by Mark Forgy
Ian was interested in buying some artwork. He and Cynthia disappeared into Elmyr’s studio for more than two hours. Besides his technical skill as a painter, Elmyr had the profound knowledge of an art historian, so he could speak about his work and his profession with an unchallengeable persuasiveness and authority. His convincing banter usually secured a sale. He was a “closer” par excellence, and watching him was an inimitable experience.
They bought over six thousand dollars’ worth of paintings, watercolors, and drawings, which they split between their homes in Geneva and the Virgin Islands. It afforded Elmyr a comfortable life for the next several months. Ian earned a fortune buying and selling property in the islands and exhibited no second thoughts about spending his money. His casual largesse mirrored Elmyr’s own generosity, and this common trait drew the two men closer to one another. Their friendship grew quickly. Cynthia, Ian, and Elmyr felt a kinship that became apparent over their weeklong stay on the island. Elmyr threw a party at the house to have them meet some more of his friends. He was an attentive host during their visit. Before seeing them off at the airport, they had coaxed a promise from Elmyr to visit them at their home in Geneva at summer’s end. He said we would come.
As September neared, we arranged to visit our new friends. With some additional sales of his work during a socially hectic summer, Elmyr wanted to extend our itinerary into a grand tour. It would include Vienna, Salzburg, Venice, Rome, Capri, Milan, Florence, Geneva, and London.
It is hard to imagine under any circumstances how any stop in Italy would not be fantastic. I visited the country on my own during my backpacking and youth hostel days. Now, accompanying Elmyr, I traveled first class and stayed at five-star hotels.
VIENNA
In Vienna, we went to the Sacher Hotel, home of the internationally famous chocolate tort. There, the clerk informed us that there was no record of our reservation and it was unlikely that we would get a room, as the hotel was full. Elmyr then pulled a woven gold cigarette case from his suit pocket. The case’s sides each had forty uniform, bevel-cut, deep-blue sapphires. With a slow-motion gesture, he opened the jeweled case and offered me one of his unfiltered Turkish cigarettes from Abdul’s of Jermyn Street, knowing I did not smoke. The hotel manager gave a look of a conquistador eyeing Aztec gold. An instant later, he excused himself and said he had found one room available after all. Elmyr did not smoke, but when a Madrid jeweler offered an exchange of the 18k objet d’art for a painting, Elmyr felt compelled to give the impression he did.
He generously tipped the hotel concierge for hard-to-get tickets for the renowned Vienna Opera across from the Sacher. That evening we saw Cavalaria Rusticana by Pietro Mascagni. To my ears, his Intermezzo remains one of the most beautiful orchestral pieces ever written. Excursions through Europe’s grandest temples of art commenced with a tour of the Kunst Historiche Museum and the Albertina that houses perhaps the largest collection of old masters’ prints and drawings. Elmyr shared insights into European art with his personal viewpoint in gallery after gallery, always revealing details unnoticed by the casual observer.
Vienna was the capital of the Hapsburg Empire, consisting of the Kingdom of Hungary and the Austrian Empire. In 1867, they joined to become the Austro Hungarian Empire. Elmyr was happy to make clear the complex history, geography, and political spheres of influence via a dizzying organizational chart involving marital alliances, accessions, concessions, treaties, battles, coronations, borders, ethnicity, and cultures, all of which he kept neatly in his head and made perfect sense. His endurance was Herculean and a product of his passion to impart his knowledge even long after he sucked all the oxygen from the room.
One luminous morning, we visited Schönbrunn Palace, one of those cheek-slapping wonders that makes Buckingham Palace look like some down-market digs. It had a bazillion bonus rooms, all nicely appointed by the Royal Family Furniture Warehouse, most likely. Inside, a game of hide and seek might well prove fatal. The Royal Mice could nibble away at your remains before, with any luck, they found your gnawedclean bones at all. From my modest working-class background, this kind of pharaonic wealth and power was unimaginable. Elmyr identified portraits by Winterhalter and then shared not-too-brief histories of the people in them, for the genealogical pleasure of it all.
