3. Pygmalion (called Pygmalion and Galatea) 1649
Giovanni Belli (1602-1670)
Oil on canvas, 23 × 35 in. (58.4 × 89 cm.)
Belli is unusual in that he represents a reversal of the traditional direction of artistic migration, being an Italian who moved north. Born in Mantua, he is known to have studied for a time in Rome as a young man, probably as a pupil of Guido Reni (1575-1642), whose influence – less than benign – is clearly detectable in the works of the younger painter. We next hear of Belli in the year 1640 in a catalogue entry by the dealer Verheiden of The Hague, where he is referred to as ‘Joh. Belli ex Mantova, habit. Amstelodam’. Why this quintessentially Italian (southern, Catholic, death-obsessed) painter should have settled in the Low Countries is not clear. Certainly, from the evidence of his work, with its highly worked, polished textures and uncanny, one might almost say macabre, atmosphere, it seems it was not admiration for the serene genius of Dutch painting in the Golden Age that drew him northwards. He is an anachronistic, perhaps even faintly absurd figure, displaced and out of step with his time, an exile in an alien land. His work is marked by the inwardness and isolation of a man who has distanced himself from the known, the familiar, and betrays a hopeless yearning for all that has been lost and abandoned. His concern with the theme of death – or, rather, what one critic has called ‘life-in-death’ – is manifest not only in his characteristically morbid choice of subject matter but in the obsessive pursuit of stillness, poise, and a kind of unearthly splendour; a pursuit which, paradoxically, imparts to his work a restless, hectic quality, so that the epithet most often applied to it – inaccurately, of course – is ‘Gothic’. This constant effort of transcendence results in a mannered, overwrought style; what Gombrich summarises as critical attitudes to Guido Reni might also be applied to Reni’s pupil, that his work is ‘too self-conscious, too deliberate in its striving for pure beauty’. In the Pygmalion this self-consciousness and desire for purity, both of form and expression, are the most obvious characteristics. We are struck at once by the remarkable daring of the angle at which the couch is placed upon which Pygmalion and his awaking statue-bride recline. This great crimson parallelogram lying diagonally across the painting from the lower right to upper left corners gives a sense of skewed massiveness that is almost alarming to the viewer, who on a first encounter may feel as if the room in which he is viewing the picture has tilted suddenly. Against the blood-hued brocade of the couch the ivory pallor of the awaking statue seems a token of submissiveness: here ‘Galatea’ (the name does not occur in any version of the myth in classical literature and in this context is probably an invention of Renaissance mythographers) is more victim than love-object. How strikingly this figure displays itself, at once demure and abandoned, sprawled on its back with left knee flexed to reveal where the smooth ivory of the lap has dimpled into a groove, and the right arm with its still bloodless, slender hand flung out; is it the goddess’s inspiration of life that is convulsing these limbs, or are these the paroxysms of fleshly pleasure that the half-incarnate girl is experiencing already and for the first time? And is Pygmalion leaning over her the better to savour her sighs, or is he drawing back in consternation, appalled at the violence of this sudden passion he has kindled? The shocking gesture of his hand seizing upon the girl’s right breast may as easily be a token of his fear as of his desire. Likewise, the gifts of shells and pebbles, dead songbirds, painted baubles and tear-shaped drops of ambergris that lie strewn in a jumble before the couch seem less ‘the kind of presents,’ as Ovid says, ‘that girls enjoy’ than votive offerings laid at the altar of an implacable deity. With what obsessive exactitude has the artist rendered these trifles, as if they are indeed a sacrifice that he himself is making to Venus, whose great, smooth, naked form hovers above the two figures on the couch, dwarfing them. In this portrayal of the goddess – impassive, marmoreal, lubriciously maternal – can clearly be seen the influence of the mannerists, in particular the Bronzino of such works as Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time. The overall tone of ambiguous sexuality is slyly pointed up by the triple dancing tongues of flame rising from the sacrificial pyre that burns on the little moss-grown mound visible in the middle distance in the upper right-hand corner of the scene. However questionable they may be in terms of taste, it is in such subtle touches rather than in the larger gestures of this phantasmal and death-drunk work that, to quote Gombrich again, Belli’s ‘quest for forms more perfect and more ideal than reality [is] rewarded with success.’
