Titian (2 page)

From that moment on, he decided to stay with me. He followed wherever I went. He continued his monologue, however, and didn't attempt conversation.

Whilst I was looking at
Danaë
, he abruptly dragged me towards the Berlin
Self-Portrait
.

‘It's a pity they didn't hang them in the same room,' he said. ‘The hair on the body, the hair of the head, feathers, nobody can get more naked than that… I wash and wash my colours until they look like the coat of an animal. By working on clothes you can make them look worn, silky, clinging, almost like flesh.'

After this, for him, long speech, he seemed a little discouraged. For half an hour he didn't say a word. In front of
Venus and Adonis
, he simply verified that I was studying the picture correctly. For my part, I showed my admiration by opening my eyes and mouth wide.

He seemed almost to have finished.

Before the
Flaying of Marsyas
, there was another splutter of words: ‘When you skin an animal, you touch the truth about flesh.'

In front of the
Pietà
, he sat down. I think he sat there for a very long time. At first, I didn't know whether to wait, to greet him, or, to tell him my own impressions. He made a sign for me to come closer. Certainly, he knew that his remarks about fur had impressed me, for instead of talking about the famous mysterious hand imploring the saint's statue in the
Pietà
– the hand I was staring at fixedly – he went his own way and repeated ‘Hair is to the body what painting is to the world!'

Then, with a deep laugh, he added something which made me think of you: ‘You can burrow into it, you can look underneath it, you can lift it, or you can pull it – but don't try to shave it – it'll always grow again!'

Before turning away from him for good, I had a very clear image of my own body lying naked on a canvas in the exhibition: of moss underneath me, of a dog at my side, of my outlines scarcely separable from the surrounding landscape. A
landscape which, later, Courbet might have walked over. With the grass, the clouds, and the soil, my flesh would then have been the earth's coat.

Hugs, Katya

HAUTE SAVOIE

Kut
,

All that you say about fur makes me think of his dogs. Was the old man by any chance accompanied by a dog?

I think he loved dogs. Perhaps they calmed or encouraged him. Were they witnesses? Witnesses he could trust. Dumb, dumb witnesses. Perhaps it sometimes happened that, whilst painting with his right hand, his left ferociously stroked one of his dogs. The fur as company for his fingers, and the dog shifting its weight as his arm moved!

At that time, it was something of a fashion to put dogs into paintings. One finds them in Rubens, Velasquez, Veronese, Cranach, van Dyck … amongst other things, they were a kind of go-between between men and women. Ambassadors of desire. They represented (according to their breed and size) both femininity and virility. They were almost human – or they shared the privacy of humans – and yet they were guileless. They were also randy. Randy, and nobody could raise their eyebrows – because, after all, they were dogs!

We see them in many of his paintings. In portraits of men and women and in mythological subjects. But nowhere more strangely than in the late picture
A Boy with Dogs
. There's no other painting like it, and I tend to agree with the experts who mostly dismiss the idea that this is a detail taken from a larger canvas. What we see is more or less what the old man meant us to see. A boy – how old do you think he is? Three? Four at the most? – alone in a dark landscape with two dogs and two young pups (perhaps four weeks old?). The boy puts his arm round the white dog – who, I guess, is male – for reassurance. The mother, the bitch, is the only one looking at us, and the pups have nosed their way through the fur to her teats.

Despite the dusk, the scene is calm, peaceful,
comblé
as the French would say. Nobody wants anything more.

The dogs are the boy's family. I would even say parents. The boy's legs and the two visible legs of the white dog are like four legs of the same table – practically interchangeable. Everyone is waiting – which is to say living.

Isn't waiting the essential occupation of dogs? Learnt maybe because of their proximity to humans. Waiting for the next event or the next arrival. Here the last important event, it seems, was birth. Pups and boy born into this bitch of a life. Born to wait for death. Yet meanwhile there's warmth, milk, the mysteries of the fur, and eyes which are speechless.

