The Animal Gazer

by Edgardo Franzosini

  Without having to crane his neck or stand on tiptoe, Rembrandt contemplated both the vision of the whole and every minute detail of the spectacle, which had been staged for several weeks with supercilious care on a dusty clearing lined by a few gray trees. The other viewers were attracted by the Galla’s attire: white cotton tunics that reached halfway down the leg or to their feet. They gazed with interest at the coral or amber necklaces, the earrings, the bracelets they wore around their wrists and elbows. The women’s eyelids painted blue, the ivory combs in their hair. The men’s shields made from antelope hides, their spears. The straw baskets they wove while squatting on their heels. Their games (they would toss a hoop into the air and try to stop its descent with an arrow). The crowd observed the dances performed in front of the mud and thatch huts, listened to the songs sung to the rhythm of copper sistrums. They offered them sweets and cigarettes. They admired the witch doctor, who had a panther skin draped over his shoulders and an ostrich feather in his hair. They sniffed in the air the pungent odor of the spices used to season peas and fava beans.

  Rembrandt instead had eyes only for their bodies, so elegant and full of vigor. Their shoulders and arms, solid, strong, powerful. The slender legs with almost no calves. The high foreheads and thick, pink lips. The hair shiny with ox tallow. The long curly locks, with red tips, that tumbled to their shoulders. The braids from their foreheads or temples that ended at their necks, or that crossed the top of their heads, from one ear to the other.

  When all the other visitors started to disappear, slowly but surely, because night was falling and the gates to the Jardin were about to close, slightly disappointed at not having arrived in time to see the Galla feasting on raw meat, painting their faces with animal blood, and flaunting the intestines as if they were necklaces, Rembrandt got even closer to the fence. The stench of ox tallow blended with the odor of cigarette smoke that one of them was inhaling with deep breaths, avidly, uninterruptedly. One more step. Now he could look them in the eyes. The setting sun brought out the fire and glow in the faces of the Galla, who took on the aspect of mysterious idols. A man with a dark beard covering his chin and cheeks raised his arm, stuck the spear he was holding between the bars, and shouting something, pointed it at Rembrandt.

  “Get away from there, monsieur,” warned a keeper who had come up behind him. “It’s strange, but it’s only when the public leaves that they become restless. Please make your way to the exit.”

  EVER SINCE PAOLO Troubetzkoy had arrived in Paris after a nine-year sojourn in Moscow, during which he taught at the Imperial Academy of Fine Arts, Rembrandt often dropped by to see him in his studio on Rue Weber. Roaming around the studio, free and undisturbed, there was a wolf, whom the prince called Vaska, and a fox. It was his penchant, and indeed it seems that in his Moscow studio he had also kept a bear and a horse, if we are to credit the word of Aleksandra Lvovna Tolstaya, who knew the artist well because he had executed three sculptures in bronze and a portrait in oils of her father, Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. Troubetzkoy—who had known Bugatti as a child, encouraged him and played an important part in his artistic formation—admired the Italian’s work.

  “When I see certain things, certain statues with eyes like egg yolks,” he confided, “I become enraged. The first work that I did, at the age of eight, was of two deer. A marble bas-relief of two animals that we had in our garden at home.”

  The yellowish-brown snout of Vaska poked out from behind a damp cloth that may have been covering a block of clay. The wolf opened its mouth wide, emitted a low, dark sound, a kind of stealthy barking, came close to Rembrandt, and sniffed at him.

  “Animals and their enigmatic stupidity,” commented Troubetzkoy.

  “Which is no worse than man’s,” observed Rembrandt.

  “No, of course not,” replied the prince, who later told his guest of his visit to the house of Robert de Montesquiou, for whom he had done a bronze portrait that was the talk of Paris, where he had seen his famous tortoise. The same tortoise on which the count had encrusted a jeweled shell. “And there were bats everywhere you looked. Bat lamps, bat furniture, what idiocy . . .”

  FOR A PERIOD Rembrandt forgot about the zoo and its animals. Troubetzkoy opened up the Paris salons for him. He took him along to the most elegant parties, the most elaborate masked balls. To the Fête Orientale of Blanche de Clermont-Tonnerre, to the Bal des Mille et une Nuits of Aynard de Chabrillan, to the Sparte au Temps de Lycurgue of Pauline Lemaitre. It was on one of these evenings that Rembrandt made the acquaintance of Marie Ernest Paul Boniface, Marquis of Castellane-Novejean, known familiarly as Boni.

