The Mirror Thief(93)
Years ago, during one of his surprise reappearances in Curtis’s boyhood, Curtis’s dad spent an afternoon lecturing him about black painters—Raymond Saunders, Frank Bowling, Beauford Delaney, Alma Thomas—and about how Picasso stole his best ideas from African masks he’d seen in the Musée de l’Homme. The next Saturday Curtis rode his secondhand Schwinn the two fast downhill miles to the new MLK Library and sat and flipped through massive hardbound books for hours, befuddled by bright blotches and smears. And then months later, when his father visited again, the sermon was about how black abstractionists were just aping the white man, how they didn’t challenge the sensibilities of white culture, and how jazz was the only revolutionary Afro-American artform. Curtis smiles, wondering what his father would be saying were he here today. Probably something about how Islam forbids image-making. The Holy Prophet, peace be upon him, teaches that on the Day of Resurrection, all the artists will be commanded to give life to the stuff that they created. And when they can’t do it, they’ll be punished. Think about it, Little Man. It makes sense. Every living thing comes from God. God made us all in his image. And it ain’t right to make images of God.
When Curtis comes to a torpid bare-breasted Venus that resembles nothing so much as a Playboy centerfold from the late Fifties, he starts paying closer attention to the art. He’s in the 1700s now—older than America—and the paintings are more realistic, more precise. An angel with a flaming sword. A pale creepy infant prince. A baleful wolfhound with intelligent orange eyes. Curtis leans in to get a close look at the hound, the detail in its fur, its chain, its collar. He and Danielle always talked about getting a dog once they moved out to East Lansdowne. A big dog. They’ve been there almost four months now and still haven’t done it. Curtis would feel better about being away if he knew Danielle had a big dog around.
As he nears the museum entrance he’s back in the Renaissance, spotting names he remembers from Mediterranean shoreleaves: Lotto, Tintoretto, Titian. One big canvas looks familiar, although the artist’s name—FRANCESCO BASSANO, 1549–1592—doesn’t ring any bells. AUTUMN, it’s called: a group of rustics harvesting apples and stomping grapes beneath the eerie green light of an overcast sky. Curtis isn’t sure what about it caught his attention, unless maybe it’s the thunderbolt-brandishing centaur bounding through the distant clouds, which reminds him a little of the bearded gods on the map in the lobby. Studying the canvas, he spends a moment trying to figure out whether he saw the real one in Italy before he remembers that this is the real one.
He’s looking at the exhibit’s oldest piece, a portrait of an unsmiling merchant from 1436, when Veronica breezes in. Just the sight of her puts him on edge. The shuteye she caught on the couch last night hasn’t done much for her: even from across the room her eyes are hooded in blue. Her movements seem loose, marionettelike, as if she’s held up by something invisible outside herself, as if each step she takes is an arrested collapse. Her feet brush the blond parquet as she glides toward him.
Veronica’s decked out in white running shoes and a lavender jenny-from-the-block tracksuit that she doesn’t quite have the body to pull off; the outfit is at serious odds with her teased-out hair and insomniac pallor. Her wide smile is probably intended to be disarming, but it’s straying into cymbal-playing-monkey territory and has pretty much the opposite effect.
She nods at the portrait of the merchant as she strolls up. They don’t make ’em like that no more, eh? she says.
Curtis glances back at the painting. The merchant’s eyes are sharp in its smoky halflight, staring at him across five and a half centuries. That’s the truth, he says. Looks like it could’ve been taken with a camera.
It was, Veronica says.
Curtis blinks, looks at her, tracks her eyes back to the oak panel. There are small cracks in the paint on the merchant’s nose and forehead. Say again? he says.
It was taken with a camera. As in camera obscura, as in a darkened room for the projection of images. I mean, it is a painting, obviously. In the Fifteenth Century, there was no way to chemically fix an image. Van Eyck projected the sitter onto the panel with some kind of optical device, and then he painted over the projection.
Veronica brushes past Curtis toward the wall, sweeping her hand over the portrait’s face like she’s tagging it with an invisible spraycan. Look how he’s framed, she says. Look how he’s lit. Look at that softness, those shadows. You see that in Leonardo’s sfumato, then later in Giorgione, Hals, Rembrandt. Canaletto and Vermeer, too, but those guys came later; they had fancy glass lenses. Van Eyck had to make do with a concave mirror. But the basic approach is the same. You see how the tonal grading opens the figure’s dimensions and gives the painting depth? That’s a total giveaway. You take a look at a Spanish or Sienese painting from the same period, it’ll be as flat and closed-off as the king of clubs.
What, Curtis says, are you talking about?
You haven’t heard about this? All the big guys, all the marquee names—van Eyck, Leonardo, Giorgione, Raphael, Holbein, Caravaggio—they all used optical devices. This is old news, man. This was on 60 Minutes like a year ago.
Curtis looks at her, irritated, and then looks at the merchant again. The portrait’s eyes seem to follow him through the room.
Veronica is backing into the gallery, turning girlishly on the ball of her foot. No optics in Titian or Tintoretto, she says, gesturing at the walls. But you can still see the influence of the optical style. Dark backgrounds? That’s from optics. Images projected in a camera obscura always have dark backgrounds. But holy shit, the van Dyck? The ruffles on that collar, are you kidding? Definitely optics. The Lotto, too, although he hides it pretty well. And check out the Pontormo. Look how f*cked his proportions are. He used the camera obscura to nail down Mary’s face and hands, the baby Jesus’s head and arm. The rest of the painting’s on a different planet. The hands and the faces don’t fit the bodies. If that Mary were to crawl down from the canvas she’d look like a power forward for the NBA. Those arms are like four feet long.