“We have created a different relationship for art,” he had said on one of those afternoons on which, after ordering him to postpone cleaning the studio, he had demonstrated more loquaciousness with Elias Ambrosius who listened to him while nearly hypnotized by the ease with which the Maestro outlined the contours, volumes, spatial placement, and the areas of shadows of what would be the scene of the adoration of the shepherds of the baby Jesus requested by the stadtholder Frederik Hendrik de Nassau. “In the city where all are engaged in commerce, we are inventing something: the commerce of painting. We work to sell to new customers with new tastes. Do you know who the best buyer of Vermeer of Delft’s is? In fact, a rich baker. A patron who sells pastries, not a bishop or a count! And chasing the money of those who call themselves burghers, be they bakers, bankers, shipbuilders, or tulip traders, painting has had to change, and has had to please the tastes of men who have never stepped inside a university. That is why specialization has appeared: for those who paint rural scenes and sell them well, then painting rural scenes it is; they could just as well paint battles, oceans, still lifes, or portraits … We have invented the commercial picture: each artist has to have his own and cultivate it to gather his fruits in the market, like any businessman. My problem, as you may know, is that I don’t have that kind of brand, nor do I care if my painting is brilliant and harmonious, as they now want … I’m interested in interpreting nature, including that of man, including that of God, and not the canons; what matters to me is painting what I feel and how I feel it. As long as I can … Because I also have to make a living.” And he pointed the end of his paintbrush toward the canvas where the Sacred Family and the shepherds requested by the gentleman in The Hague were already outlined. “I know I am no longer in fashion, that the rich are not begging me to portray them, because they are the ones to create fashion and the rich of today don’t have the beliefs of their Calvinist fathers: now they want to display wealth, beauty, power … Since that is what they have obtained that wealth for. They build palaces in the new canals and pay us for our works, since, fortunately, they consider that we are a means of investing that wealth and, at the same time, a good way to adorn those palaces and show how refined they are.”
However, the Maestro had not been communicative at all on the afternoon on which, without yet having revealed to him his purpose of using him as a model, he had ordered Elias Ambrosius to leave his cleaning utensils aside and come up to the studio, the place where, for the previous two weeks, an order had been established in which the only ones who could enter were the Maestro, his student Aert de Gelder, and the young Emely Kerk. Upon entering the workroom, Elias Ambrosius was surprised by the reason explaining its closure: on the back wall, there were two paintings, strangely alike but fundamentally different, of the hackneyed Christian scene of the adoration of the shepherds, that depiction on which the painter had been working for too long. Without giving him the opportunity to stop and contemplate the two canvases made enigmatic by their similarities, the Maestro had asked him to don a heavy brown nightshirt and placed him before a fragment of a Greek column that reached his chest. After looking at him from several angles, he began to ask him to assume different poses as, with loose strokes, he started reproducing the positions with charcoal over the rough pages of his tafelet. Something very remote and visceral had to be occupying the Maestro’s mind in the process of looking at and sketching the young Jew, in a silence broken only by his indications to modify the positions. The Maestro, Elias thought, seemed focused on a hunt rather than a work of art. And he was sure that he was witnessing an invaluable lesson.
