Self-Portraits by Émile Friant Part Four

We finish our week-long pictorial autobiography of Émile Friant with this magnificent self portrait from 1925.  Our hero is 62 years old and would only live another seven years.

With a complete lack of vanity, Friant charts for us the changes in his physical self.  His hair has thinned even more, his ears have grown with age, his handsome face is lined with age and is now somewhat shrunken.  The raw energy of the man caught in the previous portraits is gone, and Friant is now a thin, delicate creature of unique loveliness.  His virile beauty is gone and has been replaced with a deeper, more touching ethereal quality.

Once again, Friant shows a remarkable sensitivity in the painting of his own hands.  His right hand (again!) holds the brush, and each finger is beautifully articulated.  But look, too, at his ear, previously hidden by his once-luxuriant hair.  (He even manages to delineate the sections of his hair matted with oil.)  The ear is beautifully molded and rendered, capturing the supple curve and creating a believable sense of depth. 

Unlike the previous three portraits, here Friant actually records his clothing with some exacting detail.  His Legion of Honor medal is proudly displayed on his lapel, and his suit coat, waistcoat, and tiepin are rendered in a naturalistic manner.  The stitching down the side of his trousers is perfectly visible, and the bulge of his pocket square visible in his breast pocket.  Friant, with this picture, is much fussier in his style and underlying drawing; as if wishing to demonstrate his increased virtuosity.  It is a picture by a master who has been painting for nearly 50 years, and has only increased in his powers.

Another change from the pervious self-portraits is that Friant is clearly not painting himself in this picture.  The figure on his canvas appears to be wearing a red blouse, and perhaps a long blue skirt, as well.  His palette, however, does seem to echo the rich ochre coloration of his surroundings.  (As always, the canvas is suggested with very Impressionistic brushstrokes.)

But what I think has changed the most over the course of the self-portraits we’ve examined here is the quality of his gaze.  Look closely at Friant’s eyes here.  If the previous portraits showed Friant eager, or expectant, or ambitious, or self-possessed, his brush here captures eyes that are deep with a benign wisdom.  These are eyes that have seen much and understood even more.  These are the eyes of a man who knows, an experienced man who now lives philosophically.  Yes, they are searching eyes, but also compassionate – a quality we have not seen on this artist’s face before.  The eyes in the other portraits looked directly at you, expecting to learn what they could from us, the viewers.  Now these eyes have seen all that was there, and forgives.  In short, they are the eyes of an artist.

Self-Portraits by Émile Friant Part Three

Today we move away from the young adult Émile Friant of 1887 to the ever-so-slightly older Friant of 1893.  Our artist is now 30 years old, and already the recipient of the grand prize at the Paris Salon and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.  He is an artist at the pinnacle of his success. 

Time has been, if anything, kinder to Friant that we might have supposed in his self-portrait of six years earlier.  Much of the puffiness of his face is gone, as are the jowls.  His hair is still thin, but it has retained a wonderful reddish tint, and his generous mustache and beard help to accentuate the almost luminescent coloration of his face. 

Now a man of means and affairs, Friant returns to his tie and frock coat, the self-conscious modeling in an artist’s smock now over. 

As in the earlier portrait, Friant delineates his face and hands with crystal clarity. Here there is not even an Impressionistic background to compete with the figure; Friant sits alone in thickly painted bluish-white background.  The hands are crafted with Friant’s customary delicacy and sensitivity.  Note how the light captures the subtle shape of his fingers from the knuckles down.  (Note, too, that yesterday Friant held his brush in his left hand, and today it migrates to his right!)

His face is a masterwork of blended colors, from nearly white to pink to near-purple.  And the hair atop his head and in his mustache and beard captures and reflects light, brilliantly illuminating nearly each and every individual hair. 

As usual, his coat, tie and canvas are mere suggestions, but look closely at his palette.  The overarching color is a bluish-white, the same at the background. 

What has changed the most over the last six years is Friant’s gaze.  His self-portrait at 15 was that of an inner-directed adolescent, ready to wrestle with the world.  His look at 24 was one of challenge and preparedness, as well as self-confidence.  Here, his gaze is that of one who has seen much, met with some success, and looks at the world from a perspective of experience.  The eyes are less clear, more heavily lidded -- more guarded, if you will.  It is possible to imagine that the Friant of the earlier two portraits had never been wounded in any way; not so the man of 30.  Life has left its mark on him, as it does all of us.

Self-Portraits by Émile Friant Part Two

Yesterday we looked at a boyish self-portrait by Émile Friant (1863-1932), executed when he was just 15 years old.  Today we jump ahead nine years, to 1887, when our artist was a young man of 24 years.

One of the things that fascinate me most about Friant is that his style and philosophy of painting seemed ingrained so early.  In the self-portrait at 15, Friant sought to capture his own visage in the most realistic manner possible while delineating his shirt, cravat and jacket in the most Impressionistic manner.  That (perhaps uneasy) truce is still much in evidence for this later picture.

