Seiobo There Below (5 page)

They asserted everything, and then they asserted the opposite as well, it simply was unbelievable that in the case of a practically “new” masterpiece — the ensemble of panel-paintings depicting the story of Esther was altogether five hundred years old — so little was known, still, they didn’t know anything; this is not a question of the “wider public” — even though this term encompasses fewer and fewer people, this lack of knowledge going along side by side with erudition — but rather of the endless hordes of experts, who have sacrificed numerous works of scholarship to demonstrating that, of course, Sandro Botticelli painted the series of panels depicting Esther’s story, as well as others demonstrating that Sandro Botticelli did not paint them; then to prove that perhaps he only painted the essential parts, and then not even that; maybe he just created the undersketch for Lippi, to show him what he had to paint, and then that the panel entitled “La Derelitta” — one of the most mysterious artworks of the quattrocento — was of course the fourth piece, one of the side-panels, earlier believed to be lost, of the cassoni, as the forzieri — that is to say, the two large chests that were bestowed as a dowry by the bride’s family, to hold the bridal trousseau as well as preserve other valuable objects — were called; then later on someone else came along, who eliminating all doubts — hmm — hypothesized that the renowned “La Derelitta” was the work of Botticelli but it did not form, and never had formed, a part of the cassoni, of which it is not known who commissioned them, or when the order was issued by that person who commissioned them, and which were later scattered in as many directions as there were separate pieces: there is a witness to the fact that in the gallery of the Palazzo Torrigiani in the nineteenth century the six panels were still placed together, but then the individual sections turned up along the most obscure of routes, in six different museums, from Chantilly to the Horne Foundation; then came the twentieth century when — now in possession of technological possibilities previously unknown — it was possible to hope that the researchers who study these forzieri or cassoni would come up with something, well they came up with the fact that Filippino Lippi, born out of the forbidden passion of the former monk Fra Filippo Lippi and the former nun Lucrezia Buti, could have something to do with it, namely that the young child who had inherited in a truly astonishing fashion all of his father’s genius, was an apprentice — perhaps at the age of fourteen, shortly after his father’s death in 1470 or 1471 — in the workshop of Botticelli, himself previously an assistant in
his
father’s workshop, so that — the contemporary experts opined — it is highly likely that the adolescent Lippi worked on the series of panels depicting the story of Esther; later on, however, we found out from Edgar Wind and André Chastel that, well, not exactly; they painted the panels together, but it was impossible to say who had painted what, and presumably Botticelli did play some role in their creation, and we can read in the very latest promisingly monumental monograph published in 2004 by a certain Patrizia Zambrano who, doubtless ranking among the greatest masters of saying absolutely nothing, herself reached the conclusion that both Botticelli and Lippi could have painted the panels, perhaps the two of them working together, or in such a way that Botticelli somehow worked on the pictures, perhaps in the planning or the undersketches, and then Lippi did the painting; or conversely that Lippi worked completely alone — the elasticity, if it can be expressed like that, with which Ms. Zambrano covers all the possibilities, is unbelievable — and it can even be worthy of high praise that she was able to knead together, into one single study, all the hypotheses that have arisen in the difficult question of attribution since the time of the quattrocento until now; to put it briefly, we know nothing, as was always the case; it’s just as if in the matter there would now be a kind of consensus that “La Derelitta,” at least, was painted by Botticelli alone, which is quite obvious — inasmuch as one looks at the painting itself — and it is impossible to comprehend the presumed difficulty of separating it from Lippi’s oeuvre, or how one can establish that it in no way formed a part of the Esther panels, in other words, we can remain in the barren steppe of the last descriptive scholarly contribution, that is to say the work of Alfred Scharf, published in 1935, which awkwardly and laboriously ponders over the date of creation for the panels, but — thankfully — nothing more, as the author is compelled to demonstrate simply what can be seen in the individual paintings, and how all this is connected to other similar forzieri created by Lippi, and more generally, how these are connected to Lippi’s life work, and that’s it already, that’s enough, 1935, Alfred Scharf, and we’re done, because in the end what is the point of bothering with the deliberations of the scholars, if the bucket in which they are mixing their brew is completely empty; and so is it not sufficient, not deserving enough of awe, that in the terrifying and unknown machinations of chance and accident, these panels have actually been passed down to us? — for after all these speculations, at least it is not possible to doubt in their existence, to contradict the fact that they exist.

