by Unknown
Dad nodded like he understood what Jerome was asking him to do. Exactly how he’d pull all the pieces together wasn’t something Jerome would ever know for sure—because it wouldn’t happen until after he was gone.
But he could live with the uncertainty.
In fact, he kind of preferred it that way.
GRAND TOUR
by Steve Ruskin
Late October, 1845
Whitechapel, London
“What exactly … is that?” Madame Magnin eyed the device lying on the table before her.
“A camera lucida,” said John Foxx.
Magnin inclined her head slightly, raising her eyebrows.
“Ah,” said Foxx. “It’s an optical device, you see. For drawing. This small prism here, atop this stem, it projects an image of whatever is before it downward upon a flat surface. Then the image can be traced.”
Magnin blinked.
“On paper.”
She blinked again.
“By me. I’m an artist, you see.”
Foxx was already uncomfortable in the tiny room, with its sagging ceiling and yellowed, peeling wallpaper. A séance! A fool’s errand more likely, and a costly one at that.
But it was what Harriet had asked of him.
“You set it up like this,” Foxx said, assuming an explanation might help the medium with whatever it was she was going to do. He stood the device upright on the velvet-covered table, its spindly shadow scattered different directions by the candles guttering in tarnished sconces. Small and portable, around ten inches high, the camera lucida was nothing more than a thin brass rod with a flat, stable base at the bottom and a prism affixed to the top. Both the base and the prism were attached to the rod by hinges so they could be adjusted to different angles, allowing the prism to be positioned beneath the user’s eyes, which Foxx now did.
“As I adjust the prism to the proper angle and look down with my right eye, just so, past the edge of the prism, an image of whatever is in front of me—which currently is you, sitting across the table—is reflected downward onto the surface of the table. If I had my paper and pencils, well, I could simply trace the image on the paper, making a perfect copy. Of you, right now as we sit here. Or St. Paul’s cathedral if I were sitting on a bench in New Change street. Or Parliament—”
Magnin suddenly waved her hands in front of her face and turned away. “Please! Not my image … my spirit. Please, no images.”
“Of course, I’m sorry. I only meant to demonstrate …” Foxx trailed off, returning the camera lucida to the middle of the table and laying it on its side.
The room smelled of sweat and smoke and, faintly, of gin. Perhaps Madame Magnin managed a quick tipple before his appointment. It would hardly have surprised him.
“And your woman, this was hers? She could use this?” The medium was skeptical. “Remember, I require an object that was hers. Perhaps you have a handkerchief … ?”
“We shared the camera lucida,” Foxx replied. “Harriet was quite competent with it. I … I have nothing else of hers.” This last admission pained him. Harriet had scrimped to buy him the camera lucida as a wedding gift—selling many of her own personal effects—so he could sketch landscapes, which he would later use as studies for landscape paintings.
Someday. When they could afford a studio. And paint.
Magnin sighed. “Then it will have to do. Come, place your hands in mine. We begin. Now, what questions do you have for your Harriet?”
“I have only one.”
“Ah, of course. ‘Are you with the Lord?’ That is the first—”
“No.”
“‘Are you in heaven?’ That’s very much the same.”
“No, um—”
“‘Are you well? Are you lonely? Have you located grandpa and Aunt Bertie?’”
“No, I—”
Then she smiled, winking. “Ah! Of course. ‘Are your carnal desires—’”
“No!” exclaimed Foxx, red faced.
“What then? What is it you wish to ask of your departed Harriet?”
“I … I …” he stammered, disbelieving his own words even as he spoke them. “I want to know if she’s ready to go to Italy.”
oOo
The coach to Dover was bumpy and cold, a mail wagon and a poorly maintained one at that. With what little money he’d had left it was all he could afford, wanting to save what he could for his not-so-Grand Tour.
