Fire Year

by Jason K. Friedman

Jonathan Weitz had overheard the joke four times already, and he did not think it was funny. For two years he’d been the Collection’s associate curator and still had no office, just a desk outside Adger’s enormous portrait-lined room. Jon sat behind a half wall that revealed his head and yet made him invisible to the director whenever he came to see Adger. The half wall was topped by a ledge that Adger leaned on as he made demands of Jon and fraught small talk. The best Jon could do was fake a laugh when Adger, after escorting out one of his Ladies, tried the joke on him.

  It wasn’t the extravagance of Adger Boatwright’s closet that bothered Jon, nor even the fact of it. It hadn’t been so long since that freezing New Haven night when Jon walked around the Old Campus half a dozen times before seeking out the college’s Counselor of Homosexuals, who sat in a former chapel, waiting. As for Adger’s insistence on self-invention, even if he had no talent for it—well, why not? No, what annoyed Jon was that Adger Boatwright, curator of the Harrington Collection, keeper of the Twenty Renaissance Gems, knew nothing about art. Oh, he loved beautiful paintings, especially portraits, especially when hung in a room full of exquisite furniture, preferably in England. But it was this very appreciation of a painting that blinded him to it.

  A painting’s provenance—who had owned it, where it had been shown, how much it had sold for at which auction house—fascinated Adger so much that it had given him the idea for his most recent show at the Harrington. Adger had chosen from the Collection the five paintings with the ritziest pasts. Antonio Boltraffio’s Portrait of a Lady with Pearls was displayed alongside a gratuitous and absurd model of the parquet-floored room of the “English treasurehouse” where it had hung until the collection was dispersed after the Second World War. There were fingernail-sized paintings on its walls. Giorgione’s Portrait of a Girl—owned by the Duke of Edinburgh! The show was resolutely anti-intellectual, its tone dizzily self-congratulatory. A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words was coming down just as Jon got there but the museum was still abuzz; it was the most popular show in the history of any similar-sized institution in the country. Adger was golden and insufferable.

  Part lightweight travelogue, part flimsy mystery story, part This Old House, the show had so much stuff in it that you could easily overlook the paintings themselves. After an hour alone with his new boss’s show, Jon wondered if this wasn’t the point. Great art was easier not to look at than to truly take in.

  In graduate school he had been considered old-fashioned, and in a fusty field like art history this was saying something. Like the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, Jon believed the role of criticism was to illuminate the work of art itself. His doctoral research on Pope Urban VIII was sound, but he used it not to examine the nature of papal patronage but instead to appreciate the marvels the pope had commissioned—the churches, the sculpture, the loggias, the frescoes. The gift of man’s creation to the city—this was the sacred thing, and the pope knew it. Jon was young and at Yale, he was supposed to be interested in poststructuralism, postcolonialism, post-Lacanian psychoanalysis—something current, something French. He could have pretended. Instead he became like an actress who won’t keep herself blond enough or thin enough; his prospects in the academy dried up. He got interviews but not jobs; then he stopped getting interviews.

  It was for the best, he reminded himself. Unlike his peers he was not begging for visiting lectureships at poverty wages. He had been spared this particular set of humiliations. He was glad to be working for someone who had never heard of Foucault. And yet he was having a hard time sharing Adger’s vision of the museum of art as a museum of artifacts, a kind of grandmother’s attic full of interesting juxtapositions.

  As for the joke—well, the show hadn’t even happened yet and Adger Boatwright was already burying the paintings. Because the joke wasn’t just dumb, it shut out the truth, or at least the pursuit of it. Why had it taken Angelo Veneto five hundred years to get a show together? Never mind that the very idea of a show, a retrospective, was a modern one—presumably Adger knew that. Angelo was no Leonardo but he was as good as his more-famous contemporaries Bellini and Giorgione, who may have invented the modern portrait—the portrait that reveals “character” and “personality”—but never took it as far as Angelo did. Look at a Giorgione portrait and you think This kid’s head is in the clouds. Or: He’s looking at me but he seems very far away. And you feel secure in going further: just as you can’t not read a billboard that suddenly looms before you, you can’t help knowing what Giorgione’s subjects are thinking. How out of sorts I feel today! How life weighs on me in my youth! How strangely nice it feels to have Holofernes’s head under my foot! Captions suggest themselves. But the visual expression of specific thoughts wasn’t the point; introspection itself became the subject of these paintings.