For so-called historical research has cast doubt on the existence of Vashti, the existence of Esther, the story of Vashti and the story of Esther; it was so from the very beginning and even today there is a kind of suspicion around the whole thing, around Esther and particularly around Vashti, and Ahasuerus and Mordechai and Haman and the feast of the Emperor, a suspicion that everything that occurred there did not occur, because as the historians write, everything that stands in the Book of Esther is so indemonstrable, so unlocalizable, so unidentifiable and confabulatory, that it simply cannot stand; so that it would be better if we thought of it as a fable — we should think of Esther, Vashti, Ahasuerus, Mordechai, and Haman as the characters of a fable, or perhaps a little more exaltedly, of a myth, since — as is claimed, and people who understand these matters largely agree with these claims — the entire Book of Esther, and so too Vashti, who assumes merely a minor role in it, simply has
no foundation in reality
, so that well, if this
no
is not even the essence of Purim, its origins are at the very least obscure, and it can be presumed that the connection of the Book of Esther with the Hebrew text, as with the Greek canon, only occurred later, for the matter begins with the fact that historical scholarship is unable convincingly to identify the main protagonist — inasmuch as he can even be regarded as such — Ahasuerus, as for a long time the conviction reigned that this same Ahasuerus was actually Xerxes I and the entire fable reaches back to the Babylonian captivity, and this viewpoint still, even today, raises its head at times, but all in vain, for there are ever more — naturally, among those for whom the unclear origins of Purim are troubling, that is to say, what are we celebrating during Purim anyway — who remain silent in the face of the unparalleled expertise of the arguments set forth in Jacob Hoschander’s 1923 study: that, for example, the identification of Ahasuerus with Xerxes and, thus, the dating of the story of Esther to the time of the Babylonian captivity is a mistake, because Ahasuerus is none other than Artaxerxes II himself, brought forth as a leading figure during the period of decline of the Achaemenid dynasty — Artaxerxes Mnemon II, the ruler mentioned before his coronation as king under his Greek name of Artsaces — the inevitable murderer of his younger sibling, the victor in the battle at Cunaxa, the inciter of the plot in Xenophon’s masterpiece, the
Anabasis
, the faithful first-born of his mother, immortalized as the evil intriguer Parysatis, who had a ravishingly beautiful wife Statiera, whom Hoschander, and not just with any kind of reasoning, identifies as Vashti; so coolly, so indisputably convincing does his argumentation proceed, that it is hardly denied — neither by Christian biblical researchers nor by more neutral historians; not even by rabbinical tradition, and although there is of course some divergence between these two groups on this point, the concordance is more conspicuous, even if the formulations of the rabbinical scholars are more severe, that is to say even if they deviate in a more austere trajectory from Hoschander’s analysis, which accepts the conflict between the old and the new faiths as sufficient explanation for the background to the Book of Esther, namely, for example, that Vashti, inasmuch as the story is true, did not really fulfill the king’s command — the gist of which was that she must appear among the drunkenly clamoring princes and kings, before the Great King, who desired, with his wife’s beauty, to confirm the insurpassability of his own Empire; namely, his command was such that she must leave her own gathering, held for the illustrious ladies of the Persian court in the audience-hall of the queen’s apartments in the zenana, which in keeping with tradition occurred simultaneously with the week-long celebration of the Emperor, prescribed in such cases by Persian and even older tradition, and during which she must not be absent, and at which she sat until it was over, her person completely veiled — well, if all of that is really true and it occurred like that, but then again — according, that is, to the rabbinical commentators — it was not like that, the cause was not the pride of the Great Queen, but an illness that Vashti had been hiding from the Emperor for weeks now, so that to no avail, the Hebrew and the Christian bibles relate, it was whispered and whispered again into her ear that she had to leave the women’s feast, and had to appear immediately before the Emperor, to no avail did the eunuchs keep repeating it nervously, alarmed by what they saw in the Empress’s eyes, for what they saw in those incomparable eyes was that, as for the Emperor’s truly unusual request — in opposition to every kind of courtly decorum — that