A few weeks before, when he began to work on one of those versions of The Adoration of the Shepherds, the painter had made the predictable decision of once again using the young Emely Kerk, his son Titus’s governess, as the model for the figure of the Virgin Mary, as he had already done in the scene that he titled Sacred Family with Angels. The work, finished and handed in at the beginning of that year, and whose process of creation Elias Ambrosius had had the privilege of watching, had sparked a near-magnetic attraction in the young apprentice. He devoted long hours to its contemplation, trying to discover, since he found himself capable of it already, the effects by which that familiar and magical scene managed to transmit an emotion that, despite his Jewish education and beliefs, Elias could not help but feeling; and one day, he found that the key to the painting was not in its representation of a mystical event but in quite the opposite, in the manifestation of its earthly serenity. The Maestro seemed to be further and further away from the expression of obvious feelings of fear, pain, surprise, sorrow, and fury, to which he’d handed himself over, years before, in his paintings about the story of Samson, or in his works about Abraham’s sacrifice for the so-called Belshazzar’s Feast, all so dramatic and full of movement. Now, in contrast, he had opted for the internalization of feeling and, in that scene, had been capable of concentrating all of the emotion of the circumstances in the careful gesture of a hand. The hand of the young and beautiful Emely Kerk, turned into the Mother of God, summarized, as a last emission of her character, the perfection that began in the oval shape of her face, in the softness of her demeanor, and continued with the pleasant curve of her shoulders, to go on to the delicacy of that extremity that approached the boy to confirm if he was sleeping: it was just one gesture, easy and routine, almost vulgarly maternal and earthly, but it successfully conferred to the representation of the Virgin a sweetness capable of proclaiming, in its tenderness that was simultaneously human and cosmic, that this was not a normal mother, but rather, the Mother of a God. The Maestro had created an explosion of the magic of beauty and had been capable of turning his own carnal desires for the model into a universal and transcendental lesson in love. And Elias Ambrosius understood that only the most gifted maestros were capable of achieving so much with so little. Could he, someday, come anywhere close to that greatness?
In the work of the adoration of the shepherds to which the painter had devoted himself for the previous two months, there appeared the same Virgin, but as part of a group of characters. With the Christ child lying in a Moses basket—more so, a rather ordinary basket—placed on her lap, the Virgin is showing the foreign shepherds the recently born Son of God. Mother and child, ever since they were sketched, appeared to benefit from the painting’s only light, the source of which one would say came from the divine beings themselves. Nonetheless, something in that work, destined for the stadtholder’s palace, did not seem to please the Maestro, and its conclusion had been delayed for several weeks already, throughout which the man, without even dipping his paintbrush, devoted himself to look at what had already been painted or to wander the city, as if he had completely forgotten the piece. Pushed by that dissatisfaction with the work, as all in the workshop would later find out, the Maestro had made a strange decision: he had asked Aert de Gelder, the most gifted of his young students, to use a canvas of similar dimensions to the one he had chosen and reproduce the main body of that painting. De Gelder had to copy the scene with the greatest fidelity, although with the freedom to introduce any variations the young man thought necessary. Aert de Gelder, who was the most surprising pictorial imitator of the Maestro who ever existed, had accepted the challenge and, with delight, had focused on the work, knowing that it was not a matter of a simple exercise of copying but rather a more intricate experiment whose final goal he did not yet know. It was in those days that entering the studio had been forbidden to all of the house’s workers and inhabitants. As such, it was only that afternoon, after receiving the Maestro’s command to move until he was standing just before him, that Elias Ambrosius at last had the opportunity to stop and study the two works, still very much in need of touch-ups and concluding treatments. It surprised him to see how the paintings multiplied the feeling of symmetry, since they seemed to be looking at one another in a mirror, and the young Jew surmised that, in all certainty, de Gelder had decided to carry out the task of reproducing what already exi
sted by relying on the optical instruments that the image made by the Maestro projected over the canvas on which the student had copied it. For that reason, the figures in the reproduction were inverted in regard to the original, with the characters somewhat more concentrated on the light source, although transmitting the same feeling of respectful introversion. But, for anyone who did not have the background that Elias and the rest of the students possessed, the question that would immediately arise from the contemplation of those twin works without a doubt would be: Which was the original and which was the copy?
“Do you want to know why I am doing this?” the Maestro asked at last without needing to confirm the object of Elias Ambrosius’s hypnotized gaze.
“With all due respect,” the young man said, and the painter then turned to stand facing the works, his back to his apprentice.
