The Unknown Masterpiece

by Honoré de Balzac

  Porbus, bowing respectfully, admitted the youth as well, supposing he had been brought by the old man, and paid little heed to him, for the neophyte remained under the spell that must beguile any born painter at the sight of his first real studio, in which are revealed some of the art’s material operations. A skylight illuminated the master’s studio; falling directly on the canvas fastened to the easel and as yet marked by only three or four strokes of white paint, daylight failed to penetrate the dark corners of this huge room, though stray reflections in the gloom picked out a silvery gleam on a suit of armor hanging on the wall, suddenly glistened on the carved cornice of a venerable sideboard holding odd pieces of crockery, or spangled points of light upon the coarse texture of some old brocaded draperies lying in broken folds. Plaster lay-figures, limbs and bodies of classical goddesses lovingly polished by the kiss of centuries, littered shelves and console tables. Countless sketches, studies in three colors of crayon, red chalk, or pen-and-ink, covered the walls up to the ceiling. Boxes of paint in powder and tubes, jars of oil and turpentine, and a series of overturned stools left only a narrow path by which to reach the aureole cast by the skylight around Porbus’s pale face and the strange visitor’s ivory cranium. The youth’s attention was soon entirely absorbed by a picture which, in that age of disorder and upheavals, had already become famous and was often visited by several of those fanatics to whom we owe the preservation of the sacred fire in evil times. This lovely canvas portrayed a Mary of Egypt undressing in order to pay her passage to Jerusalem. Marie de Médicis, for whom it was painted, would sell this masterpiece in the days of her destitution.

  “I like your saint,” the old man said to Porbus, “and I’d give you ten gold écus for her over and above what the queen’s paying, but the devil take me if I’ll bid against her!”

  “You think it’s good?”

  The old man sniffed. “Good?... Yes and no. Your lady is assembled nicely enough, but she’s not alive. You people think you’ve done it all once you’ve drawn a body correctly and put everything where it belongs, according to the laws of anatomy! You fill in your outline with flesh tones mixed in advance on your palette, carefully keeping one side darker than the other, and because you glance now and then at a naked woman standing on a table, you think you’re copying nature—you call yourselves painters and suppose you’ve stolen God’s secrets! ...Brrr! A man’s not a great poet just because he knows a little grammar and doesn’t violate usage! Look at your saint, Porbus! At first glance she seems quite admirable, but look again and you can see she’s pasted on the canvas—you could never walk around her. She’s a flat silhouette, a cutout who could never turn around or change position. There’s no air between that arm and the background; no space, no depth, yet the thing’s in perfect perspective and the shading correctly observed; for all your praiseworthy efforts, I could never believe this splendid body was animated by the breath of life. If I were to put my hand on that breast, firm and round as it is, it would feel as cold as marble! No, my friend, blood has never flowed under that ivory skin, the veins don’t weave their mesh of crimson dew beneath those transparent temples and that fragrant bosom. Right here there’s something like a pulse, but over here it’s motionless: life is at grips with death in every pore. Here it’s a woman, there a statue, and everywhere else a corpse. Your creation’s unfinished. You’ve managed to put only part of your soul into your precious work. Prometheus’s torch has gone out more than once in your hands, and lots of places in your picture are untouched by the divine fire.”

  “But why has this happened, maître?” Porbus asked the old man deferentially, while the youth with difficulty repressed a strong desire to strike him.