He bought passage on a paddle steamer to Calais. It was a postal ship, and he transferred to it along with the mail from the coach like so much portage. At sea, Foxx was left to fend for himself on the shelterless deck as the little craft struggled across the heaving waves of the English Channel. A cold, miserable passage.
Paris, of course, was denied him. That great city was the traditional first stop of any Grand Tour itinerary, where wealthy English travelers would begin their cultural holiday polishing their French, touring the Louvre, maybe learning how to fence or dance. But Foxx had neither the money nor the time for that kind of dalliance. He was bound for Italy, and directly.
So he spent his three hours in Paris, between his arrival and departure, negotiating for sour wine, day old-bread, and hardened cheese. Fare for the rest of his journey.
It wasn’t until he was on the overland coach through southern France that he reflected on what had happened during the séance. He had heard those rituals were supposed to involve spinning tables and ghostly knocking. But his had not. Perhaps he had been shortchanged?
Madame Magnin had gone into a trance, swaying and muttering, and after only a few minutes sat bolt upright, her dark skin suddenly pale, and blurted out, “Yes! Your Harriet said yes. And …” the medium seemed as if she were trying to recall a dream “… she says you must bring … that.”
She pointed a crooked finger at the camera lucida. Foxx glanced at it and noticed it was, unaccountably, standing upright. He was sure he had laid it on its side.
But that could be easily explained. A sleight of Magnin’s hand. A parlor trick for dramatic effect. Easy to accomplish in the darkness with his attention directed elsewhere.
And that was the entirety of the affair. Magnin waved him away, declaring the séance over. “Her spirit is strong, Mr. Foxx. Take your seeing device and go.” Foxx felt the medium watching his every move as he folded the base and prism of the camera lucida inward on their hinges—collapsing the apparatus so that it was barely longer than his own hand—and placed it into its small, cloth-lined wooden carrying case. Then he slipped the case into his coat pocket and was back out in the street.
What had he expected? It was all nonsense, and dramatic nonsense at that. Magnin, whose shop was little more than a closet tucked down some nameless Whitechapel alley, had been recommended not because of her reputation for conducting effective séances but because of her reputation for conducting them inexpensively.
Foxx was convinced she was a crackpot.
But Harriet had been so adamant that he try to contact her before he left for Italy. To let her know he was ready to go. The séance had been Harriet’s wish; she had left him money for it, and so he had obliged.
Money wasted, he was sure. Harriet left him all she had, but it wasn’t much, the small remainder of her job teaching history and classics at a school for well-to-do girls.
“You will be a fine artist, John!” she had told him, and not because she was naïve and in love. No. She had an eye for art, although history was her passion, and after all Foxx had trained at the Royal Academy. That’s where they had met, one day when she was touring a new exhibition with her students and he was painting in one of the nearby galleries.
They fell in love, and married.
Their dream was to take the Grand Tour through Italy, that rite of passage that any member of the nobility or landed gentry undertook in the pursuit of the art and culture of Western civilization.
But they were commoners, with only her meager salary and his occasional commission—a portrait here and there. The
y would have to consider themselves fortunate to spend a month abroad, maybe two, so Foxx could visit the home of the Renaissance masters, see their works first hand, study their techniques, sketch the landscapes. And then he and Harriet would return to England, penniless but happy, and start their lives.
But soon after they were married, before they could even think of taking their Tour, Harriet grew ill. And did not improve.
When she knew she had only a short time left she made Foxx promise that he would go to Italy without her. He protested and wept and said he could never go alone but she smiled beatifically and promised she would join him, hovering like an angel above him, guiding him as Beatrice did Dante, showing him things no one but they could see. He was too distraught to say no to her sweet, moribund madness, and too grieved after she was gone to not keep his promise.
He patted his pocket and felt the thin padded case with the camera lucida inside.
It was all he had left of her now.
oOo
Florence in early November was pleasantly cool, nearly deserted (at least by other Englishmen), and completely glorious. The late Autumn daylight was flat and soft as the sun swept ever lower toward the winter solstice, turning the city’s labyrinth of stucco walls to golden caramel and its terra cotta roofs to molten copper.