The old man, of course, wanted your sympathy. No, not sympathy, your interest. Because if you were interested, you
would pose for him, and he wanted to paint you! Painting women, he forgot his doubt. But each time he forgot, he was adding to his worry. All the women he painted – from Adriane to the Repentant Magdalene – represented this worry, which wasn't about women. Each one consoled and at the same time reinforced his worry.

The painting with the dogs is about the consolation. It's a honeyed painting. It's about bliss. The pups have discovered bliss in the fur – as Jove will never find it with Danaë or Danaë with Jove.

Meanwhile the other three (the boy and the two adult dogs) are waiting … And the two waiting dogs, watching, are the old man's accomplices. They are the nearest he can find to what he has dreamt of painting and to what he paints with. They can bite and they are innocent.

I love you, John

ATHENS

John
,

I try to find an answer to the question ‘What made him paint?' And I can hear only one word, coming from all the chaos of physical matter, as if from the bottom of a black well.

Desire. His desire (as befits an eminently virile painter) was, if not to cut into appearances, at least to penetrate and lose himself
in the skin of things. Yet, being human and being a painter, he came up against the impossibility of doing this: the heart of nature, the animal in humans, the world's pelt can never be seized, and, above all, they are unrepeatable, unreproducible. And so, for a while, like many of his contemporaries, he used his skill to show that everything was vanity,
vanitas vanitatis
: beauty, wealth, art.

The women in his pictures – or rather
the
Titian woman, with her special simplicity and innocence – is to him a relentless reminder of his artistic impotence and defeat. Him the master! Perhaps it was women who embodied the doubt you talk about? Naked, the colours of their flesh are for drowning in. Never have the painted bodies of women demanded as much as his do, to be touched, to be pressed with the hands – as Mary Magdalene presses her hand through her hair against her own breast. Yet like all other bodies in paintings across the whole world, those painted by Titian can be neither touched nor plunged into.

Gradually, he came to understand that in the very impotence of his art (this art which continually underlined the virility of the men it depicted), there might be a hidden miracle. With the sables and bristles of his brushes – instead of rendering the texture of the world's hide – he could twist its limbs! Unable to reproduce, he could transform and transfigure. Instead of being the servant of appearances, obliged to lick their boots, he could impose his will upon them. Produce arms or hands which could never exist. Bend limbs against their nature. Fuzz objects to the point of their becoming unrecognisable. Make contours tremble so that they came to
depict matter without any outline. Deny the difference between bodies and corpses. (I'm thinking of the last
Pietà
.)

I pack all kinds of questions concerning power, prestige, even the question of the dog, into this train of thought. The truth is that Titian's art is itself untouchable, inviolable. It calls out and then it forbids. We remain open-mouthed.

Kisses, Katya

PARIS

Kut
,

Vanitas vanitatis
. In 1575, the Plague ravaged Venice, killing almost a third of the city's inhabitants. The old man, aged nearly a hundred, died from the Plague in 1576. As did his son. After their deaths, their house on the Biri Grande, full of pictures and precious objects, was looted. And the following year, a fire in the Ducal Palace destroyed paintings by Bellini, Veronese, Tintoretto, and the old man.

I see you today, not in the Piazza San Marco, but on the terrace of your flat in Athens. In Gyzi, where all the kitchens and bedrooms overlook one another, and the washing hangs between telephone cables and hibiscus flowers. Perhaps Athens is the antipodes of Venice? Dry, makeshift, ungovernable. A city of merchants, national heroes, and the widows of heroes, where nobody dresses up.

And I'm writing in a Paris suburb, and I've been to the Sunday market. I saw young couples there, pale, poorly dressed against the rain, wearing jeans, hair lacquered, with city acne, holding hands, pushing prams, teasing in argot, each one with a thin, crooked-toothed recipe for happiness. And as I watched them I asked myself: What would they say about the
Flaying of Marsyas
? Who knows? Everyone lives legends.

In the
Flaying of Marsyas
, a lapdog is licking drops of blood off the ground below where Marsyas is strung up. On the right, there's another dog, held by a boy, who is very like the one in the painting with the pups.

