“You have done well, Corniche, and you have done it much quicker than I thought you would. The explosion of Letztpfennig has given you a name—a modest name, but nevertheless a name. Still, before you are ready to appear before the world as amico di Saraceni instead of the lesser alunno di Saraceni there is an important test I want you to accept now. Quite simply it is this: can you paint as well as Letztpfennig? He was a master, you know, in this lesser realm of art. I can say it, now that you have disposed of him. I am not talking of course of faking, for that is contemptible, but I mean the ability to work truly in the technique and also in the spirit of the past. Unless you can satisfy me of that I shall not feel absolutely certain about you. Drollig Hansel was good. What you have done during the past year is good. But when you are not under my eye and subject to my advice and relentless criticism—I know I’m a bastard, but all great teachers must be so—can you really bring it off? So: while I am away I want you to paint an original picture on a large scale—not just big, but big in conception—and I want you to do it not in imitation of anyone, but as you would paint yourself if you were living in the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Find your subject. Grind your colours. I have found a groundwork for you.
“Look here; it is, as you see, a triptych, an altar-piece of fair size in three panels that hung in the chapel here before it was done over in the great Baroque style. It is a wreck, of course. It has been standing for at least two hundred years in one of the innumerable service corridors of this castle from which we have recovered so many discarded paintings, but it was never very good and now it is rubbish. Clean it, right down to the wood, and go to work. I am expecting something that will tell me just how good you are, when you work independently. You will have plenty of time. I shall return in the spring, or perhaps a little later. But I shall certainly return.”
So, shortly before Christmas of 1938, Francis found himself the virtual master of Düsterstein. The family rooms, as well as the great rooms of state, were transformed by dust-sheets and muslin wraps for the chandeliers into the habitations of ghosts. One small room was left for his use, and there he sat and ate his meals when he was not busy in the shell-grotto. He took walks in the grounds, squelching over mossy paths under weeping trees. Another man might have found it melancholy, but Francis welcomed the solitude and the dimness, for he was turned in upon himself and wanted no distraction, no invitation to play. He was seeking his picture.
The philosophy of Saraceni, as distinguished from the avarice and opportunism of Saraceni, was not something he had learned as Amalie learned her lessons. He had absorbed it, and ingested it, and had made it part of his own wholeness. What was so plainly unworthy in the Meister he regarded with amusement; he was not such a fool as to suppose that great men do not have their foibles, and that such flaws might not be great ones. He had consumed the wheat and discarded the chaff, and the wheat was now bone of his bone. It was his belief, not his lesson.
What did he now believe, at the end of a toilsome and sometimes humiliating apprenticeship? That a great picture must have its foundation in a sustaining myth, which could only be expressed through painting by an artist with an intense vocation. He had learned to accept and cherish his vocation, which was none the less real because it had been reached by such a crooked path. He had worked in the shell-grotto as a man under orders, but now he was to work under no orders but his own, even though he must express himself in a bygone mode of painting. But what was his picture, the masterpiece which would conclude his apprenticeship, to be?
Rooted in a myth, but what myth? In the tangle of mythology, the cosmic bedroom farce and vulgar family wrangles of the gods of Olympus or their diminished effigies as conceived by the Romans? Never! In the finer myth of the Christian world, as seen in a thousand forms in the Age of Faith? Catholicism he certainly possessed, but it was still the sweet Catholicism of Mary-Ben rather than that of the rigorous Church Fathers. In the myth of the greatness of Man, as the Renaissance had asserted, or the myth of Man Diminished and Enchained as it appeared to the Age of Reason? What about Romanticism, the myth of the Inner Man sharply declining to the myth of Egotism? There was even the nineteenth-century myth of Materialism, the exaltation of the World of Things, which had evoked so many great pictures from the Impressionists. But these must be rejected at once, even if they had strongly attracted him (which they did not), because his orders—and he was still under orders—were to paint a picture in the manner of the Old Masters, a picture that would contain some technical instruction even for the ingenious Letztpfennig.
Alone, and only vaguely aware of the Europe that was boiling up toward a war of hitherto unexampled horror almost on his doorstep, Francis found his answer, and it was the only possible, the inescapable answer. He would paint the myth of Francis Cornish.
But how? He was not free to work as a painter might who was not seeking to advance from alunno to amico in the fierce school of Saraceni. He could not descend, so far as his talent allowed, into the Realm of the Mothers and return with a picture that might evade the understanding of even the most intuitive and sympathetic of observers, but that would perhaps explain itself after twenty years as a prophecy, or a cry of despair. He must have a subject that could be identified as the subjects of the Old Masters are identified, however much these say that is not contained in the obvious subject.
He made and destroyed innumerable sketches, but even as he rejected them he felt that he was moving nearer to his goal. At last a subject began to assert itself, and then to show that it was inescapable, a subject that might be invited to body forth the myth of Francis Cornish. It was at this point that he began to make the preparatory studies and drawings in the old manner, on prepared paper with a silver-point; studies which might, at some distant time, puzzle the experts. His theme, his subject, his myth, was to be contained in a triptych of The Marriage at Cana.
It had not been one of the most popular themes of the masters who painted before the High Renaissance, the masters who painted in the mode that preceded the lush depictions of that wedding feast—so improbable in terms of the biblical story—which were, in fact, glorifications of the splendours and luxuries of this world. Francis must work in terms of the austere but not starveling manner of the sunset of the Gothic world. And as he made his drawings he found that this was a manner that would serve him very well; the myth of Francis Cornish was not a Renaissance myth, or a myth of Reason or of self-delighted egotism, or the myth of the World of Things. If he could not speak in the voice of his century he would speak in the final accents of the Gothic voice. And so he worked, not furiously but with concentration and devotion, and when at last his preliminary cartoons were done, and the ruinous old picture on the triptych was scoured and scraped off, and his colours were chosen and prepared down to the last grinding of the lapis lazuli that lay so readily at hand, he began to paint.