Headlong (14 page)

Multa pinxit, hic Brugelius, quae pingi non possunt
…

The nice thing is that Kate can translate it for me. She can read the Latin in a breviary or a Book of Hours as easily as the English in a newspaper. As with the iconography, we can work on this together.

I walk round our cold flat in Oswald Road, still wearing my overcoat, turning on the central heating. I’m going to stay in town overnight and go off to the V & A first thing in the morning to do what I should have done today – investigate Giordano prices – since I’m determined to leave nothing to chance, and to have a clear-cut plan of action for Kate’s approval.

I look in at each of the cold rooms, checking that nothing’s changed behind our backs. Nothing has. Everywhere there are the traces of Kate and Tilda, and our life together. Tangles of tights and underwear on the stairs, waiting either to be washed or put away; plastic ducks and buckets scattered across the bathroom floor; the newspaper I was reading at breakfast the morning we left propped up against a lurking bag of muesli. One of the things we like about each other is that we’re neither of us obsessively tidy, and Tilda seems set to take after us.
Multa pinxit
… In the rush of our departure we’ve forgotten to make the bed; the pillows still have the shape of our heads in them, the piled duvet the mass of our warmly twined bodies …
Quae pingi
non possunt
…

I sit down amid the sweet wreckage of the bed and phone her. As I listen to the phone ringing in our distant cottage, and imagine her coming indoors, or laying Tildy down, or drying her hands, I put my head down into the bedclothes to inhale the deliriously lingering smell of us, and I feel the life stir inside my trousers.

The dear familiar caution of her ‘Hello?’ thrills me, as it always has.

‘I’m faxing you some Latin to translate.’

‘Where are you?’

‘At Oswald Road. I’m going to have to stay overnight.’

‘Oh,’ she says, and I realize how much she was looking forward to the moment when my smiling face separated itself from all the meaningless faces emerging around it into the station yard.

‘I know,’ I say. ‘But I still haven’t got round to Giordano. I’ve been working on our man.’

Our
man. Yes. Now.

‘Not because of what
I
said?’

‘Not at all. Because of what
I
said. I just want to be absolutely sure in my own mind before I go ahead. As sure as it’s humanly possible to be.’

‘Don’t give Tony Churt a chance to get rid of it some other way first,’ she says. She’s being so sweet about it!

‘No, but I’m not going to rush, I’m not going to panic. How’s Tildy? What’s she been doing? What’s the weather like down there? No sign of Mr Skelton yet? The sink hasn’t blocked up again? Oh, Kate, I miss you so much!’

And love her so much. Perhaps even more at this distance than I do when we’re together. She’s like my picture. No painting in the world has ever meant as much to me as that briefly glimpsed panel, so difficult of access. I think of it all the time, almost as much as I think of Kate – I’m think
ing of it now, even while I’m talking to her. By the time I’ve had it on the kitchen wall for three months I’ll probably have ceased to look at it.

‘Everything’s fine,’ she says. ‘I took Tildy to see the cows. The sun came out just after lunch. Did you get to the bank?’

She’s even taken the initiative in talking about the bank! It transforms life, now I can say everything to her quite openly again, now we’re in this together.

‘Just!’ I confess. ‘No problems, though. We can simply increase our mortgage. It should only take a week to go through.’

We
– yes. Joint account. I’ve applied for the maximum they’ll offer, which against the equity we’ve got is £15,000, just in case I decide to go ahead with my original plan of getting Tony the full price of a genuine Vrancz. On my vague estimate this might leave a few more thousand to find – not from Kate! – but there must be other sources. It’s a useful possibility to keep at the back of my mind, that’s all. No point in going into hypotheticals with her at the moment, though. Time enough if the occasion should actually arise. I’m not going to do anything until I’ve really identified that picture. I can’t, in any case, until the bank’s come through with the money.

‘So what’s this Latin?’ demands Kate. She’s beginning to be caught by the mystery. I can hear it in her voice.

‘You tell me. I’ll put it on in a moment.’

‘Don’t forget to look up the Giordano tomorrow. You don’t want any surprises.’ She’s becoming as obsessed as I am.

