“Why not get back together with your ex-girlfriend? Why not have kids?” I asked him, the same way I ask single people now if they want a cat. I thought if he could care for me, he could care for others. The two of them were friends and she sometimes came over to the apartment in the afternoon. She seemed as melancholy as he did. “Boh!” Paolo exclaimed and turned up his hands, the sound he made when he did not want to tell you the answer. Then he bugged his eyes out, spread his mouth into a smile. “Never be friends with your ex-girlfriend,” he said. And he rubbed his eyes and said there was no point, no, he’d never have kids, there was no point.
The weekend before I left, Paolo and I biked along Via Appia, the ancient road that connected Rome to Brindisi, the road where the catacombs were first rediscovered.
We bought a baguette, some cheese and salami, and a bottle of Coke. I couldn’t bike well, it being years since my father and I rode in the park, and Paolo would wait for me, pulled to the cobblestones’ side as I wobbled along. We ate on a grassy hill by the road. I didn’t know it, but we were following the ancient pagan tradition of dining with ancestors on Sundays, just as Priscilla must have done.
The hill was near the hollow where a millennium ago an earthquake or a landslide opened a shaft in a vineyard and exposed a path down into the catacombs. Here, explorers first mapped the catacombs and followed itinera ad sanctos until they reached saints’ bodies. They plundered these, substituting anonymous skeletons for martyrs, rearranging epitaphs to create sanctified graves, the human body once again reconstituted to serve a message.
After we ate, I asked Paolo where he saw himself in ten years. “Ten years?” he asked, smiling because it was a silly question he didn’t know how to answer. “I’ll be dead,” he said.
That was nine years ago now.
According to scholars, the epitaphs left next to the catacomb tombs were “rarely very communicative.” They “provoke rather than satisfy curiosity,” there not so much to tell us who a person was as to remind us not to disturb that person’s rest.
What’s curious about catacomb epitaphs is how precisely, how assiduously, they record the age of the dead. They measure lives down to the hour. One fragment in Priscilla reads: “To his dearest wife, with whom I lived so many years, six months, three days, and fifteen hours.” And another: “Five years, two months, six days, and six hours.”
This record-keeping is touching, if not baffling. Why be so Swiss about time? But maybe this is the point—knowing how much will be lost, and the expanse that will be slowly eaten away, perhaps the only way to recognize a person is to acknowledge the days we had with them, to count the exact moments and believe that an extra six hours a millennium ago mattered as much as all the ones in between.
The morning I left Rome, we were running so late that Paolo had to push me on board the train to Fiumicino. Earlier, he handed me a note in Italian, at the end of which he wrote: quando una porta si chiude, un’altra si apre. “When one door closes, another opens.” That’s a cliché, I know, the simplest solution to an architectural problem, but it was what I wanted to hear. I don’t know exactly what he meant, but I wondered if, through the vagaries of language, he intended it the same way I took it: that when my father died, I found him.
Now I do not preserve the memory of my father so much as the memory of my losing him. His cold hands on my cheek after he came home from work. His hunch over the dinner plate my mother left out for him, the pasta and sauce always cooked separately. The way his knees have become my knees—so knobby that when I sleep on my side I need an airplane pillow to soften the bones. How he and I must look like bodies in their loculi that way.
To write about a memory, another saying goes, kills that memory. An act of preservation is an act of distortion. Just ask those explorers: when we get close enough to someone, we end up with someone else.
That’s fine, I guess. If my father’s no longer a person, then he’s a place where a person once was. A void, a quarry, a hollow. Material to carve into—tufa, soft porous rock, the ash sprung from volcanoes. Bacteria stained white, a structure slowly turned to ruin by the being that most wants to keep it alive.
The catacomb epitaphs, in their mixture of Greek and Latin, were some of the earliest iterations of the Italian Paolo and I pidgined our way through.
A funny thing happens when you’re able to communicate a simple phrase in another language to someone else. It’s as if you then know that person better than you’ve known any other. As if the precision needed for those few words was more than you could muster with all the words in your own tongue. As if to say anything at all is a hard-won power, microscopic and microbial, persistent and painstaking and all too slow to be seen.
Sometimes I search online for Paolo, hoping that in the intervening years he turned on his computer and signed up for wireless. I search hoping he’s still alive. But though I come close, I can find no trace of him—there’s a Paolo Boni who’s a lawyer in Rome, another who’s an architect in Milan. I run through images but do not see his face. I stop for a second or two—there’s someone his age, laughing or smiling, his arms around his friends—and I wonder if I’ve gotten it all wrong, if this is actually him and I’m remembering someone else.
