* * *
He knew he was privileged. He surmised that he would witness some marvelous events and wanted to have the option of remembering them for the rest of the days of his life and, perhaps, in an unforeseen future, transmit them to others. Because of that, a few weeks after he started frequenting the Maestro’s house and workshop, Elias Ambrosius decided to make a kind of book of impressions in which he would start writing down all of his emotions, discoveries, digressions, and acquisitions in the Maestro’s shadow and light. And also his fears and doubts. He had to think a lot about where to hide that notebook, since, if it fell into anyone’s hands—he thought, above all, of his brother Amos, who was, with each passing day, more intransigent in religious matters, insistent even on speaking the impenetrable jargon of those rustic Jews from the East—it would make all of his precautions and concealment unnecessary, and make any minimal attempt to defend himself impossible. In the end, he opted for an open trapdoor in the floorboards of the attic, hidden from view by an old wood-and-leather chest.
On the first page of the notebook, which he himself assembled and pasted together at the printshop according to the model of the tafelet in which the painters usually made their sketches, he wrote in Ladino, with large letters, putting great effort into the beauty of the Gothic calligraphy: New Jerusalem, Year 5403 since the Creation, 1643 of the Common Era. And to begin, he devoted himself to narrating what the possibility of sharing the Maestro’s world meant to him, and later, in various entries loaded with adjectives and exclamation points, he tried to express the epiphany that was caused by witnessing the miraculous act through which that man touched by genius brought forth figures from the base of dead color primed on the oak board, how he dressed them, gave them faces and expressions with a touch of his brush. He tried to explain to himself how he managed to illuminate them with the fabulous, almost magical play of ocher colors, as he placed them in a semicircle around the kneeling woman dressed in white, to give definitive form to the Christian drama of Jesus pardoning the adulterer, condemned to be stoned to death. The work turned out to be a process of pure ex nihilo creation, in which, day to day, the young man had been able to contemplate a convocation of lines and colors that appeared and took shape often to be devoured by other lines, other colors capable of better outlining the silhouettes, the ornaments, the scenery, the shapes, and the lights (How did he achieve that controversy of dark and light? he would ask himself over and over again) until, after many hours of effort, he reached the most resounding perfection.
As they had agreed on the day of his first visit, Elias, once his daily work at the printshop concluded, worked at the Maestro’s house every afternoon and evening, from Monday to Thursday, and even a few hours before sunset on Friday evening. (“When Friday ends, you must fulfill your commitments as a Jew. On Sundays, I sometimes go to my church and, if I can avoid it, I don’t like to have anyone at home,” the Maestro said to him.) Broom and cleaning rag in hand, following Mme. Dircx’s instructions, the young man started to go all over the building where, at one time, happiness, celebrations, and chatter had filled the days and nights. But now the surrounding atmosphere was gloomy, forged by the presence of death, which had circled so much around it. The only things to bring signs of life and normality to the ambience were the running around, laughter, and tears of little Titus, the surviving son, and the presence of the students, some even younger than Elias, who oftentimes could not avoid an eruption of laughter capable of altering for a few moments the somber atmosphere enclosed within those walls.
Elias always carried out his tasks quickly, although conscientiously, desirous of going up as soon as possible to the attic where the students worked in their nooks. He even, if possible, tried to gain admission to the Maestro’s studio before sunset, since, despite his preference for nocturnal scenes, he would discover that seldom would the man continue his work on a painting using the light of candles or a bonfire prepared by his assistants in a great copper pot designed for that purpose. But when spring arrived and the sun’s disappearance became more delayed, Elias had more time at his disposal to wander, always in silence, broom and rag in hand, throughout the painter’s studio; and when the latter was not working or when he had locked the door, on occasion he remained in the first-floor rooms, contemplating the Maestro’s recent works (a delicate portrait of his deceased wife, adorned like a queen and showing her last smile; a magnificent image of David and Jonathan exuding tenderness, in which the Maestro had used his own face to create the second of these characters); paintings by his friends and most outstanding students (Jan Lievens, Gerrit Dou, Ferdinand Bol, Govaert Flinck); and pieces that he had acquired, some to keep, others to sell for some gain. Among those jewels, Elias found A Samaritan Woman by Giorgione, a re-creation of Hero and Leander by the exuberant Flemish Rubens, and that Virgin’s bust he had seen on the day of his first visit to the house, which ended up being a work by the great Raphael. More often than not, of course, he directed himself to the stalls in the attic, set apart by mobile panels, where the apprentices worked, on some occasions guided by the Maestro, and others, working on their own pieces, according to the abilities they’d already acquired. With Keil the Dane, Samuel von Hoogstraten, the boyish Aert de Gelder, and, above all, with the very gifted Carel Fabritius (with reason, frequently invited by the Maestro to help him advance in some of his own works), he began his true learning of the mysteries of composition, light, and form, although with all of them, he took care not to reveal his actual intentions, even when he assumed that it would not be difficult for any of the students and apprentices to guess them, in addition to the fact that the possible aims of an insignificant Jewish servant could interest those offspring of businessmen and affluent bureaucrats very little.