Foxx walked around Florence for an entire day—not sketching, just getting his bearings—finding his way with an outdated guidebook he had bought before he left London. He crossed the river Arno at every bridge and wandered through small sunlit piazzas. Tall palazzos announced the former wealth of the Medici family, their terraces climbing to dizzying heights down from which, as night fell and windows glowed, came a gentle shower of music and conversation.
The next day he climbed a nearby hill with his portable drawing table and looked down on the city. Florence from above was dotted with gardens and clusters of finger-like cypress trees. The city’s cathedral dominated the view—Brunelleschi’s great dome rising out of the mists like a ruddy egg. He thought about the Renaissance, and how magnificent it would have been to live in Florence, to be patronized by the Medici as were Botticelli, Leonardo, and Michelangelo.
By a little stone wall at the side of an ancient, cobbled road he unfolded his table, unpacked pencils and paper, and began to frame his scene. How he wished Harriet had been there with him. She had an eye for perspective, for middle distance and foreground placement.
The morning sun was just hitting the Arno, making its surface shimmer, as he adjusted the prism of the camera lucida on its brass stem. Just below him on the road a peasant appeared, stopping to water his cattle at a roadside spring.
Foxx peered through the prism. Not quite. Tweaked the brass rod. Better. The peasant was in frame—good, very bucolic. But the top of the cathedral was still … no. He adjusted the prism again.
Perfect! The entire scene, just so.
The image the camera lucida projected was crisp and airy, almost as if looking through a magic lens onto a fairy world. Sharp lines, ethereal colors. Of course, he would sketch in lead pencil. But the dynamic image was a joy to behold while he did.
He started at the top, the sky with its scudding clouds. Then down to the horizon of distant Tuscan hills. Over the course of fifteen minutes he traced the scene: the cathedral center-right, the Arno snaking away bottom left, the tower of the Palazzo Vecchio dead center. He finished his drawing at the bottom, as was his habit, penciling in the foreground trees and the road up which he had walked.
Finally he sketched the peasant and cows. Superb. He could turn this scene into a beautiful landscape someday. When he could afford paint. And canvas.
Absorbed in his last few strokes he did not hear the approaching feet or the stamp of hooves. Suddenly a procession entered the scene. There, superimposed on his pencil-grey road, came some sort of costume parade. Its participants were dressed as if they were contemporaries of Michelangelo, all Renaissance frippery—flat, broad velvet caps, elaborate shoulders, silken doublets with puffed-out sleeves. Tight trousers, low shoes. At the head of the parade a marcher carried a banner: a yellow shield with five red orbs and one blue one.
He had seen that symbol everywhere around Florence. The Medici crest. Perhaps the parade was some commemoration of that great dynasty.
Now a military guard tramped by. Four abreast, they held long halberds in their mailed mitts, wore red- and white-striped sleeves and pants beneath metal breastplates. A bright spectacle, even though they were clearly hardened soldiers—scarred faces, muscle-knotted bodies.
Foxx had not looked up from the camera lucida when the parade came by for fear of losing his perspective as he drew. Sketching rapidly, he added a few of the costumed marchers as they passed, before finally setting down his pencil and looking up to observe the parade directly.
But nothing was there. The road was empty save for the peasant, now dozing, and his lolling cattle.
Foxx gaped in disbelief, and looked back down through the prism. As he did so the parade reappeared, filing past him on his sketched-in road as if he had never looked away.
It was then he realized they were moving silently, like ghosts. He heard nothing, when he should have heard the stamp of feet and clank of armor.
He looked up again.
Nothing.
This is madness! Like a cuckoo, Foxx’s head bobbed up and down, looking up at nothing, then down again at the continuing procession.
He closed his eyes and rubbed them, convinced he was hallucinating. He opened them, and looked up.
