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Supper at Emmaus

by michwo 

Posted: 28 October 2016
Word Count: 1788
Summary: A story told by his friend Bronzino after JC's death about a picture by the 16th century Florentine painter Jacopo Carucuu a.k.a. Pontormo who died on 6 January 1557.


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Supper at Emmaus
 
Today is a day for remembering.  Today, January 6th, 1557, the feast of the Epiphany, I found my friend, Jacopo Carucci, known to those who loved him by the name of the village he was born in, Pontormo, dead inside his house at Empoli near Florence. How different we are and were from each other – I alive, he dead, of course, but also I have prospered in my career as an artist, having become official court painter to the Medici, specializing in portraiture, from the portrait of Duke Cosimo’s Spanish wife, Eleanora of Toledo in happier times to the portrait I did three years later as a memento mori of his illegitimate six-year-old daughter, Bia, amongst others.  My friend, on the other hand, largely ignored by the glitterati of our fickle Florence, became a recluse and spent the last years of his life drawing the dead that he wanted to figure in his vision of the Last Judgement which he painted with painstaking care in the choir of San Lorenzo.  And I am so dark I could pass for a Moor and he is so fair he could pass for a German.  He had great admiration for a German in his younger days as it happened and his “Supper at Emmaus” would probably not have been painted at all without the influence on him of Albrecht Dürer’s “Christ and the Disciples in Emmaus”.  How fitting it was that this picture should have been painted in the first instance for the dispensary of the Carthusians at San Lorenzo del Monte – he loved to dispense hospitality to his friends as he grew older and especially in the form of food.  On reflection, it might even have been more fitting for the picture to have been displayed in the monastery’s refectory.  I think, just now, that the memories I have of Jacopo most dear to me are precisely those where I envision myself seated at his table with occasional and voluble guests enjoying a hearty meal.  And none of his guests could surpass in the art of telling stories the woodcarver and friend of Cellini, Giovanbattista del Tasso.  He too is no longer with us unfortunately, but I can still hear his voice when he was alive telling what his trip to Rome was like when Cellini and he went there as young men and how he built the framework to support Cellini’s Perseus. Half a lifetime had gone by between those two events – thirty-five years to be exact. And he had been in Rome two years before Pope Leo excommunicated that troublesome monk, Martin Luther, and seen an elephant and thought of Hannibal crossing the Alps.
 
“Have I told you this story before, Pontormo?”
 
“You have, Battista.”
 
“Where was I?”
 
“The elephant.”
 
“That’s right.  The elephant.  He died three years before I came to Rome, in 1516, so I didn’t see him in the flesh.  He was a white elephant, a gift from King Manuel of Portugal in 1514 to commemorate Leo’s election as pope the previous year. God knows where Manuel got him from – some Indian potentate, I believe.  Raphael painted him in a memorial fresco in the Apostolic Palace of the Vatican. He even had a name – Hanno.”
 
“And Aretino wrote a poem about him.  Am I right?”
 
“Yes. I never read it though. I never did much reading.”
 
“I doubt you missed much by not reading it.  He went on to write libidinous sonnets and sundry scurrilities in somewhat dubious taste by all accounts.  None of it seems to have done him much good. He’s stagnating somewhere in among the waterways of Venice these days after having had the Medici popes as patrons in Rome.”
 
“Well, he never singled me out as an object for his satire.”
 
“Count yourself lucky on that score.  Even princes came to fear that vitriolic pen of his.  No wonder he ended up in Venice – it’s the only place that would have him at the end of the day.  More wine, Battista?”
 
“Yes.  Why not?”
 
And then Battista would remember the spring of 1554 when Cellini’s Perseus was finally unveiled completely and put on public display.
 
“Nine years it took him to do. I who am speaking to you now built the supporting framework for his model in 1545 if I remember rightly.”
 
“Even Bronzino here and my good self were impressed with it.  It’s a masterpiece alright, Battista.  Good for him. But is he as good a man as he is a sculptor?  One hears such terrible stories about him. He’s reputed to have killed at least six people in quarrels and duels and he’s boastful and provocative. And it seems to me that there’s an element of hypocrisy in his going to mass and receiving the host still.  Why has he not been excommunicated for his sins?  Is it because he has friends in high places?  Do you know what Martin Luther’s reaction to excommunication by Pope Leo was?  He excommunicated Leo!  At least there was moral fibre there and a willingness to go it alone.”
“The greater the sinner, the greater the relief he must have to feel that his sins are forgiven.  And Cellini’s bronze Perseus must have covered a multitude of sins for him.”
 