In the initial weeks, the Maestro barely addressed a word to him, except for when he ordered him to clean somewhere or hand him a specific object. That treatment, bordering on contempt, motivated perhaps by how unprofitable his presence was, wounded the young man’s pride but did not defeat it: in the end, he was where he wanted to be and learning what he had so desired to learn. And being invisible was his best shield, as much inside as outside that house.
Elias tended to pay particular attention to the jobs assigned to the students, since he knew well that these tasks had to do with the basic rules of the trade. Someday, with any luck, he, too, would receive those orders. With special attention, he followed the process delegated to the apprentices of applying second and third layers of primer to the canvases, over which, many times, they applied a thick, nearly ridge-like, mix of gray quartz colored with a bit of ocher brown, more or less reduced with white, all of it diluted in drying oil, to obtain the maximum roughness of texture and dead color demanded by the Maestro; he stopped to observe the art of preparing the colors, how the little mill pulverized the stones of pigment in the mortar, for the students to then mix them with precise quantities of linseed oil so that the paint would bind sufficiently, without being too thick; he studied the way of setting up the Maestro’s palette (surprisingly limited in colors) according to the phase in which the work found itself or what piece of it the Maestro would be working on at that moment. All of those jobs were developed with precise mandates, and only on occasion did they come with any sort of a less didactic explanation of the artist’s intentions. Elias discovered, besides, that the painter was generally the one who prepared the yellow, gold, copper, earth, and sienna colors (which he used profusely), as if he only trusted in his own ability to achieve the precise hue demanded by his mind. Nonetheless, it was while conversing with the pleasant Aert de Gelder—the student who could reproduce the Maestro’s works with the greatest ease, as if the Maestro himself were inside him—when Elias Ambrosius had the first notion of how the colors had to combine to achieve those impressive effects of light and how to apply them to attain the gloomy shadows that gave such interior drama to the pieces coming out of the workshop.
One afternoon during the month of April—just barel
y after Pesach, the Jewish feast that, due to stipulated rituals, spaced out Elias’s visits to the house—the young man found two occasions to be happy. The first was when, upon entering the studio, he saw the Maestro seated before a canvas that he had ordered Carel Fabritius to prepare a few days prior. During the days on which the student was working on linen that was six quarters high by one ell wide, Elias had witnessed the most remote origin of a work that at that moment was only in the mind of the Maestro, beating like desire. While Fabritius prepared the linen, the Maestro devoted himself to drawing on a tablet and watched the work of priming the canvas out of the corner of his eye. On two occasions, he requested “More,” and Fabritius had had to add the dark Kasel earth powder paste, to give the surface an even deeper tone. At last, the Maestro drew some lustrous, white-lead lines across that nearly black surface that was tinged with a hint of brown, and Elias made out the shape of a head, covered perhaps by a bonnet … like the one that the painter was wearing at that moment. The position of the mirrors—placed near the easel in such a way that the artist could see himself full-on and at three-quarters profile and at an angle at which the sun’s light, filtered by the windows, would highlight only one of the model’s cheeks—revealed the work’s subject matter.
As soon as Fabritius left the studio, Elias Ambrosius, moving as carefully as possible, placed in a bucket the dozen large, dirty paintbrushes picked up from the floor and recovered his friend the broom to depart: the first law he had learned upon arriving at the workshop was that when the Maestro was working on a self-portrait, he always had to be alone, unless he solicited someone’s presence—either to use him as a clothing model or to retouch certain areas of the piece. That is why he was surprised when he heard the Maestro’s voice speaking to Elias’s image reflected in the mirror: “Stay.”
Elias leaned the broom against the wall and lowered the bucket but did not move. The Maestro went silent again and looked his own face in the eye, as seen in the reflecting glass. That face had been, without a doubt, the most recurrent image in the Maestro’s work. Several dozen of his self-portraits, including paintings, sketches, and engravings, had left his hands and found buyers in the market and space on the walls of Amsterdam’s bourgeois houses, where they had nearly always arrived not for their beauty, but for having been considered a sure value by some daring buyers: the same as gold or diamonds, just like everything that came from the hands of that Maestro before his reputation was damaged by the piece in the great hall at Kloveniers. The search for expressions, feelings, real or feigned moods, had perhaps led the Maestro to consider himself the ideal model who was, of course, always available. Perhaps the search for images that could be used in the many other portraits he executed (with recognized skill) constituted another reason for that reliance. But, above all, Elias thought, after hearing commentaries on the subject from the students and apprentices, and after speaking about that obsession with his teacher Ben Israel, it appeared that the Maestro found in his features—none too noble, incidentally (his Roman nose, his rebellious and free curls—cadenettes, as the Dutch called them, using the word from the French—the expressive although harsh mouth, with his teeth increasingly darkened by cavities, and the always alert depth of his gaze)—the reflection of a well-known life, of whose gains and losses, happiness and disasters, he wanted or meant to leave testimony of, with the certainty (as he would one day, much later, tell Elias Ambrosius) that one man is one moment in time; and the life of a human, the consequence of many moments throughout the time, more or less extended, he was given to live. A face not as representation but as result: the man is like the emanation of the man who has been.