The road was empty, the peasant snoring loudly.
But through the lens of his prism the parade seemed to be reaching a climax as heralds with trumpets—which he quite distinctly could not hear—marched by. And behind them—he had to be hallucinating—loped an African giraffe, muzzled and led by long cords, resignedly following his handlers along the road toward Florence.
Foxx sketched like a madman, convinced now that he might in fact be one.
After the giraffe came an opulent gilded carriage, drawn by four cream-white horses. Inside rode a dour man with coiffed brown hair and a hooked nose, staring magisterially down upon the city below him. Then came one final platoon of soldiers before the road was once again empty, save for the sleeping peasant and lolling cattle.
Madness!
“I say!” Foxx called to the peasant below him. “Mi scusi! Mi scusi, signore!”
The peasant opened a bleary eye.
“I say, did you see the parade? The one that just passed by?”
The peasant simply shrugged his shoulders. Foxx ran over to the man, gesticulating in the exaggerated manner that tourists use when trying to convey anything more complicated than “hello” in a language they do not speak.
“Parade! Did you see a parade?” Foxx shouted, even though he was now standing directly before the peasant. Foxx marched back and forth, swinging his arms, kicking out his legs and pretending to play the trumpet. “Parade!” he yelled, even louder.
This merely caused the peasant to burst into laughter.
“Parata!” the man howled. “Parata! L’idiota Inglese vuole una parata!” Then he rolled back over, chuckling, and fell asleep again.
Foxx returned to his table and stared at his sketch. He had captured the banners, the soldiers, the heralds, the giraffe, and then the carriage with its scowling occupant. And although the parade had been much longer than what he had drawn, it was accurate enough.
With great care, as if it was somehow possessed, he rolled up his sketch, tied it with a ribbon, and made his way slowly back down to Florence, shaking his head.
oOo
Later that evening he sat at an inn nibbling fresh bread and waiting for his stew (the least expensive item on the bill of fare). He unrolled the sketch and set it gingerly on the table, watching it nervously as if the parade might suddenly begin anew.
When the stew was placed before him—an earthenware bowl full of potatoes and onions floating in thick gravy—the waiter sta
red over Foxx’s shoulder for a minute and then said, in good but halting English, “Is very nice. Good immaginazione! Look just like Lorenzo il Magnifico. And his giraffa. Just like the Vecchio painting.”
“Which painting?” Foxx asked, surprised.
“In the Lorenzo room, Vecchio palace. You get your idea from this painting, yes? When Lorenzo marches into Florence with his giraffa? Very good.”
The next morning Foxx was first in line when the Vecchio opened. It had been Florence’s town hall since it had been built by the Medici family centuries ago and still contained frescos worthy of a dedicated museum. Someone pointed him to Lorenzo the Magnificent’s room. Craning his neck to look upward he saw, painted in a massive fresco high atop the arched ceiling, the very same man, and the very same giraffe, that had marched past him the previous morning.
He walked outside to the broad flagstone expanse of the Piazza della Signoria and consulted his guidebook.
Lorenzo died in 1492.
oOo
He left Florence two days later, after trying and failing to recapture the parade from the same spot on the road. Each time he finished drawing the scene … nothing happened. No parade.
And then it was time to move on.
Foxx had no itinerary other than to travel Italy until his money ran out, sketching picturesque scenes that he would someday paint, God willing, back in London.
In Pisa, he made a sketch of the town’s famous tower with its off-kilter angle. Just as he was putting the last lines on the teetering tower and the nearby cathedral of the Piazza del Duomo the scene changed, revealing something unseen.
He watched as a man, beard flowing over the collar of his knee-length coat, dropped balls and other objects of various sizes from high atop the tower. Another man on the ground—an assistant?—made notes, a quill in one hand and sheaf of papers in the other. This assistant occasionally looked upward as if to yell something to the man on the tower.