Elias Ambrosius could not deny that proximity to the Maestro and his environment, that world where everything was thought and expressed, with a nearly sickening recurrence, in terms of painting (technically, physically, philosophically, and even financially), had already made him another man and, even if just to live humiliated by his own misfortune, he would never again be who he once was: he knew greatness, he had received the light and warmth of a genius and, above all, had learned that greatness and genius, when mixed with the propensity to challenge and the will to exercise freedom from criteria, could (or tended to? he hesitated) lead to disaster and frustration.
But what did that knowledge do for him? The young Jew was thinking about his situation and weighing his drastic decision with more determination on those nights on which, facing a piece of clumsily stained linen, he convinced himself that, no matter the effort dedicated to absorbing everything he saw or heard, and despite his enthusiasm and tenacity, there was still lacking between his brain and that challenging surface something of the undoubted emanation of divine grace that he, it seemed clear, would never possess: true talent. And if his whole life was going to be mediocre, it wasn’t worth the expenses, the humiliations, and the weight of a secret that he couldn’t trust even his best friends with. For a mediocre painter, he told himself, the affronts and fears he’d accumulated were already enough.
That cold afternoon on which his life would experience an unpredictable and encouraging jolt, the recurring idea of giving up had followed him like a tenacious dog while, sinking his feet into the recently fallen snow, he headed to the Maestro’s house. But an imprecise agitation, as intangible as a premonition, prevented him from taking the step that, like others taken in his short life, he knew would be definitive.
The new maid in the house, the young Emely Kerk, was the one who opened the door, and Elias Ambrosius approached the stove of the neighboring room to try to rid himself of the cold he’d accumulated during the walk. In an almost automatic way, he thought, seeing flames flicker and the metallic container for the peat nearly empty, that that afternoon they would order him to go to Nieuwemarkt to advise the provider that he was required at number 4 Jodenbreestraat. Elias Ambrosius was preparing himself to go down to the kitchen to change his heavy clothing for the old work shirt and collect his daily weapons, the bucket and the broom, when the Maestro came out of his room and, after placing in one cheek one of those melted sugar sticks that had caused and would cause so many toothaches (those sticks which, he assured, he would not be able to give up), he looked at him and said, “Don’t change your clothes, today you are coming with me.”
At that moment, without being able to guess what still awaited him, Elias Ambrosius had the certainty that—whatever the possibility was—those magic words placed his relationship with the Maestro on another level of proximity in one fell swoop. And he immediately forgot about the well-worn decision, as if it had never existed.
Of all his habits, the Maestro’s preference to go out in the morning to make his purchases was known. Always, around ten in the morning, he chose one or two students, according to his intentions, and took up going around to different stores that could best meet his peculiar demands. The adventure finished around twelve thirty, generally at the food stand that an Indonesian couple with lots of kids had set up in the port, and where, alongside black stevedores, English and Norwegian sailors, Magyar and German mercenaries, and other extraordinary characters (Indians from Surinam selling parrots or dark Jews from Ethiopia dressed in pre-Christian attire), one could observe faces, dress, and gestures, as he took delight in eating the dishes of meat with seasonal vegetables, overflowing with flavors and aromas evoking mysterious remote worlds, delicacies prepared by those two beings with ashy skin and bodies as flexible as swamp reeds. Depending on the Maestro’s mood, the students accompanying him—ever since his favorite, Carel Fabritius, had left the workshop to try out his luck as an artist, he almost always chose his brother Barent, who was bad at painting but good at carrying, and sometimes he also took Keil the Dane, other times Samuel van Hoogstraten or the recently arrived Constantijn Renesse—followed him to the unpolished wood tables belonging to the Indonesians, or he ordered them to return with the acquired materials. In any case, participating in those excursions was considered a privilege among the apprentices, who, upon returning, displayed the new provisions to the others and narrated, if they had existed, the Maestro’s chats with his providers or with the crowds at the port.
Without ceasing to keep in mind the difference in his situation and that of the other students who were admitted as such (the oldest of whom, having overcome certain prejudices, already considered him nearly an equal), Elias Ambrosius, while simultaneously obsessing about his doubts and fears, had begged his God for almost two years to one day (just one day!) hear the order that would individualize him, at least as a human being. The reason that the painter had not gone out in the morning, it was easy to surmise, was due to the fact that, from dawn until midday, a persistent snow had been falling. Although, the young man also knew, at the same time that he had started smiling again, the Maestro had spaced out his morning outings to the street, ever since, a few months before, around his house started to flutter the young figure of Emely Kerk, hired part-time as Titus’s governess, an impossible responsibility for Mme. Dircx, given her scarce relationship to literacy. But the important thing was not the reason, but rather the choice, since with all certainty, in the attic’s stalls there would still be working some of the students, who paid the required one hundred florins: like other times, the Maestro’s order could have been that Elias himself go to the upper floor and tell one or some of the apprentices that he was ready, about to go. But this afternoon, he had chosen him.
