Titian (3 page)

When tourists enthuse about the living heritage of ancient Greece, it makes me a little sick. It's too easy, too obvious. And it reminds one painfully of the political nullity into
which Greek civilisation has fallen. But one thing has survived unquestionably, and that's the national proclivity for
comment
. To relive happenings, to make a synthesis of them, and to draw conclusions and lessons (which are usually forgotten the next day). Greek philosophy, in its ancient sense and in its contemporary, popular sense, comes exactly from this vision of the Chorus: to tell, to take account of the consequences, to measure the importance.

Today I passed by Akadimias Street again, I can't avoid it. A smaller crowd of men was still there, doing the same thing. Meanwhile women had clearly come yesterday afternoon, when the men were taking their siesta, for flowers had been placed all along the fatal barrier.

I think I'll never see him again in the form of an old man. In Venice, he was simply wearing one of his disguises. Just as Zeus transformed himself into a rain of gold to take Danaë, the old man continually transforms himself, according to the circumstances, the place, the desire.

If he shows himself to me here, it is in the rough walls darkened by the filthy air of Athens; or in the soil – a dry earth slightly dampened by the rain – or in a cloud in the sky, cottony, curdled, grey; or in the noise of a motorbike, farting, coughing, spitting.

Each time, I know it's him, for he tells me the same thing in the same voice. ‘Scratch, scratch,' he says. ‘Scratch everything you can scratch!' And the word boils in the depths of his throat.

I heard this voice nearly every day during the six months I was confined to bed in Gyzi. On the wall beside the bed, there was a large poster of his painting of Danaë. During the interminable hours lying there, I could either look through my window, which gave on to a second window, beyond which another life was being lived, or I could look at the telly (beyond which there was the pretence of other lives being lived), or I could look at his painting: a woman, nude, always the same, lying on a sheet with cushions around her.

A woman painted as from the inside and only clothed in her skin afterwards. The opposite of what Goya did when he undressed the Maja. The old man first put himself inside – or behind – the canvas, and from there he burrowed his way towards the visible surface of the body. In the case of both painters, it is the breasts which are revealing. In the Titian, you have to imagine being inside the body to feel the fullness of her right breast: its imperceptible shadow is evoked so minimally that you feel nothing, if you don't feel it from the inside. Yet this makes it all the more real, all the more quivering, all the more desirable.

Whereas in the Goya, the protuberance, the swelling, is too clear, too held up by a corsage which has disappeared, too visible, and therefore, oddly, not carnal. No?

The old man was avid. For cash, for women, for power, for more years to live. He was jealous of God. Angry. So he started to imitate him. He didn't only reproduce, like so many other painters, the appearance of things created by God, but he started to give these things, as God had done, a skin,
a hide of fur, hair, fat, an epidermis, folds, wrinkles. (Or he did the opposite, he took off the covering of flesh, as in the
Flaying of Marsyas;
he cut it open to demonstrate the skill of his own flesh-art.)

No other artist gets so close to making us believe in the palpitating life of what he paints. And he gets there not only by copying nature, but equally by knowing how to turn the spectator's brain. He knows where
we
place the life, the warmth, the tenderness in his painted bodies.

Titian worked like Shakespeare. You have the impression, before their works, that an arm or a word can say everything, because, like magicians, they knew exactly where the human spirit loves to drown itself. In a way, they are greater than God, for they know everything about their fellow men and women! Hence their vengeance.

I imagine a picture he might have painted, as you once imagined a non-existent Frans Hals. It would show Eve being created from Adam's rib. Flesh coming out of flesh. God placing his hands on matter and bringing another life to life. The setting would be a forest where there are tree-trunks and a lot of moss. Two inert, naked forms in the mud, whose substance seems to be alive. Finally, the act of painting, continually repeated like fornication, becomes a body. Not a body like Pygmalion's, whose body is washed marble. Here the body can sometimes be obscene.

Eve born of Adam as the universe was born of God, as painting
is born of Titian, as life can be born of art, as I was born of you, as Chloé was born of me.

So I have to tell you I see him everywhere, the old man, I see him even in your granddaughter, who is more beautiful than light, sweeter than fire, gentler than water. Already she has won over our death …

Love, Katya

HAUTE SAVOIE

Darling Kut
,

I've been reading Erwin Panofsky's book on the old man. Apart from Panofsky's erudition, he had a love for what men left behind as signs of their thoughts and feelings – like that of an astronomer for the stars. So reading him, you enter a kind of stellar peace.

And two notions struck me. One about perception in general and the other about the old man and his tricks.

Perception never only takes in a single fact or a single series of facts. It's always receiving messages from a circuit or a whole field of energy. It picks up waves rather than particles. This is particularly pronounced when it concerns the perception of a work of art – which is already such a nexus of energy. But it's true of all perception. Look at an animal listening or smelling. Its attention never has a
single
focus but
scans
a
whole area. Why do I say this? Perhaps it explains the ‘coincidence' of even simple perceptions.

For instance, I said the old man's hands made me think of a money-lender. I learn from Panofsky that Jacopo Bassano painted a portrait of Titian as the money-lender in his
Purification of the Temple
!

For instance, you write: ‘I imagine a picture he might have painted. It would show Eve being created from Adam's rib. Flesh coming out of flesh. God placing his hands on matter and bringing another life to life.' And Panofsky quotes Baschini, who wrote about the old man in Venice in 1600, saying that when painting he used his figures ‘like God when he created man'.

For instance – in relation to what the old man told you about fur – it seems that Titian's personal seal (trademark) showed a she-bear licking her cub into shape! And his motto was
Natura potentior ars
(art is more powerful than nature).

