1
In an arched niche high in the wall stood a cast of Venus. She looked down at Jared’s Descent from the Cross, the large painting he had been working on for the past five years. It depicted the central Christian paradox: the secular defeat leading to the spiritual victory. On the surface Jared did not believe what his painting conveyed - the creed of his church fathers that there exist final causes. He was a man still awaiting his revelation.
The last time he had worked on it was a few days ago when he had painted an emerald stone around the neck of the Virgin Mary. His wife had posed for the Madonna and lay in a faint at the bottom of the canvas. The swirling dark background threatened to engulf her. This was the third time he had unconsciously painted his wife unconscious. The third time he had shown her in a state of slumber, unable or unwilling to open her eyes. This was one of the mysteries of his painting. His wife’s daughter, whom he had brought up as his own child, the legacy of running off with another man’s wife, was the ministering angel who held the Madonna’s head. His eye moved up to the figure in the fiery red robe who represented St. John of the Apocalypse and then to Christ on the cross who bore a subtle resemblance to Jared himself. The sky had split open above Christ’s head. His left hand was still nailed to the cross, his right arm stretched down towards the unconscious Madonna. The living Christ was embraced by the beautiful Magdalene who gripped his leg beneath the knee around which she had entwined her long dark curls. Jared had painted a second shadow Christ, from whose shoulder, suggesting the idea of the Passion, flowed in tangled folds a purple robe. This was the Christ who would descend down into hell to pluck out Adam and Eve. Jared’s own daughter, the eight-year-old Cordelia, had posed as a child who held the Madonna's hand but was looking up at Magdalene, the fallen woman. Only now did he notice a note of wary reproach in the highlight of his child’s eye.
Jared opened the copy of the Bible given to him by his father. If thou seekest her as silver, and searchest for her as for hid treasure; Then shalt thou understand the fear of the Lord, and find the knowledge of God. Jared enjoyed opening the Bible at random and reading the first few lines on which his eyes alighted. If thou seekest her as silver... What did that mean exactly? Her instantly evoked an erotic undertow. She was the vision which set him down before the ocean of all his sustaining longings. She could never be for him merely an abstract principle. She was forever and always personified in physical form as the muse. Was the problem then that his wife had ceased to be his muse? He had given some thought to the idea of adding two panels to his Descent from the Cross - on these he would depict Adam and Eve. No muse though had appeared, no girl posing nude for his students was appropriate to the idea he had in mind.
As Jared stepped up closer to his picture, a voice, English, well-educated, slightly affected in tone and unfamiliar, resounded through the corridor of the deconsecrated church.
“If I’m not mistaken, that’s Raphael leading Tobias and his dog on the plaque outside,” said the dark-haired man who pushed aside the drapes of Jared’s studio. “Forgive me for intruding. My name, by the way, is Damien Sparks.”
Jared shook the man’s hand. He was wearing a russet sweater beneath a black sheepskin coat.
“This building,” said Jared, “used to be a church dedicated to the Archangel Raphael, healer and guide of wayfarers.”
“Now it’s an art school, I believe. This building, you see, played a part in my youth. I attended one or two parties here in the sixties. That was before I went into law, when I was still idealistic.” The man, lit a cigarette with a match and blew out a dissolving circle of smoke. “I remember there was a huge Buddha statue up there which I see has been replaced by Venus. In fact, the parties here were rather wild. A woman was raped at one of them, downstairs somewhere I believe. That caused quite a rumpus among the English community at the time. In those days, as I recall, this building was believed to be haunted. An angry woman was the general hypothesis. I don’t suppose you've ever experienced her - the angry woman?”
“I thought all women were angry nowadays,” smiled Jared.
“I’ll never understand women. One of the reasons I’m retracing my steps is a hiatus in my relations with my wife. She possesses an absolutely brilliant mind and thus it's very difficult ever to win arguments. She’s given me permission to have an affair. Says I ought to sow some wild oats. Her only clause is that it must be an affair with a girl no older than twenty-two. Her reasoning is that I’ll soon grow bored without intellectual stimulus and that girls are still mentally unformed until they reach twenty-three. I suppose that's rather an arbitrary statement but those were her words. She believes I will be saved by a sacrifice on her part.”
“So you’ve come to Florence to have a fling?”