Other times I go back and look through Google Maps and zoom in real close to Via Vivaldi. I click on the chubby little yellow man and drop him onto the blue line of street. Suddenly, there I am in the digital flesh, a little herky-jerky, dizzy from my bird’s-eye fall as I swivel my fat yellow head around the streets. But once I gain my footing, I start to whirl around, first slowly then faster, 180 then 360, patient, swiveling my cursor, honing in not on the pavement or cars or storefronts or angles but on the people—searching their blurred, anonymous faces in the long-shot hope that there’s an outline or a semblance of a body, long-ago familiar, that I once knew.
Capricci
Midmorning, the oils mixed, the canal clear and alive with chatter, the painter sits down to his veduta. He lays pen and ink beside him in case he needs a quick sketch—quills for the soft lines, metal points for the sharp. It will be a simple scene: the Rialto Bridge spanning the Grand Canal, the Basilica of Vicenza and Palazzo Chiericati on either side. Already the painter can pinpoint what will fall into his view, what will background and sell his work to the English patrons who trek the Grand Tour across the continent to buy his work. He used to be a scenographer after all, a designer of opera sets just like his father. And so those seagulls swarming upon a mess of nets, picking at something not-quite dead, not-quite alive—they must go. Same for the shade cast over the water by that colonnade; he’ll scale that back a bit and replace it with light. He has always preferred, in any case, painting sunlight to water. But the dozen or so people peppering the scene, the figures who assume other shapes in the distance—the robed pear standing by the side of the stairs; the gondolier upright like a mantis, punting his extra leg of an oar—these he will keep. These are his drama.
Venice: Caprice View with Palladio’s Design for the Rialto Bridge
The tourist would like to take a brief vacation. He would like to see everyone from a different angle. Don’t we all need to get away from ourselves sometimes? He looks at the people before him and decides that the robed man next to the bridge’s stairs—most likely a priest—resembles not just a pear, but a bell. And that the white-stockinged gentleman in front of the canal has the legs of a crane. But the pose of each—at least this is what it seems—reminds him most of the conduttori on the train he took from Rome to Venice. One drearily trudges down the corridor in midnight blue, tapping his fingernails on the seatbacks as he passes; the other crosses his arms in impatience as the tourist fumbles for his ticket, for his admission to scene and city.
The year is 1745, it is unsurprisingly sunny in Venice, and the painter is Giovanni Antonio Canal. He goes by Canaletto, “the little canal,” the diminutive given to the painter of water channels and the son of B
ernardo (the Big, the Papa, the Grand) Canal. Canaletto paints vedute, landscapes and cityscapes, and his large-scale work ranks at the forefront of Venetian vedutisti.
James McNeill Whistler would say that “Canaletto could paint a white house against a white cloud.” The American so loved the Venetian’s level of detail that when he visited the National Gallery in London, he went at once to “smell the Canalettos.” Pressed to explain his popularity, other critics put it more simply: Canaletto could make the sun shine in his pictures. True, he couldn’t do much with water—“chain mail laid over marble,” sniped one—but he paid special attention to mortar and stone, the coto belo chiaro and cenerin of gray-cobbled Venice. And who needed water when one could imagine a sky so uniformly blue that no tint or gild of sun seemed possible? So blue that his early commissions were always delayed until his patrons complained, threatening to leave him for a Piranesi in Rome, and the painter replied with demands for more time, whingeing on about the price of Prussian blue, that essential yet expensive pigment, the one color needed to finish off his masterful, scumbled skies and capture the real thing. Canaletto perfected a type of painting where the central unifier was hidden in broad daylight. He painted sunlight without the sun. He made what was present appear absent.
View of the Piazzetta
The tourist is soaking it in. How the sun shines from everywhere, even in near December! The air smells faintly of sardines but no matter. For there in the distance, a heavy white sail hangs from the boom of a barge—oh how it reminds him of the sheets his mother used to drape over the shower rod. He remembers bunching the heavy wet linens in a corner so the showerhead would not spray them. How wonderful that everything has correspondence and analogy. The tourist is content. Today he will see the Grand Canal; today he will touch Murano glass.
Before he sets to work, Canaletto consults the sketches that came before. He rifles through his papers and runs his hand over the brown ink’s crosshatches.