SALZBURG
This city, nestled among the snow-capped Austrian Alps, challenges the imagination to rival its scenery. Everyone should make a pilgrimage there at least once in one’s life. Here, we followed a performance of chamber music of Mozart the first evening, with lodging in a fourteenthcentury inn. Just to attest to its authenticity, its ceilings and doorways were low, its wood floors slanted and squeaky, like the beds. While the peak tourist season had waned, it was surprising how bourgeois this city was. Around eight in the evening they seemed to “roll up the sidewalks,” as they say in the Midwest. It’s as if all the residents responded to some inaudible dog whistle, shuttered their windows, locked their doors, donned ankle-length nightgowns, night caps, and dutifully went to bed—a quaint custom for a large European city, I thought.
Some friends who were also clients of Elmyr’s invited us to visit them in the Tyrol region of Austria, where they lived. Through some quirk of geography and location, this area is a blessed climatic sanctuary in the mountains, offering lush forests and weather mild enough to support semitropical plants in much the same way as the Gulf Stream warms the southern coasts of Ireland and England for their gardeningobsessed residents. The region also boasts the oldest (or largest) grape vine in Europe. Heavy gauge wire supports its fruit-bearing canopy, covering hundreds of square meters. The viticulture there dates back to Roman occupation, and the fermented juice from the pressed grapes is probably as delicious today as it was to the Latin forebears who introduced it.
VENICE
Traveling then to Innsbruck and through the Brenner Pass into Italy, one could savor the majesty of the Italian Alps and better appreciate how formidable a feat it was for Hannibal to move his army and precious elephants over this intimidating snow-capped mountain range twenty-two centuries earlier. We were on our way to Venice, the splendid city of the doges. This would be my third time back, but first with Elmyr, although now it was not the low-budget adventure it was twice before. Au contraire; we were booked into the Gritti Palace on the Grand Canal. From our room we had the unusual opportunity to see the city welcome its first visit from a reigning pope (Paul VI) in over two hundred years. The city spared no effort or colored banner to celebrate the occasion. This former maritime superpower brought out every seaworthy craft imaginable for this papal regatta. They orchestrated the Holy Father’s naval welcome with all the adept Italian stagecraft and pomp fitting the event. One was not only awed by the visually rich pageantry but also by its historical significance.
Here, fittingly, Elmyr personally introduced me to the school of great Venetian colorists, Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, Tiepolo, and others. The city’s famed Italian Gothic architecture, with its onion-shaped arches, commonly outlined with stone ornamentation resembling braided bread, are a ubiquitous reminder of its glory years of the late Middle Ages. The eighteenth-century paintings of Francesco Guardi and Canaletto visually document the decay to which the once glorious city had succumbed, but at the same time suggest its haunting grandeur. Its narrow streets and arterial canals still infuse a timeless romantic appeal without equal anywhere else. Elmyr wanted to introduce me to “Harry’s Bar,” an institution to savor. The famed landmark attracted Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and other illuminati, also any other aspirant who wished their name connected to the word class.
One morning a couple of days into our stay, I woke to a knock at our hotel room door. It was a young man in a crisply starched white jacket, carrying our breakfast tray. A large divided window opened to the cloudless sky; sunlight glistened on the blue-green Adriatic waters of the Grand Canal. It was a morning of promise but for an uncharacteristically dour look on Elmyr’s face. “What’s tr
oubling you?” I inquired. He explained that he had gone to the casino at the Lido the night before and lost the equivalent of seven hundred pounds sterling, or about $1,400. This was a time before the ubiquity of credit cards, which, in fact, he never owned. It represented a large portion of cash he had left until he could access a Swiss account in Geneva. We spent most of the day trying to reach a Hungarian friend of his in Geneva, a retired investment banker, who had helped him open the account. It was a complicated process involving international bank transfers. This challenging monetary maze seemingly required some divine intervention. By late afternoon the requested funds had been wired to the Italian bank, Banco di Santo Espirito—Bank of the Holy Spirit; a fitting redemption for an earthly sin—gambling.
