The Animal Gazer

by Edgardo Franzosini

  On September 27 Rembrandt wrote to Michel L’Hoëst: “Dear Sir, this morning I received a telegram in which I was informed that the two dear animals have arrived safely. I am certain you will excuse me for having done everything in such a hurry: but I had to take advantage of a quarter hour of energy before I could decide to separate myself from them. After so many months of living together, they had become true companions of my life and my work.” Then, with the care of a parent and the delicacy of a lover, he added, “You will undoubtedly have noticed that the male is fatter and his fur has become darker. He’s a superb animal . . . I hope the trip didn’t tire them out too much. If you could write to me that they’re alright, I would greatly appreciate it . . .”

  MAURICE BOISSARD, THE Mercure de France theater critic, stopped Rembrandt Bugatti on the street one day.

  “I hear you are interested in demonstrations of animal intelligence,” he told him. “You should meet my friend Remy de Gourmont, who has been studying thinking animals for some time now.”

  This is a decidedly fashionable subject, thought Bugatti to himself.

  “It’s odd,” Boissard continued, “I always thought Remy was looking at the animals only as animals, beautiful or ugly, pleasant or unpleasant, for companionship. Not like his brother Jean, whom I also know. Jean always speaks so tenderly about his cat, Zigoui, and how the little beast places its paws on his chest and with little darts of its tongue caresses his cheeks. But I was wrong about Remy. Stop by to see him. He doesn’t get out much, lupus has been devouring his face for a few years now.”

  Bugatti had already run into Remy de Gourmont once at the Jardin des Plantes. The writer was sitting on a park bench and observing a lemur from Madagascar behind bars. Although he covered his face with his hands or with a large kerchief that he kept taking out of his pocket and putting back, Bugatti recognized him. In Paris there was a lot of gossip about the lupus that had corroded his facial skin and almost completely destroyed his nose.

  Bugatti, as we know, was nothing if not annoyed by the idea of thinking animals and all the talk about the topic but, a few days later, he climbed the wooden stairs that led to the small apartment on Rue des Saints-Pères where Remy de Gourmont lived, surrounded by books.

  “I almost never go out anymore,” said Gourmont, who was wearing a dressing gown very similar to a cassock. “You understand me. I go by myself, every now and then, to the editorial office of the Mercure de France or to the Jardin des Plantes.”

  “I saw you there one day,” Bugatti said, “in front of the cage of a lemur from Madagascar.”

  “What a beautiful animal, with its black and white fur,” Gourmont said, in a shy voice with a slight stutter. “Luckily man invented the art of apparel,” he added, looking at Rembrandt, who that day was wearing a light brown, flannel corduroy jacket with two long parallel rows of buttons, black trousers, and a necktie knotted with at least six loops. Gourmont continued. “Naked, man would have cut a rather sad figure in proximity to nature, which has such harmonious forms and colors. The Greeks understood this, and to give the human form an honorable status by comparison to the animal, they shaved the hair from their arms, legs, and chests and rubbed oil over their bodies, giving them a shiny patina.”

  Gourmont, whom his friends called l’Ours—the Bear—was sitting in a wicker armchair, behind a desk piled high with papers and books. In his hand he held a pair of pince-nez eyeglasses.

  “Knowledge of animals,” he said after a moment of silence, “is in my opinion the necessary premise to knowledge of man.”

  Rembrandt did not agree with Gourmont’s statement, but he said nothing. Nor did he feel like responding to a subsequent consideration by the writer, which he could absolutely not share, namely that the wonders of animal intelligence are the progressive result of nothing more than long practice.

