The Young Apollo and Other Stories (10 page)

"Because it's not a painting. It's a play. Or a scene from a play, at least. It refers to something you've read about. It reminds you of something. Its effect, so to speak, is through your mind and memory, not your eye. A true painting should be an ocular experience."

"It can't ever tell a story?"

"Well, it can, but that's not the point of it. Not the real point, anyway. The real point is to excite emotions that may have little to do with thinking."

"Like music."

"Very like music."

"But what about all those Italian Renaissance paintings that illustrate stories from the Bible? You're not going to junk Leonardo and Raphael, are you?"

"Far from it. They had to bow to church demands if they were going to sell anything. But it was not the subject matter that was important; it was what they managed to do with it. In a Saint Sebastian you see more than a saint stuck with arrows—you see a glorious study of the nude."

The great collector nodded as he turned back to the canvas before him. "But you'll admit this is well painted."

"Certainly. Indeed, it's so well painted that you can see that the models were all contemporaries of the artist arrayed in fancy dress. They're no more Elizabethan courtiers than I am. He has faithfully delineated exactly what he saw before him. It might as well be a color photograph. But it's not art."

Dunlop grunted and rose. "Let me take you to lunch. What's your name, anyway? Who are you?"

And so that chapter of my life began. Erastus Dunlop was an unusual type of American tycoon, though not as unusual as he thought he was. He liked to point out that he had started life on a higher social level than most of his contemporary magnates—he had been a successful lawyer from an upper-middle-class Cleveland family—but the bulk of his fortune, like that of so many others, had been the fruit of good luck. He and his law partner had quit their practice to drill successfully for oil on a tract of western land deeded to them by a cash-poor client for a fee, and in selling the tract to a giant monopoly and taking stock for the purchase price they had multiplied their original investment many times over. It was also true that, although Dunlop prided himself on having a shrewd collector's eye in amassing the great art now in his Cleveland gallery, he brushed over the early years before he sought professional advice and had filled his mansion with Burne-Jones, Bouguereau, and Boldini.

He was a big, craggy, fierce-eyed man who liked to dominate and impress dealers when they brought their wares to his office, where Dunlop, seated below a Pontormo portrait of a grim-looking condottiere, would glare at them. Yet he could be as quiet as a cat, and as stealthy. He reminded me of an old repertory ham who would play Shylock one night and Hamlet the next. Always acting. What was he hiding? Perhaps the fact that he was fundamentally something of a son of a bitch.

I do not mean to minimize him. Some of those tycoon collectors
did
have sharp eyes for art, or at least they managed to develop them. Nothing teaches a man who is not a fool (and whatever these tycoons were, they were not that) like the discovery that he has just spent a fortune buying a fake. Dunlop in collecting soon learned to rely on professional experts. But never entirely. He made constant use of his own tastes, and one can certainly pick this up in his fondness for the lavish and spectacular in royal portraits, interiors, palaces, and pageants. His inner vision of himself as a collector must have been closer to Lorenzo il Magnifico than to a shareholder of Standard Oil.

Like many able financiers he made up his mind quickly, and it was not long after he had invited me to inspect and evaluate the art he had amassed that he hired me as a regular consultant. It proved a giant step in my career and led directly to my establishing an international reputation as an art connoisseur. I had become Dunlop's regular companion on his foreign excursions in search of new treasure.

I can see now that the first crack in our unity came in Constantinople, where we were examining the recently excavated sacramental vessels of a fifth-century Christian church. I did not, however, recognize it at the time. We were seated in the dark back parlor of a famous Turkish dealer while he brought out the pieces one by one, placing them, silently and almost reverently, on the velvet-covered stand before us: the golden reliquaries, patens, and communion cups of that early Christian service. But what particularly dazzled my eyes was his final offering: a set of huge silver plates on which were enchased scenes of the battle between David and Goliath. It was the finest and most impressive silver work I had yet seen of the Byzantine Empire.

If it
was
of the Byzantine Empire. Dunlop suddenly turned to the dealer and asked him, with his customary gruffhess, to please leave the room. "I wish to talk to Mr. Luchesi alone," he deigned to explain. When the dealer had promptly vanished, he explained to me that a servant at the hotel where we were staying had tipped him off that the David plates were modern work introduced into the treasure by the crooked dealer.

