Caesar or Nothing Part 36

XVI. THE PORTRAIT OF A POPE

Two or three days later Caesar met the Spaniard Cortes 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, Cortes said; he wore a green hat with a c.o.c.k's feather, a blue cape, thick eyegla.s.ses, big boots, and had a certain air of being a blond Chinaman.

"Would you like to come to the Doria gallery with us?" asked Cortes.

"What is there to see there?"

"A stupendous portrait by Velazquez."

"I warn you that I know nothing about pictures."

"n.o.body does," Cortes declared roundly. "Everybody says what he thinks."

"Is the gallery near here?"

"Yes, just a step."

In company with Cortes and the German with the green hat with the c.o.c.k's feather, Caesar 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 Caesar than those in the antique shops and the p.a.w.nbrokers', but which drew learned commentaries from the German. Then Cortes 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 Velazquez portrait?" asked Caesar.

"This is it."

Caesar looked at it carefully. "That man had eaten and drunk well before his portrait was painted," said Caesar; "his face is congested."

"It is extraordinary!" exclaimed Cortes. "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 Caesar, whom the technical side of painting did not preoccupy, as it did Cortes.

"They say he was a dull man, who lived under a woman's domination."

"The great thing is," murmured Caesar, "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 Cortes, "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_

Caesar went out of the cabinet, leaving the German and Cortes 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 Cortes.

"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 Cortes; "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 Caesar's irreverent ideas. He asked him if he understood Latin, and Caesar 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 a.s.serted that all artistic things of great merit were German: Greece. Rome, Gothic architecture, the Italian Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, Velazquez, all German.

The snub-nosed young person, with his cape and his green hat with its c.o.c.k-feather, did not let a mouse escape from his German mouse-trap.

The data of the befeathered German were too much for Caesar, and he took his leave of the painters.

XVII. EVIL DAYS

Accompanied by Kennedy, Caesar called repeatedly on the most auspicious members of the French clerical element living in Rome, and found persons more cultivated than among the rough Spanish monks; but, as was natural, n.o.body gave him any useful information offering the possibility of his putting his financial talents to the proof.

"Something must turn up," he used to say to himself, "and at the least opening we will dive into the work."

Caesar kept gathering notes about people who had connections in Spain with the Black party in Rome; he called several times on Father Herreros, despite his uncle's prohibition, and succeeded in getting the monk to write to the Marquesa de Montsagro, asking if there were no means of making Caesar Moneada, Cardinal Fort's nephew, Conservative Deputy for her district.

The Marquesa wrote back that it was impossible; the Conservative Deputy for the district was very popular and a man with large properties there.

When Holy Week was over, Laura and the Countess Brenda and her daughter decided to spend a while at Florence, and invited Caesar to accompany them; but he was quite out of harmony with the Brenda lady, and said that he had to stay on in Rome.