The Chapel

by Michael Downing

  “Brave you,” he began. “I didn’t think anyone would be crazy enough to sign up for three days of me.” He beamed a big smile around the room.

  I fished out the CPOCH schedule. NB: Registration requires attendance on three consecutive days. Registrants for this special series will not be allowed to attend alternative seminars. Enrollment is limited, and Professor Williams will not be able to accommodate newcomers for the Friday or Saturday session. Therefore, please do not reserve a place for this series if you are unable to take full advantage of this opportunity. Every seat in the room was filled. I couldn’t think of any place I’d gone three days in a row without the promise of a paycheck since high school.

  “I thank all of you for turning up today. I beg your pardon for not giving each of you a chance to introduce yourself, but I trust you will nevertheless feel free to shout out questions when you’re confused, or when you sense I am, but we do have a lot of ground to cover, and I reckon if I don’t start in soon I’m going to miss my flight to California in August.” This raised laughter and applause, which he spoke right over. “And after five years at a university in northernmost North America, I am ready to chuck my snowshoes, so I will begin after I ask you—not now, but when we move into the chapel—to please reach under your chairs, where you will find a packet of illustrations and some little notes I hope you will find helpful as supplementary reading, and here we go.”

  He asked us to imagine the front of the chapel, its center cut away to form the chancel arch, the entrance to the sanctuary. He started at the top of that wall, ignoring the controversial wooden panel when he asked us to think of God the Father, sitting in heaven, sending an angel out on a mission, “the start of the story of the birth of Our Lord and Savior,” he said. On either side of that open arch, he reminded us, below the heavens, were two framed frescoes of kneeling figures—the angel Gabriel, on the left of the open arch, and the Virgin, on the right, “enacting the Annunciation of the birth of the christ, conquering space, the divide between heaven and earth, with the word of God.”

  I knew he meant all of this as a tribute to the power of art, but I thought God was getting more credit than Giotto so far.

  A woman said, “Is there a reproduction in the packet we could use as you describe the pictures?”

  Andre said, “There is no accurate reproduction of these frescoes. Which is why we are here and not staring at the screens of our laptops. I’m not asking you to recall the frescoes themselves. We will soon go inside to enjoy them. I’m asking you right now to imagine space.” He then instructed us to skip right past the pair of framed frescoes at the next level down—Judas betraying Jesus on the left, and Elizabeth visiting Mary on the right—“which are part of the larger sequential story that spirals around the chapel, which we will take up soon enough,” he promised. “At the next level down, at about the height of a choir in an ordinary church, is a pair of fictive chapels of uncommon interest to—”

  A man near me yelled, “Fictive?”

  A man near the front turned and yelled, “Fictional.”

  A woman said, “Trompe l’oeil.”

  As if this were an auction, another woman put in a bid. “Made to deceive the eye. It’s a trick-of-perspective painting.”

  “Not a trick,” Andre said. “It is perspective painting. Indeed, it is two perspective paintings made more than a century before the Renaissance painters worked out the proportions that made it possible to do with a mathematical formula what Giotto did with his inspired gaze and his bare hands. We see into those two chapels as we see into the sanctuary and altar through the open space of the chancel arch. But when we look into those fictive chapels, we are seeing through a painted wall. We are creating space where there is none. And what do we see but windows on the back walls of those chapels, and the blueness beyond, and once we register that blue as sky, we accept the actuality of that window and we acknowledge the transparency of that painted window glass, as well as the depth of space in the chapels that contain those windows, and our eyes repeatedly tell our brains that the sky is beyond those windows, and in that moment there is no distinction between the real and the fictive sky, no observable boundary between us and the painted figures, and so we enter the fullness of time, we participate in the creation of sacred space in which there is no separation of the human and the divine, the then and now, the here and hereafter.”

  A woman said, “This is brilliant.”

  Another woman said, “I’m applying to Stanford.”

  “So, you see, it is not a trick,” Andre said. “Those chapels are miraculous. They really are. You see the hand of a genius in them, but you also see the hand of God.”

