The Hare With Amber Eyes - Edmund de Waal [14]
He has a year away from his family, a gap year, a conventional Wanderjahr, a Grand Tour through the canon of Renaissance art. This journey turns Charles into a collector. Or perhaps, I think, it allows him to collect, to turn looking into having and having into knowing.
Charles buys drawings and medallions, Renaissance enamels and sixteenth-century tapestries made after Raphael cartoons. He buys a marble child in the manner of Donatello. He buys a beautiful faience sculpture of a young faun by Luca della Robbia, an ambiguous, vulnerable creature turning round to look back at us, glazed in deep Madonna blue and yolky yellows. Back in his second-floor apartment Charles frames it in a niche in his bedroom hung with sixteenth-century Italian broderies, thickly embroidered textiles. It becomes a sort of satyric altarpiece, with the faun taking the place of a martyred saint.
There is an illustration of this altarpiece in a vast maroon three-volume elephant folio in the library at the Victoria and Albert Museum. I order it up, and there is much jocularity when it is brought into the Reading Room on a hospital trolley. This Musée Graphique contains engravings of all the major collections of Renaissance art in Europe, principally those of Sir Richard Wallace (of the Wallace Collection in London), assorted Rothschilds – and the twenty-three-year-old Charles. These folios are vanity publishing on a colossal scale, produced by collectors to impress other collectors. Three pages after his sumptuous niche for the faun – a deep burgundy with raised golden threads, panels of saints, coats of arms – another part of his collection is revealed.
It makes me laugh out loud: a huge Renaissance bed, a lit de parade also hung with broderies. A high canopy with putti embowered in intricate patterns, grotesque heads, heraldic emblems, flowers and fruit. Two rich curtains are held back with heavily tasselled ropes, each with an E on a golden background. On the bedhead itself is another E. It is a sort of ducal bed – almost a princeling’s bed. It belongs to fantasy. It is a bed from which to rule a city state, give audiences, to write sonnets in, certainly to make love in. What kind of young man would buy a bed like this?
I write down this long list of his new possessions and try to imagine being twenty-three, with these crates of treasures heaved up the winding stairs to the second floor and opened with all the shavings and splinters flying; arranging them in my own suite of rooms, trying out their disposition in relation to the morning sun that floods in from the street. As visitors come into the salon, should they see a wall of drawings or a tapestry? Should they glimpse my lit de parade? I imagine showing the enamels to my parents and my brothers, showing off to my family. And I have a sudden, embarrassed return to being sixteen and hauling my bed into the corridor in order to sleep on the floor, and tacking up a carpet over my mattress to make a canopy. And weekends spent rehanging my pictures and rearranging my books, trying out how it felt to change my own space. It feels eminently possible.
It is, of course, a stage-set. All these things that Charles collected are objects that need a connoisseur’s eye, all are things that speak of knowledge, history, lineage, of collecting itself. Unpick this list of treasures – tapestries woven after Raphael cartoons, sculpture after Donatello – and you can feel that Charles has begun to internalise how art unfolds through history. Back in Paris he donates a rare fifteenth-century medallion of Hippolytus torn apart by wild horses to the Louvre. I think I can begin to hear the young art historian talking to visitors. You sense the notebook, not just the money.
But I also begin to feel his pleasure in stuff here: the surprising