mandated she would have to show herself wearing nothing more than a crown, that is to say disrobed, displaying her beauty before the male assembly descended into a drunken rabble, that she was not going to fulfill it, to no avail did they urge her and whisper the reasons into her ear, just as tradition, too, strives to no avail to engrave this picture into memory, for in actuality, as these interpreters claim, with a sudden harshness and devoid of mercy, Vashti was leprous, and the illness, albeit still in the early stages, had disfigured her face and her entire body, and it was for this reason that she did not dare to show herself before her king, so that she would not lose his love and his admiration, and it was precisely this knowledge that had reached Parysatis’ ear earlier, who immediately sensed that in such a shaping of events the time of reckoning had come; she therefore sent a message to the Emperor at a suitable time, which was hardly unheard of or out of keeping with custom; she sent a message, however, saying that if he were to summon his ravishing queen now, she would certainly deny him his request, for she was too proud to appear in such a company, at which point Artaxerxes, prostrate from the several days’ worth of drunken carousing, and forever grappling with the uncertain nature of his worth as sovereign, immediately gave the order to the eunuchs, of the sort that — with all the logical irrationality that followed from the situation — she must come, she must come immediately in her full beauty, namely that she must not wear anything but the crown on her head — Parysatis, it is said, was in jubilation; Vashti realized that this was the end; however Artaxerxes, in his bitterness, permitted every council and agreed with everything, because all he could think of was that if Vashti, as she had been doing for weeks, disgraced him and denied him again, then the Empire would also deny its last Great Emperor, and although in his dim, slow, drunkenly flickering brain he knew what judgment he was pronouncing on her whom he loved most in all the world within reason’s grasp, he also felt that Vashti’s fate — and here the Hebrew commentators of the text lower their voice — was a mirror of the fate of the Empire, and that if Vashti were lost, the entire colossal Persian Empire itself was lost, lost forever.

He already knew how to draw a Madonna even before he knew what a Madonna was, but it wasn’t only in this that he displayed an extraordinary talent, but in nearly everything else too, for he was able to read and write, master the skills of carpentry, use the tools of the workshop, grind and mix the pigments to perfection, gild frames in such a way that no one ever had to teach him, so that in Prato his father always followed his progress with laudatory attention, keeping an eye on his every movement, and he only caressed the boy when little Filippino had the inclination to sit on his lap, and this period somehow passed very quickly, the child had hardly reached his sixth year when his father began to notice that he didn’t like to be touched, that he had no need to be embraced, indeed — to put it more directly — he detested it, although he was treated with particular love in his father’s dwelling as well as in the workshop; the family, the numerous and often-changing ranks of assistants and pupils, even the distinguished patrons, if they came to negotiate with the famous master, never failed to praise him, saying what a beautiful child, just as they never failed to gape in astonishment (although they did not truly believe that this wee mite had made the drawing so proudly displayed by the master); hence he grew up in the warmest possible of settings, but still it did not, for a long time, quell the unease felt by his parents, for it was distressing enough, from the time of his birth, to consider what an accursed life would be the share of one brought sinfully into the world, to consider the circumstances in which one of the parents had been a Carmelite monk, the chaplain in the Santa Margherita monastery, and the mother, to their even greater shame, was a nun in the same monastery at the time of conception, so truly they were sinners indeed, the manifest sinners in a scandal discussed all across Firenze for months, albeit relatively ordinary sinners, but sinners all the same, who would have remained so for a long time to come, perhaps even up until the very gates of Hell, if the extraordinary genius of Filippo Lippi, renowned all across Italy, had not, under the pressure of the Medicis, brought about a papal absolution from Pius II, who resolved the affair by “canceling them out,” that is, exempting them from their monastic vows — but he could only save them, he did not help the child any further, so that the stamp would remain forever upon little Filippo, whom his father, in vain, inundated with