Seiobo There Below (29 page)

know what to teach this Raffaello, because he already knows how to draw very well, and he learns everything that he sees me do so quickly, that he could even already be entrusted with a picture, even though he is only, I don’t know, how many years old, maybe sixteen, or seventeen, I have no idea, said the maestro and, well, that’s all that they knew about him, and here in the workshop they did not find out much more, only that he came from Urbino, and that was all, and that he was good at drawing and painting, that was it, and so they didn’t really take much notice of him, he somehow always worked apart, and the maestro always treated him differently, in a special way, not the way he treated them, which could have been a cause for anger, but it wasn’t, because this assistant from Urbino charmed everyone with his amiability, maybe he was even too gentle for such a workshop as this, one thing was certain, he had no wish to push himself forward just because he was granted such exceptional treatment on the part of the maestro, he did not want to, nor did he stand in the forefront, in that forefront stood Bartolomeo, he was the center, the workshop was entrusted to him, so that everything somehow happened around him; Raffaello became friends with Aulista, who was also fairly quiet; the whole thing began with the arrival of the Florentines, who had a good sleep, gorged themselves, and became thoroughly drunk, then they went across to Via Deliziosa 17 to report that they were ready for work, and then the next day the maestro came over from the Ospedale della Misericordia to the newly leased bottega, and to everyone’s great surprise, extorting them to continue with the work underway, took out at the very first the Pala Tezi picture, and put it on the easel, and that now this panel would be at the center of the activities of the workshop, and no one really understood why it was exactly this one, because work on it had begun and then had been left off so many times, maybe because since returning to Perugia the Tezi family was urging him to finish it; of course this was just a guess, no one but he knew anything about it, and the maestro actually never spoke of such things as patrons and commissions and honorariums and family and friends and suchlike, not even to Bartolomeo, or if he did so, then it was always with the order that the matter remain strictly between the two of them, in any event the tavola intended for Sant’Agostino turned up on the painting easel, and from that point on the fate of the panel changed, because no longer did it only happen that the maestro would paint another fold or figure onto the picture and then put it back against the wall, as he had done until now, but that from this point on the picture wasn’t even taken down from the easel, the maestro was occupied with it continually, which of course did not mean that at times Aulista, or Giannicola, or even the young Raffaello would not work on it a bit, but really, the fact was that the maestro basically took the work into his own hands, and kept it there, maybe, really, one of the Francescos noted one evening, the esteemed notary and his family had reminded the maestro that the picture was supposed to have been ready one year ago, in 1500, the entire altar must surely be ready in the family chapel, only this picture was still missing, they reflected, but they didn’t know for certain why this picture had suddenly become so urgent, one thing was certain, it was urgent, and the maestro was working, already this counted as something very new, he was working continuously, coming into the workshop every single day, and picking up where he had left off before, and the approaching event of his appointment as prior visibly did not seem to interest him, he just painted every day for at least two or three hours, and at his age — for surely he must have been at least fifty years old — this was not very common, old people, particularly in the case of the maestros who were renowned all across Italy, usually just visited their workshops once a week, and usually just taught a little, instructed the disciples, they themselves worked only very infrequently, and that was how their maestro had lived as well — in Florence, but not here in Perugia, here somehow, after the great fiasco, his fervor was renewed, or maybe he really needed the money from the Tezis, who knows, in any event he was painting, only this much was obvious: the lower garments of the Madonna were already done, with the upper part of the cloak in the gentle shading of the medium dark malachite green; the bodies were ready, the face of the Madonna, the entire figure of the little baby Jesus, the head and arms of the four saints, just as the landscape in the background was ready, in which everyone joyfully recognized a detail from Perugia with the Palazzo dei Priori, but he finished as well the ciborium and the garments of the saints, with the exception — and this was very striking, especially to Aulista, who had been watching the maestro with special attention since this feverish work had begun — with the exception of: the book in the hands of Santo Nicola da Tolentino