First, let’s look at Friant.  The Friant of this picture is still a very young man, but also an accomplished artist.  He is one scant year away from winning the grand prize at the Paris Salon and two years from the gold medal at the Exposition Universelle in Paris and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.  His hair, once luxuriant, has thinned early and his face has thickened considerably.  His generous bottom lip is now more generous still, his nose flatter and the once square jaw has become unfortunately jowly.  He also has grown the bushy red beard behind which he would hide the rest of his life. 

One thing that has not left him, however, is the intensity of his gaze. That sense of challenge, that note of preparedness to meet adversity is still very much intact.  In fact, the gaze of the earlier portrait is perhaps inner-directed, as if mercilessly scrutinizing his own capabilities and zeal before the battle; the gaze here is a man sizing up the world and marshaling those forces within prior to battle.  It’s a remarkably naked look – not romanticized in any way, frank, openly ambitious, curious and intelligent. 

Please compare the now thickened face with the hand holding the brush.  Such delicacy of touch, such tapered and exacting fingers -- Friant paints his artist-hands with all the fidelity and realism of the face.  Both stand out in marked contrast to the manner in which the rest of the picture is executed.

Again, once away from his own very human flesh, Friant uses the tropes of Impressionism to render his own figure.  Look at the arm connected to that so-delicately-painted hand: the paint is applied thickly, the folds and grooves of the sleeve suggested with swathes of color, leading up to the collar of the smock which is nothing but indistinct suggestions.  The informality of the style matches his informality of dress: not only is Friant in his artist’s smock, but he wears no tie (unlike his 15 year old self).  The easel (or canvas) upon which he paints seems indistinct of contour (especially the outer line facing the artist), and the color of the back side of the easel/canvas colored and toned with obvious brushwork. 

Look, too, at how he captures the outside world beyond the windows with uncomplicated masses of white, gray and beige paint.  There is a gate beyond the window (and perhaps a tree), but the bars are not rendered with the same exactitude as his own face and hand.  The studio around him is also gray, with a sketchy bit of design work next to the window.

One of the most fascinating things about the 1887 self portrait is the figure outside the window (and behind a wall, it seems).  A man turns towards the window and looks inside the studio at the artist.  Who is this shadowy figure?  Is Friant making a comment on his own self-directed gaze, or perhaps articulating ourselves as we look at him?  Is Friant separating the artist from the rest of society?  (This is possible as Friant, sans tie and in smock, embodies the image of the artist that was a caricature even in his own day.)  Or perhaps it is the critic, looking over Friant’s shoulder and commenting upon work from which he is far removed?  It is just one of the many questions that come to mind when regarding this fascinating, neglected artist.

Self-Portraits by Émile Friant Part One

If art history is written by the winners, then many great masters were effectively excised from any sane chronicle of art history with the advent of Modernism.  One such talent was Émile Friant (1863-1932), a French naturalist painter born in the small town of Dieuze, about 25 miles northeast of Nancy, in eastern France.  Friant’s father was a locksmith and his mother a dressmaker.  Like many of the artists covered here, Friant was something of a prodigy.  Friant studied under Louis Theodore Devilly (1818-1886) while still a teenager; Devilly was the director of the school of drawing in Nancy and an advocate of realism. 

Friant was only 15 years old when he made his debut at the annual Salon in Nancy in 1878.  His great abilities were readily apparent; he was soon awarded a municipal scholarship for study in Paris. He entered the studio of the famous Alexandre Cabanel (1823-1889), but Friant felt constricted by Cabanel’s severe Academic style and returned home.  Friant was better inspired by other Lorraine artists, including Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848-1884) and Aimé Morot (1850-1913).  He would go on to enjoy a very successful career and win many honors, including the grand prize at the Paris Salon in 1889, the gold medal at the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor that same year.

Friant eventually became a professor of painting in 1923 at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France.  He was later promoted to the position of commander in the Legion of Honor, and made a member of the Institut de France.  Friant died from the results of a fall he suffered in Paris in 1932. 

Friant’s work is interesting as he seems to straddle two distinct epochs.  Though he may have balked at Cabanel’s training, Friant could never fully embrace the movement toward Impressionism.  Like the Impressionists, Friant painted pictures of everyday life – however, he did so without the splotchy tricks most often used by Impressionists.  Art history often calls those caught between the Academy and Modernism “Realists,” but to do so also does discredit to Friant’s masterful feel for color and tone.

Like many artists, Friant painted a series of self-portraits throughout his lifetime.  The portrait that we look at here is of the artist aged 15 or so.  Before looking at the art, let’s take a moment to look at the artist.  Friant at 15 is a very handsome youth indeed; his red hair is thick and bushy, swept over his large brow.  His eyebrows are thin and sculpted, his gaze steady and clear, his mouth well formed with a generous bottom lip.  His chin is square and his nose noble and straight.  In adulthood he would hide his good looks behind a bushy beard.