It was not Elmyr’s first flirtation with games of chance, or his last. He liked the thrill of the game with its adrenalin rush. Strangely, despite his propensity to lose money practically all the time, he would return. Instead of it becoming a compulsive addiction (and curse to many), it was the glamour, ambiance, and battle of wits that beckoned him. Skill was another matter. The only two games that interested him were chemin de fer and baccarat. He always dressed for the occasion: black velvet jacket, tailored shirts from Jermyn Street, silk tie in a Windsor knot, gold monocle, and a suitable amount of jewelry. What he unfortunately never twigged to was that he had the bluff of a newborn. For his lack of a poker face, he would have been much better off, and richer too, to wear a Venetian Carnival mask. It was always painful to endure the predictably disappointing outcome of what the “gaming” industry inappropriately calls “entertainment.”
On Ibiza, Elmyr often got into high-stakes poker games with people with deeper pockets and most often more skill. In these instances, he hadn’t the aversion to risk-taking that experience should have taught him or that age should have greatly diminished. This behavior, I believe, really points to the emotional rather than analytical plain on which he operated, and also to his cavalier attitude about money. It was, after all, just a tool—like his paintbrushes, which he could always use to make more money.
MILAN
The next stop was Milan, a largely forgettable city but for the requisite visit to see Leonardo’s Last Supper in the Church of Santa Maria della Grazie, the magnificent Gothic cathedral, the Duomo, and the elegant Victor Emanuel arcade (if one has shopping in mind).
Standing before The Last Supper leaves one awestruck not so much for being in the presence of great art but more so for the Christian iconography attached to this imagine. In the early 1970s, its staggering deterioration was sadly apparent, so it looked more like a painting applied to the sun-baked, cracked mud of a dried-up river bed. Its disturbing condition greatly detracted from the experience. It should be remembered, “da Vinci was experimenting with a new fresco technique that began to fail badly within his own lifetime,” as Elmyr pointed out. Consequently, the faded colors and surface loss over the almost five hundred years since its creation invites a liberal application of imagination. The art historian Vasari described it in 1556 “as ‘a muddle of blots.’” Another important caveat Elmyr offered was that when viewing these precious works, one should keep in mind they had most likely undergone numerous cleanings and attempts at restoration with sometimes shocking results. Illustrating his point, he asked me, “Did you notice that the Mona Lisa had no eyebrows?” I said that I hadn’t. He was right, of course. Their absence is the anatomical anomaly that always comes to mind first every time I see it. He was a cornucopia of these pearls of knowledge that he generously sowed because he needed to share what he had learned.
FLORENCE
We traveled from Milan to Florence by bus. Tuscany echoed the semiarid hills and vegetation of Ibiza. It is easy to see why the familiar Mediterranean topography made many of its sea-going cultures feel at home throughout the breadth of this region. Here, the Etruscan civilization, influenced by colonizing Greeks, thrived for six to eight hundred years before the Romans assimilated them. Tall, slender cypress trees lined the winding roads. Rippled terracotta tiles graced the rooftops, slanting like three-dimensional chevrons in a myriad of directions. When the city came into view, those images so vividly described in Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography raced through my mind. He was a contemporary of Michelangelo, the foremost goldsmith of the sixteenth century. His memoir, however boastful, provides a firsthand account of the crucible that was Florence, the creative birthplace and turbulent center of the Italian Renaissance. The Campanile bell tower designed by Giotto is still the commanding landmark of the city. He, more than any other artist, is credited with liberating the art of painting from the stiff, iconic Byzantine style that had frozen the human form like gilded, vertically stacked cordwood. The writer Bocaccio and poet Dante were his friends. Together, these three giants were at the vanguard of a cultural and artistic awakening that would sweep through Europe like a canyon brush fire. Florence became the navel of the universe for the next 250 years.
