Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [72]
Abbie knelt beside me. My tutor. “Why is he important?”
“He made his own box.”
Halfway through our trip, I realized that Abbie had lifted my masters off the page, taken them out of the realm of gods and set me at a table where they were carrying on a rather lively conversation. She introduced me to them and slid my chair up to the table. It was a gift unlike any other. In doing so, she took what head knowledge I had of each of them and allowed it to sift down into my heart. Where it would take root.
In Rome we found Bernini’s sculpture Damned Soul. It is the face of a tormented man facing eternal damnation. To get the face just right, Bernini scorched his forearm with a hot iron. It worked, because you can see the torment in the eye and cheek, the rise of the nose, the wild flaming hair—open mouth, wide eyes. I shook my head. How does he do that?
In Potsdam at the Neues Palais, I marveled with Caravaggio and his Doubting of St. Thomas. For so long I’d wanted to lean in close and study how the finger, up to the second knuckle, was stuck into the skin in Jesus’s rib cage. In Rome, we found Judith, and I met the servant with the wrinkled, serious face.
At the Louvre in Paris, I met Raphael’s Baldassare Cas-tiglione. He was the clear-eyed and pensive man I’d met twenty years before on a page in the library with my mom. For the first time, I understood how the introspectiveness of the philosopher is seen through the eyes, and how such a somber mood is created with stillness and “quiet” colors.
We met countless others, but she saved my favorite for last.
Rembrandt.
In an era when most who sat for portraits were posers, clothes horses, engaged in a costume drama where they believed their clothing identified them, along came Rembrandt. He didn’t think twice about accurately depicting a crow’s foot, a bulbous nose, the oversized scrotum of a chubby toddler, or Abraham’s huge hand on Isaac’s face—which we saw at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg.
Rembrandt looked for what described a person, what identified them, and he did not avoid it or shy away from it. He sought to uncover the personality of the person before him by taking off the mask that either he wore by choice or that society had placed on him. His fine motor skills caught the precise textures of fabric, like perforations in lace or the translucent layering of chiffonlike fabric. He used high finish and rough scraping within the same area, scratching back white paint with the stub end of a brush. In A Portrait of an 83-Year-Old Woman in the National Gallery in London, he gave us the droop of an octogenarian eyelid, where the skin hanging loosely over her lid had been made with jabbing strokes of the brush. Her tortoise face, the wetness of her eyes, the way she looked past you—the shadows give thoughtfulness, and her pink eyelids suggest nights without sleep.
Nobody does eyes like Rembrandt.
With Rembrandt, there were no grotesques. His naturalism—which some would say was uncompromising—jumped off the canvas. He read people emotively and looked through the mask to find the individual. Whether through the arc of an eyebrow, the angle of a chin, the rise or fall of cheekbones, a once-broken nose or the folds of a jowl. He listened to the pull on his insides and what that told him about someone. He found that singular thing, painted it and gave you a reason to look, and look again. I could not take my eyes away. Up close and in person, I saw levels and layers to his painting that didn’t exist in any book. His craft did this, his technique, from finesse to broad strokes, his hand and brush were in perfect concert with his head, his imagination, and with this, he invited your sympathies. Even in something so simple as his Slaughtered Ox at the Louvre in Paris.
I had held it together until the end of the trip, but Rembrandt brought me to a crisis of confidence. Michelangelo would have, except that he’s…Michelangelo. Abbie knew this—that’s why she saved Rembrandt