“True, Battista, but, at the end of the day, it is only a sculpture.  Do you remember, Bronzino, when Varchi asked the question to Florentine artists: which is the greater – sculpture or painting?”
 
“I do. And I remember what you answered.”
 
“I answered that it was painting. Marble and bronze are three-dimensional, it’s true, but impersonal at the end of the day.  Who can relate to them?  Who can see them as fully human even though they are the work of human hands?  Paintings can transport us to scenes that even the non-artist can identify with because colour and flesh and landscape and seascape and rivers and forests and lakes are things that fall into the category of everyday human experience.  We recognize parts of ourselves in them.  Statues are larger than life and further away from it.  They partake of something bigger than us and more durable.  Do you remember that time, it must be thirty years ago or more now, when we left Florence to avoid the plague, Bronzino?  To paint in the Val d’Ema?  Those were the days, eh?”
 
I remember it now as if it were yesterday.  Long days.  Green meadows.  Blue skies. Like the men and women mentioned in the Decameron of our erstwhile Florentine compatriot, Boccaccio, more than a century before either of us had even been thought of, we escaped from pestilential Florence to the Tuscan countryside to avoid the urban ravages of a Black Death in miniature.  No longer imprisoned in my mentor’s painting of “Joseph in Egypt”, painted when I was only fifteen – I’m in there somewhere – which, although it is meant to be Egypt, has an air of being the piazza della Signoria in Florence with two raised examples of its august statuary in the background, I felt free to roam and breathe in life for the first time in the whole of my nineteen years on earth.
 
The hermits of Saint Bruno that we came to both know and respect inhabited a fortress-like building constructed with money left specifically in the will made by the very rich Niccolo Accaiuoli for the purpose of housing and educating the sons of Florentine merchants with a religious bent.  It was situated on top of a high hill in an outlying rural suburb directly to the south of Florence, Galluzzo, and the Carthusian monastery fort, for that is what it was in essence, was known locally as the Certosa a Galluzzo.  The charterhouse complex itself was a threefold affair with the block containing the monks’ cells to the right, the church of San Lorenzo in the middle and the workshops and monastery library to the left. The main cloister was a sort of walled-in square with a great garden tended by two gardeners, one young, one ancient. We later found out that the young gardener was one of the novices there, named after a pope, Pio Silvio, and surprisingly pious and articulate for one so young.  And then there were the monks themselves who, over a period of time, befriended us: Brother Angelo, Brother Paolo, Brother Pietro and Brother Antonio.  Apart from the art work – and there was no shortage of things for us to do there: altarpieces, lunettes, etc. – what we looked forward to most of all was Sunday when, in the afternoon, we would walk, in the time-honoured ‘spaciement’ laid down by the rule of Saint Bruno, often as far afield in the summer months as Ponte d’Ema and back.  It was the only time that the monks were allowed to break their vow of silence. 
 
It was on one such walk that it came to light that our ancient gardener, who was 120 years old, had actually served as the model for the shamed Adam in Masaccio’s “The expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden” to be found in the Brancacci Chapel in the church of Santa Maria del Carmine in our beloved Florence.  My friend Pontormo started to refer to Pio Silvio, the gardener’s apprentice, as ‘the second Adam’ and it therefore came to me as no surprise when Pontormo chose him as the model for Christ himself in his painting of “Supper at Emmaus” inspired by a Dürer woodcut.  The tall, well-built Pietro and Paolo, Pietro with his left hand raised in a gesture of benediction, stand at Christ’s side with the heads of Angelo and Antonio all but obscured by the dominant presence in the picture’s background of their taller brethren.  And Pontormo looks on in rapt attentiveness as Christ at the centre of the picture takes a crumb from the loaf of bread he holds and holds it up to consecrate it thinking if not actually saying out loud: Eat-and-do-this-in-commemoration-of-me no doubt. And I, greedy youth that I was, am tipping a pitcher to fill my glass with water, or did the pitcher in fact contain wine?  I always had an appetite for food and drink and women back then and had probably fallen in love as well, for I remember devouring the poems of Petrarch in the monastery library and Pulci’s Morgante and Boiardo’s Roland Enamoured.  Now I am less attached to these things and was able to paint a portrait of the wife of Bartolomeo Ammanati not so long ago, our Florentine poetess, Laura Battiferri, holding Petrarch’s Canzoniere without any great passion to disturb me.
 