Having Elmyr as my guide through the Uffizi Gallery and the Pitti Palace thrilled me. In a condensed, total-immersion, walking art history lecture, I felt my right brain would implode. The depth of his connoisseurship was staggering, but beyond his scholarly expertise was another dimension he was showing and teaching me. They said Balzac was a “seer.” Elmyr was also a seer. It was a sense of penetrating what was present, but also developing a psychic sense of what was not there. For some time he was ratcheting up my education. Starting with elementary building blocks, as a surgeon accumulates an increasing familiarity with anatomy, he showed me systematically all the elements of figurative art and what separates the best from the rest. To illustrate what I mean, the following day we went to see Michelangelo’s statute of David. It was simultaneously a paradigm of latent power and calm confidence, sculpted by a genius. We studied it together in silent appreciation. Then Elmyr pointed out that “the head is too big for his body.” His matter-offact announcement was now an apparent observation that it was slightly out of proportion. To this day it is a haunting refrain each time I see it.
I should make clear that these were no judgmental condemnations or carping faultfinding. It was simply a matter of stating what “is.” He knew when he was in the company of quality art and viewed it holistically. On the other hand, he knew what was bad and was not usually shy about expressing himself. In no way am I suggesting art is a recondite, elitist discipline understood only by tea-sipping Brahmins. If it were, it would not be the playpen of color and honest and spontaneous expression universally enjoyed by children. It is, nevertheless, a visual language designed to communicate with the viewer. Having an idea of its historical timeline and connectedness to the social fabric simply takes one to a greater depth of comprehension and appreciation. He simply analyzed and explained these things, wanting me to understand.
Often, visitors in art museums appear oxygen-starved, sucking air like a freshly landed fish. With eyes glazed and about forty-five minutes removed from any recollection why they were there, they would wander singularly or in a bovine herd, looking aimless, as though stunned by a Taser. Anyway, my point is that what ought to be a stimulating and rewarding experience too frequently is not. I am not sure it is imagery overload, because people show an impenetrable resilience to countless hours of television viewing without assuming that look of disengaged boredom.
As you will recall, that elfin intergalactic visitor who disguised himself as an architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, found a solution to what’s commonly called “museum fatigue” or the symptoms I just described, in his seminal design for the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. His slightly inverted cone-shape tower is open in the center with a wide descending spiral walkway at its perimeter. It is a radical departure from the usual maze of interconnected boxes where even seasoned cartographers wander about disoriented. Visitors start their viewing pleasure at the top of the spiral and casually stroll down. In the event of someone having a sensory short circuit, rather than just melting into a puddle on a flat floor and gettin
g in the way of others, with the help of gravity and incline they can simply roll to the bottom like a spilled sack of oranges.
Anyway, we walked several kilometers that morning, crossing the Ponte Vecchio, the oldest bridge spanning the Arno River. Dating from the middle of the fourteenth century, shops of gold- and silversmiths line the bridge. On one side of the river is another Harry’s Bar. Here, we had lunch. Standing next to the bar was a tall, rugged, and handsome Scotsman wearing a traditional kilt and clan tartans. Looking as though he’d become separated from the other costume-wearing trick-or-treaters, he scanned the restaurant. Standing like an old growth oak on a tree farm, he was a head above anyone else. He appeared wistful. Perhaps his deepest fears and worries had come true. Had some cruel wag whispered in his ear that one couldn’t find a decent bowl of haggis anywhere in this town? Arrgh! Moreover, what are those white furry dangly things they wear that look like the pelt of a desiccated West Highland white terrier? I suspect he, like many of his kinsmen, found a better than equal trade-off, a wee bit o’ food for some single-malt Scotch.
In a book on Boswell, Samuel Johnson’s noted biographer, a British wit said of his northern neighbors, “Scotland…a land where halfstarved spiders prey on half-starved flies.” It should be of little surprise that its gift to world cuisine was haggis. I half believe that contrary to historical accounts, vestiges of the famed Spanish Armada succumbing to violent storms, destroying the rest of their fleet on Scotland’s harsh, rocky shores may have actually been an act of sixteenth-century public relations revisionism. More likely, the ships’ crews, finding out what there was to eat if they went ashore, preferred to watch their vessels flounder and drown themselves. Even if Scotland was a good Catholic country, a soggy death seemed preferable.