of the Lily, the upper garments of broadcloth of the Madonna, the cloak covering the body of Saint Sebastian, and Jerome’s renowned bishop’s mitre on the ground, at the bottom of the picture, next to the saint and in front of the lion; no one knew why these parts were never painted, especially not Aulista, Raffaello was visibly uninterested as to why, or why these parts were to be painted at the end, before the completion of the entire picture, Aulista didn’t know why, he just waited for the day, the hour, the minute for the time to come, and he did not wait in vain, because the day did come when every element of the Pala Tezi picture really was painted, already the yellow shone there, the blue glimmered, the green swelled, the brown appeared gently, and all across the border of the sky was a strong glaze of whitish blue, but it was already obvious that it was the painting of the red that the maestro had left for the very end, and Aulista simply could not wait for that day and that hour and that minute when he would say to him to begin breaking up the pigment, because he truly hoped that he would be the one to whom the maestro entrusted this task, and he was not disappointed — not that the maestro selected him himself, but Aulista positioned himself in such a way so that if there was even the tiniest chance of breaking up the vermiglione, it was he who had something to do right there, accordingly the maestro spoke to him one day, Aulista, please be so kind and break up the vermiglione, I ask you, and Aulista flew, already there he was with a tiny sack of fragments of vermiglione from the monastery of the Jesuit order in Florence — San Giusta alle Mura — directly from brother Bernado di Francesco, from whom the maestro ordered the pigments personally, regularly, and in great quantities, he was not willing to order from anywhere else, he only ordered this kind of pigment, even if it was a little more expensive than at the apothecary’s, there was something in these paints, first and foremost in the vermiglione, due to which the maestro never used, under any circumstances, any other kind, only this and exclusively this, the breaking up of which Aulista was now preparing for, and really there was something special in it, which an experienced disciple such as Aulista, noticed immediately, this time as well, something extraordinary, this kind of vermiglione was different from every other kind, because as he broke it up now, he saw once again how the crystals in it glittered, and how something else was glittering too, just that Aulista did not know, and no one knew, only the brothers and the maestro; whatever it was, in any event, it was truly unique among pigments, not a single property of which the maestro’s assistants and disciples in any workshops could ever discuss, because it was a secret, in addition to that, it was a secret, the meaning and essence of which the assistants and the disciples of the maestro’s workshop did not know too much about; beyond the fact that through its mere use a most wondrous light could be made to appear, with this ultramarine that came from the brothers of Florence, with these malachites and azures and golds that they got from them, but especially with this vermiglione, something was happening here, when after the paints were prepared and according to custom everyone had to leave the workshop, accordingly it was some kind of thing about which they, the assistants and the disciples, could not know anything, and they did not dare ask what it was, because when following custom, after a few minutes they were allowed back in and they found the maestro already at work, who would have had the courage to disturb him in the midst of work with such questions, one thing however was sure, the maestro had a secret with these paints, in these paints there was some kind of secret, and Aulista knew that it was with these that the maestro dazzled all of the patrons who bought his pictures, but at the same time he dazzled the assistants as well, Aulista just broke up the vermiglione on the pumice stone, and he was not thinking now about what the secret could be, he was just thinking that for two or three hours he would be breaking up the vermiglione, then he would hand it in the seashell to the maestro, who then would send them out, and do something with the paints; then he sets to the upper garments of the Madonna, then the folds of the cloak on the tortured body of Saint Sebastian, and the mitre on the ground next to Jerome, and when he is ready, and they can all look at it, they are dazzled by the eternal light of this red, as it nearly shines out between the green and the yellow and the blue, then finally it becomes hopeless to them, as it does to his most trusted follower, Aulista, to answer the question as to what could have happened in Florence, in what accordingly did this fiasco consist of, why they had to return to Perugia, and why he felt that it was the end for his adored master, to answer the question of whether the maestro, Pietro di Vannucci, born in Castel della Pieve, and renowned as Il Perugino, had simply outlived his talent, or whether he had merely lost all interest in painting.