  When a few days later he ran into the marquis again at the Hôtel Ritz, he was welcomed with these words. “Can you believe the noise? It’s like being in the parrot cage at the zoo.” We don’t know whether it was by pure chance or whether Troubetzkoy had advised Boni of Rembrandt’s passions. We do know that the marquis had a request for the sculptor. “Would you be interested in doing my portrait? In bronze?” Rembrandt accepted immediately, without thinking twice.

  It was the originality of the clothes Rembrandt was wearing that most impressed the Marquis of Castel-lane-Novejean. Boni was a dandy who had, so to say, abolished all whimsy from his style of dressing. In addition to the cream-colored jackets that he combined with crimson-colored ties, the only other color he wore was gray, in the two variants of pearl gray and charcoal gray. While he conversed, his ivory walking stick was always in motion. And he took pleasure in observing Rembrandt, who on that day was sporting an overcoat that was a cross between a coat and a cape, which his sister, Dejanice, had made for him, a white suit with a double-breasted vest, a shirt with a high collar up to his chin, a bow tie, and on his head a brown hat in smooth silk velvet. On the lapel of his jacket Rembrandt had pinned the red ribbon of the Légion d’honneur, which France had awarded him a few weeks earlier “for artistic merit,” and that was conferred upon him by the Undersecretary of State for Fine Arts, Étienne Dujardin-Beaumetz, an untalented former painter of wartime and patriotic subjects—La brigade de Lapasset brulânt ses drapeaux, La garnison quittant Belfort, Á la baïonnette, Le bataillon des Gravilliers, Salut à la victoire—which had nevertheless paved the way to his political career.

  “Olivier, we must celebrate,” said Boni, summoning the maître. Then he started to speak about his collection, the one he had been forced to sell to pay off his creditors. The furniture, the porcelain, the books, the paintings.

  THE SITTINGS BEGAN one week later, at Bugatti’s studio. The Marquis of Castellane-Novejean wanted to be portrayed in boots and with a knee-length riding shirt cinched at the waist by a belt. Rembrandt modeled the clay, as was his custom, with rapid, secure blows of the thumb, without second thoughts. While he was posing, Boni talked about the racehorses he used to own. Sleeping Car had won major prizes. Then there were Effendi II, Bolide, and Balchis, but his favorite was Emerick, who took first place at Auteuil, in the Prix de Haies de Printemps.

  “To choose a horse you need to have the same impeccable taste required for a work of art. You need to observe and at the same time to understand. A rare thing indeed,” commented Boni.

  “Please,” said Rembrandt, who wasn’t used to hearing his models chat and had always preferred draft horses to racehorses.

  But the marquis continued. “At my Palais Rose, which I no longer own, I had them paint groups of animals under the vaults of the central staircase to symbolize the five continents: elephants for Asia, camels for Africa, horses for Europe, and I don’t recall which animals for the other two continents. I’ve forgotten.”

  “But I have not forgotten,” he continued, “the parties I threw at that perfect copy of the Petit Trianon of Marie Antoinette. Two thousand guests, valets in purple livery, the orchestra playing the “Marche Henri IV.” At my summer residence—I no longer have that, either—I had wanted to create a menagerie to gather the most beautiful exotic creatures: ostriches, leopards, and so on. Unfortunately my circumst
ances did not permit me to, but you would have loved it, I imagine.”

  IV

  When he was in Paris, Bugatti could not imagine letting a single day go by without going to the Jardin des Plantes, and by the same token, when he resided in Antwerp, the days began de rigueur with a short walk from the house where he lived, on De Keyserlei, straight to the intersection with Van Schoonhovenstraat, and from there to Stationsplein, until he finally reached the city zoo, the place that fostered in him what he called his own “heritage of wildlife experiences.” Rembrandt first set foot in Belgium in early fall 1906. “I have learned that an amazing rhinoceros has just arrived,” is what he told his father, without further explanation, already prepared for his departure.

