Nostalgia

by Jonathan Buckley

  ‘Oh?’ she responds, as if being pestered at a bus stop by a crank, albeit one who has just made a half-interesting remark.

  He tells her that mass can be defined by tonal contrasts.

  ‘So you paint?’ asks the silver-haired woman.

  ‘Yes, I do,’ answers Gideon.

  ‘Are you here on holiday too?’

  ‘No, I live here,’ he replies.

  ‘Lucky you,’ she says, an opinion seconded by all.

  Then, though he tries to stop himself, he says. ‘My name is Gideon Westfall.’ After a delay of four of five seconds, the name achieves a reaction from one of the party: a tiny and tremulous woman who has hitherto been concentrating with apparent anguish on her labours. ‘The exhibition in the town hall,’ she says, with a quick glance, as though answering a quiz master. ‘I haven’t seen it yet,’ she adds, ‘but I will.’ Mrs Smock hasn’t seen it yet, either. ‘I’ll be going, of course,’ she assures him, at which point, to make things worse, Luca Fabris puts in an appearance, gliding like Nosferatu up to Gideon’s shoulder. Solemn as a true connoisseur, he peruses the picture of the Redentore, which its creator has just made irredeemable by dropping a blob of too dense colour onto damp paper. Father Fabris addresses the dauber: he commends her work, and the woman actually blushes. He gives Gideon a look which requests support for his praise, which Gideon, withdrawing, withholds.

  7.6

  Founded in thanksgiving for the town’s deliverance from the Black Death, Il Santissimo Redentore – the church of the Most Sacred Redeemer – stands on the east side of Piazza del Mercato, on land that had previously been the site of a hostel used by itinerant merchants. The foundations were laid in 1360, but work seems to have come to a halt almost immediately, and to have proceeded irregularly thereafter. Though the church is not large, it was not until 1454 that it could be consecrated, and even then the exterior was far from being finished, with nothing more than the portal’s marble pediment and flanking semi-columns to relieve the bare brick. At some point in the sixteenth century, the façade was covered with a thick rendering of plaster; this was the last change to be made to the exterior of the Redentore, and the unimpressive appearance of the church has been an occasion of intermittent controversy ever since. Locally the church is sometimes referred to as Il Capannone del Redentore – the shed of the Redeemer.

  The interior is bright and austere, with tall windows of plain glass, eight columns of dark grey pietra serena on each side of the nave, and white plaster covering the walls. The painting on the high altar, Christ Enthroned, is by an artist named Andrea di Simone; documents in the Bonvalori archives indicate that it was commissioned by Ercole Bonvalori in 1418, but nothing is known about Andrea di Simone, nor has he been attributed with the authorship of any other work. On the back of the altarpiece there is a Madonna and Child with Saints, in which Ercole Bonvalori is shown on the right, with his two legitimate sons, kneeling in front of Saint George and Saint Zeno, facing his wife and daughters, whose protectors are Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Lucy. This is the oldest painting in the Redentore. The altarpieces in the aisles are mediocre, but one of them, on the third altar on the right-hand side, is at least startling: painted in 1453 by Il Beccafico (1428–1467), it depicts a disfigured Job, writhing in anguish amid a profusion of serpent-like plants. Numerous tombs of the Falcucci family, dating from the fifteenth century to the seventeenth, are to be seen in this aisle.

  The Redentore has one other arresting work of art. Should the sacristan be available, ask if you might be allowed to see La Vecchia. This is a sculptural altarpiece, in stucco, which was created in 1755 by Gianantonio and Giandomenico Colombini. The plague, fleeing before the figure of Christ, is personified as a naked old woman, whose nostrils and mouth are oozing worms, millipedes and other insects. For a few months the sculpture was displayed in the left transept of the church, but such was the public’s revulsion that it was soon removed to a room in the base of the bell tower, where it has stayed. One other item is worth a look: in the right transept, set into the wall, there’s a crystal box containing a relic of Saint Zeno – a hemp cloak that was acquired in Rome, at great cost, by Domenico Vielmi and donated to the church in August 1424, the month of his death.