89

DISTANT MANDATE

Concealed in its essence,
by its appearance revealed

We don’t even know what it was called, not a single contemporary document refers to it as the Alhambra, in part because there is no such document, or no such document has survived; in part because even if such a document did survive, this name is the most unlikely one, for its builders — if they were the ones we refer to today — would never have designated it by a name altogether not in accord with the building itself; as this name is not: if you derive an attribution from the expression based on the color of the materials used for the masonry, “qal’at al-hamra” or possibly “al-qubba al-hamra,” it could signify “al hamra,” accordingly “The Red,” which might refer to the name of the builder, a version which, although more faintly, does hold together in some fashion or another; the palace, with its breathtakingly harmonious magnificence within, surpassing the architectural beauty of any earlier or later period, is itself, however, inconsistent with this hardly exalted vernacular clarification, so distant from the nature of the Arab spirit; if we were to rely upon those whom we have to thank for this structure for the attribution, then they would certainly have found a loftier designation for it; so already we’re off to a bad start, it doesn’t even have a name, because “Alhambra” is not its name, that is only what we call it, moreover in distorted Spanish, that is to say that “Alhambra” could refer to anything at all, it just stuck somehow, not to mention that in Islam it was just as frequent for a sacred or secular building not to have a name as to be given one, because what was the name of the Mosque of Córdoba? the Aljafería of Zaragoza? the Alcázar in Seville? the al-Kairaouine mosque in Fez? and on and on along the North African shore onward to Egypt, Palestine, and northwest India? there were no names; so there are examples, if we think upon it more deeply, hundreds of examples that there can be good reason not to give a name to an immortal artwork, it’s just that this reason is indecipherable to us, just as indecipherable as the date of the construction of the Alhambra, because the records are fairly contradictory in this matter, as the whole thing depends on what the first one doesn’t know, the second one misunderstands, and where therefore the third puts the emphasis, that is to say how far away this or that one strays from the unverifiable facts; certain individuals report that there are Roman and Visigoth ruins on the mountain that served as the location for the later Alhambra — either the part of it known as Sabīka, or the entire locale — others are of the opinion that until the building of the Alhambra, this mountain, rising above the swift-flowing waters of the narrow Darro, thus including the Alcazaba, a fortress dating from the eighth century on the top of it, never played any kind of significant role, and that maybe there was some sort of battle between the Arabs and an ethnic group known as the Muladi after the Arab conquest of Al-Andalus in the ninth and tenth centuries; but yet again in the view of others — in opposition to those who say that the Jews only lived in the district known as Garnatha, that is to say down below, in the area of today’s Granada — there is only one fact worth mentioning, that in one of the centuries preceding the Alhambra, hence certainly by the eleventh century, starting from some point in time and ending at a later point in time, there existed, on the part of the mountain that was to become truly important later on, a Jewish settlement; after the fall of the Caliphate of Córdoba, an early Berber ethnic group, the Zirids, belonging to the Kutama tribe and thus to the Umayyads, who founded the city of Granada, located its center here and tried to “protect” the Jews; in any event there was a Jewish vizier by the name of Yusuf ibn Naghrallah, who built a so-called hisn, a fortified palace; we know, other scholars remark, that on the mountain beside the Darro there was, as far back as early Roman times but also after the Arab invasion of Iberia in 711, a strongly defended fortress, or at the very least from the eleventh century, an extremely well-built wall; and of course in opposition to this view there exist other opinions, according to which regarding this place — starting from Granada and the district known as Albaicín, from the nearly unverifiable fortress of Elvira nearby and the Jewish community of Sabīka, all the way to the Berber dynasties (the Almoravids and the Almohads), and the never-ending sheer butchery known as civil war — there’s nothing, nothing at all, from which we might glean a bit of certainty, and so then we finally arrive at the first Arab sources such as they are, because up until this point — here and now is the time to say this — there is no kind of usable historical material at our disposal whatsoever, because the location we are discussing never had any usable historical records or they have not survived; hypothetically, because this place, during the first centuries of Iberian subjugation, did not play an important enough role for it to have something like its own history, that is to say its own place in historical events, because this place began to acquire an important role only with the emergence of the Nasrid Dynasty, the sudden appearance of which coincides with the genesis of the Alhambra in today’s sense of the term, and it is better if we say at once its genesis, and avoid the question of who built the Alhambra, because this is already the third question after “what is its name” and “when was it built,” that we cannot answer, as even this is not certain, it never was, maybe not even to those who were involved with it, someone began it, of that there is no doubt, but as for the true founder, to take a huge leap forward in time, the true initiator and first patron of the Alhambra is said to be Yusuf I; supposedly it was he who commissioned it, who paid for a new palace complex on the ridge of the mountain — roughly the middle section — following the various and obscure initiatives of the Nasrids; because there are many already who said that the first Nasrid was the one who built the