‘First thing on my list for the morning,’ I assure her. ‘Kiss Tildy for me. I miss you both so much!’

As soon as I put the phone down, of course, I remember that I’ve no fax, because Kate’s got it – we took it down to the cottage. I’ll have to ask Midge, our usual standby in
emergencies. I write the epitaph out in carefully legible capitals, since the laptop’s relaxing in the country as well, and run downstairs with it. So much more plausible and congenial, one’s neighbours in town – and so much closer.

‘Emergency,’ I say, when she opens the door. ‘Yet again. Could you send a fax for me?’

‘I thought you were in the country,’ she says, as she ushers me in and takes the page, trying not to look at it.

‘Kate is. It’s to her. She’s got the machine.’

‘Nothing wrong?’ she asks, glancing at the desperate capitals in spite of herself.

‘No, no,’ I assure her, but she’s not listening – she’s reading.
MULTA PINXIT, HIC BRUGELIUS, QUAE PINGI NON
POSSUNT
… And she’s storing it away for future use, because she writes a column for one of the papers, I can never remember which, about the more comical aspects of life in Kentish Town. We feature in it from time to time, our names changed but otherwise our lovably eccentric and absent-minded selves, locking ourselves out and locking each other in and overflowing the washing machine into her flat. Now we’re going to be in it again, coyly corresponding about our domestic arrangements in Latin. Well, she helps us out – we help her out. Exactly like me and my good friend Tony Churt.

I’m back upstairs by this time, anyway, looking through the various commentators again to find any possible candidates for the things Bruegel painted that can’t be painted. Almost at once I find the converse – things that
can
be painted and that he
didn’t
paint. ‘Bruegel,’ says Friedländer, ‘was the first artist successfully to eliminate the lingering echo of religious devotion.’

I make another trip through the pictures, and yes, the absence is striking. Even when he
did
do religious subjects
the sacred events tend to be diminished in size, off-centre, offstage even, left at the edge of the onward rush of the everyday world, like Icarus in his fall. Saul’s converted, to become the great founding father of the Christian church, and no one notices. The citizens of snowbound Judaea pour into Bethlehem for the census, and you have to search among them to find the pregnant woman arriving on the donkey. The Kings arrive to pay homage to the holy child, and what occupies almost the whole of the picture is their train of retainers and pack animals waiting in the softly falling snow. Three-quarters of an inch further to the left and Jesus himself would have been out of frame.

I turn back to
The Fall of the Rebel Angels
. And no – it’s not a contribution to the Counter-Reformation. It’s totally unlike Floris’s picture. The fallen angels aren’t devilish muscular warriors, but fantastic creatures with the bodies of fish, the heads of birds and the wings of butterflies – figures straight out of Hieronymus Bosch. They don’t look like anything that might be described as angels, and they don’t appear to be engaged in anything that might be described as rebellion.

And then, in the great cycle of the year, not so much as a nod to religion, even in the remote background, even at the outermost edges. Not a ghost of a saint – not a prayer – not an uplifted gaze – not a sigh – nothing.

Perhaps this creeping secularity is what the Cardinal appreciated in Bruegel. At last, a painter who was trying to sober up and cut down on his biblical intake! For a senior churchman, a little breather from all that Christianity must have been as good as a holiday.

Multa pinxit
… Even as he ushered the religion out of the back door, he was smuggling something else in, and under the Cardinal’s very eye. What was it?

A sudden loud hammering on the door makes me jump out of my chair in the empty flat, full of a confused terror that the inquisitors have read my thoughts. But it’s Midge, holding out a curling sheet of fax paper.

‘Sorry,’ she says, as I gaze mutely at her, still too shocked to speak. ‘I’ve been tapping and tapping. I thought you must be asleep.’

‘No, sorry,’ I explain, ‘I was …’ Was what? I gesture helplessly. In the Netherlands, I want to say. In the sixteenth century. I can see from the little amused tightening of her lips, though, that she’s got enough for another paragraph or two already.

Well, pleased to be of some use. I’m already sitting down at the kitchen table again and reading Kate’s translation. What was it he painted that can’t be painted?