“It’s the price of money,” the Maestro said, and remained silent for a few moments, as Hakham ben Israel usually did when he was about to make a speech. “This time I cannot fail. I am counting on the stadtholder’s money to settle the back payments for this house. In sum, I don’t get commissions like this anymore; some say that my paintings look more abandoned than they do finished … A few years ago, this same stadtholder was my hope for becoming a rich, famous man and being able to live in a palace in The Hague…”
“Like the Flemish Rubens?” Elias dared to ask.
The Maestro nodded. “Like that damned Flemish Rubens … But I am not and have never been able to be like him, no matter how hard I work to achieve that, no matter if I steal his subjects, compositions, even his colors … My salvation was what at one point seemed to be my disgrace: that the stadtholder did not turn me into the court painter and that he dealt with me just as I am: a common man willing to sell his work … At that moment, I felt myself sinking, I had to give up wanting to live like Rubens, to paint like Rubens. But I also turned into a man who was a little more free. No, much more free … Although, listen well, freedom always has a price. And it tends to be too high. When I thought myself free and wanted to paint like a free artist, I broke with everything that was considered elegant and harmonious, I killed Rubens, and I conquered my demons to paint The Night Watch for Kloveniers’s walls. And I received the punishment warranted by my heresy: no more commissions of collective portraits, since mine ended up being a shriek, a burp, spit … It was chaos and a provocation, they said. But I know, I know it well, that I achieved that unusual combination of desires and fulfillment that constitute a masterwork. And if I am mistaken and it contains nothing of mastery, then the important thing is that it was a work I wanted to make. In reality, the only one that I could make while I had before my eyes the evidence of where life leads us … Toward nothing. My wife was extinguishing, spitting her lungs out, she was dying more every day, and I was painting an explosion, a carnival of rich men who were disguised, playing at being soldiers, and I did so however I felt like … The dilemma was simple: either I pleased them or I pleased myself, either I remained a slave or I proclaimed my independence.” The painter stopped his diatribe, as if he had suddenly lost his enthusiasm, but he immediately took up his digression again: “But the bitter truth is that, as long as I depend on the money of others, I will not be completely free. It doesn’t matter if the one paying is the stadtholder or the treasury of the Republic, the Church, a king, or a wealthy baker from Delft … In the end, it’s all the same. I can paint Emely Kerk as I want to paint her, or a sacred family that looks like a Jewish family from your neighborhood while receiving the visit of some angels as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And then sit and wait for a generous buyer to show up … Or not show up. But that which you see there”—he unnecessarily pointed at his painting, the larger one—“that does not belong to me: it is the stadtholder’s work. He requested it from me with what he wanted to see in detail and he is paying me to fulfill that desire … And I already learned my lesson. I know well that the stadtholder does not want to display in his palace dirty feet or ragged shepherds recently emerged from the desert, how it must have been in reality. He does not want life; just an imitation of it that is beautiful. That is why I asked Aert to make his version so that I could retouch mine with the solutions he finds … I chose Aert because he is one of the best painters I know, but he will never be an artist. And there is the proof: it looks like a work of mine, doesn’t it? Look at those lines, look at the depth of the chiaroscuro, enjoy the technique with which he works the light. Observe and learn … But, you should also learn something more important: that picture of Aert’s is missing something … It’s missing a soul, it has no mystery of true art … It is just a commission. And I am copying Aert because you have to paint that way if you want to fulfill the desires of power and earn the florins I need so badly.” He stopped, concentrating on the two paintings, and shook his head, denying something, before saying: “Art is something else … And that’s enough for today. Now clean this studio thoroughly, it looks like a pigsty … Starting tomorrow, I need you here with me. Tell Mme. Dircx that you will not be helping her for the time being. You’re going to serve as my model for the mohel in the painting of the circumcision of Jesus … And, when we finish with this commission, I will give you a paintbrush. I am curious to see if, in addition to value, vocation, stubbornness, and perhaps even talent, you have the soul of an artist.”