OK. Marsyas, the satyr-artist, entered a musical contest with the god Apollo and lost. Under the agreed conditions, the winner could do what he liked with the loser, and Apollo chose to flay the satyr alive! There are some convincing allegorical interpretations. But what interests me is why the old man chose this subject. It's very close to what he told you in the gallery. Satyrs were, by definition, creatures who revealed how skin was like fur, and both were the outer coverings of a mystery. A kind of clothing which one couldn't unbutton or unzip except with a killing knife.

The two men in the Marsyas canvas, with their blades and their precision (I have seen peasants skin goats with exactly the same gestures), are the precursors of Fontana and Saura, who, in our century, slashed the canvases they painted in pursuit of what lay beyond the skin of the canvas, deep in the wound.

But even after one has acepted the subject und interpreted it, one finds oneself face to face with something more startling! The scene (which in life would be an abominable scene of torture) is bathed in a light of honey and an atmosphere of elegiac fulfilment.

You find exactly the same atmosphere in the
Nymph and Shepherd
, painted at the same time. Yet the
Nymph and Shepherd
is a love scene, and in it the shepherd is playing the pipes which cost Marsyas his life!

Find the old man in Athens and ask him what he meant.

It must be the season of pomegranates.

Take care, John

ATHENS

John
,

You're right, it's the season for pomegranates. I'm looking at one now. Split open by the centrifugal energy of its own ripeness. He would have been able to paint its vivid blood and its granular flesh – except that it's too exotic, too eastern for him. Rather, I see for him the stone of a peach. Enlarged enormously and flattened. In fact, I see such a stone as the ground of his painting, as a kind of lining to the canvas!

Yesterday I was looking for the old man to ask him your question about why the light is so honeyed in the painting of Marsyas' torture. Instead I found a gathering of other old men in Akadimias Street, right in the centre of Athens.

Thousands of vehicles pass there every hour of the day and night. It's also the turn-around point of the city's principal bus lines. It's always crowded. It's where I pick up my bus to go to work every day. Bus no. 222. And there, two days ago, some people, waiting to get on their bus, met their deaths.

The bus – which should have taken them home for their lunch break – went out of control and ploughed into the crowd, laying low eight people before ramming into a barrier and stopping. The victims, who were mostly students, were suffocated, the bus on top of them. Screams, blood, chaos. The police and ambulance couldn't get through, for there were too many people. One hour later, the radio announced the victims' names. Everybody cried and crossed themselves. A tragedy. Yet it's the aftermath I want to tell you about, for it takes us to the heart of Greece.

When I got off my bus there yesterday (it was a bus no. 222 which caused the deaths), I saw a gathering of three or four hundred people, all men, mostly old-age pensioners – those same men go every morning to the smoky
kafenios
, the cafés for male clients only, to play backgammon, sip their ouzos, and comment on what's happening in the world – rather than trying to change it. In Akadimias Street, they were waving their arms about and shouting with great excitement.

At first, I thought it must be a new meeting place for a political debate preceding the elections. But no. What these old men had come to do was to reconstitute the event. Each one had decided when he had awakened yesterday morning to make his way to the scene of the drama and try to see more clearly what had happened.

‘The girl student was there. She wanted to run when she saw the bus coming towards her, but the crowd was too dense – and there was also the bus shelter, which stopped her going in the other direction.'

‘No, you've understood nothing! It was the ill-fated old pensioner who must have been standing here, because they said his legs were the first to be broken! Old bones break easily'

‘I tell you, those who died were all further down there. The ones here escaped. Those over there against the barrier, they got it. The others were only wounded, and now they're in Evangelismos Hospital. They'll survive – thank God. Think though of the families of those who, for no reason, died yesterday at 12.15, think of them!'

And so on. A chorus straight out of Aeschylus. Or perhaps, more exactly, the agora, the future Roman forum. The market-place where everybody met to discuss the affairs of the
polis
.