by Debra Dean
They trail after her through the dim Jupiter Hall, crowded with hundreds of vases made of precious metals and stone and presided over by the towering gold and marble statue of Jupiter. It is like being undersea, with muted light filtering down through a few unbroken panes just below the ceiling and reflecting off the green stone walls.
“The walls are artificial marble,” she informs them, “made by a special process mixing marble dust and concrete and dyes. Each of the rooms down here has walls of a different color: here rose colored”—she gestures as they pass through the Ancient Courtyard—“and up here, in the Hall of Dionysus, it is the color of coral. This is a wonderful room. I think it is like being inside the mother’s womb, very red and dark and safe.
“Do you wish to see more?” The boys nod, mute but eager.
The captain, an elderly man in a long fur-collared coat, speaks up. “You are very generous, comrade, but we don’t wish to overtire you in your condition.”
She assures them that she is not tired at all, and, amazingly, she is telling the truth. She feels as though she could walk her charges through every single room of the museum if only they would follow. There is so much she wants to show them. So she leads them up the Main Staircase to the picture gallery on the first floor, holding up her lantern to guide them. Their footsteps echo on the parquet floors. Rows of dusty gilt frames line the barren walls.
“This is my favorite part of the museum, though it may be hard to see why. From here on out, you will have to rely entirely on your imagination.”
She walks them into the Rubens Room and stops before an empty frame. The boys look bewildered. Drawing a deep breath, she silently wills up the image. Gradually, a picture takes shape for her inside the frame. It is Rubens’s portrayal of Andromeda being rescued by the warrior Perseus. A wonderful winged horse slowly surfaces on the blank green wall inside the frame. Then the decapitated head of the gorgon and the open mouth of the sea monster in the foreground. This will appeal to boys, she decides.
She begins to sketch out the painting for them. Starting at the left edge, she describes the beautiful princess posed with one hand shyly covering her privates, her eyes downcast before the smitten Perseus.
“She is a princess and was about to be sacrificed to a sea monster. Perseus just happened to be flying over the sea on his winged horse—he had been off killing the evil gorgon, whose head is impaled on his shield here. The head is still alive and the face is terrified.” She makes a horrible face. “So Perseus looked down, and he saw the beautiful Andromeda chained to a rock, and he fell instantly in love. He flew down and rescued her by slaying the sea monster. Here, at the bottom of the painting, is the dead monster. He is green and very ugly, and his eyes are bulging.”
As she talks, she sees that one of the boys in particular is transfixed, a flush spreading across his cheeks. She is encouraged. She asks them to picture the angel placing a wreath on the hero’s head and the little putti that busily attend the scene. They are draping garments over the modest young woman and holding the reins of Pegasus, the winged horse.
“This one little putto looks frightened that he will be stepped on. Pegasus is such a lively horse. His flesh is slick and quivering, and his hooves are lifting off the ground. He has huge white wings, and they are poised for flight. Any second now he will lift into the sky. You can just feel it. In fact, everything in the painting is moving. You almost feel that if you turned away, and then turned back again, the painting would be different.” She moves on, but as she walks away she sees that one of the younger boys has lingered behind. He whips his head back and forth as though he may catch a glimpse of something if only he is fast enough.
She skips down a few frames and holds up her lantern. “This is the spot where the painting Bacchus hung. Does anyone know who he was?”
One boy volunteers that he was the Roman god of wine.
“Yes, that’s right. So this is a picture about drinking. Bacchus is holding up an enormous gold goblet, and it is being filled by one of his Bacchae. The Bacchae were his female attendants. And poised directly under the goblet here is a young cupid catching the spilled wine in his mouth, and another one here is urinating.” She sees one boy stifle a smirk. “Over here is Pan, and he is pouring a river of wine into his open mouth. They are all very drunk. Look, even the leopard is drunk.” She corrects herself. “In the painting, there is a leopard right here under Bacchus’s foot, and he is chewing on a grapevine like a drunken kitten.
“Now, usually Bacchus was portrayed as a slim and handsome young man, but Rubens shows him here as very fat. Imagine a very fat, naked man with flesh piled in rolls on his huge belly. This was painted at the end of Rubens’s life, when he was so sick with gout that he could hardly grasp a brush.”
The boys trade glances between themselves.
“Excuse me, comrade—what is gout?”
Of course these boys have never heard of such a thing. “It is the disease of the decadent bourgeoisie, caused by indulging in too much rich food and wine. Catherine the Great also had gout. It caused the extremities to swell painfully. Here Rubens has given Bacchus gout, as well. He is seated on a wine cask because his toes are too swollen for him to stand.”
One of the boys raises his hand and asks, “Is his female comrade naked also?”
“Well, no,” Marina answers, keeping her face straight, “she has only one breast exposed, but that is an astute question, because Rubens’s women are often unclothed. He was the undisputed master at painting skin and making it look real, and so he was famous for his nudes.”
“Are they pretty?” another boy asks.
“I think they are quite beautiful.”
As she moves down the wall, she points out Venus and Cybele, and the boys focus intensely, as though willing the naked women to appear.
In the next room, she stops in front of another vacant frame.
