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At night they sat in the awesome apartment sipping Scotch whisky, which was Saraceni’s preferred tipple, and as they mellowed, Francis talked about his own taste in art. He was inclined to deplore the fact that, strive as he would, he liked the painting of an earlier day better than that of contemporary artists. What was he to make of himself? How could he hope to be an artist, even of the humblest rank, if he did not live and feel in tune with his own time? When the paintings that haunted him were not modern either in technique or in taste? The Bronzino, for instance…
“Ah, the Bronzino, The so-called Allegory of Love. Who gave it that inexpressive name, I wonder? It is not about love at its highest, but about Luxury—the indulgence of the senses. For all its erotic splendour and evocation of sensual pleasure it is a profoundly moral picture. Those old painters were great moralists, you know, even such a man as Angelo Bronzino, who so many imperceptive critics have called a cold and heartless artist. Surely you have seen the morality behind it?”
“I’ve looked at it literally for hours, and the more I look the less I know what is behind it.”
“Then you must look again. You, who once won a prize for Classics!”
“It isn’t really a classical theme. Venus and Cupid are the principal figures, but not doing anything I can associate with any classical reference I know.”
“You must understand the classics as the Renaissance understood them, which is not the way a boys’ school understands them. You must penetrate the classical world, which is by no means dead, I assure you; classical morality, classical feeling. Venus is tempting her son Cupid to a display of love that is certainly not simply filial. Is not that what many mothers do? Since Freud there has been a great deal of cocktail-hour chatter about the Oedipus complex and the love of a son for his mother, but who ventures on the dangerous theme of the mother’s part in that affair? Come now, Francis, has your mother, whose beauty I have heard you praise, never flirted with you? Never caressed you in a way that was not strictly maternal?”
“She never put her tongue in my mouth or coaxed me to play with her breast, if that is what you are talking about.”
“Well—but the possibility—was there never the possibility? If you had been of the pagan world and hot for pleasure, and not frightened out of your wits by Christianity, might you have recognized the possibility?”
“Maestro, I don’t really follow you.”
“I puzzle over it sometimes. So much talk since Dr. Freud about fathers who rouse erotic feeling in their daughters: never any talk about mothers who do the same with their sons. Does such one-sidedness seem really likely?”
“Where I grew up we had lots of incest. I knew one fellow, the son of a logger who was killed in the forest, and from twelve years of age onward he had to stand and deliver for his mother at least five times a week. When last I heard of him he had two brothers who were probably his sons. He never married; no necessity, I suppose. But that was in what the Renaissance would call very primitive conditions.”
“Don’t be too sure what the Renaissance would call it. But I speak of possibilities, not of completed acts. Possibilities—things that merely float in the air and are never brought to earth—can be extremely influential. It is the artist’s privilege to seize such possibilities and to make pictures of them, and such pictures are among the most powerful we have. What is a picture of the Mado
“A Holy Mother and the Son of God.”
“In the worlds of myth and art all mothers are holy because that is what we feel in the depths of our hearts. No, not the heart: that is where modern people think they feel. During the Renaissance they would have said, the liver. In the gut, in fact. Worship of the Mother, real or mythical, comes from the gut. Have you never wondered why in so many of those pictures Joseph, the earthly father, looks such a nincompoop? In the very best of them Joseph is not even permitted to enter. That is one of the unspoken foundation stones of our mighty Faith, Francis; the love affair between Mother and Son, and according to the Scriptures no other woman ever challenged her place of supremacy. But in these Mado
“Have you really looked at the picture? You have looked at the artist’s achievement, but have you understood what he is saying? Venus holds an apple in one hand, and an arrow in the other. What does that say: I tempt you, and I have a wound for you. And look at all the secondary figures—the raving figure of Jealousy behind Cupid, speaking so clearly of despair, of love despised and rejected; the little figure of Pleasure who is about to pelt the toying lovers with rose leaves—see at his feet the thorns and those masks of the concealments and cheats of the world, marked with the bitterness of age; and who is that creature behind the laughing Pleasure—a wistful, appealing face, a rich gown that might almost blind us to her lion’s feet, her serpent’s sting, and her hands that offer both a honeycomb and something beastly—that must be the Cheat—Fraude, in Latin—who can so prettily turn love to madness. Who are the old man and the young woman at the top of the picture? They are plainly Time and Truth, who are drawing aside the mantle that shows the world what is involved in such love as this. Time—and his daughter Truth. A very moral picture, is it not?”
“Certainly as you interpret it, and as I have never heard anyone else explain it I ca
“So you might well be. But he didn’t, you know. The picture that has enthralled you in the National Gallery in London was half of a design that was meant to be two tapestries. One tapestry is completed and you can see it in Florence, in the Arazzi Gallery. It is called L’i
“Maestro, you remind me very much of my dear old Aunt Mary-Ben. She insisted that pictures were moral lessons, and told stories. But you should have seen the pictures she showed me to prove it.”
“I am quite sure I have seen many of them. Their morality is of their own time, and the stories they tell are sweet and pretty, suited to people who wanted a sweetly pretty, stunted art. But they are in a long tradition quite different from those i
It was impossible to think of Picasso, or of anything but immediate concerns, after Frank had read the letter which was sent on from Corpus and reached him two days before he was to return to England.