  As soon as he descended from the train, and walked away from Antwerpen-Centraal, the large railway station of the Flemish city, he caught a glimpse, in the gray morning light, of the monumental white marble building of the zoo administration. Looking up he spied, with joy and the onset of vertigo, the colossal statue of a camel carrying a Bedouin on its hump, situated on the peak of one corner of the building.

  Rembrandt didn’t even bother looking for lodgings: with his suitcase in hand, beneath new volleys of rain, he went directly to the ticket office of the zoo. Waiting his turn in line, he looked impatiently at the two mosaics that decorated the entrance: a tiger fighting with a snake and a ferocious lion roaring with his mouth wide open. He purchased a ticket and entered, walking quickly and decisively down a wide avenue lined with chestnut and red beech trees.

  To the left rose a building with large windows, topped by two domes: it was the Feestpaleis, the Festival Hall. To the right a lemon grove and, a little farther ahead, a wooden pavilion surrounded by streetlamps, chairs, and café tables, with stands for sheet music arranged in a circle under the canopy. A gust of wind blew over some of the music stands, and the rain started coming down in sheets. Rembrandt lugged his suitcase beneath the heavy raindrops that trickled under his shirt collar until he made it to a building with a vaguely Moorish façade: the Monkey House. The inside held giant cages in the back of which the dark silhouettes of several primates could be made out. The animals shook and shrieked, upset by the storm. One of them, a chimpanzee, broke away from the group. It approached the bars with its teeth bared and fur standing straight up on its back and neck, peeled its lips back and started to emit angry shrieks. Rembrandt looked at it for a moment and then headed back to the avenue. A few hundred feet away, he found himself before the great Egyptian Temple. With his trousers drenched up to his knees, he passed beneath the architrave, which was supported by four giant columns. On the two outermost columns the capitals were painted with date palm leaves, while the capitals on the two central columns were carved with the head of Hathor, the heavenly lady, the winged cow that gave life to creation. The frieze in the entablature told the story of the Temple in hieroglyphs. The ceiling of the vestibule was decorated on either side by rows of gold five-point stars against a blue field, connected down the middle by the outstretched wings of vultures. Rembrandt’s eyes swept over the walls, covered with lions, ostriches, cheetahs, gazelles, giraffes, crocodiles, zebras, antelopes, hyenas, and leopards, together with the solemn figures of high priests, warriors, and the gods of the Nile. The mural depicted a world in which there is no defined hierarchy in creation, no hierarchy in which man occupies a position superior to other creatures. Or Rembrandt at least wanted to interpret it that way. Never before had he felt so close to understanding why one day he had confided to his brother the wish to consecrate all his time, all his energy, and all his qualities, conspicuous or insignificant though they might be, to the realization of works that no animal sculptor, ancient or modern, had ever succeeded in conceiving.

  INSIDE THE TEMPLE, in the vast, half-deserted, rectangular hall dominated by the skeleton of an elephant in the center, Rembrandt raised his eyes to the ceiling. Outside the rain had stopped and from above, through the windows of the large skylight looming over the room, a gray light descended that illuminated the elephant skeleton, lending it a ghostly appearance. The tusks in particular seemed to emit an incredibly vivid luminescence. Rembrandt cast a glance around. Behind the bars of the cages lining three sides of the hall he spotted the profiles of giraffes, camels, and zebras but, without hesitation, he headed toward the one in which the rhinoceros was enclosed.

  The animal was in the back of the cage, sniffing at its own excrement. Its entire body was caked in a sort of dark dried mud.

  To prepare himself for this encounter, Rembrandt had broken one of his own tenets, or rather, his rules. For the first time he felt the need to dedicate himself to a form of theoretical preparation. He sensed the need to master some general principles and considerations in the field of zoology. Zoology in the sense of the description and classification of animals, in terms of both comparative anatomy and the genetics of the species, in effect, which until then had never stirred any particular interest in him.

  As a young man, in Milan, he had leafed through the Historia animalium of Aristotle, but he had been bored by the cataloging of six hundred animal species contemplated in that weighty volume. Later he chanced to browse, though again without any particular curiosity or emotion, the Historiae animalium of Conrad Gessner. Indeed, he had been quite frankly irritated by the fact that the Swiss naturalist in his interminable lists had inserted fantastic mythological animals. “I’m not going to waste any more time in this manner,” he had promised himself.