“Oh, I like this one very much. It is called Saint Luke Drawing the Virgin. There were so many paintings of the Madonna in the museum, but this one is particularly clever because it is not so much about the Madonna as it is about the artist and art itself.
“The people who commissioned van der Weyden wanted an official painting for their guild, which was like a union. They said, ‘Paint us a picture with the Madonna.’ So over on the left here, holding her child, is Mary.” Marina describes a woman wearing a dark, rather plain gown, very similar in color to the dark background.
“But the artist didn’t want to paint just another Madonna, because this was such a commonplace subject, so he cleverly put himself into the picture, disguised as Saint Luke, the patron saint of artists. A patron saint,” she adds, “is the dead person that believers prayed to for help.” With the flat of her hand, she sketches the space on the right that the figure occupied. “He is over here, holding a small canvas and a brush. But not only has van der Weyden put himself in the picture, but he’s dressed in bright red, from his head to his toes. So our eye is drawn to him rather than to Mary.
“And then our eye moves here, to the center of the painting. Do you see these two smaller figures in the background?” She catches herself, realizing that she is pointing to a blank square, but the boys and their teachers are all completely focused on the spot where she has directed their gaze. “There are two figures, a man and a woman. They are standing outside, past the studio where the artist is painting his model, and they’re gazing away from the viewer at the landscape beyond. They’re posed between two dark pillars that open onto a light-filled landscape. Our eyes follow theirs to the view of the peaceful river. It zigzags through a beautiful medieval city and off into this very soft, luminous horizon.”
She is awed by the vision and doesn’t say anything for a moment. They all stare at the wall in silence.
“So,” she resumes, “the artist was saying to us that this isn’t really about a Madonna. The real miracle is the painting itself, which lifts us and carries us away to this magical world.”
And then s
he is walking again, backtracking through the rooms. “I have something else wonderful to show you,” she promises. She marches them briskly through the empty Snyders Room, calling up in her memory and then reluctantly rejecting canvas after canvas. They are wonderful—enormous market scenes teeming with dizzying heaps of fish and baskets of produce—but it would be cruel to describe such pictures to starving boys. Similarly, she skips past the frames that held Fyt’s still lifes, with their artful arrangements of dead game and glistening fruit.
They pass into a dark passage lit only by Marina’s kerosene lamp. At the start of the war, the Raphael Loggias, a glassed arcade with exquisitely detailed frescoes covering every surface, were boarded over from the inside and sandbagged up to the top of the windows. The frescoes were left in place, though, and as they move down the darkened tunnel, fantastic images emerge from the shadows, wavering in the dim light and then receding again. Painted squirrels climb columns decorated with elaborate scrolls of oak leaves. Greek athletes strike poses in medallions on the walls.
“This loggia is five hundred years old. It is an exact copy of the original in the Vatican, which was painted by Raphael and his students. This style of ornamentation was seen in classical Rome and was called grotesques.”
Every surface is crowded with animals and fruits, with real and imaginary creatures—a porcupine, a crow, a unicorn and a satyr, lions’ heads and equestrian mounts and winged angels—an illustrated encyclopedia of the world. The lamplight flickers in water-darkened mirrors, and as they pass, their own images jump out at them. Above, in a succession of vaults, loom sea-dark scenes from the Bible.
At the end of the loggia, they emerge into another denuded room. She draws them into a half circle around the first in a row of freestanding panels.
“This is the spot that held one of the most prized paintings in the entire Hermitage collection. The painting is called The Holy Family, and it was painted by Raphael.”
Marina gazes at the panel. “I don’t know that I will be able to do it justice,” she admits. “It’s such a wondrous painting because Raphael took these mythical characters, the Virgin Mary and Joseph and the Christ Child, and he reimagined them as real people, an actual family. If they were real, they wouldn’t be gilt and perfect. And so what he came up with was this rather melancholy little family portrait. On one side,” she says, pointing, “we have Mary. She is beautiful but very distant and unaware. And quite apart from her, over here, is Joseph. He’s much older than Mary. He leans on his walking stick and looks almost frail. Between them”—Marina points to the exact center of the blank square—“standing on his mother’s lap, is the Christ Child. He’s a mama’s boy. He is eyeing Joseph fearfully and his arms are reaching out for his mother. Joseph’s expression, I think, is one of resigned disappointment, a father whose child rejects him for the mother.”
The boys are staring at the blank square, their eyes unfocused and dreamy.
“They have halos,” an older boy murmurs.
“Why yes, they do,” Marina responds, a little taken aback. “You have been here before?” she asks him.
The boy’s eyes drop to the floor. “No, comrade,” he murmurs. “It is just…” he points to the framed space, unable to complete his sentence.
Marina is puzzled, but she continues. “One wouldn’t notice the halos at first, but they are there, fine as piano wires. It’s almost as though Raphael was saying that what sets them apart from any other family is almost invisible. They might be us.
“Now, over here was Raphael’s Conestabile Madonna.” She leads them to another panel, this one very ornate and gilded like the proscenium arch of an old theater. There is nothing in the center where the stage would be except a darkened square of paint.
