The wind whistles; in the light of the great fire Angioletta sits across from Lorentino. Without speaking, he asks: What will remain of you, beautiful face? A soul? What mad law drives us to possess this nothing in moving bodies? Why can’t you remain eighteen years old for an instant under the fleeting midday light, beneath the shadowy lilacs? And why didn’t I know how to paint you — you — not your excitement at soon having meat on your tongue, not your features that will change once you leave here and a man has had his way with you, but you, your youth, your force, your unfettered soul, when you were twelve years old, when you were fifteen, while you are eighteen, royal in the midday mist, gloomy like midday, brilliant like midday, like all the ones like you whom he painted up above, on the scaffold, in the shadows, whom from the opposite wall I could see while I did my touch-ups, my clumps of trees, my icy highlights on icy Oriental hats, when I was fifteen and watched him work, watched him not looking at anyone, watched him remain endlessly still and at last rise with his hand extended before him, drawing out from within a limestone wall — a wall that itself wasn’t miraculous, that we had prepared with our own hands before he arrived, kidding around just as you would have expected, Luca, Melozzo, the others, and I — thus drawing forth some Revelation, massive theological maidens, Angiolettas more real than you who bears this name, servants, but servants who serve only light made flesh, the king of midday, because the midday mist and the hand of Piero had made it so. My own hand isn’t good for anything but killing a pig, painting a peasant saint for a peasant. A saint with the name of a bear.
He would have preferred Saint Francis, Saint Augustine, or Saint Jerome, of course, or a cleric in a cardinal’s hat. He rose: Bartolomeo needed his help and was calling for him. Bartolomeo lived with them. He was the only apprentice, his only student, all that remained of a studio that had never flourished anyway. The disciple had a student of his own now; but he didn’t want to think about that. He hadn’t taught Bartolomeo very much, although he had taught him all there was to know about the profession, the tricks of the trade and the Florentine theory, how to mix plaster, how to mix ultramarines with lime and to read Alberti; that it isn’t life, but art, that one must search for in painting; that you shouldn’t make backgrounds gold; that scenes of earth should convey the same idea as those of heaven; any number of mathematical trifles. But all that really counted he hadn’t taught him; because what counts isn’t conveyed with words, it is observed and, like the midday sun, wordlessly overwhelms anyone who sees it and remains forever in the body of an apprentice who watches you do nothing for hours until suddenly you rise, extending a theological hand that blesses the wall with a single stroke, and once again sit, meditating, frowning, discontent, perhaps that’s all painting is, the perfection of a gesture and instant Revelation; and discontent that this gesture that has just impeccably brought a face to close — a pause, an élan, a midday cloud over the queens of midday — isn’t accompanied by the trumpets of Judgment, ringing out in a little church in Arezzo, tossing disciples to the ground while you yourself fill to bursting with the dimensions of the universe, eardrums bursting and limbs lifeless, but God in the flesh beating in your heart grown suddenly too small for Him. He hadn’t given Bartolomeo the responsibility of being a master. He had spared him this image from a sweet dream or a nightmare, from a sweet dream and a nightmare that pulls you forward toward weightless things, shows them to you, prohibits you from looking elsewhere; and as for the passing shadow that steals your taste for bread, which perches on your shoulders with the weight of every painter interred since Zeuxis and all their tombstones, so much weight that weightless things seem almost in reach, but they move too quickly, you cant seize them precisely because of this great weight beneath which you labor and which spurs you to seize them; this ghost one drags all the way to death, which during its life dragged along its own, its own that you thus drag part of as well, as Piero dragged Veneziano, had been embarrassed and driven forward by it, this Veneziano that Lorentino hadn’t known but whom Piero venerated and therefore whose carcass and tombstone Lorentino carried along with Piero’s; and who knows what names there were beneath Veneziano, Lorentino didn’t know these names, but he felt the weight of the stones upon which the names were engraved. Bartolomeo wouldn’t have ghosts at his back, not even horsemen saddled with tombstones; he wouldn’t be a good painter. But Lorentino — who bore Piero and all the armies of Constantine, Heraclius, their armor, the miters from the Orient, the cavalry, and even the struts for Milvius Bridge over which they rode — for all that, was Lorentino himself a good painter? My poor Bartolomeo. Lorentino looked at him for a moment; he was nearly a farmer, he too, short with short hands; he came from la Pieve a Quarto, from nowhere, he had more of a taste for Angioletta’s shapely limbs than he did for Golden Proportions, and he was too full of good will. No, Lorentino didn’t have a student. An apprentice, just so, a lieutenant more nimble than he and that’s all, younger and more naive, who prepared his palette and colors as though he were cleaning tripe for blood sausage.
Lorentino had faith in the arts, perhaps even more so than Piero, since Lorentino never really succeeded, and yet made it his life; since he never tried to start over again; since he suffered from not knowing how to start over; but he didn’t suffer when, finished in all their glory, the frescoes hadn’t brought down the walls of a little church in Arezzo, didn’t open a great breach for the cavalry of angels. And Lorentino was perhaps happier than Piero, if one can measure such things. The wind whistles through Arezzo, through the night, striking the walls of the chapel of San Francesco within which paintings are in shadow, invisible at this hour, gray and fallen like ashes, ignorant of everything, of the wall that bears them and the hand that had thought they could bring such walls down. The chapel stands tall in the wind. The farmer still far from his home jumps a stream, the Tiber; he misjudges his leap and lands with a foot in the water, splattering into the blackness, he swears and continues on heavily, unhappy about this world that whistles through the trees. Lorentino, whose hand had long ago touched Piero’s hands and remembers them well, thinks about this farmer, about Bartolomeo the Obscure whom Vasari doesn’t mention, about San Francesco in the blackness.
Diosa, his wife, had been beautiful. She had retained her unwrinkled brow and her big eyes; circles beneath those eyes made one think that the soul of a dreamer remained within her old body. She still knew how to smile, and would until she died, probably, as everyone does. Lorentino kept the rest to himself, her toothlessness, her stoop that drags the spirit down with it, the two sacks hanging from her chest, Eve leaning on dying Adam. Diosa was helping Lorentino; together they were cooking this blood in big pots and were adding what spices they had. He quickly realized that only his hands were fussing over the meal; he raised his head: Diosa was standing at the end of the table, leaning against it, the rest of her body weighed infinitely down but upright, her eyes lost but widening at what she was searching for within, and deeply at that, those things one doesn’t quite find and which depart. Her hands hung empty at her sides, she seemed extremely weary and disenchanted, was searching in vain for what reasonably could make sense of this fatigue, this disenchantment, whether through some payment or some end; but no, Lorentino clearly saw that she wasn’t finding it, her spirit beating behind her eyelids, looking everywhere and bumping into everything, the pleasures in life were behind them now, those she had clung to and those she had ceaselessly postponed: Lorentino had lost the touch he once had with her, she no longer had the body that summoned such a touch, and when she was young she hadn’t had the rich dresses seen in dreams, dresses that display a body that one hides when it grows old, and she wouldn’t have such finery, since Lorentino no longer got commissions; each day that came drained her all the more, for even sleep is weary, it no longer restores; she was looking for something she could put in place of her hopes, put in place of all there is to look forward to, tomorrow, when one is twenty — love, dresses, all the exhilaration of being twenty years old. It was beating its wings, this bird, this soul, it was falling from the nest: they had a pig and so it seems that there is a heaven, but that wasn’t really enough for her either.