  That was enough of an accomplishment for Giorgione—but not for Angelo. You want to shield your face, not guess what his subjects are thinking. Painted in three-quarters view, they stare at you or just beyond—they seem to have a secret they’re daring you to figure out. They stand armed before landscapes; scraps of text hang and curl. You stare until you lose yourself in this labyrinth of symbols, which come into the painting from the usual places—family history, classical myth, the Bible—and emerge as elements of the subject’s psyche. Spend time with the subject of the Collection’s Portrait of a Gentleman in a Red Cape and you suspect his arrogance masks something that he’d rather not confront and that you too should avoid. He knows you’re looking at him, he’ll tolerate that. But if he knew you were focusing on the worn white codpiece appearing in the hole cut out of his black tunic—where the eye is naturally drawn, where it is impossible not to look—he wouldn’t hesitate to use his stick on you.

  You’re lured, trapped, threatened, shamed—all at once. At least this was how Jon felt. Caravaggios affected him with their mysterious play of shadow and light, the gorgeous embattled flesh offering itself up to you—but when faced with, say, some street urchin pretending to be St. John the Baptist, Jon could never quite get past responding No, you’re not! The Angelos affected him as no paintings ever had. How could he hold a light up to these paintings, as he was charged to do, when they seemed intent on his submission? It was distracting. It was nuts. No wonder Angelo Veneto had never had a retrospective: the last thing you’d want to do is end up in a room full of these things.

  Adger Boatwright obviously thought otherwise. The Ladies went for that first Angelo because he had them focus on the painting’s beauty to the exclusion of all else. Sure, he looks like he’s going to kill you, but so what? He’s Italian, and hot! Maybe Adger truly thought the sexiness of Angelo’s paintings trumped all else. Whatever his attitude, thinking had little to do with it. The idea of the show had come to him in a vision. At the Louvre—where else? He was standing before the Portrait of a Boy with a Hammer, one of that museum’s two Angelos, and he imagined all the painter’s subjects crowding around him. Their various props—hammer, staff, horse-head sword—clattered and swung.

  An Angelo Veneto show. It may have been a good idea—but how to pull it off?

  The paintings are difficult, they generate a sense of unease—but there was another problem with mounting an Angelo show: almost nothing is known about him. Where and when he was born: no record. Where and when he died: ditto. His signature, on those paintings he signed, usually includes some reference to Venice, but there’s evidence he was born in Padua and moved to Venice as a child. His signature may simply have indicated his association with the Venetian school of painting. Even the safe bet that some time between birth and death Angelo lived in Venice has been challenged by one art historian’s claim that Angelo’s adult life was spent in Turin. He may have abandoned city life altogether; there was a plague in Italy during his lifetime, and young men who liked to have their portraits painted fled the cities to avoid it. Homosexuals claim Angelo as their own, and certainly history shows no trace of a wife.

  Luckily for the Harrington—cruciall
y for it—an art historian at the University of Bologna had devoted her life to reconstructing his life on this foundation of lacunae, her masonry the handful of available facts, her runny mortar a mixture of gossip and guess. Before Gloria Scipi took up the cause there had been no books on Angelo, but over the course of five centuries he did come up from time to time. He had been mentioned in an eighteenth-century diary—writing of Angelo’s Portrait of a Gentleman with Leopard and Lamb, its author, an Englishman on the grand tour, remarked on “an extravagant, almost garish portrait by an unknown painter that nevertheless stirs the sentiments in profound and unusual ways.” An undated photograph of a painting thought to be a copy of a now-lost Angelo turned up at a Paris flea market, showing a young man gripping the head of his sword while three ringless hands, the gender of which cannot be determined from the photograph, reach blindly from behind a maroon curtain. A feminist art historian in the 1970s cited the prettiness of Angelo’s noblemen as evidence of his destabilization of gender roles. In the 1980s various Queer Studies personnel, taking androgyny for homosexuality as Renaissance viewers themselves likely did, hoped that Angelo’s bold work would inspire resistance to the queer-unfriendly Reagan Administration.

