Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  Then Jupiter. Jupiter is what we associate with Christ: the mightiest and most benevolent of the planets. And do you see where it is?” His finger pointed at the bottom of the horoscope square: “Down here, in the third house, and within three degrees of falling into the lowest and darkest place of all; pretty much as inauspicious a position as it could possibly be in.”

  “Finally, Saturn,” Kratzer said. “Planet of misery and malevolence. Here”—the finger jabbed upward—“in the ninth degree of Cancer. Overhead. Near to midheaven. At its zenith, just at the time when the planet of Christ has sunk as low as it can be.” He looked up, bony head slightly cocked to the left, expecting praise. “The darkest set of influences imaginable,” he added cheerfully.

  Holbein stared, nodded, felt his brain whir with ideas.

  “There are plenty of other things too, though,” Kratzer said, leaning over to pull something else to draw on from Holbein’s bag. He began to sketch a six-sided figure. A hexagon.

  By the time the boy came to take away the plates and bring more beer, there were half a dozen drawings on the table, propped up against the tankards: hexagons, sketches of skulls, and several two-line scribbles shaped like wedges of pie with the number twenty-seven marked inside their two lines.

  This time Holbein, half aware of the feet padding around the table, dragged himself away from the conversation for long enough to put a hand in his purse and slip the boy a coin. That was enough to bring the boy gratefully back a third time, an hour later, to clear away the tankards. He found both men asleep in their chairs, fully dressed and snoring, and the table and the floor so littered with drawings that the room looked as though a freak summer snowfall had hit it. The boy shook his head, extinguished the candle still burning at the table, and tiptoed away with the tankards in his hands.

  Kratzer and Holbein woke up groaning in the midsummer dawn to a shout of birdsong. Kratzer moaned and, from where he was slumped backward on his chair, put his hands over his eyes. Holbein snuffled, stirred, took two steps over to his bed, and collapsed fully clothed on the mattress to try and sleep out the night.

  But it was too late. Ten minutes later they were staring blearily at each other, feeling their aches and pains with tired hands.

  “It’s morning, all right,” Kratzer said, his voice blurred. “No hiding from it. Let’s go and find some food.” They pulled themselves up. Saw the pictures. And Holbein’s face lit up as recollection flooded back about what they’d been doing before they passed out.

  “It was worth sitting up late,” he said. “This is good stuff.”

  They were whistling so loudly as they tramped down the stairs, with the papers in their hands, that they woke the boy from his light sleep by the embers in the kitchen. It was going to be another beautiful day.

  The painting raced ahead. There was no time to think of anything else.

  Kratzer came back so often to Holbein’s place that the old man put a second mattress in the room. At dawn, the pair got up, splashed in the water butt in the yard, and went off to buy bread and ale before marching off past the traders setting up their benches, eating as they went, to Bridewell in the clear morning light. There was simply no time anymore for loitering outside St. Stephen’s Walbrook, waiting for Meg. She prayed too late; he just couldn’t make that trip in the wrong direction when he had so much else on. Holbein scarcely even thought of what he’d done in the mornings before this painting began; he was filled with light; too busy and happy to remember even to eat until, suddenly ravenous, hunger pangs overcame him as he and Kratzer walked back into the street during the burning afternoons, filled with divine appetite for bread, cheese, and beer.

  The ambassadors were delighted with their artist’s and astronomer’s theme and ingenious ideas. They arranged for a green Lenten veil to be brought up from the chapel and hung behind them. For all their Catholic sensibilities, they even agreed to leave Kratzer’s hymnal in the picture, turned to Luther’s German-language rendering of Veni Sancte Spiritus to strengthen the notion of religious difference being the theme of the time.

  The ambassadors were fascinated too by the examples Kratzer gave them, over the many goblets of wine with which the painter and his sitters relaxed and stretched their limbs between work sessions, of the spiritual power of the hexagons and six-pointed shapes that Holbein was scattering through the work. Hexagons were beloved by astrologers (signifying planets in harmonious conjunction with one another) and by alchemists (for whom they signified the harmonious union of the sun, gold, the Lion—Leo—and kinghood on the one hand, and the moon, silver, the Crab—Cancer—and the feminine on the other; a marriage illustrated in books by pictures of a king and a queen holding flower stems which, with the help of a falling bird in whose beak is a third stem, combine to make a six-pointed star, with a bigger six-pointed star hovering over the whole picture).