Canaletto is painting a still life, but he’s also painting a city. That’s one of the difficulties of the vedutisti. He must calm the commotion, let it stand as frozen but about to thaw, count the untold steps about to be taken. He is an efficient worker, over 585 paintings in his lifetime, but he must first have everything laid out in front of him. And so what does he do with those figures to his right, the group of men lounging by the wharf, passing back and forth a bottle of white, the sunlight glinting off the glass? Does he keep them or cut them out? What do they discuss so early in the day?
Whatever he decides, he wants his painting to appear timeless. His admirers marvel that Canaletto styled a Venice “closer to the celestial city of Revelation . . . pure gold, like unto clear glass.” That is, he depicted a city that was not just timeless but at any and all time, a city whose tourists can imagine themselves to be anywhere. Stroll through any first-rate metropolis, his critics say—a Paris, New York, or London—and sooner or later you will round the corner and come upon some aspect of a scene that will remind you so completely, so uncannily, of a Canaletto.
Grand Canal: Looking East from the Campo S. Vio
The tourist is drunk. All that thought about his mother hanging sheets has made him homesick. The corner store—he does not know the name for it, but calls it a bodega—has a chalk sign advertising a liter of wine for three Euros. It is too good to pass up and he has just finished two liters of Nestlé Pure Life. He fills the bottle up with white wine from the keg and finds his friend and they go and sit on a high bench by the Grand Canal. Their legs dangle. They drink the wine quickly because the sun is out and warm white wine has the faint taste of eggs, and he and his friend pretend they are the statues of fish in fountains and try to arc wine from their mouths onto the backs of pigeons that pass beneath their feet.
Those critics must be losing their minds! New York, Paris, London. How can Canaletto’s work pass for anywhere but Venice? Start in the 1720s and his paintings sell well enough that Canaletto’s name rings as synonymous with his city. When his nephew, the painter Bernardo Bellotto, sold his own work abroad, he signed his canvases with his uncle’s name to fetch a higher price. And the art collector William Beckford professed upon visiting Venice, “I have no terms to describe the variety of pillars, of pediments, of mouldings, and cornices . . . that adorn these edifices, of which the pencil of Canaletti conveys so perfect an idea as to render all verbal descriptions superfluous.” Canaletto’s views became cicerone to his city. Travelers experienced Venice through his eyes and Canaletto through their experience of Venice.
Although, just a moment, please: Do these travelers and tourists see what Canaletto himself saw, or what he wanted them to see? Does it matter?
When it comes down to it, we do not know how he actually viewed his city. We only know how he thought his city should be viewed, which is to say how he thought it should be sold.
An Island in the Lagoon with a Gateway and a Church
Once he is drunk and the sun is setting and his friend returns to the hotel to meet the others, the tourist starts to feel romantic and so he ogles the pretty, passing girls. He imagines them aristocrats, the great-granddaughters of the Medici, wanderers of ruined villas. How much like sculpture, how beautiful! The men are not so bad either. On the way back to the hotel, he decides to get lost—a true Venetian experience, his guidebook tells him. Who knows, perhaps he will meet someone from long ago? Anyone, that is, to quell his loneliness, to lend credence to the unreality in which he’s washed up.
In 1745, Canaletto is one of only a handful of painters working from direct observation—he gondolas to a certain spot and records what he sees—and so it becomes easy to substitute one of his vedute for a view of actual Venice, to assign it documentary accuracy.
But Canaletto also paints capriccios. If his vedute were the idealized made realistic, then capriccios were fantasy rendered believable, fiction turned non. Capriccio: a subset of land-and-cityscape painting in which the painter inserts some architectural invention—an archaeological ruin, an imagined assembly of buildings—into the supposed reality of the present-day scene. An alternative way of imagining a city, raw topographic material granted pictorial license. Canaletto believed in the artist’s right to modify and redesign facts in the interest of creating a picture. So look again at where we started. The Grand Canal, the Rialto Bridge, the Palazzo, and Basilica? Fantasy. Pure Palladian fantasy. Canaletto is depicting not the actual Rialto, but a never-realized plan to replace the existing structure, a project designed by good old Andrea Palladio, the sixteenth-century architect and classicist. As for the Palazzo Chiericati and Basilica Palladiana, those are landmarks belonging to the city of Vicenza, sixty kilometers to the west.
