The Unknown Masterpiece (4 page)

“Does this young fool belong to you?” Porbus asked the old man.

“Apologies, maître: forgive my boldness,” the youth answered, blushing. “I’m a nobody, an ignorant dauber just arrived in this city, which I know to be the fount of all knowledge.”

“Then get to work!” Porbus ordered, handing him a red crayon and a sheet of paper.

The unknown youth nimbly copied the figure of Mary of Egypt.

“Oh ho!” the old man exclaimed. “Your name?”

The youth wrote “Nicolas Poussin” under his drawing.

“Not bad for a beginner, not bad at all,” observed the singular creature who had been lecturing so wildly. “I see we can talk painting in your presence. I don’t blame you for admiring Porbus’s saint. The world accounts her a masterpiece, and only the initiates of art’s secrets can discover her sins. But since you’re worthy of the lesson, and capable of understanding it, I’m going to show you how little it would take to make this a work...of art! Be all eyes, and give me your undivided attention: such an opportunity to learn something may never come again. Your palette, Porbus!”

Porbus went to get a palette and brushes. The little old man rolled up his sleeves with an abrupt convulsive gesture and thrust his thumb into the splotched, paint-laden palette Porbus handed him; then he virtually snatched a handful of brushes of all sizes, and his pointed beard quivered with the menacing exertions corresponding to the itch of an ardent imagination. Loading his brush, he growled between his teeth, “Paints like this deserve to be tossed out the window, along with the fool who mixed them—nauseating, how crude and false they are! Who could paint with these?” Then, with feverish energy he dipped the tip of his brush in each gob of paint, covering the whole spectrum faster than a church organist runs up and down his keyboard for the Easter
O Filii
.

Porbus and Poussin stood motionless on either side of the canvas, plunged in the most vehement contemplation.

“Look here, young man,” the old creature said without turning around, “you see how with three or four strokes and a little bluish glaze you can make the air circulate around the head of this poor saint who must have been stifling in that dense atmosphere! Look how this drapery flutters—now you can see the breeze is lifting it. Before, it looked like some starched linen pinned in place. Notice how the glossy highlight I’ve just put on her breasts renders the plasticity of a young girl’s skin, and how the mixture of russet and burnt ochre warms the cool gray of that big shadow where the blood had congealed instead of flowing. Young man, young man! What I’m showing you here no master could teach you. Only Mabuse possessed the secret of giving figures life, and Mabuse had only one pupil, who happened to be me. I’ve had none, and I’m an old man. You’re intelligent enough to guess the rest, from what I’ve let you see.”

While he was talking, the strange old man touched every part of the painting with the tip of his brush: here two strokes, here only one, always to such effect that it seemed a new picture, but a picture steeped in light. He worked with a frenzy so impassioned that sweat beaded on his bulging forehead; so rapid were his tiny movements, so impatient and abrupt, that to young Poussin there seemed to be a demon at work in the strange creature’s body, a demon acting through his hands, uncannily moving them against the old man’s will. The preternatural gleam in his eyes, the convulsions which seemed the effect of a certain resistance, made this notion so convincing that the youth’s imagination was utterly subjugated. The old man worked on, saying: “There, look! That’s how you spread the butter, young man! Come, little brushstrokes, warm up these icy tints! Now then, there, like that!” he muttered, creating a sensuous glow in the very places where he had pointed out a certain lifelessness, abolishing discrepancies of feeling with a few patches of color, restoring the unity of tone required for the figure of an ardent Egyptian woman.

“You see, my boy, it’s only the last stroke of the brush that counts. Porbus has laid on a hundred, I’ve made one. No one will thank us for what’s underneath. Remember that!”

Finally this demon stopped, and turning toward Porbus and Poussin who stood speechless with admiration, addressed them: “This is still no match for my Catherine Lescault, but one could put one’s name to such a thing. Yes, I could sign it,” he added, standing up to find a mirror, in which he studied the painting for a moment. “Now, let’s have something to eat,” he said. “The two of you will come along to my place for some smoked ham and a good wine. Well, well! For all the bad times we live in, we can talk painting! We’re well matched there, and here’s a young fellow,” he added, clapping Nicolas Poussin on the shoulder, “who gives every sign of having some talent.”

Then, noticing the youth’s wretched Normandy coat, he drew a leather purse from his belt, rummaged within it, and took out two gold pieces which he handed to Poussin: “I’ll buy your drawing.”

“Take it,” Porbus murmured to Poussin, seeing him start and blush with shame, for the talented youth had a poor man’s pride. “Go on, take it. He has the ransom of two kings in his money bags!”