  Holbein’s hexagrams and stars were in the spirit of the marble floor at Westminster Abbey, which he was painting now as if it were under the ambassadors’ feet. The hexagon at the heart of that floor—the place where a king being crowned at the abbey would stand as the Holy Spirit descended on him—symbolized the six days in which God created the universe and everything within it.

  Holbein’s hexagons represented the focus of the creative act. They were his rendering of the Holy Spirit; his way of showing the faint hope that all mankind could again be blessed by a shared understanding of God.

  The ambassadors chuckled over the many imaginative ways and places in which Holbein and Kratzer managed to put the number twenty-seven and the angle of twenty-seven degrees—a reminder of the altitude of the sun at the time Christ died on the afternoon of the first Good Friday—into the picture. Their only stipulation was that Holbein buy the extra strip of wood for the side of the picture—a place of honor for the sacred image of the crucifix at its left-most edge, away from the game with the horoscope.

  He attached it himself, proud to think of the shape the picture was taking, with his mind singing louder than the birds outside the window and the boys selling the first strawberries on the street.

  It was only a few weeks into the job, when the boards were already covered with color and the red underlay on the bishop’s robe was almost dry, that they had the other idea. Afterward, Holbein couldn’t quite say whose idea it had been. Perhaps de Dinteville had been called away to see the king, or to be checked over by the doctor, as he sometimes was, but the other three had all been talking. They’d all been contributing. That was one of the joys of working in this group—their minds all sparked off one another’s, sharpening one another’s wit, just as he remembered it happening with Thomas More or Erasmus. So perhaps it was his idea as much as anyone’s. It was certainly he who had thought of the shape that the conceit could take.

  “What about the memento mori?” one of the Frenchmen had said, stretching arms and legs after Holbein had made them both stand immobile for what they clearly felt was too long. “What will you use for that?”

  Holbein’s eye went to the skull on his worktable, littered with bottles and papers and jars and odds and ends of cloth. The skull was the classic way to mark human decay; to show how vain are scholarship and power when confronted by the inevitability of death. Anyone exalted by looking at a portrait must be reminded that they should not forget the end to come or their fear of God.

  “I was once what you are, and you will one day be what I am” was the memento mori’s message. “Pray for me.” Why not a skull?

  Yet suddenly he wasn’t sure. Suddenly his head was full of Meg’s long ago voice, urging him to amuse her father by including a less obvious memento mori; suddenly he remembered the picture of More, with the rope that had ended up serving as memento mori dangling against that other green curtain.

  When this picture was finished, he wanted to show it to More and Meg as a way of explaining himself; as a way of apologizing for not coming to them before. Might there be something that would impress them that he could come up with here
too? Perhaps a skull was too obvious? A cliché? Might the ambassadors laugh behind his back at his hackneyed imagination if he suggested it?

  He hesitated.

  It was the bishop who spoke next.

  He remembered that. “I would imagine that an artist with as fertile an imagination as yours wants something striking and unusual enough to be proud of as your memento mori,” he said with great courtesy. It was an invitation to think further. Holbein seized on the permission.

  “For all its secrets . . . however much we talk about religion and things of the spirit . . . this is a very worldly picture,” Holbein said, feeling uneasily that he was edging toward taboo and trying to choose his words carefully. “Its subjects”—he bowed slightly—“are noblemen of the highest degree . . . anyone who looked at it would be impressed both by the breadth of their learning and by their elevated position . . .”

  He didn’t know himself quite what he was driving at.

  “You don’t know how to remind us that even we noblemen, in our velvet robes, must die, do you?” de Selve said, and his young face broke into the most understanding of smiles. “But, Master Hans, you mustn’t let yourself be overimpressed by our station in life. I can’t talk for my colleague, but I would imagine he feels as I do; and personally I never forget that I must one day meet my Maker. Earthly life, after all, is only men in a cave, believing that reality is the shadows they see cast on the walls. I want you to play the part of the philosopher who gets out of the cave, and sees the bigger reality.”

