Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [71]
We’d been married a year when she came to me. I was sitting in my studio, mixing paints.
She sat in my lap, arm around my neck. “I want to go on a trip.”
“Okay.”
“And I want to plan it. All by myself.”
“Okay.”
“And you’ll go with me?”
“Sure.”
She walked out of the room, grabbed a folder that was about four inches thick and came back in. She sat on the floor, patted the ground next to her and then unfolded a map of the world.
One of the great things she’d gotten from her father was the ability to think outside the box. Add to that the fact that she had money and Abbie could come up with some “out there” ideas.
We were gone nearly a year.
In a perfect world, we’d have started with the early Renaissance and moved forward linearly, hopping through a timeline of artists and their work. Instead, we hopped geographically, from city to city. That is, until the very end. But that, too, she did on purpose.
Our first stop on our way to New York was the National Gallery in D.C. I remember turning a corner and there hung Rubens’s Daniel in the Lions’ Den. I sat on a bench opposite the work and walked across it with my eyes for nearly three hours. The idealized grandeur reached down within me and touched something I never knew was there.
At the Art Institute of Chicago, we sat with Toulouse-Lautrec and his At the Moulin Rouge. Toulouse was the crippled outcast who hung out in Paris bordellos with prostitutes and other social outcasts and found comfort in the night world of Paris. If Toulouse had taught me anything, it was that it takes an outcast to paint the needy.
In London, Abbie rushed me to the National Gallery where I met Giovanni Bellini and his Portrait of Doge Leonardo Loredan. The face, the expression of the mouth, the facial wrinkle in the cheek matched by the neck and, most importantly, the eyes. Nothing prepared me for that.
We flew to Florence and met Giotto. Giotto had taken the flat two-dimensional creations of his predecessors and, using light and dark shading, added dimension. He gave solidity and weight where it had not existed before. In her role as my tutor, Abbie asked me, “Why is he important?”
I could see now. “He thought outside the box.”
Second, she led me to Donatello’s sculpture Mary Magdalene—the aged woman, her anguish imprinted on her face. Her torment stopped me. The way her hair draped across her face, her torn clothes, she wore her emaciated, withered soul on the outside.
In the Uffizi Gallery, I found Piero della Francesca and his one-sided portrait of Federico da Montefeltro. Federico was disfigured in that he’d lost his right eye in a sword fight, so Francesca painted him in full profile but only of his left side—to hide it. Oddly enough, while his contemporaries were idealizing their subjects, he showed the moles and crooked nose. Also there was Titian’s Venus of Urbino. While her body is provocative, it is drawn in such a way that leads you time and time again to her face, the angle of her neck, the inviting drop of her shoulders, the playfulness in her eyes, the relaxed crossing of her legs. It’s what a nude should be.
Then she took me to Portrait of a Man (The Young Englishman). Whereas Bellini’s Doge is stiff and wooden, Titian’s Englishman is not, the youthful honesty of his face drips off the page. While his garment fades away, can even be described as washed out and nondescript, his gaze is almost verbal. He captures the viewer, pulls at your eyes and forces you to come to grips with the singular thought that his might just be the best portrait ever painted.
One afternoon, she wrapped a blindfold around my head and led me by the hand down a walkway, around a corner and sat me on a bench. I knew where we were. It’s rather a famous walk, but then she took off the blindfold. There he stood. Michelangelo