  A woman a few rows ahead of me said, “What about those of us who don’t believe in God?”

  A man yelled, “Go to Disney World.”

  I sat up straight, hoping to show my allegiance to the other atheist in the room, but the tall men around me deflected my effort.

  The woman said, “But I’m here, not at Disney World.”

  Andre said, “Exactly,” as if maybe it was the hand of God and not a $5,000 check that had reserved her a place among us. This generated a hum of approval.

  I wondered if Giotto hadn’t painted those two chapels as a gift to his benefactor, something no one else in Padua would have, a bravura flourish sure to make the monks next door mad, compensation for the bell tower and the transept with two chapels Enrico Scrovegni was not allowed to build.

  “What does it mean to you if I hold my hands like this?” Andre raised his long, thin arms and extended them toward us, the palms of his hands turned up.

  A man said, “Welcome.”

  A woman said, “I need a hug.”

  Andre said, “And if I do this?” He turned to the side, bent his extended arm, and held the back of his cupped hand to us.

  A man said, “Follow me.”

  A woman said, “Come with me.”

  Another woman said, “Don’t be afraid.”

  Andre bent one knee so his hip jutted toward us, lowered his arm to a forty-five-degree angle from his waist, and held up the palm of his hand, as if he was signaling someone to stop. “And this?”

  A man said, “Keep your distance.”

  “Don’t hurt me,” a woman said.

  “Stay away,” another woman said.

  Andre said, “Noli mi tangere.” He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything. I couldn’t translate the words precisely, but I knew what they meant. T. had struck that very pose when we parted. “Noli mi tangere. Do not touch me. In Giotto’s rendering of the scene, which is where we will begin our time in the chapel this afternoon, Jesus adopts this pose I have adopted. He is dressed in a white robe. He stands at the far right of the frame. He is alone, in an entirely uninhabited space. At the far left, below a sloping run of hills, two angels sit on the wall of his tomb, also robed in white. These are not the little putti who zip and zoom like comets through the skies above the other frescoes, expressing their delight at the Nativity, their anguish at the Crucifixion—”

  “I read that Giotto saw Halley’s Comet.” The woman stood, and then she raised her hand, as if she had not already spoken. She was two rows ahead of me, wearing a handsome ivory blazer. She was tall, and she had shoulder-length auburn hair. “I read that he used it as his inspiration for the Star of Bethlehem. Which makes me wonder if he was implying that there was a rational explanation for the wonders his contemporaries attributed to the hand of God. Which would explain his affixing comet tails on those little angels, maybe.”

  She was the atheist. From behind, she was plausible friend material. I was shuffling in my chair, hoping she might turn around.

  Andre said, “Halley’s Comet did appear in 1301, and we have Italian records of the event. Not in Giotto’s hand, but it is not unlikely he knew of the observations and studied the scientific renderings. But Giotto was not a secular humanist, I’m afraid. What you want to see as a repudiation of the Scripture is interpreted by scholars and
art historians as attribution—Giotto linking observable phenomena to the details recorded in the Gospels. Unlike you, Giotto did not consider science a counterargument to the divine story unfolded in Genesis.”

  I thought he was laying it on pretty thick, even for the holy rollers in the crowd, but a man did say, “Amen.” I could have stood and asked Andre about the Palace of Reason that burned down, and how he accounted for Giotto’s secular version of the heavens, but the atheist was still standing, and I was hoping she might have a few more unpleasant things to say.

  Andre said, “For now, let’s say it was in the air, and when we are in the chapel, we can decide for ourselves whether that is a comet or a star above the manger—or both. We have a few more ideas to discuss before we move inside.”

  The standing woman didn’t take the hint. “I guess I do just take a more humanist approach to the paintings.”

  “Now, you are simply talking about yourself, not Giotto,” Andre said. “Your approach will alter your perspective, but it won’t alter what is on the walls.”