love, every sign of passionate love; never could he free himself from the anxiety of what would become of the child when he grew up, and this anxiety persisted for years and years, until the point when the child began to show that there was no need to be anxious on his behalf, because he would be able to stand on his own two feet and his talent would compensate for his impure birth, for he demonstrated such unparalleled intellectual sensitivity, and so adept at learning was he that he simply dumbfounded everyone around him; it was possible to see that this boy would be a great man, just like his father; he was, however, never instructed — neither by his father nor by anyone else; instead he only observed, continually, regardless of who was doing what in the workshop, or at home, or on the street, the child watched silently, and he asked questions, and when he saw his father beginning to draw, he began to draw too, he took a wooden board and a bit of charcoal and he copied every movement precisely, observing how his father made a large sweeping arc with the charcoal, and the arc on his drawing curved astonishingly in the same way, but it was like that with everything, the child observed everything thoroughly, he was able to sit silently for up to an hour beside the blacksmith of Prato and watch how perhaps three pairs of horses were shod, he was able to spend long hours on the banks of the stream, observing the ripples in the water, and the light on the rippling surface, in short when he had achieved his sixth year, his parents were no longer anxious for him; his father was certain that the fruit of his deeply passionate love, sinful and yet preordained, had been taken into the protection of the Lord, he brought his son with him wherever he could, even to Spoleto, where he was at work on the Cathedral; on the building site the child, alongside the chief scribe, performed the duties of a kind of assistant, for he was capable of that too, confirming his aptitude everywhere and in everything, and in addition swept everyone off their feet with his gentleness and sensitivity, although as a result his parents were subjected to a different kind of worry, that is to say that the child’s health was not in good order; he was always catching a cold, he wouldn’t dress warmly enough; his throat was already swollen and he would be bedridden for days, so the problem was then the state of his health; his parents never managed to tell him enough that he had to take great care, even in 1469, when his father lay on his deathbed, and charged the boy with the completion of the fresco of the Holy Virgin that he had begun in the Cathedral; no, not even then, and even there, did he fail to remind his son to dress very warmly while he was working, as in the Cathedral it was always too chill, and under no circumstances should he drink cold water while at work; and of course what could Filippino do but promise to adhere to his father’s words, but then he didn’t keep it and it was practically all the same anyway, because if he happened to think of his health and dressed properly on a very cold winter day, simply to air out the workshop briefly was enough to make him bedridden again; there was no solution, he could never be circumspect enough, for he was laid open to illness, as it was expressed to him, even Battigello — his older friend who served as an apprentice alongside him in his father’s workshop, who later opened up his own workshop in Firenze where Filippino followed him — even he said so, Battigello — that name clung to him with such injustice, because as a matter of fact it was a jeer directed at his stout older brother Giovanni, who haggled with the customers in the pawnshop — in a word, even he, this Battigello who was soon to become one of the greatest painters of Firenze and of all of Italy, even he pointed out to Filippino that if he didn’t look after himself, then when a serious epidemic struck, that would be the end, it would take him and he could look back then; it was just that Filippino was powerless, this was the cross he bore, and perhaps this was the price for his sensitivity from the very beginning, on a spiritual level, as his father said, because in reality this was what separated him the most from his cohorts: while they were playing outside, Filippino sat inside, happily reading, and he read everything that Battigello pressed into his hands, and as for what Battigello pressed into his hands, it was everything, and very often such works as really should not be pressed into the hand of a eleven- or twelve-year-old youth — Ficino and Pico della Mirandola and Agnoto Poliziano, for example — and maybe Filippino didn’t understand, how would he even understand the sentences, but the spirit of the thoughts behind them reached him, and this spirit made him pensive, even then he began to spend hours brooding