  He laughed at Holbein’s bewilderment. “Here, Master Hans. So far your picture shows two men looking at some very golden shadows on a cave wall and taking them for reality. Look at us!” and he strode round, robe swishing at his ankles, to where Holbein stood behind his easel and pointed out the velvet, the fine gold chasing on de Dinteville’s dagger, and the jewels, marks of favor, dangling at wrist and cap and neck.

  Hardly knowing how he dared, Holbein laughed too.

  He said, full of relief: “It’s true. You couldn’t look grander.”

  “So,” the bishop pursued. “A good memento mori would be one which excluded and overshadowed us as completely as possible; which pushed us to the background of the picture. Which reminded us that God is waiting, behind all our earthly baubles. And the work you’ve done on us men watching the cave wall is so striking, so true to life, and so full of spirit and wit that you will need to find something truly extraordinary to eclipse us.”

  He wandered back to his place. “I wonder what you’ll come up with,” he added easily. “I can assure you we won’t be offended, whatever it is. I’m looking forward to making fresh discoveries about the power of your mind.”

  And now it was Kratzer who was leaning forward, with an intensity that Holbein knew from his own moments of almost panicky grasping at an idea.

  “I know,” Kratzer said, grasping the skull. “I think I know. We have to go back to the twenty-seven degrees.

  “Look,” Kratzer went on. He couldn’t draw, but he was a wonder at angles. He took Holbein’s notebook and sketched in stick figures representing the picture—two ambassadors and the table loaded with scribbly instruments between them. Then, with a much heavier hand, he drew a horizontal line bisecting the sketch.

  “This is my lower line,” he said. “And this is my upper line.” He took an instrument and measured a second line diverging from this horizontal axis—like a slice of pie—moving upward and leftward across the image. His line reached the top left-hand corner just at the spot where Holbein’s shadowy crucifix peeped out from behind the green Lenten veil.

  “I knew that would work,” Kratzer said with satisfaction. “Now, here’s my point. Stand at the right-hand side of this picture and look upward along this line and you will see the crucifix—a hope of God, eternity, salvation, even if it’s in shadow and in doubt. Your memento mori should be a reflection of that. Something that you’ll see by looking downward from the same point, at a reflection of the same angle. The opposite of the hope of salvation. Something—here,” and he drew the downward line, like a second slice of pie, to a place somewhere below the two central figures’ feet.

  “To be honest,” Holbein said, understanding better and better what was needed now, and with the glimmering of an idea of how to achieve it. “I can’t think of anything simpler or better for the purpose than a skull.”

  But not an ordinary skull, painted in an ordinary way. Holbein was almost certain that he knew how to do what he needed to do. He’d spent enough time doing artistic tricks as a jobbing draftsman back home that he’d tried every trick in the book. Quietly, he thanked God, and his father, for that long apprenticeship in the art of the possible.

  They stopped painting while a servant was sent out to buy a good thin piece of clear glass. The bishop could have returned to his books or his correspondence, but he was too intrigued by the fever gripping Holbein and the others to want to leave.

  The servant came back with the glass. Holbein mixed up a palette of paints to depict his familiar old skull prop: browns and grays and shadows. His hands were itching to begin. On the glass, he laid down lines—the shadows of eye sockets, broken nose and jaw. He almost cursed with impatience, under his breath, as he waited for the paint to dry.

  Kratzer and the bishop, not wanting to disturb his train of thought, stood back at the window, watching the world go by, or turning back to watch him and his inspiration.

  “Do you have a candle?” Holbein asked. He went to the window, but not to join the others. Instead he reached past them, grabbed the curtains, and yanked them shut.