  Among the murmured approval for this rebuke, I heard one man say, “Good for him.”

  The woman didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. I thought she might try to leave the room, but she just stood there.

  Andre said, “The angels seated on the wall of the tomb in Giotto’s Noli Mi Tangere are not comet-tailed putti. They are angels of a higher order.” He stopped and smiled patronizingly.

  Everyone turned to the secular humanist, willing her to sit down and stay down.

  Andre raised and lowered his hand slowly.

  The woman obeyed, grasping for the back of her chair to steady herself. As she turned to sit, she saw me.

  Rosalie Ellenbogen recognized me, and I recognized her.

  We were both wearing blue-and-white badges over our hearts, as if we were members of the same club. But unlike Rosalie, I did not belong. She was supposed to be here, Mitchell was not supposed to be dead, and I was supposed to be in Florence. When she sat down, Rosalie straightened her back and flexed her shoulders back, accentuating her greater stature. After that, neither of us moved.

  Either Mitchell’s dying wish had been a three-day reunion with Rosalie, or I had yet to inflate the affair to its proper proportions, which I quickly calculated to be the better part of the last six years. I instantly regretted the silly, simpering, sympathetic email about their loving father that I had just launched across the Atlantic to my children, along with a reputation-burnishing bonus from Mr. Moneybags.

  I regretted every day of the last six years. I wanted a lot back that I would never get back.

  Andre said, “Below the angels sleeps a small band of soldiers, unaware that the stone covering the entrance to the tomb has been rolled back and Jesus has risen from the dead. To the right of them, on her knees, Mary Magdalene extends her arms across the empty space toward Jesus. She recognizes him. She is the first living person who recognizes the resurrected Christ. But even she cannot believe her eyes—she has fallen to her knees in shock—yet she reaches for him, to touch him, to make her vision real.” Andre paused for several seconds. “Noli Mi Tangere. This is the first time in the entire fresco cycle where we see Jesus in an independent space.”

  The space between Rosalie and me was unsteady, or maybe I was dizzy from my efforts to read her mind.

  “We will examine the use of space, as well as color and gesture, in every other scene from the life of Jesus to understand how Giotto anchored Jesus in the human realm, repeatedly locating him in the midst of crowds where he is swaddled and cuddled, embraced, kissed, anointed, baptized, and later pinched, beaten, and slapped by human hands. After the resurrection, though, no human hand can reach him. He is there and not there, with them and beyond them, Jesus and Christ.” Andre picked up a pile of paper from beside the video monitor.

  I looked at Mitchell’s watch. We had at least ten more minutes in this room, plenty of time for me to plan and execute a brutal surprise attack.

  Rosalie bent forward, balanced her elbows on her thighs, cradling her head in her hands. She looked ill.

  I said a quick prayer on her behalf. Let it be a stroke.

  Andre said, “Now, if you will permit me to move from the sublime to the ridiculous, I have a little cartoon for you.”

  A man said, “What is a cartoon?”

  Another man said, “Beetle Bailey.”

  A woman said, “Charlie Brown.”

  The original man said, “Everybody’s a comedian.”

  “It’s a term of art for preliminary drawings,” Andre said. “Giotto drew cartoons—sinopie—of the entire cycle and its fictive borders and architecture before the final surface for the fresco was applied so his patron could review and approve the work.”

  I could hear my own rapid intake of air, little gasps, and so could two of the men in front of me, who repeatedly turned around to register their disapproval for my insistence on breathing.

  “Giotto would have made these cartoons—perfectly delineated and proportioned figures and landscapes—in red ocher, which would be visible when the final layer of fine white plaster—the intonaco—was applied to the wall, so it could be seen beneath as the final fresco was painted. I am not an artist, however, and I made you a little stick-figure cartoon.” He handed out two piles for distribution. “I want to use this to prepare you for the other scene we will concentrate on this afternoon, which gives us a clear and simple introduction to the use of color, shape, and geometry in the fresco cycle, and a charming illustration of Giotto’s use of space.”

