Empire of Light (17 page)

Peter promptly turned his butt around, headed back to the city and accepted his fate as a martyr. His only request of the Romans was that he not be crucified in the same manner as Christ because he didn’t deserve the honor. Instead, he wanted the Romans to crucify him while hanging
upside down
. And the Romans gleefully went for it.

Upside down? Now THAT’S an idea! Why didn’t any of you slackers think of that? It’s a damn shame when the only visionary on the block is the same guy we have to crucify. It’s become a bit of a bad habit these days, if you ask me. Awright, Pete, up you go.

Back in the church, I selfishly gaze upon Caravaggio’s depiction of this event, and all I can do is trip at how hard it’s going to be to sketch this thing. Caravaggio has chosen the moment of the raising of the crucifix to immortalize, instead of having it already planted into the ground, all nice and symmetrical like. Imagine the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, but replace the flagpole with an upside down crucified man, and replace the five service men with two clowns who seem to be figuring out this upside down cross thing as they go.

The distressed figure of Peter, with his body angled awkwardly, slashing diagonally across the painting, is a masterful optical illusion of depth and weight. Not only do you have to have a mastery of human anatomy to capture this scene, but you have to be able to draw it upside down and angled away from you. The top of Peter’s head is aimed at us in the foreground as the rest of his body spreads away from us to the horizon. It’s a wicked piece of foreshortening which makes mud out of a punk rookie like me.

In the end, my sketch of Peter’s crucifixion is a sorry mass of scribbles that floats aimlessly in the middle of my white page. It’s flat and crude and ugly.

And I’m afraid my attempt at drawing
The Conversion of Saint Paul
is also a failure. I can barely draw people, let alone a horse. I feel like tearing the sheet from my pad and using it to pick off the rest of the equine shit trapped within the tread of my shoe.

My effort to sketch Caravaggio’s work is equivalent to an ordinary baseball fan trying to hit a Randy Johnson fastball. On the other hand, you probably will never really appreciate a fastball until after the
Big Unit
blows one past your face at one hundred plus miles per hour.

I’ve never appreciated Caravaggio’s work more than I do right this minute.

13 

Krav Maga, Bitches!

Painting 5: Judith Beheading Holofernes

I’M ACTUALLY GOING TO 
have to drop dime on myself. I would really prefer to keep my current location on the down low, but the fates have conspired against me and placed me in a situation where I have no choice but to ‘fess up.

God help me. Here it goes.

I’m in Rome, sitting in a McDonald’s stuffing my head with an Egg McGriddle. I know what you’re thinking. Who the hell goes to McDonald’s while visiting one of the gastronomical capitals of the world? What kind of asshole does this? Apparently, I’m that kind of asshole.

Please allow me to plead my case.

The European breakfast is basically the crap we Americans eat before the appetizers arrive. Before you’ve dunked your first piece of deep fried onion into the vat of ranch dressing at Applebee’s, you’ve already devoured enough bread n’ water to feed all of Cell Block C on lock down. This morning I woke up, and I just wasn’t feeling the croissant, sparkling water and yogurt vibe. I wanted food with mass. I wanted a big, fat, Red State breakfast. I wanted a plate of
wake the hell up and go dig some ditches, son.
And as a newbie in this town, the only place I knew that had anything close to this type of meal, in Rome, was McDonald’s.

Now, the original plan was to take this perverse visit to my grave. Eat my breakfast wearing dark specs and then quietly exit out the front door and blend in with the crowd. Once my mission was completed, all of the waterboarding in the world wouldn’t have been enough to make me admit that I even knew a McDonald’s franchise existed in Rome. But as I suck the residual syrup from my fingertips, I glance to my right and something crazy catches my eye.

Is that…?

Is that a goddamn Caravaggio painting?

There’s a Caravaggio in a McDonald’s?

“Oh, goddamn it,” I say to myself as I stare at it in shock.

In an instant, I know there is now no way in hell that I am going to keep my sticky tryst with the Roman McGriddle a secret. How could I? This very well may be the greatest Caravaggio sighting I’ve had on this entire stupid trip. Of course it’s not an original. It’s only a mural painted just above the salad bar, but come on!

The work is simply called,
Basket of Fruit
.

Caravaggio had plenty of experience painting fruit. When he was a young apprentice in Giuseppe Cesari’s studio, fruit and foliage was the only thing the poor guy was allowed to paint. Cesari would paint the more interesting human figures, and then he’d bring in Caravaggio to supply the adornments. In other words, Cesari got to chew on a fat juicy steak while Caravaggio sat in the corner chewing on a stupid sprig of parsley, his jaws all tight with hate. So by the time Caravaggio was commissioned to create
Basket of Fruit
he’d had it up to his ass with painting crops. But I guess the guy needed the dough because he snatched up the commission anyway.

In typical Caravaggio fashion, instead of going to the market and buying some newly picked fruit so he could depict something bright and fresh—like a normal person would’ve done—this fool picked through his garbage, found some worm-eaten crap, threw it in a basket and that’s what he painted. How this guy ever managed to get people to pay him after pulling this kind of bullshit is beyond me. I guess that’s what you can get away with when you’ve got mad skills.

My table sits too far away from the mural to see any detail, so I can only wonder if the artist who recreated the painting was smart enough to merely use
Basket of Fruit
as a jumping off point. I mean, if your goal is to project freshness
,
the last thing you want costumers to see hanging over your salad bar is an apple infested with worms. But, hey, that’s just me.