That skill so singular of the Maestro’s was known to all: his capacity for reading consciences and reflecting them in the density of a gaze, which he later surrounded with a few meaningful attributes. In the city, the story was told that several years before, barely arrived in the metropolis from his native and more conservative Leiden, the young man’s aptitudes underwent a scandalously definitive test: the rich businessman Nicolaes Ruts, the king of the leather business, the nearly exclusive seller of Siberian pine martens—more expensive than gold, even more than multicolored tulip bulbs—wanted a portrait made by that “kid” who was so talked about and who was even considered the new promise of Northern painting. That debut in the circle of the powerful, that God and the already visible talents of the young painter put in his path, turned out to be spectacular enough to leave the city’s art merchants and connoisseurs with their mouths hanging open. Because the portrait of Ruts constituted, despite the few means utilized, the best possible representation of the businessman—powerful, sure of himself, but removed by ideology and faith from the siren song of ostentation. If the Nicolaes Ruts portrayed was covered in the fur of a pine marten drawn hair by hair, as pine marten had never been drawn, in an appropriation capable of carrying out the magic act of transmitting through the contemplation of the softness and warmth the pelt offered to the touch, it was because there was no one better than Nicolaes Ruts to wear one of those items. From there: the self-assured and calm gaze with which the businessman, covered by the coveted fur, looked at the spectators who were fortunate enough to see the canvas. And those who had seen it were other rich people in Amsterdam who socialized with Ruts and wore their expensive cloaks, those opulent ones who would take care of turning the portrait into a legend and into the work capable of fueling the trend so that, for ten years, those same rich people in Amsterdam would request the art of the young Maestro to immortalize themselves in the way that the city had determined to be the best possible one.
A few minutes after receiving the order to stay in the studio, Elias Ambrosius had the privilege of being able to observe how the Maestro, following a long contemplation, took the thin paintbrush and, without ceasing to look at himself in one of the mirrors, began to work on what would be his eyes.
“If you are capable of painting yourself and putting the expression you desire in your eyes, you are a painter,” he said at last, without ceasing to move his paintbrush, without taking his eyes off of his work. “The rest is dressing up … Stains of colors, one next to the other … But painting is much more, kid … Or should be … The most revealing of all human stories is the one that is described on the face of a man … Tell me, what am I seeing?” he asked, and before the silence of his aspiring apprentice, he answered himself. “A man who ages, who has suffered too many losses and aspires to freedom that eludes him once and again, although he will not give in without a fight…” Only then did the Maestro move, to better accommodate his bottom. “Take a good look. There, along with the face, on the spectator’s side, is where you should put the point of light. That way, you avoid a contour that is too neat on the other cheek. With that, you achieve breaking attention from the face as a whole. What matters are the features, especially the eyes, where you should find spirit and character. Starting with…”
The Maestro interrupted his monologue, as if he had forgotten he was speaking, because he was now working with gray and sienna in search of the form of the eyelid, rather thick, perhaps a bit fallen. Too fallen, he seemed to decide, and tried it again, after running his finger over the linen.
“The eyes are defined by shadows, not by light…” He took up his speech again and, for the first time, turned around to look at the young Jew. “The portrait is an event in time, a remembrance of the present that we visualize and eternalize. Tomorrow, I want to know what I’m like, or what I was like today, and that is why I am portraying myself … When you portray someone else, it becomes more complicated. It is no longer a dialogue between two people, but rather three: the painter, the customer, and the image of himself that that customer demands, weighed down with all of the social conventions that the person portrayed aims to satisfy … But when you paint yourself, only you are speaking to the spectator. It’s like getting naked in public: what stands before you is what there is…”
The Maestro had again turned his back to Elias Am
brosius and focused on looking in the mirror that reflected his profile. “What about you, what are you looking for in painting?” he asked, and leaned his hand holding the paintbrush on his thigh as he moved his gaze in search of the mirror reflecting the young Jew, as if demanding a response this time.
“I don’t know,” Elias confessed, willing to say the truth, and for that reason, added: “I only know that I like it.”
“That I already know: a man who is willing to be humiliated, mistreated, and even marginalized in order to achieve something; who pays thirty florins to sweep the house, do the errands, and throw out shit in the canal, because he hopes to learn something; who risks suffering the dogmatic fury of other men, which is, incidentally, the worst fury in the world … can only do so for something that he likes very much. But that thing about liking is fine for a lover, or a businessman, or even for a politician. Not for the minister in a church, like my friend Anslo, or for a fanatic of messianism, like my friend Menasseh … Nor is it sufficient for a painter, either. What else? Glory? Fame? Money?”
Elias Ambrosius thought that all of those things were appetizing and, of course, he desired them; but he also knew that they were not destined for him and that he would never achieve them with a paintbrush in his hand. If a maestro like Steen had to run a tavern where he sold beer, if Van Goyen was nearly a beggar, if Pieter Lastman had died forgotten, to what could he aspire?
Heretics Page 28