Alhambra, he, the earlier ruler of Jaén, Ibn-al-Ahmed, his full name being Muhammad ibn Yusuf ibn Nasr, but better known under the name al-Ahmar, that is to say the prince known as “The Red,” who moved his residence from Jaén to Granada, and proclaimed himself Muhammad I, he became, after the Umayyads, the Almoravids, and the Almohads, the first grandiose founder of this place, previously not so splendid; in addition to this, in the history of the western Arabs, he simultaneously became, with his own last dynasty, the luminous ruler of Islamic ambitions westward, because he began by reinforcing, to a degree never before seen, the walls of the Alcazaba; and, well, if we can believe a so-called contemporary account, the beginning of the story of the Alhambra began with him, Abdallah ibn al-Ahmar, namely, the ruler himself, at least according to the somewhat adventurous manuscript baptized as the Anómino de Granada y Copenhague: “In 1238, he went up to the place later known as Alhambra, inspected it, designated the foundation of a castle, then instructed someone to build it,” the visit from which, supposedly, six palaces emerged, the royal residence in a northeastern orientation, with two round towers, as well as countless bath-houses, so somehow it got off to a start, it was begun like this and it became like this, and perhaps the romantic history of the Alhambra really did occur like that, but it’s also possible that it didn’t, as the description originates from a chronicle that — and here every self-respecting professional scholar, from Oleg Grabar and Juan Vernet and Leonor Martínez Martín up to Ernst J. Grube, raises his index finger — is completely unreliable; I for example, Ernst J. Grube writes in a letter to a close friend, have never once seen this account; so that they — all of these aforementioned scholars, including, as well, the amicable and as yet unpublished index-card notations of the scholarly team of four that authored the minor masterpiece The Language of Pattern — all agree quite clearly that the Alhambra was planned, commissioned, and built nearly one century later by Yusuf I, the Nasrid Sultan who ruled for eleven years after 1333, whose palace most likely bore within its embryo, or in its foundations — how shall we express it in this obscurity? — the concealed essence of the final Alhambra, although at this point one becomes completely uncertain, because it is necessary to add immediately that it was he, and after one of his own bodyguards ran a dagger through him, of course, his son, because this whole has to be imagined in such a way, that they, so to speak, built this work of uncertain depth together, Yusuf and his son Mohammed V, both of whom, as it were, passed the trowel from hand to hand — an expression wishing to allude to their inseparability — therefore we can conjecture that in all likelihood both knew very well what they were doing, because in the end, after them, there is nothing else, it could have only been them; for if it is certain that this origin is as unclear as the origin of any work of art can be, moreover if one would venture to state that nothing is more unclear than the origin of the Alhambra, the end, however, is as certain as death: after Mohammed V and his long reign, ending in 1391, there can be no doubts about the end; about one hundred years then follow, during which the Sultanate of Granada, among others, consume seven more Mohammeds and four more Yusufs, but this period of one hundred years is one single chaotic tragic drama where, in relation to the Alhambra — apart from the construction of the Torre de las Infantas — nothing essential even occurs, so that when the last Nasrid ruler, Mohammed XII, known just as often as Boabdil, “The Unfortunate,” in 1492, upon the fall of his Granada and his Alhambra — seen from here, the conclusion of the great Reconquista — lamented, according to hearsay, that this was the end, no more, he must depart from all of this beauty, the Catholic Kings are marching into the Alhambra, kings who of course see the magnificent enchantment but do not understand it, but even more importantly, do not even wish to understand anything; yet they do not destroy it — how kind of them — which the non-Hispanophone historical accounts truly recognize as their one irrational, if beneficial act; in short the Alhambra’s fate was sealed, and with the victory of the Reconquista it was occupied by foreigners, and in the centuries to come they built this and that in the surrounding area, for the most part insignificant structures, so that the essential thing, looking at it from the reference point of Alhambra, was that the Arabs definitely vanished from the scene, and thus the Alhambra ended up in the most haunting of conditions imaginable, for if there was anyone at all who understood it, it was the Arabs, yet they had vanished from here for good, which means, in our case, that there remained no one, from this point on, who could approach its meaning, this is absolutely true, because there is no one up to this very day who has been able understand the Alhambra, it stands there aimless and incomprehensible, and no one can comprehend even today why it is standing there, so there is no one who can help in this situation, it is not the interpretations that are lacking, but the interpretive code through which it can be deciphered, and it will remain like this from now on, because it is not even worthwhile to keep going on in this direction, but more worthwhile to turn back, to wander back a little to the probable creators, and in the most well-founded uncertainty to say that yes, after 1391 — not including the interior of the Torre de las Infantas in the mid-fifteenth century — no one added anything anymore to the Alhambra, it came into being with Yusuf I and his son Mohammed V, and with them it also came to an end, in a word, it is more worthwhile to pronounce them indecisively as most likely to have commissioned the Alhambra; winding our way back, we cannot speak any less cautiously than this and perhaps what we have stated about Yusuf I and Mohammed V may be permitted, if one proceeds cautiously, a caution that at any single tiny point of this story is not in the least bit superfluous, particularly if we reach — as we are reaching right here and now — that point when it becomes clear that leaving aside the fact that we don’t know what the name of the Alhambra was, or even if it had a name at all, and that this isn’t even something without precedent, and so it is thus tolerable, that we cannot find a clear answer to when it was built and finally even to who built it; but now comes the point where the next thing we don’t know must be revealed; namely that we don’t know
