Allowing time for the Maestro to finish his siesta—over the years, he had acquired that habit of having a rest to regain his strength, since, besides, he tended to suffer from insomnia because of the frequent toothaches that persisted after his visits to the surgeon—Elias Ambrosius decided to entertain his anxiety. With the professionalism he had already acquired, he began to prepare the colors with which they would work, previously chosen by the Maestro, without great surprise: white lead and earth colors. There were ocher red (for the shirt that he had asked Elias to wear for their work sessions), sienna, ocher yellow, and the red-orange, whose use and place in the work still intrigued the young man.
When he had prepared the required quantities for about three hours of work, Elias settled onto his stool and studied the images of his face he was receiving from the mirrors. Ever since he had begun to paint himself in the solitude of the attic, a few years before, his features had changed a lot, making the journey from the disproportion inherent to adolescence to the settling of the characteristics of adulthood of his confirmed twenty-one years. His hair, which he always wore parted down the middle, was loose over his shoulders and had darkened some, although it maintained a reddish sheen, and his mouth seemed firmer, perhaps harder. His beard, now extended over his cheeks and chin, and his mustache over his upper lip, were sparse with thick whiskers, and the hairs of his beard, darker than the hair on his head, were corkscrew curls. But his features also announced other, less perceptible, hidden changes, caused by the experiences lived in those years during which he had discovered, enjoyed, or suffered the deep feelings of pain over the death of a loved one, the joy of love and its physical consummation, the weights of living with a secret and dragging along fear and, above all, the certainty and uncertainty of an apprenticeship so weighed down with responsibilities, stabbing tension, and fabulous finds. His face now matched that of a man who has lived his indispensable trials and, even, feels capable of turning them into material for the knowledge of others through a marvelous exercise of art.
Elias felt the unrestrainable impulse and, without waiting for the Maestro’s arrival, dared to prepare his palette and returned to the stool and to self-contemplation. Without knowing it, at that moment he was at last discovering why he had decided to throw it all in the fire and dive into painting: not for money, or for fame, or to satisfy his tastes. What moved him and now sustained his hand as he drew the lines that would hold his face was the certainty that, with the paintbrush, some pigments, and the right surface, he could enjoy the power of creating life, a life unnoticed by many people, which he was capable of seeing and, in possession of the weapons given to him by the Maestro, of reflecting, with passion, emotion, and beauty. What the young man did know in that precise moment, even when he was risking reprimand by the painter who always had the first and last word in the workshop, was that, in that instant, he was a satisfied and happy man. Just like when he coupled with Mariam; just like he had been on the day on which his grandfather took him to initiate him in the synagogue and kissed him on the cheeks after adjusting his kippah, leading him so he could become an adult; just like in the best moments of his life, because he was doing that which the Lord—he no longer had any doubts—had created him for. As he gave shape to his face, seeking himself out through a direct, clean gaze, he reached the elusive answer that for years before the Maestro had demanded from him at that same place and that only now arose in an overwhelming way. Elias Ambrosius wanted to be a painter to have that precise power. The power of creating, the most beautiful and invincible of the powers with which some men tended to govern and, almost always, bully other men.
* * *
Summer in Amsterdam is a feast of light and heat, capable of infecting the moods of its dwellers, who, fully enjoying the season, never manage to completely forget that the good fortune is temporary, between two long, snowy winters whipped by blizzards and all too frequent rains, which drove humidity deep into everyone’s bones. The light, always filtered by the steam of so much water, became dense, nearly compact, but shone for many hours of the day of that northern territory. Elias Ambrosius, also moved by the euphoria of the season, lived those days in a fit of pleasure and satisfaction, which were none too pleasant for Mariam Roca, who had to stoically withstand the physical and mental absences of her lover, who, when he was finally at her side, would get lost in digressions about the quality of the light or how quickly certain pigments dried (fast in the case of Cassel earth pigment, slow in the case of bitumen of Judea, capricious in the case of Naples yellow) and experienced sudden mood changes.
It is true that the Maestro had begun the process of working with one of his usual bitter rants, more frequent and expected when he had just taken a nap or when his teeth ached: Elias was forced to cover up his own first attempt to declare and practice artistic independence with a gray layer of primer, since the work that was in the Maestro’s mind was the one he needed and not the first one that came to an apprentice’s mind. He wanted, needed, sought out, very convincing expressions of the face of Elias-Christ that would breathe humanity, the simple humanity of a man, despite that man’s lineage and mission on earth, even despite having been resurrected and finding himself once more in the tremendous position of being among mortals and sinners. That same afternoon, in his notebook—alongside the folder of drawings and the file of works he had been hiding at the Maestro’s house for a few months—Elias tried to reproduce the man’s words, obsessive and vehement: “It cannot be the Christ by Leonardo, humble and removed, too saintly, too much of a god in relation to the disciples … Even though we’re going to put him in the red tunic from The Last Supper. Nor is he the one from Caravaggio’s first Emmaus Supper: too beautiful and theatrical, almost feminine … Also with his red tunic. It should look more like Caravaggio’s second picture, more man, more human, although it ended up being rather dramatic and perfect, as couldn’t help happening when it’s Caravaggio. My Christ has to be a man who, in front of other men, reveals his essence through a gesture we make every day, but that in him turned into the symbol of the Eucharist. The bread will be the most normal bread, and common as well will be the act of breaking it in pieces before initiating the supper … Without mysticism, without theatrics … Humanity, that is what I want, humanity,” he emphasized, nearly livid, and added: “And you have to deliver that face to me and we have to capture it au naturel.”
