A poem, a painter’s glance: the finale of a requiem for fleeting beauty, a requiem for disappearance.
I can easily imagine the conversation encouraged by true friendship: Giorgione said to Brocardo that in a dream he had seen Apelles’ fresco in the temple of Artemis at Ephesus, Alexander and Lightning. The sky on fire—unrepresentable—was pictured this single time. But of this ancient destroyed temple we have no trace—nor any evidence of Apelles’ painting. The lightning, reclaiming its divine rights, must have erased the profane image. I imagine this dialogue and I think that Giorgione must have bettered Apelles by far, having represented both the flash of lightning and the disappearance of the mortal who had witnessed the flash.
Now (April 16, 6:45 A.M.), I’m looking through a magnifying glass at an excellent reproduction of The Tempest. The colorless light has no source. Despite the painting’s patina of age, I perceive a bolt of lightning composed of every hue, including black. On either side of the river, the young man and the woman and child are calm, far too calm. Are they awaiting the promise of another life? A glow envelops them all, as well as the walls and the foliage. Night and day escape from the controversy of contrasts, gathered together in the heavenly storm.
I think of Giorgio Barbelli—that is, Giorgione—as a brother. The black death snatched him away. His days were numbered. His poet friend Brocardo, who fled Venice because of the war, sent him letters that went missing. In the years 1480–1510, the French king’s League laid waste to the villages of the Veneto and the plague broke out amid the devastations of war. On May 13, 1510, Giorgione received a final letter from his friend Antonio Brocardo. Here it is, translated from Italian:
Dear Giorgio, How pleasant it is to stroll the city streets, as the peripatetic philosophers and the wise men of old once did, speaking of our cats and of the hidden face of the world. By respecting my silence you have strengthened my taste for reticence. Sans image, what good are words? Mere pebbles rolling along a riverbed where we two cannot walk abreast, forced to proceed with our noses to our feet, without seeing anything of the world, without anything possessing the slightest meaning—except that we’re moving forward like beasts. I can see very well where we’re headed: we’re about ready to believe in the power of speech, to be caught up in its game. What a wonder the power of speech, yet how harsh and pure its exile, which so cuts us off from life. Speech is within us, yet we’re also caught up inside it. Once the ink of words is dried on paper, there’s nothing left around us but immense solitude—or death upon the shores of the sea. All is nothingness. But among the ashes of words I know very well that we would continue to write to each other, like children, with our fingers. I can clearly see what it is that obliges the two of us to write or paint: it’s that naïve desire to bring time to a halt, to take up residence in our solitude once again. We want to go on living via our signs, having now become the gods of our own immortality. But what a useless thing to pursue: this cult of immortality. If we cannot know how to live, let us at least learn to die. Our work is like the faith of the simpleminded. The sound of verse is its surest music. We are attached to signs that create a chain, binding man to man. And yet, it is only from the depths of our silence that we speak; it is only as solitaries that we come together as men. But are we yet sufficiently alone to be free? Life is such a small thing that one could easily withdraw into one’s room in order to invent the world. Again and again we repeat the same signs with new images. Come on, my special friend, we so enjoy living that we shall find pleasure in it in the end: let’s rediscover the delights of writing and of painting in quiet rooms. Our ultimate vanity. As if the only legitimate love were the love of absence. They say the plague is now generaclass="underline" take good care of yourself! Otherwise I would never have been able to speak to you as I have.
6
Aseroë
AFTER A WEEK’S WORK in Budapest in November, I decided to spend my Sunday at the National Museum. The next morning, in Szentendre, on the Danube, I was to meet the painter Endre Bálint; he was going to show me the façades of the old houses featuring the “Serbian motifs” of which I was ignorant while looking at his drawings several days earlier.
The trip to the museum was painful. I was asleep on my feet. The paintings were running in a blur before me; I had to make an effort to distinguish one from another. My week’s work, which was quite interesting and proceeding at a regular pace, didn’t explain my fatigue. I was afraid I might be falling ill, but I had no shivers, no discomfort—just a strong urge to sleep. All these rows of paintings seemed unbearable to me: bloodless nudes, idiotic portraits, nauseating crucifixions, ponderous battles. The visitors seemed to be accomplices in all this. How could I put up with their murmurs, their admiring commentaries? I was afraid some annoying person might notice my deplorable condition and denounce me as a spy. I immediately made up my mind: I would walk through the galleries at a swift clip.
I was moving along quickly from gallery to gallery, going against the direction of the tour. I raced through several centuries—the Italian Primitives, Spain, Flanders, the Renaissance, and the Baroque—a few seconds for each period and country, nothing more.
Since the rooms were well heated, I began to feel reinvigorated. Several times I passed in front of the same canvases. “No point in lingering,” I told myself toward the end of the morning tour, impatiently waiting to be hungry enough to make my exit with a good excuse.
A little later, I was stopped dead in my tracks in front of Caterina Cornaro, by Gentile Bellini. “Stopped dead in my tracks” is the right expression to describe my condition—for almost the last two hours, any sense of “culture” had been lost on me. Seized by sudden delight, I spontaneously discovered a face—with whose eyes, whose hair, and whose Venetian coif I fell instantly in love.
Talented, elegant, and flattering as the painter’s treatment may have been, it wasn’t the beauty of the face that captivated me but the sparkle of her look, the intense emotion that animated her. Resisting too hasty an infatuation, I took the time to examine all the details. I observed her forehead, her mouth; I roved lovingly over her hair, her eyes, her cheeks. It was as if her material surface were troubled by the loving caress of my gaze. This idea seemed to please the painting, and its face smiled back at me. I immediately assumed that I was the victim of some visual disorder or the effects of a fatigue too recent to be entirely overcome. I wanted to clarify the situation, and, holding my breath, I approached the portrait. The actual canvas of the painting, now so close to my eyes, became even more disturbing. Who was I to accuse, down to the last detail, the clumsiness of Gentile Bellini, who had left all the vestiges of his numerous pentimenti so poorly covered up? Had the artist interrupted his progress at several points of his painting, leaving it at the sketch stage, neglecting numerous delicate nuances, botching the finished work? Or rather, did every flutter of his brushstroke anticipate that fashionably négligé manner that would later become so common in the art of the portrait?