What affects me most strongly and most immediately in a work of art is the quality of its silence. This silence is more than an absence of sound, it is an active force, expressive and coercive. The silence that a painting radiates becomes a kind of aura enfolding both the work itself and the viewer as in a colour-field. So in the white room when I took up Morden’s pictures and began to examine them one by one what struck me first of all was not colour or form or the sense of movement they suggested but the way each one suddenly amplified the quiet. Soon the room was athrob with their mute eloquence. Athrob, yes, for this voluminous, inaudible din with which they filled the place, as a balloon is filled with densened air, did not bring calm but on the contrary provoked in me a kind of suspenseful agitation, a tremulous, poised expectancy that was all the more fraught because there seemed nothing to expect. As I worked I talked to myself, only half aware that I was doing so, putting on voices and playing out dialogues under my breath, so that often when I finished for the day my head resonated with a medleyed noise as if I had been since morning in the company of a crowd of garrulous, mild lunatics. The room too was disorienting, with its cramped wedge shape and single, disturbingly square window and invisible door. It’s a wonder I did not go off my head in that first period of solitude and unremitting concentration (perhaps I did?). I could have worked elsewhere in the house, for the place had many big empty airy rooms, but it never occurred to me to shift. I had Francie help me (he was less than gracious) to carry up an old pine table from the kitchen on which I set out my reference books, my powders and potions and glass retorts (I exaggerate), and unfolded on their green oilskin cloth the tools of my craft: the tweezers, scrapers, scalpels, the fine sable brushes, the magnifying glass and jeweller’s monocle; some other time, perhaps, I shall essay a little paean of praise to these beautiful artefacts which are an enduring source of quiet pleasure and consolation to me. So see me at play there just as in the days of my glowing if not quite gilded youth when it pleased me to pretend to be a scholar. Then it was science, now it is art.
I have considered many things since your going, and I have come to some conclusions. One is, that I was lost that radiant Florentine morning in the infancy of the quattrocento when the architect Brunelleschi disclosed to his painter colleagues the hitherto unrealised laws of perspective. Morally lost, I mean. The thousand years or so before that epochal event I think of as a period of deep and dreamless slumber, when everything moved in enfolding curves at a glacial pace and the future was no more than a replay of the past; a long, suspended moment of stillness and circularity between the rackety end of the classical world and the first, fevered thrashings of the so-called Renaissance. I picture a kind of darksome northern Arcady, thick-forested, befogged and silent, lost in the glimmering, frost-bound deeps of immemorial night. What calm! What peace! Then came that clarion dawn when the architect threw open his box of tricks and Masaccio (known to his contemporaries, with prescient and to me gratifying accuracy, as Clumsy Tommaso) and his henchmen clapped palms to foreheads in disbelief at their own short-sightedness and got down to drawing receding lines and ruined everything, spawning upon the world the chimeras of progress and the perfectibility of man and all the rest of it. Illusion followed rapidly by delusion: that, in a nutshell, is the history of our culture. Oh, a bad day’s work. And as for the Enlightenment …! How, fed on these madnesses, could a man such as I be expected to keep his head?
Anyway.
In the first days in that secret ro
om I was happier than I can remember ever having been before, astray in the familiar otherwhere of art. Astray, yes, and yet somehow at the same time more keenly aware, of things and of myself, than in any other of the periods of my life that have printed themselves with particular significance on my memory. Quick, is the word: everything, myself included, was quick with import and intent. I was like some creature of the so-called wild poised on open ground with miraculously refined senses tuned to the weather of the world. Each painting that I lifted up and set under my enlarging glass was a portent of what was coming. And what was coming, though I did not know it yet, was you, and all that you entailed.
Or did I know? Perhaps when I peered into those pictures what I was looking for was always and only the prospect of you, a speck of radiance advancing towards me from the vanishing-point.