But it is his expression that is most arresting; or, perhaps it would be better to say his gaze.  This is not the gaze of a young man filled with dreams (or youthful indolence), but, rather the fierce look of a youth ready to grapple with the world.  His brows knit in concentration, his mouth set with determination, the muscles of his face tense as he considers his next move.  If not for the youthfulness of his hair and the smooth texture of his skin, this could easily be the portrait of an experienced soldier, a businessman of affairs, or a seasoned academic. 

Friant paints his own countenance in a classical manner – the realism of his hair, his features, the representation of his eyes and mouth – nothing about the head would be out of place in the most classical, Academic of paintings.  However, Friant’s brushwork becomes loser and less defined once we move away from his head.  His shirt collar and tie are little more than generously painted suggestions, and his coat conveyed with sketchily applied gray, blue and white paint. 

You could say that Friant’s early portrait seems to encompass all of the contradictions of his style and career – a naturalist painter finding a home in a modernist world.  It is an interesting moment in our art history, one that we will look at again tomorrow with a later self-portrait.

The Quest of the Sacred Slipper by Sax Rohmer

Few guilty pleasures in life are more delicious than immersion into the delirious, pulpy universe of Sax Rohmer.

Born Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward (1883–1959) in Birmingham to a working class family, Rohmer initially toiled as a public servant before becoming a writer.  Rohmer was an incredibly well-read man and amateur Egyptologist; he also was a working writer in every sense of the term, knocking out magazine articles and comedy sketches. 

Rohmer published several stories and a novel before really hitting his stride in 1913 with the publication of The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu.  This novel was actually a collection of several inter-connected short stories, strung together by one over-arching narrative thrust:  secret agent Nayland Smith and his comrade Dr. Petrie working to rid the world of an evil criminal mastermind bent on taking over the world.  The next two novels in the series, The Return of Dr. Fu-Manchu and The Hand of Fu-Manchu, were also short stories strung together.  When Rohmer revived the series in 1931, with Daughter of Fu Manchu, he turned to full-novel form.  Some of these later novels are the best in the series (such as the Trail of Fu Manchu), but the sustained narrative structures does seem to knock the wind out of some of them.

Rohmer also wrote several different series of detective novels, featuring such characters as Gaston Max and Morris Klaw (who featured largely in supernatural mysteries).  Rohmer was one of the most well-paid thriller writers of his generation, and for laughs would sometimes sign his name $ax Rohmer.  He and his wife moved to New York after World War II and he died in 1959 from avian flu.  His wife, along with his assistant, Cay Van Ash, wrote a splendid biography of the man in 1972, called, appropriately, Master of Villainy.  (Ash also wrote two Fu Manchu novels of his own, one featuring Sherlock Holmes, and they are equal to those of Rohmer.)

It’s hard to imagine the full impact of Rohmer’s legacy today, after Fu Manchu has been watered down by countless imitators and the tides of political correctness.  However, it’s safe to say that without Fu Manchu and Nayland Smith, there would have been no James Bond, as author Ian Fleming had said that Rohmer’s novels were a key influence on his style and his decision to become a writer.  Many of the tropes that were invented or perfected by Rohmer have become today’s clichés, and the debt the thriller genre owes him is immeasurable.

Part of the great fun to be had by reading Rohmer is his fevered emotional pitch, the heavily scented style of his prose, and the sheer momentum of his narrative.  There are two other key ingredients of Rohmer’s charm.  First, nearly everything a reader comes across in his novels – no matter how outlandish – is usually real.  If Rohmer says there’s an 18 inch poisonous centipede, rest assured, there is one.  Another key is Rohmer’s commitment to his story and his characters – this man believed.  There is never a hint of irony, never less than his 100% commitment as an artist.  He may not have been writing literature, but he wrote it as if he was.

He was also a master of description.  Here, for example, is there first time the world knew of Fu Manchu:  Imagine a person, tall, lean and feline, high-shouldered, with a brow like Shakespeare and a face like Satan, a close-shaven skull, and long, magnetic eyes of the true cat-green. Invest him with all the cruel cunning of an entire Eastern race, accumulated in one giant intellect, with all the resources of science past and present, with all the resources, if you will, of a wealthy government--which, however, already has denied all knowledge of his existence. Imagine that awful being, and you have a mental picture of Dr. Fu-Manchu, the yellow peril incarnate in one man.

My affection for Rohmer came flooding back to me during a recent reading of his sublimely lurid The Quest of the Sacred Slipper, first published serially in Short Stories Magazine and collected into novel form in 1919.  Sacred Slipper is available for free from the invaluable manybooks.net and Project Gutenberg.  Seekers after vintage shivers need go no further.