"Take me to the man who made them," I promptly exclaimed, "and I'll buy everything he's got!"

"Even if they're fakes?"

"Why are they fakes? There they are, right in front of you, in all their beauty!
They
are not saying what they are or aren't."

"You think I should buy them?
Knowing
I'm being hoodwinked!"

"How can you be hoodwinked when you know exactly what you're buying? You're buying
those
plates."

Well, my client did buy them, and they turned out to be a genuine part of the early treasure, and to this day they are proudly exhibited in the Dunlop gallery. The hotel servant was found to have been working for a rival dealer who hoped to destroy his competitor's credit. But unbeknown to me, Dunlop's faith in his consultant had been seriously undermined by this exhibition of a preference for beauty over provenance. Had the plates been modern work, their value would have been a small fraction of what it is today.

My break with the great man came only a year later and was caused by his having relied on my attribution to Jean-Marc Nattier of a portrait he had purchased of a daughter of Louis XV. The picture, perfect in every respect, was a smaller version of one hanging in the Salle des Madames in Versailles, representing Madame Infante, as she was known after marrying an infante of Spain,
en costume de chasse.
Trouble came when a French scholar and the greatest authority on Nattier let it be known that there was no record of Nattier's having ever done a replica of any of his portraits of the royal family other than that of the queen, and that Dunlop's painting was presumably the work of one of the four painters who worked for Nattier in the royal atelier.

"Well, if it's not by Nattier, it's by a better painter!" was my indignant response when my client confronted me with this new evidence. "You've got a perfect thing. Shouldn't that be enough?"

Dunlop smiled. I had already learned that when he smiled, he was at his most ominous. "That doesn't alter the fact that I've spent a considerable sum on a picture I now couldn't even give away," he said softly.

"How can anyone assert it wasn't painted by Nattier?" I demanded hotly. "It came out of his atelier. He and his assistants presumably used the same materials. If the king of Spain had asked for a copy, do you think Nattier wouldn't have done it himself? And your lady, Mr. Dunlop, was the king of Spain's daughter-in-law!"

But it did me no good. Erastus Dunlop allowed a man not even one mistake. He never used my services again, but as he didn't want people to know he had ever been misled, he never mentioned the matter, and though it became known that I no longer worked for him, the damage was contained. I even implied to other clients that our difference had sprung from my disapproval of some of his later purchases, which brought me the sympathy of the Warrens, who had feuded with Dunlop over a painting they felt he had unfairly grabbed from under their very eyes, and the Warrens became a far bigger presence in my life than Dunlop had ever been.

What had a profound effect on me was my realization, engendered by the Nattier crisis, that art collecting by the rich was often simply an amusing way of reinvesting and even substantially increasing their wealth, a diversion that also paid off in dividends of public recognition, highly gratifying to egos which had not been small to begin with. Being known as the owner of a Leonardo or a Raphael might entitle one to a patch of the painter's fame. And mightn't one steal a leg of their immortality by giving a specimen of their work to a public institution, or better yet, to a museum like the Frick or the Morgan or the Guggenheim named for oneself? At any rate, it seemed to me that I had some right to a private moral code of my own, where the only criterion was the beauty of the object in question and not of where or how or by whom or for whom it had been made.

It was in Paris, where I now established my principal residence, that I had my first contact with Hank and Leila Warren. They were originally from Troy, New York, but they had moved to Manhattan and had purchased a mansion on Fifth Avenue, primarily as the repository for a growing art collection and which would, after their deaths, be converted into a museum. They already, when we met, had the beginnings of a distinguished accumulation, and they had come to Paris en route to Spain, where they hoped to snag a first-rate El Greco. As I had already obtained a wonderful repenting and weeping Magdalene for a Baltimore collector, they wished me to accompany them on their Iberian expedition, which I was glad to do.

They struck me from the start as an oddly mismatched couple, yet their mutual tolerance and understanding was clearly evident. She was small and dark, with rich raven-black hair and a pale face of rather pinched features that might have once been briefly pretty. She rarely smiled, and one was slightly uncomfortably aware of the rather grim sobriety of her countenance and the acerbic intelligence betrayed by her carefully chosen remarks. Yet I soon had reason to feel the reassuring grasp of her strong willpower and the intense emotions that she kept chained up like a watchdog. If she was on your side, it was great. He, in contrast, was big, bland, cheerfully effervescent, expansively and expensively clad, redolent of big gold chains, rings and the finest cigars. His rumbling laugh could also be the crater of bursts of temper that made all but his wife quail. If she took the lead when it came to buying art, it was he who paid, and he was very much the American tycoon in his insistence on getting his money's worth—every penny of it.