The Maestro’s idea of having two versions was that Elias would work on the panel, more malleable with the pigments, and offer him a face of Christ with a slight profile of his head tilting softly, creating a line of movement coming from the chin, running over the nose and, through the part of his hair, reaching the right upward-most angle of the surface. In that way, he aimed to make visible the entire cheek closest to the spectator and the complete contour of the interior one, at the same time that he marked a departure toward the infinite based on that daily gesture. In that pose, the gaze, tilting somewhat downward, should express introspection. The lights had to be uniform, full, and for that reason he had lifted the curtains, in search of the free movement of the thick summer light toward the studio’s interior: his interest, at that moment, was the face and only the face of a man. And so that his purpose would be executed in the best possible way, the Maestro made lines on the primed and re-covered (with the same matte gray) panel the shape of a head and the placement of the shoulders to which the hair fell. Meanwhile, his own tronie of Elias-Christ—which he would execute on the canvas—would face forward and, as he worked, he would decide on the level of his gaze, although he already assumed it would have a different orientation but should also be facing something beyond the earthly. He would seek out the gaze of someone who, from his humanity, was already seeing the announced glory that was taken away from him during the thirty-three years in which he had to suffer, as a man, all sorrows and frustrations, including betrayal, humiliation, and death. “As a man … The man who on the cross asked his father why he needed to go through those difficulties.”<
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Elias, conscious of how much was at play, set himself to the task. Following the Maestro’s guidelines, he finished outlining the face, the hair, and the downward curve of the shoulders, leaving the space for the features in reserve. He then worked on what would be the background, filling in the matte red-orange with hints of ocher that had so intrigued him, since the Maestro did not tend to use it for that purpose. Elias at last discovered the painter’s purpose: to take depth away from the piece, to give it its own light without working on sources of light and helping to highlight what would be the face. Beyond making it stand out, making it look out toward the spectator.
While the Maestro advanced in his experiments, frequently demanding that his model look him in the eyes, with his chin straight or raised, Elias barely advanced with his own creation. The hair would be the most difficult to get down. From there, he went down to the lower corner where the bust would go, covered with the earthen red tunic, marked by some deep brown folds. “Close the collar of the shirt,” the Maestro said to him at some point. “Don’t move the attention to other places: the face is the objective.”
“Can I see your painting, Maestro?”
“No, not yet. I am the one who wants to see yours finished. Let’s go.”
The day on which he focused at last on depicting the face the Maestro wanted to see, Elias understood how much he had learned and how much he still had left to learn. He had to achieve the face of a man illuminated by the interior light of his divine condition. He worked on the beard, outlined the chin, and concentrated on the mouth. Over the upper lip he met the challenge of the mustache, sparse but visible. His own nose then revealed itself to be unknown to him, as if he were looking for the first time at that protuberance that had always accompanied him, so often sketched but suddenly declaring itself foreign. He looked at the Maestro’s nose, flattened, increasingly fleshier, and wanted to have one like that. The one the mirror handed him seemed too anonymous, vulgarly perfect, definitively Jewish. Delicately and painstakingly, he brought to the panel the image delivered to him by the mirror and was almost satisfied. The forehead and arch of the eyes, crowned by the eyebrows, were less problematic for him, and he was able to work them out after a few consultations with the Maestro. And he assumed that he had arrived at the great challenge, the eyes and the gaze.
By that point, the Maestro had already finished the bulk of his work, which he decided to leave aside before making any final touches, for which he did not require Elias: only the demands of his art, his interior vision of the model, and his own processing of the Christ pursued through the living face of the young man. Elias could at last see the small canvas worked on by the painter and was shocked: that face was his, or not, in reality it ended up being more than his, and, for this reason, at the same time it was not. The gaze tilted upward set him to examining nowhere in particular, or perhaps somewhere that for the rest of men could be nowhere, and for that reason offered a powerful feeling of transcendence, of breaking with human limits, to glimpse the infinite and unknown. Without a doubt, it was he himself, Elias Ambrosius Montalbo de Ávila, but reborn, made divine in life, one would say, thanks to the Maestro’s paintbrush.
