved Tobias’ little fish, the one he carried shining in a sling when he was confronted on the road by Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael, in Filippino’s The Three Archangels. The fish looked something like a small sturgeon and wonderfully distinct against Tobias’ bright red tunic. And of course, I noticed how the angelic getups in the painting, especially Michael’s, bore a striking resemblance to Judith and Abra’s outfits when they took the rocky path back to Bethulia. I wondered, momentarily, if Botticelli had dressed Judith like an angel to suggest her role as messenger, as a sartorial sign of her famous pluck. She certainly had, in media-speak, sent a message to the Assyrians.
Judith could easily have slipped in among the twenty angels in Botticelli’s Mystic Nativity without calling attention to herself. Another party she could have crashed. She was dressed for it, even carried the de rigueur olive branch; all the angels at the nativity had one. Though, it’s true, Judith wasn’t wearing that other to-die-for accessory, wings.
Botticelli wrote a message right on The Mystic Nativity, in Greek, and Delta and I were glad the curators provided a translation: “I Sandro made this picture at the conclusion of the year 1500 in the troubles of Italy in the half time after the time according to the 11th [chapter] of Saint John in the second woe of the Apocalypse during the loosing of the devil…” Botticelli’s apocalyptic understanding of history, of for him contemporary Italy, unsettled us across five hundred years. The apocalypse, it didn’t happen, however many times it was predicted. And I associate Botticelli’s kind of interpretation with fundamentalist fanatics, whatever their religion.
(I remember stopping once, climbing up the white rocks of Patmos, at the mouth of the cave where Saint John is reputed to have written his ugly Revelation, just wishing he hadn’t. Patmos, the place itself should have been revelation enough; perhaps that’s why he needed the cave, a dark place for a sick imagination. Revelation loosed some demons, that’s for sure, and what’s especially dispiriting is the sad fact that there have always been many ready to welcome them in, to see through Revelation to apocalypse now.)
Into the Mystic Nativity itself, Botticelli admits nothing ugly. Even the seven little devils in the foreground are more amusing than terrifying and clearly on the run. Under the thatched roof of a shed, Mary kneels amid the livestock, adoring. To the left, an angel instructs the rapt wise men; to the right, another explains the goings-on to the shepherds. Above, an angelic merry-go-round hangs turning in the sky. A round dance, midair. Right in the middle of everything, getting all the attention, Harold lifts a hand as if in benediction. Too old, too long limbed for a newborn, hair enough to look coifed. That baby’s just too big!
Delta and I took a last turn through the exhibition, having a second look at our favorites. Delta spotted Joey, present too, here and there, wherever a showy bird was needed. We puzzled for a moment over Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles, meant to warn “the rulers of the earth” to be wary of heeding false council. Although allegorical figures struggle mightily in the painting, contesting the truth, the foreground is strangely empty, plenty of room there for a “Bird of Paradise,” if one had been wanted.
