Two or three days later Cæsar met the Spaniard Cortés in the Piazza
Colonna. They bowed. The thin, sour-looking painter was walking with a
beardless young German, red and snub-nosed. This young man was a painter
too, Cortés said; he wore a green hat with a cock’s feather, a blue
cape, thick eyeglasses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a
blond Chinaman.
“Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?” asked Cortés.
“What is there to see there?”
“A stupendous portrait by Velázquez.”
“I warn you that I know nothing about pictures.”
“Nobody does,” Cortés declared roundly. “Everybody says what he thinks.”
“Is the gallery near here?”
“Yes, just a step.”
In company with Cortés and the German with the green hat with the cock’s
feather, Cæsar went to the Piazza del Collegio Romano, where the Doria
palace is. They saw a lot of pictures which didn’t seem any better to
Cæsar than those in the antique shops and the pawnbrokers’, but which
drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortés took them to a
cabinet hung in green and lighted by a skylight. There was nothing to
be seen in the cabinet except the portrait of the Pope. In order that
people might look at it comfortably, a sofa had been installed facing
it.
“Is this the Velázquez portrait?” asked Cæsar.
“This is it.”
Cæsar looked at it carefully. “That man had eaten and drunk well before
his portrait was painted,” said Cæsar; “his face is congested.”
“It is extraordinary!” exclaimed Cortés. “It is something to see, the
way this is done. What boldness! Everything is red, the cape, the cap,
the curtains in the background.... What a man!”
The German aired his opinions in his own language, and took out a
notebook and pencil and wrote some notes.
“What sort of man was this?” asked Cæsar, whom the technical side of
painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortés.
“They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman’s domination.”
“The great thing is,” murmured Cæsar, “how the painter has left him
here alive. It seems as if we had come in here to salute him, and he
was waiting for us to speak. Those clear eyes are questioning us. It is
curious.”
“Not curious,” exclaimed Cortés, “but admirable.”
“For me it is more curious than admirable. There is something brutal in
this Pope; through his grey beard, which is so thin, you can see his
projecting chin. The good gentleman was of a marked prognathism, a type
of degeneration, indifference, intellectual torpor, and nevertheless, he
reached the top. Perhaps in the Church it’s the same as in water, only
corks float.”
_LEGEND AND HISTORY_
Cæsar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortés seated on
the sofa, absorbed in the picture; he looked at various paintings in the
gallery, went back, and sat down, beside the artists.
“This portrait,” he said presently, “is like history by the side of
legend. All the other paintings in the gallery are legend, ‘folk-lore,’
as I believe one calls it. This one is history.”
“That’s what it is. It is truth,” agreed Cortés.
“Yes, but there are people who do not like the truth, my friend. I tell
you: this is a man of flesh, somewhat enigmatic, like nature herself,
and with arteries in which blood flows; this is a man who breathes and
digests, and not merely a pleasant abstraction; you, who understand such
things, will tell me that the drawing is perfect, and the colour such
as it was in reality; but how about the person who doesn’t ask for
reality?”
“Stendhal, the writer, was affected that way by this picture,” said
Cortés; “he was shocked at its being hung among masterpieces.”
“He found it bad, no doubt.”
“Very bad?”
“Was this Stendhal English?”
“No, French.”
“Ah, then, you needn’t be surprised. A Frenchman has no obligation to
understand anything that’s not French.”
“Nevertheless he was an intelligent man.”
“Did he perhaps have a good deal of veneration?”
“No, he boasted of not having any.”
“Doubtless he did have without suspecting it. With a man who had no
veneration, what difference would it make whether there was one bad
thing among a lot of good ones?”
The German with the green hat, who understood something of the
conversation, was indignant at Cæsar’s irreverent ideas. He asked him
if he understood Latin, and Cæsar told him no, and then, in a strange
gibberish, half Latin and half Italian, he let loose a series of facts,
dates, and numbers. Then he asserted that all artistic things of great
merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian
Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velázquez, all German.
The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its
cock-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.
The data of the befeathered German were too much for Cæsar, and he took
his leave of the painters.