  Many of the paintings themselves had been effaced—five-hundred-year-old paint smothered by century-old paint, inscriptions on hats and rings abraded and illegible.

  Gloria Scipi did not let the absence of hard verifiable data deter her; on the contrary, it empowered her to set straight what little record there was and to make up the rest. Her monograph on Angelo, Angelo Veneto: Painter of the Soul, has a tone of weary authority and nonchalant erudition varnished by the glamour of discovery. She dutifully summarizes the few lesser efforts—so-and-so’s hypothesis that Angelo worked in Brescia, so-and-so’s claim that he was homosexual—and dismisses them all. She was responsible for identifying as Angelo’s work the portrait of a gentleman with a razor-sharp pen that for centuries had been misattributed to Giorgione. Two of the chapters of her book were written as detective stories. In one scene she troops through a field in Fiesole to track down the landscape seen through the little arched window of the misattributed Portrait of a Very Young Gentleman, a landscape that Giorgione could never have seen but that Angelo knew intimately, though he never depicted it in another painting. There is no uncertainty in Angelo Veneto: Painter of the Soul, just Gloria Scipi bearing the truth.

  It had occurred to Jon that maybe it was a poor translation that made the book, important as it was, seem so ridiculous. He had wanted to give Gloria Scipi the benefit of the doubt. But now, sitting at his little desk in his nonoffice with her catalog essay, he took it back. No translation could be this bad without some help from the original.

  Adger had never liked the essay to begin with, and not just because it was so hard to follow. Gloria Scipi, the world’s leading (and only) expert on Angelo, was never going to produce anything other than a scholarly introduction to the portraits of the great little-known cinquecento painter Angelo Veneto. Adger could edit it by making the Collection’s Gentleman with a Red Cape seem as important as The Last Supper. In a foreword to the catalog he could go on and on about this being the painter’s first one-man show; he could remind readers that it was being mounted not in Italy or New York but right here, in Atlanta, Georgia’s, finest little museum. He could make his joke: there’s hope for us all! But he could never expect Gloria Scipi’s catalog essay to easily support the kind of high-concept blockbuster he wanted. He could never have asked her for that; she had too much dignity. And he had too much respect for her.

  He gave the dirty work to Jon, instructing him to edit Gloria Scipi’s catalog essay so that it made Angelo “come alive for the average person.” Adger wanted to see her discussion of the Harrington’s own Angelo, the hunk with the red cape, on page one of the final version of her essay, though it didn’t appear until page three of the original.

  Here is how that discussion began:

  In the Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape (1515) in the Harrington Collection of Atlanta, this insouciance becomes a brutal male disdain for an unseen person who besides can only be a stand-in for the painter and, by turn, the viewer himself. Gone is Angelo’s lighthearted and surface approach to the male gaze from the first decade of the century. We have penetrated the flesh to find the soul that lies beneath. This will to interiority that manifests itself in Giorgione more often than not as sentimentality, becomes in the Atlanta portrait something deeper and more shocking. Soul is the best word here, despite the grave error of intellectual slippage committed by Jacques Moutard in his unjustly revered essay on the late quattrocento and the early cinquecento, L’me et l’esprit de l’age. The concept of the soul—in Italian, anima—could only exist in a religious context at this time, whereas Moutard sees it more generally as meaning “personality” and “interiority” without doing the necessary intellectual work to make the leap. Although its subject is secular, the overt religious context of the Atlanta portrait is clear. This gentleman’s codpiece is crossed by a crease, a thin black line in the white fabric. This is the cross; the spread attitude of the gentleman’s arms gives us the Christ, hanging.