Requiescat in pace, Pontormo.  Rest in peace.
 
 






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Comments by other Members



Catkin at 12:22 on 29 October 2016  Report this post
You have got a lot of potentially fascinating material here. There are so many interesting starting-points that it would be possible to expand this short piece into an entire novel - which is the same thought I had about the last piece of yours I read.

Unfortunately, it is all the interesting material that’s the problem: there is far too much of it, given far too quickly. One thing triggers a thought of another thing, which in turn sparks a thought of something else. The story doesn’t read like a story at all: it reads like a stream of consciousness. The story wanders away from the death of the artist, and never returns to it.

Many of the details are, because they are interesting in themselves, like the cherry on the cake; but being asked to take in all of them at once is like being presented with a lot of cherries, and no actual cake (ie, no structure). In order to produce a story that works as a story, you need to concentrate on picking out just a few of the cherries and expanding on these - make them live and breathe. You could, for instance, describe the young monk who becomes a model for the painting. You could allow him to speak and make him into a fully realised character with a real part to play in the events of the story.
 

Today is a day for remembering.  Today, January 6th, 1557, the feast of the Epiphany, I found my friend, Jacopo Carucci, known to those who loved him by the name of the village he was born in, Pontormo, dead inside his house at Empoli near Florence. How different we are and were from each other – I alive, he dead, of course, but also I have prospered in my career as an artist, having become official court painter to the Medici, specializing in portraiture, from the portrait of Duke Cosimo’s Spanish wife, Eleanora of Toledo in happier times to the portrait I did three years later as a memento mori of his illegitimate six-year-old daughter, Bia, amongst others.

- The really important thing here is that the narrator found his friend dead inside his house. That is such a momentous event, so shocking and so traumatic, that one wants to know more about it. No one, reading that, could then have any interest in what other name his friend was known by, and (at this point) in whether or not the narrator has prospered in his career as an artist - or in any of the other information. It is not that there is anything uninteresting in the other information; it’s that it is comes in the wrong place. To make this story work, you really need to say more about that huge and important event - what was it like to find the body of his friend? What condition was his body in? What did the room look like? How did the narrator feel when he found him? What had their relationship been like - were they very close friends? What did the narrator do immediately on finding him? These are the things that the reader naturally wants to know.

If this were my story, I think I would spend the first part describing what I saw and how I felt when I found my friend dead. Then I would move on to one of the memories I’d had of him - probably going to stay with the monks. I’d pick out one of the monks to be a secondary character. I’d want to say why my friend died, and in order to make it into a story with meaning, I would want to tie his death to something that had happened during the period that I remembered. Could you work with the fact that the narrator has had a much more successful career than his friend? Does the narrator believe that his dead friend was more deserving of success? Has the lack of success contributed to his death? Somehow, the death and the painting that the narrator remembers being painted have to come together thematically in order to make a meaningful story - otherwise, it is just a random and sprawling history lesson.

I’m going to ask a provocative question here: why fiction? Are you truly interested in fiction, and in becoming good at writing it? Because if so, you’re going to have to let go of an awful lot of the supplementary details, in order to have the space to expand on the sensory and human detail that is the foundation of fiction - but perhaps you really value the extra factual details, and don’t want to have to lose them? You obviously have a deep interest in and knowledge of the subjects that you write about. Have you thought about writing pure, non-fictional history, art history or historical biography?

michwo at 22:33 on 29 October 2016  Report this post
Catkin,
What can I tell you?  I'm a bookworm and a mostly armchair traveller.  Sometimes foreign words have an incantatory quality I value over and above the things and places they actually refer to.  I'm afraid you're going to find "The Moneylender of Kolomna" even more trying than "Supper at Emmaus".  My favourite programmes on telly have benn Michael Portillo's Continental Railway Journeys with all the little anecdotes he includes in them and Hooten and the Lady on Sky 1 which is pure escapism - Fabergé eggs, the tomb of Alexander the Great in Alexandria, a city of gold in South America, etc.
Silly, but I love it.  The way I see it now, I've got to make a go of "Olvier Brusson" and I don't know how I'm going to as I really do need a deus ex machina to rescue him from grinding poverty.  What was he thinking of to start all over again in Protestant Geneva at the end of Hoffmann's story?  How on earth can he manage to live there as a practising Catholic?
It will come as no surprise to you that, even in my translation work, I seem to choose things of no commercail value whatsoever.  I'm not a clever plotter of stories and probably far too dependent on other people's storytelling.  It might help for you to read Gogol's tale of "The Portrait" and it's very Russian in its redemption through suffering motif.  If a Russian gets things too easily he must be lacking in true spirituality and no artist worth his salt can attain to true greatness without prayer and fasting and shutting himself up in a monastery.  In my case all I'd learn would be to be even more boring and pedantic than I already am unfortunately!  Not one to do things by halves himself, Gogol starved himself to death one Lent and burned part 2 of "Dead Souls" as being impious and irreverent.  I wish I could promise to do better with my writing, Catkin, but if I didn't do it this way I wouldn't do it at all and the world might be a better place admittedly.