How to describe The Quest of the Sacred Slipper?  Pure purple romance.  It starts with our narrator, a newspaper man named Cavanagh, inheriting responsibility for a Muslim holy relic, the Slipper of the Prophet (once worn by Allah himself) after the man who uncovered it, Prof. Deeping, is murdered.  Two factions are after it – a league of Muslim assassins called the Hashishin, and a celebrated American cracksman named Earl Dexter (also called The Stetson Man for his taste in hats).  The Hashishin are led by the murderous Hassan of Aleppo, and leave a trail of severed hands and dead men as they and Dexter pursue the slipper, with Cavanagh and Scotland Yard’s Inspector Bristol always one step behind.

All of this is delivered in a delirious, ornate, heavily scented style; as if Oscar Wilde and Ian Fleming collaborated on a thriller while drinking too much absinthe.

Of course, many readers will snort at the Hashishin – ritualistic Muslim murderers who smoke hashish before committing their crimes.  But remember, it’s Sax Rohmer we’re writing of here, so it’s no surprise that the Hashishin actually existed after a fashion, and that the word “assassin” actually derives from the same root.  And for Rohmer to have anticipated murderous Muslim fanatics roaming London fully 90 years before it actually happened adds additional irony to the notion that he was a mere pulpy romance writer.  (I often think of Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar/The Saint, who wrote that World War II showed that writers of “Yellow Peril” fiction for the 20 years previous might have been onto something.)

Here’s a taste of some of the incensed delights to be found in the Golden Slipper:

All that I knew of the weird group of fanatics – survivals of a dim and evil past – who must now be watching this cottage as bloodlustful devotees watch a shrine violated, burst upon my mind.  I peopled the still blackness with lurking assassins, armed with the murderous knowledge of by-gone centuries, armed with invisible weapons which stuck down from afar, supernaturally.

Or: Many relics have curious histories, and the experienced archaeologist becomes callous to that uncanniness which seems to attach to some gruesome curios. But the slipper of the Prophet was different.  No mere ghostly menace threatened its holders; an avenging scimitar followed those who came in contact with it; gruesome tragedies, mutilations, murders, had marked its progress throughout.

No one would argue that Sax Rohmer was a great writer, or that his novels enter the elevated realms of high art.  But he did do something no thriller writer was ever able to pull off – he wrote trash that could be savored by aesthetes.

Amsterdam by Ian McEwan

Amsterdam, inexplicably winner of the 1998 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, is a remarkably uneven novel … one is nearly tempted to say disjointed. 

That is not to say that Ian McEwan’s prose style is lacking.  He is not a luminescent stylist in the manner of, say, Michael Chabon, but McEwan writes with a striking economy of line and incisive ability to capture character with a phrase.  So how did so accomplished a writer fail so badly with this book…?

Amsterdam tells the story of four people, one dead and her three surviving lovers.  The novel opens at the funeral of Molly Lane, who died painfully after a swift and debilitating illness.  Molly seems to be that perfect woman who can only be realized post mortem: she is loving, sexy, talented, erudite, carefree and supportive.  Clearly too difficult to write in anything other than the reminiscences of other characters. 

Among the mourners are composer Clive Linley and newspaper editor Vernon Halliday.  Each had longish affairs with Molly in the past, and are friendly with each other independent of her.  Also attending is Foreign Secretary Julian Garmony, another of Molly’s ex-lovers.  Garmony is an extreme right-winger (he would seem to be nearly as loathsome as our former President Bush) in line to become Prime Minister who uses the funeral as an event to glad hand reporters.

Also attending is Molly’s husband George, a wealthy publisher of trashy books. 

Following the funeral, Clive -- perhaps McEwan’s one sympathetic character in the novel -- fears that he too may be ill.  Both he and Vernon were upset by the horrific details of Molly’s passing and he discusses end-of-life care with Vernon.  Both men vow that if either becomes too sick or too debilitated with illness to live with dignity, that the healthy man will help the other find the release of death.

Clive’s illness proves to be nothing more than anxiety, and the novel lurches to its next key plot point: George has uncovered, among Molly’s effects, compromising photos of Garmony in drag.  He sells them to Vernon’s newspaper and Clive and Vernon argue bitterly over the morality of publishing them.

Vernon decides to print them, and is absorbed in the roll-up to publication while Clive works on his symphony, commissioned by the government to celebrate the coming millennium.  The bitter words exchanged have festered to some degree in both men, and their misunderstandings escalate after Garmony out-maneuvers Vernon by having his wife make the photos public herself.

All of this is good stuff.  Both Clive and Vernon are realistically rendered, each with a some degree of sympathy.  And while this is not a comic novel per se, there is a great deal of humor in the depiction of each man.  We also get an idea of the inner workings of Clive as an artist.  Here he is thinking while taking a train across London:

In his corner of West London, and in his self-preoccupied daily round, it was easy for Clive to think of civilization as the sum of all the arts, along with design, cuisine, good wine, and the like.  But now it appeared that this was what it really was – square miles of meager modern houses whose principal purpose was the support of TV aerials and dishes; factories producing worthless junk to be advertised on the televisions and, in dismal lots, lorries queuing to distribute it; and everywhere else, roads and the tyranny of traffic.  It looked like a raucous dinner party the morning after.  No one would have wished it this way, but no had been asked.  Nobody planned it, nobody wanted it, but most people had to live in it.  To watch it mile after mile, who would have guessed that kindness or the imagination, that Purcell or Britten, Shakespeare of Milton, had ever existed?