below the workshop window, huddled into a corner, if there happened to be no book in his hand, and when he turned fourteen, even Battigello himself was forced to recognize his ability to penetrate everything intuitively, so that roughly during the time when Battigello became to be called Botticelli, and the young master began to be mentioned and praised all across Firenze, one day he informed Filippino that he no longer regarded him as an apprentice, he had in fact never done so; Filippino should instead regard himself as a fellow painter in the workshop, as he had already been, strictly speaking, for a long time now, maybe even from the very day when, stepping into Battigello’s workshop, he had begun to work with him; because for grinding the pigments, burning the wood for charcoal, boiling up the sizing and so on, a real assistant or two was always turning up; Battigello always gave Filippino such tasks as: well, do you see that Madonna, paint the Infant in her arms with two angels, all right? — fine, Filippino would answer, and an Infant and two angels would appear upon the painting, such that no one would have ever been able to say that Battigello had not done them himself; this Filippino had an unbelievable ability to penetrate everything intuitively; he only had to observe, for example, the movements of Battigello’s hand, his thoughts, his colors and his drawings, his themes and his figures and his backgrounds — all beyond his father’s painterly world — and from that point on he was able to paint any kind of a Battigello at any time; so that he, Battigello — when he received the commission from the new master of the Merchants’ Guild to paint an allegory of one of the seven virtues, and this commission took up all of his time — he entrusted Filippino to prepare, from start to finish, all of the other projects of lesser import in the workshop, and so it happened that the commission of the panels, depicting the story of Esther, of the two forzieri was given to Filippino, who after discussing the manner of elaboration of the theme with Battigello, completed them to the greatest satisfaction of the patron, and even on time, indeed completed them the day before the date agreed upon, which was truly not a characteristic of Battigello or the greater number of masters in Firenze at all, and perhaps not even of Filippino, but, well, this was a bridal gift and there could be no question of delay, and the commission itself, the workshop’s first genuinely serious commission in this respect, stimulated Filippino in an extraordinary fashion, so that he worked on it night and day, and the two larger panels were ready within two months, and he had already painted the second side-panel when Master Sangallo had finished constructing the two chests and Antonio had prepared the goldsmithing; Battigello was satisfied and praised the work of Filippino, but tactfully avoided expressing the thought that it all looked as if he himself, Battigello, had painted it; Filippino, however, was not fooled by this, because when the beginning of the last month of the year came around, and only one panel remained to be painted and placed into the chest, he decided that he would work not in the spirit of Battigello, but according to the dictates of his own imagination; namely, he completed the commission, creating the companion picture of the side panel “Esther arrives at the palace of Susa” so as not to upset the balance of the entire work, but he did paint the chief figure in the picture, Queen Vashti, as he saw fit, and he saw fit to paint her in such a way that this exile would reflect forth every humiliation, every indignity, every human collapse, and that moreover in this humiliation, in this indignity, in this collapse, Queen Vashti would not lose any of her extraordinary beauty, for as Filippino sensed, it was only with the deepest beauty that this humiliation, indignity, collapse could be expressed — this was different to what Battigello had seen up until now, so very different, and on the day before the last day of the year, the patron came with his extensive and merry family, as well as a tumbrel hired for the two heavy chests, and on this occasion — for the reckoning of the bill had to take place as well — Battigello had to be present, and so he arrived a few hours early, and while waiting, he examined the chests once again, at length, for the last time, including the last side-panel, and Filippino could tell how he was struck just as wordless as when he had examined them for the first time, and then he looks at him, Filippino, with a sad, endlessly mournful gaze, and it is as if his words were not addressed any longer to his companion, as he looks away from him, and then he says in his own velvety, gentle voice: if only one day I could find such beauty as that in someone, Filippino, if only one day I could find it too.