  “It is no longer possible to doubt what Zarif and Muhamed are doing. These are facts attested to by men of science,” said Gourmont. “They answer every question posed to them by shaking their heads or nodding, depending on whether they want to say yes or no. I am thinking of Elberfeld’s horses. The literature is already vast,” explained Gourmont. “They can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and even extractions of square roots. They give their answers by tapping their hooves. To say sixty-two they tap six times with their left hoof and two with their right. Someone should make up their mind to sculpt one of those horses, by going to the lessons of Master von Osten, the trainer of thinking horses. Emmanuel Frémiet, for example, if you really don’t want to do it yourself! Rather than an animal sculptor, Emmanuel is basically a horse sculptor.” Gourmont continued. “Yes, of course, he does occasionally sculpt a cat, a dog, or an orangutan, but he sculpts horses more than any other animal. Warhorses, parade horses, but in particular bronze horses that are more appropriate to a veterinary institute than to a museum: dying horses, I mean to say.”

  Emmanuel Frémiet taught animal drawing at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle of Paris and Bugatti attended some of his lessons in his spare time, but without much enthusiasm.

  “You know, I imagine, the source of his interest,” said Gourmont. “As a boy Emmanuel worked at the morgue, painting corpses. In the sense that after maybe reconstructing a body decapitated by blows of a hatchet, or sliced up by a mowing machine, he would dab a little color on the lips, on the cheeks, on the forehead, or arrange the hair.”

  This must be the reason, Rembrandt thought to himself, that every time I see something by him, whether or not it’s a horse, I always have the unpleasant impression that Frémiet sculpts with the unacceptable certainty, the idiotic presumption, that nature is revealing its most incredible secrets to him.

  “Getting back to Elberfeld’s horses,” Gourmont continued, “they thought it might be remote transmission of thought, electric transmission. A scientific committee was appointed . . .”

  All this talk about thinking horses left Rembrandt indifferent. He barely listened. He stirred only when Gourmont mentioned his “deer fly.” They had shipped it to him from the Pyrenees, together with a sprig of heather, and it got its name—the “deer fly”—because of its exceptional but inoffensive horns.

  “I put it in a display case, where it stared at the wooden columns, which were supposed to remind it of its native trees. It was waiting patiently for the tree to secrete the nectar on which the fly fed. Then I came up with the idea of feeding it with peach peels soaked in sugar, which it enjoyed, and it survived for the short life-span of the deer fly, just a few nights. But what a masterpiece of mechanical construction, what colors!”

  REMBRANDT WAS STANDING in front of the cage of the Hamadryas baboon. He had been observing it for a while. He realized—or at least this was his impression—that for a few days now the baboon had been subjecting its every contemplated action to a torturous examination. Whether or not to enter its den, a kind of small cave built in the back of the cage. Whether to climb up or down a steel pole that was hung in midair across the entire length of the cage. Rembrandt watched it staring at its reflection in a small puddle on which strands of hay and a few tufts of fur were floating. It seemed to be using its eyes to look for its eyes. A gust of wind sent ripples across the surface of the water and together with the water a ripple went through the eye of the baboon and with that eye a thought. Then eye and thought came to rest on the dark bottom of the puddle and became illegible.

  AFTER ANIMALS, REMBRANDT Bugatti’s second favorite subject was himself. Nothing so strange about that. There was no denying that he had always taken great care and had great regard, an almost smug admiration, some whispered, for his appearance.

  Bugatti did his self-portraits with pencil, graphite point (for the poster of his solo exhibit, Exposition des Oeuvres, at Antwerp’s société Royale de Zoologie in 1910), colored pencil and charcoal. He sketched quick, nervous images of his body and face on the back of postcards that he sent to his parents, brother, and sister, or to his bon copain André Taponier (with his h
ead between the jaws of a lioness, or as a creature with elongated limbs, half-man and half-animal, or as a giant sculpting a tiny horse, or yet again with a face that has no eyes, no nose, and no mouth, hidden beneath a sombrero, in what he called “my brainless portrait”).

  Although in the opinion of some, the most sincere, most credible self-portrait Bugatti ever did was the one in which he used as his model the Hamadryas baboon of the Antwerp zoo (the same work that many consider his absolute masterpiece), he personally preferred the one in which he depicted himself with the features of a marabou. “I resemble a marabou,” he wrote in a page of his notebook that conserves, in all probability, the rough draft of a letter. Like a marabou, in effect, he had long thin legs, a neck hunched forward, and a guarded style of walking. Wary.