Thunder.

This seems to be what Ortelius is suggesting. That Bruegel painted thunder.

I was through the door of the London Library next morning as soon as it opened, and now I’m sitting with Kate’s translation on the desk in front of me, together with a pile of classical dictionaries and Vol IX Book XXXV of Pliny’s
Historia Naturalis
. What Ortelius was trying to say in his epitaph takes a lot of puzzling out even translated into English, because it’s wrapped up in a series of obscure classical allusions.

This Bruegel
[begins Kate’s neat handwriting]
painted many
things which cannot be painted, as Pliny said of Apelles
.

I dimly recall that Apelles of Kos was a painter, and I discover from my books that Pliny thought he was the greatest in classical Greece, though nothing of his work has survived. And, yes, according to Pliny he ‘painted the unpaintable, thunder, for example, lightning and thunderbolts.’

I can’t see what’s so unpaintable about the last two, but thunder would certainly present problems. When I run through the works of Bruegel in my mind, however, no suggestion, however oblique, of thunder in any literal sense, or even of lightning or thunderbolts, can I recall. If Bruegel contrived to paint an electrical storm it must have been a metaphorical one.

Then comes a reference to another Greek painter:

The same author said of Timanthes that in all his works more is
always understood than is painted
.

Also a suggestion of something hidden. Not thunder in the case of Timanthes. What his reputation rested on was a picture called
The Sacrifice of Iphigenia
, in which Agamemnon conceals his uncontrollable grief by covering his head with his mantle. Is this the ‘thunder’ that Bruegel was hiding – feelings too terrible to reveal?

Actually, Apelles, like Timanthes, was famous for concealing something, though in his case it was himself. ‘It was also his habit’, says Pliny, ‘to exhibit his finished works to the passer-by on a balcony, and he would lie concealed behind the picture and listen to the faults that were found with it, regarding the public as more accurate critics than himself.’

So perhaps Bruegel was also concealing himself in some way – not just his feelings but his whole character and identity.

There are two more allusions to come, though, that seem at first sight to sit oddly with the idea of concealment:

Eunapius, in his Iamblichus, said that painters who paint people
made beautiful by the bloom of youth, and who want to add
some allurement and charm of their own to the painting, debase
the whole portrait they produce, and depart equally from the
model placed before them and from true beauty. Our Bruegel is
free from this weakness
.

Eunapius, I discover, was a historian, and he was chiefly famous for being an obstinate opponent of Christianity, and for trying to establish the great Neoplatonist philosophers as alternatives to the Christian saints. One of these philosophers was Iamblichus, and Eunapius wasn’t praising him
for his powers of concealment, but quite the contrary, rebuking him for failing to tell the unadorned truth.

Whereas our Bruegel did. So he was a good portrait painter? Not literally, because he never painted portraits at all, any more than he did thunderstorms. What Ortelius is saying in his epitaph, then, as I understand it, is that a truth of some sort lies concealed but unadorned in Bruegel’s work – much as it does in this epitaph – a truth about the painter himself, perhaps; and that this truth is as startling and ominous as thunder.

He’s saying, I guess, that Bruegel didn’t merely know about the heterodox ideas shared by Ortelius and his circle in Antwerp, didn’t merely sympathize with them – but that he found some way of expressing them in his pictures.

How, though? Where? In which pictures?

In
my
picture, perhaps?

I should move on to the V & A and look up Giordano – I don’t think there’s any more meaning to be squeezed out of the Ortelius. But instead I sit gazing out of the windows of the Reading Room at the tops of the trees in St James’s Square, where the spring’s advancing by the minute in the April sunshine, just as it is in the
Merrymakers
, and I think.

What I’m thinking is this:
why
should one of those six pictures in Jongelinck’s house have gone missing?

It’s not very surprising at first sight, perhaps. A lot of Bruegel’s pictures have gone missing. But this particular one should have been well cared for.