  The rhinoceros family includes four or five different species, between the Asiatic and the African branches, but in the antediluvian era there were many more—at least fourteen. These were the first notions that Rembrandt learned from the pages of the Dizionario enciclopedico illustrato published by Vallardi. And in the same book, which his father had brought with him from Italy, he learned that the Indian rhinoceros is distinguished by the fact that it has only one horn, and by its unpredictable but not ferocious temperament. Rembrandt also read the entry for “Rhinocéros” in the Histoire Naturelle, générale et particulière by the naturalist and cosmologist Georges-Louis Leclerc de Buffon, where he found confirmation that unicorn rhinoceroses are “neither ferocious nor carnivorous nor particularly savage,” but that they are “nevertheless intractable . . . without intelligence or sentiment,” and often “subject to fits of rage that nothing can calm.” Buffon had observed two rhinoceroses in the flesh. The first, Clara, had been paraded through the fairs and courts of Europe for twenty years as a sideshow attraction. The second, the “Rhinoceros of Versailles,” had been captured in Western Bengal, given as a gift to Louis XV, and died in 1793, a victim of the revolution, run through by a saber. Its embalmed body is kept at the Muséum d’Histoire Naturelle, and it was by studying it that Georges Cuvier, paleontologist and continuer of the work of Buffon, was able to create the third work consulted by Rembrandt: Observations anatomiques sur le rhinoceros.

  Once he had completed these readings, and felt that he had now learned enough, Bugatti left for Belgium with a firm grip on his newly-acquired knowledge.

  AFTER DRAGGING ITS enormous mass from the point where its dung was collected all the way to the bars of the cage, the animal stopped in front of Rembrandt and looked at him, slowly opening its eyelids. Although he could touch it, if he extended his hand, and feel the warmth of its flesh beneath its crust of dirt and leathery skin, Bugatti thought it would be best, for the moment, to forgo such a gesture. As if awaiting a sign, a proof of attention, and irritated at not receiving one, or surprised by the man’s apparent lack of interest, the pachyderm lowered its head to one side, rubbed it against the ground a few times, and then returned to its dung heap.

  I have to speak with the man in charge here, thought Rembrandt as he left the Egyptian Temple.

  Michel L’Hoëst, who was the director of the Antwerp Zoo (the L’Hoëst family was a dynasty of directors: first Michel François, followed by Michel Junior), welcomed him affably and courteously, without the prudent ske
pticism that in other circumstances he might have reserved for a man like Rembrandt: an Italian who was quite tall, although a little hunchbacked, with facial features that were melancholic and sharp, though not exactly severe, and dressed in a style that, at a minimum, could be described as subtly bizarre or strangely provocative.

  “All animal sculptors are welcome here,” said L’Hoëst, with a hint of pride in his voice. “For them our arms are always open! We do everything in our power to make them happy, to support their creative process.”

  Perhaps the esteem and reputation that Bugatti had started to enjoy in France had also reached the ears of the director.

  THE FIRST VISIT, the first contact of Rembrandt with the Antwerp Zoo, was thus limited to a quick stroll through the Egyptian Temple, a brief stop before the Indian rhinoceros, and a meeting with L’Hoëst. But it was the beginning of a bond that would grow closer and stronger, and Bugatti’s stays in Antwerp became longer and longer. Every time Rembrandt found himself in the Flemish city, he would visit the zoo on an almost daily basis. Even when, sometime later, he abandoned his room on the second floor of the De Keyserlei to go live, together with two other animal sculptors—Albéric Collin and Oscar Jespers—in a large studio on Begijnenvest that was cold, unhealthy, and reeking of mold, he did not let himself be discouraged by the distance. Nor would he disavow his “imperious, almost burning” desire—as he himself defined it—to reward his gaze with the vision of animal life that took place on the other side of the bars and fences of the Antwerp Zoo.

  Every day, around midmorning, Rembrandt would appear before the gates of the zoo with a supply of modeling clay. (He prepared it himself, with clay, lard, and powdered sulfur; this composition made the material firm but never completely hard.) With a nod in the direction of the ticket booth, an exchange of greetings— “Goedemorgen!” “Goedemorgen, heer Bugatti!”—and on rare occasions a knowing smile, he would breach the entry, proceeding straight to the place at the center of his interest that particular day.