All three descended the stairs from the studio, conversing about the arts until, near the Pont Saint-Michel, they came to a fine timbered house; its decorations, door knocker, and carved window frames amazed young Poussin. Before he knew it, the youth was in a low-ceilinged room in front of a roaring fire, sitting at a table covered with good things to eat, and, by some unheard-of stroke of luck, in the company of two great artists who were inclined to be friendly.

“Young man,” Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare openmouthed at a picture, “don’t look at that canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.”

It was the
Adam
Mabuse had painted to gain release from the prison his creditors had kept him in so long. And indeed the figure produced such an illusion of reality that Nicolas Poussin began to understand the true meaning of the wild claims that had been made by the old man, who now regarded the picture with a complacent expression, though without enthusiasm, as if to say: “I’ve done better!”

“There’s life in it,” he said. “My poor master outdid himself there, but the background still lacks a certain degree of truth. The man’s alive all right, he’s standing up and about to walk toward us, but the sky, the wind, the air we see and feel and breathe aren’t there. In fact, the man’s the only thing in the picture, and all he is is a man. Now the one man who came straight from the hands of God should have something divine about him, and that’s what’s missing. Mabuse used to be quite cross with himself about it, when he wasn’t drunk.”

Poussin glanced back and forth between the old man and Porbus with anxious curiosity. He moved closer to Porbus as if to ask the old man’s name; but the painter put a finger to his lips with a mysterious expression, and the youth, though fascinated, held his tongue, hoping that sooner or later some chance word would allow him to guess the name of their host, whose wealth and talents were sufficiently evidenced by the respect Porbus showed him and by the wonders amassed in that room.

Catching sight of a magnificent portrait of a woman set off by the dark oak paneling, Poussin exclaimed, “What a splendid Giorgione!”

“No,” the old man replied. “What you see there is one of my first daubs!”

“Saints preserve us!” Poussin cried naïvely. “I must be in the house of the god of painting!”

The old man smiled like someone long familiar with such praise.

“Maître Frenhofer!” said Porbus. “Couldn’t you manage to order a little of your good Rhenish wine for me?”

“Two casks,” the old man replied. “One to pay for this morning’s pleasure of seeing your lovely sinner, and the other as a gift of friendship.”

“Oh, if I weren’t still ailing,” Porbus continued, “and you would allow me a glimpse of your mistress, I think I could do a picture with life-size figures—something high, wide, and with real depth to it, too.”

“Show you my work!” the old man exclaimed, suddenly upset. “No, no, it must still be brought to perfection. Yesterday, toward evening, I thought I was done. Her eyes seemed moist to me, her flesh was alive, the locks of her hair stirred...She breathed! Though I thought I’d learned how to render nature’s depth and solidity on a flat canvas, this morning, by daylight, I discovered my mistake. Ah! To achieve this glorious result, I’ve studied all the great colorists. Layer by layer I’ve analyzed and dissected the paintings of Titian, and like that master of light, I’ve laid in my figure in high colors with a soft, heavily loaded brush, for shadow is no more than an accident—remember that, my boy. Then I went back over my work and by using halftones and glazes, which I made less and less transparent, I managed to create the strongest shadows and even the deepest blacks—for most painters’ shadows are of a different nature from their lighter tones; they’re wood or bronze, whatever you like, anything except flesh in shadow. You feel that if the figure were to change position, the shadowed parts would never brighten, never become luminous...I’ve avoided this defect where so many of the most illustrious artists have failed: in my pictures the whites are still white within the opacity of even the deepest shadows! Unlike that pack of dabblers who suppose they’re drawing correctly because their work is so painstakingly sleek, I never surround my figures with the sort of dry outlines that emphasize every little anatomical detail—the human body isn’t bounded by lines! In this regard, sculptors come closer to the truth than we painters ever can. Nature consists of a series of shapes that melt into one another. Strictly speaking, there’s no such thing as drawing! Don’t laugh, young man! Strange as it sounds, you’ll understand the truth of this some day. Line is the means by which man accounts for the effect of light on objects, but in nature there are no lines—in nature everything is continuous and whole. It’s by modeling that we draw, by which I mean that once we detach things from the medium in which they exist, only the distribution of light gives the body its appearance! Hence I never fix an outline; I spread a cloud of warm blond halftones over the contours—you can never put your finger right where the contours blend into the backgrounds. At close range, such labors look blurred and seem to lack precision, but at two paces everything congeals, solidifies, stands out; the body turns, the forms project, you feel the air circulating around them. Yet I’m still not satisfied—I have doubts. Perhaps it’s wrong to draw a single line: Wouldn’t it be better to deal with a figure from the center, concentrating first on the projecting parts which take the light most readily, then proceeding to the darker portions? Isn’t that the method of the sun, the divine painter of the universe? Oh nature, nature! Who has ever plumbed your secrets? There’s no escaping it; too much knowledge, like too much ignorance, leads to a negation. My work is ...my doubt!”