  “Oh, man.” One of the men in the front held up the page he’d received and said, “Don’t quit your day job.” Laughter spread my way as the pages were passed back.

  And just like that, I welled up, tears streaming down my face. At last, my true companion was at hand.

  I could fill in the lines, flesh out those people. I knew them well. I recognized every detail except the angel, which I was certain did not appear in the panel painting of this scene, which I had memorized during my many hours on my own in the Gardner Museum while Mitchell pined and pondered over one of Mrs. Gardner’s exquisite editions of Dante.

  I was here, and I was there. But I wanted to be there and there alone, there in the museum before I knew what it meant to be here. I also wanted the hand of God to reach down through the ceiling and pluck me out of that airless chamber. Short of that miraculous intervention, I did not want to enter the chapel. I didn’t want to see the fresco of the Presentation—not with Rosalie, not with Andre and his admirers, not while I was wearing Mitchell’s watch.

  Andre said, “This is an especially stately painting, with its six human figures aligned in the foreground. Their colorful robes, as you will soon see, bestow on each figure a singularity, a distinct habitable space, and yet the generous folds of those robes overlap, overcoming the space between them, uniting them in spirit. You will see that Giotto painted Jesus as an extraordinarily charming and slightly confounded child, a kid we instantly recognize as a kid. He and Simeon are raised slightly above the others, a status that is here ceremonial and yet also befitting the divine nature of that sweet child.”

  He took a pious pause—he even bowed his head slightly—which seemed designed to give everyone a chance to contemplate the wonders of the Incarnation and the humility of this shining star of academe. I didn’t doubt his sincerity, but I did wonder if he saw himself reflected in the painted image of Scrovegni, hoisting up the chapel in exchange for a big reward.

  “Now, look again at the fullness of time in this image, how Giotto balances the past and future in this moment,” Andre said. “At the far right, Anna, who prophesied the arrival of the Messiah at the temple, is present, holding the scroll of her prophecy. Above her, the Angel of Death is present to confirm that Simeon’s death is imminent, fulfilling the promise of the Holy Spirit to the just and devout Simeon—that he would not die before he met the Messiah. Each figure, in one sense, represents the fulfillment of proph
esy, and thus their hands are extended toward each other and toward the child at the center of the frame, the center of all promise, the incarnation of the prophetic word. The Virgin reaches for her son, and at her side, her husband Joseph holds two doves, two earthly creatures that also live in the sky, a kind of mirror of the angel and the Christ child, creatures of this world and not. The woman at the far left of the panel provides symmetry in number, and balance in gender—three human figures on each side of the picture plane, three male and three female.”

  A woman said, “Who is she?”

  Andre said, “We don’t know.”

  A man said, “She looks like a servant.”

  But she didn’t.

  Andre said, “She is dressed in a very remarkable robe for a servant.”

  Andre was right. Shelby was clearly a companion to the mother of the Virgin Mary, and her peasant dress marked her as a servant. This pink-robed woman was no one’s attendant.

  The same man said, “I meant a handmaiden, attending to Mary and her child.”

  Andre said, “You will see that both St. Anne and the Virgin often appear with handmaidens in the frescoes, but this is clearly not either of those women.”

  I was already so deeply identified with that woman with no identity that I nearly stood up and announced that I knew her name.

  A woman said, “She is not the first woman in history to be treated as if she is insignificant.”

  “She is not insignificant. She is unidentified,” Andre said. “Indeed, Ruskin pointed out how beautifully she is drawn, how elegantly her gown is draped and colored. She has an honored place here in the chapel.”

  A very elderly woman said, “I’m sure she was happy just to be there.”

  It wasn’t clear whether that woman was being cynical or sincere, siding with the feminists or with Andre, but most of the women and men in the room nodded their assent. Andre had the wit to let that inscrutable verdict stand, and then the doors behind him slid open and a guard said something rather complicated in Italian before he returned to the hallway behind the doors, where he was hurrying a small group out of the chapel.