What happens to McEwan’s book then is quite tragic – the final chapter seems to flee from the main body of his story and turn into some kind of grotesque shaggy dog story.    Let me make this clear – the closing chapter of Amsterdam seems to belong to another book; it comes almost completely from left field, as if McEwan suddenly remembered he had been writing a comic novel, and decided to close it off with an unfunny joke.

With his conclusion, McEwan successfully breaks the covenant between writer and reader by effectively defacing and erasing all that has come before.  What is doubly confusing to your correspondent is that McEwan seems to want to write a straight novel while playing some cheap kind of post modernist game.  That Amsterdam won the Booker Prize is just one unpalatable aspect of the book among many.

The Capt. Alatriste Novels of Arturo Pérez-Reverte

Like most aesthetes, your correspondent is slavishly addicted to novels of swashbuckling romance.  A good swashbuckler has a tremendous sense of style, is written with élan and thrives on a heightened sense of drama, emotion and plot.

So, it’s natural that many people have pushed on me the historical romances of Arturo Pérez-Reverte, author of several novels about solider and swordsman-for-hire Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, and his young companion, Íñigo Balboa y Aguirre.  With these novels, Pérez-Reverte clearly shows his ambition to create a series that rivals the D’Artagnan romances of Alexandre Dumas.

Pérez-Reverte (born 1951), author of the excellent The Fencing Master already covered in these pages, has set a laudable goal for himself with these books.  The author admits to being horrified at the lack of depth in the coverage of Span’s Golden Age in contemporary schools, and sought to correct this with a series of historical romances that fully detail the glory that was Spain.

However, it is his very ambition that sinks the Alatriste novels, as Pérez-Reverte forgets the romancer’s pledge to recreate history, rather than teach it.  I have just finished the fourth in the corpus (The King’s Gold), and, at this point, despite my devotion to the genre, could not possibly go back for a fifth (or seventh, as that is where the novels now stand with no sign of letting up) helping.

Pérez-Reverte does not wear his erudition lightly, and the novels stop regularly for Alatriste or one of the supporting characters (often real-life historical personages) to rattle off long bits of poetry, historical detail or antiquated epigrams and aphorisms.  This is amusing in small bits, but page after page is rather like a historical romance written by a Spanish Charlie Chan – very little goes a long way indeed.

Moreover, the great masters of the form (talents as diverse as Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini) had a wonderful flair for intricate plotting.  Indeed, one of the deep joys of swashbuckling romance is its complexity of plot, almost for its own sake.  That love of plot is usually married to a depth of emotion – not just love, but hate, lust, the thirst for revenge, envy and self-respect.  However, the Alatriste novels never deliver this density of plot; indeed, they have more the plodding feel of 17^th Century police procedurals, where Alatriste and Íñigo make a bloody path from point A to point B. 

Missing, too, is that sense of style, that distinct touch of panache so essential to the genre.  Perhaps this is because Alatriste is a taciturn battle-weary survivor, or that Íñigo, our narrator, is too young for such embroideries.  But this ennui prevents the books from ever really taking off – they cannot inhabit the more expansive corners of our imagination because they have no appeal to our sense of fun.

It is often with the supporting characters – the various aides, schemers and villains – that the author of romances truly shines, and here, too, Pérez-Reverte fails.  The recurring villain of the piece, Gualterio Malatesta, an Italian fencing master, is clearly the Basil Rathbone part.  However, like Alatriste, he never really comes to life – we know he’s the villain because he gets to sneer quite a bit, but there is never that passion for naughtiness, that sheer delight in vileness, that essential theatricality, that marks a great swashbuckling heavy.  Angélica de Alquézar, who spends most of her time in the books alternately trying to seduce or murder Íñigo, is weak tea indeed, never becoming more than a pale shadow of Dumas’ Milady de Winter, her most obvious influence.  Historical figures, such as Francisco de Quevedo (1580–1645), come off more like name dropping than fully rounded characters, a trick Dumas, for example, admirably pulled off with Cardinal Richelieu.

Part of the problem may be inherent in the series itself – because they are set in Spain of the 17^th Century, the Alatriste novels cannot help but escape a whiff of provincialism.  While most European nations at the time were unified under one strong ruler, Spain was in essence broken up under various feudal lords who served the King.  In addition, both royalty and the Catholic Church used religion to keep the people pliable, ignorant and afraid.  Spain simply had not the expansive, intellectually exploratory or cohesive feel of England or France at that time. 