When Elias’s mood changed (and sometimes this happened easily, thanks to a talk the Maestro dedicated to him, or over the discovery of a new capacity to paint something that until then had eluded him or at the prospect of a meeting with Mariam Roca, the girl who for a few months had attracted him almost as much as painting), the young man placed in the balance the fact that throughout those two years—full, it was true, of surprises, fears, and disappointments—he had also come to know, for a more than modest price, the joys of learning in the most prestigious workshop in Amsterdam and in the Republic. Elias Ambrosius recognized in the entrance that he had crossed the rocky stretch of sidereal ignorance to that of knowing how much he had to learn if he aimed to turn his obsessions into works and prove, with the necessary instruments, the qualities of his possible talent (which had suddenly grown in his own opinion when those circumstances arose, more by virtue of the waves of euphoria that ran through his spirit than because of concrete work). The Maestro’s conversations with his students that he had been witness to, the careful curiosity with which Elias approached them to interrogate them without appearing to, and the open voracity with which he devoured the occasions on which the painter addressed him, as well as the fact of having been witness to the birth, growth, and conclusion of several works by that genius (he had been fascinated by the portrait of Emely Kerk, whom he had placed in a pose as if she were looking out of a window; and on two occasions Elias had even prepared his palette for the piece he had been painting for months, a mundane domestic representation of the Christian Sacred Family at the moment of being visited by some angels), each propitious circumstance allowed him to further penetrate a world much more fabulous than he had imagined, and, for him, definitively magnetic, despite all of its sorrows … Because of that, from the charcoal and paper of the past, he had gone on to experiment on card stock with watercolors, sketching with the Maestro’s characteristic large and simple lines and, for a few months already, to painting on linen, the cheapest ones, bought on occasion as scraps, to which he applied himself in an abandoned room, found out past Prinsengracht, the remote Prince’s Canal, since he feared that the unmistakable smell of linseed oil would betray him if he worked with it in the attic.
Several times, he had h
ad to lie when a friend or someone in the house asked him about his work in the Maestro’s workshop: the pretext that he worked as a cleaning boy fulfilling the request of his former Hakham ben Israel, a great friend of the painter’s, was sufficient to inform his grandfather (anything having to do with Ben Israel seemed appropriate to him), calm down his father (although he did not understand why his son, with two jobs, was always short on money), and, for the moment, trick Amos and his own friends, or, at least, aim to do so.
That joyous afternoon, when they went out, Jodenbreestraat looked like a white carpet rolled out to receive them. The snow collectors had still not begun their task and the path was only marked by the footprints of some passersby. When they went down to the street, the Maestro took a right, to go up to Meijerplein, and, immediately, Elias knew that something had happened, an event capable of putting the painter in a good mood: only thus could he explain to himself the loquaciousness with which the man surprised him in the first yards they covered. As they walked, sinking to the ankles of their boots in the still-soft snow, the Maestro devoted himself to telling Elias how he had met each one of his Jewish neighbors—Salvador Rodrigues, the Pereira brothers, Benito Osorio, Isaac Pinto, and, of course, Isaías Montalto, all favored for their opulence—in whom he admired the capacity to maintain their faith in the midst of greater adversities and, of course, to multiply florins. Without transition, he went on to reveal his theory, many times discussed with Ben Israel and some of those Sephardic neighbors, about why Amsterdam’s citizens maintained that close relationship, more than tolerance, with the members of the Sephardic Nação: “It is not because your people and my people are enemies of Spain, nor because you help us become more wealthy. Spain has more than enough enemies and we don’t need business partners. It’s not because we are more understanding and tolerant, either, or even close to it: it’s because the Dutch are as pragmatic as you are and we identify with the history of the Hebrews to improve and adorn our own, to give it a mystical dimension, as our friend Ben Israel says so well. In two words: Protestant pragmatism.”
Elias Ambrosius knew that the Maestro had a difficult relationship with the creators of the myths about the history of the United Provinces and with the most active and radical Calvinist preachers. The fiasco in which, a few years before, the commission of a painting devoted to celebrating the union of the Republic (still involved in its infinite war against Spain) had devolved and had damaged the painter’s relationship with the country’s authorities. The work, which should have been on display in the royal palace of The Hague, was never finished, since the promoters of the commission, warned by the sketches, considered that the Maestro’s interpretation did not meet with the demands or with the historic reality as they understood it and, much less, with the patriotic spirit that it should exalt. On the other hand, his friendship with the problematic preacher Cornelis Anslo was also public, as was his active participation in a Mennonite sect, propagators of a return to the simplifying and natural ways supported by the Scriptures. His new and capricious sympathy for the Arminianists, defenders of adhering to the original spirit of the Protestant reform and much more liberal than the pure Calvinists, was now very well-known. As if that bunch of heterodox or orthodox attitudes weren’t enough, the Maestro prided himself on his dynamic and spiritual closeness with the Jews and even with Catholics: he was a friend of Steen the painter, who professed that faith; also of the city’s most sought-after architect Philips Vingboons, a frequent visitor at the house on Jodenbreestraat. All of those challenges had made of him a man at the limits of what was tolerable by the ideological rectors of his society, who apprehensively looked at an artist always fighting against what was established, an artist who was too much of a transgressor of the accepted.
