When Colonel Osmotherley had quieted the uproar he explained that the Commission had no instructions to act as Baudoin suggested, and it would take a long time to get them, if that were possible. Could the experts not reach some conclusion based simply on what they saw? Giving every consideration to their widely acknowledged ability to see beyond what was given to lesser people, added the Colonel, who had a turn for diplomacy.
It was at this point that Francis, who had been suffering for two days and a half the torments of an inflamed conscience, disputing with a mischievous inclination to let the experts go on and commit themselves to positions from which they could not retreat, felt that he should rise to his feet and make a speech in the manner of the late Letztpfennig: “Gentlemen, I cannot tell a lie. I did it with my little paintbox.” And then, what? Not hang himself, certainly, with his hat and overshoes on, as poor Letztpfennig had ridiculously done. But what a sea of explanations, of excuses or denials would follow any such declaration! The only person who could corroborate anything he said was Saraceni, and steadfast as the Meister could be in some things, he might prove altogether too supple in such a matter as this.
He had underestimated Saraceni, who now rose to his feet. This was in itself significant, for the experts usually spoke seated.
“Mr. Chairman; Esteemed Colleagues,” he began with heavy formality; “please permit me to point out that our attempts to explain the curious nature of this picture in terms of Christian iconography are bound to fail, because it is not solely—perhaps not even primarily—a Christian picture. Of course, it demands to be called The Marriage at Cana because of the words issuing from the mouth of that curious floating figure—Thou hast kept the good wine until now. In the Scripture story it is the so-called ‘governor of the feast’ who says that; here it is this mysterious figure who seems to be addressing the parents—the Knight and his Lady in the right-hand panel. This strange figure holds a unifying crown over the heads of Bride and Groom. Who are they? You will not have missed that they look more like brother and sister than a wedded pair. These facial resemblances are surely crucial to an interpretation of the picture? Look at the face of Christ. Is he not kin to the Bride and Groom? Look at the Knight and his Lady in the right-hand wing; are they not plainly the parents of both the married ones? Look at the old artist; a fat, elderly version of the same face. We cannot pretend that these resemblances come about because the artist can only draw one face; the man with the whip, the astrologer, the dwarf, the old woman in the curious cap, the Judas, all show how adept he was at portraiture and revelation of character. No, no, gentlemen; there is only one way to explain this picture, and I suggest, humbly, that I know what it is.
“Consider where it comes from. You don’t know? Of course not, because it has been hidden. But I know. It comes from Schloss Düsterstein, where, as you do know, there is an extraordinary collection of masterworks (or was, until General Göring took the best of them under his protection) upon which I was engaged for some years in repair and restoration work, before the war. But this picture was not among those that were hung. These panels were under wraps in a storage room very near the Chapel, where they had served as the altar-piece until the Chapel was wholly transformed in the Baroque taste by Johann Lys at some time during the first quarter of the seventeenth century. The old altar-piece was replaced by one painted by Lys, or one of his pupils, an inoffensive Madonna and Child with saints, which may still be seen. The old altar-piece had by that time become disagreeable to the taste of the Ingelheim family.
“Why? The picture we see here had grown out of fashion, and it was also, to a strict Christian taste, heretical. Look at it: this is a picture with strong alchemical suggestions. Of course, alchemy and Christianity were never incompatible, but to seventeenth-century theological orthodoxy, which was that of the Counter-Reformation, it was too near a rival to the true Faith.
“I don’t know what you may know of alchemy, and you must forgive me if I seem to tell you what is already clear in your minds. But this is plainly a depiction, given a Christian gloss, of what was called The Chymical Wedding. The alchemical uniting of the elements of the soul, that is to say. Look at it: the Bride and Groom look like brother and sister because they are the male and female elements of a single soul, which it was one of the higher aims of alchemy to unite. I won’t harass you with alchemical theory, but that unity—that wedding—was not achieved in youth or with ease, and so the Groom, at least, is not a man in his first youth. That such a unity is brought about by the intervention of the highest and purest element in the soul—which is, of course, what Christ has long been, and was to the Middle Ages, and is still in a somewhat altered but not destructively altered sense—is plain enough. Here we see Christ as a beneficent power at the Wedding. But in this picture it is the Holy Mother—what unorthodox but not heretical thinkers sometimes call Mother Nature—who blesses the Marriage of the Soul, the achievement of spiritual union. Am I making myself clear?”
“Clear so far as you go, Maestro,” said Professor Nightingale. “But who are these other figures? That creature in the sky, for instance; a very nasty-looking piece of work, like a pinhead in a circus. Who may he be?”
“I cannot tell you, though of course we all know that in Gothic and late-Gothic art—there are lingering elements of Gothicism in this picture—such an angelic figure often represented a relative—big brother, it might be—who had died before The Chymical Wedding was achieved, but whose memory or spiritual influence might have been helpful in bringing it about.”
“All very fine, but I don’t trust the craquelure,” said Professor Baudoin.
“Oh for God’s sake forget the craquelure,” said John Frewen.
“With your permission,” said Baudoin, “I shall not forget the craquelure, and I would thank you, sir, not to snarl at me.”
“I do well to snarl,” said Frewen, who was a Yorkshireman and hot-tempered. “Do you suppose anybody would trouble to fake such a farrago of forgotten rubbish as this? Alchemy! What’s alchemy?”
It was the irrepressible Aylwin Ross who spoke.
“No, Mr. Ross, not that!” said Saraceni. “Some alchemists were cheats, of course, as some priests of all faiths are cheats. But others were truly sincere seekers after enlightenment, and are we who have suffered so much during the past five years under the evil alchemy of science to jeer at any sincere belief of the past, whose style of thought and use of words has grown rusty?”
“Mr. Ross, I should remind you that your position here does not extend to expressing opinions,” said Colonel Osmotherley.
“I am very sorry,” said Ross. “Just a few words from Ben Jonson, that slipped out.”
“Ben Jonson was a great cynic, and a great cynic is a great fool,” said Saraceni, with unwonted severity. “But, gentlemen, I do not pretend to explain all the elements in this picture. That would give an iconographer work for many days. I merely suggest that we could be looking here at a picture prepared to the taste of Graf Meinhard, who, four and a half centuries ago, was reputed to be an alchemist himself—a friend and patron of Paracelsus—and to do things at Düsterstein in what was the most advanced science of his time. His chapel was not, after all, a public place of worship. May he not have pleased himself in this way?”
The experts, credulous perhaps in a matter not within the range of their own knowledge, were inclined to agree that this could have been so. Their discussion was long and cloudy. When he thought it had gone on long enough, Saraceni summed it up.
“Might I suggest, Mr. Chairman and Esteemed Colleagues, that we agree that these panels, which certainly came from Düsterstein, be returned to the great collection there, and that we attribute this picture, which we are all agreed is a splendid previously unknown work of art, and a great curiosity as well, to The Alchemical Master, whose name, alas, we cannot determine more exactly?”