  7.7

  The Last Supper

  2003

  Oil-tempera on canvas; 275cm x 365cm

  Private collection, Moscow

  The Last Supper, Gideon Westfall’s only extant painting with an unambiguously Christian subject, is also the largest piece he ever painted.

  It was not painted to a commission, but it had been the artist’s intention to offer the painting as a gift to the church of the Redentore. This donation was first proposed to Father Luca Fabris by Robert Bancourt, who showed a sheaf of sketches to the priest in order to give him an idea of the general conception. Father Fabris admired the drawings; he was immensely appreciative of Mr Westfall’s gesture; but it would, he said, be somewhat difficult for him to accept, as an adornment to the Redentore, a work of art by a man who was not of the faith. This objection had been anticipated, and an answer rehearsed: Guido Reni had been an inveterate gambler, but had nonetheless been hired by the Vatican; Carlo Crivelli abducted a married woman, yet was commissioned by numerous churches, as was Filippo Lippi, who was a lecher and a violator of religious vows; Veit Stoss, sculptor of the great altar of St Mary’s Church in Kraków, was a forger who was branded for his deception; Leone Leoni was a man of terrible violence, yet Pius IV paid him to create a monument to Gian Giacomo Medici, the pope’s brother, in Milan’s cathedral; and Caravaggio, of course, was a murderer, but does anyone think that the church of Sant’Agostino in Rome is in any way besmirched by the presence of Caravaggio’s Madonna di Loreto? After further perusal of the sketches, Father Fabris consented to view the picture whenever it might be finished.

  More than a year passed, in which time the painting underwent considerable revision. Many representations of the Last Supper depict the moment at which Christ, having broken the bread, tells his followers: Take, eat: this is my body (Mark 14:22). Others show the moment at which he bids his disciples to drink, saying: This cup is the new covenant in my blood; this do ye, as oft as ye drink it, in remembrance of me (I Corinthians 11:25). Westfall’s Last Supper does not illustrate either of these utterances, nor does it illustrate Christ’s announcement: I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me (John 13:21). And Christ in this painting is not delivering the sermon that is recorded in chapters fourteen to sixteen of the Gospel of St John. Westfall’s Christ is not speaking: he is looking outward, rather than at any of the Apostles, and they – with one exception – are not looking at Him. Some are in conversation, some are lost in thought, some seem to be doing nothing more than looking around the room in which they are gathered. The table is bare. The betrayal has yet to be declared.

  Six disciples are seated on each side of Christ, and none of them has his back to us. Other than Christ’s face, however, Judas’s face is the only one in full light: the rest are in shade, or obscured by hands, or have been turned away from us. Judas is seated next to Christ, and is looking at Him. A lamp hangs directly above the head of Christ, whose eyes are darkened by the shadow of his brows. He is looking in our direction, but not directly at us. What His expression conveys above all, to use the artist’s own words, is a sense of inconceivable loneliness.

  Father Luca Fabris, upon being shown the finished painting, praised its verisimilitude. One could feel the texture of the wood and breathe the air of that place, he remarked. The quality of the portraiture, he said, was astonishing: ‘These are the faces of real men. One knows them, immediately.’ But unfortunately, in the view of Father Luca Fabris, these faces were not the faces of Our Lord and His Apostles. Judas in particular was unacceptable: he was, to put it simply, too simpatico. Father Fabris (translated by Robert) reminded Mr Westfall that Dante had placed Judas in the deepest pit of the Inferno, in the claws and jaws of Satan himself. He is the vilest of the da
mned, and yet here, in this picture, we see a man for whom, it would appear, we are being invited to feel compassion. The artist in reply observed that without Judas there would have been no Crucifixion, and without the Crucifixion there is no redemption. Father Fabris quoted the words of Our Lord, recorded by St Mark: It would be better for him if he had not been born. Replied the artist: ‘I do not disagree. This is what Judas is thinking, before the words have been spoken. Hence my sympathy.’