If by hiding the sun in broad daylight Canaletto made what was present appear absent, then the capriccio, well . . . absence becomes presence. Nostalgia springs magically back into the frame and whimsy forms solid architecture.
Capriccio: A Palladian Design for the Rialto Bridge, with Buildings at Vicenza
The tourist walks around the city and sees what he wants to see. He projects long-lost faces onto anonymous strangers. Often he pauses on his walks along the canal banks, the side streets so narrow and filled with shade, and watches a father rowing his son down the channel.
Canaletto’s popularity came at some expense. John Ruskin, that stale old fart, steamrolled him in a diatribe that cemented the painter’s reputation for years: “The mannerism of Canaletto is the most degraded that I know in the whole range of art. Professing the most servile and mindless imitation, it imitates nothing but the blackness of the shadows . . . Let it be observed that I find no fault with Canaletto for his want of poetry, of feeling, of artistical thoughtfulness in treatment . . . He professes nothing but coloured daguerreotypeism . . . no virtue except that of dexterous imitation of commonplace light and shade.”
Note the points on which Ruskin wants to skewer Canaletto: “mindless imitation,” “commonpl
ace light and shade,” “daguerreotypeism.” As if Canaletto were only aiming—and failing—at documentary photography. As if art and invention belonged to another figure entirely.
Yet what if Ruskin has a point? Take Canaletto out of Venice, and even that dexterous imitation falls apart. The painter moves to London in 1746, and the quality of his work falls so dramatically that the art world accuses him of being an impostor. The public demands he give a painting demonstration to prove he is who he says he is. He so loses his knack for translation—no longer able to make of the English evening the silver and saffron of a Canaletto sunset—that the answer can only be that he’s no longer himself.
Though if we speak of the man himself, the hidden unifier, the arranger, we beg the question: who was Canaletto actually?
Nighttime Celebration Outside the Church of San Pietro di Castello
The tourist goes to an inexpensive bar with his friends, stands outside, smokes Gauloises, and drinks too many Peronis. The bar’s not actually so inexpensive because he forgets to convert his Euros into dollars. He and his friends buy a bottle of limoncello and drink it by the water and try to lift a Smart car from the street onto the curb. They fail. At the hotel, the tourist wanders into a dining room and pees in the corner. He tries to stack a number of wine glasses into a pyramid, but the pyramid falls down, and the glasses break. He sits on a balcony, nursing his cut hand, and kicks his legs out over the street. He didn’t expect this, but he is homesick. Two of his friends stand next to him and make out. He falls asleep in the bathtub.
What we know: That he was born in 1697. That his first signed and dated work was a capriccio. That his personality was, according to a Swedish count, “fantasque, bourru, Baptistise”—temperamental, abrupt, clownish. That by 1755, Canaletto so tired of London he returned to Venice. That, at the same time, no record of him exists between 1755 and 1760, so that he might not have returned to Venice after all. That Bernardo Bellotto had good reason for signing his uncle’s name on his own work because he painted some of Canaletto’s vedute. That Canaletto’s father painted some as well. That Tiepolo quite possibly painted his figures. That although Whistler said of his paintings “In this work you will find no uncertainty,” the public painting demonstration proved very well warranted all the same. That in 1760 a young Englishman and his tutor saw a “little man painting” in a Venetian square. That this little man invited them back to his studio, where he sold them a view of London. That this was most likely Canaletto. That Canaletto wasn’t elected to the Venetian Academy until 1763, since a simple landscape painter was considered inferior to history and portrait painters. That when he was elected, he was expected to provide the Academy a painting, but that it took him—fantasque, bourru, Baptistise—over three years to submit something. That he submitted a capriccio. That his last signed and dated work ended with the boast: Anni 68, Cenza Oculi. Aged sixty-eight, Without Spectacles. That this was 1766. That two years later on April 19, 1768, Canaletto would die at seven in the evening from a fever. That he left behind some old clothes, a few household goods, and twenty-eight small and medium pictures. That his assets were listed as a small property and eighty pounds sterling. That this was not very much for a supposedly prudent bachelor after 585 paintings in a lifetime. That Canaletto never married or had any children. That he had very few friends. That he was, by all accounts, all alone. That the people in his paintings were almost always anonymous. That in his only known self-portrait, he appears as a miniature man in blue, a cow looking over his shoulder as he sits and stares at the viewer, brush in hand, a man so unknown he could be anyone, though he just so happens to be himself.
The Book of Resting Places Page 7