I was in Vienna recently – a city I don't like, but in which nevertheless I feel at home. The capital of reincarnations! Whilst there I went again – of course! – to look at his
Nymph and Shepherd
. And for the hundredth time, I watched the hand caressing the nymph's right arm. Caressing is not the right word. Scratching is better, like he told you. Lightly, lightly scratching. And for the hundredth time, I said to myself: It
isn't
her own hand. Its anatomical position, its gesture and the fact that it appears to have a cuff,
make it impossible. It's a roving hand which belongs to nobody.

Perhaps it was going to be her hand, and the old man painted it differently, making it less and less her hand. If so, he did it for a reason – it was not clumsiness or shortsightedness. The touching of this hand is the centre of the whole painting. It is what the painting
came
to be about.

An act which is a gesture of calling, of farewell, of greeting? Perhaps all three. In any case, it's an act that came from the old man, not from the nymph.

In
Walk Me Home
, the unfinished film which Nella and Tim Neat and I made, William, at the end, gets out of bed, dresses, adjusts his tie in the hotel mirror, and, before leaving for good, goes and stands by the bed where Cloud is still sleeping. He is old, and Cloud is a much younger woman. He knows he has to go. In five minutes (this he doesn't know), he'll be dead. He puts out his hand to touch Cloud for the last time. As you know, I played the role of William, and at this moment the gesture I made (I realise now, but I wasn't thinking of it then) was
exactly
the gesture of the hand in the Vienna painting.

I see you in your snake-dress.

With all my love for Chloé and Oresters and Snake, John

ATHENS

John
,

So, you've got it into your head to see me as (to turn me into?) a serpent. As you wish it, I'm willing. I can be a serpent or something else. I'll play, imitate, and make believe. Like in the field – remember? – when I was a kid, and we stopped to picnic on our Sunday walks in the Jura. And I would mimic for you whoever or whatever I thought might amuse you.

But it is best with animals. We can identify with them so deeply. They are just close enough and just far enough away for it to be easy. They are the
other
, a little more the
other
than another person. And so they're easier to understand; they demand imagination, aim, identification, whereas people demand intelligence, mental calculation, abstractions. And the meaner the human world becomes – the more people slip into egoism and the greed of despair – the more the animals align themselves with us, becoming brothers, closer than our human brothers. In fact, when this happens, even nature, even the inorganic, offers a shelter to our imaginations. Nature comes closer, just as those who are called the closest become more distant.

Maybe this is somewhat comparable to why you felt at home in Vienna, the capital of reincarnations, as you call it. No towns are more densely populated with the relics of other lives than the cities of art – Venice, Florence – even New York. So in a way, Vienna has an ‘animal-effect'. The city encourages inward journeys, projections, flights of imagination.

Serpents! There's a man painted by Titian who to me is an animal: something between a snake and a lamb. He's in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, and some people attribute his portrait to Giorgione. (You?) The sweetness of the picture is indeed Giorgionesque, but its animal side and its cunning make me think of Titian.

Look at his hand – it's made of the same stuff as the hide on his back. Look at the curls near his ears, and you think of cattle.

His face, of course, belongs to the family of men painted by Titian. You remember I had the same feelings of a blood likeness shared by the women Titian painted. (Magdelenes, Venuses, Nymphs, Girls …) For some reason he was haunted by an archetypal man and woman, an original Adam and Eve from his own Creation!

The man in Munich holds the same glove in his hand as the
Man with a Glove
in the Louvre. But tell me, what is that snake-hat in the background? Isn't it a Serpent?

In the
Nymph and Shepherd
, the nymph is lying on a fur – just as I dreamed of doing, just as I still dream of doing! Not only on a fur: on a whole animal specially stripped for me, Katya, on a just-skinned Marsyas.

Inside herself, she then becomes an animal, rejoins nature and is welcome there. Maybe William's hand belongs to the animal, to nature, to Creation?

Anyway, I envy her, how I envy her! Lying half turned away, facing the other world – the world of the peach stone. There for ever on a canvas, at peace, still, placid in the music of nothing. Already immortal without even having had to live! Existing to be seen, yes, but only as her Creator decides – exhibited and protected at the same time! Focus of the craziest phantasms and interpretations, lending herself to other minds yet, at the same time, unalterable, immutable.

Supposing when we are dead we are able to reincarnate in paintings or music, and not only in other human beings. Wouldn't it be better? Come to think of it, you don't have to die to do this. It's enough to make the effort now of joining the universe of objects! And what could be more peaceful?

It seems that on Mount Athos, where no woman is allowed to set foot, there's an inscription on one of the monasteries:

‘If you die before dying, you do not die at the moment of death.'

Take care. All my love, Kut

PARIS

Kut
,

With the rendezvous which you suggest – half turned away, resting on your arm, facing another world (the world of the peach stones), lying on Marsyas, peaceful, still, without a sound in the music of nothing, a rendezvous on the far side of waking up, with this rendezvous you'd seduce any man! And maybe that's why it's so much a painting about seduction. Not the shepherd seducing the nymph, or the nymph the shepherd. It's the two of them with the old man seducing anyone who passes. Seducing with the promise of seduction.

Today I'm sending you two postcards which are also about seduction. The portrait of the young Isabella d'Este. The old man painted her from imagination and from other portraits of her, when she was in fact sixty! And the
Girl in a Fur
, a portrait of a ‘Venetian Courtesan'. The model was one of Titian's favourites at the time. When he painted it, he was forty-seven years old.