  In the semidarkness, followed by the other two men, he went to the big painting at his easel. Once at his place, he measured off the twenty-seven-degree angle upward, leading from the right-hand side of the image up to the crucified Christ. On his real picture, the starting point was much lower than halfway down the painting; Holbein made it somewhere around the bishop’s velvet-clad knee. Then he measured the twenty-seven degrees leading down from that right-hand starting point, and painted—freehand, with the thinnest line imaginable (he wasn’t known as Apelles for nothing, after all)—a perfectly straight line down toward the bottom left-hand corner of the picture.

  Then he lit the candle. “Hold this,” he told Kratzer, brusquely.

  Kratzer took it. Holbein held his painting on glass of the skull up, at an angle, against the big painting. “Move the candle close to the glass,” he said. Kratzer obeyed, and as the candle moved it cast a long shadow up the twenty-seven-degree line, up the painting.

  The bishop moved closer.

  “Look,” Holbein said. They gasped. There it was: the most enigmatic memento mori imaginable. The distorted shadow of a skull, cast at twenty-seven degrees from the horizontal. A mysterious, flickering, slightly menacing shape, with something of the night about it even before you realized what it was. And then, once your eye and brain did seize it, once you shifted to the strange sideways angle at the edge of the painting that you needed to be at if the skull was to take realistic shape, once the real-life subjects of the picture—the ambassadors—had faded to insignificant two-dimensional blobs of paint and pomp that your eye couldn’t follow, then the memento mori became a bizarre, provoking puzzle; an e-catching proof that you were in the presence of sacred mysteries while you looked at this picture, whether your eye was led upward to the shaded, suffering presence of possible eternal life or downward to the shadowy, distorted certainty of death.

  “I’ll paint this in, shall I?” he said; a question, but he already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” said Kratzer simply.

  “Excellent,” said the bishop.

  “Come on, hold the candle yourself, so I can take a look from the right,” Kratzer said impatiently. They swapped. Kratzer shuffled round with a hand over one eye, squinting to the left, raising and lowering his head until he got himself into the one place at which the skull undistorted itself and became the only truly drawn figure on the entire ca
nvas.

  Then he nodded, and grinned. “Yes,” he said. “Oui, oui, oui! It really works. This will be the most unusual picture ever painted. You’re a genius, my friend!”

  For a glorious moment, Holbein knew it. Every clever detail he and Kratzer had thought of was part of the same somber message: he was showing a world that had once been united by religious harmony but that was now being destroyed by nationalist ugliness and factional feuding. He was using the things of this earthly life to tell a solemn story about the divisions rending God’s universe asunder. He’d seen a deeper kind of truth, and revealed it.

  It was only much later that evening—after a self-congratulatory stop at the alehouse with Kratzer—that Holbein made his way back up Ludgate Hill toward his lodgings. For once he was alone. Kratzer had burped sleepily as they left and said it was time he slept in his own bed for once; he was getting smelly enough to make a change of linen urgently necessary.

  “You don’t need me to talk to tonight,” he slurred, “we’ve solved all the problems in this painting now.” And he wandered off down the alley to the river.

  Holbein was listening to the drunks and the nightingales sing as his feet planted themselves, one in front of the other, on the filth of the street.

  His heart was singing too. No one had commented on the symbolism that he’d first thought of to use in the painting—the simplest game of all—in which every one of the strong diagonals around which he’d constructed his painting led to the mulberry skirt of de Selve’s robe. His own idea had been for the true meaning of the painting to be mulberry color – morus - to those who spoke Latin, like the tree More grew in his own back garden and, symbolically, on his coat of arms: More’s name for himself.

  The lesson he wanted to learn from making this painting was one anyone who saw it could also remember: that every eye would be drawn to the color that was an eternal reminder of More; that memento mori can also mean just “remember More.”

  That would have been enough for him before he’d begun the intellectual voyage of discovery that he’d made in the past few weeks with Kratzer and the Frenchmen. But now, with all the extra layers of meaning and wisdom that four intelligent men had managed to pack into it, his painting was going to be a more elaborate triumph. He grinned, slowed down as he skirted the cathedral and filled his lungs with hot, smelly, happy night air. It was time to start taking more exercise, he was thinking cheerfully; it was bad to be so breathless after nothing worse than that small hill.