One might succumb to the pleasant illusion that these words flowed from the tender heart of a monarch moved by the cruel fate of an artist. What is more probable is that Charles I—a well-known art lover, whose court painter, after all, was Van Dyck himself—decided simply to take advantage of the situation and procure the famous Torrentius cheaply, in exchange for an unclear promise of royal favors. One way or another diplomatic machinery was set in motion. The Secretary of State Viscount Dorchester intervened with Holland’s Pensionary De Glarges; the royal ambassador Sir Dudley Carleton was particularly active in the affair. In nearly all letters the same argument is repeated: it would be a great loss if such an eminent artist miserably passed away.
These efforts were crowned with success. Torrentius left prison, but under three conditions: he had to pay the high costs of the trial, solemnly promise that he would leave for England immediately, and never return to his homeland.
We can re-create the further fate of the painter only in very general outline. Nothing certain is known about his stay in England. It seems that in the land of his saviors the incorrigible Torrentius continued his old lifestyle. This at least is how one can interpret an enigmatic mention of him, “giving more scandal than satisfaction,” that we find in Horace Walpole’s book Painters in the Reign of Charles I.
His return to Holland clearly borders on madness. He suddenly appeared in 1642, and indeed it is impossible to say what he counted on. That his guilt would be forgiven, and the biblical story of the Prodigal Son be repeated? After all, he knew the unrelenting hatred of Haarlem’s bourgeois only too well. Maybe the exile was simply forced to flee from his place of asylum, and he could do nothing but return to his homeland, hoping with work to earn better memory from future generations. It is quite possible Torrentius also wanted to challenge fate to a last duel, find his old companions and experience with them a few wild nights, recalling his youth with a Faustian gesture regardless of the price to be paid. Finally, it is not out of the question that he felt deadly tired of a game he himself had invented, and did not care what the continuation and finale might be of this tale full of sound and fury.
He met what everyone could have easily predicted—a second trial, of which hardly anything is known except that once again he underwent tortures. He died in his native Amsterdam a broken man on February 14, 1644.
The fate of Torrentius brings to mind a novel. But what kind? An adventure novel, or allegory? Our hero escapes formulas, definitions, and traditional descriptions, as if his only ambition after death was to deceive and repeat that he was a guest from nowhere, without ancestors, progeny, or relatives, an inhabitant of infinity.
It would be a modest statement, coming barely half a step closer to Torrentius’s mystery, if we were to say that he was different, not at all like the other citizens of the Republic, a provocatively colorful bird amid birds of a uniform color. He probably treated his own life like a material substance to which he gave unusually sophisticated form; therefore he destroyed conventions, bewildered, and scandalized.
He deserves the title and sad dignity of precursor, for there was something of the Marquis de Sade in him, and something of the nineteenth-century poètes maudits, or to use a closer analogy, the Surrealists. He was ahead of his times, as if demanding the exceptional status of an artist in exchange for unusual works, and this was completely beyond the comprehension of the upright bourgeois, bourgeois painters included. This is why Torrentius had to suffer a defeat.
For us he remains the creator of a single painting, and a curious case on the borderline of politics, the history of manners, and art.
What happened to his works? It is justified to fear they shared the fate of their author and were destroyed. But here and there one comes upon their traces, in inventories and brief references by contemporaries. Kramm, who wrote in the first half of the seventeenth century, mentions the portrait of a theologian. The painting was composed of two mobile surfaces, one placed on top of the other. The first represented the honorable scholar of divine affairs; when it was moved, before astonished eyes would appear “an artistic, unusually well-done scene from a public house.” Not bad.
In the inventory of the collection of Charles I we find a notation about three paintings by Torrentius, terse but thought-provoking: “One is an Adam and Eve, his flesshe very ruddy, theye show there syde faces. The other is a woman pissing in a mans eare. The best of those 3 is a young woman sitting somewhat odly with her hand under her legg.”