How had they met? Well, they hadn't. They had grown up together as first cousins. Their fathers had been brothers and partners in a prosperous western mining operation; each had been an only child, and their ultimate union had guaranteed the continuing solidity of the family business. Indeed, from what I could make out, they had taken for granted from childhood that they were destined to wed, a fate apparently entirely acceptable to each. Had they always been in love with each other? Had they ever been? Who knew? They never quarreled, and they were always together. They had one child, a daughter, long married and independent, with whom they seemed on good but not intimate terms. Someone told me that she was a dull but amiable ass, wed to a dull but faithful spouse; her parents had settled a fortune on her, and that was that. The rest could go to art. Leila's share might be equal to Hank's, but he had legal control of the whole.

The painting they were after was owned by a grandee in Burgos, and to Burgos the Warrens and I now directed our steps. It hung in the dark and decayed parlor of a dark and decayed palace, where its owner, obviously anxious to make a great sale, left the three of us alone to study it.

It was another version of the
Martyrdom of Saint Maurice,
of which the best-known hangs in the Escorial, even though Philip II had not cared for the artist or his work. El Greco, of course, had a custom of doing different studies of the same subject; there are several
Saint Jerome
s,
Cleansing of the Temples,
and
Agony in the Gardens.
In the picture before us the saint, in the regalia of a Roman officer, is depicted as engaged in a serious discussion with his presumably accusing fellow officers. In the background we see the two scenes that will follow his condemnation for his Christian faith: his exposure, stripped of all clothing, before the legion and his beheading. The striking thing about the painting is that the officers engaged in the discussion with the saint do not appear in the least vindictive; one can only suppose that they are trying earnestly to induce their friend to abandon his religion and avoid the penalty that they are otherwise bound to inflict on him. And the saint seems touched that they should care and genuinely sorry that he cannot oblige them.

At dinner at a restaurant that night the Warrens and I had a long discussion about the painting and then about the artist. Leila did not for a minute believe that he had been a devout Catholic.

"You have to remember that all his life, wherever he was, he was an alien. In Crete he may have been a native Greek, but the island was ruled by Venice. And when he moved to Venice and then Rome, he was still under the sway of Italians. And even after he had spent the better part of his lifetime in Toledo, he was always known to the Spaniards as 'the Greek.' His life was painting, and in Spain what did the Inquisition want you to paint? Religious iconography, of course. Oh, you could do portraits, yes, and even now and then a landscape, but saints and martyrs were the order of the day, and don't anybody forget it! El Greco had occasion to see how the Holy Office treated Moors and Jews. He had no idea of being burned alive. And he wanted to prosper. So he conformed. Let us be thankful that he did!"

I protested. "But you can't deny, can you, the passionate faith you see expressed in the heaven-seeking eyes of all those ascending virgins and carved-up saints?"

"Of course not. The man was a mystic. He had a deep sense of another world around us, a greater, more wonderful world, whether morally better or worse than our own we don't know, but which our spirit, if we are open to it, may touch, though our reason denies it. And he saw that gifted men may live on two levels, even if some of them attain the greater level through what seems to us terrible means. For even an inquisitor who believes he can be saved by burning heretics may be touched with this sometimes cruel inner fire. Look at that old cardinal Mrs. Havemeyer has bought. The average man isn't capable of such exalted feeling; he can only look on in mild bewilderment like those noblemen in
The Burial of Count Orgaz
or the Roman officers in the painting we've just seen. A Catholic, even a bigot, may be blessed or cursed with these otherworldly visions, but the Catholic Church and its dogma have nothing to do with them. That, gentlemen, is what I believe El Greco saw. He could transmit the sense of beauty that seized him through a Christ on the cross or a Laocoon in the coils of a serpent or a storm over Toledo. That is why he was always an artist. Bowing to the organized fanaticism of the Holy Office gave him no trouble at all. Why should it have? The church was simply irrelevant to everything in life that was vital to him."