Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on her: on breasts and belly and buttocks. And the hot red imprint of his palm on her white cheek, and her hands both fluttering up to hold the place he’d hit her as he slammed the door and clattered off back down the stairs, practically howling with his own pain. His last memory of her: wounded eyes staring uncomprehendingly back at him.

      Well, Magdalena was who she was. He shouldn’t have asked more of her. She had her own way to make in the world, after all, and times were hard. There weren’t many pickings for an artist’s model any more. And so, when a few months later Master Mayer turned out to have taken her under his wing (‘a young widow … angelically beautiful,’ the old fool kept burbling), Hans made no bones about painting her face into Master Mayer’s family chapel as the Virgin of Mercy protecting the old man and his various wives and children, dead and alive, from ill-fortune. Master Mayer could believe whatever nonsense he wanted in the privacy of his own home. Hans Holbein wasn’t going to argue with such a good patron. But he knew he’d never look without scepticism at another religious picture after that. He probably wouldn’t paint any more religious pictures, either. He’d had enough of dressing women of dubious virtue up in blue robes and pretending they were Madonnas. All that was just play-acting, children’s stories. What he wanted now was to portray the real-life faces and personalities of the people God had put on this earth to enchant and torment each other, without costumes, without artifice. To get at the truth.

      But he was a bear at home. Snarling at poor Elsbeth, till her face turned as sour and rough as those hands sticking out from under her pushed-up sleeves, permanently reddened from tanning hides. Hating the stink of leather up his nostrils all the time, till even his food tasted of animal skins and poverty. Hating little Philip’s endless whining; yelling at Elsbeth’s scared-looking boy to take better care of the child. Even hating the long-winded abstract talk of his humanist friends, whom he usually admired. Part of him was now blaming them for his gloom – for starting the whole upheaval of these evil times with their clever-clever talk about the corruption of the clergy and their desire to purify the Church. Look where those ideas had landed everyone now. And look how panicked the humanists and even the most determined of the reformers were, at the violent enthusiasm of the mob for their elegantly formulated ideas – even Brother Luther, thundering ‘strike, stab, slay’ from his Wittenberg pulpit in a vain attempt to stop the thugs destroying civilisation.

      Suddenly Hans Holbein hated the humanists’ silly, clever faces; suddenly even the Latin names they chose to call themselves seemed pretentious. His brother Prosy, under their influence, had renamed himself Ambrosius; Hans wasn’t so grand, and, in his current black mood, resented the Latinised name they insisted on calling him: Olpeius. If they had to be foolish enough to call him something classical, the only name he’d have liked was the one they were always giving Albrecht Dürer – the only real compliment a painter could desire – Apelles, the greatest painter of antiquity, the court artist to Philip of Macedon and a famous portraitist. So he sat knocking back tankard after tankard at the tavern with them, in thunderous silence, hating whey-faced Myconius’s thin mockery: ‘Poor love-struck Olpeius – drowning his sorrows in beer.’

      And there was no work, or hardly any. With the hate-filled, frightening turn public life was taking – now that the peasants’ revolts in the countryside had given way to mobs of image-breakers roaming the city streets and smashing windows and burning devotional pictures and hacking statues to bits – the rich weren’t keen on displaying their wealth by having frescoes painted on their houses. And of course there was no new work to be had in churches that were being stripped down and whitewashed. Painters’ studios were closing down on all sides. Woodcarvers and carpenters were fighting over the same menial tradesmen’s work. And there was a limit to how hard you could fight for the few book-engraving jobs or tavern sign commissions that still came on the market.

      It had been so exciting before. Before the year of doom three years ago, when all the planets coalesced in the constellation of the fish and brought chaos and destruction. In the days when Magdalena had always been there in his studio, ready to drape her naked form in whatever scrap of velvet or silk he could find to pose for him. When there had still been enough work to justify keeping a model. When he personally had more work than he could cope with, doing the pictures for both Adam Petri’s and Thomas Wolff’s versions of Luther’s New Testament in German – and getting an extra payment from Tommi Wolff, as well as an extra dose of grinning thanks from the impish little blond man, Basel’s biggest charmer, with his fangy teeth, sparkling eyes and that dark mole on his right cheek, for making his best best-seller even more of a success – a payment big enough to buy Magdalena a dress and give Elsbeth extra housekeeping money. Well, they were good pictures, after all.

      He had read the New Testament properly for the first time (his Latin had never been up to much; it was one of the things that the humanist circle that met at Johannes Froben’s publishing works laughed at him for). And he was painting at his peak – able, for the first time, to show the divine truth as he knew it really was in the Book; without recourse to a priest or a preacher to tell him how they read it. And he had felt enlightened. Purified. Transfigured by the truth.

      Hans Holbein was all right for longer than most people, after things went wrong, because he had the Rathaus fresco commission. But then the burghers got scared of his daring design for the last wall – respectable if hypocritical Jews shrinking away from the presence of Jesus, in the parable of the woman taken in adultery; Christ warning the Jews, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ So the respectable if hypocritical burghers cut off his contract. They preferred looking at a blank wall to being reminded that their integrity might also be questioned. And the money stopped.

      The last straw was his Dance of Death engravings. Forty-one of them, using every ounce of imagination and passion he possessed. He started them after his father died. They were the only way he had to show the truth about today as he saw it, through a theme he chose for himself without any interference from a patron. Two years’ work: his and Hans Luetzelberger’s blockmaking skill combined in merciless mockery of every one of the failings and offences of the age’s corrupt priests, the powerful and pious and their bedazzled followers. All exposed as vanity-filled frauds at the moment they met Death. The Pope crowning an emperor, waving a Papal bull, full of hubris – and surrounded by devils. Death coming to the Judge, accepting a bribe from a wealthy litigant while a poor plaintiff looked disconsolately on. Death coming to the Monk, who, even though his calling meant he should have been prepared, was trying frantically to escape, clutching his money box. No one would publish the pictures. The Council was scared. Erasmus had told them not to publish inflammatory pamphlets, and – too late – they’d begun to heed his advice.

      Then, last summer, Hans Luetzelberger died. Bankrupt. The creditors settled on his goods like scavengers. The Dance of Death blocks ended up being snapped up by a printer in Lyon and shut up in a storeroom. And Hans Holbein hadn’t got a penny out of any of it.

      ‘Go travelling,’ Erasmus said phlegmatically. ‘Take a Wanderjahr. Go to quiet places where all this trouble isn’t happening. Learn something new; find new patrons; get your heartache out of your system.’ Erasmus never stopped travelling. True, he had to stay on the move these days. He’d just come back to Basel – still a relatively civilised and free-thinking place – after three years in Louvain; Louvain had got too militantly Catholic for his taste, but he was already worried that Basel was going too far the other way. Still, Erasmus genuinely didn’t mind taking to the road. He’d always travelled. Then again, he was a famous man; there were homes for him everywhere, and people begging him to endorse their religion or their political beliefs just by living among them. He had it easy.

      So Hans Holbein cut the old Dutchman off in mid-flow, just as he was pronouncing his favourite maxim: ‘Live every day as though it were your last; study as though you will live forever,’ and asked, abruptly, ‘How could I travel? And where to?’

      Hans Holbein wasn’t scared of moving. He and Prosy had managed to set themselves up in Basel when they were young men, after their father went СКАЧАТЬ