Many works of art have been condemned to a secret life, and what we see in the museums and art galleries, accessible to everyone, is only a part of the existing heritage of the past. The impenetrable remainder winters in closed labyrinths, treasure houses, and hiding places together with valuable papers jealously guarded by not always enlightened collectors. Therefore it is not out of the question—though the chances are not great—that a new Torrentius will emerge one day.
At a Parisian auction in 1865 a canvas by our painter was sold. No doubt it was signed, since at that time he was in the limbo of forgetfulness. We only know the title, “Diana and Actaeon.” Neither a reproduction nor even a description of the work has been preserved. The situation was changed radically, as if touched by a wand (the object of our investigation forces us to make use of the terminology of magic), when Bredius8, an excellent connoisseur of Dutch art, published in 1909 a pioneering monograph about the artist. Four years later the “Still Life with a Bridle” was discovered in quite unusual circumstances, which should not surprise us because it was like a last mockery from the other world. It served for several centuries as a cover for a barrel with raisins.
An anonymous reviewer writing in a 1922 publication about Viennese galleries reported a new work by Torrentius put up for sale; he described it as a real sensation, “Als ganz ausserordentliche Seltenheit.” Its mythological subject was a peculiarity in itself; like nudes, it belonged to a rare genre in Dutch painting. In addition, what extreme audacity in his treatment of the subject. In the foreground a large, ornate bed, a baldachin with a fat cupid hanging above it; on the bed Mars and Venus are entirely preoccupied with each other. On the left side Vulcan appears with a net in his hand, intending to catch the divine couple in the act. Above, a group of Olympians watch the scene with delight, like spectators in a theater. A few more details: a little monkey squatting on the bed, a white Doberman pinscher. Under the bed, sandals and a night pot.
We know nothing of the further fate of this canvas nor its aesthetic qualities, aside from a general remark of the reviewer: “Es ist eine Feinmalerei9.” But even this inventory of personages and objects emanates an atmosphere of the boudoir and dissoluteness, powder, perfumes, and sin. Wasn’t Torrentius far ahead of the style of his epoch, a solitary precursor of the rococo, a distant forerunner of Boucher and Fragonard? But in a country of sober-minded merchants, where did he find amateurs for his licentious works? Well, in almost every epoch there are collectors of obscene canvases who meticulously hide their treasures from the eyes of children, wives, and the guardians of morality. Only on exceptional occasions, excited by wine, will they wander with swaying steps toward their dark nooks and display them to their closest friends, bursting with an indecent giggle.
Only one painting was saved for us. One, and the only one stopped at the edge of nothingness.
2
THE LIFE OF TORRENTIUS is a ready literary fabric; it imposes a style, demands from the writer a rapid, breakneck narrative, sharp contrasts, baroque exaggeration, modeling of the protagonist from contradictory elements, and the art of expressing moods changing from lighthearted jauntiness and intoxication with the sensual world to the dread of the torture room and catastrophe. A bewitching subject.
It is much harder to manage his lonely work. It is homogeneous; at the same time it brings to mind a palimpsest and a subtly woven chain that leads to the bottom of a dark well of ever-new secrets. It lures us, and leads us astray.
An attempt to explain to anyone that th
e painting is a masterpiece seems quite hopeless, as usual in such cases. Art historians have not confirmed this with their word of honor, and I myself do not know how to translate my stifled shout when I first stood face-to-face with the “Still Life” into comprehensible language, nor the joyous surprise, the gratitude that I was endowed beyond measure, the soaring act of rapture.
I remember a certain episode that happened many years ago not far from Paris in an old monastery transformed into a retreat for intellectuals. A park, and in the park the ruins of a Gothic temple. The remains of the walls, white and thin as parchment, grew out of the ground. Their unreality was emphasized by the large, ogival windows through which lighthearted birds were flying. There were no longer stained-glass windows or columns, vaults or stone floors; only the skin of the architecture remained, as if hanging in the air. Inside the nave, fat pagan grass.