The old man paused, then continued: “It’s ten years now, young man, that I’ve been struggling with this problem. But what are ten short years when you’re contending with nature? How long did Lord Pygmalion take to create the only statue that ever walked!”

The old man sank into a profound reverie, his eyes fixed and his fingers toying mechanically with his knife.

“Now he’s in conversation with his
genius
,” Porbus whispered.

At this word, Nicolas Poussin was seized by an inexplicable curiosity—an artist’s curiosity. This old man with his blank stare, fixed and comatose, had become more than human in the youth’s eyes: a kind of fantastic genie inhabiting an unknown sphere, rousing a thousand vague ideas in his soul. The moral phenomenon of such fascination can no more be defined than we can translate into words the emotion produced by a song reminding an exile of his homeland. The scorn the old man affected for the noble endeavors of art, his wealth, his odd manners, Porbus’s deference toward him, his supreme work of art kept secret for so long—a work of patience, doubtless of genius, judging by the head of the Virgin which young Poussin had so candidly admired and which, still beautiful even beside Mabuse’s
Adam
, evidenced the imperial mastery of one of the princes of art: everything about this old man transcended the limits of human nature. What Nicolas Poussin’s fervent imagination could apprehend, what now became quite clear to him from his intercourse with this supernatural being, was a consummate image of the artist’s nature, that wild nature to which so many powers are entrusted, and which all too often abuses them, leading cold reason, the bourgeois public, and even some connoisseurs down a myriad barren paths, precisely where this capricious white-winged sprite discovers castles, epics, works of art! A nature sometimes mocking, sometimes kind, at once fertile and desolate! So for the enthusiastic Poussin, this old man had become, by a sudden transfiguration, Art itself, art with all its secrets, its passions, its reveries.

“Yes, my dear Porbus,” Frenhofer continued, “till now, what I’ve failed to find is a flawless woman, a body whose contours are perfectly beautiful, and whose complexion—But where is she in the flesh?” he interrupted himself. “That matchless Venus of the ancients, so often sought and never found except in scattered elements, some fragmentary beauties here, some there! Oh! I would give all I possess if just once, for a single moment, I could gaze upon that complete, that divine nature; if I could meet that ideal heavenly beauty, I would search for her in limbo itself! Like Orpheus, I would descend into the Hades of art to bring her back to life!”

“We might as well leave now,” Porbus murmured to Poussin. “He doesn’t hear us anymore, or see us either!”

“Let’s go up to his studio,” the dazzled youth suggested.

“Oh, the old monkey has made sure to keep it locked away from the likes of you and me. His treasures are too well protected for us to get at them. I didn’t wait for your suggestion and your imagination to lay siege to that mystery...”

“Then there is a mystery?”

“Yes,” Porbus replied. “Old Frenhofer is the only pupil Mabuse would take on. Becoming his friend, his savior, his father, Frenhofer sacrificed the greater part of his treasures to satisfy Mabuse’s passions; in exchange, Mabuse bequeathed him the secret of relief in painting, the power to give his figures an extraordinary life, that natural bloom which is our eternal despair but the technique of which he possessed so securely that one day, having drunk up the money for the brocaded damask he was to wear at the ceremonial reception of Charles V, he accompanied his patron wearing paper garments painted to look like damask. The special luster of the material Mabuse was wearing amazed the Emperor, who, in attempting to compliment the old drunkard’s companion, discovered the deception. Frenhofer’s a man in love with our art, a man who sees higher and farther than other painters. He’s meditated on the nature of color, on the absolute truth of line, but by dint of so much research, he has come to doubt the very object of his investigations. In moments of despair, he claims that drawing doesn’t exist and that lines are only good for rendering geometrical figures, which is far from the truth, since with line and with black, which is not a color, we can create a human figure. There’s your proof that our art is like nature itself, composed of an infinity of elements: drawing accounts for the skeleton, color supplies life, but life without a skeleton is even more deficient than a skeleton without life. Lastly, there’s something even truer than all this, which is that practice and observation are everything to a painter; so that if reasoning and poetry argue with our brushes, we wind up in doubt, like our old man here, who’s as much a lunatic as he is a painter—a sublime painter who had the misfortune to be born into wealth, which has allowed him to wander far and wide. Don’t do that to yourself! Work while you can! A painter should philosophize only with a brush in his hand.”