I must confess that the shortcomings of 17^th Century Spain detailed in The King’s Gold inspired extremely uncomfortable comparisons to the present-day United States as I read the novel.  Here’s a passage that I found disconcertingly familiar:

Most political activity, therefore, consisted in a constant to-and-fro of haggling, usually over money; and all the subsequent crises that we endured under Philip IV – the Medina Sidonia plot in Andalusia, the Duque de Hijar’s conspiracy in Aragon, the secession of Portugal, and the Catalonia War – were created by two things: the royal treasury’s greed and a reluctance on the part of the nobility, the clerics, and the great local merchants to pay anything at all.  The sole object of the king’s visit to Seville in sixteen twenty-four and of this present visit was to crush local opposition to a vote in favor of new taxes.  The sole obsession of that unhappy Spain was money, which is why the route to the Indies was so crucial.  To demonstrate how little this had to do with justice or decency, suffice it to say that two or three years earlier, the Cortes had rejected outright a luxury tax that was to be levied on sinecures, gratuities, pensions, and rents – that is to say, on the rich.  The Venetian ambassador, Contarini, was, alas quite right when he wrote at the time, “The most effective war one can wage on the Spanish is to leave them to be devoured and destroyed by their own bad governance.”

Perhaps my overarching problem with the Alatriste novels is that their setting – 17^th Century Spain – has too, too many similarities with the worst components of 21^st Century American life: an exploitive over-class, unquestioning religious devotion, a hawkish international stance and the crippling provincialism of many of its people.  Hardly my recipe for romance.

Maps and Legends by Michael Chabon

Some time ago we covered Michael Chabon’s wonderful book of essays, Manhood for Amateurs.  As a professed Chabon devotee, it is with some surprise that I confess disappointment at his earlier essay collection, Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands (2008).

Chabon (born 1963) is one of our most interesting, contemporary literary writers.  He is one of a small number of literary writers who still care about craft, construction and well-made stories, as well as the expansive humanity found in the best fiction.  He also has a more-than-healthy respect for quality genre fiction.  His books, though, have largely been hit-and-miss affairs.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is one of the most remarkable books of its decade, and Wonder Boys, Werewolves in Their Youth and The Mysteries of Pittsburg are all equally fine.  He floundered terribly with the unreadable The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Gentlemen of the Road (his sword-and-sandal tale) and The Final Solution (his poor rift on Sherlock Holmes) are perhaps, if anything, worse.

And yet I both like and admire Chabon.  He is a critic of remarkable sensitivity and his prose style is fluid, descriptive and often achingly beautiful.  No post modernist, Chabon values human beings, human interactions, and the deep and vital connection people have with art.  We need more like him.

That is one of the reasons I was so disappointed in Maps and Legends – many of the essays are almost brilliant, but they never quite take off.  Also, the essays here are often so disjointed, with too many disparate elements almost connected by a central argument, that they never feel organic or honest.  These are largely essays as performance art, with Chabon seeing what he can get away with.  He could do better.

However, we must congratulate Chabon on his fearlessness.  Many serious writers would dread losing membership in that august body by admitting to a passion for comic book artist Howard Chaykin, or admiring Cormac McCarthy’s sole foray into science fiction, The Road.  Chabon is determined to find art in all manner of places, and that is a gift.

As with all essay collections, this is a mixed bag.  Many of the essays are only interesting to those already familiar with the genre he addresses: his thoughts on Howard Chaykin and comics legend Will Eisner are really only meaningful to the already-initiated, and one feels that Chabon missed an opportunity to make larger points.  He almost scores high with his essay on Sherlock Holmes, but, as with many essays here, Chabon introduces so many side issues (pastiche, genre-fiction in general and detective fiction in particular, the sinister nature of secrets) that one nearly forgets his central point, if he ever had one.  (And Chabon and his editors should both know better – it’s Professor Moriarty, not Dr. Moriarty…)

In “Imaginary Homelands,” Chabon details how a Yiddish phrasebook inspired The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and the essay is infinitely more amusing, interesting and moving than anything found in his novel.  Also excellent is his discourse on the ghost stories of M. R. James, and in “My Back Pages,” Chabon describes, with great wit and depth of feeling, his struggle to write his first novel. 

Chabon’s three greatest strengths are his great empathy, his expansive feelings toward literature and the human spirit, and a limpid prose style.  Here is Chabon writing about Philip Pullman’s series of fantasy novels:

Like a house on the borderlands, epic fantasy is haunted: by a sense of lost purity and grandeur, deep wisdom that has been forgotten, Arcadia spoilt, the debased or diminished stature of modern human-kind; by a sense that the world, to borrow a term from John Clute, the Canadian-born British critic of fantasy and science fiction, has “thinned.”  This sense of thinning – of there having passed a Golden Age, a Dreamtime, when animals spoke, magic worked, children honored their parents, and fish leapt filleted into the skillet – has haunted the telling of stories from the beginning.  The words “once upon a time” are in part a kind of magic formula for invoking the ache of this primordial nostalgia.