I remember this image better than the face of my interlocutor, Witold Gombrowicz10, who was mocking my fondness for art. I did not even defend myself but only mumbled some nonsense, aware that I was only an object, a gymnast’s bar upon which the writer was exercising his dialectical muscles. If I were an innocent stamp collector Gombrowicz would have made fun of my albums, classifiers, and sets of stamps; he would have proved that stamps are the lowest rungs of the ladder of existence, morally suspect.
“But it has absolutely no sense. How can one describe a cathedral, a sculpture, or some sort of painting,” he asked me, quietly and pitilessly. “Leave this amusement to the historians of art. They don’t understand anything either, but they have persuaded people they are cultivating a science.” It sounded convincing. I know well, too well, all the agonies and vain effort of what is called description, and also the audacity of translating the wonderful language of painting into the language—as voluminous, as receptive as hell—in which court verdicts and love novels are written. I don’t even know very well what inclines me to undertake these efforts. I would like to believe that it is my impervious ideal that requires me to pay it clumsy homages.
It seems Gombrowicz was irritated by the innate “stupidity” of the fine arts. Indeed, there is no painting that even in a popular way could demonstrate the philosophy of Kant, or Husseri and Sartre, two favorite thinkers of the writer who served him to intellectually annihilate interlocutors that were first subject, however, to the meticulous manipulation of what he called upupienie.
But this very “stupidity,” or to speak more delicately, naïveté, has always put me in a state of happiness. Thanks to the intermediary of paintings, I experienced the grace of meeting the Ionian philosophers of nature. Concepts sprouted only from things. We spoke the simple language of the elements. Water was water, a rock was a rock, fire was fire. How good that the deadly abstractions had not drunk all the blood of reality to the end.
Paul Valéry warned: “We should apologize that we dare to speak about painting.” I was always aware of committing a tactless act.
The “Still Life” of Torrentius was discovered quite accidentally in 1913, almost exactly three centuries after its creation. The painting has the monogram of the painter on its back, as well as a stamp stating it belonged to the collection of Charles I.
Helpless wonder is the most appropriate attitude toward the posthumous fate of this artist. We cannot help it. I could tell about many events that have happened to me since I decided to investigate this painter: the sudden piling up of insurmountable difficulties, the mysterious disappearance of my notes (precisely about him), misleading signals, books leading on a false track. Torrentius fiercely defended himself from the alms of charitable memory.
The “Still Life with a Bridle” is in the shape of a circle somewhat flattened “on the opposite poles,” and creates the impression of a slightly concave mirror. Because of this mirror the objects assume an intensified and swollen reality. Torn from the environment that disturbs their peace, they lead a willful and majestic life. Our everyday, practical eye blurs contours and perceives only muddy, tangled traces of light. Painting invites us to the contemplation of individual, despised objects, it removes their banal accidentality; here an ordinary tumbler means more than it means—as if it were the sum of all tumblers, the essence of the species.
The light of the painting is peculiar: cold, cruel, one would like to say clinical. Its source is beyond the painted scene. A narrow shaft of brightness defines the figures with geometric precision, but it does not penetrate the depths, it stops before the smooth, hard wall of the background, black as basalt.
On the right side—but a literary description resembles the laborious moving of heavy furniture, it develops slowly in time while the painterly vision is sudden, given like a landscape seen in the illumination of lightning. On the right side, then, a clay jug with a warm, brown glaze on which a small circle of light has settled. In the middle the tumbler, called a roemer, made of thick glass and half-filled with wine. Finally, a pewter pitcher with an energetically protruding beak. These three vessels, lined up facing the spectator in a position of attention, stand on a barely outlined shelf near two pipes with their stems turned down, and the lightest detail of the painting, a white-hot piece of paper with a musical score and text. At the top is the object I could not decipher at first, which seemed to be a piece of old armor hanging on the wall; at closer observation, it appeared to be a chain bridle used to tame exceptionally skittish horses. This metal contraption, stripped of its stable commonness, emerges from the dark background threatening, hieratic, somber like the specter of the Great Commander.