  The figure of Christ was also unacceptable, Father Fabris continued. His face is not the face of Our Redeemer, he said. It has force but it lacks majesty. The painter responded that the model had been a young man he had encountered in Puglia, a young man who was all but unschooled and had suffered great hardships. He was a fighter, like Christ, and his face was expressive of a soul that was wise and – dare he say it? – profoundly good. This was, in short, the perfect face for the carpenter’s son who was God in human form. Father Fabris regretted that they were not seeing the same picture. ‘And Judas resembles you, a little, I think,’ he added.

  Father Fabris was correct in this identification: Judas Iscariot was based on studies that the artist had made of himself, some twenty years earlier. Bartholomew was a guest at the Ottocento hotel, a specialist in Etruscan pottery, from Mannheim; James, son of Alphaeus, was a nephew of a friend of Luisa Fava; a friend of Ennio Pacetti provided the figure of Andrew; Simon the Canaanite was a lorry driver, encountered at a pizzeria in Siena; Simon Peter was derived from a photograph of pilgrims at Lourdes, as was St Philip; John and his brother James were twins from Belgium, who attended the 2002 Festa di San Zeno; Thomas was a somewhat masculine Dutch woman, sketched in the Caffè del Corso; Matthew was a furniture restorer from Anghiari; and Thaddeus, whose face was almost entirely hidden, was modelled on Robert Bancourt.

  Father Fabris would not take the painting. This decision was inevitable, in the opinion of Carlo Pacetti, who had told Gideon Westfall that The Last Supper was perhaps the finest thing he had ever created, and that Father Fabris was an imbecile. The Church was a corporation of imbeciles, he went on, gathering momentum. There is nothing more depraved than Christianity, said Carlo; it is the negation of every healthy and honest instinct; pain and misery are what keeps it alive; the Church is a death-obsessed cult which has as its banner the image of a tortured God, bleeding to death on a cross. The Christ in this Last Supper, he told the painter, is no sacrificial victim: he is a captain; he has come through a long battle and foresees harder battles to come. Who is this King of glory? It is the Lord strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle – this was the man that Westfall had portrayed. This painting has something to say, Carlo Pacetti told him. It is a thinking picture. But a man like Fabris does not think. He is, like all priests, a purveyor of nonsense.

  One afternoon, soon after The Last Supper had been rejected, Carlo Pacetti, passing Father Fabris in the street, remarked that the maestro’s painting was much too good for the Redentore. Father Fabris began to explain that it was not a question of quality. The painting was a fine piece of work, he said, but its spirit was not in keeping with the teachings of the Church. ‘The last true Christian died on the Cross,’ murmured Carlo Pacetti; he wished the priest good day and went on his way.

  7.8

  Robert is waiting at the loggia, with a holdall between his feet. ‘I have a proposal,’ he says. ‘A picnic by the pool. It’s hot, and it’s your last afternoon, and there’s bugger all else to do here. Nice pool. Shame to waste the opportunity. What do you reckon?’ He gives her a mock-chirpy grin, like an impersonation of a stallholder encouraging her to buy more stuff than she needs.

  She points out that, nice though it may be to take a dip, she doesn’t have a swimming costume.

  ‘Sorted,’ he answers, unzipping the bag, to show a carrier of picnic food, rolled towels, and a new one-piece, electric blue. ‘Courtesy of Gideon, from Luisa’s shop,’ he explains, draping the swimsuit over the holdall. ‘The size will be right, I’m sure. Gideon can take a woman’s measurements in five seconds from a range of fifty yards.’

  ‘Interesting colour,’ she observes. ‘Is this his way of telling me to lighten up?’

  ‘He thinks it’ll work well on you,’ says Robert, as if merely conveying a message.

  ‘Does he now?’ The heat is extreme; the idea of the water is alluring. ‘Gideon’s not joining us?’ she inquires.

  ‘You joke,’ says Robert.

  They call at the hotel for her suntan lotion and book. From the shade of the Corso they move into the blaze of Piazza della Libertà, where the wings of the angel on the war memorial seem to twitch in the heat. When a car drives past its tyres roll on the road with a gluey sound. They pass through the Porta di Massa, into air that feels even hotter, with not the slightest movement in it. Robert, unaffected by the heat, saunters beside her. ‘And how was your morning?’ he asks.