“No. The older I get the less interested I become in libidinal frisson. Among other things, I’ve come with the idea of purchasing property in Chiantishire.”
“Not this particular piece of property, I take it?”
“No, no. I'm no artist and I'm certainly not interested in moral responsibilities. Any claim I had to moral high ground went to the dogs when I defended the Prince of Darkness. That’s what I call the most infamous of my clients. He pays me a yearly annuity for a scrape I got him out of. Therefore, I'm still, you might say, in his pay.”
“The Prince of Darkness?”
“My private joke,” said Damien Sparks. He now turned to look at Jared’s painting for the first time. “So you're a great fan of chiaroscuro. Isn’t that merely old hat?”
“I paint from nature; I paint what I see,” said Jared.
“I’m not sure I trust these formulas for capturing beauty. We’ve had golden sections, squares, circles, S shapes. Each one becomes slavish in its own way. Artistic doctrine has a well-recorded history of inhibiting creativity. Actually, I recently acquired a rather nice piece of work. It was a painting on a piece of old plywood. Rather Chinese in its effect of leading the observer towards an idea of the purification of spirit. I've also just purchased two paintings by a London artist called Babb. They're both yellow – primrose yellow squares actually. I find them fascinating.”
“Modern life has very much been turned into yellow squares - neat equations of bland optimism. But do they offer any resolutions or redemptions? Perhaps though, as Shelley said, poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration. What kind of inspiration is a yellow square?”
“Inspiration is for artists. I’m a lawyer. So,” the man said, after looking deeply into Jared’s shy blue eyes, “a charge of magus might be levelled at you? What is it you teach your students? To paint what they see?”
“Any idea of beauty depends on seeing the whole, what you choose to leave out as well as put in. Painting has as much to do with evolving consciousness as training the eye.”
“Quantum theory has it that we change things by observing them. So aren’t you really just seeing what you want to see? Which is to say, reality as the old masters perceived it? And you hate all modern and abstract art?”
“I dislike fads.”
“You go in for the abiding truths? The thing I don’t understand,” continued the barrister, “is how one can even believe it’s possible to recreate the sensibility of the sixteenth century. Violence, the threat of plague, persecution and the fervent fear-induced nature of religious belief gave to those paintings a profundity we can only regard with disenfranchised awe nowadays. Who any more, for example, could paint a proud regal male without poking fun at him? Males in those days never suffered from self-doubt in their social and religious roles - the infrastructure was still intact which gave them their authority. Any male nowadays who sees himself in those high and mighty terms simply becomes a laughing stock. Irony is the medium through which we now grasp reality. To discount it from any depiction of modern life is to deny the organic evolution of our thinking.” The barrister turned his attention back to Jared’s painting. “But tell me, why is the Virgin wearing an emerald stone?”
Jared himself was not sure why he had painted the stone around his wife’s neck. The moment he had seen the green stone while searching for a fortieth birthday present for Diane he knew it was what he wanted to give her. It summoned to his mind an image of the grail stone and his idea was that it would act as a kind of talisman. He associated one particular day with the stone. Earlier in the year he and his wife had been on holiday in France. The day started, while Diane was intent on her reflection in the mirror, applying her usual sweet-smelling accruement of body paints and powders, with an argument. Stencilling a subtle black shadow beneath the blue of her widened eyes, she told him she was not interested in accompanying him on a tour of the Romanesque churches in the area. What once had drawn her to him - the contagious ascendancy of his insistence on harmonious line - had now become her chief source of irritation.
Jared followed the old pilgrim’s route as designated in his guide. He had visited a few churches and seen a perfectly preserved wooden crucifix from the twelfth century before parking the car in a small village. Red geraniums contrasted poignantly with the grey stone of the houses. He heard the crisp sound of a man hammering nails into wood. The church itself was in shadow and stood in a small square with several plane trees and a magnolia whose flowers were on the verge of opening. There was a scallop shell on the door, a testament to the pilgrims who had used these shells in which to collect alms.