  WHEN HE WAS not doing his own portrait, Rembrandt had his friends do it for him. He posed for a plaster bust by Troubetzkoy (we will get back to this sculptor prince shortly), an oil portrait by Max Kahn, an etching by Walter Vaes, and two sculptures by Kathleen Bruce. In one of these last two, Rembrandt is nude.

  “And to think that, the minute I arrived in Paris from London,” Kathleen told him, “I used to flee at the sight of the nude models at the Académie Colarossi and lock myself in the bathroom.”

  Rembrandt spent long mornings in Kathleen’s studio. Posing. Kathleen complained because she could never quite grasp his look. From one moment to the next, Rembrandt shifted from being a snob to being a shy, skinny boy (but one day she saw him lift a piano by himself), a serious, reserved man, a melancholic marionette.

  Rembrandt, in turn, depicted Kathleen in bronze, but he placed a cat next to her. Kathleen told him that she had met Auguste Rodin and that she had been in his studio at the Dépôt des Marbres, where the Ministry of Public Works stored marble on Rue de l’Université. While she was waiting to be received (from the next room she could hear the loud, imperious voice of Rodin, issuing orders to his assistants), she opened one of the drawers of a giant credenza that occupied a whole wall. Then she opened another, and then another. “They all contained the same thing,” she said. “Dozens and dozens of plaster casts of hands, of feet.”

  Rembrandt had also met Rodin, a few years earlier. But how could the two of them relate to one another?

  One man spent hours and hours at the Louvre, as if he were listening to a long concert of beautiful music, where he would feel exhilarated, ecstatic, and find stimulation for his work. The other confessed that his only consolation was spending the whole day at the zoo.

  One man challenged everybody: “I dare you to tell me that I’ve made an error, a single mistake in my anatomy!” The other admitted, without pride, without arrogance, that he completely ignored the anatomy of his models and trusted only in the precision of his eyes.

  For one man, art demanded patience, perseverance, and he commented, “When you work, progress is slow, uncertain.” The other sculpted quickly, decisively, and without hesitation.

  Nevertheless, when the old sculptor with the face of a faun saw Bugatti’s animals, he expressed words of admiration for him. There was one thing on which they could agree. Rodin also refused to force the models of his sculptures to sit for endless poses. Sittings, he said, are too laborious, premeditated, artificial, mannered. He proclaimed that he wanted to unite every aspect of a figure in a single sitting.

  As for Rembrandt, what he liked observing in his models was precisely their movement, and certainly not static poses. How they crouched down, bodies extended, mouths half-open, claws unfurled. How lithely they arched their backs. How they shook their horns and beat their hooves on the ground. How they thrashed, twisted and turned when something caused them pain. He was fascinated to watch a tapir throw itself on the ground, tremble with fear, expel excrement. Or a fawn that stretched out on its back and rolled from side to side, opening and closing its jaws. Or a guanaco that spit out disgusting bubbles of spit. Or a monkey that liked to scratch its balls. Sometimes, after looking around himself to make sure no one was watching, he even tried to imitate the gait of the animals. He lifted his legs, moved his arms, shook his torso.

  Movement is one of the questions that most obsessed him. (He wasn’t the only one in his family with an obsession: his brother, Ettore, had a fixation on speed, the most extreme and exasperating form of movement, while his grandfather Giovanni Luigi racked his brains out, almost losing his mind, over the phenomenon of perpetual motion, another excessive, almost implausible aspect of movement). Rembrandt plumbed the depths of the problem. And he did not limit himself to observing incessantly the movements of his models. Instead he addressed the question with a more systematic method. One day he drew a dog with a skinny profile, subdivided the figure into four parts (front legs, rear legs, body, and head), and then glued it all to a piece of yellow cardboard and named his work The Mechanical Greyhound.

  In this manner, he believed, he could clarify the physical, dynamic laws that govern the movements of a body. Nor would the architecture of the skeleton and the functions of its joints withhold their mystery from him any longer.