When they reached the Meijerplein, Elias Ambrosius would know where their first stop would be and, soon, the reason for the Maestro’s euphoria. At one of the plaza’s angles, in front of the terrain acquired by the Spanish and Portuguese Jews to carry out the dream of raising a synagogue, at last conceived as such and projected as a challenging modern version of Solomon’s Temple, was the store of Herman Doomer, a German who specialized in the making of hard ebony frames, who also offered supports in other less noble woods and even blackened whalebone, a cheaper substitute. The relationship between business and painter was very close since, a few years prior, the Maestro had done a portrait of Doomer, while his son, Lambert, had spent some time as an apprentice in the workshop—seemingly without too much success. Because of their closeness, the German always gave the Maestro the best prices and the most beautiful woods he had.
His greeting of a friend and favorite client was as warm as could be expected from a man who was as Lutheran German as could be. He included not the usual invitation to beer or wine but rather a cup of the infusion that was beginning to become fashionable in the United provinces: coffee come from Ethiopia, a luxury that few could permit themselves. Standing at a prudent distance, savoring his cup of black liquid sweetened with molasses, Elias Ambrosius followed the two men’s conversation and at last understood the reasons for the Maestro’s euphoria: the stadtholder Frederik Hendrik de Nassau, supreme magistrate of the Republic, had commissioned two new works from the painter, and, of course, for that order, the frames had to be of the highest quality (regardless of the price, which, at the end of the day, would be charged to the powerful customer).
Like all in the know about the interstices in the country’s art world, the young Jew was aware of the rumors that aimed to explain the end, seemingly turbulent, of the relationship of business and sympathy between the gentleman from The Hague and the Maestro from Amsterdam. Six years before, after concluding Resurrection, the third of the paintings commissioned by the stadtholder representing the Passion of Christ (he had before turned in Ascension and, nearly along with the last one, Burial), the Maestro had written to the prince humbly but in very clear terms, suggesting that, instead of the six hundred florins agreed to, he pay him a thousand for each one of the last two paintings—taking into account, according to the Maestro’s thinking, that his prices in the market had gone up in the last two, three years, along with the complexity and quality of the works. The stadtholder’s response came with a bill of exchange for the agreed-to sum and a reprimand for all the time, excessive in his opinion, that he had had to wait for the works … And it was marked with a pernicious silence as the only rebuttal to the new letters sent by the Maestro. With that affair and with the immediate rejection of his projected painting about the union of the Republic, the artist had seen his dreams crumbling of becoming, like that Rubens he envied, loved, and hated so much, a famous painter of the court, owner of estates and art collections.
Ever since his wife’s death, which so affected his spirits, and since the confusion and alarm that the Maestro’s work for the grote zaal at Kloveniersburgwal created among potential customers, but above all, since the scandalous judicial dispute to which Andries de Graeff, equally rich as he was stupid, subjected him for considering that the portrait he commissioned the painter, for which he had paid the enormous sum of five hundred florins, was far from seeming finished and even offering any likeness with his person, the levels of demand for the Maestro had visibly fallen. Amsterdam’s powerful no longer lined up to be immortalized by that always problematic and strong-willed painter, and his commissions now went to the hands of more docile artists—of which there were dozens to choose from in the city—whose paintings were more polished and light-filled. Following those setbacks, the Maestro’s momentum had lessened and, to anyone who knew him, it could seem evident that his most recent commissions (in which he had resorted more than usual to the help of Carel Fabritius and the young Aert de Gelder) were elegant works, well determined, but scarcely personalized and barely worthy of his genius. Although it was also true, as Elias Ambrosius could testify, that his work that was less committed to reigning tastes, less concerned with pleasing, had been turning deeper, more free and personal. And there wa
s another portrait to prove it: that of Emely Kerk, young, unpretentious, and earthy, looking out a window from which she offered a palpable sensation of truth. With his thwarted dreams of reaching the court, the Maestro had freed himself at last of the most difficult burden he’d been dragging along for several years: that of the mundane example, the out-of-control pictorial drama, and the imagery that was overwhelming but always pleasing to the tastes of the Flemish Rubens’s patrons. He had made himself more free.
Elias Ambrosius trembled when he heard the price of the ebony frames, almost six quarters high and one ell wide, but when he heard that the works would be sold for one thousand two hundred florins each, he had the sense that the money to pay for the most luxurious frames was not going to be a problem for that noble customer and that the Maestro, always capable of squandering on his whims more than he earned with his work, would be giving a rest to his turbulent finances, which prompted so much discussion over expenses with Mme. Dircx.
When they went back out to the street, the rushed winter twilight had fallen over the white square, but the Maestro’s enthusiasm remained unaltered, or perhaps powered by two cups of the dark and reviving infusion offered by Mr. Doomer. The man looked around, as if only thinking about his next steps at that moment, and he seemed to make the decision: “We’re going to drink a beer here around the corner … Then we’ll visit Isaac Pinto. But before, I want to finish explaining what I was telling you.”
Heretics Page 30