“The Conestabile Madonna was one of only three paintings that were packed with their frames. Which is too bad for us, because the frame itself was quite beautiful and elaborate.” She describes the frame and then works her way in to the round canvas at the center. “Everything in the painting has been arranged to fit inside the circle,” she says. “The Madonna’s head is slightly inclined”—Marina demonstrates by tucking her chin just so—“and the shore of the lake and the distant mountains curve into the center.”
She sees something that has escaped her notice before. It is very faint, but there seems to be another face hovering in the sky just to the left of the Virgin.
She describes the Madonna before her, how small she is, how delicately colored, her formal, upright posture, the way her heavily lidded eyes are distant and peaceful. And the way that the child appears to be reading the open prayer book in Mary’s hand.
“Of course, the logical explanation is that he is simply attracted to the book, as toddlers are. But Raphael’s contemporaries would have seen it differently. They would have seen a miracle.”
Just inside the left edge of the frame is the faint outline of another child, a child that is not in the Conestabile. It is like having double vision, as though her memory were blurring. Marina remembers her teachers in school describing a phenomenon called pentimento. Indigent painters would sometimes reuse canvases, covering over inferior paintings with a coat of pigment and then painting a fresh picture. With time, as the oils aged, the old image might appear ghostlike behind the new. An eye would peer out from the folds of a woman’s skirt, a piece of fruit would hover in a cloudless blue sky. She wonders if it is possible that Raphael used this canvas before he painted the Conestabile.
A second Madonna is coming into focus, and then there are three toddlers ghosting and overlapping one another, and one of them holds up two sticks lashed together in the shape of a cross. With a shock, Marina knows all at once what she is seeing. It is Raphael’s Alba Madonna, the one that disappeared, just as Anya described it. She reaches out to touch the canvas, but there is nothing there, just the paneling.
She turns to the boys, her face radiant. “Do you see?” she asks them. Past them, she can see other paintings in the Skylight halls. Her vision is filling with color and images.
She sweeps through a doorway, beckoning breathlessly for them to follow. The hall is so cavernous that lamplight doesn’t reach the far end. Above, the barrel-vaulted ceiling recedes into black. From the darkness comes the steady drip of water hitting water, each drop echoing in the chasm. Except for the enormous frames that line the walls, the vast room is empty.
“Look here.” She details for them a dramatic scene, three women surprised at an open tomb by an angel. Then she describes another picture, this one showing the Virgin being taken up into heaven. Then another, the conversion of Saul. As she talks, images appear inside the gigantic frames. The pictures are wild with stormy skies and electric emotion, and as Marina’s sweeping gestures paint the scenes, the lantern sways, throwing wild swoops of light up the walls. Figures appear out of the shadows, their robes swirling, their hands raised in amazement.
“All this is yours, comrades,” Marina tells them. “Can you see?” She is ecstatic. Her voice trembles when she speaks, but her eyes are bright and calm. “It’s all yours.”
Ravishing splashes of color pour out of the darkness and resolve into images—paintings that hung elsewhere in the museum, paintings Marina remembers and others that she has only heard tell of. The room is filling with women, with children, with saints and goddesses, and the boys are whispering among themselves. They point at the frames on the wall, at the paintings crowding the edges of the lamplight. The captain is weeping. He is staring at the wall, wiping at his eyes. “Look,” he says to no one in particular. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful?” He points to a spot at eye level on the wall. It is Giampetrino’s Madonna, and she is staring right back at them.
Several years hence, when Marina’s body is finally winding down, Helen will feel no grief, only a quiet detachment, as though she is waiting for a bus—it is late and she is tired, but she has nowhere she needs to be and it will get here when it gets here. She and Andrei and Naureen and the grandchildren have
long since said their good-byes, and Marina herself has left, though no one is able to pinpoint exactly when that happened, only that at some point she was no longer there. It is all over but the waiting.
While she waits, sitting at her mother’s bedside and listening to the hoarse rasp of her breathing, Helen finishes another sketch of her, something she does periodically to pass the time. Once she had thought that she might discover some key to her mother if only she could get her likeness right, but she has since learned that the mysteries of another person only deepen, the longer one looks.
The last time she sketched her, her mother was still speaking occasionally. She had asked to see what Helen was drawing, and when Helen turned the pad, she had looked at her portrait without recognition. This was no measure of Helen’s artistic skill. By then, Marina didn’t know who Helen was, either. She called her Nadezhda. Andrei, too, had lost his identity as her son and become someone else, an imagined suitor with whom she would flirt shamelessly. Only old photographs of herself or Dmitri sparked any recognition. Helen had gone to the dresser and picked up the cracked photograph of Marina taken back in Russia and showed it to her.
Marina studied it long and hard, her face a mask of concentration. “She looks familiar,” she said to Helen. “Do you know her?”
“Not really,” Helen answered. “Maybe you could tell me about her.”
“I think she was one of the Madonnas,” Marina said. “But I can’t say for certain. There were so many.”
It is tempting to see meaning where there may be none. Very often, Marina’s blank-faced comments have seemed to carry the weighty truth of Zen koans, and the family repeats them, teasing out the possible meanings and then dismissing their own credulity. There is always, though, the yearning to believe.