At heart I am a hopeless romantic: I wished to believe in Josiah Marbot, that staid adventurer and beady-eyed snapper-up of unconsidered treasures. As I got to know the pictures I was convinced I was coming to know him, too (perhaps it was with him my phantom dialogues were conducted?), his bitter sense of humour, his taste for the grotesque, the diffident manner masking the ruthlessness of the dedicated collector. I could almost see him, a thin old tall figure in frock-coat and stock making his slow way up through the house at nightfall, leaning on a pearl-handled cane, one arm behind him with fist pressed to the small of his bent back, the arthritic fingers curled. His rheumed eyes are still sharp, the corners of his mouth turn down (the teeth are long gone); his nose is thin and pointed and bloodlessly white, dry white, like these desiccated walls. He pauses at a window, his man with candle going on ahead capered about by shadows, and looks down into the narrow street; drizzle greases the cobbles; a carriage clops and creaks past, the nag’s head hanging; he is remembering an alleyway on the Ile de la Cité thirty years before, the darkness coming on as now, and a half-drunk fat dealer under a low, smoke-blackened ceiling bringing out a package wrapped in dirty rags and crooning and kissing bunched fingers as if it were one of his daughters he was offering the rich milord: Vaublin, m’sieur – un vrai Vaublin! I thought of his passion for pictures, or at least for collecting them, as somehow indecent, a secret vice. I imagined him haunting the showrooms, as he might have the great brothels of the time, in a subdued fever of longing and shame, stammering out his desire for something different, something special … Certainly his taste was for the louche and the deformed, yet the sports he possessed himself of looked perfectly proper – I mean, insofar as technique was concerned – like so many humpbacked, three-breasted whores tricked out in silks and crinolines.
But what exactly did I make of these paintings, what exactly did I feel for them? (I am sitting here, by the way, with a pitying half smile on my face, like a magistrate listening to a doltish accused stumbling through his earnest and self-condemning testimony.) How can I say for certain what I felt or did not feel? The present modifies the past, it is a continuing, insidious process. That time, though it is only a little while ago, seems to me now impossibly distant, a prelapsarian era bathed in a tawny light and filled with the slow music of solitude. Did I give myself to the pictures with that sensation of inward falling that great art is supposed to provoke? Probably I did. True, I found them uncanny; they stared at me from across the room, remote and motionless, like a row of propped-up catatonics. But you see, I had never before been in such proximity to works of art, had never been allowed such freedoms, had never been permitted to take such liberties. It was like suddenly breaking through to a different version of reality, a new and hitherto undreamed-of dimension of a familiar world. It was like – yes, it was like what they seem to mean when they talk of love. To place one of these extraordinary artefacts before me on the little table in the white room and go to work on it with my tweezers and my magnifying glass was to be given licence to enter the innermost secret places of a sacred object. This was the surface the painter had worked in, I kept telling myself, these were the brushstrokes he had set down; still lodged in the paint would be a few stray atoms the creator had breathed out as he leaned rapt before his canvas three and a half centuries ago in a leaky garret on some back street of Antwerp or Utrecht under a sky piled high with gigantic clouds. That was how it seemed to me, that was how I thought; no wonder when I stood back and rubbed my eyes I could not focus on what was before me. I was like a lover who gazes in tongue-tied joy upon his darling and sees not her face but a dream of it. You were the pictures and they were you and I never noticed. All this I understand now – but then; ah, my dear, then! You see my difficulty: a grotesque among grotesque things, I was content there and wanted nothing but that this peaceful and phantasmally peopled solitude should continue without disturbance; content, that is, until you became animate suddenly and stepped out of your frame.
Here is what happened. This is what happened, the first time. Not the first first time but the first time that you that I that we … Here it is.
And yet, what did happen? Nothing, to speak of, nothing that can be spoken of, in words, adequately. Morning. The autumn was really under way by now, with sunlight the colour of brass on the faces of the houses and the sense of a silent, continuous slippage in the full, still, shining air. Very quiet, too, only the odd blare of a bus engine revving on the quays and, farther off, a tipsy jangling of bells from the cathedral where what must have been an apprentice campanologist was practising his scales. I am at my table, poring over my catalogue of the big Vaublin show in Washington, the pages lying open at a rather muddy reproduction of the Flaying of Marsyas: peasants having a carouse in the foreground while the bad business is done in miniature in a bosky grove off in the middle distance. I have a headache, it is beating away in there, a slow, soft, silent pounding. I lift my gaze. A great chubby silver-white cloud by Magritte is standing upright in the window in front of me, opening its arms. You appear out of silence. That is how I think of it, as if the silence in the room had somehow materialised you and given you form. I felt you there before I heard your step. A sort of shift occurred, as if an engine somewhere had shunted silently, enormously, into another gear, and I looked