That Awful Mess on the via Merulana - Carlo Emilio Gadda [113]
left shoulder of the two partners, did not cover the calves and still further, below the calves, the repainted malleoli: and that had allowed the first painter, their "creator," to bring on to the scene four unsuspected feet. The two right ones, enormous, had come to him in a flash: and they were generously tentacled in toes, stretched forward in their stride, to puncture the foreground, the ideal plane (vertical and transparent), to which every visual occasion is referred. With particular expressive vigor, in a remarkable adaptation to the mastery of the centuries, the big toes were depicted. In each of the two extended digits, the cross strap of otherwise unperceived footwear segregated and singled out the knuckled-toe in that august pre-eminence which is his, which belongs to the big toe, and to that toe alone, separating it out from the flock of the toes of lower rank, less suitable for the day of glory, but still, in the osteologues' atlases and in the masterpieces of Italian painting, toes. The two haughty digits, enhanced by genius, were projected, hurled forward: they traveled on their own: they almost, paired off as they were, stuck in your eye: indeed, into both your eyes: they were sublimated to the central pathetic motif of the fresco, or alfresco, seeing as how it was plenty fresh. A bolt from heaven, a light of excruciated hours blanched them; however, when you came right down to it, the light seemed to rise from underground, since it struck them from below. The distant bray of a donkey, as the wind rose again, with the tinkle of bells. The glorious history of our painting, in a part of its glory pays tribute to the big toe. Light and toes{54} are prime ingredients, ineffable, in every painting that aspires to live, that wants to have its say, to narrate, persuade, educate: to subjugate our senses, win hearts from the Malign One: insist for eight hundred years on the favorite images. Not even the saints, then, so laden with so many gifts of the Lord— not even they could avoid the indispensable gift of feet: and still less these two, who walked the Appian Way together to Babylon,{55} towards decollation or upside-down crucifixion. They had, indeed, in their feet, the physical instrument of their itinerant apostolate: they trod on the feet of Ahenobarbus. Who, however, remained less than persuaded. No, the saints must not lack their full complement of toes: as soldiers must receive their full issue of tins: and even less when an Italian painter of the sixteenth or seventeenth century or, of the eighteenth, or worse, kneels before them and prepares to depict them, from below, with the soul of a pedicurist. Light, in Italy, is the mother of toes: and if one is an Italian painter, it's nothing to joke about, as Manneroni didn't joke at I Due Santi, neither with the light nor with the toes. The metatarsus of Saint Joseph has been peduncled with an inimitable big toe in the Palatine tondo by Michelangelo (the Holy Family): which huge digit, for a minimal portion, to tell the truth, has its pictorial tegument from the little toe of the Bride: a livid and almost surreal, or perhaps eschatological light, proposes the Toe-Idea, loftily incarnating—or in ossifying—it, in the foreground of the contingent: and salvages it promptly for the metaphysical bruises of eternity. The same metartarsus protuberates, the foot's thumb, rival of the Michelangelan-Palatine (to signify the miracle, or rather the audicle, of male chastity) in the Urbino master's Sposalizio, today at the Brera. The divarication of the solitary, bony toe from the remaining herd of other toes is rendered prominent by the perspectively charming joints of the cleansed pavement, where there is no husk or skin, neither orange's nor chestnut's, nor has any leaf or paper settled there, nor has man urinated there, nor dog. And the master toe, though disjoined from the others, at its root is spurred and gnarled: and then it converges inwards, as if forced by gout or by the habitual constriction of a shoe momentarily removed, or I'd say domum relapsa as if too fetid