Ashamed, he looked at his other face, pictured on the wood but still lacking eyes, and told himself that he would never reach the celestial heights through which the Maestro’s artistic creation moved. Although he immediately reproached himself for his exaggerated vanity: very few men in the world had reached those heights, and that had not kept Veronese, Leonardo, Titian, Raphael, Tintoretto, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Velázquez from painting, each at his own level, but with care and beauty. Right there, in Amsterdam, hundreds of men dipped their paintbrushes every day, wondering whether or not to compete with the drama and force of that genius or with the sweetness and delicacy of Vermeer of Delft or the detailed exquisiteness of Frans Hals—but these men were committed to their art.
“I’ll leave you so you don’t get distracted,” the Maestro said to him, on an afternoon at the end of August, as he removed his apron. “You’re doing well. Now, work until you’re exhausted. When you can’t keep going, give a shout and I will help you. But before that, I should tell you two things: first, I don’t want the gaze of a God; second, we are searching for what no one has found: a living God … And, incidentally, I also wanted to tell you that you are already a painter and I am proud of you.” And without giving the young man time to react, he threw his apron in a corner and left the studio.
* * *
When the Maestro focused on making the final touches to the panel and canvas, they reached their definitive pictorial perfection, having attained a tangible warmth and a quality that was simultaneously unsettlingly earthly and transcendental. The two Christs, different but united by a clear family resemblance, at last exuded the desired humanity following the exercise of plucking them from reality with that corporeal condition intact. In the final phase, the painter had insisted on his purpose of conferring on them the exact balance, known only to him, that their gazes should offer: Elias’s Christ looked inward, in contemplation of his own unfathomable world, while the Maestro’s was looking outward, searching for the infinite and unreachable. It did not surprise Elias that, once the pieces were finished, the Maestro decided not to use either of the two heads as a reference for the image of Christ that, behind a table, would break bread before the pilgrims at Emmaus. “I have something different in mind,” he said, as if that were perfectly normal. But, to feed the incommensurate joy amid which the young man was living, the Maestro made a decision capable of surpassing Elias’s expectations: according to the workshop’s custom, whenever warranted by the work of the student, he would sign the Christ created by Elias as his and, at some point, offer it for sale. By contrast, on the version he had sketched on the canvas, he would always place the initials of his name, and would present it as a gift to the apprentice, as recompense for his efforts in that search, but, above all, as recognition for the achievements of the young Jew who had arrived at his house four years prior, armed only with enthusiasm, a painter capable of going to the market with the work bearing the signature of the Maestro.
Elias, surprised and moved by that recognition and the Maestro’s seldom seen gesture of gifting an apprentice a work of his, patiently waited until the end of the day, devoted to collecting and washing paintbrushes, placing easels, making space to accommodate the linen that, the following day, he himself would begin to prime in the company of the German Christoph Paudiss, at that moment the most outstanding of the students welcomed in the workshop. It would be the linen on which the Maestro would begin to work on his new version of Pilgrims at Emmaus, with which, for some reason he would not confess, he had been so obsessed for several months (almost as obsessed as he was with the young Hendrickje Stoffels, who day by day was taking over areas previously reigned over by Mme. Dircx).
As soon as the Maestro declared the day’s work finished, Elias went running out to Jodenbreestraat and up Sint Antoniesbreestraat, passing proudly in front of the houses where other painters had lived (Pieter Lastman, Paulus Potter)—more famous, but painters like him—and the building where the merchant Hendrick Uylenburgh lived (at some point, he should speak with him), in the direction of De Waag and, from there, the house of Mariam Roca. In his hand, rolled up, he was carrying the small linen signed with a long R and a very small v, the linen that, after so much anxiety, had turned into the laurel wreath of his success and, very soon, would turn into the source of infinite disgrace.
As he walked with his fiancée around the Spui Square, in the direction of the banks of the Singel and the fresh air that always ran over that canal, Elias told her of the latest events, so transcendent for him. Mariam, more worried than happy, listened to him in silence, weighing perhaps the dimensions of the responsibilities and actions in which the young man had entangled himself. When they were seated on one of the wooden trunks that would soon be moved toward the Dam Square to be used in some of the construction being carried o
ut there in a rush, Elias Ambrosius, taking advantage of the last light of that August afternoon, could not resist the push of his pride and vanity any longer and dared to unfold, in the middle of the street, the small linen that was his greatest treasure.
When Mariam Roca saw the face of her lover copied on the canvas, she had a small shock: that figure was her Elias Ambrosius, but it was also, without any doubt, the face established by the Christians as the man they considered the Messiah.
“It’s very beautiful, Elias,” she said. “But it’s a heresy,” she added, and asked him to roll it up again. “What are you going to do with that?”
“For now, hide it away.”
Heretics Page 38