up, puzzled. It is said that in the instant before lightning strikes you can feel the rocks and trees around you buzzing. You were wearing … what were you wearing? A light dress of linen, or cotton, with tiny flowers printed on it, tight-waisted with a full skirt; what was called in my day a summer frock, the weather was still just warm enough for it. And pumps, black pumps with a little pressed black satin bow on each instep. No make-up today, or none that I could detect, so that her features had a shimmery, ill-defined quality, as if I were seeing her through a fine, bright mist. What was surprising was that we were not surprised. We might have been meeting here like this every morning for months. When she leaned down at my shoulder I could hear the faint soft rasp of her breathing. And I could smell her. That was the first thing, really the first thing, her smell: at once staleish and tart, with a tang in it like a tang of nettles that made my saliva glands tingle. She smelled of childish things, of seasides, of schoolrooms, and of something else, I don’t know, something chafed and raw – just flesh itself, maybe – and I thought at once, with a sort of startled, swollen avidity, of sunburn, and chilblains, and the delicate, translucent pink rims of your nostrils when you caught that cold and would not let me touch you for three days (I know, I know, this is all out of sequence). Occasionally even still I am reduced on the spot to a state of slack-jawed inanity by an afterbreath of that mingled, carnal savour; there must be a whiff of it lodged somewhere in the caverns of my skull. If only I could isolate that trace, some fiendish savant might be able to culture out of it a genetic model of you perfect in every detail – except, that is, the only one that matters. She wanted to know what was happening in the picture on the page before me and when I told her she squared her mouth in disgust and made a retching noise. Poor Marsyas; they sing Apollo’s praises but give me Dionysus any day. She walked to the window and put her face close to the glass and peered o
ff sideways at something only she could see. That stillness, that feline concentration: where had I seen some other loved one stand in just that pose? Then she turned and sat down on the sill, leaning forward with elbows locked and the hollows of her arms turned inside out (those delicate blue veins, my God!) and her hands braced at her sides and one balletic toe pressed to the floor, while she slowly swung the other leg which at the apogee of each swing bared itself to glimmering mid-thigh. I cannot see a Balthus, any Balthus – those autumnal tones, that characteristic air of jaded lewdness – without thinking of A. sitting there that day, lips parted, faintly frowning, gazing into herself with that irresistibly vacant expression her face always took on in repose. What was I thinking now, what was I feeling? I was waiting, I did not know for what exactly, while the pendulum of that hypnotically swinging leg marked off the slow, swollen seconds. How pale she was. Her hair at the side hung away from her canted cheek like a cropped black gleaming wing. I could not see her face clearly with the light behind her. Had her gaze shifted, was she looking at me now? Time passed. We must have talked, or at least exchanged remarks, we cannot have sat in silence all that while, but if so I don’t remember. I recall only the look of things: her print dress, that hanging wing of hair, the triangular shadow lengthening and contracting along her inner thigh as she swung her leg, the polar blue in the window behind her and that ogreish cloud at her back still stealthily spreading its icy arms. Or is it just that I want to linger here in this moment when everything was still to come, to preserve it in the crystal of remembrance like one of those little scenes in glass globes that I used to play with as a child, cottage and tree and robin redbreast on a twig and all swirled about with snowflakes? (I could weep a blizzard if I once got started.) Her face was unexpectedly cool under my hand. With a fingertip I traced the line of her jaw, her chin. She did not lift her head. Her leg had stopped swinging. How had I got from table to window? I imagine a great soft bound, a sort of slow-motion kangaroo hop that landed me grinning and atremble before her. I felt shaky and impossibly lofty, as if I were balancing precariously on stilts and ogling down at her with a clownish, protuberant eye. She was very still, a sleek, warm, watchful creature poised in wait for whatever was to happen. I took a deep breath that caught in my gullet and became a gulp, and in the would-be no-nonsense voice of a workman rolling up his sleeves to tackle a tricky but attractive job I said, ‘Well, this chance won’t come again,’ and unaccountably the taste of blackberries flooded up from the root of my tongue. She began to say something rapidly, I did not catch the words, and she laughed breathily into my mouth and I felt her lips slacken and slide sideways under my ill-aimed, glancing kiss. We kept our eyes wide open and gaped swimmingly at each other in a sort of amazement, then she drew her face away quickly, looking at once pleased and scornful, and made a circle of her lips and said softly, ‘Poh!’ A very long moment of absolute immobility, and then I have the impression of a complicated, awkward untangling, with clearings of throats and muttered apologies and the threat of ruinous laughter hanging over all. Then I swung about and walked to the table, stumping along on my invisible stilts, hot with thrilling terror and keeping my back firmly turned to her. I picked up something from the table, I don’t know what, and began to discourse on it in a laughable attempt at nonchalance. And when I looked again she was gone.
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