Let’s follow its trail as far as we can. In 1592 the Duke of Parma, the current Governor of the Netherlands, dies (just before the King can stab him in the back, as he did most of his other loyal henchmen), and in the following year his successor arrives. The Archduke Ernst, the new incumbent, is from the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs. According to
Motley he is ‘very indolent, enormously fat, very chaste, very expensive, fond of fine liveries and fine clothes, so solemn and stately as never to be known to laugh, but utterly without capacity either as a statesman or a soldier.’ Nevertheless, the city of Antwerp welcomes him with the traditional ceremony of the Joyous Entry, one of the grandest ever accorded, in the course of which they present him with a number of paintings. They include Jongelinck’s cycle of the year, which they’ve acquired either by foreclosing on the pictures when de Bruyne failed to repay his debt, or by buying them, as the account book kept by the Archduke’s secretary suggests, from an art dealer, Hane van Wijk. They seem to be intended as a kind of thank-offering to Ernst from Antwerp to show its gratitude to Spain for having sacked the city twice through the good offices of Ernst’s predecessors, the Duke of Parma and the Duke of Alva. According to the account book, there are six of them. They’re shifted by barge to Brussels, to the Governor’s official residence. The following year the Archduke dies, having accomplished nothing, says Motley, and passing out of history like a shadow. But leaving behind him the pictures. Six of them still, listed once again in the post-mortem inventory of the Archduke’s collection made on 17 July 1595.

Then, for half a century, like the Archduke himself, they pass out of history.

From 1646 to 1656 the Governor of the Netherlands is the Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, and the curator of his collection in the Royal Palace is the artist David Teniers. Teniers does a number of paintings of the collection, but in none of them is there any sign of the Bruegels, which suggests that they’d been shipped off to Vienna after Ernst’s death together with the rest of his collection. From Vienna they seem to have been passed on to the Emperor himself, Rudolf
II, in Prague. But by 1659 they’re back in Vienna, listed in the inventory of Leopold Wilhelm’s collection after his return from the Netherlands, and in 1660 Teniers publishes a letter from an unnamed friend in Vienna which describes seeing the series in the archducal gallery in the Stallburg. Teniers’ correspondent says there were six pictures on display, but the sixth must have been an odd one, put in to make up the total (as happened again in the nineteenth century, when the series included two substitutes) because in the Archduke’s inventory there are by this time only five.

So the first picture in the series – my picture – has disappeared somewhere between Brussels, Prague and Vienna, at some time between 1595 and 1659. ‘The loss can well be put down to the account of transportation,’ says the Kun-sthistorisches catalogue nonchalantly.

I wonder. Does a picture on its way between branches of the most powerful dynasty in Europe simply fall off the back of a lorry in transit? Unremarked? One of a set? The first of a set?

Or was it removed from the collection by its curators, for some good reason?

I have a feeling that one day some official looked a little more closely at this innocent series of pastorals hanging on the walls of the Royal Palace in Brussels, or awaiting shipment to Vienna. Someone with a fresh eye, perhaps. A prelate, one of Granvelle’s successors, being shown over the collection for the first time, or for the last before it was crated up. And suddenly he sees in one of the pictures something that no one had seen before.

A number of Bruegel’s pictures have been censored at various times. The prominent erections of some of the peasants in
The Wedding Dance
were painted over, and only recently revealed. In the seventeenth century the children’s
bodies in
The Massacre of the Innocents
were repainted to turn them into sacks of grain, and conceal the real horror of what’s happening. Now the curious prelate bends to look at some detail in one of the pictures of this charming series of the year – in the first picture, to be precise, the one that establishes the mode of the whole set … and is transfixed. Within hours it’s being lifted down from the wall, or removed from the shipment, and carried down to the palace cellars before further scandal can be caused.

What was it that my keen-eyed and public-spirited cleric might have seen? What might
I
see, if I looked at it now with an informed eye?

Had Bruegel in this one picture lifted Agamemnon’s mantle from his face, and for a moment shown some terrible truth beneath? Had he emerged in person from behind the canvas? Painted the thunder? Expressed what can only be implied?

Well, I must look! I must go back to Upwood. Ask to see the Giordano, perhaps, to check one or two points that my Belgian has raised, and then, as soon as I’m alone …

The Giordano, yes. Before I do anything else I have to get back to the V & A for the prices.