  ‘I went to the museum.’ She does not want to talk; her lungs feel as if they are half their normal size and her legs weigh a hundred pounds apiece.

  ‘Enthralling, isn’t it?’

  ‘I liked the carvings,’ she says. ‘The ivory things.’

  He has some information about Ridolfi: his plant collection; his pickled animals and monsters; his nocturnal expeditions, wearing his lantern-hat. It’s hard to absorb any facts; her brain has become a gas.

  But they are soon at the gate of the villa. It opens onto a gravel slope, which turns tightly at an embankment of lavender and broom, onto the travertine paving that surrounds the pool. There are five white plastic sunbeds beside the water; two have canopies, and Claire drags one of these into the narrow triangle of shade which is cast by the retaining wall of the gravel slope. Robert drops the swimsuit and a towel against the wall and goes over to the other side. He’s in the pool before she’s finished getting the angle of the sunbed right. She watches him for a length: he swims like a man who has set himself a target before getting back to work; his stroke is inelegant and strenuous.

  Having tucked the towel securely into her armpits, Claire undresses. The procedure takes some time – it’s as though she imagines herself in the midst of twenty men, all eager for a peek. Eventually the towel comes off. She removes her sunglasses and stands beside the sunbed, arms outstretched, requesting a verdict. The cut of the swimsuit is matronly, but the colour does look good on her, and her legs are surprising: solid, undimpled, like a pale-flesh version of a Maillol woman. He’s seen footballers with weaker legs.

  Head bowed, she regards herself. ‘From here, I have to say, the view is not great. Blackpool beach, 1950.’

  ‘The colour’s good.’

  ‘It’s OK, I suppose,’ she says. With a finger she traces the seam of the leg, as if appraising the thing on a mannequin rather than on her own body. She sits on the sunbed to apply lotion to her face, neck, shoulders, arms, hands, legs, feet. This takes some time. At last she approaches the edge of the pool, doing springy little steps on the hot stone. He anticipates the way she’ll enter the water: she’ll sit on the side, dabble her feet, and slide herself in. ‘How deep is it in the middle?’ she asks.

  ‘Over my head.’

  She nods and immediately dives in, with as small a splash as a cormorant would make. With each pull of her arms her shoulders rise clear of the water; each kick gives her a surge; her face, swooping up from the water, is as composed as if she were performing a gentle breathing exercise. For twenty minutes she goes up and down, turning with a perfect somersault and surfacing a third of the way down the pool; she’s not competing – she swims as if alone in the water – but again and again she overtakes him, though she’s swimming breast-stroke and he’s using front crawl.

  He rests at the deep end, with his forearms on the paving and his chin on his hands, facing the hills. A minute later she stops beside him, in the same posture, leaving a good space between their elbows; her breathing is light. ‘Gideon told me something this morning,’ she remarks. ‘He said he’s not had a relationship with
a woman since his twenties. A proper relationship. Is that true?’

  ‘Wouldn’t know,’ he answers. ‘Haven’t known him that long.’

  ‘OK. But for as long as you’ve known him – nothing?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Not Luisa?’

  ‘Definitely not Luisa.’

  ‘He’s never mentioned anyone else, from before you started working for him?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Amazing,’ she says. ‘He’s not exactly a catch – but still, being an artist gives you a kind of glamour, doesn’t it? And plenty of opportunities. Artist and model, and all that. Nice-looking women taking their kit off. Things tend to happen, I should think. But with Gideon – nothing?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Her eyes, aimed without focus on the middle distance, seem to indicate a slight and begrudging reappraisal in Gideon’s favour. ‘I thought he might have been exaggerating,’ she says.

  Cross-legged she sits beside the sunbed, reading her biography of JFK. She holds the book open in her flattened hands, which rest on her knees, as steady as a lectern; her back and neck are straight and her shoulders level; she is perfectly, admirably still. He cannot stop himself asking: ‘You do yoga, by any chance?’

  ‘Yes,’ she answers, without looking up.

  ‘Thought so,’ he says.

  Nothing more is said for a quarter of an hour, then she puts the book down and stands up. ‘God, this thing really is hideous,’ she says, snapping a leg of the costume as she comes to the side of the pool.