Equally fine is Chabon writing about the Norse mythology he read as a boy: Loki never turned up among the lists of Great Literary Heroes (or Villains) of Childhood, and yet he was my favorite character in the book that was for many years my favorite, a book whose subtitle might have been “How Loki Ruined the World and Made It Worth Talking About.”  Loki was the god of my own mind as a child, with its competing impulses of vandalism and vision, of imagining things and smashing them.  And as he cooked up schemes and foiled them, fathered monsters and stymied them, helped forestall the end of things and hastened it, he was god of the endlessly complicating nature of plot, of storytelling itself.

Throughout Maps and Legends, Chabon has wonderful things to say about the adventure of childhood, the even-greater adventure of adulthood, genre fiction and fine art, and his identity as a father, a husband and a Jew.  The essays may not all hold together in any organic way, but there are treasures strewn throughout.

Titian’s Abraham and Isaac

Like the earlier David and Goliath we examined by Titian, this representation of Abraham and Isaac is now in the church of Santa Maria della Salute in Venice. It was originally made as a ceiling painting for the Santo Spirito in Isola; Titian’s other ceiling painting for that church depicted Cain and Abel.  (If the composition and foreshortening seems “funny,” remember this would ideally be seen from below.)

Titian was born Tiziano Vecellio in Pieve di Cardore in 1489 (dying in 1576, quite an old man by Renaissance standards).  He was perhaps the greatest Venetian painter of his era; his contemporaries called him The Sun Amidst Small Stars (after the final line of Dante’s Paradiso).  Titian was equally at home with landscapes, portraits and large narrative pictures.  Despite his compositional felicity and superior draughtsmanship it is perhaps is his unique mastery of color upon which his reputation rests.  His style changed often throughout his lifetime, but his serious study and application of color was a constant throughout his career.  His later works were, perhaps, muted compared to his earlier pictures, but his overall approach also grew in subtlety.

By any yardstick, this is a remarkable picture.  The painting is characterized by the spiraling movement of the figures, the counterpoised pose and the strong intersecting diagonals.  Like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Titian chooses the moment when the angel appears just before Abraham can murder his son in an act of devotion to God.  But it would be hard to imagine a painting more unlike the other two – let’s start by looking at his characterization.

If Caravaggio’s Abraham is an unthinking zealot and Rembrandt’s a confused duffer, Titian’s muscled prophet seems to our eyes more like Samson or Hercules.  Though he holds Isaac’s head down (like Rembrandt), this sword thrust would most likely cleave Isaac’s head from his body.  (And note, too, that this is no simple knife – it is a sword.  This Abraham is a figure of potency, indeed.)

The angel here is unlike the celestial interlopers of Caravaggio (who seems oddly human) and Rembrandt (who is definitely otherworldly) – this angel is more in line with the putti seen decorating various religious paintings of the period.  That so simple and childlike an angel can stop so massive a human seems incredible; however, the face of Titian’s angel seems to us the most urgent of the three.  This angel will stop this madness, regardless of his relative size.

Which brings us, as is almost always the case in this story, to the artist’s depiction of Isaac.  Caravaggio showed us an adolescent clearly terrified and abused; Rembrandt a heavenly youth of beautiful whiteness, his face brutally hidden by his father’s massive fist.  The Isaac of Lievens is clearly conflicted, unable to see the angel above him and clearly uncomfortable in his father’s grasp.  But Titian’s Isaac is different – this is no adolescent, it is a young boy.  And despite straddling a funeral pyre, with his father holding his head and face away, he seems curiously nonplussed.  This Isaac is too innocent of his father’s intention, too young to fully appreciate that he is about to die, and that makes the scene doubly horrible.  (Indeed, his face is eerily similar to that of the ass and the lamb, all of them, to Abraham, little better than dumb animals.  Note that the older man seems to stand on one and put his full weight on the other.)

Note, too, that, like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, here Isaac seems to be lit from another source.  Caravaggio’s Isaac is horribly white – perhaps in terror, perhaps rendered so by the artist in a mode of self-identification.  Rembrandt’s Isaac looks as if a hot spotlight lit his youthful lines, focusing the picture on his boyish innocence.  Titian, however, aligns the light of heaven alongside his Isaac – the clouds are highlighted with white, heavenly light, throwing Isaac’s simple robe into stark outlines.

Interesting, too, and again like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, Titian cannot help but fetishize Isaac.  The most luminous focal point of the picture is Isaac’s bottom, and it can not be unintentional.  There is something in this myth that seems to inspire in even the most devout of souls dark contemplations of parental abuse, sexual and otherwise.

Though this is bound to raise hackles, to my eye Titian’s picture is far superior to that of Caravaggio, Rembrandt and Lievens.  Possibly because of its intended use as a ceiling picture, the composition is more dynamic, more energetic and more frenetic than the other pictures we’ve looked at in this series.  (Note the train of Abraham’s robe trailing behind him.)  Titian was also a draughtsmam of prodigious ability: the rich musculature of Abraham and the soft lines of both Isaac and the angel are wonderfully captured, and the triangular quality of the composition keeps the eye going from victim to angel with zealot locked between them.