  Gloria Scipi was actually not all that bad. For instance, she went on to discuss with great authority a few other appearances around this time of the unusual scarlet color of the gentleman’s cape, proving that the Harrington’s portrait had been misdated by a decade. This was not news—she made this discovery years ago. The date she had assigned to the painting was the one that now appeared on the wall beside it. And yet the personal story she recounted—Gloria Scipi hot on the heels of the color red—still riveted.

  Nonetheless—what was he going to do with this dog’s breakfast! Jon had a self-immolating fantasy of opening the essay, as instructed, with the discussion of the Collection’s portrait. Unaltered and unintroduced. The Christ, hanging.

  Adger Boatwright waited for a cab to take him to the airport. He was going to Houston with a very young man. (Beat.) Giorgione’s Portrait of a Boy. This was the joke currently being inflicted on the Ladies, as Jon knew from sitting outside his office all day. The Parmann Museum of Art was putting on a show of Renaissance portraits—Every Face Tells a Story—and Adger was the courier for the Giorgione in the Collection. Three blissful days without his boss—Jon would have time to brood and think, he would have space, he would figure this thing out.

  The door to Adger’s office was open a crack, and through it Jon could see him at the mirror, an early-nineteenth-century dressing glass of mahogany and white pine supposedly rescued from the ancestral plantation as it burned. Adger straightening his tie, licking his fingers and rubbing them all over his hair, checking his breath with his hand, trying out various faces. Jon knew that before any social engagement his boss also wrote out questions he might be asked, and the answers to them, on little scraps of paper that he stuffed into his pockets.

  Adger emerged and leaned on the half wall, his big white head perfectly eclipsing the fluorescent light. His tie was crooked and blond curls shot out at strange angles around his ears. He reached down and said, “Shake my hand.”

  “Why?”

  “Come on, shake my hand, be a team player, for Christ’s sake.”

  Jon took Adger’s big white moist hand, with its clear-polished nails, in his own.

  “Come on, shake!” Adger said, squeezing.

  “I am.”

  “That’s how you shake hands?” Adger asked. “Just kind of flopping it up against somebody’s hand like that, like it’s being beached there? Why didn’t I know that? I must have shaken hands with you in the interview, didn’t I?”

  “Uh—”

  “I mean nobody wants to shake a hand that they think is dead, do they?”

  “I think it’s pretty obvious my hand is alive.”

  “Well, you better start showing some conviction if you want to be sure of that.”

  “Next time I will,” Jon said, wanting to turn back to his computer screen. />
  “So what’d you think of mine?” Adger sheepishly asked.

  “Your what?”

  “My handshake. Do you think it showed conviction? But at the same time it wasn’t too macho and bullying, was it?”

  Jon smiled. Unlike the Ladies, he was immune to Adger’s charm. But he could be moved by his insecurity, how much rehearsing he did before walking out onto the stage of life. “You’ll be fine.”

  Adger reached over and snatched up Gloria Scipi’s essay from Jon’s desk. This was another good thing about his boss. The moment you began to have any troubling human feelings for him, he did something maddening to get you immediately over them.

  Jon sighed as Adger shuffled pages.

  “How is this coming along?” Adger asked, removing a jeweled fountain pen from his pocket.

  “It makes no sense.”

  “Well, I know that, that’s what I asked you to do—make sense of it.”

  “I’m trying, but first I have to understand what she’s saying.”

  “Understand, understand.” Adger was turning pages and scribbling. “This isn’t the fucking Ivy League. Just do it!”

  Jon snatched the pages back. The words “seminal masterpiece” now modified the title Portrait of a Gentleman with a Red Cape wherever it appeared.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Adger said. “Lighten up!”

  “Go, Adger. Go to Houston.”

  “At least give me a title,” Adger implored.

  “For the essay? It came with one. ‘Angelo—”

  “Not for the essay. The show.”

  “Well, once I figure out what the show’s about, I’m sure a title will fall into place.”

  “Fall into place? You mean like a silkworm falling out of a mulberry tree and onto your head? Think! You need to come up with the title first. Why do you think anyone goes to a show anyway? No one’s ever heard of Angelo Veneto, you have to sell him. Do you know how I came up with the title A Picture Is Worth a Thousand Words?”