  “Ah, there we have it!” the ancient creature exclaimed. “You’ve wavered between two systems—between drawing and color, between the meticulous phlegm and stern resolve of the old German masters and the dazzling ardor and happy abundance of the Italians. You’ve tried to imitate Holbein and Titian, or Dürer and Veronese, at the same time. It was certainly a magnificent ambition, but what’s happened? You’ve achieved neither the severe charm of the Germans’ dry outlines nor the deceptive illusions of the southerners’ chiaroscuro. Over here, like molten bronze cracking the mold, your rich high colors à la Titian have exploded the austere Dürer contours you poured them into. While here, the lineaments have resisted and throttled the splendid excesses of the Venetian’s palette. Your figure’s neither perfectly drawn nor perfectly painted, and everywhere betrays the traces of this unfortunate vacillation. If you didn’t feel your inspiration was strong enough to fuse these rival styles, you should have confined yourself to one or the other, to achieve that unity which simulates one of the conditions of life. Your truth is all in the interior parts—your contours are false, they fail to encircle the limbs or suggest there is something behind them... Now here there’s truth,” the old man said, pointing to the saint’s throat, “and here,” he continued, indicating the place on the canvas where the shoulder ended. “But here”—returning to the center of her bosom—“everything’s wrong. Let’s not analyze it; it would only drive you to despair.” The old man sat down on a stool, rested his chin on his hands, and fell silent.

  “Maître,” Porbus told him, “I did study that breast from the model; but, alas for us, certain effects which are true in nature cease to be lifelike on canvas...”

  “It’s not the mission of art to copy nature, but to express it! Remember, artists aren’t mere imitators, they’re poets!” the old man exclaimed, interrupting Porbus with a despotic gesture. “Otherwise a sculptor would be set free from all his labors by taking a cast of his model! Well, just try casting your mistress’s hand and setting it down in front of you: you’ll see a horrible corpse utterly unlike the original, and you’ll be forced to rely on the chisel of a man who, without copying it exactly, can represent its movement and its life. It’s our task to seize the physiognomy, the spirit, the soul of our models, whether objects or living beings. Effects! Effects! But they’re just the accidents of life, not life itself. A hand—to continue with my example—a hand isn’t just attached to an arm, and that arm to a body; no, it expresses and continues an idea that must be seized and rendered. Neither painter, nor poet, nor sculptor can separate effect from cause, they’re invincibly united! That’s your real struggle! Many painters succeed instinctively, without ever knowing this theme of art. You draw a woman, but you don’t see her! That’s not the way to penetrate nature’s secrets. With no thought on your part, your hand reproduces the model you’ve copied in your life-drawing class. You don’t delve deeply enough into the intimacies of form. You don’t pursue them with sufficient love and perseverance in all their disguises and evasions. Beauty is something difficult and austere which can’t be captured that way: you must bide your time, lie in wait, seize it, and hug it close with all your might in order to make it yield. Form’s a Proteus much more elusive and resourceful than the one in the myth—only after a long struggle can you compel it to reveal its true aspect. Artists like you are satisfied with the first likeness it yields, or at most the second or third; that’s not the way this victory is won! The victorious painter is never deceived by all those subterfuges, he perseveres until nature’s forced to show herself stark naked, in her true spirit. That was Raphael’s way,” the old man said, removing his black velvet cap to express his respect for this monarch of art. “His supremacy’s due to that intimate sense which apparently seeks to break Form. In Raphael’s figures, Form is what it is in all of us: an intermediary for the communication of ideas and sensations, a vast poetry! Each figure is a world, a portrait whose model has appeared in a sublime vision, colored by light, drawn by an inner voice, examined by a celestial hand which has revealed the sources of expression in an entire existence. You people make lovely gowns of flesh for your women, elegant draperies of hair, but where’s the blood which creates peace or passion, which causes particular effects? Your saint’s a brunette, yet this, my poor Porbus, this belon
gs to a blonde! And so your figures are tinted phantoms you parade before our eyes, and you call that painting, you call that art! Because you’ve made something that looks more like a woman than a house, you think you’ve achieved your goal, and because you no longer need to scribble under your figures currus venustus or pulcher homo, like the earliest painters, you now suppose you’re wonderful artists! Ha, ha! Not so fast, my brave friends: forests of pencils and acres of canvas must be used up before you’re there. Of course, of course! A woman tilts her head this way, she holds her skirt like that, her eyes melt with a look of submissive sweetness, the shadow of her lashes trembles just so on her cheeks! That’s it—and that’s not it. What’s lacking? A trifle that’s nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything. You’ve got the appearance of life, but you don’t express its overflowing abundance, that je ne sais quoi which might even be the soul, floating like a cloud over the envelope of flesh. You know, that bloom of life that Titian and Raphael caught. Starting from where you’ve left off, some excellent painting may be done; but you exhaust yourself too soon. The crowd admires, and the true connoisseur smiles. Oh Mabuse, Oh my master!” added this singular creature, “what a thief you are, taking life with you when you left us!— All the same,” he interrupted himself, “your painting’s worth more than the daubs of that imposter Rubens with his mountains of Flemish meat sprinkled with vermilion, his waves of auburn hair, and his clashing colors. At least here you have color, and feeling, and drawing, the three essentials of art!”