Also, Titian’s sense of color cuts through the haze of sanctity that usually envelops the story, making more clear and more terrible just what was about to happen here.

The Angel Prevents the Sacrifice of Isaac by Rembrandt van Rijn (c. 1635)

Yesterday we looked at how Dutch artist Jan Lievens envisioned the Biblical story of God’s edict to Abraham to murder his own son, Isaac, as a sign of his devotion.  Lievens was a contemporary (and sometime studio partner) of Rembrandt van Rijn, who also painted his own version of the story.  Unlike Lievens, who painted the scene after Abraham spared Isaac and killed a ram instead, Rembrandt, like Caravaggio before him, chose the more dramatic moment of the story when the angel appears and stops Abraham in his murderous intent.

Rembrandt (1606 – 1669), of course, is one of the world’s most famous and celebrated painters.  His is one of the few names (like Leonardo and Michelangelo) that have become shorthand for “artist.”  His revolutionary use of light and color, in addition to the sensitivity with which he portrayed the human condition, were combined with a supreme sense of composition and narrative.  He is truly one of the great masters.

Rembrandt was born into a middle class family; he showed an early aptitude for art and studied first with Jacob van Swanenburgh, and later (alongside Jan Lievens) with Pieter Lastman.  Lastman was deeply impressed by Caravaggio’s use of light and color, and it’s probable that Lastman held up the Italian Renaissance master as a model to his students.  (Caravaggio himself painted a deeply disturbing version of the Abraham and Isaac story.)

Rembrandt became one of history’s most celebrated portrait painters.  He married Saskia van Uylenburg in 1634 and her father, an art dealer, was able to secure a great deal of work for his son-in-law.  The couple lived and worked in the Breestraat, a busy street on the boarder of the Jewish neighborhood.  Rembrandt studied many of the faces he saw there, and this study stood him in good stead for his masterful pictures depicting Old Testament figures.  Rembrandt created more than 300 Biblical works, including drawings and etchings. 

Despite his success, Rembrandt was never very competent when it came to financial affairs.  He lived way beyond his means, using much of his money to buy art and antiquities.  He sold much of his collection to avoid bankruptcy in 1656 including Roman busts, Japanese armor and his collections of minerals and gems.  The art establishment, always out to get him, represented by the painters guild actually created a rule that artists in Rembrandt’s financial position could not trade as painters.   Rembrandt was forced to move into a smaller house and he died in dire financial straits.

The Angel Prevents the Sacrifice of Isaac was painted around 1635 and, as is usually the case with Rembrandt, he finds the decisive, dramatic moment of the story to illustrate with his brush.

Rembrandt was much the same age as Lievens when he painted his version of Abraham and Isaac.  And though both men are great masters in their own right, I think that the Rembrandt is by far the superior picture of the two.  Both artists focus on Isaac, but where Lievens pinpoints the ambiguity of the boy’s emotions, Rembrandt details his lily white youth and supple boyhood.  Indeed, the bleached white of Isaac’s torso shows that the heavenly light is not on Abraham, but on Isaac.

Nor is Isaac any willing murder victim; like Caravaggio’s possible self-portrait in the same role, this is an Isaac who is clearly being abused by his father.  Abraham’s hand covers the boy’s face and mouth – he cannot cry out, nor can he breathe.  His hands are tied behind his back, but his body and legs twist and squirm in terror. 

It is curious, too, that Rembrandt’s Isaac, like Caravaggio’s, is nude or mostly nude.  This curious fetishizing of Isaac links the work of these two masters, and will also be in evidence tomorrow when we look at Titian.

Where Caravaggio paints Abraham as an emotional blank, though, Rembrandt creates a very different picture of the prophet.  Here, Abraham is clearly a confused old duffer, dropping his knife in surprise at the arrival of the angel.  There is no sense of purpose, as with Caravaggio, or perhaps continued malign intent, as with Lievens, but, rather, simply infirmity and, possibly, dementia.  One wonders how the old man managed to subdue the boy in the first place.

Also interesting is the angel.  It appears here that the angel arrives in the proverbial nick of time – and the look on its face seems to indicate more than a touch of disapproval of the entire incident.  (What, it seems to ask, are you crazy…?)

I would draw your attention to the hands of both Abraham and the angel – they seem, to me, curiously deliberate.  The hand smothering Isaac is quite massive, and the hand that held the knife seems quite powerful indeed – hardly the hands belonging to so old a man as Abraham.  The angel’s hand clutching Abraham’s wrist also seems powerfully delineated, with dark patches between fingers, while the hand heavenward seems curiously feminine and small. 

As is often the case with this story, one wonders what happens once the angel drifts heavenward.  Isaac is already tied and lying on what would be his funeral pyre.  The ram that will be killed in his stead is nowhere in evidence – so we have to ask, how does one move from this moment of supreme drama and religious mania back to normalcy?