The food comes. Tiziana eats little of hers. She cannot eat. Her mouth is still full of that English stodge. Jim remonstrates with her. It’s a waste to leave so much food. She should have ordered half a portion. Now he’ll have to pay for a whole plate of wasted food. Tiziana looks at him with narrowed eyes. Scoteesh, she says disgustedly.
I try to console Tiziana with my Italian. I say that I too feel humbled, feel childlike and impotent. It is hard to feel so primitive, so stupid. At this Tiziana looks exultant. Yes, she says, Italian is very sophisticated. It is the most sophisticated language in the world. It is very complicated and beautiful. English is not complicated. That is why it is difficult for an Italian to express herself in English. An English person could never learn all the words there are in Italian. Look at Jim, she says. He has lived here for twelve years and his Italian is una merda. But the English expect everyone to use their language. They will never understand the intricate mysteries of other tongues. They will never surrender themselves to the beauty of what is foreign to them. Instead they have to make an empire. Instead we all have to choke on English stodge.
The spaghetti alle vongole is so delicious that it has a kind of holiness about it. Trained as we now are on sheep’s milk cheese and white Italian flour, purged of our promiscuous tastes, we are capable of understanding it. It is our prize, our reward, this understanding. A pile of empty clamshells remains on my plate like the integuments of a poem whose meaning I have finally teased out. Afterward Jim says he’s going home to watch the French Open. Tiziana will not come with him. She declares her intention of going to look up an old friend in Sansepolcro. She is petulant and overwrought. In the car park Jim says goodbye to her. He is grim around the mouth. But a few days later we meet them in Gianfranco’s and they seem excited, almost delirious. Tiziana is dolled up in a tiny skirt and high-heeled shoes. She flashes her eyes exultingly as Jim drags her up and down the aisles by her hand. Jim has a kind of charged resignation about him. They are buying steaks. Gianfranco has fantastic steaks, Jim says, with his best Dundee certitude. They’re top-quality steaks, he repeats, so hang the expense. Not Scoteesh, says Tiziana, winking her fronded eye. She giggles as Jim drags her away again by the hand. We continue our slow progress along the aisles, patiently piecing together our diet as we piece together our Italian sentences, while Gianfranco waits behind his counter to pat the children on their heads and ask us how we are enjoying our long vacanza.
THE VEILED LADY
Vasari has the following to say about Raphael Sanzio, born in Urbino in 1483:
With wonderful indulgence and generosity heaven sometimes showers upon a single person from its rich and inexhaustible treasures all the favours and precious gifts that are usually shared, over the years, among a great many people. This was clearly the case with Raphael Sanzio of Urbino… Nature sent Raphael into the world after it had been vanquished by the art of Michelangelo and was ready, through Raphael, to be vanquished by character as well. Indeed, until Raphael most artists had in their temperament a touch of uncouthness and even madness that made them outlandish and eccentric; the dark shadows of vice were often more evident in their lives than the shining light of the virtues that can make men immortal.
Raphael was the only child of a painter, Giovanni Santi, a man whose own rough upbringing had both lamed his talents and refined his humanity. Perhaps this is what Vasari means when he describes the meting out of heaven’s gifts. Must the need to live and the need to create be fed from the same allotted share? Thus the artist is uncouth, or mad; and the man who chooses to be good will rarely have enough left over to fund his visions, unless he had the luck to enter this world undamaged. This was Raphael’s position. Vasari notes that Giovanni refused to send his baby son out to be wet-nursed. Instead Raphael spent his infancy and childhood at home, with his parents. Giovanni taught him how to paint, and when he had ascertained the extent of his son’s talents he set out to find a great artist to whom he could apprentice him.
The preeminent painter of that period was reputed to be Perugino, and so it was to Perugia that Giovanni took himself, to cultivate the friendship of the man whose powerful brand of parochialism is so aptly expressed in the name by which he became known. Perugino was an egotist-innovator of the Cimabue type; and just as Cimabue’s fame was eclipsed by that of his pupil, Giotto, so Perugino’s art was fated to become a pleasant suburb of Raphael’s. Shortly after brokering the apprenticeship of his eleven-year-old son, Giovanni died. Raphael left Urbino and the world of his childhood, and went to Perugia to embark on a second childhood with a second father, whose self-portrait in Perugia’s chamber of commerce bears the legend: Behold Perugino, the greatest painter Italy has ever known.
The sweetness of Raphael’s disposition is often mentioned by art critics. It is offered as the explanation for many things: his popularity with influential patrons, his humility, the timbre of the paintings themselves, with their devotional secularism, their innocent-seeming love. Vasari, with his trademark enthusiasm, believed that Raphael’s gifts of “the finest qualities of mind accompanied by grace, industry, looks, modesty and excellence of character” raised him above the sphere of men and into that of “mortal gods… who leave on earth an honoured name in the annals of fame [and] may also hope to enjoy in heaven a just reward for their work and talent.”
It is a little curious, this feting of the virtuous artist. Like Mozart’s, Raphael’s art resolves itself in the childlike love of life: this is the harmonic home from which the world is investigated and to which the art is always striving to return. There are no scars in Raphael’s art. There is none of the phallic aggression of Michelangelo, the worldliness of Titian, the tragic knowledge of Tintoretto. In short, there is no dimension of experience: everything is seen as if for the first time, is lived before our eyes, and sweetly remarked on. How relieving, to arrive at art by the route of pure sensibility! How pleasant, to look at Raphael’s fond Madonnas and playful Christs and see only happy recollection there, not doomed foreknowledge!
When Raphael went to live with Perugino, his work consisted of filling in parts of Perugino’s large frescoes on the master’s behalf. Raphael was adept at this: indeed, he soon became better at painting Peruginos than Perugino himself. Raphael made copies of his master’s work that could not be told apart from the originals. And, as Vasari puts it, “it was also impossible to distinguish clearly between Raphael’s own original works and Perugino’s.” Raphael, it seems, was a little too sweet-natured. Where was his artist’s ego, his vanity? Was he so well brought-up, so couth, that he broke his own chip of genius in two and shared it? One day Perugino went off to Florence on business and Raphael went to visit Città di Castello with some friends. While he was there he did one or two paintings in local churches, in his Perugino style. They would certainly have been mistaken for the real thing had he not signed them himself: as it was, the imitations brought Raphael immediate fame. He was invited to Siena to do some decorations in the library, and while he was there he heard a group of painters discussing the current rivalry between Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, and the great works with which they were attempting to outdo one another in Florence. Raphael immediately stopped what he was doing and went to Florence. The sight of Leonardo’s and Michelangelo’s paintings woke him from his religion of Perugino. Yet how would this awakening express itself? Would he merely subsume himself in one artist after another? And their paintings were so anatomical, so mortal, so charged with emotion: how could Raphael, the obedient child, the ventriloquist, compete with these phallic male giants?