  “But that saint is sublime, my dear sir!” the youth exclaimed loudly, emerging from his deep reverie. “Those two figures, Mary and the boatman, have a delicacy of purpose quite beyond the Italian painters—I can’t think of a single one who could have invented the boatman’s hesitation.”

  “Does this young fool belong to you?” Porbus asked the old man.

  “Apologies, maître: forgive my boldness,” the youth answered, blushing. “I’m a nobody, an ignorant dauber just arrived in this city, which I know to be the fount of all knowledge.”

  “Then get to work!” Porbus ordered, handing him a red crayon and a sheet of paper.

  The unknown youth nimbly copied the figure of Mary of Egypt.

  “Oh ho!” the old man exclaimed. “Your name?”

  The youth wrote “Nicolas Poussin” under his drawing.

  “Not bad for a beginner, not bad at all,” observed the singular creature who had been lecturing so wildly. “I see we can talk painting in your presence. I don’t blame you for admiring Porbus’s saint. The world accounts her a masterpiece, and only the initiates of art’s secrets can discover her sins. But since you’re worthy of the lesson, and capable of understanding it, I’m going to show you how little it would take to make this a work...of art! Be all eyes, and give me your undivided attention: such an opportunity to learn something may never come again. Your palette, Porbus!”

  Porbus went to get a palette and brushes. The little old man rolled up his sleeves with an abrupt convulsive gesture and thrust his thumb into the splotched, paint-laden palette Porbus handed him; then he virtually snatched a handful of brushes of all sizes, and his pointed beard quivered with the menacing exertions corresponding to the itch of an ardent imagination. Loading his brush, he growled between his teeth, “Paints like this deserve to be tossed out the window, along with the fool who mixed them—nauseating, how crude and false they are! Who could paint with these?” Then, with feverish energy he dipped the tip of his brush in each gob of paint, covering the whole spectrum faster than a church organist runs up and down his keyboard for the Easter O Filii.

  Porbus and Poussin stood motionless on either side of the canvas, plunged in the most vehement contemplation.

  “Look here, young man,” the old creature said without turning around, “you see how with three or four strokes and a little bluish glaze you can make the air circulate around the head of this poor saint who must have been stifling in that dense atmosphere! Look how this drapery flutters—now you can see the breeze is lifting it. Before, it looked like some starched linen pinned in place. Notice how the glossy highlight I’ve just put on her breasts renders the plasticity of a young girl’s skin, and how the mixture of russet and burnt ochre warms the cool gray of that big shadow where the blood had congealed instead of flowing. Young man, young man! What I’m showing you here no master could teach you. Only Mabuse possessed the secret of giving figures life, and Mabuse had only one pupil, who happened to be me. I’ve had none, and I’m an old man. You’re intelligent enough to guess the rest, from what I’ve let you see.”