The interior of the church, at first glance, had no floor and resembled the kind of spectacle the mind produces in sleep. The arches and the roof all lay at his feet as well as over his head: the floor was entirely covered in mirrors. His initial reaction was mistrust as though he were about to be ensnared in some fatuous modern performance art from which even his beloved Romanesque churches were no longer immune. He thought about turning his back on the experience, especially when he saw a sign saying that shoes had to be removed. He picked up a leaflet. The leaflet was entitled, Quod superius, sicut quod inferius - As above, so below. There was a primitive drawing of two snakes forming a double spiral around a rod. They were on the verge of attacking one another. He read only a fragment of the text alluding to the Tabula smaragdina, the emerald tablet, on which the essence of the alchemical opus was inscribed in thirteen sentences from Hermes Trismegistus. He walked slowly across the glass towards the transept with the church’s double row of arches soaring both above and below him. The world had been turned upside down. He felt as though he was walking on water. All the weight in his body dissolved and he succumbed to a sensation of being suspended ethereally between two surfaces, two worlds. His progress across the glass and its disorientating duplications was accompanied every so often by images of an embryo developing inside a womb. Something was trying to rebirth him. Something was trying to make him experience a reality which defied hard analysis.
He gave his wife the leaflet to read without having read it himself. Diane though was tired of giving credence to his enthusiasms and lost it without so much as glancing at it. He searched among the rubbish, the fermenting vegetable peelings, the fat and bone of chewed meat, the crushed cartons and oxidising tins but it had vanished without trace. She did not remember what she had done with it. Lost, it began assuming an immense significance in Jared’s mind.
The stone he gave to his wife had the form of an Egyptian scarab, symbol of rebirth, and its markings etched out a primitive cross. Jared explained to Diane that it represented the four elements which together give rise to the quintessence. He later discovered that the emerald stone was the jewel that fell to earth from Lucifer’s crown when the angel of dawn was cast out of heaven. Diane wore the green stone for a month, seeming to take great pleasure from it, and then put it away in a drawer.
“Do you know why you do everything you do?” asked Jared in response to Damien Sparks’ question. “The stone appeared and I painted it.”
The barrister raised his eyebrows and then picked up a jar of honey-coloured medium which he held up to the light. “I don’t suppose,” he said, swirling the unctuous liquid around in the glass, “for old times sake, you'd care to show me round the downstairs part of the studio?”
There being no direct access between the upstairs and downstairs floors, they descended the narrow marble stairs to the street below. Jared led Damien Sparks through a large wooden door. Beneath a high vaulted ceiling the room was cluttered with easels and model stands. Small plaster casts lined the shelves - an orderless miscellanea of angels, ballerinas, holy virgins and nymphs collecting dust.
“I seem to recall there being talk of a crypt somewhere down here. You haven’t located it, I suppose.”
“There’s a kind of trap door beneath that rug over there which leads down into a small cellar.”
“No, this was a proper crypt. People were said to have hidden down there during the war.”
“Perhaps you should speak to the owner of the building, Guido Locatelli. His family has owned this building for generations. They were all sculptors. You should talk to Locatelli. He might know where the crypt is.”
Jared flicked on the switch but no light was forthcoming. The walls of the old church climbed a vast distance until they disappeared into the penumbra beneath the wooden rafters high above. Hoists which once upon a time must have shifted huge slabs of marble were adorned with rams' heads. Diffused luminosity filtered down through the large glass window and lent to the many white casts scattered everywhere a disconcerting intimacy. The two men stood in the shadow of an angel with poised wings. A rat darted out from behind a ladder and vanished behind a shimmering profusion of figures at the far end of the room.
“It’s like the building’s memory," said the barrister. “I was here in 1966, the year of the flood. Did you know there was another serious flood in 1333? Do you go in for number games? I personally have a soft spot for that kind of thing. 33 and 66 might lead one to deduct that the next flood will be in 99.”
“The apocalyptic flood of Revelations?” said Jared, struck by the angel and remembering that his wife had just painted herself with wings: swan’s wings.
The light now flickered on, bringing into focus the far wall where chipped grey columns supported a series of three arches beneath one of which hung a crucified Christ. They were standing in a vast neglected warehouse of casts.
“I believe our underworld vault is over there, somewhere behind those statues. I have a feeling that’s where this woman was raped.”
“Why are you so interested in this rape?”
The barrister, having led Jared over to a colossal reclining stone river god, said: “I suppose because in a way it decided my fate. It marked the end of an era.”
“You knew the woman involved?"
“She was an extremely attractive though rather unconscious woman, if you know what I mean. And, as I recall, it was believed in certain quarters that a child was born.”