Wonderfully misleading Torrentius jeers at all those investigators who want to define his status and place in the history of art. He could not fit within life; one looks vainly for him in textbooks in which everything results from something and everything falls in well-behaved patterns. One is certain that in his generation he was an absolutely exceptional phenomenon without any definite artistic forebears, competitors, imitators, or pupils, a painter bursting schematic divisions into schools and trends.
This is probably why the not very clear title “master of illusory realism” was bestowed on him. What does it mean? Simply the rendering of people, objects, and landscapes so they seem alive, not only deceptively similar but identical with the model. The hand instinctively reaches out, wishing to liberate from their frame existences that were put to sleep. The old masters appealed not only to the eye, but also awakened other senses: taste, smell, touch, even hearing. Thus in the presence of their works we quite physically feel the sour taste of iron, the cold smoothness of a glass, the tickling of a peach or corduroy, the gentle warmth of clay pitchers, the dry eyes of the prophets, bouquet from old books, the breeze of an approaching storm.
The composition of Torrentius’s work is simple, almost ascetic. Built on horizontal and vertical axes, the painting is based on the design of a cross; it would make a graceful subject for practitioners of formal analysis and their somewhat pedantic search for parallels, diagonals, squares, circles, and triangles. But in this case such exertions do not seem very fruitful. From the beginning I had the irresistible impression that in the motionless world of the picture something much more, and something very essential, is occurring. As if the represented objects combined in meaningful relations and the entire composition contained a message, an incantation transmitted in the letters of a forgotten language.
The “Still Life with a Bridle” is for many historians one of a number of extremely popular allegories, namely the allegory Vanitas. One can agree with this, because who would dare to oppose Ecclesiastes, who proclaims that everything is vanity of vanities. But this simple explanation sems too superficial, too general. How to explain, for instance, the exceedingly daring and “surrealist” juxtaposition in the picture of the bridle hanging menacingly over the trinity of vessels? Above all, that page with musical notes and a text. Maybe precisely here we should look for the hidden meaning of the work?
The text in Dutch is as follows:
E R Wat buten maat bestaat
The abbreviation used at the beginning of the verse can be read as “Eques Rosa Crucis,” which brings us to the old scent—that is, the conjecture that Torrentius was a Rosicrucian. In fact, it is not a proof of anything. Equally well the artist could have painted this picture on commission from one of the members of the order, and according to his instructions. Similarly, during the Middle Ages an overwhelming majority of altar compositions were created according to strict indications from theologians who dictated to their artists the arrangement of scenes, symbols, even colors. Preserved contracts expressly attest to this.
Gnomic poems, particularly those that are esoteric texts, should be explained rather than translated word by word. One should approach them by degrees of meaning, carefully and on tiptoes, because literalness renders their meaning shallow and frightens away mystery.
Here is how I understand the text inscribed in Torrentius’s painting:
What exists beyond measure (order)
in over-measure (disorder) will meet a bad end.
I realize this is one of several possible translations, and it sounds rather banal compared with the original, which shows a greater wealth of thought. However, the apparent obviousness of this translation should not be discouraging. Whoever has come in contact with the thought of the Pythagoreans or Neo-Platonism knows the large role played by the symbolism of numbers in these movements, also the measure of and the search for a mathematical formula uniting man with the cosmos.
The intellectual construction of the poem is based on the antinomy of harmony and chaos, or of reasonable form and shapeless matter, which in the cosmologies of many religions was a dark mass awaiting the divine act of creation. In ethical categories Torrentius’s “Still Life” is not at all an allegory of Vanitas if my suppositions are correct, but an allegory of one of the cardinal virtues called Moderation, Temperantia, Sophrosyne. This interpretation is suggested by the represented objects: a bridle, the reins of the passions, vessels that give shape to formless liquids, and also the tumbler only half-filled as if recalling the praiseworthy custom of the Greeks of mixing wine with water.
The Collected Prose Page 34