  III

  One Sunday in the summer of 1908, after long contemplation and having rejected the idea repeatedly, Rembrandt climbed on board the tram that departed from the Montparnasse station in the direction of the Bois de Boulogne. It was already late afternoon when he got off at the Boulevard Maillot stop. He started walking with long strides toward the side of the Bois de Boulogne that from Porte des Sablons leads to Port de Neuilly—to the exact location of the Jardin Zoologique d’Acclimation.

  For the whole ride, Rembrandt had read a guidebook that he now pondered while heading toward the entrance to the zoo: the Jardin had been opened to the public “to introduce into France, by agreement with and under the direction of the Société d’Acclimation, every possible species of animal or plant, whether domestic or wild, for the purpose of intensifying their reproduction and educating the public.”

  After passing through the gate, Rembrandt walked down the main boulevard with a specific goal in mind. He was not interested in the big greenhouse on the left, which gathered every variety of camellia along with tropical flowers and exotic trees. Nor did the building located immediately after the greenhouse, where silkworms were raised, spark his curiosity enough to persuade him to make a short visit. And then what sadness, what revulsion, to see that halfway down the boulevard, Madame Odile Martin’s Grande Épinette Tournante—the Great Revolving Chicken Coop—was still in operation. It was an enormous rotating cylinder divided into cells holding about fifty brooding hens. A man would feed them one by one, going up and down on a kind of hoist on a track: he would insert a rubber straw into the birds’ beaks, press down hard on a pedal, and send the food directly into their stomachs. Many visitors to the Jardin would stop to observe, as if they were watching a show.

  Rembrandt continued on, passing alongside an iron and brick tower more than one hundred feet tall, from which you could hear the cooing of an incalculable number of pigeon couples. He made it to the end of the boulevard and started to notice the first plaster and lime boulders, the winding brooks fed by the Paris city aqueduct, the little waterfalls that gushed from artificial ridges. There in the middle was a chamois climbing up a cement peak.

  Coming toward him was old Juliette, the elephant who had survived by several years the death of her companion, Roméo. The two animals, he had heard, were a gift from Vittorio Emanuele II, the King of Italy, to replace Castor and Pollux, the two exemplars of the African elephant that the Jardin, in the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian war, had sacrificed to the hunger of the Parisians.

  On her back Juliette was carrying a howdah upholstered in red fabric with silver fringes. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but as soon as she saw Rembrandt, Juliette raised her proboscis and trumpeted. The tremor made the two women and man in the howdah lose their balance, and they were almost thrown to the ground. One of the women screeched. So did an eagle in a cage.

  An eagle screeches and e
verything in my mind becomes clearer, thought Rembrandt. Where did I read that? Or was it a bear growling, or a parrot squawking?

  While mulling over these thoughts, Rembrandt continued without stopping until he neared his goal, at the edge of a fenced-in area. He did not get there alone, but was accompanied by a noisy swarm of visitors headed in the same direction. A crowd of feathered hats, straw boaters, kepi, bowlers, homburgs, and caps pressed together before the iron bars of a fence, but his height allowed Rembrandt to see the attraction that was drawing people from Paris and all France. (Rembrandt’s height often made him look very frail, but being a head taller than people who reach your chest or shoulders also has its advantages.) There’s no reason to hide the fact: Bugatti had been drawn to the Jardin d’Acclimatation by the same attraction, though for different reasons, driven by a desire that the other visitors might not understand. Combining the attention of his eyes with the attention of his mind, as he always did when he was studying his models, Rembrandt started to observe the forty Galla (he counted them immediately: there were twenty-five men, six women, and nine children) who had arrived from the highlands of Ethiopia. In previous years the Jardin had also exhibited, for the pleasure of its visitors, Lapps, Nubians, Eskimos, Kalmyks, Redskins, Caribs, Hottentots, and Bushmen. This time it was the turn of the inhabitants of the area of Africa lying between the Jubba River, Lake Rudolph, and Mount Kenya.