* * *
Once again, Emely Kerk was the Virgin who, in the foreground, watched with devotion as her husband, Joseph, held in his arms the boy swaddled in white sheets, while Elias Ambrosius, transfigured into a mohel dressed like a character from Persian tales, his head covered in the style of the primitive eastern Jews who increasingly swarmed about Amsterdam, prepared himself, his back nearly turned to the spectator, to perform the ritual surgery on the descendant of the house of David, arrived on earth to change the fate of the religion of the Hebrews and even the very history of the people of Israel, who did not recognize him as the Messiah. Behind those characters, over whom the light was concentrated, was a cavernous darkness in which figures could be made out, all of them dressed in dark vermilion tunics, and, in the background, a curtain with some gold reflections and the columns of the temple of Zorobabel and Herod the Great, the last great vestige of the glory of Judah that, shortly after, the Roman legions would destroy.
Several times, as the Maestro worked on that Circumcision of Christ, Hakham ben Israel came to the workshop to help him in the interpretation of a biblical scene referred to only by Luke so that he could accurately represent the thousands-year-old ceremony. Deeply familiar not only with the Torah and the books of the prophets, but also with the so-called New Testament written by the disciples of the man whom Christians considered to be the Messiah, Ben Israel possessed a deep mastery of Christology. Drinking the painter’s wine, he again enjoyed that work as a consultant, which he had already carried out on several occasions, since, although the Maestro knew the Scriptures by heart—he read almost no other books—their deeper historic meaning and connections with the complicated Hebrew imagery could always escape him, something that he did not want to risk in that commissioned work. Several years before, fulfilling a similar mission, it had been the Hakham who, in a game of Kabbalistic meanings whose specifics the Maestro did not master, had written the message that, in a divine cloud, covers the wall of Balthazar’s palace and announces to the Babylonian emperor the end of his corrupt reign. The Hebrew letters, arranged on vertical columns, instead of appearing arranged horizontally and from right to left, enclosed in the encrypted warning and esoteric meaning that only those familiar with the mysteries of the Kabbalah and its cosmic projections could understand, as was the case with Ben Israel.
In those talks, almost always dampened with more wine than was required to calm their thirst, of which Elias Ambrosius was the witness several times from his position as a model, the Maestro and the Hakham frequently talked about the messianism, which, from the precepts of their respective religions, they understood in different
ways. Elias discovered that his former teacher differed from the conclusions of the schools of Kabbalist scholars settled in the Eastern Mediterranean—Thessaloníki, Constantinople, Jerusalem itself, places where those maestros or their immediate ancestors had arrived following their exit from Sepharad—which had propagated the lost theory of their esoteric interpretation of the writings that, in the nearby year of 1648, in other words, year 5408 since the Creation, was marked in the Book as that of the arrival of the Messiah. The great disgraces suffered by the Jews in recent centuries, the new exodus signified by being expelled from Sepharad, the hostility lurking everywhere (“This new Jerusalem is an island,” Ben Israel would say, with words that he could have stolen from Grandfather Benjamin), the loss of faith by so many Israelites converted to Christianity, Islam or, worse still, handed over to disbelief (the excommunicated Uriel da Costa was not the only heretic who had grown among them, and he mentioned the controversial, nearly dangerous, ideas of a young man who was too intelligent and rebellious, called Baruch Spinoza, of whom Elias was hearing for the first time), constituted, according to the Kabbalists, the first of the great catastrophes. They were just a foreseeable prologue of the enormous disgraces to come, announced to precede the true arrival of the Anointed and to celebrate, at last, the judgment of the just and begin the era of the universal acknowledgment of the God of Abraham and Moses. But, besides, the Hakham disagreed with the reflections of the Eastern scholars over one specific point: the prophets Daniel and Zechariah, he said, clearly warn that the arrival of the Messiah would only occur when Jews lived on every corner of the earth. Never before.
Heretics Page 33