Catkin at 23:47 on 29 October 2016  Report this post

I'm afraid you're going to find "The Moneylender of Kolomna" even more trying than "Supper at Emmaus".


Honestly, I didn't find it trying. I thought it was a shame that all that potentially great and fascinating material was presented in a way that made it hard to take in and appreciate.

I think this comes down to whether or not you actually want your work to be read by others, and whether you want the readers to enjoy it, or get something out of it. At the moment, you are in a halfway house between history and fiction. If you want to be read, I think you should either write straight history, or put some time into the study of the craft of fiction writing: with your obviously great intellect and abilities, you would probably pick up fiction-writing techniques quite quickly. I really don't think you have to have a talent for inventing plots, either, because there are so many stories from history that you could simply pick up and re-tell - all you need is a fiction-writer's eye for what's really relevant, and what is going to clutter up the story.

judie at 08:30 on 31 October 2016  Report this post
Hi Michwo,
I agree with Catkin. Your knowledge of the period is astounding and you tell it in a way that really does evoke the richness of an artist's life in medieval Florence/Italy. But the product you have written does not fit easily into a known genre. I don't mind that particualrly, rules are meant to be broken. But you tend to write a kind of interior monologue that references details, people, places and events that the teader simply does not know, and that you as a writer don't explain. It makes for rich detail but frustration on the reader's behalf, who sees potential stories in every line.
This would be a story. I want to read what happened in this paragrpah in a story or a chapter of a novel.
I remember it now as if it were yesterday.  Long days.  Green meadows.  Blue skies. Like the men and women mentioned in the Decameron of our erstwhile Florentine compatriot, Boccaccio, more than a century before either of us had even been thought of, we escaped from pestilential Florence to the Tuscan countryside to avoid the urban ravages of a Black Death in miniature.  No longer imprisoned in my mentor’s painting of “Joseph in Egypt”, painted when I was only fifteen – I’m in there somewhere – which, although it is meant to be Egypt, has an air of being the piazza della Signoria in Florence with two raised examples of its august statuary in the background, I felt free to roam and breathe in life for the first time in the whole of my nineteen years on earth.
I can see such potential in all this fascinating detail, and the way you hint at the characters, the events like the plague, the relevance of past art, the settings, the faults in the painting, the reason why he was a model for the painting, who his mentor is - so much interesting stuff!
I have one suggestion. If you were to have this sort of writing published, what would the blurb say? Can you sum up the essence of what it is you want to communicate and why? How would you persuade a potential reader to open the cover and start reading?
Cheers Judie


 

michwo at 09:49 on 31 October 2016  Report this post
Judie,
Thanks for your comment.  Strange to relate, but this has been published!  If you go on amazon.co.uk and scroll down to Kindle Store and then key in the words Supper at Emmaus and Other Art Tales, you should see my front cover adorned with a reproduction of the actual painting itself.  It was produced under the aegis of SBPRA in America or Strategic Book Publishing and Rights Agency and has been available to purchase since June 2013.  I got the idea of calling these little stories 'art tales' from a short story collection by the American writer, Valerie Martin The Unfinished Novel and Other Stories.  She also re-wrote Robert Louis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde from the point of view of the housemaid, Mary Reilly.  Part of the problem for me with all this is a lack of genuine originality on my part.  Unless other books and writers are there to strike sparks off nothing much gets done.  Also a lot of my memories are not particularly happy ones.  I have to appreciate your modifications to the opening of "Supper at Emmaus", of course, but the thing that stood out for me when reading Pontormo's actual diary was his love of conversation and sociability and the conversation and sociability are there before the memories of bygone days - they come later and are sharper for being deferred.  How's "Unconditional" coming along?
 


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