I nervously amble in the direction of the salad bar, wondering just how to admire a painting in a McDonald’s and not look like a fool. To hell with it. If I can survive slipping into a pile of horse shit in the middle of a packed piazza, I can take being an art geek in a Roman Micky D’s.

I roll up close on the mural and examine the thing. God help me, it’s an exact replica. The artist did saturate his version with a bit more color, but now the leaves are a richer shade of shit brown, and I’m not sure that’s really any more appetizing. There’s no way I’m going to waste a Brownie snapshot on this mural, so I bust out the trusty Kodak point and shoot, line up the shot and—

“
Ehi! Che cosa fai?!” 
demands the manager from behind the counter, asking me what I’m doing.

She’s a cougar, at least mid-forties, with the top button of her McDonald’s white blouse opened to expose a crucifix aimed at her cleavage. A religious symbol that makes me stare at tits is
not
cool.

“I want to take a picture of this wall. Um...
Voglio fare una foto del questo muro.
”

“Oh,” she says with an expression on her face that says something like,
You’re an asshole, but whatever.
But she then dances into my frame and models in front of it, like Vanna White presenting vowels on the Wheel of Fortune.

“
Perfetto!
” I exclaim and then frame up the picture. But before I can press the button her hand shoots in front of my lens like a starlet fending off paparazzi.

“
Aspetta per me!
” screams the cashier, asking me to wait as he also dashes into the frame. They swing their arms around each other and proudly smile, the ugly Caravaggio behind them.

Click!

The morning rush is over and there’s time to exchange our 411 info, so I can send them a copy of the picture. As we swap email addresses and sip some espresso, I lean on the counter and I tell them of my trip thus far and where I’m headed, leaving out the bits about the magic camera, of course.

As I exit the McDonald’s and head for the subway entrance, I wave back at the new friends I’ve just met, who warmly stand at the restaurant’s door to see me off.

“If you don’t die in Naples, come visit us again!” the manager shouts as I head to the subway entrance.

Once underground, I slide my ticket into the turnstile and bounce to the train.

“Shit!” I curse and jog back to the turnstile where I left my ticket, again, like the moron that I am.

I’m such an idiot. I need that thing to get back to my hotel. I snatch it and run back to the platform just as the train arrives. I grab a seat and take a look at the photo of the mural and the two employees on my digital camera. I wonder again just why in the hell somebody would put that Caravaggio mural over a McDonald’s salad bar.

I can only figure two scenarios.

One. The artist pulled a fast one and made a covert statement regarding the infiltration of his beautiful city with cheesy American culture.

Two. The owner was in on it, making a statement that the food snobs should lighten the hell up.

I choose to believe the latter.

On my way to the next Caravaggio, I pull out my sketchbook and peruse the drawings I’ve created thus far. What a mess.

The train speeds through the tunnel and the next metro stop is mine. I gotta date with a Jewish dish with a bad attititude. You get in this chick’s way and she’ll lop your head off just as soon as lookin’ at ya.

Her name is Judith.

***

The Name of the Game is ACTION!

That is the title of chapter six of one of the most bitchin’ how-to books ever made,
How To Draw Comics The Marvel Way
.

The book was written by Marvel Comics legend Stan Lee (the genius behind Spider-Man) and artist John Buscema, whom Lee called the “Michelangelo of the comics.” High praise, and you’d be hard pressed to find anybody who’d disagree with his assessment. Almost every storyboard artist in Hollywood has had this book tucked underneath his arm as a kid, running around the neighborhood and touting the thing as bible.

It’s in chapter six where the book really kicks it into gear. The opening lines bark at you like a Vince Lombardi pre-game speech, inspiring you to pick up your pencil, sharpen that son of bitch, and attack.

Hell yeah, Stan!

Let’s get it on!

Chapter six focuses on drawing the human figure in a dynamic way. It orders you to exaggerate your action, keep the figure loose, supple and always in motion. But most importantly it alerts you to something called the
center line
. It’s this line that makes Caravaggio’s
Judith Beheading Holofernes
so
fun to view
, as well as sketch.

However, before I drop the science of the
center line
on ya, first let me tell you about this fierce little Hebrew babe named Judith.

Holofernes was an Assyrian general under the king of Babylon, Nebuchadnezzar. The king used the general, this hulking mass of war, to lay waste to nations that refused to bow to him. But, Holofernes met his match in Judith, a gorgeous Jewish rebel who saved Israel from the general’s wrath by sneaking into his camp, seducing him and then decapitating the giant motherfucker with a sword.

Judith then swaggered back into her town of Bethulia like she owned the joint and rolled Holofernes’ fat head across the floor, calling out the men. She challenged them to finally stand up and fight for themselves, their families, and their land.

“Pull your panties up and defend yourselves!”

At least that’s what the Judith in my head said.

“Inspired” by Judith’s bravery (more like embarrassed by it, if you ask me), the men jumped up and handed Nebuchadnezzar his ass on a plate.

In Caravaggio’s shadowy painting, the moment of decapitation is captured. Judith is in the act of sawing through the muscular neck of the Babylonian general as he lies in his bed, smashed on red wine. Next to Judith stands her old hag of a maid, Abra, eagerly watching the grisly scene while grasping the sack that will soon hold the general’s disembodied head.

I bet Uncle Stan loves this painting. Because as grim as this work may be, it’s Judith’s pose, that elegant
center line
, that gives it a shocking grace.

When drawing the human form, the
center line
is the first line that you draw. From the bottom of the egg shaped head and down through the trunk, it defines the curve, the rhythm and the swing of the figure. In other words, this line is what gives your drawing the illusion of life.