what
the Alhambra is, that is to say we don’t know why it was built, what was its function — if we don’t view it as a residence, a private palace, or a fortification, because we don’t view it as that, then, well, how should we regard it? generally we don’t know, we have no idea at all, and this is difficult to explain, difficult, because now it seems as if everything is in order, one picks oneself up and travels to Granada, goes up the left bank of the Darro, then turns right and crosses above the Darro’s bubbling froth, reaches the road that leads to the Alhambra, drags himself up in the heat — for let us say that it’s summer and there is a dreadful, dry, scorching heat, and he has no parasol — and he buys the
expensive
entrance ticket, then a great surprise, more precisely an unpleasant surprise awaits him when at last, wandering with difficulty here and there up above, up here are all kinds of structures, from various gates to the chill, icy, unfinished, supposedly Renaissance palace of Charles V, but one feels that not one of them is
it
; then he finds it, because in the end, he finally realizes that it is there, at that little gate, where he has to go in, and then he finds out that he can’t go inside, that he has to wait, because visitors are only allowed in at certain intervals, and he is a visitor, he has to follow the rules, to wait in the inhuman parching heat, there is no refreshment stand, so accordingly he withdraws to a more shaded corner, and if he is lucky, and let’s assume that he is, then he has to wait for only twenty minutes, then he goes in and his jaw drops, because something like this, but like
this
, he says to himself, utterly stupefied, he has really, but really never even seen, this, the person says to himself, surpasses anyone’s imagination, but in the meantime it doesn’t even occur to him that something isn’t right; he thinks it is a royal palace, well yes, he reads the brief explanatory sheet that comes with the ticket, or he hears the bellowing of the tour guides, that Yusuf I, was it not, and his son Mohammed V, they were the ones who created this wondrous masterwork, this unsurpassable wonder of the Muslim Moors, he hears this and he reads the same, and it never even occurs to him to question whether this is a palace, or a fortress, or perhaps a private residence, or all of these things together — why, what else could it be? — well, the sultan lived here, or didn’t he? and here, living in his proximity, was the ocean of courtiers, and the women of the harem, courtly life, in a word, went on, there were huge feasts, splendid concerts, glittering receptions, the renowned baths, radiant celebrations and, well, of course, because this too is known, there were the thousands of ugly intrigues and machinations, secret associations and plots, and danger and murder, and chaos and blood and collapse, after which there always came the next sultan from the Nasrid dynasty, in a word everything went on just like it should in such a sultanate, one thinks to oneself, or perhaps doesn’t even think, as the images already precede the thoughts, when that which a person is thinking about gives rise to just one question, yet a question that remains unspoken because, well, who would ask it, maybe the tourist guide with his hand-held megaphone? — no, really no, the suspicion does not even arise within him that he now in such a place, for the first time in his life — because in the world there is only one such place as this, the Alhambra, where innumerable signs indicate that everything here, called only by their Spanish names — from the Patio de los Arrayanes to the Sala de la Barca, the Patio de Comares to the Patio de los Leones, the Sala de las Dos Hermanas to the Mirador de la Daraxa — everything here does not constitute a palace but something else; innumerable signs indicate to the visitor taking part in the immortal beauty of the Alhambra, that no, this is neither a fortress nor a palace, not even a private residence, but again and again — something else, and well, here, then we start with the walls, about which we should first know that they were originally whitewashed with lime, so that from below, from today’s Granada, or concretely the Darro or the Albacín quarter which once provided the Alhambra with water, the predecessor of the Alhambra was white, not red, and that is enough here about the name just one last time, but what is much more important is that these walls, for the most part towers connected to each other haphazardly — no matter what kind of well-intentioned expert sets to examining them — they were suitable for many purposes but it becomes ever more certain that they did not truly protect whoever was the ruler of the Alhambra, so then what were the walls for, what were they protecting: the Alhambra, fine, but from what, because in a military sense they were not really capable of defending anything; their significance, however, is as obvious as anything else in the Alhambra, or in relation to the Alhambra, so that then here, in the matter of the walls it is not really possible to arrive at any other decision than that the walls of the Alhambra — it is of course the outer walls of which we are speaking — did not provide any function of defense, but that their construction . . . perhaps . . . was intended as a kind of manifestation, namely to manifest that these walls were on the one hand like those of a fortress, accordingly high and wall-like, hence they could unconditionally protect something, something located behind them, yet on the other hand the people who commissioned these walls wanted to indicate that life within was unassailable, that it was not possible to enter here, not possible to breach these walls, and it was