  While he was talking, the strange old man touched every part of the painting with the tip of his brush: here two strokes, here only one, always to such effect that it seemed a new picture, but a picture steeped in light. He worked with a frenzy so impassioned that sweat beaded on his bulging forehead; so rapid were his tiny movements, so impatient and abrupt, that to young Poussin there seemed to be a demon at work in the strange creature’s body, a demon acting through his hands, uncannily moving them against the old man’s will. The preternatural gleam in his eyes, the convulsions which seemed the effect of a certain resistance, made this notion so convincing that the youth’s imagination was utterly subjugated. The old man worked on, saying: “There, look! That’s how you spread the butter, young man! Come, little brushstrokes, warm up these icy tints! Now then, there, like that!” he muttered, creating a sensuous glow in the very places where he had pointed out a certain lifelessness, abolishing discrepancies of feeling with a few patches of color, restoring the unity of tone required for the figure of an ardent Egyptian woman.

  “You see, my boy, it’s only the last stroke of the brush that counts. Porbus has laid on a hundred, I’ve made one. No one will thank us for what’s underneath. Remember that!”

  Finally this demon stopped, and turning toward Porbus and Poussin who stood speechless with admiration, addressed them: “This is still no match for my Catherine Lescault, but one could put one’s name to such a thing. Yes, I could sign it,” he added, standing up to find a mirror, in which he studied the painting for a moment. “Now, let’s have something to eat,” he said. “The two of you will come along to my place for some smoked ham and a good wine. Well, well! For all the bad times we live in, we can talk painting! We’re well matched there, and here’s a young fellow,” he added, clapping Nicolas Poussin on the shoulder, “who gives every sign of having some talent.”

  Then, noticing the youth’s wretched Normandy coat, he drew a leather purse from his belt, rummaged within it, and took out two gold pieces which he handed to Poussin: “I’ll buy your drawing.”

  “Take it,” Porbus murmured to Poussin, seeing him start and blush with shame, for the talented youth had a poor man’s pride. “Go on, take it. He has the ransom of two kings in his money bags!”

  All three descended the stairs from the studio, conversing about the arts until, near the Pont Saint-Michel, they came to a fine timbered house; its decorations, door knocker, and carved window frames amazed young Poussin. Before he knew it, the youth was in a low-ceilinged room in front of a roaring fire, sitting at a table covered with good things to eat, and, by some unheard-of stroke of luck, in the company of two great artists who were inclined to be friendly.

  “Young man,” Porbus said, seeing Poussin stare openmouthed at a picture, “don’t look at that canvas too long, it will drive you to despair.”

  It was the Adam Mabuse had painted to gain release from the prison his creditors had kept him in so long. And indeed the figure produced such an illusion of reality that Nicolas Poussin began to understand the true meaning of the wild claims that had been made by the old man, who now regarded the picture with a complacent expression, though without enthusiasm, as if to say: “I’ve done better!”

  “There’s life in it,” he said. “My poor master outdid himself there, but the background still lacks a certain degree of truth. The man’s alive all right, he’s standing up and about to walk
toward us, but the sky, the wind, the air we see and feel and breathe aren’t there. In fact, the man’s the only thing in the picture, and all he is is a man. Now the one man who came straight from the hands of God should have something divine about him, and that’s what’s missing. Mabuse used to be quite cross with himself about it, when he wasn’t drunk.”

  Poussin glanced back and forth between the old man and Porbus with anxious curiosity. He moved closer to Porbus as if to ask the old man’s name; but the painter put a finger to his lips with a mysterious expression, and the youth, though fascinated, held his tongue, hoping that sooner or later some chance word would allow him to guess the name of their host, whose wealth and talents were sufficiently evidenced by the respect Porbus showed him and by the wonders amassed in that room.

  Catching sight of a magnificent portrait of a woman set off by the dark oak paneling, Poussin exclaimed, “What a splendid Giorgione!”

  “No,” the old man replied. “What you see there is one of my first daubs!”

  “Saints preserve us!” Poussin cried naïvely. “I must be in the house of the god of painting!”

  The old man smiled like someone long familiar with such praise.

  “Maître Frenhofer!” said Porbus. “Couldn’t you manage to order a little of your good Rhenish wine for me?”